> resources. Hezbollah is not only a major political party, but is the country's > second largest employer, mostly for its network of government services that it > provided to areas that the Lebanese government was either unable to or unwilling > to provide to -- schools, hospitals, etc. Public service activism is one of the > main ways that the party wins support, even down to the local level. I saw a
Yes, but it's Iranian money; Hezbollah is basically an Iranian shell company. One could argue that they've bought loyalty with this money. But there's evidence that some of this loyalty has been frayed by anger at the pointless destruction that Nasrallah's group instigated.
There's also anecdotal reports about people who were ordered to stay put in southern Lebanese towns by Hezbollah gunmen, apparently to provide more human shields.
> Contrary to popular myth, Hezbollah (unlike Hamas and the other Palestinian > groups) prefers not to operate around civilians. Not for a concern for the > civilians' safety -- they'll confiscate buildings to use as shooting positions > if needed, whether their owners like it or not -- but for their own > safety. Hamas operates openly as a sign of pride and defiance. However, by > doing that, it only takes a tiny handful of defectors to point out to Israel > where they are and what they're doing. Hezbollah, on the other hand, prefers to > operate in areas where nobody is around to reduce the risk of being exposed by > defectors.
This may be true but many Hez fighters nonetheless operated extensively around civilians, sometimes in the same building but more often near civilian-occupied structures.
> As we saw in the last conflict, they're a very effective military, and it's a > big question mark on how to deal with them. It's almost funny how the major > Arab powers were defeated one after another, yet this tiny band was blowing up > warships and taking out hundreds of Merkavas, in addition to maintaining a > steady rain of over 100 Katyushas per day throughout the entire conflict. And > now their popularity is soaring -- not just in other countries, but even in > Lebanon, where they started the conflict. Check out these polls. Check out this > as well.
As stated previously, there is also a lot of anger at Hezbollah for starting the conflict which wrecked people's homes across the south as well as parts of Beirut and set the country back many years in its economic development. Hezbollah has resorted to paying off returning families with $10K grants and crowing about its victory, while opposition editorialists have denounced Hezbollah for their reckless adventure.
Hezbollah certainly did not take out "hundreds of Merkavas"; I believe the number is more like 13, and the IDF is claiming that the Merkavas actually performed very well--probably would have done even better without this communications hacking disaster, and no doubt they have a lot more incentive now to get off their duffs and install the Trophy system (reported on/. a few months ago). The one hit to a battleship was made by an Iranian guided missile system that was probably manned by Iranian technicians. It's doubtful that Hezbollah could pull that off on its own, though with extensive training they could probably man future missile batteries. It should be noted that the Israeli air force took out most of the Iranian missile batteries in about 34 minutes at the outset of the war, unfortunately not all of them however.
Given 4-5 more weeks, Israel would undoubtedly have degraded Hezbollah significantly enough that it would not be a threat again for a long time. Note how after claiming he would never cease fire, Nasrallah hypocritically sued for a cease-fire, and Israel's stupid government caved to U.S. pressure to call it off just when they were finally winning.
Privately, the Iranians are said to consider this war a disaster bo
They've obviously never visited University of Massachusetts at Boston's website or Northeastern University's School of Professional and Continuing Studies. Just try to find a course listing on these pathetically designed sites; I dare you. Note especially how you need to look up a code that corresponds to "Fall 2006" on the UMass site before you can even search for a fall course, and you have to go through this horrific Peoplesoft data entry screen. I am sure that the average high school student could have designed a simpler, more usable site than either of these.
Fooey on bad web sites, made by multimillion dollar organizations, that cause hundreds of people to have to call up the institution and ask how to navigate to the information they need. Simpler and more cost effective would have been to simply put the university's logo and a phone number, since you're going to have to call them anyway.
Yours is a common argument. In an earlier era in the 1970s people were saying, why don't we spend that money here on earth where it's needed? Yet, every cent of that money is spent here on earth; it's not as though we launch tons of dollar bills into orbit and eject them into space. Thousands of engineers, scientists, physicians, space suit makers, rocket ship builders, computer programmers, astrophysicists, and others are employed by the space program.
I question that we would necessarily have developed velcro, microcomputers, Tang, new alloys, biomedical advances, etc., by sending robotic ships to explore space. Perhaps other things might have been developed instead, perhaps some of the same things, but scientific developments and spinoffs are not predictable. JFK didn't say he believed this nation should develop microcomputers and velcro by the end of the decade, he said we should land a man on the moon and bring him safely back to earth. The implementation details are where the technical advances are made.
What's more, it's the manned space flights that hold the public's interest and keep the funding up. The public latched onto astronauts as national heroes early on, in an era when heroes were greatly needed, and today is no different. Dangerous exploration is a glamorous thing. Sure, the robotic craft that explore Mars are very exciting and of course we should continue such efforts, but the extra effort of accommodating humans in space is what really pushes us forward technologically and emotionally.
It's also worth considering that even if the U.S. doesn't travel back to the Moon, other countries will. Do you really want your grandkids to have to buy tickets on a Chinese spacecraft to visit the Chinese moon city fifty years hence? Or the EU moon base? Or the Russian Mars base? Not that our grandkids will be able to afford such things; we'll be the has-beens, the left-behinds who stand at night and gaze at the sky while other nation-states dominate the heavens. No way. The U.S. has got to maintain its leadership role in space or it will become an also-ran.
If a mere 10 inch meteor can create a 4 ton explosion then I don't think it would ever be a good idea to try to put a colony on the moon. If this kind of thing happens often, and the say it does, there would have to be a whole lot of protection for any structure we put on the moon. Or develope shields...
Why not put the base underground? Ten meters or so should do it. Probably the temperature is more stable underground, making environmental maintenance a little simpler. Spread a bunch of solar panels on the surface, mine oxygen and other essential elements from the soil, and you have the makings of a self-sustaining colony.
Probably much worse than the infinitesmal chance of a direct meteor strike is the dust problem, which may actually sink the whole idea of a moon base if they can't figure out how to filter the stuff. But at the end of the day these are all technical problems and technical problems are solvable to one degree or another. I say let's go ahead and put a base there; it's good for science and will employ a whole new generation of engineers, astrophysicists, etc.
Being a chinese company, I wonder if their government "suggested" they go to using only licenced MS products. New equipment with a paid copy of Windows and Office don't need pirated versions, which has been an issue for them.
That sounds highly unlikely. China strongly supports linux and strongly opposes foreign software companies like Microsoft. Their government has been supportive of linux for some time now as an alternative to Microsoft.
What's more, the Chinese government has been very reluctant to go after IP pirates, and they began shutting down the CD factories only after intense pressure from the U.S. and Europe during negotiations to allow China into the WTO.
It's implausible that China would suddenly become a staunch ally of Microsoft. It's more likely that Lenovo is trying to capitalize on its existing relationship with Microsoft (as per TFA) and perhaps also to distinguish themselves from IBM.
Whether this results in a more effective product offering is another question. Personally I think they're shooting themselves in the foot long term, but short term probably Microsoft made it an extremely favorable decision.
China's success is primarily due to a ferocious exploitation of their labor market by Hong Kongers, Taiwanese, Japanese, and Americans.
Now the mainland Chinese are patting themselves on the back, taking all the credit for their economic success, when in fact they have an obsolete oligarchy of Communist cadres ruling over a cynical populace burned out from ten years of cultural revolution that followed 40 years of communism.
It's no wonder that today they are issuing these clumsy, heavy-handed proclamations dripping with an alarming degree of contempt for the rest of the world.
Some of these less informed forum participants can crow about how Intel is "just as bad" or America used to be "just as bad" but let them go live in China for a while and see what a morally bankrupt country it has become.
I learned my Mandarin in Taiwan and while no place is perfect, they at least preserved some of the grace and beauty of classical Chinese culture. No wonder Peking is aiming 700 missiles at them, and more on the way....
Paypal is OK for small transactions, but they constantly annoy me with demands to get "verified" by giving them my bank account number, something I don't wish to do. But I have to click past this demand screen every time I log in. Also, they limit my transaction size for arbitrary reasons. I have a credit card with a ridiculously high credit limit, and I have superb credit, yet they won't let me pay more than two or three hundred dollars because I'm not verified. What's the issue here. I use my credit card all the time for multi-thousands of dollars transactions with other people but Paypal needs my bank account number to do a $500 transaction?
I look forward to Google giving Paypal some healthy competition, especially if Microsoft really does buy EBay, which owns Paypal. Google has a way of implementing very elegant solutions, such as for example their gmail product and their video search. Bring it on, Google!
I've thought this was a good idea for a long time. Charge it at the net connection to companies or individuals. Privately, I send ~100 emails a month, professionally, ~200 on a busy month. Most of the professional ones are through Intranet, and $1.00 a month isn't going to put me in the hole.
What a ridiculous concept. How on earth are they going to implement such a tax? There must be trillions of bytes transmitted per month over the Internet. Even China can't totally control its network, and they are a totalitarian state with thousands of bureaucrats spying on people. My guess is, we would have to route all our network traffic through China to take advantage of the low cost of snoops over there.
This is the brainless plan put forth by a bankrupt government. Italy would be better advised to foster the growth of small businesses, which would contribute to more employment and in the long run add greatly to government coffers.
China doesn't need the West's help to censor their internet; they build most of the world's computer equipment, they've shipped a person into orbit, and they have nuclear power. They're a big science and technology power and have been for some years. To say that Cisco or Yahoo are helping China to keep tabs on dissidents is true in the narrow sense but in reality the Chinese government is perfectly capable of doing it all themselves.
That said, it leaves a bad taste in my mouth to know that American companies are complicit in locking down the Chinese network, but of course we in the U.S. long since traded any moral high ground for profit, when it comes to China; there's just too much money to be made from outsourcing there. Maybe when India gets its manufacturing act together, we can go back to being moralistic about China's repression of dissidents.
What's probably more important than moralizing is to allow more of their students into our universities so that they can experience a more unfettered system. Not that the U.S. is perfect but it is way more open than China's system and the educated elite need to appreciate the value of openness.
The $100 laptop project is being developed by a non-profit organization and is not intended to make a profit. That cuts out some percentage of markup--admittedly not a huge difference, since hardware tends to have slim margins, but still a difference. It is also innovative technically; they are using a dramatically less expensive LCD display.
"Realistic" is a fairly arbitrary term that means little in the context of an altruistic project like the $100 laptop initiative. If you want to be realistic, stop giving food to starving people, and Darwinian principles will prevail. However, compassionate people are not "realistic" in that sense.
I think the Chinese $150 PC is a nice idea, although it's certainly neither original nor all that attractively priced; you still need to buy a display, or have a very clear, sharp TV set that won't ruin your eyesight.
Walmart marketed a $199 linux PC for a while, though they seem to have discontinued it. Some people mentioned a similar Tigerdirect model, but I haven't found it on their site. You have to really look for these deals.
I suspect that as Linux matures and especially as Wine improves, the cheap Linux PC will make a comeback, though it's awfully hard to sell the public on something that works with about 50% of the stuff out there--devices, software, peripherals--when for another $50 you can get something that works with 90% or 100%. I just did my taxes using Turbotax 2005 running in Crossover/Wine on my fedora workstation, and while it basically worked, a few features such as help pop-ups were broken and I had to do a lot of manual data entry because the stock investments download feature didn't work perfectly. Would I pay $50 more to avoid this kind of aggravation? Of course and so would everyone else.
The other thing I would worry about is compatibility. Is it worth paying $150 for a machine that uses a non-Intel compatible CPU? Especially when slower Intel/AMD cpus can be had for quite cheap these days. If it's just a matter of national pride--it has to be all Chinese-built--well, come on, almost all computer parts are made in China already, so just go buy any PC you like--Lenovo, Dell, Toshiba--and chances are it'll be 80-90% Chinese content.
You end up with abortions like the Treo which is a really crappy phone and a pretty crappy PDA. Hell, you can't even get a decent simple phone with bluetooth without also getting the crappy MP3 player and crappy camera (and crippled bluetooth as well.) Furthermore, if you want to send an email they seem to want to tack on another $50 / month on top of a $60 voice plan. Considering DSL can now be had for $20/month, that's insane. Ya, it's wireless, but still...
You've got to be kidding. The Treo is neither a "crappy phone" nor a bad PDA. Far from it; it's the best smartphone out there. Reviewers from PC Magazine to Brighthand to Walter Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal have been praising the Treo for years. Palm has sold millions of the units and it's basically the only thing keeping them afloat right now, providing about 74% of Palm's revenue according to Infoworld and other sources. There's no other smartphone that comes close in ease of use and smooth integration of the phone with the PDA.
The only thing wrong with the Treo is precisely your valid criticism that the cellular providers limit its networking capabilities. However the latest Treo (the 700w) does support wifi cards. As soon as the 700p comes out (the PalmOS version) no doubt a goodly number of Palm afficionados who own Palm wifi cards will upgrade and start happily getting online with their Treo phones.
As for "crippled bluetooth", it's not clear what you mean. I use my Nokia 6600 all the time to get my Palm Tungsten online via bluetooth, on the T-Mobile phone network. It would be great to combine these two devices into one, but this works and it's a lot better than nothing. I am psyched about the idea of a 1 megapixel camera included with the phone. I don't always carry my digital camera with me and it would be a great thing to have. When the 700p comes out it's going to be one sweet, tempting convergence device, particularly if they allow dialup networking finally.
Googlemobiles!
on
Google's DNA
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· Score: 5, Interesting
This comparison of Google to stem cells is rather hyperbolic. After all, many companies out there do almost everything. Microsoft has its fingers in a lot of pies, too, even though they have been playing catch up in most of the areas that they don't yet dominate. IBM is probably another example; though they're known for their computers, they are very big in software services, chip manufacturing and basic research, and they have internal projects going on a whole lot of interesting stuff that never makes it into the market.
Google does have the coolness market cornered right now, though. They have continued to do a great job on their search engine, and their email, mapping, and other web services are really well done.
I would like to see Google truly act like stem cells and develop a better car. I am willing to bet that a Googlemobile would be truly innovative. Probably it would come with builtin navigation tools such as Google Maps but beyond that it would be self-parking, highly secure from theft (because it runs Linux), and get terrific gas mileage--or else use some other less carbon-generating source such as alcohol or direct solar power.
On a less whimsical note, there's a tremendous potential for Google in branding nifty handheld devices that have easy access to the world's online knowledge, incorporate speech recog and the like. I suspect that Google's move into urban wifi is a step in this direction; if they can control the airwaves and the receiving devices they will truly have vertical integration. And Microsoft will be even more annoyed, which is probably a good thing.
A victory for the victims of cyber-bullying, or missed chance by thin-skinned Ghyslain to cash-in as the next William 'She Bangs' Hung?
I vote for missed opportunity by Raza. I don't expect a high school student to have a well developed ability to laugh at himself, but surely his 15 minutes of fame could have been put to better use than merely to sue a few classmates. Still, what they did wasn't very nice.
Furthermore, I doubt that it will prevent so-called cyberbullying; it will just remind the more intelligent bullies to wreak their mischief anonymously.
When I think of all the bullies I had to deal with growing up, back in the pre-Web days, and the revenge I could have gotten by spoofing them on a website, well, I guess I'm glad I didn't have that opportunity to do something so easy that would haunt me the rest of my life. It would have been fun, though.
This is clearly a situation where strong federal leadership is needed. If Americans are on board with reducing global warming, then let's make reduced fossil fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions a reality by: - mandating higher MPGs in automobiles - granting huge tax credits for solar heating/electric panels on private and commercial buildings - mandating solar equipment for ALL federal buildings - mandating a switch to ethanol or methanol biofuels for federal fleets - grant tax breaks for anyone switching to biofuels - aid to cities that want to build or expand public transportation - aid to cities to convert existing buses to biofuels - massage research into alternative energy - end the war in Iraq to free up the funds for the above initiatives - Wind mill farms granted more eminent domain power (e.g., to overcome NIMBY opposition by estate owners in Marblehead, Massachusetts because "it ruins the view").
Germany during World War II switched to hydrogen for its cars when its petroleum supplies were cut off. Brazil has switched to domestically produced alcohol. It's all do-able with a strong federal leadership. This is clearly a situation where the market economy is going to favor lower prices, not (necessarily) environmentally desirable results. The federal government is the agent that can mandate the conditions necessary to make this stuff a reality.
There's a total disconnect between economic and political realms. In the economic realm, the Chinese (with the technical and managerial assistance of the Taiwanese and Japanese and Americans) are turning a once-backward nation into an outsourcing superpower. In the political realm, the Chinese Communist Party runs the country in a Stalinist fashion, killing or arresting anyone who rocks the boat, be he a democracy activist or a Fa Lun Gong practitioner.
As Stalin once said, "You have a man, you have a problem. No man, no problem." This is how the CCP keeps a lid on trouble in the country, albeit perhaps less homocidal today than Stalin was.
The interesting thing is that this disconnect occurs on both sides of the Pacific. The Americans are still getting used to China as an economic giant; in most people's living memory, China was an economically incompetent, Cuba-like welfare state that was still recovering from the traumas of decades of war and depredation.
But today China's past that, mostly, except for this legacy government which I believe is truly dangerous. They had a general talking openly about nuking Los Angeles just a few years ago. They're working on their own version of the sophisticated Aegis command-and-control system for their navy. They're stealing, buying, and copying American military technology as fast as they can, and they have purchased the latest submarines and fighter jets from the idiotic Russians, tipping the balance of power in the Taiwan Strait and the Pacific literally overnight. They have spoken of an ongoing project to hack into and shut down the American air traffic control system. Various entities engaged in hacking into U.S. defense systems have been traced to the China mainland. Who knows what kind of satellites they are designing and launching that may be designed to destroy U.S. tracking systems and global communications. And they point thermonuclear warheads at the U.S.
So it's not particularly surprising or unusual that the American government is suspicious of sensitive electronics that it is purchasing from a Chinese owned company. After all, the Americans demonstrated the power of booby-trapping electronics when it shipped a bunch of hacked printers to Iraq and used them to remotely shut down the Iraqi communications systems during the first Gulf War.
The difficulty is that in the economic realm, the U.S. and China are bosom buddies, joined at the hip, united as business partners. It's a strange situation and not one that can benefit the U.S. in the long run. in the short run, it's profitable, however.
Here's the link to the conference site for those wanting to know details such as the date;)
I've been to this show several times and it's always a blast. A nice way to collect more new Penguin T-shirts, Linux pens and other artifacts of our era for archeologists to puzzle over a thousand years hence!
I am a Palm user from way back and I am dying for a Treo, but I don't want to buy one and then see Palm go under or sell out or otherwise orphan their products. I want to see lots o' new stuff coming out for Palm platform and I don't want to have to get a Windows-based handheld in a year or two. Go Palm!
That said, I wish it were happening because of free and fair competition rather than that some predatory patent holder with a team of clever lawyers screwed a great company through bogus patent suits. I hope Rim bounces back, too.
I had assumed that most of these "dangerous attachments" were Windows executable files that would not work on Mac/Linux. So if they do work on Mac X and Linux, what the heck are they? Shell scripts that contain previously unknown root exploits?
As a Linux user, I find this rather disturbing. Even on Linux, I never open attachments from unknown senders and even known senders' attachments go into a kind of quarantine, but up till now I had assumed that there was little cause for concern. Maybe MS Word files opened in OpenOffice with macros enabled might do some such as communicate back to the sender, but they still wouldn't have root privileges to do anything really evil. Or maybe they don't need root privileges, just internet access.
Hmm. I'm opening all Word docs in gmail.com from now on!
...it seems that more companies are switching to open source rather than paying Oracle $40,000 a processor.
...and provides exactly one example. It's clear that a little more analysis is needed to back up this claim. A more credible statement might be that companies are choosing either open source databases or lower priced Microsoft and IBM alternatives. DB2 from IBM is actually a lot cheaper per CPU than Oracle's dbms; a former employer of mine had decided to go with DB2 (before the company went under) because it was a fraction of Oracle's $250,000 price for a relatively small system.
On the other hand, Oracle has been very generous in allowing developer downloads of their DBMS; I was able to take their Linux port, install it on an old box running Red Hat, and port a Microsoft SQL Server-based back end over to Oracle in a couple of days just as an experiment. Obviously, to actually use the product would cost some bucks but this kind of flexibility is what helps keep Oracle's tentacles in so many businesses.
The other thing that the analysts ignored is that the database and enterprise software business isn't so much about having innovative technology, contrary to what was asserted in the Business Week article but rather having an effective sales organization. DBMS and enterprise management software is sales driven, not innovation driven. Executives don't watch commercials about sexy features in the latest rev of Oracle or Sql Server, then order a few copies from Amazon. It's the inside sales teams that patiently build relationships over the years. IBM knows this, Oracle knows this, and MS knows it too. Sybase tried but their hubris and arrogance brought them down. (direct personal experience with that!)
No doubt, while Larry crows about upcoming tech innovations, he's internally yelling at the sales teams to get more aggressive, offer more discounts, and steal more customers from Bill and from the SAP people. He'll eke out a few more percentage points of market share, and the investors will be satisfied for a couple more quarters. That's how the business works.;)
Contact numbers are saved directly to your SIM card. Most modern-day phones come with at least some internal memory, but the C100 series phones have none.
I'm not sure I see why it's bad or "cheap" that the phone saves contact information to the SIM card. In fact my fancy, shmancy Nokia 6600 requires some special shenanigans to move contacts to the card if, for example, I wanted to switch to another phone. Apparently it gets confusing if you move your contacts to the card because the phone will continue to save new contacts to its internal memory and you need to keep track of that. Why not just use the permanent, removable storage for such vital information? Or better yet, have the option to copy it to both places (but only display it once, which it can't currently do)?
Aside from this, he makes a great point about how the U.S. phone market is too controlled by a tiny handful of providers. I would like to see phones unlinked from the service providers, much as personal computers are separate from the DSL and cable broadband providers. Imagine if you had to buy a Verizon PC or a Comcast Macintosh and if you switched from Comcast Cable to Verizon DSL you'd need to buy a new PC!
It seems as though GSM is a step in the right direction because T-Mobile, Cingular, and ATT branded phones are basically interchangeable. Even so, the Europeans and Japanese always seem to have much cooler phones, and the options in the U.S. are just so limited.
Employers have often done background checks on applicants. In the old days the hiring manager might ask around, call up a friend who works at the applicant's previous place to get another perspective than what their references were saying. It was also possible to go to the library and search periodicals, find out if the person's ever been arrested, check their claimed schools to see if they really graduated, and so forth. Internet searching has certainly made it easier to find out about people but the practice has been around probably for centuries.
From the employer's perspective, given the amount of deceit and puffed up resumes floating around, frankly I would want to do some factual verification. Now if I saw some dumb image of them on myspace I'd perhaps note it but not let it influence me. At worst, I'd inquire of the applicant whether it was them and give them a chance to explain it but it would probably be irrelevant in the hiring decision. It's about someone being a good and reliable contributor for 1, 2, or 5 years, not about marrying them.
From the applicant's perspective, if a potential employer looks askance at a silly picture on myspace.com then that says a lot about the employer and this guy was probably better off to run the other way.
Well when you shoot enough arrows, one of them is bound to hit a target. Or put another way, fund 10,000 wacky ideas and you'll get maybe one good product out of it. The internet is one such product of a DARPA project so it's probably not a bad approach.
What I don't understand is why this would be in the international wire reports. What happened to secrecy. If they let the entire world know that these things are being developed, the targets (e.g., Iraqi insurgents) will outfit themselves with cans of insect repellent or maybe just spray paint or hair spray, anything that will disrupt or kill the insects. A group of insurgents sitting around in a room are going to notice a butterfly; it's fairly slow moving and obvious.
Now, what would be really cool is if they developed some sort of super killer bees that have a really deadly neural toxin instead of the usual venom. One of those babies pricks you and you're dead within seconds. The bees would act like normal insects until the operator sends it a certain signal which activates some neurological pathway to sting anything that moves. This pathway would of course be based on studying the killer bees from S. America. Then release a few million of them, wait until they're near some baddies, and zap!
Of course, if these things could breed, the entire world would be in trouble. But that's never stopped those guys before!
An estimated 8,000 people are executed in China annually. "Estimated" because no one really knows for sure; the Chinese government keeps the number secret. People are killed for such crimes as murder, bribery, and embezzlement. It is not known how many mistaken executions take place.
People are arrested for criticizing the government in print or on a web site. People who try to form a political party will be arrested.
China watchers estimate that over a thousand people were shot dead for holding a demonstration a while back in Tiananmen Square; no one really knows how many because the government won't discuss it and certainly won't allow any Chinese citizens to write about it or talk about it. Mothers who went to the government asking where their children were, where they were buried, were threatened with arrest and in some cases were arrested when they persisted.
Web site operators are not allowed to criticize the government; if they do, they will be shut down. Cyber cafes also have to police themselves or else lose their "license".
People who practice a certain kind of qigong called "Fa Lun Gong" are arrested and thrown into prison; some of them have died from torture and abuse while in prison. No one knows how many, though Amnesty International has reported on a few specific cases.
China is massing thousands of missiles along the Fujian coast opposite Taiwan, an independent and democratically governed island which they claim as theirs. They routinely threaten the Taiwanese with war if the Taiwanese should ever declare "independence". They are working hard at their ability to counter the U.S. navy and to launch a massive invasion of the place, so as to make their possession of the island a fact and not just an empty claim. It is only China's fear of the U.S. and Taiwan's possible possession of nuclear bombs that has kept them from militarily invading and overthrowing the locally elected government.
China violently invaded and continues to occupy Tibet, which was once an independent country, attempting to sinify the territory by importing hundreds of thousands of ethnic Chinese settlers. They have never compensated the Tibetans for the hundreds of temples they destroyed and the thousands of Buddhist monks they murdered. They will not let the Dalai Lama, a peaceful Buddhist leader of the Tibetans, even set foot in Tibet, nor any other part of China. They hate it when any other country including the U.S. lets him visit and they say nasty, threatening things.
China is engaging in a massive military build up that is alarming its neighbors, at a time when it has no enemies particularly except perhaps for the U.S., which has no reason at all to invade China but lately has become less friendly because of China's many provocative anti-American speeches.
China cuts deals with pariah countries like Zimbabwe and Iran because it doesn't care about human rights abuses. In the 90s, they sold Iraq high tech fiber optic based air defense comm systems to help Saddam to counter American jets enforcing the no-fly zones. They are moving into Africa and South America in a big way, trying to present themselves as an appealing alternative to the U.S.
China has some simmering social problems that it is either ignoring or downplaying through censorship that are going to suddenly boil over some day. There are an estimated 800 million people living in rural districts who have been left behind by the economic boom and who are increasingly angry at the lack of jobs, lack of basic health care and the gaudy display of wealth to which they have no access. Factories which once provided lifetime jobs have closed or become more efficient and capitalistic, causing a lot of resentment and anger.
Recently some security forces shot a bunch of peasants in southern China for protesting over local governmental corruption. The exact number of deaths was suppressed but estimates range from 60 to 100. Thanks to the internet, eyewitness accounts were transmitted to the West bef
All the spending is blamed on one man? Goodness, no. Congress allocates the spending in the United States; by the "your dollar" comment I infer that you are from another country so obviously are unfamiliar with the U.S. system of government. Congress voted for the war; Congress allocates the money, and Congress has the power to reduce the debt should it choose to. Blaming Bush is like blaming your mother for your ignorance; it ain't her fault, chum.
The economy has absolutely recovered; it's a matter of fact. You must get your information from MoveOn.org, TheNation and other leftist groups who live in a sort of fantasy world of hatred for everyone and everything "conservative", as is evidenced by the ad hominem language you choose to use. $280 billion to create a democracy in the Middle East is a bargain, all told. 20 years from now the Middle East will be democratic and will have peaceful relations with Israel and the West, if Bush's policies prevail. Study a little history; Bush will be recorded as a significant achiever among presidents.
The judiciary in the U.S. since the 1960s has been very liberal and anti-business and thus we have had a generally pro-union slant in decisions. It's only in the past 20 years or so that the pendulum has started to swing to the other side, and hopefully Mr. Bush will appoint a good many more judges before his term is up. I continue to be appalled at the RIM settlement, which only a fool would consider good for the country and for the economy.
True; if a company is privately held no one can forcibly "take" it from them. But if Oracle came along and made the owners of MySql.com (the venture capitalists plus the founders) an offer they could not refuse, why shouldn't they sell?
It's unlikely Oracle would shut them down, for the following simple reason: Oracle needs a MS Sql Server killer, and MySql is the logical candidate. They can tweak it, make it as Sql Server-compatible as possible, i.e. compatible stored procedures and isql-like command interpreter, and then just give it away or sell it dirt cheap under Microsoft's nose, much as Sun has done with Star/Open Office.
Of course, MySql seems to be doing just fine without a corporate sponsor, but I can see how Oracle would want to keep them in the low-to-mid range market to hurt MS while Oracle continues to dominate the mid-to-high end. I hope they succeed at this strategy, because the worst possible thing is that MySql kills Oracle and DB2 while Microsoft blithely continues, letting open source kill its competitors while it just pours more money into its unprofitable lines.
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> resources. Hezbollah is not only a major political party, but is the country's
/. a few months ago). The one hit to a battleship was made by an Iranian guided missile system that was probably manned by Iranian technicians. It's doubtful that Hezbollah could pull that off on its own, though with extensive training they could probably man future missile batteries. It should be noted that the Israeli air force took out most of the Iranian missile batteries in about 34 minutes at the outset of the war, unfortunately not all of them however.
> second largest employer, mostly for its network of government services that it
> provided to areas that the Lebanese government was either unable to or unwilling
> to provide to -- schools, hospitals, etc. Public service activism is one of the
> main ways that the party wins support, even down to the local level. I saw a
Yes, but it's Iranian money; Hezbollah is basically an Iranian shell company. One could argue that they've bought loyalty with this money. But there's evidence that some of this loyalty has been frayed by anger at the pointless destruction that Nasrallah's group instigated.
There's also anecdotal reports about people who were ordered to stay put in southern Lebanese towns by Hezbollah gunmen, apparently to provide more human shields.
> Contrary to popular myth, Hezbollah (unlike Hamas and the other Palestinian
> groups) prefers not to operate around civilians. Not for a concern for the
> civilians' safety -- they'll confiscate buildings to use as shooting positions
> if needed, whether their owners like it or not -- but for their own
> safety. Hamas operates openly as a sign of pride and defiance. However, by
> doing that, it only takes a tiny handful of defectors to point out to Israel
> where they are and what they're doing. Hezbollah, on the other hand, prefers to
> operate in areas where nobody is around to reduce the risk of being exposed by
> defectors.
This may be true but many Hez fighters nonetheless operated extensively around civilians, sometimes in the same building but more often near civilian-occupied structures.
> As we saw in the last conflict, they're a very effective military, and it's a
> big question mark on how to deal with them. It's almost funny how the major
> Arab powers were defeated one after another, yet this tiny band was blowing up
> warships and taking out hundreds of Merkavas, in addition to maintaining a
> steady rain of over 100 Katyushas per day throughout the entire conflict. And
> now their popularity is soaring -- not just in other countries, but even in
> Lebanon, where they started the conflict. Check out these polls. Check out this
> as well.
As stated previously, there is also a lot of anger at Hezbollah for starting the conflict which wrecked people's homes across the south as well as parts of Beirut and set the country back many years in its economic development. Hezbollah has resorted to paying off returning families with $10K grants and crowing about its victory, while opposition editorialists have denounced Hezbollah for their reckless adventure.
Hezbollah certainly did not take out "hundreds of Merkavas"; I believe the number is more like 13, and the IDF is claiming that the Merkavas actually performed very well--probably would have done even better without this communications hacking disaster, and no doubt they have a lot more incentive now to get off their duffs and install the Trophy system (reported on
Given 4-5 more weeks, Israel would undoubtedly have degraded Hezbollah significantly enough that it would not be a threat again for a long time. Note how after claiming he would never cease fire, Nasrallah hypocritically sued for a cease-fire, and Israel's stupid government caved to U.S. pressure to call it off just when they were finally winning.
Privately, the Iranians are said to consider this war a disaster bo
They've obviously never visited University of Massachusetts at Boston's website or Northeastern University's School of Professional and Continuing Studies. Just try to find a course listing on these pathetically designed sites; I dare you. Note especially how you need to look up a code that corresponds to "Fall 2006" on the UMass site before you can even search for a fall course, and you have to go through this horrific Peoplesoft data entry screen. I am sure that the average high school student could have designed a simpler, more usable site than either of these.
Fooey on bad web sites, made by multimillion dollar organizations, that cause hundreds of people to have to call up the institution and ask how to navigate to the information they need. Simpler and more cost effective would have been to simply put the university's logo and a phone number, since you're going to have to call them anyway.
Yours is a common argument. In an earlier era in the 1970s people were saying, why don't we spend that money here on earth where it's needed? Yet, every cent of that money is spent here on earth; it's not as though we launch tons of dollar bills into orbit and eject them into space. Thousands of engineers, scientists, physicians, space suit makers, rocket ship builders, computer programmers, astrophysicists, and others are employed by the space program.
I question that we would necessarily have developed velcro, microcomputers, Tang, new alloys, biomedical advances, etc., by sending robotic ships to explore space. Perhaps other things might have been developed instead, perhaps some of the same things, but scientific developments and spinoffs are not predictable. JFK didn't say he believed this nation should develop microcomputers and velcro by the end of the decade, he said we should land a man on the moon and bring him safely back to earth. The implementation details are where the technical advances are made.
What's more, it's the manned space flights that hold the public's interest and keep the funding up. The public latched onto astronauts as national heroes early on, in an era when heroes were greatly needed, and today is no different. Dangerous exploration is a glamorous thing. Sure, the robotic craft that explore Mars are very exciting and of course we should continue such efforts, but the extra effort of accommodating humans in space is what really pushes us forward technologically and emotionally.
It's also worth considering that even if the U.S. doesn't travel back to the Moon, other countries will. Do you really want your grandkids to have to buy tickets on a Chinese spacecraft to visit the Chinese moon city fifty years hence? Or the EU moon base? Or the Russian Mars base? Not that our grandkids will be able to afford such things; we'll be the has-beens, the left-behinds who stand at night and gaze at the sky while other nation-states dominate the heavens. No way. The U.S. has got to maintain its leadership role in space or it will become an also-ran.
Probably much worse than the infinitesmal chance of a direct meteor strike is the dust problem, which may actually sink the whole idea of a moon base if they can't figure out how to filter the stuff. But at the end of the day these are all technical problems and technical problems are solvable to one degree or another. I say let's go ahead and put a base there; it's good for science and will employ a whole new generation of engineers, astrophysicists, etc.
What's more, the Chinese government has been very reluctant to go after IP pirates, and they began shutting down the CD factories only after intense pressure from the U.S. and Europe during negotiations to allow China into the WTO.
It's implausible that China would suddenly become a staunch ally of Microsoft. It's more likely that Lenovo is trying to capitalize on its existing relationship with Microsoft (as per TFA) and perhaps also to distinguish themselves from IBM.
Whether this results in a more effective product offering is another question. Personally I think they're shooting themselves in the foot long term, but short term probably Microsoft made it an extremely favorable decision.
China's success is primarily due to a ferocious exploitation of their labor market by Hong Kongers, Taiwanese, Japanese, and Americans.
Now the mainland Chinese are patting themselves on the back, taking all the credit for their economic success, when in fact they have an obsolete oligarchy of Communist cadres ruling over a cynical populace burned out from ten years of cultural revolution that followed 40 years of communism.
It's no wonder that today they are issuing these clumsy, heavy-handed proclamations dripping with an alarming degree of contempt for the rest of the world.
Some of these less informed forum participants can crow about how Intel is "just as bad" or America used to be "just as bad" but let them go live in China for a while and see what a morally bankrupt country it has become.
I learned my Mandarin in Taiwan and while no place is perfect, they at least preserved some of the grace and beauty of classical Chinese culture. No wonder Peking is aiming 700 missiles at them, and more on the way....
Paypal is OK for small transactions, but they constantly annoy me with demands to get "verified" by giving them my bank account number, something I don't wish to do. But I have to click past this demand screen every time I log in. Also, they limit my transaction size for arbitrary reasons. I have a credit card with a ridiculously high credit limit, and I have superb credit, yet they won't let me pay more than two or three hundred dollars because I'm not verified. What's the issue here. I use my credit card all the time for multi-thousands of dollars transactions with other people but Paypal needs my bank account number to do a $500 transaction?
I look forward to Google giving Paypal some healthy competition, especially if Microsoft really does buy EBay, which owns Paypal. Google has a way of implementing very elegant solutions, such as for example their gmail product and their video search. Bring it on, Google!
This is the brainless plan put forth by a bankrupt government. Italy would be better advised to foster the growth of small businesses, which would contribute to more employment and in the long run add greatly to government coffers.
China doesn't need the West's help to censor their internet; they build most of the world's computer equipment, they've shipped a person into orbit, and they have nuclear power. They're a big science and technology power and have been for some years. To say that Cisco or Yahoo are helping China to keep tabs on dissidents is true in the narrow sense but in reality the Chinese government is perfectly capable of doing it all themselves.
That said, it leaves a bad taste in my mouth to know that American companies are complicit in locking down the Chinese network, but of course we in the U.S. long since traded any moral high ground for profit, when it comes to China; there's just too much money to be made from outsourcing there. Maybe when India gets its manufacturing act together, we can go back to being moralistic about China's repression of dissidents.
What's probably more important than moralizing is to allow more of their students into our universities so that they can experience a more unfettered system. Not that the U.S. is perfect but it is way more open than China's system and the educated elite need to appreciate the value of openness.
The $100 laptop project is being developed by a non-profit organization and is not intended to make a profit. That cuts out some percentage of markup--admittedly not a huge difference, since hardware tends to have slim margins, but still a difference. It is also innovative technically; they are using a dramatically less expensive LCD display.
"Realistic" is a fairly arbitrary term that means little in the context of an altruistic project like the $100 laptop initiative. If you want to be realistic, stop giving food to starving people, and Darwinian principles will prevail. However, compassionate people are not "realistic" in that sense.
I think the Chinese $150 PC is a nice idea, although it's certainly neither original nor all that attractively priced; you still need to buy a display, or have a very clear, sharp TV set that won't ruin your eyesight.
Walmart marketed a $199 linux PC for a while, though they seem to have discontinued it. Some people mentioned a similar Tigerdirect model, but I haven't found it on their site. You have to really look for these deals.
I suspect that as Linux matures and especially as Wine improves, the cheap Linux PC will make a comeback, though it's awfully hard to sell the public on something that works with about 50% of the stuff out there--devices, software, peripherals--when for another $50 you can get something that works with 90% or 100%. I just did my taxes using Turbotax 2005 running in Crossover/Wine on my fedora workstation, and while it basically worked, a few features such as help pop-ups were broken and I had to do a lot of manual data entry because the stock investments download feature didn't work perfectly. Would I pay $50 more to avoid this kind of aggravation? Of course and so would everyone else.
The other thing I would worry about is compatibility. Is it worth paying $150 for a machine that uses a non-Intel compatible CPU? Especially when slower Intel/AMD cpus can be had for quite cheap these days. If it's just a matter of national pride--it has to be all Chinese-built--well, come on, almost all computer parts are made in China already, so just go buy any PC you like--Lenovo, Dell, Toshiba--and chances are it'll be 80-90% Chinese content.
The only thing wrong with the Treo is precisely your valid criticism that the cellular providers limit its networking capabilities. However the latest Treo (the 700w) does support wifi cards. As soon as the 700p comes out (the PalmOS version) no doubt a goodly number of Palm afficionados who own Palm wifi cards will upgrade and start happily getting online with their Treo phones.
As for "crippled bluetooth", it's not clear what you mean. I use my Nokia 6600 all the time to get my Palm Tungsten online via bluetooth, on the T-Mobile phone network. It would be great to combine these two devices into one, but this works and it's a lot better than nothing. I am psyched about the idea of a 1 megapixel camera included with the phone. I don't always carry my digital camera with me and it would be a great thing to have. When the 700p comes out it's going to be one sweet, tempting convergence device, particularly if they allow dialup networking finally.
This comparison of Google to stem cells is rather hyperbolic. After all, many companies out there do almost everything. Microsoft has its fingers in a lot of pies, too, even though they have been playing catch up in most of the areas that they don't yet dominate. IBM is probably another example; though they're known for their computers, they are very big in software services, chip manufacturing and basic research, and they have internal projects going on a whole lot of interesting stuff that never makes it into the market.
Google does have the coolness market cornered right now, though. They have continued to do a great job on their search engine, and their email, mapping, and other web services are really well done.
I would like to see Google truly act like stem cells and develop a better car. I am willing to bet that a Googlemobile would be truly innovative. Probably it would come with builtin navigation tools such as Google Maps but beyond that it would be self-parking, highly secure from theft (because it runs Linux), and get terrific gas mileage--or else use some other less carbon-generating source such as alcohol or direct solar power.
On a less whimsical note, there's a tremendous potential for Google in branding nifty handheld devices that have easy access to the world's online knowledge, incorporate speech recog and the like. I suspect that Google's move into urban wifi is a step in this direction; if they can control the airwaves and the receiving devices they will truly have vertical integration. And Microsoft will be even more annoyed, which is probably a good thing.
Furthermore, I doubt that it will prevent so-called cyberbullying; it will just remind the more intelligent bullies to wreak their mischief anonymously.
When I think of all the bullies I had to deal with growing up, back in the pre-Web days, and the revenge I could have gotten by spoofing them on a website, well, I guess I'm glad I didn't have that opportunity to do something so easy that would haunt me the rest of my life. It would have been fun, though.
This is clearly a situation where strong federal leadership is needed. If Americans are on board with reducing global warming, then let's make reduced fossil fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions a reality by:
- mandating higher MPGs in automobiles
- granting huge tax credits for solar heating/electric panels on private and commercial buildings
- mandating solar equipment for ALL federal buildings
- mandating a switch to ethanol or methanol biofuels for federal fleets
- grant tax breaks for anyone switching to biofuels
- aid to cities that want to build or expand public transportation
- aid to cities to convert existing buses to biofuels
- massage research into alternative energy
- end the war in Iraq to free up the funds for the above initiatives
- Wind mill farms granted more eminent domain power (e.g., to overcome NIMBY opposition by estate owners in Marblehead, Massachusetts because "it ruins the view").
Germany during World War II switched to hydrogen for its cars when its petroleum supplies were cut off. Brazil has switched to domestically produced alcohol. It's all do-able with a strong federal leadership. This is clearly a situation where the market economy is going to favor lower prices, not (necessarily) environmentally desirable results. The federal government is the agent that can mandate the conditions necessary to make this stuff a reality.
There's a total disconnect between economic and political realms. In the economic realm, the Chinese (with the technical and managerial assistance of the Taiwanese and Japanese and Americans) are turning a once-backward nation into an outsourcing superpower. In the political realm, the Chinese Communist Party runs the country in a Stalinist fashion, killing or arresting anyone who rocks the boat, be he a democracy activist or a Fa Lun Gong practitioner.
As Stalin once said, "You have a man, you have a problem. No man, no problem." This is how the CCP keeps a lid on trouble in the country, albeit perhaps less homocidal today than Stalin was.
The interesting thing is that this disconnect occurs on both sides of the Pacific. The Americans are still getting used to China as an economic giant; in most people's living memory, China was an economically incompetent, Cuba-like welfare state that was still recovering from the traumas of decades of war and depredation.
But today China's past that, mostly, except for this legacy government which I believe is truly dangerous. They had a general talking openly about nuking Los Angeles just a few years ago. They're working on their own version of the sophisticated Aegis command-and-control system for their navy. They're stealing, buying, and copying American military technology as fast as they can, and they have purchased the latest submarines and fighter jets from the idiotic Russians, tipping the balance of power in the Taiwan Strait and the Pacific literally overnight. They have spoken of an ongoing project to hack into and shut down the American air traffic control system. Various entities engaged in hacking into U.S. defense systems have been traced to the China mainland. Who knows what kind of satellites they are designing and launching that may be designed to destroy U.S. tracking systems and global communications. And they point thermonuclear warheads at the U.S.
So it's not particularly surprising or unusual that the American government is suspicious of sensitive electronics that it is purchasing from a Chinese owned company. After all, the Americans demonstrated the power of booby-trapping electronics when it shipped a bunch of hacked printers to Iraq and used them to remotely shut down the Iraqi communications systems during the first Gulf War.
The difficulty is that in the economic realm, the U.S. and China are bosom buddies, joined at the hip, united as business partners. It's a strange situation and not one that can benefit the U.S. in the long run. in the short run, it's profitable, however.
Here's the link to the conference site for those wanting to know details such as the date ;)
I've been to this show several times and it's always a blast. A nice way to collect more new Penguin T-shirts, Linux pens and other artifacts of our era for archeologists to puzzle over a thousand years hence!
I am a Palm user from way back and I am dying for a Treo, but I don't want to buy one and then see Palm go under or sell out or otherwise orphan their products. I want to see lots o' new stuff coming out for Palm platform and I don't want to have to get a Windows-based handheld in a year or two. Go Palm!
That said, I wish it were happening because of free and fair competition rather than that some predatory patent holder with a team of clever lawyers screwed a great company through bogus patent suits. I hope Rim bounces back, too.
I had assumed that most of these "dangerous attachments" were Windows executable files that would not work on Mac/Linux. So if they do work on Mac X and Linux, what the heck are they? Shell scripts that contain previously unknown root exploits?
As a Linux user, I find this rather disturbing. Even on Linux, I never open attachments from unknown senders and even known senders' attachments go into a kind of quarantine, but up till now I had assumed that there was little cause for concern. Maybe MS Word files opened in OpenOffice with macros enabled might do some such as communicate back to the sender, but they still wouldn't have root privileges to do anything really evil. Or maybe they don't need root privileges, just internet access.
Hmm. I'm opening all Word docs in gmail.com from now on!
On the other hand, Oracle has been very generous in allowing developer downloads of their DBMS; I was able to take their Linux port, install it on an old box running Red Hat, and port a Microsoft SQL Server-based back end over to Oracle in a couple of days just as an experiment. Obviously, to actually use the product would cost some bucks but this kind of flexibility is what helps keep Oracle's tentacles in so many businesses.
The other thing that the analysts ignored is that the database and enterprise software business isn't so much about having innovative technology, contrary to what was asserted in the Business Week article but rather having an effective sales organization. DBMS and enterprise management software is sales driven, not innovation driven. Executives don't watch commercials about sexy features in the latest rev of Oracle or Sql Server, then order a few copies from Amazon. It's the inside sales teams that patiently build relationships over the years. IBM knows this, Oracle knows this, and MS knows it too. Sybase tried but their hubris and arrogance brought them down. (direct personal experience with that!)
No doubt, while Larry crows about upcoming tech innovations, he's internally yelling at the sales teams to get more aggressive, offer more discounts, and steal more customers from Bill and from the SAP people. He'll eke out a few more percentage points of market share, and the investors will be satisfied for a couple more quarters. That's how the business works.
Aside from this, he makes a great point about how the U.S. phone market is too controlled by a tiny handful of providers. I would like to see phones unlinked from the service providers, much as personal computers are separate from the DSL and cable broadband providers. Imagine if you had to buy a Verizon PC or a Comcast Macintosh and if you switched from Comcast Cable to Verizon DSL you'd need to buy a new PC!
It seems as though GSM is a step in the right direction because T-Mobile, Cingular, and ATT branded phones are basically interchangeable. Even so, the Europeans and Japanese always seem to have much cooler phones, and the options in the U.S. are just so limited.
Employers have often done background checks on applicants. In the old days the hiring manager might ask around, call up a friend who works at the applicant's previous place to get another perspective than what their references were saying. It was also possible to go to the library and search periodicals, find out if the person's ever been arrested, check their claimed schools to see if they really graduated, and so forth. Internet searching has certainly made it easier to find out about people but the practice has been around probably for centuries.
From the employer's perspective, given the amount of deceit and puffed up resumes floating around, frankly I would want to do some factual verification. Now if I saw some dumb image of them on myspace I'd perhaps note it but not let it influence me. At worst, I'd inquire of the applicant whether it was them and give them a chance to explain it but it would probably be irrelevant in the hiring decision. It's about someone being a good and reliable contributor for 1, 2, or 5 years, not about marrying them.
From the applicant's perspective, if a potential employer looks askance at a silly picture on myspace.com then that says a lot about the employer and this guy was probably better off to run the other way.
Well when you shoot enough arrows, one of them is bound to hit a target. Or put another way, fund 10,000 wacky ideas and you'll get maybe one good product out of it. The internet is one such product of a DARPA project so it's probably not a bad approach.
What I don't understand is why this would be in the international wire reports. What happened to secrecy. If they let the entire world know that these things are being developed, the targets (e.g., Iraqi insurgents) will outfit themselves with cans of insect repellent or maybe just spray paint or hair spray, anything that will disrupt or kill the insects. A group of insurgents sitting around in a room are going to notice a butterfly; it's fairly slow moving and obvious.
Now, what would be really cool is if they developed some sort of super killer bees that have a really deadly neural toxin instead of the usual venom. One of those babies pricks you and you're dead within seconds. The bees would act like normal insects until the operator sends it a certain signal which activates some neurological pathway to sting anything that moves. This pathway would of course be based on studying the killer bees from S. America. Then release a few million of them, wait until they're near some baddies, and zap!
Of course, if these things could breed, the entire world would be in trouble. But that's never stopped those guys before!
An estimated 8,000 people are executed in China annually. "Estimated" because no one really knows for sure; the Chinese government keeps the number secret. People are killed for such crimes as murder, bribery, and embezzlement. It is not known how many mistaken executions take place.
People are arrested for criticizing the government in print or on a web site. People who try to form a political party will be arrested.
China watchers estimate that over a thousand people were shot dead for holding a demonstration a while back in Tiananmen Square; no one really knows how many because the government won't discuss it and certainly won't allow any Chinese citizens to write about it or talk about it. Mothers who went to the government asking where their children were, where they were buried, were threatened with arrest and in some cases were arrested when they persisted.
Web site operators are not allowed to criticize the government; if they do, they will be shut down. Cyber cafes also have to police themselves or else lose their "license".
People who practice a certain kind of qigong called "Fa Lun Gong" are arrested and thrown into prison; some of them have died from torture and abuse while in prison. No one knows how many, though Amnesty International has reported on a few specific cases.
China is massing thousands of missiles along the Fujian coast opposite Taiwan, an independent and democratically governed island which they claim as theirs. They routinely threaten the Taiwanese with war if the Taiwanese should ever declare "independence". They are working hard at their ability to counter the U.S. navy and to launch a massive invasion of the place, so as to make their possession of the island a fact and not just an empty claim. It is only China's fear of the U.S. and Taiwan's possible possession of nuclear bombs that has kept them from militarily invading and overthrowing the locally elected government.
China violently invaded and continues to occupy Tibet, which was once an independent country, attempting to sinify the territory by importing hundreds of thousands of ethnic Chinese settlers. They have never compensated the Tibetans for the hundreds of temples they destroyed and the thousands of Buddhist monks they murdered. They will not let the Dalai Lama, a peaceful Buddhist leader of the Tibetans, even set foot in Tibet, nor any other part of China. They hate it when any other country including the U.S. lets him visit and they say nasty, threatening things.
China is engaging in a massive military build up that is alarming its neighbors, at a time when it has no enemies particularly except perhaps for the U.S., which has no reason at all to invade China but lately has become less friendly because of China's many provocative anti-American speeches.
China cuts deals with pariah countries like Zimbabwe and Iran because it doesn't care about human rights abuses. In the 90s, they sold Iraq high tech fiber optic based air defense comm systems to help Saddam to counter American jets enforcing the no-fly zones. They are moving into Africa and South America in a big way, trying to present themselves as an appealing alternative to the U.S.
China has some simmering social problems that it is either ignoring or downplaying through censorship that are going to suddenly boil over some day. There are an estimated 800 million people living in rural districts who have been left behind by the economic boom and who are increasingly angry at the lack of jobs, lack of basic health care and the gaudy display of wealth to which they have no access. Factories which once provided lifetime jobs have closed or become more efficient and capitalistic, causing a lot of resentment and anger.
Recently some security forces shot a bunch of peasants in southern China for protesting over local governmental corruption. The exact number of deaths was suppressed but estimates range from 60 to 100. Thanks to the internet, eyewitness accounts were transmitted to the West bef
All the spending is blamed on one man? Goodness, no. Congress allocates the spending in the United States; by the "your dollar" comment I infer that you are from another country so obviously are unfamiliar with the U.S. system of government. Congress voted for the war; Congress allocates the money, and Congress has the power to reduce the debt should it choose to. Blaming Bush is like blaming your mother for your ignorance; it ain't her fault, chum.
The economy has absolutely recovered; it's a matter of fact. You must get your information from MoveOn.org, TheNation and other leftist groups who live in a sort of fantasy world of hatred for everyone and everything "conservative", as is evidenced by the ad hominem language you choose to use. $280 billion to create a democracy in the Middle East is a bargain, all told. 20 years from now the Middle East will be democratic and will have peaceful relations with Israel and the West, if Bush's policies prevail. Study a little history; Bush will be recorded as a significant achiever among presidents.
The judiciary in the U.S. since the 1960s has been very liberal and anti-business and thus we have had a generally pro-union slant in decisions. It's only in the past 20 years or so that the pendulum has started to swing to the other side, and hopefully Mr. Bush will appoint a good many more judges before his term is up. I continue to be appalled at the RIM settlement, which only a fool would consider good for the country and for the economy.
True; if a company is privately held no one can forcibly "take" it from them. But if Oracle came along and made the owners of MySql.com (the venture capitalists plus the founders) an offer they could not refuse, why shouldn't they sell?
It's unlikely Oracle would shut them down, for the following simple reason: Oracle needs a MS Sql Server killer, and MySql is the logical candidate. They can tweak it, make it as Sql Server-compatible as possible, i.e. compatible stored procedures and isql-like command interpreter, and then just give it away or sell it dirt cheap under Microsoft's nose, much as Sun has done with Star/Open Office.
Of course, MySql seems to be doing just fine without a corporate sponsor, but I can see how Oracle would want to keep them in the low-to-mid range market to hurt MS while Oracle continues to dominate the mid-to-high end. I hope they succeed at this strategy, because the worst possible thing is that MySql kills Oracle and DB2 while Microsoft blithely continues, letting open source kill its competitors while it just pours more money into its unprofitable lines.