I guess if by "swimming in money" you mean "less than one quarter US GDP per capita", then yeah, they sure are!
A rocket is a rocket, whether your country has 1000 billion people or 10. And the GDP is in the same order of magnitude. Only the costs are much lower in China.
So basically, they have plenty of money to invest into space flight if they want to, per capita doesn't matter at all there.
That bit I can't argue with. They should be annexing Taiwan any day now, and then turning their ambition on the rest of asia.
China is the probably the only larger country in the world that hasn't invaded another sovereign nation in the last 50 years. Probably more than 100.
India, Pakistan, Russia, Japan, Germany, USA, on the other hand, have been all over the place.
Funny that you're picking on the one country that ISN'T invading countries.
Strictly speaking, if you're talking about continuity of government, the "Chinese Government" is a robust democracy in Taiwan - they are the heirs to the traditional Chinese government.
Strictly speaking, the "Chinese government" in Taiwan only started resembling a democracy in 1980s. Before that it was a dictatorship famous for murdering dissidents.
The Taiwanese government started opening up slightly earlier than Mainland China. It's just that it's easier to do so with 20 million ethnically homogeneous people than it is to do with 1300 million ethnically diverse people.
My issue is not with the definition of capitalism, which I agree with.
It's whether such a system can ever work without governmental control. For a working capitalist market, you need to honour contracts and you need to honour other people's property, and history has shown that this never tends to happen, which is why we have contract law, property law, police, prisons, etc.
It boils down to whether you believe that humans can be reduced to a perfect homo economicus (like Milton Friedman thinks), and then model all the transactions between people through the Subjective Theory of Value, which would likely be your vision of ideal capitalism.
I personally don't believe that humans will ever really act like that. True, taking history as a predictor of the future is not always the best thing to do, but I don't see this happening. Capitalism has always needed a state in the past, precisely because people don't act like they "should". They disregard property as soon as it's not punished (look at the "piracy" phenomenon), and they won't always honour contracts either.
The easiest proof of this comes from the well-known study that showed if everyone one Earth consumed the same resources as the average American, we would need 3 Earths to generate the basic inputs of materials and energy - clearly an impossibility.
Yes, but living like an average American is not exactly needed in order to provide "life's basics".
In fact, the food that is produced TODAY could feed the world two times over.
That's using government to get what you want by force.
And this is exactly what capitalism is.
A government-granted monopoly over an object or an idea (or who knows what else) which is traded for other government-granted monopolies under a market guarded by the government.
That's the only type of capitalism that has ever existed, and will ever exist.
Egyptian hieroglyphic writing was largely phonetic, contrary to what is surprisingly common belief here. Some signs were logographic or ideographic, but the majority of signs were phonetic.
In fact, there is an increasing awareness that ALL written systems are, in fact, phonetic, including the Far East ones.
Actually, the one thing I find more interesting than anything else, is the amount of political activism from people who usually aren't involved in politics. This is the first time the Olympics has been so closely related to politics, whether it's the world's economic markets, the Tibetan question, the Falun Gong, the freedom of press, pollution, hydroelectric dams, minority rights, the value of the Yuan, the students sent to "spy" on the West, the practice of eating dogs in Beijing restaurants, the policing of the internet, or something else.
This is the first time in history where basically NONE of the news regarding Olympics has actually been about the Olympics themselves, but rather about how the host country is evil. Admittedly, many of these issues are real issues that need to be dealt with, but the ferocity with which the international press is attacking everything related to Olympics right now is probably unheard of in history -- I don't even know is the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany Olympics faced such an onslaught from media and citizens alike.
What I'm really interested in seeing is how many of these issues will continue to be relevant as soon as the Olympics moves to a different country with exactly the same problems, like, say, Russia. This will show whether this is the result of the rising political consciousness worldwide, or simply a display of international power struggle and political pressure.
How many people will attack the Russian Olympic torch demanding freedom for Chechnya? Will the German government put the Chechen flag on the parliament building while the torch is passing through Berlin? Will the pollution in Moscow make bigger headlines than the athletes themselves? Will we read about the assassinations of journalists or attacks against minorities in every bigger Russian city?
IBM PC's. That IBM did the R&D for and licensed to Lenovo. In 1998? Or in 1990, when they first started producing computers?
I'm sure you have a good link for this, cause I'll laugh if you don't.
In any case, Lenovo did their own research and is definitely investing a lot into research now, opening research centers in China, India, the US, and elsewhere.
Like I said, you start with cheap knockoffs and producing other people's designs, then you move over to researching yourself. That exactly was my point, whether you're too dumb to understand it or not.
Come back down to Earth. The fight is about getting people to look at software differently in order to facilitate more productivity and ultimately better business. I used to think like that, that Free Software, was simply a novel development model, for more efficiency for companies, etc.
But I've realised that I value the freedom that Free Software gives me far more than efficiency or productivity or whatnot.
I've also realised that I don't really give a flying fuck about what a company might think about it. I like the fact that I'm in control of my computer, and I love the fact that knowledge is freely shared, that communities exist where users and developers help each other, that I can get high quality software free of cost (and trojans, diallers, viruses, etc), but also that I can contribute and become a part of this community.
This is what I really value about Free Software today, not whether some company will improve their efficiency by 10%. As long as the community is here and alive, and providing an alternative to DRM infested, patent-trolled closed crap, I'm happy, whether the general public cares about it or not.
I wouldn't trade this for all the efficient software productivity and better business models of the world.
Tell that to Sony, with their long line of tech wins which failed in the market.
You can make cheap knockoffs forever, or you can try to take initiative and do R&D. Sometimes it will work, a lot of the times, it will turn out to be rubbish, especially when you're just starting in the industry.
So how's the Dragon PC w/ the People's Linux coming along? I don't know, but Lenovo PCs running QQ are all the rage in China. You know, QQ, that tech "win". They should have just used skype. Or purchased from Dell.
DVDs are way more sensitive to damage than CDs, which were not that robust in the first place. It seems to me that every new optical format will be progressively more sensitive to scratches and other kinds of surface damage/warping. 1. Make a sensitive product 2. Make backing up your movies/music/data illegal 3. Wait for the first scratch 4.... 5. You have to buy that Disney movie your kids love so much over and over again.
It's a crappy business plan, IMHO, but it seems to be headed in that direction.
China starts lots of projects like this. They serve only to demonstrate to the world how advanced China is, and how they don't need the rest of the world. They spend tons of money to develop far inferior (but domestically developed!) alternatives to easily and cheaply available western technology. It never goes anywhere. Japan started by making inferior knockoffs of Western products, then Taiwan and Korea followed, and they are all high-tech superpowers.
There are advantages to fostering domestic high-tech development, as you need a lot of experience to play with the big boys. They are educating and employing an army of young scientists end engineer who would otherwise fuck off to the US, Japan and Germany and work for the high-tech companies there. It's a loss in the short-term, but it is the only way to develop a homebrewed high-tech industry.
You can't expect a Chinese company to catch up with a century of experience that companies like Ford, GM, Toshiba, Matsushita, etc. have. But if you don't try and tread the same path yourself, you will forever be dependent on foreign imports.
The KHTML team has never decided to kill KHTML and go with Webkit. In fact, the KHTML code from the 4.1 branch is the best KHTML ever, and an extremely capable HTML engine.
Webkit HAS been integrated into Qt, and there are (experimental) ways to use Webkit as the Konqueror HTML engine. But KHTML is not abandoned, this is just KDE users having more choice.
Webkit is a fork of KHTML, and some of the bugfixes are ported from Webkit over to KHTML. The two engines are basically sisters, and both continue to be developed.
The KDE team has been rewriting/porting basically everything over to Qt4, which was a gargantuan task.
During this time, they used the opportunity to fix some long-standing issues and redesign some key components. Things were broken and in development for a long time, while the stable release 3.5.x went into bugfixing mode. Gnome was making steady improvements to their 2.x codebase this entire time.
KDE is only now starting to reap the fruits of this effort. The real power of the platform will become more obvious in the coming years.
Strangely enough... we don't see similar numbers of attacks from Catholics, Buddhists, Mormons, Quakers, Amish, Jews, Zoroastrians or even Atheists. Ever heard of Northern Ireland, or the Basque separatists in Spain? How about reading about the role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust, or the role of the Catholic and Orthodox Church in the Balkan war?
Or doing some research into Tibetan Buddhism anno 1950 or so, with cutting off limbs, rape and skinning people alive. In fact, only a couple of months ago, Tibetan Buddhists were killing Chinese civilians on the streets of Lhasa.
Ever heard of the Jewish Defense League?
The biggest organisation classified as terrorist by the US (and other countries) is Colombian FARC (30,000 members). The organisation with by far the biggest number of suicide bombers is the Tamil Tigers. Both of these are atheist.
Funny tidbit -- the first terrorist attack in modern-day Middle East was executed by a group of Lebanese, which included Christians.
I think you should do some reading before talking about terrorism. Yes, there are Muslim crackpots bent on doing terrible things in the name of religion/ideology, but the same goes for just about any other religion/ideology. The way forward is confronting idiocy, mindless following and fundamentalism EVERYWHERE, and not in bashing more than a billion peaceful Muslims with uneducated stereotypes.
That's because US immigration policy is more rational. You can get into the US if you have a job offer. UK immigration is a mess. It's very hard to get in legally if you have a job offer. If you enter illegally you're unlikely to get caught. If do get caught you can 'claim asylum'. But asylum seekers can't legally work. So you end up with lots of illegals and lots of unemployed asylum seekers living on benefits. Sweden is even worse - asylum seekers can easily spend their whole lives on benefits and benefits are much more generous.
Several of my family members ended up in Sweden as refugees. Been through the refugee camps, had to go to school again before they were allowed to work, all while facing discrimination from many people they met (not ALL people, and not the majority, but it's still a factor).
You have been reading too much anti-immigrant propaganda, I'm afraid. Evil foreigners living off benefits, plotting the downfall of the Western civilisation, etc. The life of an asylum seeker is pathetic, they fear deportation on a daily basis, get just enough to subsist on, aren't allowed to work, and face discrimination everywhere.
Go visit one of these refugee camps or camps for asylum seeker, and ask them how they live.
Yet a 200 kg person is hardly average in any way. a muscular person weighing 100kg will expend far more energy than an obese person weighing 100kg.
A 200kg obese person will probably use up more energy than a 50kg athlete, that's true, but a 200kg person is unlikely to make 50kg, regardless of what he/she does anyway. And since obese people tend to move far less than physically active people, they don't necessarily expend more energy overall. The 50kg guy who runs 10 miles every day will likely expend more energy than the obese guy who walks over to the fridge 3x a day.
I'm just saying that it's incorrect to claim that eating much automatically = obesity. I have never met an obese person at my weight who eats as much as I do.
Muscle uses a lot of energy. People with a muscular build NEED a lot more food than fat people, because fat doesn't consume energy, muscles do.
Add to this the fact that muscular people probably got that muscle through regular exercise, which burns lots of energy too.
Obesity is very often a case of bad diet (eating the wrong stuff) and non-balanced lifestyle (no exercise to match the food), and not simply eating too much. Athletes eat FAR more than your average fatty.
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I guess if by "swimming in money" you mean "less than one quarter US GDP per capita", then yeah, they sure are!
A rocket is a rocket, whether your country has 1000 billion people or 10. And the GDP is in the same order of magnitude. Only the costs are much lower in China.
So basically, they have plenty of money to invest into space flight if they want to, per capita doesn't matter at all there.
That bit I can't argue with. They should be annexing Taiwan any day now, and then turning their ambition on the rest of asia.
China is the probably the only larger country in the world that hasn't invaded another sovereign nation in the last 50 years. Probably more than 100.
India, Pakistan, Russia, Japan, Germany, USA, on the other hand, have been all over the place.
Funny that you're picking on the one country that ISN'T invading countries.
I hope you have some source for your outrageous claims.
The things you find natural are completely unnatural and alien to me.
"The Terrist" were actually living in Germany and other countries, and I seriously doubt that there is US oil interest there.
Destroying the Middle East wouldn't have done jackshit to these "Terrist".
We cant build stuff like this at all because of civil rights and they can build stuff like this all too easily because of a lack of civil rights.
France, Spain, Germany and Japan have all managed to build ultra-fast trains. They can build "stuff like this" even without trampling on civil rights.
There are engineers involved in creating exciting technology. But yeah, it's a China article, pour on the stereotypes!
Strictly speaking, if you're talking about continuity of government, the "Chinese Government" is a robust democracy in Taiwan - they are the heirs to the traditional Chinese government.
Strictly speaking, the "Chinese government" in Taiwan only started resembling a democracy in 1980s. Before that it was a dictatorship famous for murdering dissidents.
The Taiwanese government started opening up slightly earlier than Mainland China. It's just that it's easier to do so with 20 million ethnically homogeneous people than it is to do with 1300 million ethnically diverse people.
My issue is not with the definition of capitalism, which I agree with.
It's whether such a system can ever work without governmental control. For a working capitalist market, you need to honour contracts and you need to honour other people's property, and history has shown that this never tends to happen, which is why we have contract law, property law, police, prisons, etc.
It boils down to whether you believe that humans can be reduced to a perfect homo economicus (like Milton Friedman thinks), and then model all the transactions between people through the Subjective Theory of Value, which would likely be your vision of ideal capitalism.
I personally don't believe that humans will ever really act like that. True, taking history as a predictor of the future is not always the best thing to do, but I don't see this happening. Capitalism has always needed a state in the past, precisely because people don't act like they "should". They disregard property as soon as it's not punished (look at the "piracy" phenomenon), and they won't always honour contracts either.
The easiest proof of this comes from the well-known study that showed if everyone one Earth consumed the same resources as the average American, we would need 3 Earths to generate the basic inputs of materials and energy - clearly an impossibility.
Yes, but living like an average American is not exactly needed in order to provide "life's basics".
In fact, the food that is produced TODAY could feed the world two times over.
THAT is a tragedy.
That's using government to get what you want by force.
And this is exactly what capitalism is.
A government-granted monopoly over an object or an idea (or who knows what else) which is traded for other government-granted monopolies under a market guarded by the government.
That's the only type of capitalism that has ever existed, and will ever exist.
Egyptian hieroglyphic writing was largely phonetic, contrary to what is surprisingly common belief here. Some signs were logographic or ideographic, but the majority of signs were phonetic.
In fact, there is an increasing awareness that ALL written systems are, in fact, phonetic, including the Far East ones.
Here is a good article with references, which covers hieroglyphs too.
Yeah, because politics were never a part of the Olympic games.
They were never the ONLY part of the Olympic games.
Actually, the one thing I find more interesting than anything else, is the amount of political activism from people who usually aren't involved in politics. This is the first time the Olympics has been so closely related to politics, whether it's the world's economic markets, the Tibetan question, the Falun Gong, the freedom of press, pollution, hydroelectric dams, minority rights, the value of the Yuan, the students sent to "spy" on the West, the practice of eating dogs in Beijing restaurants, the policing of the internet, or something else.
This is the first time in history where basically NONE of the news regarding Olympics has actually been about the Olympics themselves, but rather about how the host country is evil. Admittedly, many of these issues are real issues that need to be dealt with, but the ferocity with which the international press is attacking everything related to Olympics right now is probably unheard of in history -- I don't even know is the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany Olympics faced such an onslaught from media and citizens alike.
What I'm really interested in seeing is how many of these issues will continue to be relevant as soon as the Olympics moves to a different country with exactly the same problems, like, say, Russia. This will show whether this is the result of the rising political consciousness worldwide, or simply a display of international power struggle and political pressure.
How many people will attack the Russian Olympic torch demanding freedom for Chechnya? Will the German government put the Chechen flag on the parliament building while the torch is passing through Berlin? Will the pollution in Moscow make bigger headlines than the athletes themselves? Will we read about the assassinations of journalists or attacks against minorities in every bigger Russian city?
I don't know, but I'm waiting with interest.
Goodbye, troll!
I'm missing the part that says that Legend PC used licensed IBM technology in 1998.
It just states that the IBM and Lenovo product lines were independent until the 2000s, which is exactly what I said.
Try again, I'll give you all the time you need.
I'm sure you have a good link for this, cause I'll laugh if you don't.
In any case, Lenovo did their own research and is definitely investing a lot into research now, opening research centers in China, India, the US, and elsewhere.
Like I said, you start with cheap knockoffs and producing other people's designs, then you move over to researching yourself. That exactly was my point, whether you're too dumb to understand it or not.
But I've realised that I value the freedom that Free Software gives me far more than efficiency or productivity or whatnot.
I've also realised that I don't really give a flying fuck about what a company might think about it. I like the fact that I'm in control of my computer, and I love the fact that knowledge is freely shared, that communities exist where users and developers help each other, that I can get high quality software free of cost (and trojans, diallers, viruses, etc), but also that I can contribute and become a part of this community.
This is what I really value about Free Software today, not whether some company will improve their efficiency by 10%. As long as the community is here and alive, and providing an alternative to DRM infested, patent-trolled closed crap, I'm happy, whether the general public cares about it or not.
I wouldn't trade this for all the efficient software productivity and better business models of the world.
Lenovo was selling millions of PCs long before they purchased IBM's PC division.
You can make cheap knockoffs forever, or you can try to take initiative and do R&D. Sometimes it will work, a lot of the times, it will turn out to be rubbish, especially when you're just starting in the industry. So how's the Dragon PC w/ the People's Linux coming along? I don't know, but Lenovo PCs running QQ are all the rage in China. You know, QQ, that tech "win". They should have just used skype. Or purchased from Dell.
2. Make backing up your movies/music/data illegal
3. Wait for the first scratch
4.
5. You have to buy that Disney movie your kids love so much over and over again.
It's a crappy business plan, IMHO, but it seems to be headed in that direction.
There are advantages to fostering domestic high-tech development, as you need a lot of experience to play with the big boys. They are educating and employing an army of young scientists end engineer who would otherwise fuck off to the US, Japan and Germany and work for the high-tech companies there. It's a loss in the short-term, but it is the only way to develop a homebrewed high-tech industry.
You can't expect a Chinese company to catch up with a century of experience that companies like Ford, GM, Toshiba, Matsushita, etc. have. But if you don't try and tread the same path yourself, you will forever be dependent on foreign imports.
I'd rather correct you than mod you down.
The KHTML team has never decided to kill KHTML and go with Webkit. In fact, the KHTML code from the 4.1 branch is the best KHTML ever, and an extremely capable HTML engine.
Webkit HAS been integrated into Qt, and there are (experimental) ways to use Webkit as the Konqueror HTML engine. But KHTML is not abandoned, this is just KDE users having more choice.
Webkit is a fork of KHTML, and some of the bugfixes are ported from Webkit over to KHTML. The two engines are basically sisters, and both continue to be developed.
The KDE team has been rewriting/porting basically everything over to Qt4, which was a gargantuan task.
During this time, they used the opportunity to fix some long-standing issues and redesign some key components. Things were broken and in development for a long time, while the stable release 3.5.x went into bugfixing mode. Gnome was making steady improvements to their 2.x codebase this entire time.
KDE is only now starting to reap the fruits of this effort. The real power of the platform will become more obvious in the coming years.
Or doing some research into Tibetan Buddhism anno 1950 or so, with cutting off limbs, rape and skinning people alive. In fact, only a couple of months ago, Tibetan Buddhists were killing Chinese civilians on the streets of Lhasa.
Ever heard of the Jewish Defense League?
The biggest organisation classified as terrorist by the US (and other countries) is Colombian FARC (30,000 members). The organisation with by far the biggest number of suicide bombers is the Tamil Tigers. Both of these are atheist.
Funny tidbit -- the first terrorist attack in modern-day Middle East was executed by a group of Lebanese, which included Christians.
I think you should do some reading before talking about terrorism. Yes, there are Muslim crackpots bent on doing terrible things in the name of religion/ideology, but the same goes for just about any other religion/ideology. The way forward is confronting idiocy, mindless following and fundamentalism EVERYWHERE, and not in bashing more than a billion peaceful Muslims with uneducated stereotypes.
Several of my family members ended up in Sweden as refugees. Been through the refugee camps, had to go to school again before they were allowed to work, all while facing discrimination from many people they met (not ALL people, and not the majority, but it's still a factor).
You have been reading too much anti-immigrant propaganda, I'm afraid. Evil foreigners living off benefits, plotting the downfall of the Western civilisation, etc. The life of an asylum seeker is pathetic, they fear deportation on a daily basis, get just enough to subsist on, aren't allowed to work, and face discrimination everywhere.
Go visit one of these refugee camps or camps for asylum seeker, and ask them how they live.
Yet a 200 kg person is hardly average in any way. a muscular person weighing 100kg will expend far more energy than an obese person weighing 100kg.
A 200kg obese person will probably use up more energy than a 50kg athlete, that's true, but a 200kg person is unlikely to make 50kg, regardless of what he/she does anyway. And since obese people tend to move far less than physically active people, they don't necessarily expend more energy overall. The 50kg guy who runs 10 miles every day will likely expend more energy than the obese guy who walks over to the fridge 3x a day.
I'm just saying that it's incorrect to claim that eating much automatically = obesity. I have never met an obese person at my weight who eats as much as I do.
Not quite.
Muscle uses a lot of energy. People with a muscular build NEED a lot more food than fat people, because fat doesn't consume energy, muscles do.
Add to this the fact that muscular people probably got that muscle through regular exercise, which burns lots of energy too.
Obesity is very often a case of bad diet (eating the wrong stuff) and non-balanced lifestyle (no exercise to match the food), and not simply eating too much. Athletes eat FAR more than your average fatty.