Knowing which libraries to use, writing readable code, release management, configuration management, debugging, and dozens of other things involved in writing code takes it beyond being "just math".
Yeah, there totally isn't any way to do anything on the internet without Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc.
There is! But it's exceedingly hard. I have more than 10 extensions in Firefox active right now, and I still can't totally eliminate them, especially since there is no decent substitute for youtube.
- Discussion forums, which exist for pretty much every single interest group imaginable
Most of which have Twitter/Facebook/Google integration, running their APIs and javascript. And thus tracking your every move. They've put their filthy paws on seemingly every single site in the universe.
There are quite a few discussion forums and online communities which have stopped working for me unless I allow Google (or Googleapis or analytics or somesuch) to execute scripts on my computer. Same goes for Amazon (cloudfront).
A whole spectrum of places to buy stuff, most of which AREN'T Amazon
Yes. Until you get to the payment part. Then you need to log into Amazon, Google, or PayPal, in about 90% of the cases.
- Millions of blogs about every conceivable topic and viewpoint
One of the biggest is run by Google, the others have Google and Facebook tracking bugs tracking your every move
- Websites by companies providing information about what they sell
True, but we've had those all along. And many are moving onto Facebook. Or running their whole business on Google Docs. For sure they are running Google analytics and probably Google ads too.
- A way to interact with the government
Including all of your browsing history being handed over whenever asked. Who has your entire browsing history? Google and Facebook. They likely have all your email too.
- Online banking
This one is actually quite cool.
- Research
You can certainly do research without Microsoft or Google scholar. It's just that you hit the Elsevier and ACM paywalls next.
While it is true that there is so much more contents out there than there used to be back in the dialup days, the Internet is much more of a product nowadays.
Have you actually TRIED surfing without using Google or Facebook or Amazon? It takes about 10 different browser extensions to curtail all their vile malware spyware stuff that is leaping at you from every corner of the internet. Install Ghostery and marvel. And when you think that you've covered the cookies and scripts and supercookies and DOM storage and ads and the rest, they fingerprint your browser and then you have to fake that as well.
Surfing without Google and friends requires daily effort, lots of computer know-how and discipline.
Actually, Germany is somewhere in the middle of the pack in terms of the percentage of renewable sources in the electricity mix. The problem is that they also consume a lot of electricity (industry and population), so their consumption really matters in absolute terms. That's why it is an important country -- if they can pull it off, it means that other large industrial producers like France and the UK also can.
Keep in mind that that report is 2 years old now, and many countries like Spain and Portugal have invested additional resources, with Portugal passing the 50% mark this year.
really? vim knows which symbols are in scope when I hit '.' or '->' at any location, especially if those symbols are defined in a different scope, in a different file that isn't open, that has syntax errors in it?
Vim will automatically scan through all the header files you include and autocomplete that. It will also autocomplete from all the files you have open in your current session (other tabs, other buffers).
Try it. Open a dummy c file with nothing but int main(). Try autocompletion -- nothing. Then add an #include stdio.h, save, and it will autocomplete from there.
It won't understand your code (e.g. class hierarchy) and be very intelligent about it, which means that you might need one or two extra keystrokes now and then, though.
I program mostly in C/C++. I haven't tested this with Java and other languages.
This whole discussion is fucking bizarre. It turns out that there are many people out there who think that if you are not running a 1435 TB monstrosity of an IDE, your only alternative is ed. Just use an editor from this century, FFS. Emacs, vim, Kate, Notepad+, anything modern and targeted at programmers.
Personally, I use vim:
Code completion? Check Syntax highlighting? Check Brace matching? Check Search and replace w/ regexp? Check Language-specific auto indentation, retabbing, reindent, etc. Check Multiple files open in tabs, with easy switching? Check Language-specific auto commenting? Check Filesystem navigation? Check Code folding? Check Scriptable? Check
I do understand that full-blown IDEs offer some additional functionality: integrated build system, CVS integration, debugger integration, stepping through errors, etc. I don't find these useful personally, but I understand that other people do, and that's OK. Vim and Emacs can also do most of those, but if you are so dependent on all this, then a large IDE is probably something you'll be more comfortable with, and that's OK.
On the other hand, vim has its own advantages -- it doesn't tie you to itself (you use standard tools like CMake and Mercurial/git), it's lightweight (somebody in here suggested increasing the memory available to the VM to 2 GB so Eclipse runs faster WTF?!?!?!?!?), it's fast, and it is unbeatable at keyboard shortcuts. Yes, many IDEs offer configurable keyboard navigation, but it's an afterthought, none of it is as efficient with keyboard as vim. I don't like using mouse for editing.
So in the end, it's up to you to decide. Personally, I'm an editor+shell guy, and I honestly don't feel that I'm missing out on anything. Each to his own.
A solution at planetary level it's a different thing. Probably photo-voltaic plants in a few main deserts plus a planetary power grid could be enough. But also this would scare all politicians! So, forget it.
Almost all other distros have provided most if not all of those four advantages since day one
Sure, and I'm not dissing other distros, but Gentoo is simply so much better in those areas, IMHO.
Just try asking a technical question on an Ubuntu forum, and on a Gentoo forum. The Gentoo guys are so good at pinpointing the cause of your problems and offering solutions that it's sometimes scary. Writing/adapting an ebuild is a lot more convenient than building a package for any distribution, anyone familiar with python can do it, including automatic git pull and adding custom patches. And when it comes to flexibility, source distributions are king, and this will never change.
I have used RedHat, SUSE and Debian extensively, and have dabbled with Ubuntu (mostly against my will) and stuff like Knoppix. It's those three points that have kept amazing me with Gentoo. Though it's true that other distros have caught up somewhat and that Gentoo has slipped some.
But optimisation of binaries is not the point of Gentoo. I wonder why this myth still prevails.
The advantages of Gentoo over other distributions are 1) documentation and knowledgable community, 2) flexibility, 3) easy mixing of hand-compiled stuff with the package management stuff.
The disadvantages are 1) compile times 2) although the distro tools are excellent, it's still considerably more complex to use than most, 3) breakage is more likely, so it takes more maintenance than most.
As with ANY distro, it comes down to what you want and what is important to you. I was a happy Gentoo user for 8 years, but finally I switched back to Debian because I simply don't have much time now, and Debian is a joy to run. I still think that Gentoo is brilliant.
It's not that tools like DreamWeaver are ALWAYS the wrong tool -- they can be useful for graphic designers with little computer knowledge -- but your son is a programmer, a tinkerer, who uses advanced editors, likes to understand stuff he builds in detail, and is not afraid of programming and editing by hand. I'm willing to bet anything that he will create better looking, more reliable, more standards-compliant and more correct webpages in less time if he learns the basics of modern HTML/CSS than he would if he mucked around with DreamWeaver and the like.
I'm not a web-developer, but I have a fleeting knowledge of HTML (most of it from early 90s) and CSS (most of it from early 00s). My girlfriend is a designer and asked me for help with a web page she is developing. Nothing complex, but quite meticulously laid out, lots of pictures, hover-effects, menus, and the like. It took her many weeks of hard work to produce the GIMPed designs for me to work on. In less than a weekend, I had it running in all major browsers using nothing but vim, and this includes looking up most of the needed stuff on the internet. The code is clean, reusable, validates (both HTML and CSS), and works in all major browsers (I might need to add some IE6 workarounds, but I probably won't bother, let it burn).
So anyone who is a coder should be able to pick the basics up in a couple of days, and this will be infinitely more useful in the long run than learning the quirks of a Web design program.
No, they don't. Most Chinese live in poverty, only dreaming of the luxury of higher education.
Most Chinese live in big cities (more than a million inhabitants) and have access to government scholarships if they score well on the university entrance examination (gaokao).
The scholarships are a pittance, and many students have to work part-time to get through university, but their universities are loaded with brilliant people.
China is a developing country and many people do live in poverty, but there are likely more kids with (real!) Gucci bags in Chinese cities than in the US. You have no idea how fast the place is developing.
Mandarin has four tones. There is a fifth "neutral" tone, but it is rarely used, and you don't really need to learn it.
There are four canonical tones in Mandarin + neutral.
In practice, they have many realisations. The third tone has 3 different pronunciations, the neutral tone has 4 different pronunciations, depending on the context (tone sandhi).
In any case, tones are easy in isolation, but complicated like nothing else in fluent speech. Which is why very few foreigners really master them
The German version of Quake IV (the game was completely in English, only there was a special edition for German market only) had edited some gory sequences out. IIRC, the game was already unsuitable for 16-year olds, this was basically censorship.
You had to run a German-version binary with German-version data or the game would crash.
You lost me with the music and movies, though. Could you elaborate?
Many of them (though probably not the majority) are encoded using open-source encoders and codecs like Xvid or LAME. Xvid in particular is very popular. So you are benefitting from open source software whenever you watch an Xvid-encoded movie.
Of course, open source players like VLC are very popular too, even among Windows crowds.
I share the same philosophy about computers. I don't want to waste hours of my life on coding software. I'd rather just work 1 hour of overtime, and then go out and buy the program I need.
You don't get the whole point of Free Software in the first place.
But the beauty of it is that even you can profit from its fruits. Every time you surf on the internet, or listen to music or watch a movie. Most of those are running on or were created with Free Software.
I can't bother to RTFA so I sure as hell can't be bothered to read your link, but I have to say that Chinese characters didn't evolve phonetically, but were actual representations (ie drawings) of the word they represent (more complex ideas being made up of combinations of simpler concepts). But as a speaker of Japanese, not Chinese, I only know the history of the characters in Japan, which is not the country of origin.
To the best of my knowledge, this theory is widely discredited today. DeFrancis' book "The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy" is a good read, there is a relevant excerpt online
Over 90% of all Chinese characters have a strong phonetic component in it. Only a tiny number of characters are either true pictographs or a combination of true pictographs. The characters originally developed from pictograms, but soon they were used as a sort of rebus, where pictographs were substituted to represent words that sounded exactly the same. This happened with other pictographic scripts too, like Egyptian hieroglyphs, where most of the pictographs were used phonetically.
Most characters in existence have a phonetic part + a semantic part (radical). In Japanese, the phonetic connection is not always obvious, and in Chinese, you sometimes need to look at several dialects or reconstructions of middle Chinese to see it. In short, Chinese characters are a complicated and inaccurate phonetic writing system.
Despite the bewildering complexity and variety of Chinese characters, there are actually a very limited set of ways to pronounce them. This results in tons and tons of words sounding exactly the same, and the only way to know them apart is by context. It's a real downer for learning the language when you see two native speakers misunderstanding each other. It is also a gold mine for puns, like the story says. Different characters from motherfucker, but sounds the same. Since the internet is not spoken, then technically it's not offensive.
There are about 1200 ways to pronounce a syllable in modern Mandarin, and about 1800 in modern Cantonese. Compare this to the 8000 of English and around 100 in Japanese, and you'll find that Chinese is not that poor phonetically (see DeFrancis: "The Chinese Language" for more details). Furthermore, most words in modern Chinese are composed of several characters. The number of different characters that sound exactly the same is huge, but the number of actual words that sound exactly the same is actually very small. It's still a very context-heavy language, but not as much as people sometimes imagine.
The problem is that people ignore the tones in Chinese, which are extremely important. Grass-mud-horse (cao3 ni2 ma3) sounds very different from "motherfucker" (cao4 ni3 ma1), but it is close enough to be humorous and to get the message across.
A good example is the Three Gorges Dam which displaced millions of people when they flooded the river valley and towns and villages that lived off it(Remember how Bush got slammed for how he handled Hurricane Katrina? This flood was actually man-made and much bigger!). The rationale of this huge dam was that the electricity would help catapult modern china into competition with the other first-world countries, i.e a propaganda move. Essentially, poor Chinese were pushed aside to help develop the modern areas.
Actually, the main reason the dam was built was to stop regular flooding of the Yangze river. Besides producing electricity, the three gorges dam also regulates the flow of the river.
The 1954 flood killed over 30,000 people and left 19 million homeless. The 1998 flood killed over 3,000 and left 14 million homeless. The last flood alone cost almost as much as the construction of the dam, which should help prevent most of such floods and minimise the effects of the remaining ones.
I do agree that the loss for the displaced people is great, and that the value of the cultural relics flooded forever cannot be measured, but this damn prevents much greater disasters than Katrina and the Sichuan earthquake.
Actually, after Japan did it, Taiwan did the same, and they were also considered cheap crap in the beginning. Now they're considered high tech and produce first-class stuff.
Then after Taiwan did it, Korea did it. People used to laugh at Goldstar and their crappy TVs. Then Goldstar changed name to LG and they're one of the market leaders.
So yeah, it's possible that China will do the same, especially considering the pure volume they are producing and how much they're investing in engineering and education.
Slashdot Mirror
Knowing which libraries to use, writing readable code, release management, configuration management, debugging, and dozens of other things involved in writing code takes it beyond being "just math".
Yet these are not the parts which get patented.
What gets patented is math.
Yeah, there totally isn't any way to do anything on the internet without Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc.
There is! But it's exceedingly hard. I have more than 10 extensions in Firefox active right now, and I still can't totally eliminate them, especially since there is no decent substitute for youtube.
- Discussion forums, which exist for pretty much every single interest group imaginable
Most of which have Twitter/Facebook/Google integration, running their APIs and javascript. And thus tracking your every move. They've put their filthy paws on seemingly every single site in the universe.
There are quite a few discussion forums and online communities which have stopped working for me unless I allow Google (or Googleapis or analytics or somesuch) to execute scripts on my computer. Same goes for Amazon (cloudfront).
A whole spectrum of places to buy stuff, most of which AREN'T Amazon
Yes. Until you get to the payment part. Then you need to log into Amazon, Google, or PayPal, in about 90% of the cases.
- Millions of blogs about every conceivable topic and viewpoint
One of the biggest is run by Google, the others have Google and Facebook tracking bugs tracking your every move
- Websites by companies providing information about what they sell
True, but we've had those all along. And many are moving onto Facebook. Or running their whole business on Google Docs. For sure they are running Google analytics and probably Google ads too.
- A way to interact with the government
Including all of your browsing history being handed over whenever asked. Who has your entire browsing history? Google and Facebook. They likely have all your email too.
- Online banking
This one is actually quite cool.
- Research
You can certainly do research without Microsoft or Google scholar. It's just that you hit the Elsevier and ACM paywalls next.
While it is true that there is so much more contents out there than there used to be back in the dialup days, the Internet is much more of a product nowadays.
Have you actually TRIED surfing without using Google or Facebook or Amazon? It takes about 10 different browser extensions to curtail all their vile malware spyware stuff that is leaping at you from every corner of the internet. Install Ghostery and marvel. And when you think that you've covered the cookies and scripts and supercookies and DOM storage and ads and the rest, they fingerprint your browser and then you have to fake that as well.
Surfing without Google and friends requires daily effort, lots of computer know-how and discipline.
Just think -- how many source files you can have side-by-side on this baby :)
Many programmers already use two monitors side-by-side in a multi-head configuration, so I don't see why this would be any different.
Actually, Germany is somewhere in the middle of the pack in terms of the percentage of renewable sources in the electricity mix. The problem is that they also consume a lot of electricity (industry and population), so their consumption really matters in absolute terms. That's why it is an important country -- if they can pull it off, it means that other large industrial producers like France and the UK also can.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_the_European_Union
Keep in mind that that report is 2 years old now, and many countries like Spain and Portugal have invested additional resources, with Portugal passing the 50% mark this year.
really? vim knows which symbols are in scope when I hit '.' or '->' at any location, especially if those symbols are defined in a different scope, in a different file that isn't open, that has syntax errors in it?
Vim will automatically scan through all the header files you include and autocomplete that. It will also autocomplete from all the files you have open in your current session (other tabs, other buffers).
Try it. Open a dummy c file with nothing but int main(). Try autocompletion -- nothing. Then add an #include stdio.h, save, and it will autocomplete from there.
It won't understand your code (e.g. class hierarchy) and be very intelligent about it, which means that you might need one or two extra keystrokes now and then, though.
I program mostly in C/C++. I haven't tested this with Java and other languages.
This whole discussion is fucking bizarre. It turns out that there are many people out there who think that if you are not running a 1435 TB monstrosity of an IDE, your only alternative is ed. Just use an editor from this century, FFS. Emacs, vim, Kate, Notepad+, anything modern and targeted at programmers.
Personally, I use vim:
Code completion? Check
Syntax highlighting? Check
Brace matching? Check
Search and replace w/ regexp? Check
Language-specific auto indentation, retabbing, reindent, etc. Check
Multiple files open in tabs, with easy switching? Check
Language-specific auto commenting? Check
Filesystem navigation? Check
Code folding? Check
Scriptable? Check
I do understand that full-blown IDEs offer some additional functionality: integrated build system, CVS integration, debugger integration, stepping through errors, etc. I don't find these useful personally, but I understand that other people do, and that's OK. Vim and Emacs can also do most of those, but if you are so dependent on all this, then a large IDE is probably something you'll be more comfortable with, and that's OK.
On the other hand, vim has its own advantages -- it doesn't tie you to itself (you use standard tools like CMake and Mercurial/git), it's lightweight (somebody in here suggested increasing the memory available to the VM to 2 GB so Eclipse runs faster WTF?!?!?!?!?), it's fast, and it is unbeatable at keyboard shortcuts. Yes, many IDEs offer configurable keyboard navigation, but it's an afterthought, none of it is as efficient with keyboard as vim. I don't like using mouse for editing.
So in the end, it's up to you to decide. Personally, I'm an editor+shell guy, and I honestly don't feel that I'm missing out on anything. Each to his own.
A solution at planetary level it's a different thing. Probably photo-voltaic plants in a few main deserts plus a planetary power grid could be enough.
But also this would scare all politicians!
So, forget it.
Actually, it's already underway: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desertec
Almost all other distros have provided most if not all of those four advantages since day one
Sure, and I'm not dissing other distros, but Gentoo is simply so much better in those areas, IMHO.
Just try asking a technical question on an Ubuntu forum, and on a Gentoo forum. The Gentoo guys are so good at pinpointing the cause of your problems and offering solutions that it's sometimes scary. Writing/adapting an ebuild is a lot more convenient than building a package for any distribution, anyone familiar with python can do it, including automatic git pull and adding custom patches. And when it comes to flexibility, source distributions are king, and this will never change.
I have used RedHat, SUSE and Debian extensively, and have dabbled with Ubuntu (mostly against my will) and stuff like Knoppix. It's those three points that have kept amazing me with Gentoo. Though it's true that other distros have caught up somewhat and that Gentoo has slipped some.
For the archs that both support, I don't see any advantage Debian has over Ubuntu.
KDE works properly. That's an advantage.
But optimisation of binaries is not the point of Gentoo. I wonder why this myth still prevails.
The advantages of Gentoo over other distributions are 1) documentation and knowledgable community, 2) flexibility, 3) easy mixing of hand-compiled stuff with the package management stuff.
The disadvantages are 1) compile times 2) although the distro tools are excellent, it's still considerably more complex to use than most, 3) breakage is more likely, so it takes more maintenance than most.
As with ANY distro, it comes down to what you want and what is important to you. I was a happy Gentoo user for 8 years, but finally I switched back to Debian because I simply don't have much time now, and Debian is a joy to run. I still think that Gentoo is brilliant.
It's not that tools like DreamWeaver are ALWAYS the wrong tool -- they can be useful for graphic designers with little computer knowledge -- but your son is a programmer, a tinkerer, who uses advanced editors, likes to understand stuff he builds in detail, and is not afraid of programming and editing by hand. I'm willing to bet anything that he will create better looking, more reliable, more standards-compliant and more correct webpages in less time if he learns the basics of modern HTML/CSS than he would if he mucked around with DreamWeaver and the like.
I'm not a web-developer, but I have a fleeting knowledge of HTML (most of it from early 90s) and CSS (most of it from early 00s). My girlfriend is a designer and asked me for help with a web page she is developing. Nothing complex, but quite meticulously laid out, lots of pictures, hover-effects, menus, and the like. It took her many weeks of hard work to produce the GIMPed designs for me to work on. In less than a weekend, I had it running in all major browsers using nothing but vim, and this includes looking up most of the needed stuff on the internet. The code is clean, reusable, validates (both HTML and CSS), and works in all major browsers (I might need to add some IE6 workarounds, but I probably won't bother, let it burn).
So anyone who is a coder should be able to pick the basics up in a couple of days, and this will be infinitely more useful in the long run than learning the quirks of a Web design program.
No, they don't. Most Chinese live in poverty, only dreaming of the luxury of higher education.
Most Chinese live in big cities (more than a million inhabitants) and have access to government scholarships if they score well on the university entrance examination (gaokao).
The scholarships are a pittance, and many students have to work part-time to get through university, but their universities are loaded with brilliant people.
China is a developing country and many people do live in poverty, but there are likely more kids with (real!) Gucci bags in Chinese cities than in the US. You have no idea how fast the place is developing.
Intel and AMD both support OpenGL 3.0 using OSS drivers. And it's stable.
Not GL4, though.
In terms of GFX space, who provides better than Nvidia?
If you mean open source drivers included in the Linux kernel, then: everybody.
since when does "but GNOME's ctrl+space+"fi"+enter is significantly faster" imply using a mouse?
It doesn't, but it implies not wanting to type Chinese, or other CJK scripts.
ctrl+space is the default combination for scim, ibus, and basically any non-European input method.
What's wrong with Alt+F2+"fi"+enter?
It's been there for at least a decade, you know?
Mandarin has four tones. There is a fifth "neutral" tone, but it is rarely used, and you don't really need to learn it.
There are four canonical tones in Mandarin + neutral.
In practice, they have many realisations. The third tone has 3 different pronunciations, the neutral tone has 4 different pronunciations, depending on the context (tone sandhi).
In any case, tones are easy in isolation, but complicated like nothing else in fluent speech. Which is why very few foreigners really master them
The German version of Quake IV (the game was completely in English, only there was a special edition for German market only) had edited some gory sequences out. IIRC, the game was already unsuitable for 16-year olds, this was basically censorship.
You had to run a German-version binary with German-version data or the game would crash.
Not really.
Insulting a police officer will indeed land you a 5000 Euro fine. Insulting a judge should be similar.
You lost me with the music and movies, though. Could you elaborate?
Many of them (though probably not the majority) are encoded using open-source encoders and codecs like Xvid or LAME. Xvid in particular is very popular. So you are benefitting from open source software whenever you watch an Xvid-encoded movie.
Of course, open source players like VLC are very popular too, even among Windows crowds.
I share the same philosophy about computers. I don't want to waste hours of my life on coding software. I'd rather just work 1 hour of overtime, and then go out and buy the program I need.
You don't get the whole point of Free Software in the first place.
But the beauty of it is that even you can profit from its fruits. Every time you surf on the internet, or listen to music or watch a movie. Most of those are running on or were created with Free Software.
I can't bother to RTFA so I sure as hell can't be bothered to read your link, but I have to say that Chinese characters didn't evolve phonetically, but were actual representations (ie drawings) of the word they represent (more complex ideas being made up of combinations of simpler concepts). But as a speaker of Japanese, not Chinese, I only know the history of the characters in Japan, which is not the country of origin.
To the best of my knowledge, this theory is widely discredited today. DeFrancis' book "The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy" is a good read, there is a relevant excerpt online
Over 90% of all Chinese characters have a strong phonetic component in it. Only a tiny number of characters are either true pictographs or a combination of true pictographs. The characters originally developed from pictograms, but soon they were used as a sort of rebus, where pictographs were substituted to represent words that sounded exactly the same. This happened with other pictographic scripts too, like Egyptian hieroglyphs, where most of the pictographs were used phonetically.
Most characters in existence have a phonetic part + a semantic part (radical). In Japanese, the phonetic connection is not always obvious, and in Chinese, you sometimes need to look at several dialects or reconstructions of middle Chinese to see it. In short, Chinese characters are a complicated and inaccurate phonetic writing system.
Despite the bewildering complexity and variety of Chinese characters, there are actually a very limited set of ways to pronounce them. This results in tons and tons of words sounding exactly the same, and the only way to know them apart is by context. It's a real downer for learning the language when you see two native speakers misunderstanding each other. It is also a gold mine for puns, like the story says. Different characters from motherfucker, but sounds the same. Since the internet is not spoken, then technically it's not offensive.
There are about 1200 ways to pronounce a syllable in modern Mandarin, and about 1800 in modern Cantonese. Compare this to the 8000 of English and around 100 in Japanese, and you'll find that Chinese is not that poor phonetically (see DeFrancis: "The Chinese Language" for more details). Furthermore, most words in modern Chinese are composed of several characters. The number of different characters that sound exactly the same is huge, but the number of actual words that sound exactly the same is actually very small. It's still a very context-heavy language, but not as much as people sometimes imagine.
The problem is that people ignore the tones in Chinese, which are extremely important. Grass-mud-horse (cao3 ni2 ma3) sounds very different from "motherfucker" (cao4 ni3 ma1), but it is close enough to be humorous and to get the message across.
A good example is the Three Gorges Dam which displaced millions of people when they flooded the river valley and towns and villages that lived off it(Remember how Bush got slammed for how he handled Hurricane Katrina? This flood was actually man-made and much bigger!). The rationale of this huge dam was that the electricity would help catapult modern china into competition with the other first-world countries, i.e a propaganda move. Essentially, poor Chinese were pushed aside to help develop the modern areas.
Actually, the main reason the dam was built was to stop regular flooding of the Yangze river. Besides producing electricity, the three gorges dam also regulates the flow of the river.
The 1954 flood killed over 30,000 people and left 19 million homeless. The 1998 flood killed over 3,000 and left 14 million homeless. The last flood alone cost almost as much as the construction of the dam, which should help prevent most of such floods and minimise the effects of the remaining ones.
I do agree that the loss for the displaced people is great, and that the value of the cultural relics flooded forever cannot be measured, but this damn prevents much greater disasters than Katrina and the Sichuan earthquake.
Actually, after Japan did it, Taiwan did the same, and they were also considered cheap crap in the beginning. Now they're considered high tech and produce first-class stuff.
Then after Taiwan did it, Korea did it. People used to laugh at Goldstar and their crappy TVs. Then Goldstar changed name to LG and they're one of the market leaders.
So yeah, it's possible that China will do the same, especially considering the pure volume they are producing and how much they're investing in engineering and education.