I don't understand statements like yours. Someone like you goes out, plays the latest Halo or Battlefield incarnation, and decides, Oh! So this is what FPSes are like. All shit!
I've been playing FPSs since the earliest days.
You know, ones that place emphasis on superior maneouvering, strategical engagements, and tactical placements of assets: where one bullet is enough to end a life or maim a limb, [...] individually superior opponents.
Boring. Not what I want.
What games are like that? (long list)
All of those are realistic military shooters and several of them are multiplayer. Sorry, doesn't interest me.
Hey, let's make specious comparisons and stupid remarks on internet forums!
They're only "specious" if you don't understand them. The point is that there are lots of ways in which we can put people to work through useless jobs. They'll make it appear as if everybody is productively employed. An oil spill is a typical example for a bad event that, on paper, looks economically beneficial. And employing people in the government in order to do jobs that can be better done by machine is another such example.
In a free market and with technological progress, jobs become obsolete and it makes no economic sense to continue employing people in those jobs. We all lose if groups like this union succeed in forcing the public to continue employing people in those jobs.
'Cutting public services is not only bad for the public who use services but also the economy as we are pushing people who provide valuable services on the dole,' says one union leader
Hey, let's engineer a couple of oil-spills, too! Jobs for thousands of people, and those people will be performing valuable services!
There's really only one thing I want a tablet for: reading. For that, I want something that is extremely responsive and no hassle to use.
Those requirements mean that anything e-ink based is not suitable; the refresh rate on e-ink makes any attempt at a decent UI fail. Neither is any Windows-based tablet; Windows is too sluggish even on high-end desktop hardware, let alone on a power-sipping tablet; Windows is also far too complex.
That leaves the iPad and maybe Android and Chrome-based tablets.
From all the comments, it appears that Watts was convicted not for assault, but for non-compliance with instructions from a border guard. The jury convicted him for that because, technically, he really was guilty of that, even though it may have been understandable.
So, if you don't like this verdict, you need to change the law. But how do you want to change the law? Under what circumstances should someone crossing the border be permitted not to comply with instructions by a border guard?
What ever happened to buying old cars and restoring them
And that's different... how? People don't restore some arbitrary car, they restore a 1966 Mustang or a 1960 Corvette. Why? Those cars are objectively not very good for transportation. They restore those because of their virtual attributes: branding, styling, nostalgia.
or going on bike rides or outdoor activites?
If you do those things by yourself, you're weird. What gives meaning to those activities is that they're social activities. And you can engage in the same kind of social activities in many other contexts. And to many urbanites, the idea of socializing during outdoor activities has always been preposterous anyway; why would you want to put up with bug bites and broken bones?
Even if you buy physical goods, most of the money goes into branding and identity. Nike sneakers, organic produce, green energy, BMW luxury sedan, diamond rings--none of that is necessary or rational, but it's the "virtual" attributes that make people pay extra for it. It's how you show off to your friends, or some other attribute unconnected to the physical good that makes you happy.
Twitch games require skill and fast reaction times. But many games don't even do that anymore. FPS now reincarnate you with weapons and health near where you died just so that you can continue, and they'll overlay an arrow or give you verbal instructions on where to go so that you don't get lost and don't have to figure things out for yourself. Forget about having to have any kind of plan or strategy to get past the baddies. Forget about having to figure out a level.
since there is no relation between sound and shape of the characters
Chinese characters aren't just pictures. Rather, they consist of about 200 radicals that are combined 2, 3, and 4 at a time. Many characters consist of just two parts: a sound indicator and a meaning indicator. There are plenty of books explaining this and using these relationships to help make Chinese characters easier to learn (look on Amazon).
The headline makes it sound like Amazon is doing something bad. But Amazon is twisting publishers' arms to sell their books for less than they would otherwise. Publishers have wanted to charge excessively high prices for their books. And Apple has been trying to lure them by letting them get away with it.
Your last two posts make it clear that you've got no experience with production-level document scanners. [...] an appropriate scanner does make the scanning part very easy
That is preposterous. There are so many exceptions when scanning books (stuck pages, brittle pages, bad cuts, foldouts, torn pages, dog-ears, gum, double-feeds, failure of double-feed detection, sticky notes, napkins, and tons of others) that scanning is never "very easy", even if scanners were perfect. But scanners aren't perfect: they gum up, they get dirty, their rollers start slipping, etc.
I have experience in the area
You may have used a new, big and expensive scanner for scanning stacks of clean, neatly cut paper. That makes it appear easy, but it has little to do with real-world book scanning.
And it certainly doesn't have anything to do with the kind of low-cost book scanning that this thread is about.
Sorry to have to say it again: you're naive, and you don't know what you're talking about.
there are well-known equipment and well-established techniques that do not involve rubes with bandsaws and script hackery.
But you keep saying nothing about how to remove the binding, other than recommending that people buy an overpriced and completely unwieldy guillotine (which, incidentally, also doesn't just work). What cheaper methods are there? Is a bandsaw OK or should it be a circular saw? Does a scroll saw work? How do you fix the book? How do you avoid having the pages become jagged?
Well, once the binding is off, assuming clean edges, then yes it is just that easy.
No, it is not. Pages get stuck and ripped, paper piles up, scanners misfeed, etc. You need to worry about rescanning, cleaning, and a lot of other things. Scanning books is tough even with a duplex sheetfed scanner. And I have yet to find an affordable (then you buy the appropriate equipment to do so.
Every scanner has its own tricky issues, and so does the scanning software. Buying the "appropriate equipment" doesn't make those issues go away. A $20000 scanner lets you scan a lot faster than a $50 scanner, but you'll probably actually have a harder time getting it to work.
In summary: you don't know what you're talking about, and you would do well to just keep quiet and don't give people lousy advice.
Presumably in the past there must have been some evolutionary advantage to developing scars rather than regrowing a new limb.
Speed is one possible reason. Another may be that a lot of scars are caused by things that persist (e.g. splinters, fibers, parasites), and it is potentially useful to encapsulate them in fibrous tissue, rather than regenerating normal tissue.
I'm not sure how that would work. Microsoft has yet to come up with a single patent infringed by Linux.
Apple's patents--the ones Apple is asserting against HTC and Nokia--however, cover a lot of Microsoft's libraries, including their.NET platform. And the way things have been going for Microsoft, they don't seem to be able to defend against such lawsuits.
Why didn't you say that at the start. this is your actual point and you didn't need to try to insult Chinese culture to get it across.
It is unavoidable that one "insults Chinese culture" in a rational discussion about world history because the facts contradict what the Chinese believe and say about their culture. That's no accident either: China has been using myths about its culture as a domestic and international political tool for a long time. And that's why it's important that people like you don't blindly repeat ideas about "ancient Chinese culture" or "Chinese feats".
And I think you should familiarize yourself a little more with your own culture and heritage. You'll find that European culture and history is far older and richer than China's.
The Greek people I talk to admit that modern Greek culture is not the same as ancient Greek culture (Although they wish it was).
Of course it is not. The culture of classical antiquity moved geographically from Greece and Rome to Germany, France, and England, and eventually North America.
The majority of people learned in the classical languages (Latin and Greek) were intellectuals outside Greece and Italy. For many centuries, you couldn't be an intellectual anywhere in Europe without at least speaking Latin. Until the mid-1950's, places like Harvard still required students to learn classical Latin and/or classical Greek. The Holy Roman Empire existed until the 19th century in what is now Germany, France, and Italy.
But similar movements and geographic shifts occurred within China; they are part of any large, living culture and society.
Where to draw the line is tricky and we seem to differ on this point.
We don't need to pick an absolute place. I'm saying that if you draw the line such that you consider Chinese history continuous since 200AD (or even 500BC), then you certainly have to consider European history to be continuous since at least 800BC or even earlier.
The way to establish that is to examine individual areas of culture--philosophy, engineering, science, language, art, mythology, religion, etc.--and trace them back in both cultures. If you actually do that carefully, you'll find that Europe has longer continuity in more areas than China.
You know what. I wrote a large reply but after reading through it I realised that you and I simply disagree on what defines culture.
I don't think we actually do. I think you simply don't see the history behind your own culture, and you have fallen prey to deliberately created Chinese cultural myths.
I don't feel any connection at all with Roman or Greek cultural teachings. I don't feel that Aristotle had the same culture as me.
Whether you "feel" a connection doesn't really matter; your education, your language, your way of thinking are a product of 3000 years of European history and culture.
All of the Chinese people I have talked to see a deep and direct connection with Confucius and rightly or wrongly believe that he and the people around him lived in roughly the same cultural background as modern China.
Yes: that is a belief deliberately inculcated into the Chinese people. But it is not true; it is a fiction created for political purposes.
From my perspective, the Chinese culture is old and worthy of admiration from its many feats
Well, that's the question, isn't it: has Chinese culture actually produced "many feats" or has it been a stagnant, unimaginative society throughout its history? The question is quite important now, since China wants to influence the rest of the world with its culture and ideology.
I've always found Chinese culture interesting. But after studying it for a while, I don't admire it anymore. Although it has some positive aspects, in the end, I don't want to live in anything like it. And a lot of its supposedly positive aspects are myths.
Or, to put it in politically incorrect terms, I find Chinese culture inferior to European culture, and I think Europe and the US should continue to strongly oppose Chinese attempts to influence global politics and culture.
European culture has nothing at all in common with what was in Europe 2000 years ago. Very few people understand the common languages in use back then. No one follows anything remotely like the Roman culture or beliefs.
That's utterly wrong. European culture and language is deeply rooted in European classical antiquity. That's where European individualism, democracy, science, engineering, philosophy, poetry, and literature come from. The languages and literature of classical antiquity (Greek, Latin, Hebrew) are still taught in many schools. But Europeans don't have to be educated in the language, literature, and philosophy of classical antiquity, it is just pervasive all around them. If they don't get Oedipus as a Greek drama, they get it as part of Harry Potter or Final Fantasy X.
As far as the middle east is concerned. I doubt you will find anyone that could argue that modern Middle east culture is anywhere near what it was like 2000 years ago.
Come on! The Arabs and Jews are fighting the same war they have been fighting for thousands of years, living in the same depressing buildings and worrying about the same depressing things.
Most modern Indian languages emerged around 1000 years ago.
And modern standard Chinese (Mandarin) emerged around 500 years ago. The fact that a Chinese can decipher older logographic inscriptions written in other languages doesn't change that. So what's your point?
The form of the characters were standardized by the Qin emperor in around 200BC, and there were few modifications throughout the millenia.
And Greek script was standardized around 1400BC, while Latin script was standardized around 500BC. There have been few modifications since.
An average well educated Chinese person can read and understand Chinese written in 200BC and beyond.
So can an average, well-educated Japanese, but that doesn't make them Chinese. It's an accident of logographic writing systems that people can decipher writings in what really are unintelligible dialects or languages to them. On the other hand, the relationships between European "languages" are far closer than they may appear on the surface.
The Roman Empire simply ceased to exist forever. China is still on the map, and has a traceable cultural and political heritage that goes back to at least the Qin empire and beyond.
But Europe is on the map. The term "Europe" originated in around 500BC and referred to northern Greece, the region where European culture comes from. It has continuously existed and expanded since then. The Roman Empire existed for nearly 2000 years as a political entity in various forms within Europe. So, you have multiple names referring to different aspects of a cultural continuity, just like in China, you have "Han" and "Qin" and others.
In fact the stagnation (relative to the rapid rise of the west in the last 500 years) is probably what led to the downfall of the "great" Chinese empire.
Yes, China has been more politically stagnant than Europe. But Europe's dynamism doesn't mean a break with the past; quite the opposite is true: a lot of modern European politics, culture, and ideas derive from culture and writings that are more than 2000 years old.
I agree that there is a lot of "my Chinese dick is longer than your western dicks" kind of meaningless boasting, but I do feel compelled to rectify some of your points that I see as invalid.
And I'm saying your interpretation of history is inaccurate because you're confused by superficial issues like the use of logographic writing systems or the name that a region gives itself. Europe's political history has been somewhat more dynamic than China's, but its culture, ideology, and linguistic traditions go back much further than China's.
What we do have is actual written characters dating back to ~1200BC. The earliest Greek texts that we have date back to ~1400BC. So based on this evidence you could say Greek was earlier, but not by nearly as far as you suggest.
No, you just don't understand.
The Greek script has been in continuous use in its modern form since about 1400BC; the modern Chinese script dates back to maybe 200-700AD. The earliest writing systems in the Middle East go back to at least 3400BC, 2200 years before any documented Chinese writing (oracle bone writing, a rather restricted form). In fact, it is far more plausible that China got writing via the Silk Road than that the Chinese invented it independently.
Modern Chinese society is based on the Qin culture which dates back to at least 9th century BC.... While this is not terribly old, the unification under the Qin emperor in 221BC wiped out all of the other cultures of the Chinese people which dated far further back.
And then it split again a few centuries later, then there were civil wars, rebellions, more splits and unifications, religious divisions, even more splits, etc. Not much different from what Europe experienced with Rome and afterwards. But parts of Europe have a history that goes back much further still.
As far as contemporary cultures are concerned, there are very few that can date back as far as 200BC.
Well, at the scale and fuzziness at which you define a "culture", we have four major surviving cultures: China, Europe, India, and the Middle East. Of those, China is the youngest.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't understand statements like yours. Someone like you goes out, plays the latest Halo or Battlefield incarnation, and decides, Oh! So this is what FPSes are like. All shit!
I've been playing FPSs since the earliest days.
You know, ones that place emphasis on superior maneouvering, strategical engagements, and tactical placements of assets: where one bullet is enough to end a life or maim a limb, [...] individually superior opponents.
Boring. Not what I want.
What games are like that? (long list)
All of those are realistic military shooters and several of them are multiplayer. Sorry, doesn't interest me.
Hey, let's make specious comparisons and stupid remarks on internet forums!
They're only "specious" if you don't understand them. The point is that there are lots of ways in which we can put people to work through useless jobs. They'll make it appear as if everybody is productively employed. An oil spill is a typical example for a bad event that, on paper, looks economically beneficial. And employing people in the government in order to do jobs that can be better done by machine is another such example.
In a free market and with technological progress, jobs become obsolete and it makes no economic sense to continue employing people in those jobs. We all lose if groups like this union succeed in forcing the public to continue employing people in those jobs.
Failure to comply with a lawful order should give the police the right to forcibly carry out the lawful order.
I'd rather go to court than give police additional powers to use force.
When the guard is performing, or has just performed, an illegal act (e.g. assault and battery), thereby revoking their privilege of authority.
Well, as far as the law is concerned, these guards haven't performed an illegal act, since they haven't been convicted of one.
'Cutting public services is not only bad for the public who use services but also the economy as we are pushing people who provide valuable services on the dole,' says one union leader
Hey, let's engineer a couple of oil-spills, too! Jobs for thousands of people, and those people will be performing valuable services!
There's really only one thing I want a tablet for: reading. For that, I want something that is extremely responsive and no hassle to use.
Those requirements mean that anything e-ink based is not suitable; the refresh rate on e-ink makes any attempt at a decent UI fail. Neither is any Windows-based tablet; Windows is too sluggish even on high-end desktop hardware, let alone on a power-sipping tablet; Windows is also far too complex.
That leaves the iPad and maybe Android and Chrome-based tablets.
From all the comments, it appears that Watts was convicted not for assault, but for non-compliance with instructions from a border guard. The jury convicted him for that because, technically, he really was guilty of that, even though it may have been understandable.
So, if you don't like this verdict, you need to change the law. But how do you want to change the law? Under what circumstances should someone crossing the border be permitted not to comply with instructions by a border guard?
What ever happened to buying old cars and restoring them
And that's different... how? People don't restore some arbitrary car, they restore a 1966 Mustang or a 1960 Corvette. Why? Those cars are objectively not very good for transportation. They restore those because of their virtual attributes: branding, styling, nostalgia.
or going on bike rides or outdoor activites?
If you do those things by yourself, you're weird. What gives meaning to those activities is that they're social activities. And you can engage in the same kind of social activities in many other contexts. And to many urbanites, the idea of socializing during outdoor activities has always been preposterous anyway; why would you want to put up with bug bites and broken bones?
Even if you buy physical goods, most of the money goes into branding and identity. Nike sneakers, organic produce, green energy, BMW luxury sedan, diamond rings--none of that is necessary or rational, but it's the "virtual" attributes that make people pay extra for it. It's how you show off to your friends, or some other attribute unconnected to the physical good that makes you happy.
Twitch games require skill and fast reaction times. But many games don't even do that anymore. FPS now reincarnate you with weapons and health near where you died just so that you can continue, and they'll overlay an arrow or give you verbal instructions on where to go so that you don't get lost and don't have to figure things out for yourself. Forget about having to have any kind of plan or strategy to get past the baddies. Forget about having to figure out a level.
since there is no relation between sound and shape of the characters
Chinese characters aren't just pictures. Rather, they consist of about 200 radicals that are combined 2, 3, and 4 at a time. Many characters consist of just two parts: a sound indicator and a meaning indicator. There are plenty of books explaining this and using these relationships to help make Chinese characters easier to learn (look on Amazon).
The headline makes it sound like Amazon is doing something bad. But Amazon is twisting publishers' arms to sell their books for less than they would otherwise. Publishers have wanted to charge excessively high prices for their books. And Apple has been trying to lure them by letting them get away with it.
Your last two posts make it clear that you've got no experience with production-level document scanners. [...] an appropriate scanner does make the scanning part very easy
That is preposterous. There are so many exceptions when scanning books (stuck pages, brittle pages, bad cuts, foldouts, torn pages, dog-ears, gum, double-feeds, failure of double-feed detection, sticky notes, napkins, and tons of others) that scanning is never "very easy", even if scanners were perfect. But scanners aren't perfect: they gum up, they get dirty, their rollers start slipping, etc.
I have experience in the area
You may have used a new, big and expensive scanner for scanning stacks of clean, neatly cut paper. That makes it appear easy, but it has little to do with real-world book scanning.
And it certainly doesn't have anything to do with the kind of low-cost book scanning that this thread is about.
Sorry to have to say it again: you're naive, and you don't know what you're talking about.
You said:
there are well-known equipment and well-established techniques that do not involve rubes with bandsaws and script hackery.
But you keep saying nothing about how to remove the binding, other than recommending that people buy an overpriced and completely unwieldy guillotine (which, incidentally, also doesn't just work). What cheaper methods are there? Is a bandsaw OK or should it be a circular saw? Does a scroll saw work? How do you fix the book? How do you avoid having the pages become jagged?
Well, once the binding is off, assuming clean edges, then yes it is just that easy.
No, it is not. Pages get stuck and ripped, paper piles up, scanners misfeed, etc. You need to worry about rescanning, cleaning, and a lot of other things. Scanning books is tough even with a duplex sheetfed scanner. And I have yet to find an affordable (then you buy the appropriate equipment to do so.
Every scanner has its own tricky issues, and so does the scanning software. Buying the "appropriate equipment" doesn't make those issues go away. A $20000 scanner lets you scan a lot faster than a $50 scanner, but you'll probably actually have a harder time getting it to work.
In summary: you don't know what you're talking about, and you would do well to just keep quiet and don't give people lousy advice.
Are really that dumb? You recommended guillotine-style shears, but they are expensive, heavy, and big. So, what is your alternative?
And if you think book scanning is as simple as "step 1) buy duplex document scanner; step 2) scan" your really ignorant.
First, there are guillotine-style shears for cutting bindings off books that do no damage at all to the pages.
Yes, but they are very expensive.
there are well-known equipment and well-established techniques that do not involve rubes with bandsaws and script hackery.
Why don't you do something useful and put together a HOWTO?
Presumably in the past there must have been some evolutionary advantage to developing scars rather than regrowing a new limb.
Speed is one possible reason. Another may be that a lot of scars are caused by things that persist (e.g. splinters, fibers, parasites), and it is potentially useful to encapsulate them in fibrous tissue, rather than regenerating normal tissue.
I'm not sure how that would work. Microsoft has yet to come up with a single patent infringed by Linux.
Apple's patents--the ones Apple is asserting against HTC and Nokia--however, cover a lot of Microsoft's libraries, including their .NET platform. And the way things have been going for Microsoft, they don't seem to be able to defend against such lawsuits.
Why didn't you say that at the start. this is your actual point and you didn't need to try to insult Chinese culture to get it across.
It is unavoidable that one "insults Chinese culture" in a rational discussion about world history because the facts contradict what the Chinese believe and say about their culture. That's no accident either: China has been using myths about its culture as a domestic and international political tool for a long time. And that's why it's important that people like you don't blindly repeat ideas about "ancient Chinese culture" or "Chinese feats".
And I think you should familiarize yourself a little more with your own culture and heritage. You'll find that European culture and history is far older and richer than China's.
The Greek people I talk to admit that modern Greek culture is not the same as ancient Greek culture (Although they wish it was).
Of course it is not. The culture of classical antiquity moved geographically from Greece and Rome to Germany, France, and England, and eventually North America.
The majority of people learned in the classical languages (Latin and Greek) were intellectuals outside Greece and Italy. For many centuries, you couldn't be an intellectual anywhere in Europe without at least speaking Latin. Until the mid-1950's, places like Harvard still required students to learn classical Latin and/or classical Greek. The Holy Roman Empire existed until the 19th century in what is now Germany, France, and Italy.
But similar movements and geographic shifts occurred within China; they are part of any large, living culture and society.
Where to draw the line is tricky and we seem to differ on this point.
We don't need to pick an absolute place. I'm saying that if you draw the line such that you consider Chinese history continuous since 200AD (or even 500BC), then you certainly have to consider European history to be continuous since at least 800BC or even earlier.
The way to establish that is to examine individual areas of culture--philosophy, engineering, science, language, art, mythology, religion, etc.--and trace them back in both cultures. If you actually do that carefully, you'll find that Europe has longer continuity in more areas than China.
You know what. I wrote a large reply but after reading through it I realised that you and I simply disagree on what defines culture.
I don't think we actually do. I think you simply don't see the history behind your own culture, and you have fallen prey to deliberately created Chinese cultural myths.
I don't feel any connection at all with Roman or Greek cultural teachings. I don't feel that Aristotle had the same culture as me.
Whether you "feel" a connection doesn't really matter; your education, your language, your way of thinking are a product of 3000 years of European history and culture.
All of the Chinese people I have talked to see a deep and direct connection with Confucius and rightly or wrongly believe that he and the people around him lived in roughly the same cultural background as modern China.
Yes: that is a belief deliberately inculcated into the Chinese people. But it is not true; it is a fiction created for political purposes.
From my perspective, the Chinese culture is old and worthy of admiration from its many feats
Well, that's the question, isn't it: has Chinese culture actually produced "many feats" or has it been a stagnant, unimaginative society throughout its history? The question is quite important now, since China wants to influence the rest of the world with its culture and ideology.
I've always found Chinese culture interesting. But after studying it for a while, I don't admire it anymore. Although it has some positive aspects, in the end, I don't want to live in anything like it. And a lot of its supposedly positive aspects are myths.
Or, to put it in politically incorrect terms, I find Chinese culture inferior to European culture, and I think Europe and the US should continue to strongly oppose Chinese attempts to influence global politics and culture.
European culture has nothing at all in common with what was in Europe 2000 years ago. Very few people understand the common languages in use back then. No one follows anything remotely like the Roman culture or beliefs.
That's utterly wrong. European culture and language is deeply rooted in European classical antiquity. That's where European individualism, democracy, science, engineering, philosophy, poetry, and literature come from. The languages and literature of classical antiquity (Greek, Latin, Hebrew) are still taught in many schools. But Europeans don't have to be educated in the language, literature, and philosophy of classical antiquity, it is just pervasive all around them. If they don't get Oedipus as a Greek drama, they get it as part of Harry Potter or Final Fantasy X.
As far as the middle east is concerned. I doubt you will find anyone that could argue that modern Middle east culture is anywhere near what it was like 2000 years ago.
Come on! The Arabs and Jews are fighting the same war they have been fighting for thousands of years, living in the same depressing buildings and worrying about the same depressing things.
Most modern Indian languages emerged around 1000 years ago.
And modern standard Chinese (Mandarin) emerged around 500 years ago. The fact that a Chinese can decipher older logographic inscriptions written in other languages doesn't change that. So what's your point?
The form of the characters were standardized by the Qin emperor in around 200BC, and there were few modifications throughout the millenia.
And Greek script was standardized around 1400BC, while Latin script was standardized around 500BC. There have been few modifications since.
An average well educated Chinese person can read and understand Chinese written in 200BC and beyond.
So can an average, well-educated Japanese, but that doesn't make them Chinese. It's an accident of logographic writing systems that people can decipher writings in what really are unintelligible dialects or languages to them. On the other hand, the relationships between European "languages" are far closer than they may appear on the surface.
The Roman Empire simply ceased to exist forever. China is still on the map, and has a traceable cultural and political heritage that goes back to at least the Qin empire and beyond.
But Europe is on the map. The term "Europe" originated in around 500BC and referred to northern Greece, the region where European culture comes from. It has continuously existed and expanded since then. The Roman Empire existed for nearly 2000 years as a political entity in various forms within Europe. So, you have multiple names referring to different aspects of a cultural continuity, just like in China, you have "Han" and "Qin" and others.
In fact the stagnation (relative to the rapid rise of the west in the last 500 years) is probably what led to the downfall of the "great" Chinese empire.
Yes, China has been more politically stagnant than Europe. But Europe's dynamism doesn't mean a break with the past; quite the opposite is true: a lot of modern European politics, culture, and ideas derive from culture and writings that are more than 2000 years old.
I agree that there is a lot of "my Chinese dick is longer than your western dicks" kind of meaningless boasting, but I do feel compelled to rectify some of your points that I see as invalid.
And I'm saying your interpretation of history is inaccurate because you're confused by superficial issues like the use of logographic writing systems or the name that a region gives itself. Europe's political history has been somewhat more dynamic than China's, but its culture, ideology, and linguistic traditions go back much further than China's.
What we do have is actual written characters dating back to ~1200BC. The earliest Greek texts that we have date back to ~1400BC. So based on this evidence you could say Greek was earlier, but not by nearly as far as you suggest.
No, you just don't understand.
The Greek script has been in continuous use in its modern form since about 1400BC; the modern Chinese script dates back to maybe 200-700AD. The earliest writing systems in the Middle East go back to at least 3400BC, 2200 years before any documented Chinese writing (oracle bone writing, a rather restricted form). In fact, it is far more plausible that China got writing via the Silk Road than that the Chinese invented it independently.
Modern Chinese society is based on the Qin culture which dates back to at least 9th century BC. ... While this is not terribly old, the unification under the Qin emperor in 221BC wiped out all of the other cultures of the Chinese people which dated far further back.
And then it split again a few centuries later, then there were civil wars, rebellions, more splits and unifications, religious divisions, even more splits, etc. Not much different from what Europe experienced with Rome and afterwards. But parts of Europe have a history that goes back much further still.
As far as contemporary cultures are concerned, there are very few that can date back as far as 200BC.
Well, at the scale and fuzziness at which you define a "culture", we have four major surviving cultures: China, Europe, India, and the Middle East. Of those, China is the youngest.