I know it's really about having different cultural and historical contexts, given that the USA is a country established by claiming a continent as their own (displacing natives) and basically saying "go fsck yourself" to their "mother" country (i.e. Britain) But I digress.
The fact is, the present boundaries of China is pretty much more or less the same as the China (when it had strong influence) had been for some thousands of years.
You may have a point with border conflicts and rather sick stuff going on on the China western borders, but generally modern China has not been keen on sending troops to attack any sovereign states. And to nit pick, the places you mention don't really count as "counties". Perhaps it's just a nitpick, but then there's a difference between something which can be arguably said to be "suppressing rebellions/civil wars" and outright invasion of a country on the other side of the globe. The means (killing the innocent, torture, etc.) are another matter, and there's really no point in arguing who's the lesser evil (You killed your OWN PEOPLE while we only killed an EVIL MUSLIM!!).
The point is, what the USA currently is doing is going around the world threating all countries around the world with outright invasion if they don't like you -- it's not like China's going to do that in any foreseeable future (except maybe Taiwan, duh, but in the present political climate not even that).
So most "Chinese apologists" here I can guess are not really defending the status of things in China, but are genuinely perplexed by how these "Americans" (note: last I heard USA was still a democracy so generalizations are presumably > 50% correct) can violate human rights by secret prisons, torture, invading another country and wrecking it up, outright lying to citizens, heavy use of death penalty, etc, turn around and accuse China for basically the same things. Maybe China is worse, but to get pounded by the one who's merely slightly "less bad" isn't convincing. It's a valid argument that things which need to be done ought be done regardless whether others are doing the same wrong things, but just that it's not fscking convincing.
[OT rant follows]
Since you brought up the issue of "Tibet", "East Turkestan" or "Xinjiang", or "South Mongolia", perhaps I could lend you some comparative perspectives. I understand that USA was founded by breaking free of British rule and declaring independence and war against Britain that ultimately succeeded. That's the "ideal model" of creating a "free and democratic country" according to USA history. I further understand that most people tend to see their home country under a positive light, which is why this "declare independence from evil totalitarian regime" mindset is so perfect and pristine for so many Americans. I understand why they think that the same model would work on Iraq, even though it's basically untested and the only "really" successful example is the USA itself. I'll also briefly note that what they tend to deemphasize is where the native Americans have gone to.
However, Chinese history has a different story to tell. Most times of war, poverty and turmoil were when China was having difficulty either internally (struggling with civil wars) or externally (when "barbaric" tribes were strong and attacking the borders). Usually both. So as I understand it, most Chinese would view a strong and unified China as *the* path to prosperity. Military rebellions by non-Han ethic groups (seen as the "bad guys" in Chinese history) on the Chinese borders were something to be frowned at, and inaction by the central government was usually a sign of impotence. And the worst times in Chinese history are usually times when individual regions of China declare themselves sovereign and get into messy infighting. So the general mindset is -- if all is (apparently) stable, don't "fix" things by having regions go independent; The keywords are control, centralization and unification. (c.f. USA values of "freedom, liberty, independence") Anythin
Aside from the obvious "nobody really uses Linux" argument as mentioned by many other posters, the problem that every "Linux" setup is potentially very different from each other raises the cost by a few orders of magnitude.
When you are writing software that is supposed to run on many client's machines, the monoculture of Windows (and Mac) help. You develop the software on a windows machine, and be reasonably certain that it will run on other windows machines. If not, these days you only need to test for winxp, 2k, 2003 and vista really. Having four different configurations for testing is easy.
Consider doing testing for Linux. You have Fedora, Mandriva, Debian, Ubuntu, Gentoo, Slackware, etc. If you're doing support software for a hardware product, you have to check whether the system uses plain old/dev with real device nodes, devfs, sysfs, udevd, or whatever. You have the various different kernel configurations, together with the patches included by each different distribution (and don't forget not everybody is running x86(-64)). If your product has a GUI, you'd have to make sure it works with GNOME/KDE/XFCE or whatever DE/WM, and since it's a GUI you wouldn't want it to look like crap on GNOME even if it was written with QT.
And unless your product is wildly popular, you'd guess that with good luck there'd be like a dozen people or so using your product for each different configuration tested. There's no way a sane person could convince him/her-self to spend resources testing on so many different systems, with the thought that maybe there's only like a handful of potential users that may be using this particular configuration, and that they probably have a windows machine lying around anyway.
OSS projects have less of this problem since they have a greater pool of testers, and they generally won't worry about getting their ass sued for some obscure glitch. So in early versions of OSS projects, they can simply release and rely on the community to report on oddities on their exotic systems, and maybe even get a few patch fixes. Most commercial companies don't have such a luxury. Especially for utility support software bundled with a hardware product.
> OS installation is pretty straightforward nowadays.
Except perhaps for MS Windows. Ever tried hunting for drivers? It would definitely be a headache to install windows with a vanilla Windows installation CD... (instead of the vendor supplied recovery disks that includes all the drivers etc.)
> If you sue for copyright infringement because a party has not disclosed its source code (and you > believe that they are obligated to), you're going to get countersued for breach of contract > yourself.
Perhaps you are trying to play with words, but the copyright owner CAN sue the other party. I'm not very familiar with contractual licenses, but even under simple contract law, the copyright owner can sue for breach of contract, and perhaps even obtain an injunction to compel the other party to carry out its contractual duties. I don't agree that GPL when construed as a contract carries an implied term that the copyright owner does not sue even in case of breach, but even so I doubt courts would be that inflexible that a counterclaim of "you promised us not to sue for copyright infringement even if we are liable for breach of contract!" would succeed.
> "But he broke the contract first!" is not a defense.
Uh... where'd you get that? It can be a defense, depending on the subject and extent of breach of contract by the other party. In fact, in some situations the contract would become null and void, and in that case there'd be no contract to talk about to begin with.
> This is why Slashdot is a poor source for legal information, because the masses just mod up your > comments because they seem to make sense and support a popular viewpoint.
Have you ever written real software that spans more than 1000 lines? Too many #ifdefs tend to bloat up the CODE SIZE significantly, lowers maintainability of the code in question, confuses the developers, and either slows down development or leads to even worse quality of the code. Ultimately, runtime performance WILL be indirectly affected if the code in question is in bad shape (even if runtime performance was, at a point in time, excellent).
Or maybe you think Linus and minions are gods and can understand every submission in IOCCC with a glance?
So yes, IMHO, you didn't understand a single bit on "There is much more to code efficiency than a freshman C class.", which, together with your unwarranted hostile response to the GP, really makes you an idiot.
I've never understood the "whitespace" thing... don't you guys indent your code anyway????
Removing the curly braces was only slightly problematic for me because my "%" key didn't work with python code for Vi(m)..... I'm sure there are plugins for Vim to fix that, but even that wasn't bad enough to make me find a fix.
#1 Come up with a new name, let that be "NewName" #2 Create an alternate website marketing this software called "NewName" #3 Write scripts to automatically pull from the GIMP upstream repository, s/GIMP/NewName/g and release as such #4 ???? #5 Profit!
I'd say it's much easier than convincing them to change its name. It's not remotely hard even. "GIMP" is bad marketing, but the legacy of the name is huge... and it's one of the earliest open source GUI programs (note that the "G" in GTK stands for "GIMP")
Well it might be intended for +5 Funny, but AFAIK this really happens.
I live in a GMT+08 place (i.e. approximately on the opposite side of the Earth) and I knew of friends who invested in USA stocks, and they really do stay up at night to keep an eye on the market.....
I'm not really into the OS business, but I'd suppose QNX and linux were written in entirely different architectures -- one is a microkernel and the other is pretty much based on a monolithic model. Code that works perfectly on a microkernel might not make sense on a monolithic kernel such as Linux, at least without significant changes.
It's not like you can trivially "copy" over some magic code and make an OS more "real time". Just as you couldn't copy over any code that makes an OS more "stable", or "secure". Those attributes are really a consequence of the OS's architecture and design. Of course the kernel developers might gain insight from looking at the QNX source and adopt some of the ideas, but I doubt any significant actual code copying would be useful.
And obviously there is the license issue which makes everything else a moot point. Still, with all the comments saying "oh cool let's copy the code to linux!" it's probably a good thing to point this out.
[Disclaimer again: I know sh!t about computer architecture and OS design]
> Why isn't dynamic [shared] objects the default on Linux platforms?
For gcc, the standard C library shared object, also known as/lib/libc.so.6, is present on almost all modern Linux platforms. For gcc it can produce a dynamic object that links with the C library and not expect any problems.
For Pascal, there is no "Pascal Standard Library", so all the code that C can delegate to a standard library, a pascal compiler has to include in the output executable.
> e.g. to make an application binary-wise portable, to use it when glibc or other libs may not be available
In fact this is a similar case. Suppose there is a "Pascal standard library" that comes with the Free Pascal compiler. A dynamically linked executable would likely not run on another random machine because FPC was not installed there (however a C program using only the C standard library calls would run even if it were dynamically linked).
And obviously glibc is not available for a Pascal compiler. The "c" in glibc... stands for "C" as in the programming language. IIRC GNU Pascal uses glibc (correct me if I'm wrong here), but that's probably because gpc uses the gcc backend whereas FPC does not.
Granted it's not a comprehensive dictionary (i use "wamerican-small"), but no way an average person knows twice as many words than a dictionary list...
Company_X should not be allowed to help totalitarian_regime_Y because it grew up in a democratic and free climate
I don't know whether it's right or wrong to restrict companies from doing things overseas for ideological reasons, I'm just pointing out that "freedom" may not be as straightforward and simple as you might have thought. It's a bit like the GPL vs BSD issue - do we mean freedom as in "do whatever you want", or freedom as in "do whatever you want except the things that restrict others' 'freedoms'"? Some believe in the former, some believe in the latter.
The fallacy of Americans trying to solve the "problems in China": If the USA does not have a good "solution", how do they convince others that they can solve the "problem" better than anybody else? i.e. "If you can't fix your own problems, why should I believe that you can fix mine?"
A similar problem is this: the excuse generally goes along the lines of "it's not ethical to allow China to do blah blah blah". When one brings the issues of ethics and morality onto the table, others generally expect that one practices what he preaches. It's not terribly convincing to say "sure, we suck, but *still* we condemn you for being unethical and immoral... just like us! So let us fix your problems before we fix ours...".
And perhaps I don't really understand your culture and customs. But here, we generally don't try to break into our neighbor's house to fix their roof, or telling them that grounding their kids for not eating vegetables is an inappropriate way to educate their kids.
I've heard that your left brain controls your right hand. And your left brain is on the USA side of the border. A simple expert witness on the matter should suffice.
So, what you are saying is that, it is perfectly fine to point a finger at another country's human rights violations (etc.) while one's own country's records are dubious at best? [Or are you really cute...?]
Sure, there's nothing preventing you from doing this, but using words like "moral", "ethical" (I know you haven't used these exact words, but the implications of similar meanings are rampant) in conjunction with this hypocritical view is really not convincing.
The bottom line is, if there are similar problems at home, why not strive to fix them before trying to meddle in another country's "internal affairs"? If you're an American, at least you got voting rights that might make a difference in the policies and politics of your country. Doesn't it seem to be a much more efficient exercise than mere finger pointing at the practices of a country on the other side of the globe? At least you *might* make a difference at home.
So the only reasonable conclusion from all the (mostly) Americans trying to "fix" China human rights problems is that they think their own country is so good in this arena that their efforts are better spent on futile attempts in messing with another country's politics that they have no connection to. So although the GP does not have a factual basis for his assumptions, I see where he got those assumptions from.
AND. If you do have personal ties with China, or if you even consider yourself Chinese (as you hinted), I'd note that trying to use foreign influence to change the landscape of China's politics is extremely distasteful (at least in my eyes). We've all seen how adept the USA is at fscking up a country (*cough* Iraq *cough*). When anybody from USA says something like "let us give you freedom", it's hard not to relate that with the "freedom" Iraqis are "enjoying" now.
I hope that takes care of you and all the "China savior" wannabes.
[Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, I am BS-ing below] [Disclaimer #2: My analysis is based largely on English law, not US Law, so YMMV]
From your description above, the doctrine seems to only apply to cases brought in equity. If I am not mistaken this means unless the claimant only holds an equitable title to the patent, or is trying to seek equitable relief, the doctrine of laches will not apply. I suppose most patent owners would own the legal (as opposed to equitable) title to the patent, so the doctrine won't help at all.
There is probably some other principles in which one is barred from suing for lapse of time, but that's probably in the order of many years...
From the wikipedia article:
"A successful defense of laches will find the court denying the request for equitable relief. However, even if equitable relief is not available, the party may still have an action at law if the statute of limitations has not run out."
In fact this might work really well. Instead of switching between insert/command mode, just open your mouth. Now we won't have to press all the time, or remap our caps lock keys....
For most high profile stories you can imagine that there will be many submissions on the same story. The slashdot editors have a choice on which submission to post, and I'm guessing they look for the one with the "best" headline/summary, i.e. one that they like.
So it's still possible that they are trying to twist the stories a bit, even if they hadn't modified a single bit of your submission. They can simply choose one with the highest level of FUD, which could be better than anything they could come up with themselves.
I've been ranting on other posts about Hong Kong's autonomy from the rest of China, so I won't repeat this here.
I'll just state a fun fact: not long ago our Chief Executive (roughly equivalent to a mayor) started an extensive campaign to encourage couples to raise THREE kids because of the low birth rate (a common problem of most modern cities).
So no, no population problem here. It's a small place though, and I'll grant you that we do have some overcrowding problem in this dense city.
Here we have funny laws/regulations which had somehow been enacted at some point in history but nobody cares enough to look at/enforce them.
If you still remember, our courts convicted a guy posting some movie on a newsgroup using BitTorrent, and the specific clause relied upon for the conviction was some 100 year old provision that have not been used EVER until now. (By the way, I've heard the case is still on appeal, so keep your fingers crossed)
I'm guessing the abundance of these laws is because of the colonial history -- the legislature was appointed around the 1980s (IIRC), and it's pretty likely that what the law-makers had in mind was to make every potentially undesirable act an offense and leave it to law enforcement departments to decide whether to enforce the rules or not.
I mean, it's funny but technically you can be convicted of a (minor) offense if you bring musical players into our metro. Of course everybody brings iPods and whatnot around without any trouble at all, and nobody knows about the "ban" anyway. The obscenity laws are less obscure, but I guess either the govt wanted to make an example of the guy, or he pissed off somebody and that somebody went to the authorities. In the Hong Kong newspaper article by another poster above, it is claimed that the government acted pursuant to a complaint... I wonder what kind of people would complain somebody posting porn on a PORN FORUM unless he was pissed off or something.
It's pretty sad that people still get all emotional and jerky when they hear "China" and assume that everything related to "China" is communist, human rights degrading, under militarist rule, and so on.
Doubly so when Hong Kong gets accused of such sh!t. As others have posted, Hong Kong has a totally separate legal, political and economic system from mainland China, and the fact that you (and many others) couldn't grasp such an idea is a testimony to how much of a feat this is. Listen, after the handover from British colonial rule, we have arguably MORE rights than we ever had, and there is (as another poster have mentioned) a lively debate on how to get more of these rights.
So, no, this is not Communist China. This is not even "post-communism" because it was never practiced here EVER.
Hate China (and Hong Kong) as much as you want, but at least get your facts right.
Given the poor performance of bubblesort over almost ANY data set, I don't think it would add anything meaningful to one's own personal codebase either.
How about mergesort? Or a nice quicksort with good pivoting?
Slashdot Mirror
I know it's really about having different cultural and historical contexts, given that the USA is a country established by claiming a continent as their own (displacing natives) and basically saying "go fsck yourself" to their "mother" country (i.e. Britain) But I digress.
The fact is, the present boundaries of China is pretty much more or less the same as the China (when it had strong influence) had been for some thousands of years.
You may have a point with border conflicts and rather sick stuff going on on the China western borders, but generally modern China has not been keen on sending troops to attack any sovereign states. And to nit pick, the places you mention don't really count as "counties". Perhaps it's just a nitpick, but then there's a difference between something which can be arguably said to be "suppressing rebellions/civil wars" and outright invasion of a country on the other side of the globe. The means (killing the innocent, torture, etc.) are another matter, and there's really no point in arguing who's the lesser evil (You killed your OWN PEOPLE while we only killed an EVIL MUSLIM!!).
The point is, what the USA currently is doing is going around the world threating all countries around the world with outright invasion if they don't like you -- it's not like China's going to do that in any foreseeable future (except maybe Taiwan, duh, but in the present political climate not even that).
So most "Chinese apologists" here I can guess are not really defending the status of things in China, but are genuinely perplexed by how these "Americans" (note: last I heard USA was still a democracy so generalizations are presumably > 50% correct) can violate human rights by secret prisons, torture, invading another country and wrecking it up, outright lying to citizens, heavy use of death penalty, etc, turn around and accuse China for basically the same things. Maybe China is worse, but to get pounded by the one who's merely slightly "less bad" isn't convincing. It's a valid argument that things which need to be done ought be done regardless whether others are doing the same wrong things, but just that it's not fscking convincing.
[OT rant follows]
Since you brought up the issue of "Tibet", "East Turkestan" or "Xinjiang", or "South Mongolia", perhaps I could lend you some comparative perspectives. I understand that USA was founded by breaking free of British rule and declaring independence and war against Britain that ultimately succeeded. That's the "ideal model" of creating a "free and democratic country" according to USA history. I further understand that most people tend to see their home country under a positive light, which is why this "declare independence from evil totalitarian regime" mindset is so perfect and pristine for so many Americans. I understand why they think that the same model would work on Iraq, even though it's basically untested and the only "really" successful example is the USA itself. I'll also briefly note that what they tend to deemphasize is where the native Americans have gone to.
However, Chinese history has a different story to tell. Most times of war, poverty and turmoil were when China was having difficulty either internally (struggling with civil wars) or externally (when "barbaric" tribes were strong and attacking the borders). Usually both. So as I understand it, most Chinese would view a strong and unified China as *the* path to prosperity. Military rebellions by non-Han ethic groups (seen as the "bad guys" in Chinese history) on the Chinese borders were something to be frowned at, and inaction by the central government was usually a sign of impotence. And the worst times in Chinese history are usually times when individual regions of China declare themselves sovereign and get into messy infighting. So the general mindset is -- if all is (apparently) stable, don't "fix" things by having regions go independent; The keywords are control, centralization and unification. (c.f. USA values of "freedom, liberty, independence") Anythin
Aside from the obvious "nobody really uses Linux" argument as mentioned by many other posters, the problem that every "Linux" setup is potentially very different from each other raises the cost by a few orders of magnitude.
/dev with real device nodes, devfs, sysfs, udevd, or whatever. You have the various different kernel configurations, together with the patches included by each different distribution (and don't forget not everybody is running x86(-64)). If your product has a GUI, you'd have to make sure it works with GNOME/KDE/XFCE or whatever DE/WM, and since it's a GUI you wouldn't want it to look like crap on GNOME even if it was written with QT.
When you are writing software that is supposed to run on many client's machines, the monoculture of Windows (and Mac) help. You develop the software on a windows machine, and be reasonably certain that it will run on other windows machines. If not, these days you only need to test for winxp, 2k, 2003 and vista really. Having four different configurations for testing is easy.
Consider doing testing for Linux. You have Fedora, Mandriva, Debian, Ubuntu, Gentoo, Slackware, etc. If you're doing support software for a hardware product, you have to check whether the system uses plain old
And unless your product is wildly popular, you'd guess that with good luck there'd be like a dozen people or so using your product for each different configuration tested. There's no way a sane person could convince him/her-self to spend resources testing on so many different systems, with the thought that maybe there's only like a handful of potential users that may be using this particular configuration, and that they probably have a windows machine lying around anyway.
OSS projects have less of this problem since they have a greater pool of testers, and they generally won't worry about getting their ass sued for some obscure glitch. So in early versions of OSS projects, they can simply release and rely on the community to report on oddities on their exotic systems, and maybe even get a few patch fixes. Most commercial companies don't have such a luxury. Especially for utility support software bundled with a hardware product.
> OS installation is pretty straightforward nowadays.
Except perhaps for MS Windows. Ever tried hunting for drivers? It would definitely be a headache to install windows with a vanilla Windows installation CD... (instead of the vendor supplied recovery disks that includes all the drivers etc.)
> Just saying you are not allowed to do that isn't enough. There should, I asume, also some punishment declared.
Uh, the problem with most international treaties is that there is no efficient mechanism for enforcement.
> If you sue for copyright infringement because a party has not disclosed its source code (and you
> believe that they are obligated to), you're going to get countersued for breach of contract
> yourself.
Perhaps you are trying to play with words, but the copyright owner CAN sue the other party. I'm not very familiar with contractual licenses, but even under simple contract law, the copyright owner can sue for breach of contract, and perhaps even obtain an injunction to compel the other party to carry out its contractual duties. I don't agree that GPL when construed as a contract carries an implied term that the copyright owner does not sue even in case of breach, but even so I doubt courts would be that inflexible that a counterclaim of "you promised us not to sue for copyright infringement even if we are liable for breach of contract!" would succeed.
> "But he broke the contract first!" is not a defense.
Uh... where'd you get that? It can be a defense, depending on the subject and extent of breach of contract by the other party. In fact, in some situations the contract would become null and void, and in that case there'd be no contract to talk about to begin with.
> This is why Slashdot is a poor source for legal information, because the masses just mod up your
> comments because they seem to make sense and support a popular viewpoint.
Well said.
"If you rob a 7-11 you'll get a much harsher punishment than if you stole millions online,"
Like... distributing a mp3 on a P2P network?
> Which, again, results in no runtime bloat.
Have you ever written real software that spans more than 1000 lines? Too many #ifdefs tend to bloat up the CODE SIZE significantly, lowers maintainability of the code in question, confuses the developers, and either slows down development or leads to even worse quality of the code. Ultimately, runtime performance WILL be indirectly affected if the code in question is in bad shape (even if runtime performance was, at a point in time, excellent).
Or maybe you think Linus and minions are gods and can understand every submission in IOCCC with a glance?
So yes, IMHO, you didn't understand a single bit on "There is much more to code efficiency than a freshman C class.", which, together with your unwarranted hostile response to the GP, really makes you an idiot.
I've never understood the "whitespace" thing... don't you guys indent your code anyway????
Removing the curly braces was only slightly problematic for me because my "%" key didn't work with python code for Vi(m)..... I'm sure there are plugins for Vim to fix that, but even that wasn't bad enough to make me find a fix.
#1 Come up with a new name, let that be "NewName"
#2 Create an alternate website marketing this software called "NewName"
#3 Write scripts to automatically pull from the GIMP upstream repository, s/GIMP/NewName/g and release as such
#4 ????
#5 Profit!
I'd say it's much easier than convincing them to change its name. It's not remotely hard even. "GIMP" is bad marketing, but the legacy of the name is huge... and it's one of the earliest open source GUI programs (note that the "G" in GTK stands for "GIMP")
Well it might be intended for +5 Funny, but AFAIK this really happens.
I live in a GMT+08 place (i.e. approximately on the opposite side of the Earth) and I knew of friends who invested in USA stocks, and they really do stay up at night to keep an eye on the market.....
I'm not really into the OS business, but I'd suppose QNX and linux were written in entirely different architectures -- one is a microkernel and the other is pretty much based on a monolithic model. Code that works perfectly on a microkernel might not make sense on a monolithic kernel such as Linux, at least without significant changes.
It's not like you can trivially "copy" over some magic code and make an OS more "real time". Just as you couldn't copy over any code that makes an OS more "stable", or "secure". Those attributes are really a consequence of the OS's architecture and design. Of course the kernel developers might gain insight from looking at the QNX source and adopt some of the ideas, but I doubt any significant actual code copying would be useful.
And obviously there is the license issue which makes everything else a moot point. Still, with all the comments saying "oh cool let's copy the code to linux!" it's probably a good thing to point this out.
[Disclaimer again: I know sh!t about computer architecture and OS design]
> Why isn't dynamic [shared] objects the default on Linux platforms?
/lib/libc.so.6, is present on almost all modern Linux platforms. For gcc it can produce a dynamic object that links with the C library and not expect any problems.
For gcc, the standard C library shared object, also known as
For Pascal, there is no "Pascal Standard Library", so all the code that C can delegate to a standard library, a pascal compiler has to include in the output executable.
> e.g. to make an application binary-wise portable, to use it when glibc or other libs may not be available
In fact this is a similar case. Suppose there is a "Pascal standard library" that comes with the Free Pascal compiler. A dynamically linked executable would likely not run on another random machine because FPC was not installed there (however a C program using only the C standard library calls would run even if it were dynamically linked).
And obviously glibc is not available for a Pascal compiler. The "c" in glibc... stands for "C" as in the programming language. IIRC GNU Pascal uses glibc (correct me if I'm wrong here), but that's probably because gpc uses the gcc backend whereas FPC does not.
> An average college graduate in the USA has a vocabulary of 100,000 words.
/usr/share/dict/words /usr/share/dict/words
$ wc
57025 57024 529097
Granted it's not a comprehensive dictionary (i use "wamerican-small"), but no way an average person knows twice as many words than a dictionary list...
Perhaps you meant 10,000?
Irony.
Company_X should not be allowed to help totalitarian_regime_Y because it grew up in a democratic and free climate
I don't know whether it's right or wrong to restrict companies from doing things overseas for ideological reasons, I'm just pointing out that "freedom" may not be as straightforward and simple as you might have thought. It's a bit like the GPL vs BSD issue - do we mean freedom as in "do whatever you want", or freedom as in "do whatever you want except the things that restrict others' 'freedoms'"? Some believe in the former, some believe in the latter.
The fallacy of Americans trying to solve the "problems in China": If the USA does not have a good "solution", how do they convince others that they can solve the "problem" better than anybody else? i.e. "If you can't fix your own problems, why should I believe that you can fix mine?"
A similar problem is this: the excuse generally goes along the lines of "it's not ethical to allow China to do blah blah blah". When one brings the issues of ethics and morality onto the table, others generally expect that one practices what he preaches. It's not terribly convincing to say "sure, we suck, but *still* we condemn you for being unethical and immoral... just like us! So let us fix your problems before we fix ours...".
And perhaps I don't really understand your culture and customs. But here, we generally don't try to break into our neighbor's house to fix their roof, or telling them that grounding their kids for not eating vegetables is an inappropriate way to educate their kids.
A rather "technical" tongue in cheek answer:
:)
I've heard that your left brain controls your right hand. And your left brain is on the USA side of the border. A simple expert witness on the matter should suffice.
Case solved
So, what you are saying is that, it is perfectly fine to point a finger at another country's human rights violations (etc.) while one's own country's records are dubious at best? [Or are you really cute...?]
Sure, there's nothing preventing you from doing this, but using words like "moral", "ethical" (I know you haven't used these exact words, but the implications of similar meanings are rampant) in conjunction with this hypocritical view is really not convincing.
The bottom line is, if there are similar problems at home, why not strive to fix them before trying to meddle in another country's "internal affairs"? If you're an American, at least you got voting rights that might make a difference in the policies and politics of your country. Doesn't it seem to be a much more efficient exercise than mere finger pointing at the practices of a country on the other side of the globe? At least you *might* make a difference at home.
So the only reasonable conclusion from all the (mostly) Americans trying to "fix" China human rights problems is that they think their own country is so good in this arena that their efforts are better spent on futile attempts in messing with another country's politics that they have no connection to. So although the GP does not have a factual basis for his assumptions, I see where he got those assumptions from.
AND. If you do have personal ties with China, or if you even consider yourself Chinese (as you hinted), I'd note that trying to use foreign influence to change the landscape of China's politics is extremely distasteful (at least in my eyes). We've all seen how adept the USA is at fscking up a country (*cough* Iraq *cough*). When anybody from USA says something like "let us give you freedom", it's hard not to relate that with the "freedom" Iraqis are "enjoying" now.
I hope that takes care of you and all the "China savior" wannabes.
[Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, I am BS-ing below]
[Disclaimer #2: My analysis is based largely on English law, not US Law, so YMMV]
From your description above, the doctrine seems to only apply to cases brought in equity. If I am not mistaken this means unless the claimant only holds an equitable title to the patent, or is trying to seek equitable relief, the doctrine of laches will not apply. I suppose most patent owners would own the legal (as opposed to equitable) title to the patent, so the doctrine won't help at all.
There is probably some other principles in which one is barred from suing for lapse of time, but that's probably in the order of many years...
From the wikipedia article:
"A successful defense of laches will find the court denying the request for equitable relief. However, even if equitable relief is not available, the party may still have an action at law if the statute of limitations has not run out."
In fact this might work really well. Instead of switching between insert/command mode, just open your mouth.
Now we won't have to press all the time, or remap our caps lock keys....
I'll play the devil's advocate.
For most high profile stories you can imagine that there will be many submissions on the same story. The slashdot editors have a choice on which submission to post, and I'm guessing they look for the one with the "best" headline/summary, i.e. one that they like.
So it's still possible that they are trying to twist the stories a bit, even if they hadn't modified a single bit of your submission. They can simply choose one with the highest level of FUD, which could be better than anything they could come up with themselves.
I've been ranting on other posts about Hong Kong's autonomy from the rest of China, so I won't repeat this here.
I'll just state a fun fact: not long ago our Chief Executive (roughly equivalent to a mayor) started an extensive campaign to encourage couples to raise THREE kids because of the low birth rate (a common problem of most modern cities).
So no, no population problem here. It's a small place though, and I'll grant you that we do have some overcrowding problem in this dense city.
Here we have funny laws/regulations which had somehow been enacted at some point in history but nobody cares enough to look at/enforce them.
If you still remember, our courts convicted a guy posting some movie on a newsgroup using BitTorrent, and the specific clause relied upon for the conviction was some 100 year old provision that have not been used EVER until now. (By the way, I've heard the case is still on appeal, so keep your fingers crossed)
I'm guessing the abundance of these laws is because of the colonial history -- the legislature was appointed around the 1980s (IIRC), and it's pretty likely that what the law-makers had in mind was to make every potentially undesirable act an offense and leave it to law enforcement departments to decide whether to enforce the rules or not.
I mean, it's funny but technically you can be convicted of a (minor) offense if you bring musical players into our metro. Of course everybody brings iPods and whatnot around without any trouble at all, and nobody knows about the "ban" anyway. The obscenity laws are less obscure, but I guess either the govt wanted to make an example of the guy, or he pissed off somebody and that somebody went to the authorities. In the Hong Kong newspaper article by another poster above, it is claimed that the government acted pursuant to a complaint... I wonder what kind of people would complain somebody posting porn on a PORN FORUM unless he was pissed off or something.
It's pretty sad that people still get all emotional and jerky when they hear "China" and assume that everything related to "China" is communist, human rights degrading, under militarist rule, and so on.
Doubly so when Hong Kong gets accused of such sh!t. As others have posted, Hong Kong has a totally separate legal, political and economic system from mainland China, and the fact that you (and many others) couldn't grasp such an idea is a testimony to how much of a feat this is. Listen, after the handover from British colonial rule, we have arguably MORE rights than we ever had, and there is (as another poster have mentioned) a lively debate on how to get more of these rights.
So, no, this is not Communist China. This is not even "post-communism" because it was never practiced here EVER.
Hate China (and Hong Kong) as much as you want, but at least get your facts right.
[Disclaimer: I'm a Hong Kong resident]
Given the poor performance of bubblesort over almost ANY data set, I don't think it would add anything meaningful to one's own personal codebase either.
How about mergesort? Or a nice quicksort with good pivoting?
Despite your UID,
You must be new here...