Misguided people? Everywhere. Me too on some things.
After all, if your government told you something how would you check otherwise. Especially if foreign news was censored if available at all.
But to intentionally misguide people? As a governmental policy?
Don't you see that the government having an active program of censorship and suppression of demonstrations, etc, is far worse than the possibility someone *might* be misguided on their own?
And what you say about Taiwan is what I've heard when I question Chinese. "Sure, not everyone wants to come back but there's a movement of those who do."
When asked why they don't simply let these people pack their bags and move back to China without a war they stumble on about bringing wayward brothers back to the fold.
Seriously. If Taiwanese want to be Chinese so much buy them a fucking plane ticket and let them choose.
While many Americans are just as misled, at least the truth is out there for them to find.
China isn't perfect. The USA isn't perfect. Even Switzerland/Canada/etc - the "best in the world" states are far from perfect.
Do you know what the difference is?
China is still doing it. They aren't trying to stop.
If they wanted to get better they'd stop censoring everything. They'd realize that whatever the original solution in Tibet was, nobody gives a fuck - the Tibetans are their own people and China does not own them. Ditto the Taiwanese, etc.
Certainly I don't think China has a monopoly on evil. I've read accounts of horrific acts, but I've also read of the "Rape of Nanking", German atrocities, Rwandan and Burmese genocides, Cambodian, etc. But I'd also be violently opposed to imperial Japan, Nazi Germany, racist thugs with machetes, the Burmese Junta, the Khmer Rouge, etc. I know China has been the target of as much as it has dished out.
This isn't hard. It's not an anti-China game. Simply stop killing and oppressing people - especially in name of protecting them - and you'll stop being a murderous thug. It applies equally well to counties and individuals.
I see. I wish China would stop organlegging, I must first stop killing and harvesting prisoners and undesirables myself. I wish China would stop censoring the internet - I myself should stop keeping my subject population ignorant. I wish China would stop threatening to attack(er... bring back to the fold) Taiwan, so I must myself first stop threatening war with nations a hundredth my size.
You ask what China should do, and mention its economic reforms, etc, as proof that it can't make anyone happy.
How about not executing prisoners. No more organ harvesting. Stop censoring the Internet. Stop threatening to invade people who don't want your help.
Who have I tried? The Chinese people? I think not.
I don't feel my politicians truly represent me and do not agree that they act in my name or with my authority. I certainly couldn't blame the Chinese citizens for the actions of their more oppressive government.
I have condemned the rulers. Not with evidence of their supposed actions, but with their very actions themselves as evidence.
China censors the internet - not to keep their information from foreign spies or anything, but to keep foreign information from their citizens who they feel are incapable of handling free thought.
What more can I say? They lose in one move. It's like scoring on your own goal, for countries.
If they really supported the people they'd need the full rational support of the people. That's not something you can ever censor into people.
With a post like yours I'd remain anonymous too...
I didn't say I supported the removal of Saddam, I said "If people think". As in, people obviously do think that - see the war - so they should also think this other thing.
You're pretty much on the pro-China playbook. You've got the "But the USA is bad too" argument and the "But the Chinese support China - support in the USA is less than total".
1) Yeah? So fucking what? The USA sucks balls. No decent accounting for your tax money, too many people in jail for non-crimes, thought crime legislation, useless wars, etc. I wouldn't support its actions for a second.
But really, if you have to compare yourself to someone else to deflect criticism it's likely very accurate.
If you can't think of reasons why your country sucks you don't care enough to wish to improve it.
2) Yeah, and support was almost total in the USSR... Look at the last Iraqi election, Saddam by a landslide.
Look at the sheep in 1984 - would a single one express any criticism of Big Brother?
Just like in China. Dissent and be culled.
On the other hands even in a moderately free country like the USA, which you are fond of using as a comparison, it would be ridiculous to expect that one candidate could be the favorite choice of any majority (and indeed elections are about the ratio of votes, not a strict majority).
Similarly, it's good most people think Bush is fucking everything up. Because he is. Without realizations and comments like that we couldn't properly recognize the good presidents.
The support of the ignorant oppressed isn't that impressive when you're the one keeping them ignorant. The support of the Chinese people would be far more impressive if it was educated (not just formally, but those who educate themselves) people who had heard the criticisms and the truth behind them, not a populace kept ignorant by censorship and death threats. When China finds the free-thinkers who question the system they drive over them in tanks.
As for China's atrocities, I didn't think you'd need a list. Is your Wikipedia finger broken? Threatening Taiwan is just the most obvious. Whatever else you are, if you threaten to kill your neighbors unless they recognize your authority, people will think you're a warmonger.
As for the sovereignty of the USA, I agree. It has no moral authority to rule. It claims to be a higher authority than the people, ruling in their name, yet without their mandate. While this is truer than some places (see China) it is a big fucking lie. Many people do not support the actions being taken in their name and do not consent to be ruled. A state using these people is a slave state. They have no choice but to work for a percentage of the year to feed the military and other governmental budgets. What else could you call that?
The USA is on my list of countries I think we should send soldiers into to liberate the population. But it's far below Afghanistan, North Korea, China, and others. But it still is going to war, imprisoning recreational drug users, and torturing suspects. Not an entity I can truly support, despite its good actions.
But again, is that the only way you can answer criticism? To deflect?
So yes, I think I'm justified in calling China an abomination. A stain upon the land. A bad idea whose time is gone. It's a war-mongering state ever trying to increase its slave population via conquest.
We need to defy the dangerous idea that China has sovereignty, or any rights at all. The Chinese people have those. The Taiwanese people have those. China itself is just a concept on a map, an obsolete one.
The answer is that the Scottish, the Irish, and the Tibetans all deserve absolute self-rule, without any interference from the settlers.
Impossible? Only if we invest power in nations, whose only claim to legitimacy is a border on a map.
If there was no force that could compel you to fight in a war, or pay taxes for one, you might actually be free. Until then you merely trade English rulers for Scottish ones.
And that part of 1984 is pretty much accepted to be spot on.
In the USA people march the street expressing their hatred of the country. Yawn. Another day of political yammering.
But in many countries we'd consider far worse we see the victims (citizens) themselves lauding the benefits of their totalitarian regime.
So either they're so much more educated than everyone elsewhere, such that they know of some higher purpose behind the state's atrocities, or they're so much worse educated that they don't know of many of the state's atrocities and assume that what they do know of must be the same elsewhere...
Not everyone can be pleased, nor will anything please everyone. If people are complaining about government injustices it's not because that government has problems, but because that government doesn't shoot complainers.
In most countries (free ones) you're allowed to be wrong. If you say something incorrect other people might disagree but you won't be hauled off for re-education. China "protects" its citizens, lest one find a scrap of information and, without the benevolent protection of the state, misunderstand it.
If you think there's a tiny bit of freedom in China I dare you to make a mirror of Wikipedia, in its totality, and take it home to China. Declare it at the border. Make copies for everyone. Have your next of kin smuggle out a report of how well it went. Dibs on your pancreas.
Chinese people are nice, and this says what about their government or state of mind control?
China is our enemy though. That of anyone who doesn't want to be called China. For whatever reason, Taiwan had said "Stay back", and China keeps threatening. That doesn't sound like the actions of a friendly nation.
This doesn't mean Chinese people are an enemy, any more than Russians. I can't imagine the average Chinese person themselves is much different from either of us. Russian people aren't. But the USSR was an enemy, and China is an enemy. Not to the USA, but to all people in the world who don't think it's a crime to read a foreign newspaper.
China is an enemy to its own people as well (or moreso), as is any country that assumes it owns the people and can do anything from keep them ignorant to sell their organs.
Yeah yeah, don't look at China, other places are bad too...
You might be educated, as others might, but it's got to be harder in a country where tying to access uncensored news is a crime.
I've asked tons people about the war in Iraq and gotten a ton of different opinions about its effectiveness and legitimacy. Ask Chinese people about Taiwan or Tibet and they start spouting the state line. Without realizing it, I'm sure. The country with the more-controlled news and internet cannot help but have more ignorant citizens.
The problem is you don't have a government. You have a dictatorship that runs your physical region, but it doesn't have any legitimacy and never has. China has always been ruled through force. For so long you can't even imagine another way. China isn't even really a country, just an armed slave camp.
Take a bunch of random people in a discussion about government. Most will bitch about their own system. The Chinese - arguably having one of the worst government by rational standards - do nothing but laud their system and/or make excuses for it.
Even now, ask your Chinese (born there, not just ancestry) coworkers if they think China will invade Taiwan.
I bet you they'll say something like:
"Well, there's a huge swell of nationalism in Taiwan! Most of them want to come back to China, but can't. So yes, but only to bring our brothers back to the family."
They aren't bad people. They aren't saying Taiwan should be nuked. But they're deluded as fuck. Most Taiwanese would vote China off the planet it they could - they aren't looking to go back. They might be "brothers" racially, but politically have made it very clear that they do not want any part of China.
How could these people not know? Either a whole country collectively has the intelligence of a fast-food worker, or they're being brainwashed. Considering China drives tanks over people who wish to read a newspaper, this isn't really hard to believe.
In the USA many people don't agree with Bush. I for one think we should hand him to the UN for war-crimes trials. But that's not a shooting offense. (Yet?) In China you might be hauled off in the night for that, only to return as the vital-organs of many rich foreigners.
If countries had personalities, China would be Stalin. Brutal, insane, and paranoid.
Quite right. The stories of China are clear enough, and don't hang on little details that could be mistaken. You're either trying to brutally suppress people or you're not. It's either illegal to have an uncensored net connection or it's not. They either murder political prisoners for organs, or they do not.
Tibet doesn't want to be Chinese. Taiwan doesn't. Censored students obviously don't want to be Chinese. Who does want to be Chinese? (Nationally, not racially.) (And if they're in the richest third, don't bother with their opinion - they're the beneficiaries not the victims.)
We should remove China. Nobody wants it, but it wants to brutally control everyone. Anyone else see a problem with this?
Yeah, who'd hack the whitehouse? They've deleted all their own email and sensitive documents years ago. Now that ironworking company, that sounds interesting...
I agree China has sovereign power as to it's borders.... That's the thing. I don't. China isn't a country, it's a fucking slave pit. Moreover, it's a slave pit with pretty much the worst record world-wide of human rights. Not that the option comes up much, but I support and work for the total elimination of China. Not its defeat, but the removal of it from the map and utter destruction of anything the country as a whole stands for. Not the people, just the deadly religion that is China.
If people think Saddam was insane and needs to be removed they need to read some Chinese history and look at their actions. Tibet, Taiwan, the rest of the world... China sees itself as having a divine right, a manifest destiny, and it brutally slaughters millions - of its own people and others - to achieve this destiny. If other countries invade one another they call it a war. China claims (and its people seem to believe) that its actions are of a peaceful nature, as they threaten to invade Taiwan (and historically, kill millions), invade Tibet (and kill millions), etc. China talks about going to war with Taiwan, to return their 'wayward brothers' to the fold. Very self-serving. "Criminals" (whose crime was saying something inconvenient while having the right blood-type.) are harvested for their organs, and students are shot for reading the "wrong" (read, right) books.
So no. China has *no* "sovereign power". For that they'd have to be a legitimate nation. For that they'd have to rule with the mandate of the people - not by terrorizing the people. They do have a lot of guns, and have brainwashed and terrorized millions into supporting their wars, but that's no different than a common dictator. That was Saddam's claim to legitimacy.
In other words, China has as much sovereign right as a violent step-dad... They've got the power and the motivation to use it brutally, but they don't rule with the mandate of the people and do everything possible to avoid doing so.
We'd step in and take children away from a violent step-parent, why don't we step in and take Tibet away from a violent conqueror? All because of the stupid idea that slavery is just dandy as long as you practice it on people who look like you and any abuses are just family matters, not genocide, if you do them inside a line painted on a map.
It's fucking revolting that we legitimize them at all with the trappings of a society when we might as well laud Jeffery Dahmer's population-management techniques. They're sociopathic murderers and need to be called that.
The world is shocked that Austrian guy kept his daughter in a cage for twenty years, but that's nothing compared to what goes on in China and we just brush it off, calling it a sovereign matter. Why is murder/rape horrible when it happens to one person, but acceptable when it happens to millions as part of day-to-day running of a country?
I understand how some Jews could have survived the Nazi regime by being quiet and useful, but that wasn't my point. If it were merely a matter of saying "Jew? Nope. Gave it up last year.", nobody would have been killed. And while the Nazis might not specifically believe undesirability was genetic, that didn't seem to stop them from killing whole families whose only crime is that of association.
I've heard that comeback before, by a suit to a tech who knew a better answer. It's daft because that tech is as likely to start a business as the suit is to program a kernel driver. If that's your test for good technology it's not much related to the facts of the matter.
People get this idea that if they run their business, and it's successful, that they're some sort of frickin' genius - smarter than anyone who could ever work for them. (It's at all levels, from a one-man business to the CEOs of many companies.)
Instead it's the other way around. If you spend enough time on your business to do it justice, you can't be as up to date on the technology around you, etc.
That means that the people on the other side of your desk are more often the experts (unless you're one of the bosses who only hires people who don't challenge them) than you are, except in your specialties.
Occasionally there are business realities which you need to explain to the tech: "Oh, Windows is already paid for, so on *my* budget it already is free." etc. It's not obvious unless they're financially apt and have read this company's financials.
But all the arguments of "X is supported by a company, Y is freeware and unsupported" for instance, are a case where management is dead wrong. The techs are the ones who use the software, and fix it, and get to know the value of their co-workers versus the support-contract techs. It's as if management on a construction project was trying to dictate the brand and style of work-boot worn based on their now-distant few years experience in a different job.
Those techs aren't wrong, their bosses are just incapable of asking proper questions.
If you murder someone in a hospital by exploiting a previously unknown flaw in a life support system, even though you've revealed a flaw that needs to be addressed, you still committed murder and should be charged. I'll fix that for you. You forgot the election was already dead.
"If you stick a knife into a corpse in the hospital, in the process of proving a murder was committed, you may be charged with molesting a corpse, not murder, but you probably shouldn't be charged anyways."
No extra harm was caused. In fact, his minor vandalism prevented a cover-up that would likely have happened.
He was doing something wrong, minor tampering that should have either had no effect or taken minutes to fix, if the system worked. Yes, it was a crime. So is spray-painting the underside of a bridge. But not a very large one.
How much 'wrong' could a guy really be doing by voting for 'American Ninja'? Was that his pseudonym? Was he poised to take control of the valuable... student body presidentship...? Not even. It was just a prank - "Hey look everyone, American Ninja is more popular than any of the real candidates. Haha". OMG! Alert the authorities, that's some major evil there!
And then they make him pay for the election, as if he ruined it. He *might have* ruined it, if it hadn't already been ruined. But to say that he ruined it is a farce - if anything he brought some modicum of trust to future elections. But yeah, shoot the messenger.
Nobody claimed Nazis were smart. They evidently thought some part of Jew-ness, either common racial ancestors of many or some corrupting nature of the religion or culture, was genetic. Hence all that subhuman blather. If they really thought it was just the religion they'd have been happy to leave anyone alive if they'd merely publicly renounce their religion and leave that community.
I got your point from the first post. You fail to understand that there's a difference between recognizing a behavior and advocating it.
Nazis hate Jews and they already can't identify them except by actions, but that didn't stop them. I think it's not as much the actions (religion) they dislike, as that they merely dislike Jews (racially - because Hitler said so, based on centuries of fear-mongering) and figure the religion/culture is a handy way of identifying these people.
It's circular, but religion (and blind hatred for religious reasons) don't make much sense. The best we can do is watch from the sidelines and try to reverse-engineer the reasons.
It's not your language and everyone else who uses it disagrees with you.
The point am trying to drive home is that the Nazis were simply wrong. There are no "racial" differences between German Christians and German Jews. Yes, I know. But now you have two groups, however arbitrary the original criteria.
Hating Jews might be religious, but hating the children and relatives of Jews is racial, even if Jews aren't a tidy race.
Even if there's no meaningful difference between your father and the next guy, if I shoot his children, you'll die for racial reasons.
No, he didn't cost the school anything! Yes he did. If he had wanted to raise awareness of the problems with the system, all he had to do was report it. No, you just keep getting this wrong. The vote was already fucked from the moment he *could* do something. It needed to be redone either way. The money was already spent - if they didn't plan on ignoring the warning.
There's a chance the votes were tampered with. It's not like they could patch a bug and keep on going. They had to pitch the whole thing and start fresh.
But all of that is irrelevant because he wasn't trying to make anyone aware of anything, he was just playing a stupid prank. So? Exposing a flawed election is helpful even if he didn't intend to be.
He's no freakin' hero. So? He accomplished something very useful anyways.
Um, can you explain to me how he could be "charged with hacking" if he hadn't actually done anything yet? You're living in the USA (presumably?) and asking me to explain how someone could be charged with or punished for something they didn't do? Wow.
Charged with whatever they can because the school is screaming about electronic terrorism, or merely sued and kicked out of school. Both have happened for less. Google for old Slashdot articles if you need examples.
Nobody is asking Apple to support anything, merely to stop sabotaging hacks.
And stop fighting against the perfectly legal actions of companies like Psystar. Psystar took advantage of the same laws that let Apple buy parts and sell them for more money. Apple likes the law when it's them buying RAM, HDs, video cards, etc, with no further obligation to their original creators. So why does Apple get so bent out of shape when someone wants to buy their product and resell it?
The same legal issues apply. All sales completely transfer all right and require no licensing. There's software involved in all cases, from OS X to the firmware on the HD, or controller on the RAM. Whatever power Apple thinks it has over Psystar, its component makers have over it.
Is there specifically a DMCA complaint? Who knows? Who cares? Apple is fond about of abusing the courts and attacking everyone from gossip columnists to hackers. Why would it matter which law they use?
The election was ruined from the moment they started. He merely pointed out the error they had already made. If he hadn't pointed it out they may have failed to catch the error, but they'd have an invalid result.
If this guy had voted for a real candidate (not obviously fake) the students who were unable to vote would have been written off as having forgotten (or lied) about already voting, or isolated errors and incorrect passwords. His voting for a fictional candidate in large numbers was the only thing that would make the organization admit an error.
Anyone who sees something like this vote that has the appearance (and requirement) of security and anonymity but is not actually secure, has an obligation to let everyone else know. But if he'd brought the issue up in quietly (as in, able to be swept under the rug) he'd have still be charged with hacking and the school would have let the election continue.
If you want a car analogy, let's see... A student sees a broken brake cable on the school bus but the driver refuses to fix it. So the student slashes a tire on the bus to prevent it moving, weighing the small damage and lost time versus the risk of fatalities.
User-generated content is going to be important, but that doesn't have to come from EA. And it only needs to come in a background transfer, it's not like Spore is going to be a head-to-head game now.
They couldn't even if they wanted to. The new owners would have the right and probably wouldn't want to give away property they just finished buying at the bankruptcy sale. Especially as whoever buys EA would be buying it largely for the software rights.
Writing the patch would take work, and even if the software is twenty years old and for a dead platform they still aren't going to just give it away. It just isn't a accountant/lawyerly thing to do.
You're right, there's no way this would ever happen.
Slashdot Mirror
Misguided people? Everywhere. Me too on some things.
After all, if your government told you something how would you check otherwise. Especially if foreign news was censored if available at all.
But to intentionally misguide people? As a governmental policy?
Don't you see that the government having an active program of censorship and suppression of demonstrations, etc, is far worse than the possibility someone *might* be misguided on their own?
And what you say about Taiwan is what I've heard when I question Chinese. "Sure, not everyone wants to come back but there's a movement of those who do."
When asked why they don't simply let these people pack their bags and move back to China without a war they stumble on about bringing wayward brothers back to the fold.
Seriously. If Taiwanese want to be Chinese so much buy them a fucking plane ticket and let them choose.
While many Americans are just as misled, at least the truth is out there for them to find.
China isn't perfect. The USA isn't perfect. Even Switzerland/Canada/etc - the "best in the world" states are far from perfect.
Do you know what the difference is?
China is still doing it. They aren't trying to stop.
If they wanted to get better they'd stop censoring everything. They'd realize that whatever the original solution in Tibet was, nobody gives a fuck - the Tibetans are their own people and China does not own them. Ditto the Taiwanese, etc.
Certainly I don't think China has a monopoly on evil. I've read accounts of horrific acts, but I've also read of the "Rape of Nanking", German atrocities, Rwandan and Burmese genocides, Cambodian, etc. But I'd also be violently opposed to imperial Japan, Nazi Germany, racist thugs with machetes, the Burmese Junta, the Khmer Rouge, etc. I know China has been the target of as much as it has dished out.
This isn't hard. It's not an anti-China game. Simply stop killing and oppressing people - especially in name of protecting them - and you'll stop being a murderous thug. It applies equally well to counties and individuals.
I see. I wish China would stop organlegging, I must first stop killing and harvesting prisoners and undesirables myself. I wish China would stop censoring the internet - I myself should stop keeping my subject population ignorant. I wish China would stop threatening to attack(er... bring back to the fold) Taiwan, so I must myself first stop threatening war with nations a hundredth my size.
You ask what China should do, and mention its economic reforms, etc, as proof that it can't make anyone happy.
How about not executing prisoners.
No more organ harvesting.
Stop censoring the Internet.
Stop threatening to invade people who don't want your help.
Is it really that hard to understand?
It's not the effectiveness of the censorship, it's the censorship at all.
The Chinese government is literally saying: "We consider every citizen of this country to be incapable of understand world events."
I don't think Chinese people are subhuman, of low intellect, or incapable of understanding complex thoughts. Why does the Chinese government?
Who have I tried? The Chinese people? I think not.
I don't feel my politicians truly represent me and do not agree that they act in my name or with my authority. I certainly couldn't blame the Chinese citizens for the actions of their more oppressive government.
I have condemned the rulers. Not with evidence of their supposed actions, but with their very actions themselves as evidence.
China censors the internet - not to keep their information from foreign spies or anything, but to keep foreign information from their citizens who they feel are incapable of handling free thought.
What more can I say? They lose in one move. It's like scoring on your own goal, for countries.
If they really supported the people they'd need the full rational support of the people. That's not something you can ever censor into people.
With a post like yours I'd remain anonymous too...
I didn't say I supported the removal of Saddam, I said "If people think". As in, people obviously do think that - see the war - so they should also think this other thing.
You're pretty much on the pro-China playbook. You've got the "But the USA is bad too" argument and the "But the Chinese support China - support in the USA is less than total".
1) Yeah? So fucking what? The USA sucks balls. No decent accounting for your tax money, too many people in jail for non-crimes, thought crime legislation, useless wars, etc. I wouldn't support its actions for a second.
But really, if you have to compare yourself to someone else to deflect criticism it's likely very accurate.
If you can't think of reasons why your country sucks you don't care enough to wish to improve it.
2) Yeah, and support was almost total in the USSR... Look at the last Iraqi election, Saddam by a landslide.
Look at the sheep in 1984 - would a single one express any criticism of Big Brother?
Just like in China. Dissent and be culled.
On the other hands even in a moderately free country like the USA, which you are fond of using as a comparison, it would be ridiculous to expect that one candidate could be the favorite choice of any majority (and indeed elections are about the ratio of votes, not a strict majority).
Similarly, it's good most people think Bush is fucking everything up. Because he is. Without realizations and comments like that we couldn't properly recognize the good presidents.
The support of the ignorant oppressed isn't that impressive when you're the one keeping them ignorant. The support of the Chinese people would be far more impressive if it was educated (not just formally, but those who educate themselves) people who had heard the criticisms and the truth behind them, not a populace kept ignorant by censorship and death threats. When China finds the free-thinkers who question the system they drive over them in tanks.
As for China's atrocities, I didn't think you'd need a list. Is your Wikipedia finger broken? Threatening Taiwan is just the most obvious. Whatever else you are, if you threaten to kill your neighbors unless they recognize your authority, people will think you're a warmonger.
As for the sovereignty of the USA, I agree. It has no moral authority to rule. It claims to be a higher authority than the people, ruling in their name, yet without their mandate. While this is truer than some places (see China) it is a big fucking lie. Many people do not support the actions being taken in their name and do not consent to be ruled. A state using these people is a slave state. They have no choice but to work for a percentage of the year to feed the military and other governmental budgets. What else could you call that?
The USA is on my list of countries I think we should send soldiers into to liberate the population. But it's far below Afghanistan, North Korea, China, and others. But it still is going to war, imprisoning recreational drug users, and torturing suspects. Not an entity I can truly support, despite its good actions.
But again, is that the only way you can answer criticism? To deflect?
So yes, I think I'm justified in calling China an abomination. A stain upon the land. A bad idea whose time is gone. It's a war-mongering state ever trying to increase its slave population via conquest.
We need to defy the dangerous idea that China has sovereignty, or any rights at all. The Chinese people have those. The Taiwanese people have those. China itself is just a concept on a map, an obsolete one.
The answer is that the Scottish, the Irish, and the Tibetans all deserve absolute self-rule, without any interference from the settlers.
Impossible? Only if we invest power in nations, whose only claim to legitimacy is a border on a map.
If there was no force that could compel you to fight in a war, or pay taxes for one, you might actually be free. Until then you merely trade English rulers for Scottish ones.
And that part of 1984 is pretty much accepted to be spot on.
In the USA people march the street expressing their hatred of the country. Yawn. Another day of political yammering.
But in many countries we'd consider far worse we see the victims (citizens) themselves lauding the benefits of their totalitarian regime.
So either they're so much more educated than everyone elsewhere, such that they know of some higher purpose behind the state's atrocities, or they're so much worse educated that they don't know of many of the state's atrocities and assume that what they do know of must be the same elsewhere...
Not everyone can be pleased, nor will anything please everyone. If people are complaining about government injustices it's not because that government has problems, but because that government doesn't shoot complainers.
In most countries (free ones) you're allowed to be wrong. If you say something incorrect other people might disagree but you won't be hauled off for re-education. China "protects" its citizens, lest one find a scrap of information and, without the benevolent protection of the state, misunderstand it.
If you think there's a tiny bit of freedom in China I dare you to make a mirror of Wikipedia, in its totality, and take it home to China. Declare it at the border. Make copies for everyone. Have your next of kin smuggle out a report of how well it went. Dibs on your pancreas.
Chinese people are nice, and this says what about their government or state of mind control?
China is our enemy though. That of anyone who doesn't want to be called China. For whatever reason, Taiwan had said "Stay back", and China keeps threatening. That doesn't sound like the actions of a friendly nation.
This doesn't mean Chinese people are an enemy, any more than Russians. I can't imagine the average Chinese person themselves is much different from either of us. Russian people aren't. But the USSR was an enemy, and China is an enemy. Not to the USA, but to all people in the world who don't think it's a crime to read a foreign newspaper.
China is an enemy to its own people as well (or moreso), as is any country that assumes it owns the people and can do anything from keep them ignorant to sell their organs.
Yeah yeah, don't look at China, other places are bad too...
You might be educated, as others might, but it's got to be harder in a country where tying to access uncensored news is a crime.
I've asked tons people about the war in Iraq and gotten a ton of different opinions about its effectiveness and legitimacy. Ask Chinese people about Taiwan or Tibet and they start spouting the state line. Without realizing it, I'm sure. The country with the more-controlled news and internet cannot help but have more ignorant citizens.
The problem is you don't have a government. You have a dictatorship that runs your physical region, but it doesn't have any legitimacy and never has. China has always been ruled through force. For so long you can't even imagine another way. China isn't even really a country, just an armed slave camp.
Take a bunch of random people in a discussion about government. Most will bitch about their own system. The Chinese - arguably having one of the worst government by rational standards - do nothing but laud their system and/or make excuses for it.
Who else did this? Soviets...
Even now, ask your Chinese (born there, not just ancestry) coworkers if they think China will invade Taiwan.
I bet you they'll say something like:
"Well, there's a huge swell of nationalism in Taiwan! Most of them want to come back to China, but can't. So yes, but only to bring our brothers back to the family."
They aren't bad people. They aren't saying Taiwan should be nuked. But they're deluded as fuck. Most Taiwanese would vote China off the planet it they could - they aren't looking to go back. They might be "brothers" racially, but politically have made it very clear that they do not want any part of China.
How could these people not know? Either a whole country collectively has the intelligence of a fast-food worker, or they're being brainwashed. Considering China drives tanks over people who wish to read a newspaper, this isn't really hard to believe.
In the USA many people don't agree with Bush. I for one think we should hand him to the UN for war-crimes trials. But that's not a shooting offense. (Yet?) In China you might be hauled off in the night for that, only to return as the vital-organs of many rich foreigners.
If countries had personalities, China would be Stalin. Brutal, insane, and paranoid.
Those are the Whites as much as drunken louts are the Indians.
Oh, you aren't drunk? And I didn't kill your ancestors. Go figure.
Quite right. The stories of China are clear enough, and don't hang on little details that could be mistaken. You're either trying to brutally suppress people or you're not. It's either illegal to have an uncensored net connection or it's not. They either murder political prisoners for organs, or they do not.
Tibet doesn't want to be Chinese. Taiwan doesn't. Censored students obviously don't want to be Chinese. Who does want to be Chinese? (Nationally, not racially.) (And if they're in the richest third, don't bother with their opinion - they're the beneficiaries not the victims.)
We should remove China. Nobody wants it, but it wants to brutally control everyone. Anyone else see a problem with this?
Yeah, who'd hack the whitehouse? They've deleted all their own email and sensitive documents years ago. Now that ironworking company, that sounds interesting...
If people think Saddam was insane and needs to be removed they need to read some Chinese history and look at their actions. Tibet, Taiwan, the rest of the world... China sees itself as having a divine right, a manifest destiny, and it brutally slaughters millions - of its own people and others - to achieve this destiny. If other countries invade one another they call it a war. China claims (and its people seem to believe) that its actions are of a peaceful nature, as they threaten to invade Taiwan (and historically, kill millions), invade Tibet (and kill millions), etc. China talks about going to war with Taiwan, to return their 'wayward brothers' to the fold. Very self-serving. "Criminals" (whose crime was saying something inconvenient while having the right blood-type.) are harvested for their organs, and students are shot for reading the "wrong" (read, right) books.
So no. China has *no* "sovereign power". For that they'd have to be a legitimate nation. For that they'd have to rule with the mandate of the people - not by terrorizing the people. They do have a lot of guns, and have brainwashed and terrorized millions into supporting their wars, but that's no different than a common dictator. That was Saddam's claim to legitimacy.
In other words, China has as much sovereign right as a violent step-dad... They've got the power and the motivation to use it brutally, but they don't rule with the mandate of the people and do everything possible to avoid doing so.
We'd step in and take children away from a violent step-parent, why don't we step in and take Tibet away from a violent conqueror? All because of the stupid idea that slavery is just dandy as long as you practice it on people who look like you and any abuses are just family matters, not genocide, if you do them inside a line painted on a map.
It's fucking revolting that we legitimize them at all with the trappings of a society when we might as well laud Jeffery Dahmer's population-management techniques. They're sociopathic murderers and need to be called that.
The world is shocked that Austrian guy kept his daughter in a cage for twenty years, but that's nothing compared to what goes on in China and we just brush it off, calling it a sovereign matter. Why is murder/rape horrible when it happens to one person, but acceptable when it happens to millions as part of day-to-day running of a country?
I understand how some Jews could have survived the Nazi regime by being quiet and useful, but that wasn't my point. If it were merely a matter of saying "Jew? Nope. Gave it up last year.", nobody would have been killed. And while the Nazis might not specifically believe undesirability was genetic, that didn't seem to stop them from killing whole families whose only crime is that of association.
I've heard that comeback before, by a suit to a tech who knew a better answer. It's daft because that tech is as likely to start a business as the suit is to program a kernel driver. If that's your test for good technology it's not much related to the facts of the matter.
People get this idea that if they run their business, and it's successful, that they're some sort of frickin' genius - smarter than anyone who could ever work for them. (It's at all levels, from a one-man business to the CEOs of many companies.)
Instead it's the other way around. If you spend enough time on your business to do it justice, you can't be as up to date on the technology around you, etc.
That means that the people on the other side of your desk are more often the experts (unless you're one of the bosses who only hires people who don't challenge them) than you are, except in your specialties.
Occasionally there are business realities which you need to explain to the tech: "Oh, Windows is already paid for, so on *my* budget it already is free." etc. It's not obvious unless they're financially apt and have read this company's financials.
But all the arguments of "X is supported by a company, Y is freeware and unsupported" for instance, are a case where management is dead wrong. The techs are the ones who use the software, and fix it, and get to know the value of their co-workers versus the support-contract techs. It's as if management on a construction project was trying to dictate the brand and style of work-boot worn based on their now-distant few years experience in a different job.
Those techs aren't wrong, their bosses are just incapable of asking proper questions.
"If you stick a knife into a corpse in the hospital, in the process of proving a murder was committed, you may be charged with molesting a corpse, not murder, but you probably shouldn't be charged anyways."
No extra harm was caused. In fact, his minor vandalism prevented a cover-up that would likely have happened.
He was doing something wrong, minor tampering that should have either had no effect or taken minutes to fix, if the system worked. Yes, it was a crime. So is spray-painting the underside of a bridge. But not a very large one.
How much 'wrong' could a guy really be doing by voting for 'American Ninja'? Was that his pseudonym? Was he poised to take control of the valuable
And then they make him pay for the election, as if he ruined it. He *might have* ruined it, if it hadn't already been ruined. But to say that he ruined it is a farce - if anything he brought some modicum of trust to future elections. But yeah, shoot the messenger.
Nobody claimed Nazis were smart. They evidently thought some part of Jew-ness, either common racial ancestors of many or some corrupting nature of the religion or culture, was genetic. Hence all that subhuman blather. If they really thought it was just the religion they'd have been happy to leave anyone alive if they'd merely publicly renounce their religion and leave that community.
I got your point from the first post. You fail to understand that there's a difference between recognizing a behavior and advocating it.
Nazis hate Jews and they already can't identify them except by actions, but that didn't stop them. I think it's not as much the actions (religion) they dislike, as that they merely dislike Jews (racially - because Hitler said so, based on centuries of fear-mongering) and figure the religion/culture is a handy way of identifying these people.
It's circular, but religion (and blind hatred for religious reasons) don't make much sense. The best we can do is watch from the sidelines and try to reverse-engineer the reasons.
Hating Jews might be religious, but hating the children and relatives of Jews is racial, even if Jews aren't a tidy race.
Even if there's no meaningful difference between your father and the next guy, if I shoot his children, you'll die for racial reasons.
There's a chance the votes were tampered with. It's not like they could patch a bug and keep on going. They had to pitch the whole thing and start fresh. But all of that is irrelevant because he wasn't trying to make anyone aware of anything, he was just playing a stupid prank. So? Exposing a flawed election is helpful even if he didn't intend to be. He's no freakin' hero. So? He accomplished something very useful anyways. Um, can you explain to me how he could be "charged with hacking" if he hadn't actually done anything yet? You're living in the USA (presumably?) and asking me to explain how someone could be charged with or punished for something they didn't do? Wow.
Charged with whatever they can because the school is screaming about electronic terrorism, or merely sued and kicked out of school. Both have happened for less. Google for old Slashdot articles if you need examples.
Nobody is asking Apple to support anything, merely to stop sabotaging hacks.
And stop fighting against the perfectly legal actions of companies like Psystar. Psystar took advantage of the same laws that let Apple buy parts and sell them for more money. Apple likes the law when it's them buying RAM, HDs, video cards, etc, with no further obligation to their original creators. So why does Apple get so bent out of shape when someone wants to buy their product and resell it?
The same legal issues apply. All sales completely transfer all right and require no licensing. There's software involved in all cases, from OS X to the firmware on the HD, or controller on the RAM. Whatever power Apple thinks it has over Psystar, its component makers have over it.
Is there specifically a DMCA complaint? Who knows? Who cares? Apple is fond about of abusing the courts and attacking everyone from gossip columnists to hackers. Why would it matter which law they use?
No, he didn't cost the school anything!
The election was ruined from the moment they started. He merely pointed out the error they had already made. If he hadn't pointed it out they may have failed to catch the error, but they'd have an invalid result.
If this guy had voted for a real candidate (not obviously fake) the students who were unable to vote would have been written off as having forgotten (or lied) about already voting, or isolated errors and incorrect passwords. His voting for a fictional candidate in large numbers was the only thing that would make the organization admit an error.
Anyone who sees something like this vote that has the appearance (and requirement) of security and anonymity but is not actually secure, has an obligation to let everyone else know. But if he'd brought the issue up in quietly (as in, able to be swept under the rug) he'd have still be charged with hacking and the school would have let the election continue.
If you want a car analogy, let's see... A student sees a broken brake cable on the school bus but the driver refuses to fix it. So the student slashes a tire on the bus to prevent it moving, weighing the small damage and lost time versus the risk of fatalities.
User-generated content is going to be important, but that doesn't have to come from EA. And it only needs to come in a background transfer, it's not like Spore is going to be a head-to-head game now.
They couldn't even if they wanted to. The new owners would have the right and probably wouldn't want to give away property they just finished buying at the bankruptcy sale. Especially as whoever buys EA would be buying it largely for the software rights.
Writing the patch would take work, and even if the software is twenty years old and for a dead platform they still aren't going to just give it away. It just isn't a accountant/lawyerly thing to do.
You're right, there's no way this would ever happen.