This MMORPG war on gold farming just seems to me like the USA's ridiculous War on Drugs. It seems to me that these things are true:
People apparently want to buy gold.
People apparently want to sell gold.
My point is, from an observational standpoint, those two things appear to be facts. Therefore, fighting this is going to consume lots of time and resources (the game makers admit to having a "strike team" specifically for this purpose, which I assume costs them money), and at the end of the day, strike team or not, I doubt that gold farming can ever be stopped if there's enough will among the community.
So, I don't know...I don't understand why they don't just design the game so that gold farming can be a part of the game and skim money off the top? Certainly, real life is organized this way; some people want to do grunt work and sell the results of their labor, and some people are busy with other stuff and want to play the more "fun" parts of the game in the limited time they have available to play. Design the game so that people can excel at tasks with or without the gold, and set up a central store where people can sell stuff all they want.
I understand your point, which is that the freedom of speech guaranteed in the Bill of Rights is not being impinged here, and you're right.
But I don't think that the world is as simple as it used to be (i.e., that rights are bestowed by governments and that's that). The USA is fast becoming (has already become?) a corporatocracy, and what we have here is a classic example of self-censorship. The credit card companies are massively popular entities, and they are essentially part and parcel of the government.
No one has 'forced' anyone in this situation; Discovery Channel decided this wasn't a battle worth fighting. But clearly, there is some speech here that someone wants to give, and whose audience wants to hear, and yet it is being stymied by corporate interests.
I guess in a nutshell, I think you're kind of diluting the concept of free speech by limiting it to only the context of citizen vs. government.
So, I read the article, and I thought about commenting on little nuances and details, or about crafting some kind of painfully witty reply that would goad mods into giving me karma points, but I read the article and the most eloquent response I can come up with is "it's about fucking time".
Just a point of clarification: Apple didn't buy the whole software company (which was not, by the way, an audio software company...it was Casady & Greene, a software utility developer), they basically bought iTunes (only then it was called SoundJam).
Shit, now this means the photos I have on flickr are going to be owned by Microsoft? Oy vey. Can we have a "good photo sharing site" thread now so I can find the alternatives?
I think we should worry more about the government members making accurate claims about THEMSELVES, and then move on to the claims they make about others.
12 mm...not much, but in this context, that's 30% wider. I'd say that's a LOT. And, the height loses 20mm, which is only 22%. So, proportionally, your assertion that it "isn't that much wider" and that it is "much shorter" don't add up for me.
Not that I really give a shit, to be honest. I already have a nano, and am craving the new iPod touch.:p
BTW, on a different note, iPod touch has no microphone, but there are already third party add-ons for current iPods that feature microphone/recording capability, and there are even add-ons that allow your iPod to make calls via Bluetooth to your cell phone. So, I think it's within reason to imagine a Skype/hardware combo add-on in the future, assuming Apple's opening its developer API up to big partners, even if it is not publicly available yet.
Yeah, thanks for posting that. I thought this BusinessWeek article was like 10 years too late; Microsoft has been pursuing exactly the strategy they condone for the past 5 years or so.
And I don't know what they're talking about in terms of Microsoft needing to make sure their software is used in China. (I live here.) Nobody uses anything except Windows (and no, they don't pay for it, either). In fact, Microsoft's already got this market completely locked up, as far as I'm concerned. They even do things like sell Windows to students for $3 or so, because they know people are going to pirate it anyway. They have been making deals with the OEMs (like Lenovo, for example) to put "legit" software on shipping computers. I've heard that maybe 60% of PCs sold here now have legitimate copies of Windows. Thing is, Microsoft won't say what those deals are like; I'm guessing Lenovo gets the software for almost nothing.
Anyway, why is Windows "worth" $200, anyway? The fact is, it isn't. Microsoft is raping you if you buy it, and they know it. Nobody's going to sell software in China for hundreds of dollars because (surprise) people don't have hundreds of dollars to help your CEO get a new yacht. You could say "then they shouldn't use it", but IMO the original price is the as much of a rip-off as the pirating. They should just sell at different price points for different markets, or else they will just get pirated. To Microsoft, it doesn't really matter, I think, because they have more money than god, and they want dominance in terms of market share first, and money second.
Personally, I don't really care if Microsoft's stuff is pirated or not; I just thought this BusinessWeek article was like a total anachronism.
Not only that -- when the leader of the Thunderbirds was on the Daily Show, he said something I found kind of surprising. He's been the leader now for (I think) 3 years or so, and he has not changed the routine from what it was before he was there. They most definitely do not push boundaries of any kind; they perform a very calculated show to wow people, kind of like circus acrobats. Is it dangerous? sure. Pushing the limits? Not so much.
I was going to try to be all like scholarly in replying to this, since it was apparently 30 years they wasted on this "academic" study. But, in a nutshell, this study is fucking stupid.
The results of it are correct. If you have fat friends, you are more likely to become fat.
Of course, if you have friends who are into sci-fi, you're more likely to watch/read sci-fi. If you have friends who ride bikes, you're more likely to ride bikes. You're more likely to do everything your friends do. They are, after all, your friends for a reason: you share similar procilivities, you do things together, word of mouth passes between you faster than it does between others, etc. People always conform a bit to their peer groups, whether they want to or not.
And the bit about people were less likely to get fat if their family was fat, and even less likely if their neighbors were fat. Gee, what a surprise, since people are closest to their friends, next closest to their family, and not as close to their neighbors.
My lord...what fantastically colossal waste of time. I hope not very much money was spent on this "study".
The theory of what you're saying seems plausible, but there's more to it than just population density by region, I think. Let me offer another theory.
The USA is a suburban culture; Europe and northeastern Asia are truly urban cultures. You can look at an area like Connecticut (~270 people / sq. km), and then look at a country like Germany (~234 people / sq. km), and then conclude "Connecticut should have better broadband than Germany." Whether it does is immaterial, but I do have a point...
In Germany, I think it'd be much easier to roll out broadband than Connecticut, because it's not suburban. Even tiny villages with only 1000 people are actually tiny; they are built with a bunch of houses very close together around a very small city square (at least where I traveled there), and between the villages and cities there is basically very little...farms and forests, but in the USA, like where I am from (New England), houses are quite a ways apart...there really is not much of a center to many towns).
Therefore, thinking about, say, a fiber-optic network, you'd need a lot less cable to wire a similarly sized portion of Germany than you would Connecticut. One main line between villages, and then very short lines going around town, but in a Connecticut suburb, long lines connecting everything, every long road, etc.
I'm not saying that there aren't big policy differences between Europe and the USA, but there are also existant physical concerns in play as well; population density tells you very little about the efficiency of building your network; it's about how the population is distributed within that territory.
So your solution is that you cover up other people's crappy job? I was a cashier when I was a teenager (ahh...the '80s), and I never understand when people make this argument. I would take in ~$15,000 in cash in the space of about 4 hours. If we were off (in either direction) by more than $5, we got reamed out for it, and for good reason: cashiers need to be accurate. If their drawer is off by $20, they should be fired and do something else they don't suck at.
In short, by taking the $20, you're helping them learn what they suck at so they can choose another job, you're helping the company discover a crappy cashier and replace them, thus giving all customers better service, and you're helping yourself because you get $20. Everybody wins.
Please how explain how open source automatically translates to "mindshare". I don't really see the link, but I'm interested in hearing your thoughts behind that assertion.
IMO, there are certainly advantages (as well as disadvantages) to being open source (depending on the project), but either way I think mindshare has a whole hell of a lot more to do with marketing than the open/closed nature of your product.
I like my Apple TV. It's not the end-all, be-all device for everything TV, but it's well designed, and works flawlessly. There are a lot of things it doesn't do, but then I knew that when I bought it. It does everything Apple said it would do, and it does it elegantly.
According to a Discovery Channel show I watched once (sorry...I can't cite anything), they said that conversations with passengers were almost exactly as distracting as conversations on cell phones, after they ran some tests of people navigating obstacle courses in various situations at various speeds.
I suspect it's just cause conversing requires CPU power from the same part of the brain as driving.
Not sure why this was modded insightful; maybe you and all the mods slept through the late '90s. Microsoft wasn't rebuked for bundling a Web browser; rather, the main complaints were:
(1) The browser could not be reasonably uninstalled (perhaps minor complaint, although it was always running, and sucking resources even when not in use)
(2) Microsoft leveraged its monopoly position to create deals with OEMs such that they could not have Windows licenses unless they agreed NOT to bundle Netscape or other competing browsers in the default install. (the more major complaint, IMO, since it's a pretty clear example of leveraging a monopoly position to prevent competition)
In this situation, I would absolutely argue that an operating system should include robust search (it's perhaps more pertinent to the core function than a web browser); just that Microsoft ought not to put in any booby traps that prevent Google's thing from running, and not try to prevent OEMs from installing it if they want to.
Therefore, personally, I'm of the opinion of many here...I can't entirely agree with Google, but what goes around comes around. Microsoft stuck it to Netscape in kind of a bad way, and they deserve some payback, eventually (especially as the whole DOJ thing was kind of a farce).
Many web sites in Asia are coded to be Internet Explorer-only (for what I reason I still have not figured out). For instance, in Korea, you cannot even view some sites without installing ActiveX controls.
It's not Safari's fault; developers here (I'm in China) often just don't bother to code for anything other than IE, and many times they don't even specify their character encoding properly (in many cases using ancient and obscure character encodings instead of Unicode, as well).
I pretty much hate Microsoft. However, I'm kind of impressed.
As for the technology...I don't know. I remember seeing it in a movie in Minority report, for example, whenever the hell that shitty movie was out. Jeff Han's stuff was certainly publicized earlier than this, but that doesn't mean he had his ideas first; according to the history stuff on Microsoft's Web site, they've been working on the idea for a long time. So either of them (or in fact someone else we have never seen or heard from) could really be the originators of this idea.
Anyway, I don't much care for who "invented" it, because it was going to happen eventually anyway.
What I'm impressed with is that it's well designed. It's the first thing I've ever seen from Microsoft that has Apple's ease of use...that follows the "less is better" dictum of interface design. They resisted using toolbars, and menus, and everything is simple and would be pretty intuitive for even technophobes to use.
So, for once, I have to say, "nice job, Microsoft".
If you think CNN, NY Times, Washington Post, BBC, et al. (choose your news source of choice) are not spewing propaganda, you have the kind of naïveté that a 9 year-old girl could only hope to aspire to. Everybody's got an agenda, man...
If you want something more closely resembling the truth, then try getting your news from people who have no real stake in the outcome. It seems to me that a critical thinker would actually read stuff from many sides, and then maybe make some kind of decision about what he believes and doesn't.
Pretty much everything we do just conforms to the limitations of our environment. It's all we can really do, after all. That the Pentagon's shape happened because of an artificial "environment" (the shape of a plot of land) is irrelevant. And then, the shape wasn't changed when it was moved because of a lack of time...well, this is also pretty common, I think.
I'm not trying to pooh-pooh the article, but it's just kind of...well...you know, my shoe is shaped kind of oblong and rounded because, well, that's how feet are shaped. Isn't that amazing?
I guess what I'm getting at is...erm...why is this interesting? I guess the only news here is the bit about how it was shaped to fit one site, then moved. Riveting stuff, that.
Right...in the USA, "human rights" are just something for (white or rich) Americans to enjoy. If you live in Cuba, or Iraq, or Afghanistan, or Peru, or Chile, or Guatemala, or any of the other countries where the USA has like assassinated democratically elected leaders, invaded to steal resources, helped to ignite civil wars - sometimes by arming both sides, or just generally swindled and fucked with in order to keep their governments bankrupt.
Then, you can look at the prisons, which are filled with somewhere on the order or 80% non-white citizens in a country with roughly 80% white population. Over 2/3 of those in American prisons are there on nonviolent drug offenses (many incredibly minor for the punishment), and they are working as essential slaves in a privatized prison economy. Oh, and in many states, they will lose their right to vote - for the rest of their lives, despite the fact that drug laws have been continually lobbied for by groups like the trial lawyer's association and prison food suppliers, who make more money when people are incarcerated. (Money for white lawyers instead of freedom for minority Americans.)
And then there are further instances that are sometimes difficult to quantify: Guantanamo, secret CIA prisons, evil despots in foreign governments who are on our payroll, oil companies raping poor countries by stealing 85% of their profits from oil, free speech only existing in "free speech zones", the PATRIOT Act, etc. and so on...
Seriously, Americans (of which I am one) throwing darts at other countries because of "human rights" is a fucking joke. And it's a really twisted, disgusting joke, because these same Americans apparently seem to believe that their government is immune from being Really Fucking Evil because they can play video games more than 3 hours a day and say that Bush is a fucking asshole (which he indeed is).
In the case of China, many of the "nanny state" policies are irritiating, and perhaps even "Morally wrong", and many are certainly motivated by a great deal of paranoia and self-preservation on the government's behalf. And, journalists have indeed been jailed, and all sorts of horrible things have happened in the name of the government. And all of these things are indeed disgusting.
I'm not arguing China's government isn't tinged with evil. But if you get yuor head out of your ass and stop watching/reading American news, which is controlled by exactly 3 companies, 2 of which are defense contractors, you might find out our government is just as evil, only we hide it better, and we tend to fuck with people outside our country instead of inside.
I think the real point is: governments are evil...plain and simple.
Anyway, while you cry for the Chinese youth who can't play WoW for more than 3 hours a day, I'll come back to the "freedom" of the USA this weekend, where I can't even take hair conditioner on a fucking airplane unless it is less than 3 ounces or something, and in a ziplocked plastic bag. And, this plastic bag can only be a certain size, even if the contents are in tiny containers and don't exceed the limit, because we all know plastic bag size is what brings down airplanes.
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This MMORPG war on gold farming just seems to me like the USA's ridiculous War on Drugs. It seems to me that these things are true:
My point is, from an observational standpoint, those two things appear to be facts. Therefore, fighting this is going to consume lots of time and resources (the game makers admit to having a "strike team" specifically for this purpose, which I assume costs them money), and at the end of the day, strike team or not, I doubt that gold farming can ever be stopped if there's enough will among the community.
So, I don't know...I don't understand why they don't just design the game so that gold farming can be a part of the game and skim money off the top? Certainly, real life is organized this way; some people want to do grunt work and sell the results of their labor, and some people are busy with other stuff and want to play the more "fun" parts of the game in the limited time they have available to play. Design the game so that people can excel at tasks with or without the gold, and set up a central store where people can sell stuff all they want.
I understand your point, which is that the freedom of speech guaranteed in the Bill of Rights is not being impinged here, and you're right.
But I don't think that the world is as simple as it used to be (i.e., that rights are bestowed by governments and that's that). The USA is fast becoming (has already become?) a corporatocracy, and what we have here is a classic example of self-censorship. The credit card companies are massively popular entities, and they are essentially part and parcel of the government.
No one has 'forced' anyone in this situation; Discovery Channel decided this wasn't a battle worth fighting. But clearly, there is some speech here that someone wants to give, and whose audience wants to hear, and yet it is being stymied by corporate interests.
I guess in a nutshell, I think you're kind of diluting the concept of free speech by limiting it to only the context of citizen vs. government.
So, I read the article, and I thought about commenting on little nuances and details, or about crafting some kind of painfully witty reply that would goad mods into giving me karma points, but I read the article and the most eloquent response I can come up with is "it's about fucking time".
Just a point of clarification: Apple didn't buy the whole software company (which was not, by the way, an audio software company...it was Casady & Greene, a software utility developer), they basically bought iTunes (only then it was called SoundJam).
Shit, now this means the photos I have on flickr are going to be owned by Microsoft? Oy vey. Can we have a "good photo sharing site" thread now so I can find the alternatives?
I think we should worry more about the government members making accurate claims about THEMSELVES, and then move on to the claims they make about others.
12 mm...not much, but in this context, that's 30% wider. I'd say that's a LOT. And, the height loses 20mm, which is only 22%. So, proportionally, your assertion that it "isn't that much wider" and that it is "much shorter" don't add up for me.
:p
Not that I really give a shit, to be honest. I already have a nano, and am craving the new iPod touch.
BTW, on a different note, iPod touch has no microphone, but there are already third party add-ons for current iPods that feature microphone/recording capability, and there are even add-ons that allow your iPod to make calls via Bluetooth to your cell phone. So, I think it's within reason to imagine a Skype/hardware combo add-on in the future, assuming Apple's opening its developer API up to big partners, even if it is not publicly available yet.
Yeah, thanks for posting that. I thought this BusinessWeek article was like 10 years too late; Microsoft has been pursuing exactly the strategy they condone for the past 5 years or so.
And I don't know what they're talking about in terms of Microsoft needing to make sure their software is used in China. (I live here.) Nobody uses anything except Windows (and no, they don't pay for it, either). In fact, Microsoft's already got this market completely locked up, as far as I'm concerned. They even do things like sell Windows to students for $3 or so, because they know people are going to pirate it anyway. They have been making deals with the OEMs (like Lenovo, for example) to put "legit" software on shipping computers. I've heard that maybe 60% of PCs sold here now have legitimate copies of Windows. Thing is, Microsoft won't say what those deals are like; I'm guessing Lenovo gets the software for almost nothing.
Anyway, why is Windows "worth" $200, anyway? The fact is, it isn't. Microsoft is raping you if you buy it, and they know it. Nobody's going to sell software in China for hundreds of dollars because (surprise) people don't have hundreds of dollars to help your CEO get a new yacht. You could say "then they shouldn't use it", but IMO the original price is the as much of a rip-off as the pirating. They should just sell at different price points for different markets, or else they will just get pirated. To Microsoft, it doesn't really matter, I think, because they have more money than god, and they want dominance in terms of market share first, and money second.
Personally, I don't really care if Microsoft's stuff is pirated or not; I just thought this BusinessWeek article was like a total anachronism.
Not only that -- when the leader of the Thunderbirds was on the Daily Show, he said something I found kind of surprising. He's been the leader now for (I think) 3 years or so, and he has not changed the routine from what it was before he was there. They most definitely do not push boundaries of any kind; they perform a very calculated show to wow people, kind of like circus acrobats. Is it dangerous? sure. Pushing the limits? Not so much.
I was going to try to be all like scholarly in replying to this, since it was apparently 30 years they wasted on this "academic" study. But, in a nutshell, this study is fucking stupid.
The results of it are correct. If you have fat friends, you are more likely to become fat.
Of course, if you have friends who are into sci-fi, you're more likely to watch/read sci-fi. If you have friends who ride bikes, you're more likely to ride bikes. You're more likely to do everything your friends do. They are, after all, your friends for a reason: you share similar procilivities, you do things together, word of mouth passes between you faster than it does between others, etc. People always conform a bit to their peer groups, whether they want to or not.
And the bit about people were less likely to get fat if their family was fat, and even less likely if their neighbors were fat. Gee, what a surprise, since people are closest to their friends, next closest to their family, and not as close to their neighbors.
My lord...what fantastically colossal waste of time. I hope not very much money was spent on this "study".
Hmm...I guess I'm missing the part where he said "The gas station owner left gasoline sitting in gas cans in the parking lot so I took them."
Did you miss "Analogies 101" in college?
The theory of what you're saying seems plausible, but there's more to it than just population density by region, I think. Let me offer another theory.
The USA is a suburban culture; Europe and northeastern Asia are truly urban cultures. You can look at an area like Connecticut (~270 people / sq. km), and then look at a country like Germany (~234 people / sq. km), and then conclude "Connecticut should have better broadband than Germany." Whether it does is immaterial, but I do have a point...
In Germany, I think it'd be much easier to roll out broadband than Connecticut, because it's not suburban. Even tiny villages with only 1000 people are actually tiny; they are built with a bunch of houses very close together around a very small city square (at least where I traveled there), and between the villages and cities there is basically very little...farms and forests, but in the USA, like where I am from (New England), houses are quite a ways apart...there really is not much of a center to many towns).
Therefore, thinking about, say, a fiber-optic network, you'd need a lot less cable to wire a similarly sized portion of Germany than you would Connecticut. One main line between villages, and then very short lines going around town, but in a Connecticut suburb, long lines connecting everything, every long road, etc.
I'm not saying that there aren't big policy differences between Europe and the USA, but there are also existant physical concerns in play as well; population density tells you very little about the efficiency of building your network; it's about how the population is distributed within that territory.
So your solution is that you cover up other people's crappy job? I was a cashier when I was a teenager (ahh...the '80s), and I never understand when people make this argument. I would take in ~$15,000 in cash in the space of about 4 hours. If we were off (in either direction) by more than $5, we got reamed out for it, and for good reason: cashiers need to be accurate. If their drawer is off by $20, they should be fired and do something else they don't suck at.
In short, by taking the $20, you're helping them learn what they suck at so they can choose another job, you're helping the company discover a crappy cashier and replace them, thus giving all customers better service, and you're helping yourself because you get $20. Everybody wins.
You forgot a word:
"it is (mainly) the task of the CIA to track down foreign threats to the US, and they are the ones [allegedly] trying to find Osama"
Please how explain how open source automatically translates to "mindshare". I don't really see the link, but I'm interested in hearing your thoughts behind that assertion.
IMO, there are certainly advantages (as well as disadvantages) to being open source (depending on the project), but either way I think mindshare has a whole hell of a lot more to do with marketing than the open/closed nature of your product.
I like my Apple TV. It's not the end-all, be-all device for everything TV, but it's well designed, and works flawlessly. There are a lot of things it doesn't do, but then I knew that when I bought it. It does everything Apple said it would do, and it does it elegantly.
What's your problem with it?
According to a Discovery Channel show I watched once (sorry...I can't cite anything), they said that conversations with passengers were almost exactly as distracting as conversations on cell phones, after they ran some tests of people navigating obstacle courses in various situations at various speeds.
I suspect it's just cause conversing requires CPU power from the same part of the brain as driving.
Not sure why this was modded insightful; maybe you and all the mods slept through the late '90s. Microsoft wasn't rebuked for bundling a Web browser; rather, the main complaints were:
(1) The browser could not be reasonably uninstalled (perhaps minor complaint, although it was always running, and sucking resources even when not in use)
(2) Microsoft leveraged its monopoly position to create deals with OEMs such that they could not have Windows licenses unless they agreed NOT to bundle Netscape or other competing browsers in the default install. (the more major complaint, IMO, since it's a pretty clear example of leveraging a monopoly position to prevent competition)
In this situation, I would absolutely argue that an operating system should include robust search (it's perhaps more pertinent to the core function than a web browser); just that Microsoft ought not to put in any booby traps that prevent Google's thing from running, and not try to prevent OEMs from installing it if they want to.
Therefore, personally, I'm of the opinion of many here...I can't entirely agree with Google, but what goes around comes around. Microsoft stuck it to Netscape in kind of a bad way, and they deserve some payback, eventually (especially as the whole DOJ thing was kind of a farce).
Let me get this straight...you think runaway global climate change is going to be stopped by a fucking gas tax?
Really?
This is, in a word, bullshit.
Many web sites in Asia are coded to be Internet Explorer-only (for what I reason I still have not figured out). For instance, in Korea, you cannot even view some sites without installing ActiveX controls.
It's not Safari's fault; developers here (I'm in China) often just don't bother to code for anything other than IE, and many times they don't even specify their character encoding properly (in many cases using ancient and obscure character encodings instead of Unicode, as well).
I pretty much hate Microsoft. However, I'm kind of impressed.
As for the technology...I don't know. I remember seeing it in a movie in Minority report, for example, whenever the hell that shitty movie was out. Jeff Han's stuff was certainly publicized earlier than this, but that doesn't mean he had his ideas first; according to the history stuff on Microsoft's Web site, they've been working on the idea for a long time. So either of them (or in fact someone else we have never seen or heard from) could really be the originators of this idea.
Anyway, I don't much care for who "invented" it, because it was going to happen eventually anyway.
What I'm impressed with is that it's well designed. It's the first thing I've ever seen from Microsoft that has Apple's ease of use...that follows the "less is better" dictum of interface design. They resisted using toolbars, and menus, and everything is simple and would be pretty intuitive for even technophobes to use.
So, for once, I have to say, "nice job, Microsoft".
If you think CNN, NY Times, Washington Post, BBC, et al. (choose your news source of choice) are not spewing propaganda, you have the kind of naïveté that a 9 year-old girl could only hope to aspire to. Everybody's got an agenda, man...
If you want something more closely resembling the truth, then try getting your news from people who have no real stake in the outcome. It seems to me that a critical thinker would actually read stuff from many sides, and then maybe make some kind of decision about what he believes and doesn't.
But that's just me.
Pretty much everything we do just conforms to the limitations of our environment. It's all we can really do, after all. That the Pentagon's shape happened because of an artificial "environment" (the shape of a plot of land) is irrelevant. And then, the shape wasn't changed when it was moved because of a lack of time...well, this is also pretty common, I think.
I'm not trying to pooh-pooh the article, but it's just kind of...well...you know, my shoe is shaped kind of oblong and rounded because, well, that's how feet are shaped. Isn't that amazing?
I guess what I'm getting at is...erm...why is this interesting? I guess the only news here is the bit about how it was shaped to fit one site, then moved. Riveting stuff, that.
Right...in the USA, "human rights" are just something for (white or rich) Americans to enjoy. If you live in Cuba, or Iraq, or Afghanistan, or Peru, or Chile, or Guatemala, or any of the other countries where the USA has like assassinated democratically elected leaders, invaded to steal resources, helped to ignite civil wars - sometimes by arming both sides, or just generally swindled and fucked with in order to keep their governments bankrupt.
Then, you can look at the prisons, which are filled with somewhere on the order or 80% non-white citizens in a country with roughly 80% white population. Over 2/3 of those in American prisons are there on nonviolent drug offenses (many incredibly minor for the punishment), and they are working as essential slaves in a privatized prison economy. Oh, and in many states, they will lose their right to vote - for the rest of their lives, despite the fact that drug laws have been continually lobbied for by groups like the trial lawyer's association and prison food suppliers, who make more money when people are incarcerated. (Money for white lawyers instead of freedom for minority Americans.)
And then there are further instances that are sometimes difficult to quantify: Guantanamo, secret CIA prisons, evil despots in foreign governments who are on our payroll, oil companies raping poor countries by stealing 85% of their profits from oil, free speech only existing in "free speech zones", the PATRIOT Act, etc. and so on...
Seriously, Americans (of which I am one) throwing darts at other countries because of "human rights" is a fucking joke. And it's a really twisted, disgusting joke, because these same Americans apparently seem to believe that their government is immune from being Really Fucking Evil because they can play video games more than 3 hours a day and say that Bush is a fucking asshole (which he indeed is).
In the case of China, many of the "nanny state" policies are irritiating, and perhaps even "Morally wrong", and many are certainly motivated by a great deal of paranoia and self-preservation on the government's behalf. And, journalists have indeed been jailed, and all sorts of horrible things have happened in the name of the government. And all of these things are indeed disgusting.
I'm not arguing China's government isn't tinged with evil. But if you get yuor head out of your ass and stop watching/reading American news, which is controlled by exactly 3 companies, 2 of which are defense contractors, you might find out our government is just as evil, only we hide it better, and we tend to fuck with people outside our country instead of inside.
I think the real point is: governments are evil...plain and simple.
Anyway, while you cry for the Chinese youth who can't play WoW for more than 3 hours a day, I'll come back to the "freedom" of the USA this weekend, where I can't even take hair conditioner on a fucking airplane unless it is less than 3 ounces or something, and in a ziplocked plastic bag. And, this plastic bag can only be a certain size, even if the contents are in tiny containers and don't exceed the limit, because we all know plastic bag size is what brings down airplanes.
What is that you said about "nanny state" again?
FYI: Youtube's not blocked in China....today, anyway. (I live here.)