I have to say that every time I've been back to China, I've encountered absolutely nothing in terms of enforcement of laws regarding security, information, freedom, religion, porn, blah blah blah. The real problem is the latency of the connection from China to the US. It is absolutely horrible.
I was recently in Shanghai visiting family and took a lot of photos and would upload them to Flickr through the Flickr Uploader software. Typically, I would have to try 3 or 4 times to get them uploaded because the connection would keep timing out. Same thing for accessing my bank account, my credit card, and so on. Incredibly slow because of the latency even though I was on a 1.5Mbps/256Kbps DSL line. I also had no trouble getting to major US newspapers like the NYTimes and CNN, and no trouble getting to porn sites in the US. Mind you, this is all on a connection provided by, and available only through China Telecom, a corporation that is state-owned and operated (They own and operate all phone communications in China I believe).
So for those people who are moving to US and are deathly afraid of loss of such freedoms, don't be, as others have said, as long as you're not trying to raise a ruckus, no one's gonna give a damn. Though being guarded about your opinions in front of people in high positions of power maybe a worthwhile tactic. I would guarantee you, in most places, people will eye your skin color and then think about how to make money off of you first before they worry about if you're gonna try to spread the evils of western-style thinking. What you should be most concerned about is the difference in manner and attitudes of Chinese people.
What you never heard on the news at any point is that these people who practice Falun Gong/Dafa were primarily peasants and farmers in the country side. These people became so enamored with it that they made their kids do it too, and then everyone became so enamored with the promise of Falun Gong that the kids stopped going to school.
Now whats better for poor peasant kids? Hoping to find a spinning wheel in your stomach so you can ascend to heaven, or going to school to learn some skills so they can join the world economy? You decide.
This wasn't happening to people in the big cities. It was happening to poor peasants who have little to hope for, and for them, Falun Gong is a cult just like the Branch Davidians, Heaven's Gate, etc. While peasants aren't stupid necessarily, they don't realize the value of education in the same way that people in western/modern cities/nations do.
These idiotic Falun Gong cultists find solace in the western idea of ideological freedom, because it's the easy way to cover up their true beliefs. I have no problem with people wanting to perform exercises to maintain health of mind and body - I do have problems when people want to start a cult with little kids in it.
Some economists point fingers at the payroll tax that companies have to pay on their employee's salary. Because income tax has gone down over the past several years, payroll tax has come up, and is now equivalent to income tax. This of course makes it harder on corporations to hire people cause they gotta pay the huge tax on the CEO's paycheck, which could probably pay 3 or 4 salaries of typical worker drones.
It is very possible that IBM was forced to accept MS-DOS because when IBM first began development of an encryption system for DES in the early 70s, the NSA forced them to reduce the key length to 56 bits from 128 bits so that they could more easily crack the encryption. Two opponents of reducing IBM's key length estimated that a 56 bit encrypted message could be cracked in about 10 hours for a cost of $5000. Whereas an 128 bit key would cost about $200 septrillion or $200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 and god knows how long.
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I have to say that every time I've been back to China, I've encountered absolutely nothing in terms of enforcement of laws regarding security, information, freedom, religion, porn, blah blah blah. The real problem is the latency of the connection from China to the US. It is absolutely horrible.
I was recently in Shanghai visiting family and took a lot of photos and would upload them to Flickr through the Flickr Uploader software. Typically, I would have to try 3 or 4 times to get them uploaded because the connection would keep timing out. Same thing for accessing my bank account, my credit card, and so on. Incredibly slow because of the latency even though I was on a 1.5Mbps/256Kbps DSL line. I also had no trouble getting to major US newspapers like the NYTimes and CNN, and no trouble getting to porn sites in the US. Mind you, this is all on a connection provided by, and available only through China Telecom, a corporation that is state-owned and operated (They own and operate all phone communications in China I believe).
So for those people who are moving to US and are deathly afraid of loss of such freedoms, don't be, as others have said, as long as you're not trying to raise a ruckus, no one's gonna give a damn. Though being guarded about your opinions in front of people in high positions of power maybe a worthwhile tactic. I would guarantee you, in most places, people will eye your skin color and then think about how to make money off of you first before they worry about if you're gonna try to spread the evils of western-style thinking. What you should be most concerned about is the difference in manner and attitudes of Chinese people.
Last I remember, Reason was a nuclear-powered gauss gun or something that fired depleted uranium rounds.
their internal network is 10Gbps, with a 1Gbps external connection according to this page: http://www.cyberport.com.hk/userdata_hkcmcl/ITT_En glish/ipn.html
What you never heard on the news at any point is that these people who practice Falun Gong/Dafa were primarily peasants and farmers in the country side. These people became so enamored with it that they made their kids do it too, and then everyone became so enamored with the promise of Falun Gong that the kids stopped going to school. Now whats better for poor peasant kids? Hoping to find a spinning wheel in your stomach so you can ascend to heaven, or going to school to learn some skills so they can join the world economy? You decide. This wasn't happening to people in the big cities. It was happening to poor peasants who have little to hope for, and for them, Falun Gong is a cult just like the Branch Davidians, Heaven's Gate, etc. While peasants aren't stupid necessarily, they don't realize the value of education in the same way that people in western/modern cities/nations do. These idiotic Falun Gong cultists find solace in the western idea of ideological freedom, because it's the easy way to cover up their true beliefs. I have no problem with people wanting to perform exercises to maintain health of mind and body - I do have problems when people want to start a cult with little kids in it.
Some economists point fingers at the payroll tax that companies have to pay on their employee's salary. Because income tax has gone down over the past several years, payroll tax has come up, and is now equivalent to income tax. This of course makes it harder on corporations to hire people cause they gotta pay the huge tax on the CEO's paycheck, which could probably pay 3 or 4 salaries of typical worker drones.
It is very possible that IBM was forced to accept MS-DOS because when IBM first began development of an encryption system for DES in the early 70s, the NSA forced them to reduce the key length to 56 bits from 128 bits so that they could more easily crack the encryption. Two opponents of reducing IBM's key length estimated that a 56 bit encrypted message could be cracked in about 10 hours for a cost of $5000. Whereas an 128 bit key would cost about $200 septrillion or $200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 and god knows how long.