Especially when it comes to cellphones a lot of things seem to be adapted from Japan. Such as the navigation capabilities of the iphone (all the mobile mapping stuff has been around for years here) or social networking applications (checking on actvities in your friendship circle, social grouping etc.). One thing that also might be picked up soon is a little 2nd-life clone that runs on my softbank (vodaphone) mobile. So while riding the train I can run around in a 3d environment on my cellie and talk to other people connected to there etc. Anyway I am not sure, but I think it is not overly popular here.
Regarding the code scanning, I mean it might be a great new high-density code that microsoft is using but in the end all it needs to do is call up a certain webpage in the cellphone browser (maybe with some local info added or so). However considering that the qr codes have been in popular use in Japan for ages this is so not new.
The Wii has been become the most popoular console in the US (here) Based on these facts, of course an US court will rule in favour of a US company as the result will make the country profit from an overseas competitor like Nintendo.
put up a cardboard puppet of yourself in front of one CCTV camera and commit a crime somewhere else. Even if your crime will be recorded on another CCTV camera, they will never be able to prove which one of the two was really you..
Agree with parent, before reading the actual paper the press release is kinda useless.
Also the example shown in the article does not really make sense for me. I mean of course if we look at a blurred and rotated object in a series of images it is hard to discern. Also we might think the object is not the same in the different images, although it actually is. But the question is, does that mean that the algorithm can reliably determine the identity of an object even if a human viewer cannot?
Actually I doubt it and as the post is linked to an MIT acrticle about MIT research it feels like it might be a bit overrated..
Okay, that's a bit of satire, but there's some truth in it, to be sure.
There is a lot of truth in that. But only from our perspective. Please dont forget how different Japanee people feel about things. How important the social integration, their and their families safety and the rules in general;) are. I just talked to my friends on the weekend when we went to the club. I asked them if they really all the stuff with the rules and being so tied up in the company. And they said yes. And they meant it. Poeple might look like clones zombies etc here sometime, but (fantastically from our perspective) they actually enjoy that. OOOOKASHIIIIIII!
Foreign engineers really can't keep pace with the Japanese engineers here.
It's the running around in circles. In a way he is right. I study for a PhD in robotics here in Tokyo. My fellow students are in most ways incredibly good at what they are doing (better than me most of the time). But what is their handicap is that they have this really fussy, maybe typically Japanese way of doing things. They want to plan things perfectly and they want to do things perectly all the time. Everyone stick to the rules please!
So they have a hard time dealing with fuzzy planning which is very important in everyday engineering work (especially if your boss has no idea what he is talking about). So thats when the marooning (maru in Japanese =circle) starts.
So maybe Japan needs more engineers because the current number does not work efficiently enough. Also foreigners can easily enter a company or any university here in Japan. Only requirement (except being an ok engineer): reading, writing, speaking Japanese. And takes a while to learn..:(
let this be the last article on/. on the subject "can i use a proxy to get around china`s firewall?" for a while. The existance of the thing itself is already annoying enough, but in the end almost noone in China really cares all the much anymore. Recently the subject seems to be used as a chance to point the finger at bad bad red red China all over again.
3-D live-action feature A CG 3D render movie? A 3D vision movie you watch through red-green glasses? A 3D first person shooter? All of the that? None of that?
I agree with the many previous posts stating, that there is a significant difference in the personal experience that you make at a Liberal Arts University (or similar) and at a purely technical university.
Speaking from personal experience I think that it might actually be very favourable to your skill development to study at a college that is not engineering only. Normally you might spend most of your days in the lab or going to lectures dealing with mostly purely technical subjects. Of course this is very interesting and probably complying with your expectations. However at least at lunchtime, when you go to the campus cafeteria it might be quite nice to meet some people who do something completely different (non-technical) than you. Also you might want to take a literature class in your spare time etc.
What I am saying is not that liberal arts in general are exciting and colorful, and engineering dull and grey. It is the mixture that makes the difference. To write good code you have to get inspirations, and if you are influenced from a field of interest opposite to your own this will help you in your development. The brain needs these stimuli.
This is also the reason why you go to university / college. Of course you can get the same amount of practical skills by acquiring job experience. But what you should get in university are NOT only the practical skills, but also the ability to abstract problems even surpassing the borders of your field. For people studying the arts it is exactly the other way around. They also need counterweights to root their creativity.
If I would be hiring for my company I would (given the case that the interview results are equivalent) choose the person from the Liberal Arts college.
I just bought the Eee with Windows a few days ago here in Tokyo. Actually I havent really closely followed the story, but I think I already saw it here in the stores with Windows XP at least 1.5 month ago.
Anyway, just to comment on the usability: With the preconfigured Windows setup the small screen is really not used to the optimum. But if you tweak a little bit (like hiding the startbar, setting the Desktop environment to maximum performance etc.) things turn out to be quite ok. I also installed the 'hacked' scaling video driver, which works nicely and allows me to run my VJing application at 1024x768. So far without crash.
I would have preferred to buy the Linux version of this machine, but couldn't get it here at Big Camera. So the Windows version was more of a second choice. No proper command line but, anyway, I dont regret it.
Oh, and Microsoft/Asus does deliver some bundled stuff with the machine. Some LiveBlabla (office suite or something). I uninstalled it without looking at it though (for openoffice).
To conclude I dont think the normal Windows XP is such an unpleasant experience on the Eee. Of course a version with a smaller harddisk footprint might be nice.
Most chinese people, in fact, place unity as a higher priority than human rights. They have been brainwashed to. People do not necessarily place 'unity' as a higher priority than human rights. However one can say that it is a common attitude in China that crimes should be punished very hard (including punishments that violate human rights) to prevent further crimes. This of course is a quite medieval view from our perspective (at least for the ones of us who do not comply with capital punishment as we have it in the states etc.), but comes from the fact that many Chinese have to face hardships in daily life that people in the western societies are confronted with less often. Take for example mutilated children who are being sneaked into the subway by a mafia organization to collect money. People see this kind of thing every day when they go to work. Of course they are terrified and wish for the responsible criminals to be punished. I do not want to justify any violation of human rights. Also I am sure that the goverment is involved with the mafia (or represents one itself) all over the country to gain money. I just want to explain why people think what they think and that it is not all due to brainwashing.
So most of them know three rote phrases? wow, thats all the language skills need to participate in complex sociopolitical debate. Eg. in Shanghai there are almost fifty larger or smaller universities. There are thousands of students. And I guarantee you that most of these students could indeed easily join a discussion as we are having it right now. Children get eductaion in the English language from the first year in school.
By the way there are more native Chinese (Mandarin ) speaking people in the world than there are native English speakers. Do you know three phrases in Chinese?:)
"The right direction" being defined as the ability of the ruling class to stay in power, you're absolutely right. Yes, you are right the ruling class (if you can really speak of a class, as quite every normal citizen is actually able to start a political career) tries to stay in power by all means. But they also know that they cannot rule forever. If they really wanted to keep the dictatorship up forever then they had to act like some North Korean or Burmese regime. Of course they know that by opening the country up to communication with the west they will gradually lose power.
The English sites will be seen be only the most educated: Those who stand to benefit most from maintaining the status quo. Unblocking only English language sites was a pretty slick move, for evil levels of slickness. I know a lot of people who are not exactly government friendly who will appreciate accessing Wikipedia from China without having to use a proxy. Unblocking the English content is not the real thing yet, but it is better than nothing. As I said it can be read by a lot of people including the students who come from all social levels, not only from a status quo content middle class.
However as a fact most Westerners do not understand very much about the, I think, quite complex structure of Chinese society. Even if you lived there it is not easy to get a feeling for what people ranging from the very poor countryside worker to the super rich entrepeneur really thinks about the government. Chinese people are not stupid, the have the same thoughts about their government as we have. Most people in China (except the very poor people) have access to the net and know how get past the firewall. Most people's English is much better then most people's Chinese in Europe or the states. They are able to read the news and follow the ongoing controversy.
It is so easy for us to say: ok we see that our system works in our country, so please do the same in China. But I think one also has to notice that the Chinese government does make efforts to steer the country in the right direction. The country is just so big and hard to control due to its extremly diverse ethnicity and the big gap between rich and poor. If things change from one day to the next, there will be a civil war and a lot of people will die and suffer. More than do right now because of the oppression by the government.
Chinese people know that they are oppressed and they are sick of it. The country is gonna change. But not tomorrow and not the day after. Not even because of the Olympic games. It takes time.
Um, yeah. You haven't lived here in Japan have you?
I wonder why the previous post got modded to 5 (anyways, anti-asian prejudices once again going strong on/.)? I dont know how long this person has lived in Japan, but I meet a lot of people like that here, and all they do is complain complain complain. If you have so much trouble with the Japanese way of doing things, why do you even stay there?
If they really do this and I lose my net access, that's it. I just lost my net access.
Being restricted about doing things which do not belong to the common rules in this country is always a problem. The consequences on illegal downloading are only one aspect of that. One has to understand, that in Japanese culture everything is about being an apt member of society. That means (among many other things like not littering etc.) that you should respect the copyrigt of other people. And really, if you ask a Japanese person about downloading and stuff, in almost all cases he will say, he doesn't do it.
Japanese society is pretty homogeneous, so actually most people do actually have enough money to buy the movies, music and software that they need. The same goes for me, Japan has been really good to me so far. I get good money, I can buy any computergame, movie or music that I want. Of course I also get mad at everything from time to time, or dont understand a thing about whats going on here. But in the end one has to accept that this is not the US or Europe, so things are just different. And even though they might seem very wrong to Westerners, to Japanese people they do make sense (and most people are actually happy here I think).
And honestly I would rather just be cut off from my internet access by one ISP than being charged a fantastically huge amount of money, in case some certain people caught me in the US.
People don't push back. They let companies plow them over and say nothing. There are no consumer rights in Japan.
And of course there are consumer rights here. People do push back. However, the way of pushing back is a more slow and subtle process than our western way.
most Japanese people can barely even type
I recently did some writing speed contest against a friend, Kanji (Japanese) versus Romanji (German). We are both more or less educated and have quite average writing speed. However my friend using a lot of kanji always won. When typing on the computer, the difference was even more significant..
Last but not least, if you really want to download with bittorrent and you dont have a huge amount of data every month, it is really no problem. You wont get cut off from your internet. Alao speed will be ok.
from the article: "..things..at least among younger people in the more developed markets just become common sense that that's the way things get done."
Being a scientist more or less being involved in similar research ( http://www.takanishi.mech.waseda.ac.jp/ ), I can only say that I would be really happy to create something that was even a little bit as creepy an AI as the one we have in the usual movies (Terminator etc.). Reality is that things like the 'Wizkid' or similar devices might be ok at conveying some crude intelligence through a smart choice of interactive features. However, in fact they are miles away from any kind of 'artificial intelligence' that might even remotely come close to outclassing a human (except in 'calculator' style intelligence of course).
Hmm, there have been so many replies already, but I do not really see anyone reporting too much of an inside view. I have been living/working in China for some time (in a Chinese tech company) and my girlfriend works in one of the few larger Chinese multimedia content provider companies. The development (regarding the complete scientific devlopment, but Nanotech in particular) I see is:
1. The goverment invests a lot in new technologies, but mostly trying to spark corporate investments (they keep their money rather for the Olympic games / military equipment / other means of keeping control of that huge country). So basically I think, the Chinese government could spend a lot more money if they wanted. It is doing the big "blabla" to, one the one hand make their own people happy (kinda propaganda), and on the other hand to fire this wonderful sense of competition the other countries have with the 'Red Giant'.
2. There are a lot of ingenious scientists in China. There is vast number of universities in the country and if a person is really smart, then the chances that he/she will raise to the top are very good. Regardless of the average level of the universities, selection is made and the best people do go to the top universities (Tsing Hua / Beijing Da Xue / maybe Fudan) It is undeniable that there is a huge amount of interlectual potential in the country.
3. On the other hand is the difference in niveau between one of the top universities and one of the average universities severe. The purpose of average universities in China is not to breed excellence but good standard techicians for the factories. So, in contrast to a not so numerous elite, there are a lot of average graduates, who are quite unlikely to make huge discoveries in Nanotechnology etc.
What I want to say with 2. and 3. is, that the scientific progress in China should neither be overrated nor underrated. There is no need to panic because of a future invasion of millions of brilliant scientists from China, nor is there zero potential. This goes for Nanotechnology as well: of course Chinese scientists are also researching the field with sponsorship from the goverment, but for sure they will not come out with THE huge new development like Jack in the box.
Regarding the 'Zi Zhu Chuang Xin': this is not the Chinese way of overstating their potential to the world. If one has ever checked on Chinese names for shops etc. in Shanghai or Beijing you might find a lot of "Zhu's wonderful shoeshop - the best shoeshop in the world". This is just a tradition in giving names, nothing more. Actually some Americans might be quite familiar with this kind of thing..
4. The older generation in China (40 upwards) has lived parts of their lifes in a very limited, sometimes very poor, sometimes very oppressed environment (one child policy only one example): now that the country is opening up this has several consequences (which do have direct impact on the Nanotech debate, I dont wanna be off-topic): People have a tremendous strive to use their new freedom to become as rich as the people they see evryday on tv or cruising their Beamer through Shanghai. This makes them strong and this gives them this energy that the west is so affraid about. This gives them interest in exploring and exploiting new technologies.
5. People grow reckless. Their cultural education was anihilated and forbidden during the cultural revolution. Now, for many people, the only ideal they have is money. It is wrong to think that the Chinese as such stand for their nation and want to exploit the other countries. Nothing could be further from the truth. Most people are fed up with their country. They will act with an ellbow-mentality not only to foreign people but also amongst themselves.
So also for 4. and 5.: People are very strong and forward thinking, but not without their (given the circumstances) quite natural flaws. It is true that many of the average Chinese people will outrun an average westerner in drive to become wealthy and successful. But also
Slashdot Mirror
Especially when it comes to cellphones a lot of things seem to be adapted from Japan. Such as the navigation capabilities of the iphone (all the mobile mapping stuff has been around for years here) or social networking applications (checking on actvities in your friendship circle, social grouping etc.). One thing that also might be picked up soon is a little 2nd-life clone that runs on my softbank (vodaphone) mobile. So while riding the train I can run around in a 3d environment on my cellie and talk to other people connected to there etc. Anyway I am not sure, but I think it is not overly popular here.
Regarding the code scanning, I mean it might be a great new high-density code that microsoft is using but in the end all it needs to do is call up a certain webpage in the cellphone browser (maybe with some local info added or so). However considering that the qr codes have been in popular use in Japan for ages this is so not new.
The Wii has been become the most popoular console in the US (here) Based on these facts, of course an US court will rule in favour of a US company as the result will make the country profit from an overseas competitor like Nintendo.
.. 'in dubio pro reo'
I forgot to add..
put up a cardboard puppet of yourself in front of one CCTV camera and commit a crime somewhere else. Even if your crime will be recorded on another CCTV camera, they will never be able to prove which one of the two was really you..
without set-top boxes
Set-top boxes have been gone for ages..
flat-screen TVs are just too thin for that
but so does the famous famous Leather Godesses of Phobos 'scratch and sniff' card.
So, who's got one of these to sell (unscratched of course)?
Agree with parent, before reading the actual paper the press release is kinda useless.
Also the example shown in the article does not really make sense for me. I mean of course if we look at a blurred and rotated object in a series of images it is hard to discern. Also we might think the object is not the same in the different images, although it actually is. But the question is, does that mean that the algorithm can reliably determine the identity of an object even if a human viewer cannot?
Actually I doubt it and as the post is linked to an MIT acrticle about MIT research it feels like it might be a bit overrated..
waste of time! Just remeber how long it takes to get rid of a preinstalled `complimetary` Norton Antivirus Suite..
an MPEG4 video player running the CPU will probably last forever (or at least until the heat gun experiment). Not enough load..
Okay, that's a bit of satire, but there's some truth in it, to be sure.
There is a lot of truth in that. But only from our perspective. Please dont forget how different Japanee people feel about things. How important the social integration, their and their families safety and the rules in generalPoeple might look like clones zombies etc here sometime, but (fantastically from our perspective) they actually enjoy that.
OOOOKASHIIIIIII!
It's the running around in circles. In a way he is right. I study for a PhD in robotics here in Tokyo. My fellow students are in most ways incredibly good at what they are doing (better than me most of the time). But what is their handicap is that they have this really fussy, maybe typically Japanese way of doing things. They want to plan things perfectly and they want to do things perectly all the time. Everyone stick to the rules please!
So they have a hard time dealing with fuzzy planning which is very important in everyday engineering work (especially if your boss has no idea what he is talking about). So thats when the marooning (maru in Japanese =circle) starts.
So maybe Japan needs more engineers because the current number does not work efficiently enough.
Also foreigners can easily enter a company or any university here in Japan. Only requirement (except being an ok engineer): reading, writing, speaking Japanese. And takes a while to learn..
let this be the last article on /. on the subject "can i use a proxy to get around china`s firewall?" for a while. The existance of the thing itself is already annoying enough, but in the end almost noone in China really cares all the much anymore.
Recently the subject seems to be used as a chance to point the finger at bad bad red red China all over again.
A 3D vision movie you watch through red-green glasses?
A 3D first person shooter?
All of the that? None of that?
I agree with the many previous posts stating, that there is a significant difference in the personal experience that you make at a Liberal Arts University (or similar) and at a purely technical university.
Speaking from personal experience I think that it might actually be very favourable to your skill development to study at a college that is not engineering only. Normally you might spend most of your days in the lab or going to lectures dealing with mostly purely technical subjects. Of course this is very interesting and probably complying with your expectations. However at least at lunchtime, when you go to the campus cafeteria it might be quite nice to meet some people who do something completely different (non-technical) than you. Also you might want to take a literature class in your spare time etc.
What I am saying is not that liberal arts in general are exciting and colorful, and engineering dull and grey. It is the mixture that makes the difference. To write good code you have to get inspirations, and if you are influenced from a field of interest opposite to your own this will help you in your development. The brain needs these stimuli.
This is also the reason why you go to university / college. Of course you can get the same amount of practical skills by acquiring job experience. But what you should get in university are NOT only the practical skills, but also the ability to abstract problems even surpassing the borders of your field. For people studying the arts it is exactly the other way around. They also need counterweights to root their creativity.
If I would be hiring for my company I would (given the case that the interview results are equivalent) choose the person from the Liberal Arts college.
I just bought the Eee with Windows a few days ago here in Tokyo. Actually I havent really closely followed the story, but I think I already saw it here in the stores with Windows XP at least 1.5 month ago.
Anyway, just to comment on the usability: With the preconfigured Windows setup the small screen is really not used to the optimum. But if you tweak a little bit (like hiding the startbar, setting the Desktop environment to maximum performance etc.) things turn out to be quite ok. I also installed the 'hacked' scaling video driver, which works nicely and allows me to run my VJing application at 1024x768. So far without crash.
I would have preferred to buy the Linux version of this machine, but couldn't get it here at Big Camera. So the Windows version was more of a second choice. No proper command line but, anyway, I dont regret it.
Oh, and Microsoft/Asus does deliver some bundled stuff with the machine. Some LiveBlabla (office suite or something). I uninstalled it without looking at it though (for openoffice).
To conclude I dont think the normal Windows XP is such an unpleasant experience on the Eee. Of course a version with a smaller harddisk footprint might be nice.
This of course is a quite medieval view from our perspective (at least for the ones of us who do not comply with capital punishment as we have it in the states etc.), but comes from the fact that many Chinese have to face hardships in daily life that people in the western societies are confronted with less often.
Take for example mutilated children who are being sneaked into the subway by a mafia organization to collect money. People see this kind of thing every day when they go to work. Of course they are terrified and wish for the responsible criminals to be punished.
I do not want to justify any violation of human rights. Also I am sure that the goverment is involved with the mafia (or represents one itself) all over the country to gain money. I just want to explain why people think what they think and that it is not all due to brainwashing. So most of them know three rote phrases? wow, thats all the language skills need to participate in complex sociopolitical debate. Eg. in Shanghai there are almost fifty larger or smaller universities. There are thousands of students. And I guarantee you that most of these students could indeed easily join a discussion as we are having it right now. Children get eductaion in the English language from the first year in school.
By the way there are more native Chinese (Mandarin ) speaking people in the world than there are native English speakers. Do you know three phrases in Chinese?
However as a fact most Westerners do not understand very much about the, I think, quite complex structure of Chinese society. Even if you lived there it is not easy to get a feeling for what people ranging from the very poor countryside worker to the super rich entrepeneur really thinks about the government. Chinese people are not stupid, the have the same thoughts about their government as we have. Most people in China (except the very poor people) have access to the net and know how get past the firewall. Most people's English is much better then most people's Chinese in Europe or the states. They are able to read the news and follow the ongoing controversy.
It is so easy for us to say: ok we see that our system works in our country, so please do the same in China. But I think one also has to notice that the Chinese government does make efforts to steer the country in the right direction. The country is just so big and hard to control due to its extremly diverse ethnicity and the big gap between rich and poor. If things change from one day to the next, there will be a civil war and a lot of people will die and suffer. More than do right now because of the oppression by the government.
Chinese people know that they are oppressed and they are sick of it. The country is gonna change. But not tomorrow and not the day after. Not even because of the Olympic games. It takes time.
I wonder why the previous post got modded to 5 (anyways, anti-asian prejudices once again going strong on
Being restricted about doing things which do not belong to the common rules in this country is always a problem. The consequences on illegal downloading are only one aspect of that. One has to understand, that in Japanese culture everything is about being an apt member of society. That means (among many other things like not littering etc.) that you should respect the copyrigt of other people. And really, if you ask a Japanese person about downloading and stuff, in almost all cases he will say, he doesn't do it.
Japanese society is pretty homogeneous, so actually most people do actually have enough money to buy the movies, music and software that they need. The same goes for me, Japan has been really good to me so far. I get good money, I can buy any computergame, movie or music that I want. Of course I also get mad at everything from time to time, or dont understand a thing about whats going on here. But in the end one has to accept that this is not the US or Europe, so things are just different. And even though they might seem very wrong to Westerners, to Japanese people they do make sense (and most people are actually happy here I think).
And honestly I would rather just be cut off from my internet access by one ISP than being charged a fantastically huge amount of money, in case some certain people caught me in the US.
And of course there are consumer rights here. People do push back. However, the way of pushing back is a more slow and subtle process than our western way.
I recently did some writing speed contest against a friend, Kanji (Japanese) versus Romanji (German). We are both more or less educated and have quite average writing speed. However my friend using a lot of kanji always won. When typing on the computer, the difference was even more significant..
Last but not least, if you really want to download with bittorrent and you dont have a huge amount of data every month, it is really no problem. You wont get cut off from your internet. Alao speed will be ok.
from the article: "..things..at least among younger people in the more developed markets just become common sense that that's the way things get done."
Is that how he got Windows done?
Being a scientist more or less being involved in similar research ( http://www.takanishi.mech.waseda.ac.jp/ ), I can only say that I would be really happy to create something that was even a little bit as creepy an AI as the one we have in the usual movies (Terminator etc.). Reality is that things like the 'Wizkid' or similar devices might be ok at conveying some crude intelligence through a smart choice of interactive features. However, in fact they are miles away from any kind of 'artificial intelligence' that might even remotely come close to outclassing a human (except in 'calculator' style intelligence of course).
Hmm, there have been so many replies already, but I do not really see anyone reporting too much of an inside view.
I have been living/working in China for some time (in a Chinese tech company) and my girlfriend works in one of the few larger Chinese multimedia content provider companies. The development (regarding the complete scientific devlopment, but Nanotech in particular) I see is:
1. The goverment invests a lot in new technologies, but mostly trying to spark corporate investments (they keep their money rather for the Olympic games / military equipment / other means of keeping control of that huge country). So basically I think, the Chinese government could spend a lot more money if they wanted. It is doing the big "blabla" to, one the one hand make their own people happy (kinda propaganda), and on the other hand to fire this wonderful sense of competition the other countries have with the 'Red Giant'.
2. There are a lot of ingenious scientists in China. There is vast number of universities in the country and if a person is really smart, then the chances that he/she will raise to the top are very good. Regardless of the average level of the universities, selection is made and the best people do go to the top universities (Tsing Hua / Beijing Da Xue / maybe Fudan) It is undeniable that there is a huge amount of interlectual potential in the country.
3. On the other hand is the difference in niveau between one of the top universities and one of the average universities severe. The purpose of average universities in China is not to breed excellence but good standard techicians for the factories. So, in contrast to a not so numerous elite, there are a lot of average graduates, who are quite unlikely to make huge discoveries in Nanotechnology etc.
What I want to say with 2. and 3. is, that the scientific progress in China should neither be overrated nor underrated. There is no need to panic because of a future invasion of millions of brilliant scientists from China, nor is there zero potential. This goes for Nanotechnology as well: of course Chinese scientists are also researching the field with sponsorship from the goverment, but for sure they will not come out with THE huge new development like Jack in the box.
Regarding the 'Zi Zhu Chuang Xin': this is not the Chinese way of overstating their potential to the world. If one has ever checked on Chinese names for shops etc. in Shanghai or Beijing you might find a lot of "Zhu's wonderful shoeshop - the best shoeshop in the world". This is just a tradition in giving names, nothing more. Actually some Americans might be quite familiar with this kind of thing..
4. The older generation in China (40 upwards) has lived parts of their lifes in a very limited, sometimes very poor, sometimes very oppressed environment (one child policy only one example): now that the country is opening up this has several consequences (which do have direct impact on the Nanotech debate, I dont wanna be off-topic): People have a tremendous strive to use their new freedom to become as rich as the people they see evryday on tv or cruising their Beamer through Shanghai. This makes them strong and this gives them this energy that the west is so affraid about. This gives them interest in exploring and exploiting new technologies.
5. People grow reckless. Their cultural education was anihilated and forbidden during the cultural revolution. Now, for many people, the only ideal they have is money. It is wrong to think that the Chinese as such stand for their nation and want to exploit the other countries. Nothing could be further from the truth. Most people are fed up with their country. They will act with an ellbow-mentality not only to foreign people but also amongst themselves.
So also for 4. and 5.: People are very strong and forward thinking, but not without their (given the circumstances) quite natural flaws. It is true that many of the average Chinese people will outrun an average westerner in drive to become wealthy and successful. But also