Why does everyone seem to think a humanoid robot would be such a great solution?
Manifold reasons (not necessarily good ones, but that's humanity for ya):
1) Top of the list of many, for better or worse, is the concept of robot sex slaves. The idea of creating and more importantly commanding a customized analogue of a person's physical ideal. Your dishwasher can't measure up.
2) The sheer challenge of the task, aka 'because it's there', is enticing to overachieving designers/engineers out for fame, glory, and a lasting legacy.
3) Oddly enough, the desire to have progeny would be touched by a convincing humaniform creation, and designers may consider them analogues to children.
Besides of course previously mentioned commercial applications. It has also been mentioned elsewhere in responses to this topic that humaniform robots are able to take advantage of all the tools and other machines already designed for intended use by people. This actually decreases the cost of building those tools into the robot itself (or designing custom ones for a different interface) and makes the robot versatile in being able to replace humans without any change to process, procedure, equipment, etc.
I dislike them both, just voice-based more (which is what I said, but you chose to ignore that). Not everything is an exclusive binary system. Nice try at being cute though, next time read and comprehend the whole thing and you won't look like a douche.
Key take home point: if I'm dealing with a computer, I want to deal with it like a computer, not pretending it's human. I would rather in cases of complex problem solving (which in the context means anything other than basic inventory operations and queries of known/categorized things) deal with a human than a computer. Even a stupid human is somebody you can apply emotional pressure to, or try to reason with, or whatever. Those things you can't do with a computer.
Find me a person that prefers automated customer support so I can punch them repeatedly in the face.
Speaking as a technician who has had to call support lines for RMAs or service outages... automated parts of support are annoying as hell, especially when you're expected to talk to the computer like that's supposed to make it more familiar or comfortable. Even when the system understands, which is hard enough, you still feel like a jackass doing it when you could just be pressing a number.
Apparently in all his research on the Uncanny Valley the author missed or ignored the oft-remarked reason why the phenomenon *is* important: robots are expensive, and if people don't like them in their *first* impression, it's not worth the cost. 'Social' robots are not going to be seen in homes first, that's too expensive. The first market for social robots will be in some form of customer relations where replacing hourly employees makes business sense, but NOT if that means customers leave for whoever still has real people.
So yes, people can adapt to robots, duh, we're rational animals. However, if somebody is expecting a person, they get a robot, *and* they feel uncomfortable about it, even for a few minutes, that might be enough of a catalyst to consciously OR unconsciously cause them to look for services not provided by robots, ultimately damaging the company that bought the robot to fill the role.
Also, you allude to studies that show that the uncanny valley may not be 'real' for women but may be so for men. After all, Mori himself was male, maybe he what he thought applied to everybody only applied to his male experience. That doesn't mean the uncanny valley doesn't exist, it just means it isn't within the parameters originally believed to be understood. Basically by citing the study, you admit that it has been scientifically shown to exist, just in a more limited sense. Hardly discrediting.
You're still thinking in a old paradigm... the 20th century news model that sends a Harvard grad to Booneystan to hang out in whatever passes for the nicest hotel bar there and write an 'objective' piece based on the 'journalism' model he learned in school. That does take money to do, yes, and it's wasteful, stupid, and obsolete.
This just in: there are already people living all over the world! We don't need to send specialists everywhere to do what any jackass with free time and keyboard can do already. If I want to know what's going on in Booneystan, I'd rather get information from a guy that lives there, not some journalist hanging out in a hotel. Yes, these 'informal' pieces will frequently be subjective, but news articles are already subjective, it's just a matter of degree that separates MSM opinion pieces from their news pieces. Additionally, it's not like what happens in other places exists in a one-sided vacuum, there are always other people who are will to talk about opposing views of events, and others still who will try to be objective by nature.
In the very near future, we won't even have to worry about the language barrier, as just in the last decade automatic translation has improved to a point where it's almost usable right now.
I don't know, maybe some people think that there is reason to pay tons of money to pay 'professional' journalists for things natives could do for virtually no cost at all, but I think that most hardcore news consumers can figure out what's going on from direct sources without being spoon-fed by middle-man professionals. It might even help to remove some of the natural distortions that exist between cultures that contribute to bad foreign relations and policy decisions.
This is Africa. There is a lot of folk religion and superstition there, and they don't really understand how technology works. I remember watching a documentary recently about China's economic development in Angola, and they interviewed an Angolan man about a skyscraper the Chinese were building there, and he said he thought that the glass and steel didn't look safe. All he knew was a world of buildings made of bricks at best, and so regardless of the structural improvements represented by steel, he could only see new/different = suspicious/dangerous. African culture in broad terms is still essentially pre-industrial.
I don't think you really have clear perspective... which really isn't to be held against you when you're dealing with more than a billion people. That's just hard to visualize. Even if 90% of the people in China aren't 'reachable' or 'viable' consumers (a debatable thing in itself), 10% of China is the same as 100% of Japan, and the same again as double nations like France, Italy, and Britain. In that context, if only 5% of China reaches whatever amorphously qualifies as 'developed' then that developed part of China is directly equivalent to many of the countries of Europe.
I recognize that this is a kind of cherry picking, but it's the way most countries are thought of. People judge Canada by life in Montreal, not by life in Arviat; people judge the US by its metropolitan centers, not by its dumpy rural backwaters.
Quite true, does American arrogance know no limits that they would try to hold other countries to such ludicrous standards as possessing the basic infrastructure necessary to prevent millions from starving to death? I mean really, the sheer degenerate decadence of providing enough basic resources to actually live normal life spans...
I think you've allowed me to achieve new heights in sarcasm. I should thank you for being so irrational as to provide me the opportunity.
I agree, China could not pose a credible threat in a ground war against the continental US, but it goes both ways, even with naval superiority, the US does not pose a credible threat in a ground war against China either.
The Soviets did provide more material support for Korea than Vietnam, but in both cases it was Chinese soldiers who were the ones in every trench next to the natives. It's only natural considering the shared borders. It is true what you say, the US lost in Vietnam on policy, not in the field, but ask yourself, has policy changed? Are we any more effective in Iraq or Afghanistan? Are American GIs all super happy about ROEs as they are today? The US is just as hamstrung in the field today as in Vietnam. China never did and never will give two shits, they'll do what it takes. There's no moral highground for them, but in practical terms that's not going to matter.
The US is in a unique geopolitical situation. There is virtually no way that a wholly conventional ground war against the US could succeed from any quarter. That does not mean that US interests are invulnerable, and that economic damage could not be done to the US. Less is possible in the opposite direction, because in the decades after problems with resource shortfalls in the early period of CCP control, China has focused on being as self-sufficient as possible. The character of the Chinese people is very different too, something that somebody who hasn't studied them both personally and abstractly won't be able to understand. The Chinese can be happy with less. Lin Yutang said (roughly) that if China had been populated by Americans there would have been twenty revolutions for every one that the Chinese did themselves. It's not something I can easily explain.
I know all of these supposed revelations of yours, you just greatly exaggerate their importance.
FACT: China supplied more manpower and material support to NVA and NVC forces than the USSR.
Even if China's relationship with Hanoi was not as good, that didn't matter, because there was no way that the USSR possessed the logistical capacity to provide more men and supplies to a country that bordered China through and around China. It just wasn't physically possible. Vietnam and China never reached a level of conflict much in excess of that experienced in other disputed border areas like those in India and USSR/Russia. Diplomatically significant, yes, but not real 'war'.
A Bering Straight scenario is quite frankly, wild fantasy, I was just saying that it at least would be physically possible. I also don't think that Russia could stand against China in a physical conflict anymore. A lot has changed since the sixties, and Russia's armed forces are a rusted, disorganized wreck, where China's are exponentially more capable than ever before.
China's future foreign policy is going to be truly determined by its economic colonialism in Africa and Central/South America. If it creates a power block in the Southern Hemisphere it might have enough backing that the whole world wouldn't ally against an aggression in whatever direction, as would be the case now.
That too would require a change in the Chinese themselves, who have not tended to be very aggressive outside of their immediate sphere of influence. They don't have the same 'world domination' view of empire building that the West has traditionally had.
Per capita GDP is not a king-maker, otherwise there would be a lot of tiny European countries that somehow would manage to rule the world.
When you have more people than anybody else, it may be hard to notice the upper end of the curve, but I assure you, Shanghai is a far more prosperous place than Bogota, Havana, or Warsaw. And it is the growing Chinese middle and upper class that runs the country. China is not as well run as other countries, yes, but again going back to the GDP list, it is better run than Columbia and Cuba.
China was more involved in Korea and Vietnam than the USSR, ergo it was more politically important to (East) Asia than the USSR. Economically in Asia the USSR was nothing. NOTHING. Japan was Asia's 20th century economic leader, with China, Korea, HK, Taiwan and Thailand in tow. I suggest further that you dismiss culture so quickly because you know China's culture is so important to the continent. The language, literature, art, cuisine, music, religion, etc. of Japan, Korea, and Indochina are undeniably significantly derived from China. India was not so directly influenced by China because of a little thing called the Himalayan Mountains.
Hell, most of the war against Japan in WWII was centered around naval conflicts.
This just in: Japan is an island whose territory consisted mostly of other islands .
The US navy is formidable and deserves respect, but it is not the be all and end all of any conflict. Naval warfare is about force projection and support. If operations on the ground are woefully outnumbered or just too far away, no support will help. Further, aircraft carriers are only as effective as the aircraft they can field, and you can bet that even eleven carriers fully stocked could not go toe to toe with the entire PLA Air Force that can field more than twice as many aircraft over friendly territory (hint: air defense infrastructure).
The Opium Wars were fought in the throes of a dying dynasty run by occupying foreigners. It was hardly a cause that rank and file Hans were interested in dying for. The Sino-Japanese conflict took place immediately after the fall of the aforementioned dynasty when disunity ruled China more than any man or faction.
However, that is not China today. China is currently very strong and almost as unified as possible (Tibet and Xinjiang have never been more than ornery tributaries, so Taiwan is the only real missing piece). Its military is exponentially stronger, better trained, and with higher moral than it possessed in the century before the communists won the civil war.
You think farmer's revolts cause dissolution? You don't know much about 'their millenia in existence' then. A revolt brought down the Qin dynasty and as quickly raised a unified Han dynasty in its place. The transition from Yuan to Ming was similar.
If you want to deny China's might in spite of what I've already said, be my guest.
People still seem to be missing the point. This isn't about human rights, censorship, market share, etc. at all. This about an attack on Google's network and servers for the purposes of industrial espionage, and since the attack came from China and was focused on retrieving information about dissidents, nobody doubts it was an action supported materially or in spirit by the Chinese government. Google is using non-compliance with Chinese censorship guidelines as a weapon of retaliation, and they are basically the first major company to do so. This will cause China's government to lose face. It is very bad for their image to be called out for these espionage actions, and Google isn't the first victim. Many companies have had to deal with this behavior but they have stay quiet and done nothing. Now that Google has made so much noise and is doing something, the other companies may follow, hence the 'domino effect' I spoke of.
China's government doesn't measure everything in dollars. Image is very, very important to them, which is why they monitor everything they think affects their image so closely and why they make annoyed statements about wherever the Dalai Llama goes. The Dalai Llama isn't very important in a global, material sense except to Tibetans, but to the Chinese government he is a symbol of disunity, so everything he does is made into a big deal and the Chinese government tries very hard to exert any influence they can to make him an international pariah. They know that if how the people perceive them changes against their favor, the effect could be catastrophic. It's the publicity of this, the loss of face that matters, not dollars, not market share.
The Bering Strait is only about twice as wide as the English Channel at the respective narrowest of each, and the Normandy invasion took routes in excess of the distance across the Bering Strait. And for the precedent of open sea operations you have then entire Pacific theater of operations in WW2, or did you forget about that? Both the Japanese and US forces waged (alternatingly) successful campaigns from Indonesia to Alaska to the Solomon Islands.
As for the last 50 years... remember that little conflict called Vietnam? Do you really think that the NVA and NVC could have stood up to the US without the support of the PRC? (And there was a lot more of it than official records are ever going to admit.)
Judging how Chinese culture treats IP, I would imagine it's hard to say whose derivative of whom!
There is no debate that China is the root from which most of Japanese, Korean, and Indochinese culture (writing, language, cuisine, art, music, architecture, etc. etc.) is derived. Your attempt at an IP joke is anachronistic and doesn't have enough basis in real history to have meaning.
Further, I think your analysis of the military abilities of china is somewhat limited. Could be wrong, but armies march on their stomachs.
Didn't seem to be a limiting factor in Korea or Vietnam.
And they can't march across the ocean, or the air.
I also would not expect a "vintage" conventional war whatsoever. Proxy wars more likely, but depends on how China tries to access the resources it already needs to have had yesterday.
I agree, conventional war is unlikely, but remember that the PRC has succeeded in all its proxy wars in Asia. The US has not.
I didn't say too big 'in China'. That they are not the most popular search there is not material to the situation. They are too big a global company that their issues with China can be ignored by other companies and governments. That is the point.
You're conflating the terms 'involved' and 'participated' or 'committed'. Involvement is much broader and connotes any attachment to the event or its effects. One can say A involved B without saying that B did anything.
Slashdot Mirror
Why does everyone seem to think a humanoid robot would be such a great solution?
Manifold reasons (not necessarily good ones, but that's humanity for ya):
1) Top of the list of many, for better or worse, is the concept of robot sex slaves. The idea of creating and more importantly commanding a customized analogue of a person's physical ideal. Your dishwasher can't measure up.
2) The sheer challenge of the task, aka 'because it's there', is enticing to overachieving designers/engineers out for fame, glory, and a lasting legacy.
3) Oddly enough, the desire to have progeny would be touched by a convincing humaniform creation, and designers may consider them analogues to children.
Besides of course previously mentioned commercial applications. It has also been mentioned elsewhere in responses to this topic that humaniform robots are able to take advantage of all the tools and other machines already designed for intended use by people. This actually decreases the cost of building those tools into the robot itself (or designing custom ones for a different interface) and makes the robot versatile in being able to replace humans without any change to process, procedure, equipment, etc.
I dislike them both, just voice-based more (which is what I said, but you chose to ignore that). Not everything is an exclusive binary system. Nice try at being cute though, next time read and comprehend the whole thing and you won't look like a douche.
Key take home point: if I'm dealing with a computer, I want to deal with it like a computer, not pretending it's human. I would rather in cases of complex problem solving (which in the context means anything other than basic inventory operations and queries of known/categorized things) deal with a human than a computer. Even a stupid human is somebody you can apply emotional pressure to, or try to reason with, or whatever. Those things you can't do with a computer.
Find me a person that prefers automated customer support so I can punch them repeatedly in the face.
Speaking as a technician who has had to call support lines for RMAs or service outages... automated parts of support are annoying as hell, especially when you're expected to talk to the computer like that's supposed to make it more familiar or comfortable. Even when the system understands, which is hard enough, you still feel like a jackass doing it when you could just be pressing a number.
Mega-Maid...
She's gone from suck to blow!
What I said in the Popular Mechanics comments:
Apparently in all his research on the Uncanny Valley the author missed or ignored the oft-remarked reason why the phenomenon *is* important: robots are expensive, and if people don't like them in their *first* impression, it's not worth the cost. 'Social' robots are not going to be seen in homes first, that's too expensive. The first market for social robots will be in some form of customer relations where replacing hourly employees makes business sense, but NOT if that means customers leave for whoever still has real people.
So yes, people can adapt to robots, duh, we're rational animals. However, if somebody is expecting a person, they get a robot, *and* they feel uncomfortable about it, even for a few minutes, that might be enough of a catalyst to consciously OR unconsciously cause them to look for services not provided by robots, ultimately damaging the company that bought the robot to fill the role.
Also, you allude to studies that show that the uncanny valley may not be 'real' for women but may be so for men. After all, Mori himself was male, maybe he what he thought applied to everybody only applied to his male experience. That doesn't mean the uncanny valley doesn't exist, it just means it isn't within the parameters originally believed to be understood. Basically by citing the study, you admit that it has been scientifically shown to exist, just in a more limited sense. Hardly discrediting.
Or more pithily, they responded to insinuations of tyranny with actual tyranny, just in case somebody got the 'wrong idea'.
You're still thinking in a old paradigm... the 20th century news model that sends a Harvard grad to Booneystan to hang out in whatever passes for the nicest hotel bar there and write an 'objective' piece based on the 'journalism' model he learned in school. That does take money to do, yes, and it's wasteful, stupid, and obsolete.
This just in: there are already people living all over the world! We don't need to send specialists everywhere to do what any jackass with free time and keyboard can do already. If I want to know what's going on in Booneystan, I'd rather get information from a guy that lives there, not some journalist hanging out in a hotel. Yes, these 'informal' pieces will frequently be subjective, but news articles are already subjective, it's just a matter of degree that separates MSM opinion pieces from their news pieces. Additionally, it's not like what happens in other places exists in a one-sided vacuum, there are always other people who are will to talk about opposing views of events, and others still who will try to be objective by nature.
In the very near future, we won't even have to worry about the language barrier, as just in the last decade automatic translation has improved to a point where it's almost usable right now.
I don't know, maybe some people think that there is reason to pay tons of money to pay 'professional' journalists for things natives could do for virtually no cost at all, but I think that most hardcore news consumers can figure out what's going on from direct sources without being spoon-fed by middle-man professionals. It might even help to remove some of the natural distortions that exist between cultures that contribute to bad foreign relations and policy decisions.
You're evicted from /. Please turn in your geek card on the way out.
And you think that wireless networks are somehow immune to the effects of Faraday cages?
This is Africa. There is a lot of folk religion and superstition there, and they don't really understand how technology works. I remember watching a documentary recently about China's economic development in Angola, and they interviewed an Angolan man about a skyscraper the Chinese were building there, and he said he thought that the glass and steel didn't look safe. All he knew was a world of buildings made of bricks at best, and so regardless of the structural improvements represented by steel, he could only see new/different = suspicious/dangerous. African culture in broad terms is still essentially pre-industrial.
I don't think you really have clear perspective... which really isn't to be held against you when you're dealing with more than a billion people. That's just hard to visualize. Even if 90% of the people in China aren't 'reachable' or 'viable' consumers (a debatable thing in itself), 10% of China is the same as 100% of Japan, and the same again as double nations like France, Italy, and Britain. In that context, if only 5% of China reaches whatever amorphously qualifies as 'developed' then that developed part of China is directly equivalent to many of the countries of Europe.
I recognize that this is a kind of cherry picking, but it's the way most countries are thought of. People judge Canada by life in Montreal, not by life in Arviat; people judge the US by its metropolitan centers, not by its dumpy rural backwaters.
Quite true, does American arrogance know no limits that they would try to hold other countries to such ludicrous standards as possessing the basic infrastructure necessary to prevent millions from starving to death? I mean really, the sheer degenerate decadence of providing enough basic resources to actually live normal life spans...
I think you've allowed me to achieve new heights in sarcasm. I should thank you for being so irrational as to provide me the opportunity.
I agree, China could not pose a credible threat in a ground war against the continental US, but it goes both ways, even with naval superiority, the US does not pose a credible threat in a ground war against China either.
The Soviets did provide more material support for Korea than Vietnam, but in both cases it was Chinese soldiers who were the ones in every trench next to the natives. It's only natural considering the shared borders. It is true what you say, the US lost in Vietnam on policy, not in the field, but ask yourself, has policy changed? Are we any more effective in Iraq or Afghanistan? Are American GIs all super happy about ROEs as they are today? The US is just as hamstrung in the field today as in Vietnam. China never did and never will give two shits, they'll do what it takes. There's no moral highground for them, but in practical terms that's not going to matter.
The US is in a unique geopolitical situation. There is virtually no way that a wholly conventional ground war against the US could succeed from any quarter. That does not mean that US interests are invulnerable, and that economic damage could not be done to the US. Less is possible in the opposite direction, because in the decades after problems with resource shortfalls in the early period of CCP control, China has focused on being as self-sufficient as possible. The character of the Chinese people is very different too, something that somebody who hasn't studied them both personally and abstractly won't be able to understand. The Chinese can be happy with less. Lin Yutang said (roughly) that if China had been populated by Americans there would have been twenty revolutions for every one that the Chinese did themselves. It's not something I can easily explain.
I know all of these supposed revelations of yours, you just greatly exaggerate their importance.
FACT: China supplied more manpower and material support to NVA and NVC forces than the USSR.
Even if China's relationship with Hanoi was not as good, that didn't matter, because there was no way that the USSR possessed the logistical capacity to provide more men and supplies to a country that bordered China through and around China. It just wasn't physically possible. Vietnam and China never reached a level of conflict much in excess of that experienced in other disputed border areas like those in India and USSR/Russia. Diplomatically significant, yes, but not real 'war'.
A Bering Straight scenario is quite frankly, wild fantasy, I was just saying that it at least would be physically possible. I also don't think that Russia could stand against China in a physical conflict anymore. A lot has changed since the sixties, and Russia's armed forces are a rusted, disorganized wreck, where China's are exponentially more capable than ever before.
China's future foreign policy is going to be truly determined by its economic colonialism in Africa and Central/South America. If it creates a power block in the Southern Hemisphere it might have enough backing that the whole world wouldn't ally against an aggression in whatever direction, as would be the case now.
That too would require a change in the Chinese themselves, who have not tended to be very aggressive outside of their immediate sphere of influence. They don't have the same 'world domination' view of empire building that the West has traditionally had.
Per capita GDP is not a king-maker, otherwise there would be a lot of tiny European countries that somehow would manage to rule the world.
When you have more people than anybody else, it may be hard to notice the upper end of the curve, but I assure you, Shanghai is a far more prosperous place than Bogota, Havana, or Warsaw. And it is the growing Chinese middle and upper class that runs the country. China is not as well run as other countries, yes, but again going back to the GDP list, it is better run than Columbia and Cuba.
It may surprise you to learn that the EU is not (yet) a nation anymore than NATO is.
China was more involved in Korea and Vietnam than the USSR, ergo it was more politically important to (East) Asia than the USSR. Economically in Asia the USSR was nothing. NOTHING. Japan was Asia's 20th century economic leader, with China, Korea, HK, Taiwan and Thailand in tow. I suggest further that you dismiss culture so quickly because you know China's culture is so important to the continent. The language, literature, art, cuisine, music, religion, etc. of Japan, Korea, and Indochina are undeniably significantly derived from China. India was not so directly influenced by China because of a little thing called the Himalayan Mountains.
Hell, most of the war against Japan in WWII was centered around naval conflicts.
This just in: Japan is an island whose territory consisted mostly of other islands .
The US navy is formidable and deserves respect, but it is not the be all and end all of any conflict. Naval warfare is about force projection and support. If operations on the ground are woefully outnumbered or just too far away, no support will help. Further, aircraft carriers are only as effective as the aircraft they can field, and you can bet that even eleven carriers fully stocked could not go toe to toe with the entire PLA Air Force that can field more than twice as many aircraft over friendly territory (hint: air defense infrastructure).
The Opium Wars were fought in the throes of a dying dynasty run by occupying foreigners. It was hardly a cause that rank and file Hans were interested in dying for. The Sino-Japanese conflict took place immediately after the fall of the aforementioned dynasty when disunity ruled China more than any man or faction.
However, that is not China today. China is currently very strong and almost as unified as possible (Tibet and Xinjiang have never been more than ornery tributaries, so Taiwan is the only real missing piece). Its military is exponentially stronger, better trained, and with higher moral than it possessed in the century before the communists won the civil war.
You think farmer's revolts cause dissolution? You don't know much about 'their millenia in existence' then. A revolt brought down the Qin dynasty and as quickly raised a unified Han dynasty in its place. The transition from Yuan to Ming was similar.
If you want to deny China's might in spite of what I've already said, be my guest.
People still seem to be missing the point. This isn't about human rights, censorship, market share, etc. at all. This about an attack on Google's network and servers for the purposes of industrial espionage, and since the attack came from China and was focused on retrieving information about dissidents, nobody doubts it was an action supported materially or in spirit by the Chinese government. Google is using non-compliance with Chinese censorship guidelines as a weapon of retaliation, and they are basically the first major company to do so. This will cause China's government to lose face. It is very bad for their image to be called out for these espionage actions, and Google isn't the first victim. Many companies have had to deal with this behavior but they have stay quiet and done nothing. Now that Google has made so much noise and is doing something, the other companies may follow, hence the 'domino effect' I spoke of.
China's government doesn't measure everything in dollars. Image is very, very important to them, which is why they monitor everything they think affects their image so closely and why they make annoyed statements about wherever the Dalai Llama goes. The Dalai Llama isn't very important in a global, material sense except to Tibetans, but to the Chinese government he is a symbol of disunity, so everything he does is made into a big deal and the Chinese government tries very hard to exert any influence they can to make him an international pariah. They know that if how the people perceive them changes against their favor, the effect could be catastrophic. It's the publicity of this, the loss of face that matters, not dollars, not market share.
See above. Your logic and understanding of the English language are, quite frankly, terrible.
The Bering Strait is only about twice as wide as the English Channel at the respective narrowest of each, and the Normandy invasion took routes in excess of the distance across the Bering Strait. And for the precedent of open sea operations you have then entire Pacific theater of operations in WW2, or did you forget about that? Both the Japanese and US forces waged (alternatingly) successful campaigns from Indonesia to Alaska to the Solomon Islands.
As for the last 50 years... remember that little conflict called Vietnam? Do you really think that the NVA and NVC could have stood up to the US without the support of the PRC? (And there was a lot more of it than official records are ever going to admit.)
Judging how Chinese culture treats IP, I would imagine it's hard to say whose derivative of whom!
There is no debate that China is the root from which most of Japanese, Korean, and Indochinese culture (writing, language, cuisine, art, music, architecture, etc. etc.) is derived. Your attempt at an IP joke is anachronistic and doesn't have enough basis in real history to have meaning.
Further, I think your analysis of the military abilities of china is somewhat limited. Could be wrong, but armies march on their stomachs.
Didn't seem to be a limiting factor in Korea or Vietnam.
And they can't march across the ocean, or the air.
Uh... really? Are you kidding me?
I also would not expect a "vintage" conventional war whatsoever. Proxy wars more likely, but depends on how China tries to access the resources it already needs to have had yesterday.
I agree, conventional war is unlikely, but remember that the PRC has succeeded in all its proxy wars in Asia. The US has not.
I didn't say too big 'in China'. That they are not the most popular search there is not material to the situation. They are too big a global company that their issues with China can be ignored by other companies and governments. That is the point.
You're conflating the terms 'involved' and 'participated' or 'committed'. Involvement is much broader and connotes any attachment to the event or its effects. One can say A involved B without saying that B did anything.