You have hit the nail on the head. The Chinese idea of law is entirely alien to westerners. My favorite quote is from (as I remember it) Thomas Friedman at the NYTimes. Asking too many questions the official finally went to failsafe mode: "China is a country of law." This is true, but you must understand the crucial difference. Laws in China are not based on cases brought before a judge and/or jury. Laws in China are decided by rich plutocrats who control the legislative (communist party) the executive (communist party) and the judicial (communist party) branches of the government.
In the old days (10 years ago) every company or any other organization had a president, who was any old figurehead. The second in command, the vice-president, had a seedy little office down the hall. That person was the Communist Party member. Their job was two-fold. First, they controlled the money. No money came in or went out without their consent. Second they controlled the "stamp". The stamp was the mark of an official decision. Similar to the signature of a president or CEO it makes things legal decisions. Nowadays even that flimsy excuse for a veil is gone. The party membership owns everything, decides everything and controls everything. They are the law and they are powerful and frightened. Read the news with these things in mind and you will understand China much better.
I've been in Asia most of the last ten years and coming back to the US last summer was shocking. Your mobile service sucks, totally sucks. Your support, your choices, your prices, your implementation, pretty much every aspect of mobile telephones is lacking. On top of that, you pay and pay and pay and pay, most people don't know how to use their phones and they still pay for garbage they don't know how to use.
Oh, Sure, the land of the free and all that, I'm in China right now and there is nowhere within a 1000 km of me where I can't get excellent service, no dropped calls, 3g coverage etc. I can walk or ride my bike a short distance almost anywhere and buy a new SIM card (and therefore a new number) for $5.00 US as well as pay $3.00 US for my monthly coverage bill (not including call charges which are pennies a minute). The new card can be dropped whenever I choose or continued and used whenever I choose.
Oh yeah, there are freedom problems in China, don't get me wrong I am not claiming that this is the best place in the world, but compare the phone service to the US and i plan on throwing the damn thing away if i go back to the US because what you have there is just plain stupid and demeaning.
Here in China everybody is riding ebikes with lead acid batteries that can go @50 kph with a full charge and cover @70km on a charge. The form factors are highly varied with some having pedals and looking like an industrial exercise bike and others (like mine) looking like a Honda 110cc motorbike. They are unsafe at almost any speed with dodgy brakes and wobbly steering, and often loaded with insane amounts of people, goods or both. Ahhh I love the Asian approach to safety. Anyway, the cost for my bike (which is in the top 25% in quality and power) was about $400 US dollars but closer to $300 after bargaining. My wife and 7 year old son ride it to and from school almost every day, but then This Is China!
OK, i am not old, old fashioned or any other age related derogative, i am RETRO!
i have an aol, aim and netscape.net address. old school maybe, but actually aol gave me their two addresses so that i would drop the netscape.net. not a chance, never, too, too retro to give it up.
my wife and daughter both have had their hotmail accounts "used". Maybe "hacked" the right word, but i am still not clear about the actual use/abuse.misuse/attack vector. My daughter only uses the account for MSN with a small group of friends. She never actually opens the hotmail interface. My wife used her hotmail daily, but on a Ubuntu laptop with firewalled router, firewalled network inside the home and an iptable firewall on the lappie itself. Call me paranoid but we live in China and our wireless is pretty commonly attacked even though it is set to being hidden and uses WPA encryption. The wife uses Firefox only and it stays on auto update, so it is never more than a few hours behind release cycles on everything. On top of that I run antivirus checks on the system weekly and have never found any signs of intrusion at any time. We are not idiots, we are careful and even running linux computer, network (nfs, not samba) we don't download spicy content or open attachments with shell scripts in them.
What is going on then? I am pretty confident in my security setup here, sure if someone wanted to go through the trouble and challenge of cracking me they could, there are scores of guys around me who could do it, but unless they just wanted a challenge there is so much low hanging fruit around me that it would be a waste of effort to even try.
It looks to me like somebody has a big door into the hotmail servers.
I work in China where not only is piracy rampant (most large universities run a single ghosted copy of windows that was probably a Russian pirate to start with ). I use this as an opening to explain that this is why I use FOSS, because there are alternatives that are free and also ( and this is the kicker) show respect to Asian people.
You may wonder what that is about. MS versions that are licensed in China are often crippled by design. Windows XP for example is sometimes missing "accessories" or "system tools" or some of the basic tools one expects to find. MS Office is even more unusually crippled. You cannot, for example, "left justify" in MS Word that is sold in China. So, while piracy was more rampant in Thailand when I lived there, the Chinese market was targetted for crippleware by MS and others (Nero ) for example, not to mention antivirus companies. The Thais would buy stuff in the US and then crack it and sell it on $2.50 CD packed with 25 or 30 programs.
So, your workplace is a good place to evangelize and if possible just use the FOSS alternative because it is better and easier to work with. I use that approach here and so far I get nothing but thanks for my efforts, especially when I include appropriate language packs.
Perhaps everyone is failing to remember that the Vulcan medical system was built entirely on a base of psychosomatic medicine. They only used an expansion of the placebo effect noted above as their health care system. If we could just get past the damned "you only get what you pay for" barrier we could all be completely healthy.
no cheap shots boys and girls, remember that 1/6 of the world's geniuses live here in China, along with 1/6 of everything else in the world. At the same time the pirate culture here is stronger even than Sweden, we just don't have political parties. I say "we" not as a Chinese person but as a resident here BTW.
Now, In almost every public university in China the computers run on a pirated, crippled, ghosted, copy of windows XP. It is all of the above, and this is also true of MS Office and everything else MS here in Asia. Of course they have no respect or interest in western IP laws, this disrespect is built in to all their transactions with the west. The west is constantly trying to cheat them and assumes that they are trying to cheat the west. Since it is assumed it must/will be so. This is just human nature.
I have struggled for ten years to get the Chinese to stop thinking and saying that they are a "developing" country. Come to Appalachia, come to south Bronx, come to the highlands of Scotland or eastern Germany. We have pockets of undevelopment just as they do, it is time that China was accepted as an equal and expected to act like one. Until that happens they will continue to flagrantly act with impunity in stealing things, just because they are treated the way they are.
from china: it is not illegal to buy a computer with linux installed in China, it is impossible. they don't exist except in the hands of a few computer nerds and geeks who are being watched carefully. As for Macs, i (regretfully) have to encourage their use here for average computer users despite their price point which is 3X the pp of similarly powered windows PCs. the virus/malware situation here is insane and completely out of control. Most computers have had their security breached and run unprotected while reporting that they are fully updated and protected. They are not updated because they use ghosted pirates of WinXP that come with the malware pre-installed. It is very bad here and nobody has a handle on it.
wrong direction. bring back some of those old ENIACs from Princeton where I learned machine code. That way they learn real programming/algorhythm basic and none of this prissy drag and drop text programming. 1s and 0s will hone thier little minds and give them the real foundation for a bright future. Think about the 40th anniversary of UNICS, the OS, a text editor and whatever the hell else he did in that month. that is what a machine code foundation can do for you. I mean, how long would it take to write UNICS in python?
what you don't know is that the vast majority of Chinese never see a western internet site. They have youku.com, they don't need or want youtube.com. they have Baidu, they don't need Google. The western things only make it harder for them to find things in China since they confuse China with places like Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore, which are useless to Chinese people on the mainland.
The government has succeeded and will continue to succeed until and unless the economic situation deteriorates. The Chinese people often see yourn interference as just that: foreigners who don't understand them.
People here in Eastern China especially would whore their children if it would make them rich. In fact they do, although by other names. So, until money goes bad here the government will hold the people's support.
I started out with a netscape.net email address (still usable too) and then when netscape got bought by AOL they tried to encourage me to use a free aol.com account, which i also still have as well as a aim.com account they tried to give me later, all so they could close the netscape.net domain. I refuse to be bought off and now have all of them. I use the aim.com account for the lame-os that can't handle my gmail account which has a "0" in the name (is that a zero or an o?)
using a USA today poll to determine anything is about the same as using a New York Times poll to prove something about californis. USA today is like the Foxnews of print journalism, it is about all the reading that most fundies can manage. (this from the father of a fundie who does read and still believes in all that tripe-- a sad but true story)
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You have hit the nail on the head. The Chinese idea of law is entirely alien to westerners. My favorite quote is from (as I remember it) Thomas Friedman at the NYTimes. Asking too many questions the official finally went to failsafe mode: "China is a country of law." This is true, but you must understand the crucial difference. Laws in China are not based on cases brought before a judge and/or jury. Laws in China are decided by rich plutocrats who control the legislative (communist party) the executive (communist party) and the judicial (communist party) branches of the government. In the old days (10 years ago) every company or any other organization had a president, who was any old figurehead. The second in command, the vice-president, had a seedy little office down the hall. That person was the Communist Party member. Their job was two-fold. First, they controlled the money. No money came in or went out without their consent. Second they controlled the "stamp". The stamp was the mark of an official decision. Similar to the signature of a president or CEO it makes things legal decisions. Nowadays even that flimsy excuse for a veil is gone. The party membership owns everything, decides everything and controls everything. They are the law and they are powerful and frightened. Read the news with these things in mind and you will understand China much better.
I've been in Asia most of the last ten years and coming back to the US last summer was shocking. Your mobile service sucks, totally sucks. Your support, your choices, your prices, your implementation, pretty much every aspect of mobile telephones is lacking. On top of that, you pay and pay and pay and pay, most people don't know how to use their phones and they still pay for garbage they don't know how to use. Oh, Sure, the land of the free and all that, I'm in China right now and there is nowhere within a 1000 km of me where I can't get excellent service, no dropped calls, 3g coverage etc. I can walk or ride my bike a short distance almost anywhere and buy a new SIM card (and therefore a new number) for $5.00 US as well as pay $3.00 US for my monthly coverage bill (not including call charges which are pennies a minute). The new card can be dropped whenever I choose or continued and used whenever I choose. Oh yeah, there are freedom problems in China, don't get me wrong I am not claiming that this is the best place in the world, but compare the phone service to the US and i plan on throwing the damn thing away if i go back to the US because what you have there is just plain stupid and demeaning.
Here in China everybody is riding ebikes with lead acid batteries that can go @50 kph with a full charge and cover @70km on a charge. The form factors are highly varied with some having pedals and looking like an industrial exercise bike and others (like mine) looking like a Honda 110cc motorbike. They are unsafe at almost any speed with dodgy brakes and wobbly steering, and often loaded with insane amounts of people, goods or both. Ahhh I love the Asian approach to safety. Anyway, the cost for my bike (which is in the top 25% in quality and power) was about $400 US dollars but closer to $300 after bargaining. My wife and 7 year old son ride it to and from school almost every day, but then This Is China!
OK, i am not old, old fashioned or any other age related derogative, i am RETRO! i have an aol, aim and netscape.net address. old school maybe, but actually aol gave me their two addresses so that i would drop the netscape.net. not a chance, never, too, too retro to give it up.
my wife and daughter both have had their hotmail accounts "used". Maybe "hacked" the right word, but i am still not clear about the actual use/abuse.misuse/attack vector. My daughter only uses the account for MSN with a small group of friends. She never actually opens the hotmail interface. My wife used her hotmail daily, but on a Ubuntu laptop with firewalled router, firewalled network inside the home and an iptable firewall on the lappie itself. Call me paranoid but we live in China and our wireless is pretty commonly attacked even though it is set to being hidden and uses WPA encryption. The wife uses Firefox only and it stays on auto update, so it is never more than a few hours behind release cycles on everything. On top of that I run antivirus checks on the system weekly and have never found any signs of intrusion at any time. We are not idiots, we are careful and even running linux computer, network (nfs, not samba) we don't download spicy content or open attachments with shell scripts in them. What is going on then? I am pretty confident in my security setup here, sure if someone wanted to go through the trouble and challenge of cracking me they could, there are scores of guys around me who could do it, but unless they just wanted a challenge there is so much low hanging fruit around me that it would be a waste of effort to even try. It looks to me like somebody has a big door into the hotmail servers.
cool video i guess, but i live in China and can't reach you tube, blocked by th efirewall of course
I work in China where not only is piracy rampant (most large universities run a single ghosted copy of windows that was probably a Russian pirate to start with ). I use this as an opening to explain that this is why I use FOSS, because there are alternatives that are free and also ( and this is the kicker) show respect to Asian people. You may wonder what that is about. MS versions that are licensed in China are often crippled by design. Windows XP for example is sometimes missing "accessories" or "system tools" or some of the basic tools one expects to find. MS Office is even more unusually crippled. You cannot, for example, "left justify" in MS Word that is sold in China. So, while piracy was more rampant in Thailand when I lived there, the Chinese market was targetted for crippleware by MS and others (Nero ) for example, not to mention antivirus companies. The Thais would buy stuff in the US and then crack it and sell it on $2.50 CD packed with 25 or 30 programs. So, your workplace is a good place to evangelize and if possible just use the FOSS alternative because it is better and easier to work with. I use that approach here and so far I get nothing but thanks for my efforts, especially when I include appropriate language packs.
Perhaps everyone is failing to remember that the Vulcan medical system was built entirely on a base of psychosomatic medicine. They only used an expansion of the placebo effect noted above as their health care system. If we could just get past the damned "you only get what you pay for" barrier we could all be completely healthy.
no cheap shots boys and girls, remember that 1/6 of the world's geniuses live here in China, along with 1/6 of everything else in the world. At the same time the pirate culture here is stronger even than Sweden, we just don't have political parties. I say "we" not as a Chinese person but as a resident here BTW. Now, In almost every public university in China the computers run on a pirated, crippled, ghosted, copy of windows XP. It is all of the above, and this is also true of MS Office and everything else MS here in Asia. Of course they have no respect or interest in western IP laws, this disrespect is built in to all their transactions with the west. The west is constantly trying to cheat them and assumes that they are trying to cheat the west. Since it is assumed it must/will be so. This is just human nature. I have struggled for ten years to get the Chinese to stop thinking and saying that they are a "developing" country. Come to Appalachia, come to south Bronx, come to the highlands of Scotland or eastern Germany. We have pockets of undevelopment just as they do, it is time that China was accepted as an equal and expected to act like one. Until that happens they will continue to flagrantly act with impunity in stealing things, just because they are treated the way they are.
from china: it is not illegal to buy a computer with linux installed in China, it is impossible. they don't exist except in the hands of a few computer nerds and geeks who are being watched carefully. As for Macs, i (regretfully) have to encourage their use here for average computer users despite their price point which is 3X the pp of similarly powered windows PCs. the virus/malware situation here is insane and completely out of control. Most computers have had their security breached and run unprotected while reporting that they are fully updated and protected. They are not updated because they use ghosted pirates of WinXP that come with the malware pre-installed. It is very bad here and nobody has a handle on it.
wrong direction. bring back some of those old ENIACs from Princeton where I learned machine code. That way they learn real programming/algorhythm basic and none of this prissy drag and drop text programming. 1s and 0s will hone thier little minds and give them the real foundation for a bright future. Think about the 40th anniversary of UNICS, the OS, a text editor and whatever the hell else he did in that month. that is what a machine code foundation can do for you. I mean, how long would it take to write UNICS in python?
what you don't know is that the vast majority of Chinese never see a western internet site. They have youku.com, they don't need or want youtube.com. they have Baidu, they don't need Google. The western things only make it harder for them to find things in China since they confuse China with places like Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore, which are useless to Chinese people on the mainland. The government has succeeded and will continue to succeed until and unless the economic situation deteriorates. The Chinese people often see yourn interference as just that: foreigners who don't understand them. People here in Eastern China especially would whore their children if it would make them rich. In fact they do, although by other names. So, until money goes bad here the government will hold the people's support.
I started out with a netscape.net email address (still usable too) and then when netscape got bought by AOL they tried to encourage me to use a free aol.com account, which i also still have as well as a aim.com account they tried to give me later, all so they could close the netscape.net domain. I refuse to be bought off and now have all of them. I use the aim.com account for the lame-os that can't handle my gmail account which has a "0" in the name (is that a zero or an o?)
using a USA today poll to determine anything is about the same as using a New York Times poll to prove something about californis. USA today is like the Foxnews of print journalism, it is about all the reading that most fundies can manage. (this from the father of a fundie who does read and still believes in all that tripe-- a sad but true story)