Looks more like a play straight out of the US's exciting 21st Century, "My Big Book of Made-up Excuses & Misdirections to Justify Invading Oil-rich Nations"
Play No 1: "He's a very bad man because he doesn't do what we want him to do: Boo! hiss!
Play No 2: "The military coup we paid billions for is a legitimate government. Pay no attention to the Nazi / Al Qaeda* terrorist extremist groups we're funding — the resistance are the terrorist extremists." *delete where not applicable.
Play No 3: "They have less WMDs than us, and we're the only country mental enough to have used nukes on people, but — mushroom clouds! Terrorists! Ooo! Scary!"
Although to be fair to your cold war sensibilities, the current Russian invasion does have a Tonkin Gulf Incident feel to it, in that the aggressors appear not to have turned up yet. We have 3 crappy satellite pics of Russian hardware which, given its ubiquity throughout the Ukraine, may equally be the rebels or the Junta troops. The other 3 satellite pics NATO present as proof that Russian troops are occupying Russia —hardly an intelligence coup, and definitely not proof of an invasion.
The Waffen SS on the other hand has as a surprisingly large fan base in Western Ukraine, particularly the 14th Voluntary Division SS "Galizien".
Strange, uncomfortable, but true — I thought it was so much pro-russian rhetoric up until I chanced across the wikipedia page on the Ukrainian SS volunteers, after claims of SS Insignia wearing Junta troops by the Eastern Ukrainian rebels. There's a pic of a football stadium section packed full of SS-insignia waving supporters and a "70 years — Heroes not forgotten" from 2013 at the bottom of the page.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1...
Exports to the US represent 18% of China's exports, so whilst it'd take a hit, it may not the crushing blow you seem to think.
Where Russia could harm the US economy is by refusing to trade oil and gas in US dollars anymore and switching to Euros or Rubles or whatever. This would do far more to harm the US dollar and it's economy than bonds dumping and so on, because the EU & China wouldn't need to buy all those US dollars for Russian oil & gas. So the money would still be rolling in to Russia, but the US's ability to print it's way out of debt would be lessened. Should the number one oil producer in the world be successful in the switch from the dollar, there's no end of other oil producing countries who'd like a shot at screwing the US over royally in return for years of abuse at the hands of US foreign policy who might well follow suit. Most of the 9-11 terrorists were from Saudi Arabia. Iraq, Iran & Venezuela are not huge fans of the US either, thanks to various US coup attempts / invasions.
If God doesn't exist, and I believe and have made my life better because of that belief, I still win.
If you deny God and He does exist as He says, you will have eternity to contemplate your pride and ignorance.
That assumption only works if it was a straight choice between belief in your god or atheism.
It's not though, is it? There's supposedly around 4,200 different religions to choose from at present, with a whole load more "dead" religions to choose from.
So you've also got to contemplate a third possibility to Pascal's wager:
That you may also be denying god by your very belief in a false god.
Depending on the deity, this may work out worse for you than for the atheist.
Technically, being "struck off" the medical register means the loss of your license to practice medicine. It does not mean the loss of your medical degree.
In the UK, surgeons go by "Mr./Mrs./Miss" rather than "Dr." so, ironically, referring to him as Dr. Wakefield counts as a loss of status.
the central premise of socialism is that the government (the people, collective, whatever you call it) owns the means of production.
Which raises the question: "Will 3D printing usher in an era of semi-communism?"
If they can perfect and simplify the tech to a good level of reliability & quality, it will be very interesting, and extremely turbulent times. The markets for retail, manufacturing and the transport sector would be slashed significantly. Capitalism itself might take a beating. I suspect it might even engender a whole new economic system, neither capitalism nor socialism as we know them.
Yes, but that slight difference in morphosyntax does not mean that the character-based writing system in use across the Han languages is somehow a burden for speakers of one Han language learning another, as the OP misunderstands.
Not so slight —Cantonese and Mandarin use very different vocabulary. Cantonese also has a lot of commonly used words that don't appear in Mandarin at all, and some that don't even have a character at all. In Hong Kong they use the English letters "Q" and "D" for texting two of those "no character" words.
The Chinese subtitles on Cantonese programs on Hong Kong TV don't actually match the words spoken at all, but the meaning is for the most part similar. This is precisely because if the subtitles did match word for word, no mandarin speaker would be able to understand the subtitles.
Furthermore the whole "it's all the same script" argument only applies to the Han languages, and there's a few more languages in China, including Tibetan, Mongolian, Uighur, Kazakh, Manchu, Hebrew etc. all of which don't use the Chinese characters at all. Which is why it's got a fair few extra scripts on the renminbi notes. Mongolian for example uses the Mongol Bichig (although in the Mongolian People's Republic they also use a slightly modded form of cyrillic, too - introduced in 1946).
And then there's Zhuang, which - in its old-school form - uses Chinese characters and hybrid chinese characters, but would be utterly unintelligible to a chinese reader.
And then there's classical Chinese, which, although using the same characters is also fairly unintelligible to a modern reader, unless they have studied classical Chinese.
But unless they ditch the language wholesale, any tonal form of Chinese is stuck with chinese characters — pinyin doesn't cut it at all, and is only really useful for foreigners to learn mandarin. Context will get you so far, but written down there's no easy way to tell which of the dozen or more characters you mean by the pinyin "chán". Worse still, it only works as a phonetic for mandarin, so it makes no sense to represent the cantonese "Heung gong" as "xiang gang" and even less still with the little tone marks, given that pinyin only has 4 to represent the 5 possible tones of mandarin (4+no tone) when you're using a language with 6+ tones.
Touché! In my defense, I had just been reading an NRA thread prior to this, which makes for a lot interference on the old sarcasm compass. Will run a figure of eight round the room next time to reset.;-)
I was born in the late '60s (Generation X - I guess), and I have to say that the phrases that most infuriate me in emails are all perpetrated by Generation X people.
"R U Going?", "LOL" and the like is fine by me, but I take a very dim view of the corporate remtards who email me with "please revert to me soonest" or "this is very concerning".
Please revert to the proper use of "revert" soonest, you dimwits. Then try concerning yourself with how to use "concerning". WTF is wrong with using "reply" and "worrying", FFS? They're shorter, easier to type and, as a bonus, they actually mean what you're trying to say.
I also hate the redundancy of typing out "Dear Dave" or "Hi Bob" at the beginning and then signing off at the end on every email. Why do that? It already has "to:" and "from:" right at the top. Sure, if it's the first ever email, say "hi" at the beginning, tell them who you are, but after that it's just a waste of everyone's time.
Where " trouble-makers" is the set of people trying to use truck bombs, car bombs, and suicide vests, plus various experiments with poison gas and plague, to kill masses of innocent people and who aren't engaging in said activities on behalf of or in support of the US Government, yes.
Yes! The NSA should immediately stop hiring people who have no concept of privacy and like to indiscriminately gather private data and use it for whatever purpose they see fit.
Once you are in the house of lords you cannot run as an MP. Therefore you cannot be PM.
Not true. First up if you're in the House of Lords, you are already an MP. MP = Member of Parliament not Member of the House of Commons.
Secondly you don't have to be in the House of Commons to be Prime Minister (see all those Lords in History).
It is technically and legally up to the monarch to select who is PM - but no monarch in the last century or so has used that power as anything other than a rubber stamp of the "will" of the Commons.
A PM from the Lords hasn't happened since 1902, mostly because the power is more in the House of Commons now, and having an unelected leader of government looks a bit dodgy even in a broken down unrepresentative semi-democracy like the UK (although only the constituents of whatever safe seat the PM ran for MP in get to directly "elect" the PM).
But the fact remains that there is no legal prohibition of a member of the House of Lords becoming PM. Nor does the PM have to be leader of a political party.
Yep, sounds like what they wanted was a quick, symbolic victory, and they got it.
I reckon the symbolism of the "victory" can really only go one of three ways:
a) It symbolises that they are completely powerless, but being petty-minded bureaucratic idiots they behave like toddlers and throw a pointless tantrum when they've worked out they won't get their way.
b) It symbolises that they just don't understand how digital information works. This despite having spent the last 10 years making a copy of the whole of the internet. Maybe they're printing it out in hard copy, so they can store it safely, but the dot matrix printer can't keep up, so there's a bit of a backlog of data."
c) Both of the above.
So one of those classic UK government "victories", like Dunkirk.
Yep, sounds like what they wanted was a quick, symbolic victory, and they got it.
I reckon the symbolism of the "victory" can really go one of three ways:
a) It symbolises that they are completely powerless, but being petty-minded bureaucratic idiots they behave like toddlers throwing a pointless tantrum when they've worked out they're won't get their way.
b) It symbolises that they just don't understand how digital information works. This despite having spent the last 10 years making a copy of the whole of the internet. Maybe they're printing it out in hard copy, so they can store it safely, but the dot matrix printer can't keep up, so there's a bit of a backlog."
c) Both of the above.
Yes one of those classic British victories, like Dunkirk.
If you look at the map, the seas where finnish ice breakers roam are not it north russia (itä-meri and perämeri in finnish). As far as i know there is no ship routes trough the northern arctic sea.
It's not a Finnish Ship. It's being finished in Finland for the Russian Ministry of Transport, and is being classed by the Russian Maritime Register of Shipping. The hull was actually built in Kaliningrad's Yantar Shipyard, then shipped in bits to Arctech in Helsinki for completion. Arctech itself is joint venture between Russia's United Shipbuilding Corp and STXFinland.
It's function is billed as being "an icebreaking multipurpose emergency rescue vessel". So I guess it's more about rescuing non-icebreaker ships that are trapped (which should be thinner ice or else they wouldn't have got there), so it shouldn't need to get through thick ice.
For example, the Grand Aniva LNG carrier is KM Ice2 class, so it's no icebreaker, but it can go unaided through fragmented ice, or with an icebreaker's help through ice up to 0.55m thick.
It might not end up in the Europe end at all, but out in Vladivostok. I've seen a few icebreakers docked there.
...Or the dietary and sexual proscriptions and general calls to psychotic craziness that most sensible believers ignore.
It's popular because it's very comforting to believe that your 4-year-old daughter died for a reason. That there was some purpose to it, it was part of a grand ineffable scheme. That she lives on in a nicer place now, and one day you'll get to see her again.
It's comforting to know that someone is watching over you and loves you unconditionally when it seems no one else does.
It's comforting to know that even when you die, it won't be over.
Of course, this doesn't make religion any less untrue. But then again, the placebo effect in medicine points out the blind faith in a non-existant cure works wonders on over 20% of people.
Indeed. Especially today. I should imagine the smell would be distressing for his co-workers, for starters.
See also the Monty Python sketch about Carl French's new film starring Marilyn Monroe.
"We had her lying on beds, lying on floors, falling out of cupboards, scaring the children..."
That's probably the easiest way to deter piracy: price it reasonably for it's job. Most people would rather get it legitimately than pirate it.
Price is really the crux of it. Price it more cheaply and more people will buy it rather than pirate it. It really is that simple. All the other anti-piracy methods are merely delaying tactics. Piracy will always happen, regardless of the protection.
The problem is finding the balance of price to sales that you're comfortable with. Digital stuff is weird in that the "startup cost" of the very very first copy is stupendous, but all subsequent copies cost mere cents to produce. So selling something for $100 bucks to 10 people (and have 1,000 people pirate it), is nowhere near as profitable as selling it for $10 to 1,000 people (and have 10 people pirate it).
A real life example:
In the 1990s in Hong Kong, the VCD black market was huge. Legit VCDs went for HK$150-350 (US$20-45), recent movies being at the top end. Organised crime cartels sold them for HK$100 (US$13) for four movies, in temporary shops (they'd stay open til busted, usually about 2-3 months) making enough profit to run the risks of imprisonment, fines etc. No legislation or customs task forces could even make a dent. Shops that were shutdown would reopen either close by or in the same shop within a week or two.
Eventually, they finally found a way to put an end to the piracy: the legit VCD makers started charging HK$35-80 (US$5-10) per movie. Overnight, the pirates disappeared. Even though they were still charging more than the pirate outlets, people preferred the legit copy.
As a footnote, amusingly enough, the movie industry didn't take the lesson on board and tried the same overpricing the product foolishness with DVDs and more recently with BluRay. By then internet-based piracy had gone mainstream, offering not only really cheap movies, but far more choice and convenience. The triads didn't bother nearly as much (or at all in the case of BluRay), because the money wasn't there, so organised piracy was much less of a problem. Instead individual piracy took hold. This time it's the legit DVD/BluRay sellers that are closing down, killed off by the movie companies' refusal to accept the reality of the market: people aren't willing to pay that much for movies.
Slashdot Mirror
Looks more like a play straight out of the US's exciting 21st Century, "My Big Book of Made-up Excuses & Misdirections to Justify Invading Oil-rich Nations"
Play No 1: "He's a very bad man because he doesn't do what we want him to do: Boo! hiss!
Play No 2: "The military coup we paid billions for is a legitimate government. Pay no attention to the Nazi / Al Qaeda* terrorist extremist groups we're funding — the resistance are the terrorist extremists."
*delete where not applicable.
Play No 3: "They have less WMDs than us, and we're the only country mental enough to have used nukes on people, but — mushroom clouds! Terrorists! Ooo! Scary!"
Although to be fair to your cold war sensibilities, the current Russian invasion does have a Tonkin Gulf Incident feel to it, in that the aggressors appear not to have turned up yet. We have 3 crappy satellite pics of Russian hardware which, given its ubiquity throughout the Ukraine, may equally be the rebels or the Junta troops. The other 3 satellite pics NATO present as proof that Russian troops are occupying Russia —hardly an intelligence coup, and definitely not proof of an invasion.
The Waffen SS on the other hand has as a surprisingly large fan base in Western Ukraine, particularly the 14th Voluntary Division SS "Galizien". Strange, uncomfortable, but true — I thought it was so much pro-russian rhetoric up until I chanced across the wikipedia page on the Ukrainian SS volunteers, after claims of SS Insignia wearing Junta troops by the Eastern Ukrainian rebels. There's a pic of a football stadium section packed full of SS-insignia waving supporters and a "70 years — Heroes not forgotten" from 2013 at the bottom of the page. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1...
Don't you mean the Scottish justice system?
Not quite —the English version only has two verdicts —guilty or not guilty
Exports to the US represent 18% of China's exports, so whilst it'd take a hit, it may not the crushing blow you seem to think. Where Russia could harm the US economy is by refusing to trade oil and gas in US dollars anymore and switching to Euros or Rubles or whatever. This would do far more to harm the US dollar and it's economy than bonds dumping and so on, because the EU & China wouldn't need to buy all those US dollars for Russian oil & gas. So the money would still be rolling in to Russia, but the US's ability to print it's way out of debt would be lessened. Should the number one oil producer in the world be successful in the switch from the dollar, there's no end of other oil producing countries who'd like a shot at screwing the US over royally in return for years of abuse at the hands of US foreign policy who might well follow suit. Most of the 9-11 terrorists were from Saudi Arabia. Iraq, Iran & Venezuela are not huge fans of the US either, thanks to various US coup attempts / invasions.
Just thank the baby Jesus that the Mayo clinic hasn't got involved (or evolved?!).
If God doesn't exist, and I believe and have made my life better because of that belief, I still win.
If you deny God and He does exist as He says, you will have eternity to contemplate your pride and ignorance.
That assumption only works if it was a straight choice between belief in your god or atheism.
It's not though, is it? There's supposedly around 4,200 different religions to choose from at present, with a whole load more "dead" religions to choose from.
So you've also got to contemplate a third possibility to Pascal's wager:
That you may also be denying god by your very belief in a false god.
Depending on the deity, this may work out worse for you than for the atheist.
Technically, being "struck off" the medical register means the loss of your license to practice medicine. It does not mean the loss of your medical degree.
In the UK, surgeons go by "Mr./Mrs./Miss" rather than "Dr." so, ironically, referring to him as Dr. Wakefield counts as a loss of status.
the central premise of socialism is that the government (the people, collective, whatever you call it) owns the means of production.
Which raises the question: "Will 3D printing usher in an era of semi-communism?"
If they can perfect and simplify the tech to a good level of reliability & quality, it will be very interesting, and extremely turbulent times. The markets for retail, manufacturing and the transport sector would be slashed significantly. Capitalism itself might take a beating. I suspect it might even engender a whole new economic system, neither capitalism nor socialism as we know them.
Yes, but that slight difference in morphosyntax does not mean that the character-based writing system in use across the Han languages is somehow a burden for speakers of one Han language learning another, as the OP misunderstands.
Not so slight —Cantonese and Mandarin use very different vocabulary. Cantonese also has a lot of commonly used words that don't appear in Mandarin at all, and some that don't even have a character at all. In Hong Kong they use the English letters "Q" and "D" for texting two of those "no character" words.
The Chinese subtitles on Cantonese programs on Hong Kong TV don't actually match the words spoken at all, but the meaning is for the most part similar. This is precisely because if the subtitles did match word for word, no mandarin speaker would be able to understand the subtitles.
Furthermore the whole "it's all the same script" argument only applies to the Han languages, and there's a few more languages in China, including Tibetan, Mongolian, Uighur, Kazakh, Manchu, Hebrew etc. all of which don't use the Chinese characters at all. Which is why it's got a fair few extra scripts on the renminbi notes. Mongolian for example uses the Mongol Bichig (although in the Mongolian People's Republic they also use a slightly modded form of cyrillic, too - introduced in 1946).
And then there's Zhuang, which - in its old-school form - uses Chinese characters and hybrid chinese characters, but would be utterly unintelligible to a chinese reader.
And then there's classical Chinese, which, although using the same characters is also fairly unintelligible to a modern reader, unless they have studied classical Chinese.
But unless they ditch the language wholesale, any tonal form of Chinese is stuck with chinese characters — pinyin doesn't cut it at all, and is only really useful for foreigners to learn mandarin. Context will get you so far, but written down there's no easy way to tell which of the dozen or more characters you mean by the pinyin "chán". Worse still, it only works as a phonetic for mandarin, so it makes no sense to represent the cantonese "Heung gong" as "xiang gang" and even less still with the little tone marks, given that pinyin only has 4 to represent the 5 possible tones of mandarin (4+no tone) when you're using a language with 6+ tones.
Touché! In my defense, I had just been reading an NRA thread prior to this, which makes for a lot interference on the old sarcasm compass. Will run a figure of eight round the room next time to reset. ;-)
I'm sure she gets out of line whenever she can be sure that nobody is listening in on her calls.
Given her employer, she can be assured that somebody is always listening in on her calls.
I was born in the late '60s (Generation X - I guess), and I have to say that the phrases that most infuriate me in emails are all perpetrated by Generation X people.
"R U Going?", "LOL" and the like is fine by me, but I take a very dim view of the corporate remtards who email me with "please revert to me soonest" or "this is very concerning".
Please revert to the proper use of "revert" soonest, you dimwits. Then try concerning yourself with how to use "concerning". WTF is wrong with using "reply" and "worrying", FFS? They're shorter, easier to type and, as a bonus, they actually mean what you're trying to say.
I also hate the redundancy of typing out "Dear Dave" or "Hi Bob" at the beginning and then signing off at the end on every email. Why do that? It already has "to:" and "from:" right at the top. Sure, if it's the first ever email, say "hi" at the beginning, tell them who you are, but after that it's just a waste of everyone's time.
Where " trouble-makers" is the set of people trying to use truck bombs, car bombs, and suicide vests, plus various experiments with poison gas and plague, to kill masses of innocent people and who aren't engaging in said activities on behalf of or in support of the US Government, yes.
Fixed it for accuracy.
Here's a better analysis for you.
Yes! The NSA should immediately stop hiring people who have no concept of privacy and like to indiscriminately gather private data and use it for whatever purpose they see fit.
...
Oh. No, wait a minute...
Ah, the sweet, sweet irony.
Once you are in the house of lords you cannot run as an MP. Therefore you cannot be PM.
Not true. First up if you're in the House of Lords, you are already an MP. MP = Member of Parliament not Member of the House of Commons.
Secondly you don't have to be in the House of Commons to be Prime Minister (see all those Lords in History).
It is technically and legally up to the monarch to select who is PM - but no monarch in the last century or so has used that power as anything other than a rubber stamp of the "will" of the Commons.
A PM from the Lords hasn't happened since 1902, mostly because the power is more in the House of Commons now, and having an unelected leader of government looks a bit dodgy even in a broken down unrepresentative semi-democracy like the UK (although only the constituents of whatever safe seat the PM ran for MP in get to directly "elect" the PM).
But the fact remains that there is no legal prohibition of a member of the House of Lords becoming PM. Nor does the PM have to be leader of a political party.
Yep, sounds like what they wanted was a quick, symbolic victory, and they got it.
I reckon the symbolism of the "victory" can really only go one of three ways:
a) It symbolises that they are completely powerless, but being petty-minded bureaucratic idiots they behave like toddlers and throw a pointless tantrum when they've worked out they won't get their way.
b) It symbolises that they just don't understand how digital information works. This despite having spent the last 10 years making a copy of the whole of the internet. Maybe they're printing it out in hard copy, so they can store it safely, but the dot matrix printer can't keep up, so there's a bit of a backlog of data."
c) Both of the above.
So one of those classic UK government "victories", like Dunkirk.
Yep, sounds like what they wanted was a quick, symbolic victory, and they got it.
I reckon the symbolism of the "victory" can really go one of three ways:
a) It symbolises that they are completely powerless, but being petty-minded bureaucratic idiots they behave like toddlers throwing a pointless tantrum when they've worked out they're won't get their way.
b) It symbolises that they just don't understand how digital information works. This despite having spent the last 10 years making a copy of the whole of the internet. Maybe they're printing it out in hard copy, so they can store it safely, but the dot matrix printer can't keep up, so there's a bit of a backlog."
c) Both of the above.
Yes one of those classic British victories, like Dunkirk.
If you look at the map, the seas where finnish ice breakers roam are not it north russia (itä-meri and perämeri in finnish). As far as i know there is no ship routes trough the northern arctic sea.
It's not a Finnish Ship. It's being finished in Finland for the Russian Ministry of Transport, and is being classed by the Russian Maritime Register of Shipping. The hull was actually built in Kaliningrad's Yantar Shipyard, then shipped in bits to Arctech in Helsinki for completion. Arctech itself is joint venture between Russia's United Shipbuilding Corp and STXFinland.
It's function is billed as being "an icebreaking multipurpose emergency rescue vessel". So I guess it's more about rescuing non-icebreaker ships that are trapped (which should be thinner ice or else they wouldn't have got there), so it shouldn't need to get through thick ice.
For example, the Grand Aniva LNG carrier is KM Ice2 class, so it's no icebreaker, but it can go unaided through fragmented ice, or with an icebreaker's help through ice up to 0.55m thick.
It might not end up in the Europe end at all, but out in Vladivostok. I've seen a few icebreakers docked there.
Where do all these agencies get billions in funding if not voted by the entire congress and signed into law by the president
Guns and drugs trafficking. See Iran-Contra, Laos, Cambodia, Afghanistan, Mexico, Air America, etc etc.
... it should dissolve them and elect a people it can trust
...Or the dietary and sexual proscriptions and general calls to psychotic craziness that most sensible believers ignore.
It's popular because it's very comforting to believe that your 4-year-old daughter died for a reason. That there was some purpose to it, it was part of a grand ineffable scheme. That she lives on in a nicer place now, and one day you'll get to see her again.
It's comforting to know that someone is watching over you and loves you unconditionally when it seems no one else does.
It's comforting to know that even when you die, it won't be over.
Of course, this doesn't make religion any less untrue. But then again, the placebo effect in medicine points out the blind faith in a non-existant cure works wonders on over 20% of people.
Steve Jobs would have made a lousy employee.
Indeed. Especially today. I should imagine the smell would be distressing for his co-workers, for starters.
See also the Monty Python sketch about Carl French's new film starring Marilyn Monroe.
"We had her lying on beds, lying on floors, falling out of cupboards, scaring the children..."
"It looks like you're planning a massacre... would you like help?"
That's probably the easiest way to deter piracy: price it reasonably for it's job. Most people would rather get it legitimately than pirate it.
Price is really the crux of it. Price it more cheaply and more people will buy it rather than pirate it. It really is that simple. All the other anti-piracy methods are merely delaying tactics. Piracy will always happen, regardless of the protection.
The problem is finding the balance of price to sales that you're comfortable with. Digital stuff is weird in that the "startup cost" of the very very first copy is stupendous, but all subsequent copies cost mere cents to produce. So selling something for $100 bucks to 10 people (and have 1,000 people pirate it), is nowhere near as profitable as selling it for $10 to 1,000 people (and have 10 people pirate it).
A real life example:
In the 1990s in Hong Kong, the VCD black market was huge. Legit VCDs went for HK$150-350 (US$20-45), recent movies being at the top end. Organised crime cartels sold them for HK$100 (US$13) for four movies, in temporary shops (they'd stay open til busted, usually about 2-3 months) making enough profit to run the risks of imprisonment, fines etc. No legislation or customs task forces could even make a dent. Shops that were shutdown would reopen either close by or in the same shop within a week or two.
Eventually, they finally found a way to put an end to the piracy: the legit VCD makers started charging HK$35-80 (US$5-10) per movie. Overnight, the pirates disappeared. Even though they were still charging more than the pirate outlets, people preferred the legit copy.
As a footnote, amusingly enough, the movie industry didn't take the lesson on board and tried the same overpricing the product foolishness with DVDs and more recently with BluRay. By then internet-based piracy had gone mainstream, offering not only really cheap movies, but far more choice and convenience. The triads didn't bother nearly as much (or at all in the case of BluRay), because the money wasn't there, so organised piracy was much less of a problem. Instead individual piracy took hold. This time it's the legit DVD/BluRay sellers that are closing down, killed off by the movie companies' refusal to accept the reality of the market: people aren't willing to pay that much for movies.
That a feminist organisation was pivotal in preventing half the female speakers at the conference from talking.