When you talk to the press, they will take anythig and everything out of context, just to make it seem sensational. If Bill said what you suggested, the headlines the next day would be:
"Bill Gates says EU is 'stupid'" "Bill Gates says it doesn't matter if MSFT takes away other companies' business" "Bill Gates admits Linux is more secure" "'Security isn't the job of Windows' - Gates"
Then he would have spend countless hours trying (fruitlessly) to correct the misstatements. That is why politicians, CEOs, and other famous people are so wary in interviews.
...the going rate for a programmer with a Master's Degree and two years of working experience (typically in some game start-up) is around US$2,400 per year.
Of course, in Chengdu you can get a pretty good box lunch for $0.50, and some companies will provide housing (dorm-style)
I have a friend there who is hiring. If you are interested, I will pass your resume on to him. But I should warn you that there is a lot of competition.;-)
Moving ahead, your most important decision could be "Do I prefer Indian food or Chinese food?"
My wife's company in china just got some static IP address. The price was about US$8/month - quite a bit less than in US. I guess the market effect for this hasn't kicked in yet...
I have worked in games at various points in my career. One of the reasons you don't hear about a lot of game developers is that the bulk of people writing games are the same sort of professional developers who could just as easily be writing Oracle or Windows. In fact, it is not uncommon for people to migrate between such assignments.
The idea that game programming is somehow a different field run by rock stars or teenage geniuses is largely an illusion. It is like thinking that the film business consists soley of small quirky indie filmmakers.
Brian Hook, for better or worse, is a personality. That is why he makes a good interview.
Judging from the quantity of "first post!/natalie portman!" comments, I thought most Slashdot readers were 12 years old right now!
\me ducks
;-)
Re:DRM is not an evil technology!
on
Real DRM
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· Score: 2
No, a password in the traditional sense does not provide appropriate control. If a password was sufficient, then the large media companies would just give you a password when you buy/download a CD. I won't bother to list all of the reasons why a password is too primitive - I am sure anyone can figure this out.
The point is that I should be able to decide exactly what you can and cannot do with my images. You can look at them, but not print them. You can look at them, but you cannot copy them to a CD for your porn group. I can host them on PhotoFoo.com, but PhotoFoo.com employees cannot see them, and if PhotoFoo.com goes under, then the people who buy PhotoFoo.com cannot see them either, etc.
Also, you have to think beyond the primitive level of sharing that is being done today... Yahoo Pictures! is not the end-all of photo/media sharing...
DRM is not an evil technology!
on
Real DRM
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· Score: 0, Troll
People here always focus on the use of DRM by companies to prevent you from sharing/stealing/borrowing/whatever their copyrighted media. But that is just one small application area.
A significant use of DRM in the future is going to be in controlling the access and distribution of personal media (such as family photos that are on a public web site). DRM can prevent people from going to Yahoo! and grabbing those pictures of your kids in the bathtub and adding them to their "naked pictures of children" web site/CD/etc. These scenarios are much more important than those around protecting major media content. If the big media companies want to pay for this stuff to be developed, that is fine by me.
Ah, another year, another virtual chat universe... Do people ever study the reasons why these things fail before giving $33 Million to the next one? Some immediate problems:
* Unstable Economy - with so much money, couldn't they hire an economist? The economy in this thing is like a bad version of "former soviet Russia" - there is no connection between the price of an item and the manufacturing cost. It is like EverQuest - a +1 sword costs the same to make as a +50 sword, so the company has to constantly interfere with the price of an item, create artificial scarcity, etc. At least they have auctions...
* Wasted Graphics - they say they are going after women and emotion, but then they talk about graphics, interaction, etc. First off, the graphics are better, but not enough to make a difference. The interaction (driving around, etc.) is fun for a game but has nothing social about it. If you look at all of the various avatar chat products released over the years, after the initial excitement wears off, people just make the graphics window as small as possible or turn it off completely and focus on the text. It isn't because the graphics were bad - it is just that they are not necessary. The only reason these companies keep going back to graphics is that it makes your $33 Million price tag seem more justified.
* Immersion factor - one of the reasons that IM has trumped all of the other chat products is that it does not require immersion!! Hello, you can do it while doing something else, or chat with multiple people at the same time. IM integrates into your life, instead of forcing you into its world.
Nowadays, online social interaction is pretty well studied. The people with the checkbooks should read some of those studies.
I believe Kraftwerk did this a few decades ago... They were an entirely electronic band, and would give "live" performances with just automatons on stage. Good Stuff!!
I am sort of shocked that the cable companies feel this way. Personally, I never had cable until I got a Tivo. I grew up without a TV, and even though I would sometimes want to watch ST:TNG or something on SciFi, I just never developed the ability of being in front of the TV at a certain time. I just rented DVDs.
As soon as Tivo came out, I got one and subscribed to cable that that I could get all the channels. Now I watch more TV than ever before (about 6 hours / week). With Tivo + basic cable, my TV bill comes to about $40, which seems like a pretty good deal.
Much is made of the ability to skip commercials. Personally I think the Tivo strikes a good balance here. You can't skip them outright, but you can view the video stream at three levels of fast forward. Only the first two are useful for bypassing commercials. At this speed, you can still see what the commercial is, so I get the "exposure". If I am interested in the product advertised, I will often stop and watch the commercial. Personally I really like the "pay for skipping commercials" feature - it gives the user choice, and is fair.
The cable industry should embrace PVRs instead of vilifying them. The killer application for the cable companies would be to provide Tivo Napster themselves, instead of worrying about users doing it. They just need to record about a week's worth of content on their severs. Then they could use the existing VOD technology for delivery. Often I will talk to someone at work who will tell me about a great program from the night before. Unfortunately, this is too late. I would happily pay the cable company some small fee to have that thing appear on my Tivo. Rates could be something like $0.25/hour for a channel I subscribe to, and $1.50/hour for premium channels.
Don't equate my explaining something with my saying that it is all for the best. I agree with you completely that all citizens of the world should work to eliminate politically motivated executions. However, it is duplicitous in the extreme to focus on China when US is no better, killing thousands in our various bombing campaigns. At least China is actually targeting people who have broken a law, instead of those merely having the bad luck to live in a certain country.
Unsurprisingly, most people in China do not want violent revolution and the economic collapse and mass starvation that comes with it. People want gradual, stable change. This is what the current government is doing. Slow economic reform that ushers in slow social reform. Things are better now than during the Student Movement. Things were better during the Student Movement than during Cultural Revolution. And so forth. The trick is to not let up, to keep pushing ahead slow and steady.
However, there are a small group of people who want radical change. These people want to destroy the government and do not care particularly if that destroys the economy as well. When you talk to these people, most of them haven't considered the economic consequences at all. In that sense, they are quite irresponsible. A lot of them don't even live in China.
It is completely understandable that a government would want to stop people who are plotting its overthrow. Every government in the world is against such action, including US and our crackdown on anti-government militia. The US constitution was originally designed to explicitly give citizens the right to plan violent revolution, but that didn't last long, and for the last 150 years or so we have been just like every other country.
In any case, censorship is a symptom, not a disease itself. If you fix the disease, the symptoms will go away.
In order to bring about continuing reform in China, we have to educate the government on effective non-violent, non-oppressive ways of dealing with people who are clamoring for overthrow. This is a mixture of rural education, prison reform, tough anti-corruption laws, increased openness in government, democratic concessions such as local elections, judicial reform, and so forth. There are people both in the west and in China - including people in the Chinese government - working on just these issues. Anyone who really wants to help should help in these areas.
Also, you are incorrect on several points.
First, there are many people on Slashdot - myself included - who live and work at least part of the year in China. I have no fear of getting arrested. This debate does not require any hyperbole.
Second, even amnesty international will admit that none of these people were tried, found guilty, and executed. The Chinese prison system is all about reforming people, not punishing them or executing them. Death sentences in China are almost always commuted. You are in jail until you know in your heart that what you did was wrong, and then you are released. This could take a very long time. Very different attitude than US, where prison is a punishment. People - far too many people - die in Chinese prisons, mostly from extremely poor living conditions and improper medical care. Of course, the longer you are in there, the more likely something will happen to you. But even with its much larger population, China has far fewer prisoners than the US. If you want to help, you should start by campaigning for better sanitation and medical care in prisons.
Third, contrary to popular US belief, China supports freedom of religion. There are many, many religions in China. There is a huge catholic church not far from the Forbidden City, right in downtown Beijing. What is illegal in China is to claim that the laws of your religion outweigh the laws of the state. This is very similar to US. The ultimate authority rests with the state, not with the religion. My religion cannot say it is OK to have multiple wives (in the case of the Mormons) or to have sex with children (in the case of the Branch Davidians). The "religious persecution" you hear about in China comes from people trying to use their religious beliefs to counter the laws of the land. Often these people are not even religious, and are using religion as an excuse for political agitation. The Tibet issue is a good example of this. In particular, you should do some actual research on sick bastards like the Fu Long Gong instead of believing what the US press spoon feeds you. It is the age of the internet - there is no excuse not to check these things out for yourself.
Good points! My (chinese) wife runs a high-tech company in China, so I am all-too-familar with Chinese capitalism "in the raw". Once you start doing business in a country without standardized property laws, you start wishing for a little more government intervention in business, let me tell you... hehehe
Excellent point about the telephone fee. I must admit that I have only used this in hotels and whatnot, and thus was never subjected to fee directly. Thanks for the clarification!
I always dread seeing political issues on/., since this crowd is so *#*@@ clueless about such matters... but, here goes.
It is illegal to possess or distribute certain types of content in China. The penalties for doing these things can be quite severe. It does not matter whether a site is blocked or not. If you get caught viewing porn, that is a crime. It doesn't matter if you got it from an unblocked site or from a blocked site via some circumvention technique. Circumventing the law (any law) is also a crime in China (as it is in the US and many countries), and that is a separate crime over and above the crime of possessing/distributing forbidden material.
China's net control is not limited to blocking of the internet. They also do very extensive monitoring, thanks to their friends at Cisco. Think "FBI in the 50s" - lots of people collecting lots of files on lots of other people. Just because you can view restricted material does not mean you are getting away with anything. In fact, it is much more likely that you are not getting away with squat. They are just sitting on the info should they ever need to use it.
That said, China is primarily concerned with people who are distributing illegal materials. People who are engaging in this activity are doing so with full knowledge of the (possibly severe) punishments. This makes them either heroes or troublemakers, depending on your political view of the stuff they are distributing (i.e., kiddie porn vs. leaked gov't papers).
If you want to stop the censorship, you need to understand why the censorship is there in the first place. The sophomoric attitude of "we should force the US way on the rest of the world" is overly simplistic at best, and is one of the reasons other countries hate us. It is no help to the people actually trying to solve real problems and create change. The social and political situation is very different in China than in US. The attitude of the people towards the government, and the role government plays in the society is quite different. The US was founded on an extreme distrust of government, so it is hard for us to understand cultures who do not share this distrust.
For example, try to imagine this in the US: a senior military commander is arrested and thrown into prison. After many years, he is released. The government (this is the same government, mind you) tells him that after much investigations, it was a mistake, gives him an apology, gives him his back pay, and gives him his old job back, commanding a large part of the military. When asked about it, he says "everyone makes mistakes."
Sidney Rittenberg once said something like "The Chinese government is among the most corrupt, repressive, dysfunctional governments on Earth. It is also one of the best, and is the only one that can save China." This is from a man who lived in China 35 years - 16 of which were spent in Chinese prisons.
Most Americans also have comically extreme anti-communism attitude burned onto their collective subconscious from the 50's. Why otherwise intelligent people don't realize this is just BS government PR is beyond me. In any case, China is hardly communist in the Marx sense anyway - it is really a socialist state with increasing privatization. In some ways, it is even more capitalistic than the West. China describes its system as "socialism with Chinese characteristics", and I think that is pretty accurate.
BTW, China is NOT anti-Internet. China provides free (28.8 dial-up) internet access to their citizens. As of 10/2002, there are about 40 million internet users in China, growing at about 3%/month (from http://www.stats.gov.cn).
I think there is a pretty simple explanation for the current state of things, where Apple has a small marketshare and is loved by their users, while Microsoft is dominating software but is despised: focus.
Apple has always focused on doing things for the customer, even if it means screwing the developers and the existing user base. Apple has sort of a family-style "tough love" philosophy - almost parental. It will say things like "The dock is better for you. Just take it." Even though people may or may not like it, Apple has your best interest at heart, and so it will jam things down the users' (and developers') throats, if need be.
Microsoft, on the other hand, focuses on the developers. They want to make Windows the best development platform in the world. Microsoft figured out early on that people only buy computers for software, and that people are not going to write their own software. By luring developers to their APIs, MS achieved market dominance. The users in this case are more of an afterthought - they are sort of a problem left to each independant developer.
Some examples: When Apple introduces something new, Jobs comes out and talks about how insanely great this will be for users. When MS introduces something, BillG will talk about how the API makes it easy for devs.
At Apple, we would routinely make API changes that would break every single major application (like PhotoShop and PageMaker). Our attitude was "screw them, the devs just have to keep up, the new way is better." At Microsoft, we still have code that makes sure WordPerfect 3.5 for DOS still runs in a command window in NT.
I have worked over five years apiece for the research labs at both Apple Computer and Microsoft, so I have some insight here.
Before even writing this article, the author should have done the simplest, most basic research. Look at all of the software commonly available today as ask:
For programs of similar complexity and functionality, are those with source code available more reliable than programs without?
It is pretty obvious that there is no general correlation between source availability and code quality, which defeats the author's argument directly. I won't even get into his preposterous analogies (software as a book? a bridge? geez...)
People posting voracious opinions on things they know nothing about is of course a hallmark of Slashdot, but for some reason it always bothers me much more with political issues than with *nix religious ones. Therefore, I will go out on a limb here and encourage people to learn a little more about the political situation in China before spewing their rants.
First off, as we all know, the internet is pretty hard to block. People who are interested and motivated can get the information that they need - particularly if you are looking for political information and not more easily recognized things like illegal software or porn. Chinese university students, high-tech workers, etc., are all very smart and internet aware, and so we can assume that they know these tricks. We can also assume that the government is not run by idiots, and thus they know this as well.
So the question is, giving all of this, why does the government bother? Who do they think they are fooling? Who are they protecting, and from what?
As a westerner who has spent a quite a bit of time in China, who has worked there and whose wife runs a high-tech company there, I think I have a little insight. I can tell you that China is not interested in keeping people from reading Slashdot, or from reading CNN, or whatever. China is concerned mostly with unscrupulous people using mass-media to unduly influence large groups of extremely uneducated people. These are the people whose information they are trying to control, not the educated people in the cities.
Most people in the US are dismissive of this answer, because people here just do not appreciate the extreme education gap in China. China has about 800 million people who have only the most basic education. Whereas in the US, some self-serving nutball like David Koresh might be able to get 100 or 200 people to follow them, in China, a charismatic psycho can get several million. Without education, people cannot accurately compare promises that the government makes ("send your kids to school, pay your taxes, and the future will be better") to promises made by some pseudo-religious idiot ("you have a wheel in your heart that drives you; no need to work, or even eat." "The UFO behind the asteroid will take care of you if you send me your money.") Until China's rural population is educated, controlling the information is in fact necessary for social stability.
Sure there is a lot of political posturing going on on top of this, but at the root, this is what is actually being done at a practical level.
This was explained in another Slashdot story. They were installed by another branch of the Chinese government to monitor the email and web surfing on the plane..
The tendency of geeks to be narrowly educated, self-serving, smug, and intolerant effectively relegates them to the margins of society. Their technical knowledge is impressive, but from a political/change-the-world standpoint, it is about as useful as knowing the names of all of the Pokemon. If you want to change the world - even a little - you have to be able to engage in intelligent, educated debate. This is a social skill that comes with education and - yes - age.
Well, I for one am sitting here dumbfounded. These people are the worst hypocrites imaginable! Either that, or they are just unfathomably stupid.
How can Salon, of all people, have any credibility complaining about this, when THEY THEMSELVES just started a premium fee service that delivers - you guessed it - NAKED PICTURES!!
I was surprised, at first, to see any discussion of the China incident on Slashdot. After all, the geek crowd is notoriously self-centered and self-absorbed. Geeks are not interested in politics because politics is about other people, and geeks just don't care about anything outside of themselves. But then, geeks are also notorious for having an opinion on everything, and believing that they are always right because they are "smarter". But isn't it time for people to be smart enough to know when they don't know?
I am not surprised by Katz's views. In my history on Slashdot, I have learned that not even a total lack of information, insight, or understanding of a topic can stop Katz from writing something. Ignorance is never a barrier. I'm just glad he didn't describe it as "post-columbine".
But I have never understood why people - Americans in particular - are so inclined to believe utterly preposterous things about people living in other countries.
The first time I went to Europe, my mom (an otherwise educated person) told me to be sure not to drink the water, because they don't have sewage treatment plants in Europe, and their nuclear power plants are not well-contained, and so radiation gets into the water! I just short of smiled and thought, how could this otherwise sane person believe something so preposterous?
A few years later I went to China. Again, an otherwise intelligent person said "Aren't you worried that they will throw you in prison?" I said "no, I am not planning on breaking any laws." They responded "It doesn't matter! Don't you know that China kidnaps high-tech workers and forces them to work for the military?" Even my mother (bless her) warned me that Chinese people are evil, and that the military will break into people's homes, pull out pregnant women, and give them forced abortions. "And you know in China," she went on, "they don't have any anesthetic."
One thing that the internet can give all of us is the ability to communicate with people all over the world. Yes, even people in China. Before continuing to believe preposterous things (like "everyone in China is brainwashed by the Xinhua news agency" or "no in China can talk to people outside the country"), I encourage you to go to a chat room and strike up a conversation. Just about everyone in China is interested in practicing English. Try searching on Google for "Chinese Chat room" or something. You will certainly make new friends - after all, chinese people are super friendly. And who knows, maybe you will learn something.
- davevr
I think their response has been very clear and consistent throughout the entire campaign:
SlashDot:What do you guys think about the following issues? blah blah blah
Bush and Gore: We don't give a shit about you guys. There aren't enough of you. You don't give us any money. You don't vote. When you do vote, you don't vote for us. Go fuck yourselves.
I have worked out the answers to all ten of these questions.
Yes, they are a direct by-product of the topological shape of spacetime, and that shape is the only possible shape.
QG itself can't, but you can derive the creation of time from the topology of space. The perception of time is just a side-effect of the way our consciousness works.
Protons are "wrapped" across the entire temporal dimension, like a loop, and thus appear to live forever, unless you radically distort spacetime.
Yes, and it actually is not broken
The "temporal dimension" is an illusion of consciousness. It is really just a highly expanded spatial dimension. Only three spatial dimensions have expanded because n-banes only need three dimensions of freedom to do all of the topologically possible transformations they can undergo.
This is a direct fallout of the "shape" of the temporal dimension.
No, it doesn't yet.
The information does not go anywhere - it is stored in the topology of spacetime. This confusion comes from failing to consider time as a dimension capable of information storage.
This is an artifact of only considering gravity in the 3 expanded dimensions
Yes, again it is just an artifact of the shape of spacetime.
I have delightfully simple mathematical proofs for all of these, but alas, this text entry box does not allow me to paste in equations...
=;-P
Slashdot Mirror
When you talk to the press, they will take anythig and everything out of context, just to make it seem sensational. If Bill said what you suggested, the headlines the next day would be:
"Bill Gates says EU is 'stupid'"
"Bill Gates says it doesn't matter if MSFT takes away other companies' business"
"Bill Gates admits Linux is more secure"
"'Security isn't the job of Windows' - Gates"
Then he would have spend countless hours trying (fruitlessly) to correct the misstatements. That is why politicians, CEOs, and other famous people are so wary in interviews.
- davevr
Maybe windows can use this article in their media center ads. It is very convincing!
...the going rate for a programmer with a Master's Degree and two years of working experience (typically in some game start-up) is around US$2,400 per year.
;-)
Of course, in Chengdu you can get a pretty good box lunch for $0.50, and some companies will provide housing (dorm-style)
I have a friend there who is hiring. If you are interested, I will pass your resume on to him. But I should warn you that there is a lot of competition.
Moving ahead, your most important decision could be "Do I prefer Indian food or Chinese food?"
My wife's company in china just got some static IP address. The price was about US$8/month - quite a bit less than in US. I guess the market effect for this hasn't kicked in yet...
I have worked in games at various points in my career. One of the reasons you don't hear about a lot of game developers is that the bulk of people writing games are the same sort of professional developers who could just as easily be writing Oracle or Windows. In fact, it is not uncommon for people to migrate between such assignments.
The idea that game programming is somehow a different field run by rock stars or teenage geniuses is largely an illusion. It is like thinking that the film business consists soley of small quirky indie filmmakers.
Brian Hook, for better or worse, is a personality. That is why he makes a good interview.
Judging from the quantity of "first post!/natalie portman!" comments, I thought most Slashdot readers were 12 years old right now!
;-)
\me ducks
No, a password in the traditional sense does not provide appropriate control. If a password was sufficient, then the large media companies would just give you a password when you buy/download a CD. I won't bother to list all of the reasons why a password is too primitive - I am sure anyone can figure this out.
The point is that I should be able to decide exactly what you can and cannot do with my images. You can look at them, but not print them. You can look at them, but you cannot copy them to a CD for your porn group. I can host them on PhotoFoo.com, but PhotoFoo.com employees cannot see them, and if PhotoFoo.com goes under, then the people who buy PhotoFoo.com cannot see them either, etc.
Also, you have to think beyond the primitive level of sharing that is being done today... Yahoo Pictures! is not the end-all of photo/media sharing...
People here always focus on the use of DRM by companies to prevent you from sharing/stealing/borrowing/whatever their copyrighted media. But that is just one small application area.
A significant use of DRM in the future is going to be in controlling the access and distribution of personal media (such as family photos that are on a public web site). DRM can prevent people from going to Yahoo! and grabbing those pictures of your kids in the bathtub and adding them to their "naked pictures of children" web site/CD/etc. These scenarios are much more important than those around protecting major media content. If the big media companies want to pay for this stuff to be developed, that is fine by me.
Ah, another year, another virtual chat universe... Do people ever study the reasons why these things fail before giving $33 Million to the next one? Some immediate problems:
* Unstable Economy - with so much money, couldn't they hire an economist? The economy in this thing is like a bad version of "former soviet Russia" - there is no connection between the price of an item and the manufacturing cost. It is like EverQuest - a +1 sword costs the same to make as a +50 sword, so the company has to constantly interfere with the price of an item, create artificial scarcity, etc. At least they have auctions...
* Wasted Graphics - they say they are going after women and emotion, but then they talk about graphics, interaction, etc. First off, the graphics are better, but not enough to make a difference. The interaction (driving around, etc.) is fun for a game but has nothing social about it. If you look at all of the various avatar chat products released over the years, after the initial excitement wears off, people just make the graphics window as small as possible or turn it off completely and focus on the text. It isn't because the graphics were bad - it is just that they are not necessary. The only reason these companies keep going back to graphics is that it makes your $33 Million price tag seem more justified.
* Immersion factor - one of the reasons that IM has trumped all of the other chat products is that it does not require immersion!! Hello, you can do it while doing something else, or chat with multiple people at the same time. IM integrates into your life, instead of forcing you into its world.
Nowadays, online social interaction is pretty well studied. The people with the checkbooks should read some of those studies.
- davevr
I believe Kraftwerk did this a few decades ago... They were an entirely electronic band, and would give "live" performances with just automatons on stage. Good Stuff!!
:-(
"I am the operator / with my pocket calculator"
oops, I am indicating my age...
I am sort of shocked that the cable companies feel this way. Personally, I never had cable until I got a Tivo. I grew up without a TV, and even though I would sometimes want to watch ST:TNG or something on SciFi, I just never developed the ability of being in front of the TV at a certain time. I just rented DVDs.
As soon as Tivo came out, I got one and subscribed to cable that that I could get all the channels. Now I watch more TV than ever before (about 6 hours / week). With Tivo + basic cable, my TV bill comes to about $40, which seems like a pretty good deal.
Much is made of the ability to skip commercials. Personally I think the Tivo strikes a good balance here. You can't skip them outright, but you can view the video stream at three levels of fast forward. Only the first two are useful for bypassing commercials. At this speed, you can still see what the commercial is, so I get the "exposure". If I am interested in the product advertised, I will often stop and watch the commercial. Personally I really like the "pay for skipping commercials" feature - it gives the user choice, and is fair.
The cable industry should embrace PVRs instead of vilifying them. The killer application for the cable companies would be to provide Tivo Napster themselves, instead of worrying about users doing it. They just need to record about a week's worth of content on their severs. Then they could use the existing VOD technology for delivery. Often I will talk to someone at work who will tell me about a great program from the night before. Unfortunately, this is too late. I would happily pay the cable company some small fee to have that thing appear on my Tivo. Rates could be something like $0.25/hour for a channel I subscribe to, and $1.50/hour for premium channels.
Don't equate my explaining something with my saying that it is all for the best. I agree with you completely that all citizens of the world should work to eliminate politically motivated executions. However, it is duplicitous in the extreme to focus on China when US is no better, killing thousands in our various bombing campaigns. At least China is actually targeting people who have broken a law, instead of those merely having the bad luck to live in a certain country.
Unsurprisingly, most people in China do not want violent revolution and the economic collapse and mass starvation that comes with it. People want gradual, stable change. This is what the current government is doing. Slow economic reform that ushers in slow social reform. Things are better now than during the Student Movement. Things were better during the Student Movement than during Cultural Revolution. And so forth. The trick is to not let up, to keep pushing ahead slow and steady.
However, there are a small group of people who want radical change. These people want to destroy the government and do not care particularly if that destroys the economy as well. When you talk to these people, most of them haven't considered the economic consequences at all. In that sense, they are quite irresponsible. A lot of them don't even live in China.
It is completely understandable that a government would want to stop people who are plotting its overthrow. Every government in the world is against such action, including US and our crackdown on anti-government militia. The US constitution was originally designed to explicitly give citizens the right to plan violent revolution, but that didn't last long, and for the last 150 years or so we have been just like every other country.
In any case, censorship is a symptom, not a disease itself. If you fix the disease, the symptoms will go away.
In order to bring about continuing reform in China, we have to educate the government on effective non-violent, non-oppressive ways of dealing with people who are clamoring for overthrow. This is a mixture of rural education, prison reform, tough anti-corruption laws, increased openness in government, democratic concessions such as local elections, judicial reform, and so forth. There are people both in the west and in China - including people in the Chinese government - working on just these issues. Anyone who really wants to help should help in these areas.
Also, you are incorrect on several points.
First, there are many people on Slashdot - myself included - who live and work at least part of the year in China. I have no fear of getting arrested. This debate does not require any hyperbole.
Second, even amnesty international will admit that none of these people were tried, found guilty, and executed. The Chinese prison system is all about reforming people, not punishing them or executing them. Death sentences in China are almost always commuted. You are in jail until you know in your heart that what you did was wrong, and then you are released. This could take a very long time. Very different attitude than US, where prison is a punishment. People - far too many people - die in Chinese prisons, mostly from extremely poor living conditions and improper medical care. Of course, the longer you are in there, the more likely something will happen to you. But even with its much larger population, China has far fewer prisoners than the US. If you want to help, you should start by campaigning for better sanitation and medical care in prisons.
Third, contrary to popular US belief, China supports freedom of religion. There are many, many religions in China. There is a huge catholic church not far from the Forbidden City, right in downtown Beijing. What is illegal in China is to claim that the laws of your religion outweigh the laws of the state. This is very similar to US. The ultimate authority rests with the state, not with the religion. My religion cannot say it is OK to have multiple wives (in the case of the Mormons) or to have sex with children (in the case of the Branch Davidians). The "religious persecution" you hear about in China comes from people trying to use their religious beliefs to counter the laws of the land. Often these people are not even religious, and are using religion as an excuse for political agitation. The Tibet issue is a good example of this. In particular, you should do some actual research on sick bastards like the Fu Long Gong instead of believing what the US press spoon feeds you. It is the age of the internet - there is no excuse not to check these things out for yourself.
Good points! My (chinese) wife runs a high-tech company in China, so I am all-too-familar with Chinese capitalism "in the raw". Once you start doing business in a country without standardized property laws, you start wishing for a little more government intervention in business, let me tell you... hehehe
Excellent point about the telephone fee. I must admit that I have only used this in hotels and whatnot, and thus was never subjected to fee directly. Thanks for the clarification!
*sigh*
/., since this crowd is so *#*@@ clueless about such matters... but, here goes.
I always dread seeing political issues on
It is illegal to possess or distribute certain types of content in China. The penalties for doing these things can be quite severe. It does not matter whether a site is blocked or not. If you get caught viewing porn, that is a crime. It doesn't matter if you got it from an unblocked site or from a blocked site via some circumvention technique. Circumventing the law (any law) is also a crime in China (as it is in the US and many countries), and that is a separate crime over and above the crime of possessing/distributing forbidden material.
China's net control is not limited to blocking of the internet. They also do very extensive monitoring, thanks to their friends at Cisco. Think "FBI in the 50s" - lots of people collecting lots of files on lots of other people. Just because you can view restricted material does not mean you are getting away with anything. In fact, it is much more likely that you are not getting away with squat. They are just sitting on the info should they ever need to use it.
That said, China is primarily concerned with people who are distributing illegal materials. People who are engaging in this activity are doing so with full knowledge of the (possibly severe) punishments. This makes them either heroes or troublemakers, depending on your political view of the stuff they are distributing (i.e., kiddie porn vs. leaked gov't papers).
If you want to stop the censorship, you need to understand why the censorship is there in the first place. The sophomoric attitude of "we should force the US way on the rest of the world" is overly simplistic at best, and is one of the reasons other countries hate us. It is no help to the people actually trying to solve real problems and create change. The social and political situation is very different in China than in US. The attitude of the people towards the government, and the role government plays in the society is quite different. The US was founded on an extreme distrust of government, so it is hard for us to understand cultures who do not share this distrust.
For example, try to imagine this in the US: a senior military commander is arrested and thrown into prison. After many years, he is released. The government (this is the same government, mind you) tells him that after much investigations, it was a mistake, gives him an apology, gives him his back pay, and gives him his old job back, commanding a large part of the military. When asked about it, he says "everyone makes mistakes."
Sidney Rittenberg once said something like "The Chinese government is among the most corrupt, repressive, dysfunctional governments on Earth. It is also one of the best, and is the only one that can save China." This is from a man who lived in China 35 years - 16 of which were spent in Chinese prisons.
Most Americans also have comically extreme anti-communism attitude burned onto their collective subconscious from the 50's. Why otherwise intelligent people don't realize this is just BS government PR is beyond me. In any case, China is hardly communist in the Marx sense anyway - it is really a socialist state with increasing privatization. In some ways, it is even more capitalistic than the West. China describes its system as "socialism with Chinese characteristics", and I think that is pretty accurate.
BTW, China is NOT anti-Internet. China provides free (28.8 dial-up) internet access to their citizens. As of 10/2002, there are about 40 million internet users in China, growing at about 3%/month (from http://www.stats.gov.cn).
I think there is a pretty simple explanation for the current state of things, where Apple has a small marketshare and is loved by their users, while Microsoft is dominating software but is despised: focus.
Apple has always focused on doing things for the customer, even if it means screwing the developers and the existing user base. Apple has sort of a family-style "tough love" philosophy - almost parental. It will say things like "The dock is better for you. Just take it." Even though people may or may not like it, Apple has your best interest at heart, and so it will jam things down the users' (and developers') throats, if need be.
Microsoft, on the other hand, focuses on the developers. They want to make Windows the best development platform in the world. Microsoft figured out early on that people only buy computers for software, and that people are not going to write their own software. By luring developers to their APIs, MS achieved market dominance. The users in this case are more of an afterthought - they are sort of a problem left to each independant developer.
Some examples:
When Apple introduces something new, Jobs comes out and talks about how insanely great this will be for users. When MS introduces something, BillG will talk about how the API makes it easy for devs.
At Apple, we would routinely make API changes that would break every single major application (like PhotoShop and PageMaker). Our attitude was "screw them, the devs just have to keep up, the new way is better." At Microsoft, we still have code that makes sure WordPerfect 3.5 for DOS still runs in a command window in NT.
I have worked over five years apiece for the research labs at both Apple Computer and Microsoft, so I have some insight here.
Before even writing this article, the author should have done the simplest, most basic research. Look at all of the software commonly available today as ask:
For programs of similar complexity and functionality, are those with source code available more reliable than programs without?
It is pretty obvious that there is no general correlation between source availability and code quality, which defeats the author's argument directly. I won't even get into his preposterous analogies (software as a book? a bridge? geez...)
People posting voracious opinions on things they know nothing about is of course a hallmark of Slashdot, but for some reason it always bothers me much more with political issues than with *nix religious ones. Therefore, I will go out on a limb here and encourage people to learn a little more about the political situation in China before spewing their rants.
First off, as we all know, the internet is pretty hard to block. People who are interested and motivated can get the information that they need - particularly if you are looking for political information and not more easily recognized things like illegal software or porn. Chinese university students, high-tech workers, etc., are all very smart and internet aware, and so we can assume that they know these tricks. We can also assume that the government is not run by idiots, and thus they know this as well.
So the question is, giving all of this, why does the government bother? Who do they think they are fooling? Who are they protecting, and from what?
As a westerner who has spent a quite a bit of time in China, who has worked there and whose wife runs a high-tech company there, I think I have a little insight. I can tell you that China is not interested in keeping people from reading Slashdot, or from reading CNN, or whatever. China is concerned mostly with unscrupulous people using mass-media to unduly influence large groups of extremely uneducated people. These are the people whose information they are trying to control, not the educated people in the cities.
Most people in the US are dismissive of this answer, because people here just do not appreciate the extreme education gap in China. China has about 800 million people who have only the most basic education. Whereas in the US, some self-serving nutball like David Koresh might be able to get 100 or 200 people to follow them, in China, a charismatic psycho can get several million. Without education, people cannot accurately compare promises that the government makes ("send your kids to school, pay your taxes, and the future will be better") to promises made by some pseudo-religious idiot ("you have a wheel in your heart that drives you; no need to work, or even eat." "The UFO behind the asteroid will take care of you if you send me your money.") Until China's rural population is educated, controlling the information is in fact necessary for social stability.
Sure there is a lot of political posturing going on on top of this, but at the root, this is what is actually being done at a practical level.
This was explained in another Slashdot story. They were installed by another branch of the Chinese government to monitor the email and web surfing on the plane..
;-)
The tendency of geeks to be narrowly educated, self-serving, smug, and intolerant effectively relegates them to the margins of society. Their technical knowledge is impressive, but from a political/change-the-world standpoint, it is about as useful as knowing the names of all of the Pokemon. If you want to change the world - even a little - you have to be able to engage in intelligent, educated debate. This is a social skill that comes with education and - yes - age.
How can Salon, of all people, have any credibility complaining about this, when THEY THEMSELVES just started a premium fee service that delivers - you guessed it - NAKED PICTURES!!
Check it out:
http://www.salon.com/premium/intro/index.html
Read about the service and notice that one of their "premium" services is called Salon Sex.
My god, I can't believe that these people are complaining about this... It boggles the mind...
-davevr
Yeah, let's bash M$!!! oh... whoops!
I am not surprised by Katz's views. In my history on Slashdot, I have learned that not even a total lack of information, insight, or understanding of a topic can stop Katz from writing something. Ignorance is never a barrier. I'm just glad he didn't describe it as "post-columbine".
But I have never understood why people - Americans in particular - are so inclined to believe utterly preposterous things about people living in other countries.
The first time I went to Europe, my mom (an otherwise educated person) told me to be sure not to drink the water, because they don't have sewage treatment plants in Europe, and their nuclear power plants are not well-contained, and so radiation gets into the water! I just short of smiled and thought, how could this otherwise sane person believe something so preposterous?
A few years later I went to China. Again, an otherwise intelligent person said "Aren't you worried that they will throw you in prison?" I said "no, I am not planning on breaking any laws." They responded "It doesn't matter! Don't you know that China kidnaps high-tech workers and forces them to work for the military?" Even my mother (bless her) warned me that Chinese people are evil, and that the military will break into people's homes, pull out pregnant women, and give them forced abortions. "And you know in China," she went on, "they don't have any anesthetic."
One thing that the internet can give all of us is the ability to communicate with people all over the world. Yes, even people in China. Before continuing to believe preposterous things (like "everyone in China is brainwashed by the Xinhua news agency" or "no in China can talk to people outside the country"), I encourage you to go to a chat room and strike up a conversation. Just about everyone in China is interested in practicing English. Try searching on Google for "Chinese Chat room" or something. You will certainly make new friends - after all, chinese people are super friendly. And who knows, maybe you will learn something. - davevr
500,000 seconds? I could have made this image in about 15 seconds in PhotoShop....
SlashDot: What do you guys think about the following issues? blah blah blah
Bush and Gore: We don't give a shit about you guys. There aren't enough of you. You don't give us any money. You don't vote. When you do vote, you don't vote for us. Go fuck yourselves.----
don't waste your vote - vote third party.
- Yes, they are a direct by-product of the topological shape of spacetime, and that shape is the only possible shape.
- QG itself can't, but you can derive the creation of time from the topology of space. The perception of time is just a side-effect of the way our consciousness works.
- Protons are "wrapped" across the entire temporal dimension, like a loop, and thus appear to live forever, unless you radically distort spacetime.
- Yes, and it actually is not broken
- The "temporal dimension" is an illusion of consciousness. It is really just a highly expanded spatial dimension. Only three spatial dimensions have expanded because n-banes only need three dimensions of freedom to do all of the topologically possible transformations they can undergo.
- This is a direct fallout of the "shape" of the temporal dimension.
- No, it doesn't yet.
- The information does not go anywhere - it is stored in the topology of spacetime. This confusion comes from failing to consider time as a dimension capable of information storage.
- This is an artifact of only considering gravity in the 3 expanded dimensions
- Yes, again it is just an artifact of the shape of spacetime.
I have delightfully simple mathematical proofs for all of these, but alas, this text entry box does not allow me to paste in equations... =;-P