"survival of the fittest... If that sentence is not pure nazism, then we didn't read the same history book!"
Geez! Nazi's were not about survival of the fittest at all! They were about systematic destruction of anyone besides their "Aryan Race." Nothing to do with who is the "fittest."
And regarding your statement about people living on medicine who contributed to society... I'm not against letting them live so much, as letting them reproduce! We don't need their genes!
Exhibit A is meant as a result of Exhibit B. The world is overpopulated, as a result of humans. This in turn is causing many human deaths. Not nearly enough to counterbalance the overpopulation however. The overpopulation is resulting in a destroyed ecosystem, which is in turn killing humans.
This would also involve finding a destination that would actually be livable or at least harvestable. There's more to resources than just precious metals. Terraforming is all fine and dandy, but it's going to stay in the realms of science fiction for quite a while. Probably a lot longer than practical interplanetary travel.
From where I'm looking, it seems that we're driving ourselves extinct! The #1 killer of humans is, well, humans. Other than natural diseases and what not, the only thing that regularly kills humans is humans.
So, get rid of those natural diseases you say. But those natural diseases and what not is what keeps our population in check. When we start defeating those natural diseases, our population explodes. And this is exactly what's happening. There's simply too god damn many of us. We're destroying ourselves.
You say you'd rather be guiding your own destiny than have nothing guide it. But what's happening is short sighted, money grubbing assholes are running all our destinies. Destroying the balance of our ecosystem to make a quick buck. I'd rather have nothing guiding it.
Shoeboy (not posting anonymously ^_^ ) said:
"There's no moral difference between change due to evolution and change due to scientific treatments."
Uhm.. I'm gonna have to disagree with you here. Change due to evolution is something we don't control. It's something that happens naturally. It has nothing to do with morality.
Scientific treatments are the exact opposite. We control what we do to ourselves with science. Any changes that happen are changes that we did to ourselves. This has everything to do with morality.
This isn't even getting into the whole argument about whether we even have the knowledge required to properly alter our own evolution. Who the fuck are we to say that we know how we should evolve, when it's been working pretty damn good without our intervention for the past few eons. I would like to say the now cliche "We shouldn't play God," but i shouldn't say that since I don't think there is a God.. I'll instead just say "We shouldn't play Nature." There's sooo much we will never know about the ecosystem as a whole. We will never really know enough to where we can intelligently control our own evolution without royally fucking it all up.
Kiss the Blade said:
"The medical technology we have already is quite good enough, thank you, without sacrificing our ehtics in our lust for immortality."
I would say that medical technology has gone too far. People are living too long, people that would normally die from their genetic diseases live on to produce children, and people who should be recipients of the Darwin Award are kept alive to produce children. We are breaking the system. What happened to survival of the fittest? Medical technology has created an over polluted gene pool. People who should be dieing are passing on their bad genes to the next generation, instead of taking their diseases to their grave never to be seen from again.
Let's not forget over population! Medical technology has decreased infant mortality and increased life expectancy rates too much. Not enough people are ever going to use proper family planning, and old people are just going to keep getting older. There's always going to be too many children. The elderly will keep increasing. I know nobody wants to lose their little baby brother, or see their grandparents die, but frankly our race is doomed unless we find some fantastic new way to utilize the resources we currently have. And this would have to be implemented worldwide in order to work, not just in the US or EU. We give medical technology to third world countries, but we don't help them utilize their resources! It's just not going to happen.
Maybe I'm just too sadistic, but I think the world needs another plague or something similar to get us back into order.
And no, this post is not meant to be funny, or to be a troll. I truly believe we are fucked.
I've had a DVD copy for a while now.. Only cost about $4USD too. Only problem is it's got no english subtitles, just Chinese. Oh well, that's what I learned Chinese for anyway -- so I can get high quality cheap-ass anime and understand it!
Next goal is to learn Japanese, so I can go to China to use my Chinese skills to get cheap anime and then understand the Japanese, instead of relying on Chinese subtitles...
Chinese shares a lot of characters (Hanzi in mandarin) with a lot of countries. Not just Japan.
Korea also uses the Chinese characters, and so does Vietnam (although not very much at all nowadays). Some other sino-indian countries use Chinese characters to a limited extent as well.
Then of course you have other countries that not only use Chinese characters, but also have a very large percentage of Chinese people: Singapore, Taiwan (had to put it in somewhere..), Indonesia, and many more. Chinese people and the Chinese language are everywhere.
>-- The real Leto2 has Slashdot ID 113576. I am an imposter.
And let it be known that the real Leto2 is merely a pretender to the throne. The true god emperor is Leto-II with ID 1509.
There's no other "Leto"s with a lower id.. Bow to the original! Fear my prescience!
Whoa.. I wonder if I can get all my old NES stuff back from the little kid I gave it to. I had all of the Dragon Warrior series for the NES. Even the original.. That was one of my favorite series. Fear my low SlashID! (bidding starts at $500)
Geez, upon first glance I see "Foundation Series" -- and what am I supposed to think?? Of course I think of the great SF novels by Asimov. Wow.. How could such a grand universe be represented in a computer game... what would gameplay be like.. what characters would there be.. what would the story be.. endless questions. My mind starts to run crazy with ideas. I get excited, click on the link, and what do I find??? A game that has nothing to do at all with the Foundation books. It's a strategy game that has nothing to do with it at all. Disappointment rushes over me..
Oh well. Maybe some uber game designer saw it and had the same thoughts as I did, and they'll create a game.
One can only hope. But don't get my hopes up next time, you evil bastards!!! You are evil! Pure evil! Fear my low SlashID! (bidding starts at $500)
This will effectively stop any player that is marked as region-free, ie region #0 or set to ignore regions. But if you have a player that you can manually set whatever region you want, this protection is useless.
Re:From a Slashdot user in Beijing
on
Linux And Beijing
·
· Score: 1
Actually, I do say the same thing about the US. Both China and the US are controlled by the media. It's just that the media is controlled by the government in China and by Big Business in the US. A big difference is that in the US you are free to reed the net which may have views that differ from the media in the US. In China, they don't have that freedom -- unless you can get outside the firewall, which is always possible, but most people certainly can't.
Oh, and China is certainly different than I expected, but I think I did a pretty good job of not expecting too much before I came. I was already a communist at heart, so I was quite a bit dissapointed at the amount of capitalism going around though..
Are you a student in Oregon? If not, my information won't be of much help. The program I came over on is part of OUS (Oregon University System). Pretty much all the Universities (public/private) in Oregon can participate, plus University of Washington I believe. Most of the people who come are all from University of Oregon and Oregon State University though. It's just OUS's Beijing, China Intensive Language Program. The University here in Beijing is the Central University for Nationalites (zhong yang min zu da xue). If you come for fall term i think it's about 4,000 and if you come for combined winter/spring term it's about 5,500 i believe (both quoted amounts are for Oregon residents). For the year, obviously add the 2 together. But I would suggest NOT doing it through the OUS program if possible. If you just come on your own it's tons cheaper. For one semester here I'm paying 1,100. Plus $3.50/day for my dorm room. CHEAP. The OUS program just adds tons of fees and rips you off. You get some additional travelling added in, but you can just travel yourself for a lot less money. The only reason to do the OUS program is if you need to stay enrolled in a US university so you don't start getting interest added to student loans. The best thing would be (of course) talk to your counselor.
Hello All, I'm currently residing in Beijing so I'll try to explain what I've seen here regarding OS usage in China..
But first a bit of a background as to why you should listen to what I have to say: I came to Beijing through a study abroad program in my University, the University of Oregon, in order to improve my Chinese language skills. This has nothing to do with my major, Computer Science. (What's a CS major doing studying Chinese in China? That's another story..) I've been here since September '99, and will return to the States in September '00. The majority of my computer access has been my (Korean) roommate's (Chinese brand) TCL computer, and sometimes computers in Internet Cafes.
My University here in Beijing is located in the NW section of the city. Over the past couple of months they've been demolishing old buildings and constructing huge monstrosities of capitalism in the nearby vicinity, hoping to turn the area into Beijing's IT center. Time will tell how it turns out..
Recently I've noticed quite a few Red Flag Linux banner ads hanging above the streets nearby. But that's all I've seen. Ads. Every computer I've seen (roommate's, internet cafe's, demo machines in stores, every computer in my dorm) has been running various incarnations of Win 9X. At the beginning of this term my roommate was going to try out a couple versions of Linux with good Korean support (Alzza and Mizi). They were RedHat based BTW. I helped him with the installation, and got it working but in the end he decided it was too difficult. Also probably because XFree didn't quite like his supremely cheap video which was integrated into the MB, sharing memory with the rest of the system.
A point to notice however, is that I don't think any of the computer's I've seen have payed MS for their software. In China, a good rule of thumb for the price of CDs, be it software, music, vcds, or whatever is around US$1 per CD. DVD's a bit more expensive at almost US$2.50 / DVD. Sometimes a bit more, sometimes a bit less. Diablo 2 arrived in the area a few days ago. Starting price before haggling is 30 yuan (right now US$1 is about 8.3 yuan). All the Internet Cafes in Beijing are completely stocked with pirated games for people to play with their friends in the cafe.
Another thing I've noticed about China is that, in general, the people just go with what's popular. Even more so than the Western world. And Windows is popular. I've talked with Chinese people who have pretty good jobs in the Chinese IT field who have said that they think Microsoft should be allowed to be a monopoly, and they don't see why it's bad. Everybody uses it and doesn't know about anything else (and therefore likes it), so where's the problem?? Oh, another note: I have yet to see a single Macintosh outside of a store, and I've only seen one store selling Macs!
From what I've seen so far in China, Windows is going to stick around for a LOOONG time unless the government is actually going to do something about the millions of CDs full of pirated software that are being sold literally everywhere -- especially right outside the doors of those new IT Tech centers being built I mentioned at the beginning! If you're walking around Beijing's new super modern high tech IT area, at least half the people you walk by ask you if you want CDs, CD-ROMs, VCDs, or "Yellow"/"Fuzzy" (porn) VCDs. Why would I walk into the newly built 20+ story tower next to me and pay US prices for software, when I can pay a couple bucks and get everything I want right outside? The "free" aspect of Linux is largely lost on the Chinese. It costs the same for them to buy a CD with Linux on it as it does to buy a CD with MS Windows 98 SE on it. Even when Great Wall Computer sends out computers with Linux preloaded (which IS a good sign), I'm doubtful Linux will stay loaded when the most popular OS everyone else is using is only US$2 or so.
Oh yes, almost forgot: The firewall issue people have mentioned. The only things that have been blocked (that I can tell anyway) are News sites and University sites. For instance, the University of Oregon at one point had an article published somewhere on their web site that wasn't entirely positive towards the People's Republic of China. So for a long time now you can not connect to the main webserver of my Univ. Even though that ancient article is (I believe) long gone, you can not connect to the main webserver. I can still (sometimes) telnet and access my email at my Univ since they only blocked the main server, not the other servers of the Univ. Another site that has been blocked would be the NY Times. So actually I don't even know what the article says about the situation (so forgive me if it sounds like I haven't read it! I haven't!). Mots of the major news sites around the world are blocked because they probably at one point had an article up that didn't have a favorable opinion of the PRC. Whenever I try a link off of Slashdot to a news article I'm extremely pleased if I can actually read the article. I've come to expect not being able to connect.
Porn on the other hand, is pretty much not blocked. The PRC's reasoning for this is probably something like "Look at all that porn in those 'Civilized' Western countries! They are evil! China is good and pure!" China has always been sure to publish as much as possible that would make the morals of the US look bad (not that US morals are good, but...). When I was teaching English to Chinese this last term they all knew about the Clinton Scandal (Okay, so other countries all do to..), but also other smaller things I wouldn't expect them to know such as the incident where a female High School teacher took advantage of her male student and the two of them thought they had fallen in love. And any incident involving teenage student's violence in school was also common knowledge to them. The Chinese newspapers publish as much as possible to make the US look bad, but pretty much nothing to make it look good (morally at least). And as we all know all the newspapers are controlled by the government. They can only publish what the government wants them to. Even China's English language newspapers are like this.
Phew, enough rambling for now.. If anyone has any other questions for someone who's living here, feel free to email or respond to this comment. Maybe I'll even be able to respond in an intelligent manner.
Is when he writes a couple paragraphs on "Which OS is Better?" where there's some good arguments for UNIX, and then the next paragraph is "Which OS is REALLY better?" What's especially funny is in the previous part he says the only way to really say which is better is by using standard benchmarking utilities. But to find out which is REALLY better you just have to know NT is the choice of a new generation of IT professionals..
Slashdot Mirror
"survival of the fittest... If that sentence is not pure nazism, then we didn't read the same history book!"
Geez! Nazi's were not about survival of the fittest at all! They were about systematic destruction of anyone besides their "Aryan Race." Nothing to do with who is the "fittest."
And regarding your statement about people living on medicine who contributed to society... I'm not against letting them live so much, as letting them reproduce! We don't need their genes!
Fear my low SlashID! (bidding starts at $500)
Exhibit A is meant as a result of Exhibit B. The world is overpopulated, as a result of humans. This in turn is causing many human deaths. Not nearly enough to counterbalance the overpopulation however. The overpopulation is resulting in a destroyed ecosystem, which is in turn killing humans.
Fear my low SlashID! (bidding starts at $500)
This would also involve finding a destination that would actually be livable or at least harvestable. There's more to resources than just precious metals. Terraforming is all fine and dandy, but it's going to stay in the realms of science fiction for quite a while. Probably a lot longer than practical interplanetary travel.
Fear my low SlashID! (bidding starts at $500)
From where I'm looking, it seems that we're driving ourselves extinct! The #1 killer of humans is, well, humans. Other than natural diseases and what not, the only thing that regularly kills humans is humans.
So, get rid of those natural diseases you say. But those natural diseases and what not is what keeps our population in check. When we start defeating those natural diseases, our population explodes. And this is exactly what's happening. There's simply too god damn many of us. We're destroying ourselves.
You say you'd rather be guiding your own destiny than have nothing guide it. But what's happening is short sighted, money grubbing assholes are running all our destinies. Destroying the balance of our ecosystem to make a quick buck. I'd rather have nothing guiding it.
Fear my low SlashID! (bidding starts at $500)
Shoeboy (not posting anonymously ^_^ ) said:
"There's no moral difference between change due to evolution and change due to scientific treatments."
Uhm.. I'm gonna have to disagree with you here. Change due to evolution is something we don't control. It's something that happens naturally. It has nothing to do with morality.
Scientific treatments are the exact opposite. We control what we do to ourselves with science. Any changes that happen are changes that we did to ourselves. This has everything to do with morality.
This isn't even getting into the whole argument about whether we even have the knowledge required to properly alter our own evolution. Who the fuck are we to say that we know how we should evolve, when it's been working pretty damn good without our intervention for the past few eons. I would like to say the now cliche "We shouldn't play God," but i shouldn't say that since I don't think there is a God.. I'll instead just say "We shouldn't play Nature." There's sooo much we will never know about the ecosystem as a whole. We will never really know enough to where we can intelligently control our own evolution without royally fucking it all up.
Fear my low SlashID! (bidding starts at $500)
Kiss the Blade said:
"The medical technology we have already is quite good enough, thank you, without sacrificing our ehtics in our lust for immortality."
I would say that medical technology has gone too far. People are living too long, people that would normally die from their genetic diseases live on to produce children, and people who should be recipients of the Darwin Award are kept alive to produce children. We are breaking the system. What happened to survival of the fittest? Medical technology has created an over polluted gene pool. People who should be dieing are passing on their bad genes to the next generation, instead of taking their diseases to their grave never to be seen from again.
Let's not forget over population! Medical technology has decreased infant mortality and increased life expectancy rates too much. Not enough people are ever going to use proper family planning, and old people are just going to keep getting older. There's always going to be too many children. The elderly will keep increasing. I know nobody wants to lose their little baby brother, or see their grandparents die, but frankly our race is doomed unless we find some fantastic new way to utilize the resources we currently have. And this would have to be implemented worldwide in order to work, not just in the US or EU. We give medical technology to third world countries, but we don't help them utilize their resources! It's just not going to happen.
Maybe I'm just too sadistic, but I think the world needs another plague or something similar to get us back into order.
And no, this post is not meant to be funny, or to be a troll. I truly believe we are fucked.
Fear my low SlashID! (bidding starts at $500)
I've had a DVD copy for a while now.. Only cost about $4USD too. Only problem is it's got no english subtitles, just Chinese. Oh well, that's what I learned Chinese for anyway -- so I can get high quality cheap-ass anime and understand it!
Next goal is to learn Japanese, so I can go to China to use my Chinese skills to get cheap anime and then understand the Japanese, instead of relying on Chinese subtitles...
Fear my low SlashID! (bidding starts at $500)
Chinese shares a lot of characters (Hanzi in mandarin) with a lot of countries. Not just Japan.
Korea also uses the Chinese characters, and so does Vietnam (although not very much at all nowadays). Some other sino-indian countries use Chinese characters to a limited extent as well.
Then of course you have other countries that not only use Chinese characters, but also have a very large percentage of Chinese people: Singapore, Taiwan (had to put it in somewhere..), Indonesia, and many more. Chinese people and the Chinese language are everywhere.
Fear my low SlashID! (bidding starts at $500)
Continue reading the series.. Another Leto II is born.
Fear my low SlashID! (bidding starts at $500)
Does any of the money generated by the browser get back to Mozilla?
Uhmm.. Who do you think pays the salaries of most of the Mozilla programmers?
Fear my low SlashID! (bidding starts at $500)
No, DVD Players will not play DVD-R discs. Blame all the DVD companies for not being able to decide on standards.
Fear my low SlashID! (bidding starts at $500)
then why did you take the time to make a message saying that you didn't want the moderators to kill you?
Fear my low SlashID! (bidding starts at $500)
>-- The real Leto2 has Slashdot ID 113576. I am an imposter.
And let it be known that the real Leto2 is merely a pretender to the throne. The true god emperor is Leto-II with ID 1509.
There's no other "Leto"s with a lower id.. Bow to the original! Fear my prescience!
Fear my low SlashID! (bidding starts at $500)
Huh? I just searched through every http reference in this story's thread, at -1 even, and there is no such post.
Fear my low SlashID! (bidding starts at $500)
Come on people, this is /. here! Where's the karma whores posting the documents?!?! Let's get a look at these documents! Where are they?
Fear my low SlashID! (bidding starts at $500)
read the user info.. he's made the account open..
Fear my low SlashID! (bidding starts at $500)
Actually, the Athlon will soon be at 266, not 233. It's DDR, and it will be for 100 and 133 mhz RAM, so that would be 2x100=200 and 2x133=266.
-Toby
Fear my low SlashID! (bidding starts at $500)
Whoa.. I wonder if I can get all my old NES stuff back from the little kid I gave it to. I had all of the Dragon Warrior series for the NES. Even the original.. That was one of my favorite series.
Fear my low SlashID! (bidding starts at $500)
Geez, upon first glance I see "Foundation Series" -- and what am I supposed to think?? Of course I think of the great SF novels by Asimov. Wow.. How could such a grand universe be represented in a computer game... what would gameplay be like.. what characters would there be.. what would the story be.. endless questions. My mind starts to run crazy with ideas. I get excited, click on the link, and what do I find??? A game that has nothing to do at all with the Foundation books. It's a strategy game that has nothing to do with it at all. Disappointment rushes over me..
Oh well. Maybe some uber game designer saw it and had the same thoughts as I did, and they'll create a game.
One can only hope. But don't get my hopes up next time, you evil bastards!!! You are evil! Pure evil!
Fear my low SlashID! (bidding starts at $500)
This will effectively stop any player that is marked as region-free, ie region #0 or set to ignore regions. But if you have a player that you can manually set whatever region you want, this protection is useless.
Actually, I do say the same thing about the US. Both China and the US are controlled by the media. It's just that the media is controlled by the government in China and by Big Business in the US. A big difference is that in the US you are free to reed the net which may have views that differ from the media in the US. In China, they don't have that freedom -- unless you can get outside the firewall, which is always possible, but most people certainly can't.
Oh, and China is certainly different than I expected, but I think I did a pretty good job of not expecting too much before I came. I was already a communist at heart, so I was quite a bit dissapointed at the amount of capitalism going around though..
-Toby
Are you a student in Oregon? If not, my information won't be of much help. The program I came over on is part of OUS (Oregon University System). Pretty much all the Universities (public/private) in Oregon can participate, plus University of Washington I believe. Most of the people who come are all from University of Oregon and Oregon State University though. It's just OUS's Beijing, China Intensive Language Program. The University here in Beijing is the Central University for Nationalites (zhong yang min zu da xue). If you come for fall term i think it's about 4,000 and if you come for combined winter/spring term it's about 5,500 i believe (both quoted amounts are for Oregon residents). For the year, obviously add the 2 together. But I would suggest NOT doing it through the OUS program if possible. If you just come on your own it's tons cheaper. For one semester here I'm paying 1,100. Plus $3.50/day for my dorm room. CHEAP. The OUS program just adds tons of fees and rips you off. You get some additional travelling added in, but you can just travel yourself for a lot less money. The only reason to do the OUS program is if you need to stay enrolled in a US university so you don't start getting interest added to student loans. The best thing would be (of course) talk to your counselor.
- Leto-II
Hello All, I'm currently residing in Beijing so I'll try to explain what I've seen here regarding OS usage in China..
But first a bit of a background as to why you should listen to what I have to say: I came to Beijing through a study abroad program in my University, the University of Oregon, in order to improve my Chinese language skills. This has nothing to do with my major, Computer Science. (What's a CS major doing studying Chinese in China? That's another story..) I've been here since September '99, and will return to the States in September '00. The majority of my computer access has been my (Korean) roommate's (Chinese brand) TCL computer, and sometimes computers in Internet Cafes.
My University here in Beijing is located in the NW section of the city. Over the past couple of months they've been demolishing old buildings and constructing huge monstrosities of capitalism in the nearby vicinity, hoping to turn the area into Beijing's IT center. Time will tell how it turns out..
Recently I've noticed quite a few Red Flag Linux banner ads hanging above the streets nearby. But that's all I've seen. Ads. Every computer I've seen (roommate's, internet cafe's, demo machines in stores, every computer in my dorm) has been running various incarnations of Win 9X. At the beginning of this term my roommate was going to try out a couple versions of Linux with good Korean support (Alzza and Mizi). They were RedHat based BTW. I helped him with the installation, and got it working but in the end he decided it was too difficult. Also probably because XFree didn't quite like his supremely cheap video which was integrated into the MB, sharing memory with the rest of the system.
A point to notice however, is that I don't think any of the computer's I've seen have payed MS for their software. In China, a good rule of thumb for the price of CDs, be it software, music, vcds, or whatever is around US$1 per CD. DVD's a bit more expensive at almost US$2.50 / DVD. Sometimes a bit more, sometimes a bit less. Diablo 2 arrived in the area a few days ago. Starting price before haggling is 30 yuan (right now US$1 is about 8.3 yuan). All the Internet Cafes in Beijing are completely stocked with pirated games for people to play with their friends in the cafe.
Another thing I've noticed about China is that, in general, the people just go with what's popular. Even more so than the Western world. And Windows is popular. I've talked with Chinese people who have pretty good jobs in the Chinese IT field who have said that they think Microsoft should be allowed to be a monopoly, and they don't see why it's bad. Everybody uses it and doesn't know about anything else (and therefore likes it), so where's the problem?? Oh, another note: I have yet to see a single Macintosh outside of a store, and I've only seen one store selling Macs!
From what I've seen so far in China, Windows is going to stick around for a LOOONG time unless the government is actually going to do something about the millions of CDs full of pirated software that are being sold literally everywhere -- especially right outside the doors of those new IT Tech centers being built I mentioned at the beginning! If you're walking around Beijing's new super modern high tech IT area, at least half the people you walk by ask you if you want CDs, CD-ROMs, VCDs, or "Yellow"/"Fuzzy" (porn) VCDs. Why would I walk into the newly built 20+ story tower next to me and pay US prices for software, when I can pay a couple bucks and get everything I want right outside? The "free" aspect of Linux is largely lost on the Chinese. It costs the same for them to buy a CD with Linux on it as it does to buy a CD with MS Windows 98 SE on it. Even when Great Wall Computer sends out computers with Linux preloaded (which IS a good sign), I'm doubtful Linux will stay loaded when the most popular OS everyone else is using is only US$2 or so.
Oh yes, almost forgot: The firewall issue people have mentioned. The only things that have been blocked (that I can tell anyway) are News sites and University sites. For instance, the University of Oregon at one point had an article published somewhere on their web site that wasn't entirely positive towards the People's Republic of China. So for a long time now you can not connect to the main webserver of my Univ. Even though that ancient article is (I believe) long gone, you can not connect to the main webserver. I can still (sometimes) telnet and access my email at my Univ since they only blocked the main server, not the other servers of the Univ. Another site that has been blocked would be the NY Times. So actually I don't even know what the article says about the situation (so forgive me if it sounds like I haven't read it! I haven't!). Mots of the major news sites around the world are blocked because they probably at one point had an article up that didn't have a favorable opinion of the PRC. Whenever I try a link off of Slashdot to a news article I'm extremely pleased if I can actually read the article. I've come to expect not being able to connect.
Porn on the other hand, is pretty much not blocked. The PRC's reasoning for this is probably something like "Look at all that porn in those 'Civilized' Western countries! They are evil! China is good and pure!" China has always been sure to publish as much as possible that would make the morals of the US look bad (not that US morals are good, but...). When I was teaching English to Chinese this last term they all knew about the Clinton Scandal (Okay, so other countries all do to..), but also other smaller things I wouldn't expect them to know such as the incident where a female High School teacher took advantage of her male student and the two of them thought they had fallen in love. And any incident involving teenage student's violence in school was also common knowledge to them. The Chinese newspapers publish as much as possible to make the US look bad, but pretty much nothing to make it look good (morally at least). And as we all know all the newspapers are controlled by the government. They can only publish what the government wants them to. Even China's English language newspapers are like this.
Phew, enough rambling for now.. If anyone has any other questions for someone who's living here, feel free to email or respond to this comment. Maybe I'll even be able to respond in an intelligent manner.
-Toby Ehrenkranz
Is when he writes a couple paragraphs on "Which OS is Better?" where there's some good arguments for UNIX, and then the next paragraph is "Which OS is REALLY better?" What's especially funny is in the previous part he says the only way to really say which is better is by using standard benchmarking utilities. But to find out which is REALLY better you just have to know NT is the choice of a new generation of IT professionals..
I'm still chuckling about that..