The Great Firewall of China is not that much of an issue for most Chinese internet users because (a) they're not, mostly, looking for sensitive political material online; (b) most people don't speak English, so overseas sites are automatically less attractive, and (c) there are native Chinese equivalents -- okay, clones -- of blocked foreign sites. Facebook is blocked, but there's still Renren and Xiaonei. Twitter is blocked, but there's Sina Weibo - which is in many respects a better product. Youtube is blocked, but there's Youku. Google is around, but Baidu has better results for Chinese bulletin boards. And so on. People are aware of the censorship, but they tend to identify it with site administrators (who are ultimately the ones responsible for deciding what does or doesn't get posted in discussion forums), hence a habit of sneering at "guanliyuan" ("mods"), but generally not at the government. It's not that people are stupid or unsubtle; it's that there's not much point in getting angry at the government.
I'm not so sure about the reports of people's phones cutting out. There's definitely been a radical increase in filtering and censorship here over the past month, but I'm pretty sure I've said "protest" multiple times in both English and Chinese on my (Beijing Mobile) phone without having anything happen. Speech recognition just isn't that good, unless the technology has gotten a lot better in secret -- particularly for dealing with a language like Mandarin, which is much richer in homophones than English is, and also has plenty of regional accents that would be even harder for computers to deal with.
That's not to say it's impossible -- I have no reason to believe the NYT is lying, though their China journalism is not always good -- but if it's happening, my guess is that it's limited to a small number of people whose phones are being monitored by human beings.
The iPhone 2.0 firmware introduced both Pinyin (QWERTY)-based and handwritten input methods for Chinese in both the traditional and simplified character sets. The handwriting recognition isn't perfect, but it's reasonably comparable at least to Motorola's - can't speak to Samsung's.
Another argument for Motorola and Samsung's dominance here is that iPhones are still available only through grey market imports, and are still prohibitively expensive for most buyers. And, as kamapuaa notes above, the overwhelming majority of cell phone users in China use input methods based either on the Pinyin romanization system or the 'K9' keypad stroking system, not based on handwriting.
So? These are standard terms of service for any online service in China. The keyword filtering, likewise, is standard -- and if Myspace weren't doing it, the Great Firewall would be blocking access to the site every time the filter got tripped. So how is any of this newsworthy?
Actually, it's not uncommon for students here (particularly from middle-class families) to take the exam multiple times before getting a passing grade.
With all due respect to China's better academic institutions - I took undergraduate classical literature classes at Beijing University for a year - I wouldn't hold my breath. There are a lot of issues - liberal arts funding, lack of truly anonymous peer review, independent tenure hearings, and a general lack of actual intellectual freedom, for starters - that will have to be resolved before Chinese universities can even begin to aspire to the level of a second-tier American university.
Making more schools is actually what's behind a serious problem in China at the moment:
Several years ago, the government upgraded the status of basically all colleges, institutes, etc. to "university." In the short term, this led to employment for (more or less qualified) professors and "university" education for a greater number of students, but it's also led to a dilution of the value of a university degree, and a flooding of the job market with basically unqualified graduates. As a result, many university graduates are now finding that even with degrees from top universities, jobs aren't opening up the way they used to.
At the same time, more and more students are aiming for university educations, leading to increased strain on a "university" system composed primarily of colleges with vestigial institutes grafted onto them.
The Great Firewall of China actively monitors incoming data for keywords. There's no set list, and red-flag words will vary from city to city (Shanghai tends to be strictest) and time to time. It's not at all unimaginable that 'minzhu' (democracy) would set it off, causing the Great Firewall to stop the transfer and return a fake "server not responding" message.
So yeah, it's lame that MS is doing this. But why do they have to? Because Cisco and other American companies provided router, firewall, and filtering tech to China, showed them how to set it up, and still maintain an active role in restricting the browsing of 100 million internet users. What MS is doing is a symptom, not a cause -- follow the money.
This has been going on, in a sense, in China for a while. There, many cellphones (e.g. those on the Shenzhouxing and Donggan-Didai plans, and maybe the Quanqiutong plan as well) work by means of pre-paid cards; you can order things online, pay for QQ membership, or join websites by inputting your cellphone number and allowing them to debit your phone balance for the amount.
The Freenet site, internet searches for 'freenet,' and pages containing the word 'Freenet' are blocked in China, or at least were in Harbin and Beijing from 2002 to 2004.
So does the movie actually lessen your enjoyment? Did Garth Jennings, or whoever it was who directed it, somehow go back in time and steal your delight in the original books? Geez -- if it's not as good as the books - and I don't see how it could be - then it's not as good as the books. It's not going to make me throw away my copy, or decide that I didn't actually like it after all.
I may be misunderstanding you here, but the problem with offering romanized Chinese as an alternative to characters is that, e.g.,.cn and.cn will both come out as 'baidu.cn.' I don't really see the point of character domain names, but then I'm often too lazy to fire up my IME and input characters.
Yeah, try sitting with a laptop, WiFi or no, in any public park in Philly, and see how long before it gets jacked. Average time would be under 10 minutes.
Quite so. It was neither too long, nor too short. The posters who are complaining about it being too long probably also consider reading anything longer than a comic book to be a hardship.
I have to say, in support of Creative here, that I've had a Nomad Jukebox 3 since last July, used it near-daily, in hardship conditions (-30 C weather, occasional dropping, etc), and found it to be a solid device with great sound output. I'm tempted to sign up for one of the new Zens, but honestly, I'm already pleased enough with my Jukebox 3 that I don't see the need just yet.
However, the Supreme Court has also ruled in the past that an individual does not have a reasonable expectation of privacy against a plane flying overhead and taking pictures of visible things on their property. Sattelite data would fall into this second category.
Not at all. Plain sight, remember? If it's indoors and not within view, then it's not in plain sight. If it were in your backyard, on the other hand, they could use satellite images.
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The Great Firewall of China is not that much of an issue for most Chinese internet users because (a) they're not, mostly, looking for sensitive political material online; (b) most people don't speak English, so overseas sites are automatically less attractive, and (c) there are native Chinese equivalents -- okay, clones -- of blocked foreign sites. Facebook is blocked, but there's still Renren and Xiaonei. Twitter is blocked, but there's Sina Weibo - which is in many respects a better product. Youtube is blocked, but there's Youku. Google is around, but Baidu has better results for Chinese bulletin boards. And so on.
People are aware of the censorship, but they tend to identify it with site administrators (who are ultimately the ones responsible for deciding what does or doesn't get posted in discussion forums), hence a habit of sneering at "guanliyuan" ("mods"), but generally not at the government. It's not that people are stupid or unsubtle; it's that there's not much point in getting angry at the government.
I'm not so sure about the reports of people's phones cutting out. There's definitely been a radical increase in filtering and censorship here over the past month, but I'm pretty sure I've said "protest" multiple times in both English and Chinese on my (Beijing Mobile) phone without having anything happen. Speech recognition just isn't that good, unless the technology has gotten a lot better in secret -- particularly for dealing with a language like Mandarin, which is much richer in homophones than English is, and also has plenty of regional accents that would be even harder for computers to deal with.
That's not to say it's impossible -- I have no reason to believe the NYT is lying, though their China journalism is not always good -- but if it's happening, my guess is that it's limited to a small number of people whose phones are being monitored by human beings.
The iPhone 2.0 firmware introduced both Pinyin (QWERTY)-based and handwritten input methods for Chinese in both the traditional and simplified character sets. The handwriting recognition isn't perfect, but it's reasonably comparable at least to Motorola's - can't speak to Samsung's.
Another argument for Motorola and Samsung's dominance here is that iPhones are still available only through grey market imports, and are still prohibitively expensive for most buyers. And, as kamapuaa notes above, the overwhelming majority of cell phone users in China use input methods based either on the Pinyin romanization system or the 'K9' keypad stroking system, not based on handwriting.
I, for one -- banana banana want me banana give now banana -- Jojo, stop i -- GIVE NOW BANANA ME BANANA GIVE.
So? These are standard terms of service for any online service in China. The keyword filtering, likewise, is standard -- and if Myspace weren't doing it, the Great Firewall would be blocking access to the site every time the filter got tripped. So how is any of this newsworthy?
Actually, it's not uncommon for students here (particularly from middle-class families) to take the exam multiple times before getting a passing grade.
With all due respect to China's better academic institutions - I took undergraduate classical literature classes at Beijing University for a year - I wouldn't hold my breath. There are a lot of issues - liberal arts funding, lack of truly anonymous peer review, independent tenure hearings, and a general lack of actual intellectual freedom, for starters - that will have to be resolved before Chinese universities can even begin to aspire to the level of a second-tier American university.
Making more schools is actually what's behind a serious problem in China at the moment:
Several years ago, the government upgraded the status of basically all colleges, institutes, etc. to "university." In the short term, this led to employment for (more or less qualified) professors and "university" education for a greater number of students, but it's also led to a dilution of the value of a university degree, and a flooding of the job market with basically unqualified graduates. As a result, many university graduates are now finding that even with degrees from top universities, jobs aren't opening up the way they used to.
At the same time, more and more students are aiming for university educations, leading to increased strain on a "university" system composed primarily of colleges with vestigial institutes grafted onto them.
The Great Firewall of China actively monitors incoming data for keywords. There's no set list, and red-flag words will vary from city to city (Shanghai tends to be strictest) and time to time. It's not at all unimaginable that 'minzhu' (democracy) would set it off, causing the Great Firewall to stop the transfer and return a fake "server not responding" message.
So yeah, it's lame that MS is doing this. But why do they have to? Because Cisco and other American companies provided router, firewall, and filtering tech to China, showed them how to set it up, and still maintain an active role in restricting the browsing of 100 million internet users. What MS is doing is a symptom, not a cause -- follow the money.
My, that's a rather catty thing to say.
Check SuicideGirls, c.f. hentai.
"Inapt."
This has been going on, in a sense, in China for a while. There, many cellphones (e.g. those on the Shenzhouxing and Donggan-Didai plans, and maybe the Quanqiutong plan as well) work by means of pre-paid cards; you can order things online, pay for QQ membership, or join websites by inputting your cellphone number and allowing them to debit your phone balance for the amount.
Shouldn't that be "CYPPAFMAIYPNT?"
Boy, good thing I was rockin' the tinfoil chapeau on Friday...
The Freenet site, internet searches for 'freenet,' and pages containing the word 'Freenet' are blocked in China, or at least were in Harbin and Beijing from 2002 to 2004.
So does the movie actually lessen your enjoyment? Did Garth Jennings, or whoever it was who directed it, somehow go back in time and steal your delight in the original books? Geez -- if it's not as good as the books - and I don't see how it could be - then it's not as good as the books. It's not going to make me throw away my copy, or decide that I didn't actually like it after all.
I may be misunderstanding you here, but the problem with offering romanized Chinese as an alternative to characters is that, e.g., .cn and .cn will both come out as 'baidu.cn.' I don't really see the point of character domain names, but then I'm often too lazy to fire up my IME and input characters.
In Soviet Union, Peanut Butter and Jelly eat YOU!
(Thank you, thank you. For my next number, I'll need a Beowulf cluster of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches...)
Yeah, try sitting with a laptop, WiFi or no, in any public park in Philly, and see how long before it gets jacked. Average time would be under 10 minutes.
Quite so. It was neither too long, nor too short. The posters who are complaining about it being too long probably also consider reading anything longer than a comic book to be a hardship.
Or a paedophile.
I have to say, in support of Creative here, that I've had a Nomad Jukebox 3 since last July, used it near-daily, in hardship conditions (-30 C weather, occasional dropping, etc), and found it to be a solid device with great sound output. I'm tempted to sign up for one of the new Zens, but honestly, I'm already pleased enough with my Jukebox 3 that I don't see the need just yet.
Not at all. Plain sight, remember? If it's indoors and not within view, then it's not in plain sight. If it were in your backyard, on the other hand, they could use satellite images.
Of course there's still a limited amount of science on the International Space Station. It's not complete yet!
It's an interesting read, though. To be fair, he actually makes a few pretty good points.