Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. This is not legal advice.
> I mean, if it is from the original author of the clause in question, why > would it not have standing, even if clearly different from the exacting > legalese
Because of the requirement of legal certainty.
Say you have a license agreement (or contract). Both parties read the terms and agree to it. All is happy. Now one day the drafter of the agreement (who isn't one of the parties) comes up and says "nevermind what I wrote, I actually meant *this*!". If this was accepted, then the parties are now bound by terms that they didn't agree to.
Note that (AFAIK) in common law, the court will put some weight on the intention of the parties of the agreement or contract. But this is different from the case where the contract or agreement or license (eg. GPL) was drafted by a third party (eg. RMS). RMS's intentions are not relevant (unless, of course, the parties had RMS's personal interpretations in mind when agreeing to the terms, then maybe that would be relevant)
Anyway, the bottom line is: the law expects you to read and (argh) understand the legalese, and it doesn't expect you to find out what the drafters of the document have to say about their intentions. What you agree to is the terms expressed on the document, not the drafter's intentions. In fact, the drafter's intentions are probably even more irrelevant than the parties not involved in the drafting: (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contra_preferendum )
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. This is not legal advice. Another disclaimer: the above is a very rough approximation of the law. It is not accurate by any means. Another disclaimer: I live in a common law jurisdiction, but the law in the US and my jurisdiction can vary.
At the moment it's more like a backup tool than a fully operational sync tool (it doesn't automatically upload locally modified files). But it's open source, so if you find it somewhat useful but not powerful enough, feel free to check out the code and change things.
> The binary distros don't really expose you to the underbelly of the OS Have you tried Debian? Slackware? Good luck in making any of them work if you don't at least have an idea what is going on inside your system.
> as opposed to something arguably more serious, such as illegally running > gambling operations
> let's remember that they are repressive countries and thus no one should ever > want to go there until they clean up their act.
Are you serious?
Point one: you're saying that "because we think it's morally wrong, we can arrest you even if you're not a citizen here and committed the act abroad; but you can't arrest me if I ever went to your country because I am a moral person! (nevermind your laws, I do what I think it's right)"
Point two: "We can violate basic human freedoms because we're a "free" country and yours is not!"
I don't know whether this idea is too difficult for you to grasp, but there are different moral perspectives, and yours is not neccessary the only "correct" one. In many parts of the world (including where I live), carrying guns is more "serious" than online gambling. Would you like to get arrested when travelling abroad because you dealt with guns in your home country?
This is a racist, flamebait and factually incorrect comment that deserves a -1 Troll/Flamebait.
I won't bite except to say that not all Asians are communists. I don't know which is more sick, the blanket statement you made, or the mod who thought it deserved a +1 insightful.
So what cant the users do without admin privileges? I am very intrigued!
They can't install programs on the system. Which is exactly what you complained of in your Linux setup. If you were able to intall programs, then hey, you ARE an administrator.
In contrast, as an unprivileged user on Linux in my university office PC (where I am writing right now) I can not install ANY program (nope, RPM management requires ROOT), I can not change my monitor resolution (I know it supports more than 1024x768 because I was running Win2000 before at 1280 x 1024) because I need ROOT access to modify the xconf. I can not change the date and time of the system, I can not configure a new printer, I can not use some of the space in the computer hard disk (I have some space allocated in a network drive mounted at my ~/ dir which is the only place I have write access) [I made a directory in the tmp directory which is IN the hard drive and then pointed a link to it, it was a nice workaround].
You can install programs in your home directory. Yeah I know you can't use all the space in the computer hard disk, but that's not a problem of Linux. A normal user without quota can eat up all the space in a partition that he has write acccess. That's a configuration problem. Blame your sysadmin. And if you're complaining about not having write access to the system... well, are you SURE you had write access to C:\program files, C:\windows when you were using a Windows machine? If you did, you were running a user which had (some) administrator priviledges. And that meant that you had the priveldges to fsck up your system, which requires attention from the sysadmin to repair the system.
Date and Time of the system. Two things: 1. If you wanted to change it because the system time was inaccurate, your sysadmin should have used NTP. Why would you want to change it to a wrong time? 2. If I remember correctly, an unpriveledged user on WinXP Pro cannot change the system time. I'm not sure about Win2k but I suspect the behavior is similar. Windows is the same as Linux on this issue.
Resolution. Well if your system was correctly set up, you can change the resolution to whatever is supported by your hardware. Either your system was not correctly set up, or you simply couldn't find out how to switch resolutions, or a high resolution is not supported by linux for your hardware. If in the last case, tough luck. It's not an inherit problem of the way Linux is designed.
For printers, I am not sure how well the stuff is supported on Linux, but AFAIK the infrastructure exists to support printers without having to resort to root every time you configure a new printer. Correct me if I'm wrong here, since I haven't used a printer on Linux for ages.
And as a last point, perhaps some of my points were not really that strong, but I don't think I was trolling. To be honest, I seriously doubt whether you had sufficient sysadmin experience to label somebody as a troll on this topic.
Assuming the guy has the prerequisite knowledge, managing Linux desktops is much more simpler than managing Windows desktops.
For one, users will and can run as a normal user instead of as root, and no applications will ever break. Try that with Windows, where all users eventually have to have administrator priviledges, and install dozens of spyware and adware on their machines, bringing in dozens of trojans and worms.
Installing and upgrading the systems will be much easier too. Instead of having to go to the machine physically to install/remove applications or change settings, the admin can ssh. (yes I know there are similar ways to manage such things on Windows remotely but it's more work than ssh and apt-get)
As for the user complaining, things will get better after you tell them straight that "it's our policy to use Linux. Live with it, coz we're not going to install MS Office for you" for a few times.
It's not the Desktop Environment. It's the applications.
WWW? Firefox will take out those 64MB easily. Mail? Same for thunderbird. Office? OpenOffice will eat 64MB and more. KOffice will load the KDE libs. The GTK2 versions of AbiWord and Gnumeric are not too light either (though they probably depend on the least number of libs). Sure you can use older versions of those apps, but then why not simply use the older windows?
Unless you're using the system mainly to open xterms, and are okay with pine, lynx and vi (or emacs if you will), a 64MB *usable* desktop system on Linux is SLOW SLOW SLOW.
(Note: I've only been on the project for a short while, and the decision to switch to gnumeric as a backend was already made back then. But I'll take "you" in your comment to refer to the project as a whole)
For the speed issue, online Javascript apps are inherently slow. If you simply want your spreadsheet to be accessible anywhere on the web, just find a reliable fileserver and whenever you want to open it, just download it and open it with Excel, OO.org Calc, or whatever. When you're done, upload it back. The main advantage of these types of spreadsheets is the network - you can open a sheet and get instant updates (eg. stocks as I've mentioned), or multiple persons editing the same spreadsheet, etc. These things are not possibile with the traditional local office application. (Of course, it is entirely possible to do calculations in javascript, but the point I am making is that online spreadsheets are not to entirely displace Excel)
As mentioned by many others, online apps like this are not (yet) in a position to displace Excel in entirety. A locally run native application has many advantages in speed and flexibility, whereas an online application main selling point is its network capabilities. There is quite a bit of overlap between the two, but I don't think these online apps are going to kill MS Office any time soon.
Actually, I have just obtained a google spreadsheet account, and from what I see, google is also doing the calculations on the backend (I am not sure, correct me if I am wrong). Not to say that whatever google is doing is correct, but hey, they do it that way, we can't be too wrong can we;-p
I guess you are quite right on the scalability issue though. But then, being a relatively new site, we haven't (yet) run into major scalability problems, and would be happy to. We actually made some arrangements to our site after we knew about googlespreadsheets (a couple of hours before the news came on slashdot) just in case some thoughtful submitter added a link to our website when he submitted news about google spreadsheet;-p
While you are waiting for the invitations to Google Spreadsheet, why not try out some existing ones?
EditGrid has been out there for two months, and has cool features such as gnumeric import support (we actually use the core library of Gnumeric as our backend, and therefore support all functions that gnumeric supports), and additional stuff like automatic updated stock price data in a spreadsheet.
[ Disclaimer: I am currently working as a developer of EditGrid, see my "homepage" URL ]
I'm sorry if you were treated like shit by any Chinese persons. I would venture to think that if you didn't treat others like shit and didn't act like an asshole, they wouldn't treat you as such.
> Not only is that not true, it occurs to me that people tend to > be assholes based on how they view you.
> Whats happening here is that China has been believing its own > propaganda too much
Nobody in China really believes in the propaganda. Just like how you wouldn't believe in what your elected president says before the election. Or like how much you'd trust your mass media (you don't trust them to provide accurate information do you?)
> honestly believed the rest of the world would bend over because of the innate > superiority of their offering and the fact that China is the centre of the world
Are you living in the 19th century? Anybody with some basic knowledge of modern Chinese history knows that the Chinese learnt this lesson the hard way a hundred years ago. Do you seriously believe that anyone at all in China literally uses "zhong gwo" as such?
> I call em like I see em, son. I have no need to claim innocence, since I was never > guilty in the first place, of whatever crime you seem to be accusing me of. > Probably one of your infamous "thought crimes". Sure you never committed any crime, but the GP never said you were. It's just that your claim that all Chinese treat others like shit makes you an ignorant asshole, no matter how you claim "innocence" to an unneccessary insult to at least a fourth of the whole world.
> You mean Taiwanese and Hong Kongese industrialists and investors pumping > capital into the backward mainland changing the world. This makes me laugh. I'm live in Hong Kong, and basically a large part of our economy depends on the mainland. It's the mainland who is pumping capital into Hong Kong's economy. From what I know, Taiwan has a similar dependence on the mainland, instead of the other way round.
You still think China is the way it is three decades ago. Sure you're free to believe so, just in case you also that believe the world is flat and angels guide the movement of the stars which revolve around the Earth.
> he is a curious sort of animal able to escape those forms of nature and create > new configurations of need and choice.
Then you probably do not understand "nature". The more one learns about animals, the less he could think that he is different qualitatively in any way. Yes we may be smarter, but that's probably all.
Let me get it straight: 1. The Chinese government oppresses their people. No freedoms, no rights. 2. And then demonstrations which should be evidence (at least to some extent!) of freedom of assembly and rights to cricitize government are framed as "uprisings", purportedly evidence that people are trying to overthrow the government, and thus supporting claim #1.
Is it what they're (or the G...GP, which my initial reply was towards) saying?
Sigh. I'm not saying your argument is wrong, but I would like to add a few points.
It is true that in the USA, you won't get put into jail for protesting the war in Iraq. It is true that you won't even get put into jail for calling the President to step down.
HOWEVER.
Protests in the USA mean nothing. People protest against the war in Iraq? So what? Bush gets re-elected, and boasts proudly how the war has helped the world. In the USA, protests has become a means for citizens to vent their anger and to put them under the impression that they have "done something" for their cause -- but just look at what effect that has.
The "protests" that happened in Tienanmen back then was much, much, more serious than what you normally have in mind for a "protest".
I am not old enough to remember what happened in 1989. I live in Hong Kong, and my parents told me that scary things happened even that Hong Kong wasn't part of the PRC back then. There were riots in Hong Kong, home made bombs scattered around. I couldn't imagine what was happening in the mainland back then -- but I'm pretty sure the situation was worse. (a sidenote: the British colonial govt imposed a curfew in Hong Kong back then, so it's not something funny)
From my personal understanding, the students who protested back then took the protest seriously. They really thought the protests "meant something". They really were asking for change. They really believed in their cause. They demanded change, they demanded action, and they demanded to see it. And a substantial part of the rest of the country sympathized with and supported them. And at that time if there were any people who really believe in the ideologies and all that stuff and pursued the ideology with courage and vigor it was these student protestors.
The unfortunate thing was that the reality in China was far from ideal. Yes, I have no doubts whatsoever that the claims of corruption were substantially true. I have no doubts that corruption is a major problem in China till this day (and nobody is denying that. Former Premier Chu (among other top leaders) has spoken about his determination to fight corruption many times before).
So, what you have is a group of determined students who demanded nothing short of immediate change and action, and the unfortunate reality that the problems were so serious and deeply rooted that nothing short of a revolution at the national scale would solve them*. If the protesters were Americans, they'd have sat there for an afternoon or so and returned home thinking "tough luck we didn't get the message through". But no, the protesters stayed. For days. For weeks. And the situation grew tense. And at one point the government realized it's either another revolution in the national scale (read "devastating") unless they did something about it. And the "tank man" is the perfect illustration that nothing less than what was done would suffice.
It's a sad story. I'm not saying that stomping out your own citizens with tanks is "justified", but there really was no other alternative. In China, revolutions are not glorious. They are seen to be (and rightly so) bloody, endless wars, and cause major disasters to society. If a revolution was really to happen, millions of people would have been killed.
Since that event, everybody learnt a lesson. I'm not sure what the lesson was exactly, but I'm sure as hell that extreme cautions were made to avoid the same thing from happening again. And people from outside encouraging something similar to happen again definitely doesn't help.
*: and believe me, a revolution doesn't always help. A look at Chinese history reveals that. And Chinese are "experts" in revolutions... just take a quick glance at Chinese history if you don't know what I mean. The American revolutions are child's play compared with the scale of revolutions that happened in China.
Slashdot Mirror
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. This is not legal advice.
> I mean, if it is from the original author of the clause in question, why
> would it not have standing, even if clearly different from the exacting
> legalese
Because of the requirement of legal certainty.
Say you have a license agreement (or contract). Both parties read the terms and agree to it. All is happy. Now one day the drafter of the agreement (who isn't one of the parties) comes up and says "nevermind what I wrote, I actually meant *this*!". If this was accepted, then the parties are now bound by terms that they didn't agree to.
Note that (AFAIK) in common law, the court will put some weight on the intention of the parties of the agreement or contract. But this is different from the case where the contract or agreement or license (eg. GPL) was drafted by a third party (eg. RMS). RMS's intentions are not relevant (unless, of course, the parties had RMS's personal interpretations in mind when agreeing to the terms, then maybe that would be relevant)
Anyway, the bottom line is: the law expects you to read and (argh) understand the legalese, and it doesn't expect you to find out what the drafters of the document have to say about their intentions. What you agree to is the terms expressed on the document, not the drafter's intentions. In fact, the drafter's intentions are probably even more irrelevant than the parties not involved in the drafting: (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contra_preferendum )
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. This is not legal advice.
Another disclaimer: the above is a very rough approximation of the law. It is not accurate by any means.
Another disclaimer: I live in a common law jurisdiction, but the law in the US and my jurisdiction can vary.
Can you even dump in one fs format and restore in another?
EditGrid Sync
(Plug: I wrote that...)
At the moment it's more like a backup tool than a fully operational sync tool (it doesn't automatically upload locally modified files). But it's open source, so if you find it somewhat useful but not powerful enough, feel free to check out the code and change things.
And it runs Linux too. (wxPython)
> The binary distros don't really expose you to the underbelly of the OS
Have you tried Debian? Slackware? Good luck in making any of them work if you don't at least have an idea what is going on inside your system.
> as opposed to something arguably more serious, such as illegally running
> gambling operations
> let's remember that they are repressive countries and thus no one should ever
> want to go there until they clean up their act.
Are you serious?
Point one: you're saying that "because we think it's morally wrong, we can arrest you even if you're not a citizen here and committed the act abroad; but you can't arrest me if I ever went to your country because I am a moral person! (nevermind your laws, I do what I think it's right)"
Point two: "We can violate basic human freedoms because we're a "free" country and yours is not!"
I don't know whether this idea is too difficult for you to grasp, but there are different moral perspectives, and yours is not neccessary the only "correct" one. In many parts of the world (including where I live), carrying guns is more "serious" than online gambling. Would you like to get arrested when travelling abroad because you dealt with guns in your home country?
How you got modded insightful escapes me.
This is a racist, flamebait and factually incorrect comment that deserves a -1 Troll/Flamebait.
I won't bite except to say that not all Asians are communists. I don't know which is more sick, the blanket statement you made, or the mod who thought it deserved a +1 insightful.
So what cant the users do without admin privileges? I am very intrigued!
They can't install programs on the system. Which is exactly what you complained of in your Linux setup. If you were able to intall programs, then hey, you ARE an administrator.
In contrast, as an unprivileged user on Linux in my university office PC (where I am writing right now) I can not install ANY program (nope, RPM management requires ROOT), I can not change my monitor resolution (I know it supports more than 1024x768 because I was running Win2000 before at 1280 x 1024) because I need ROOT access to modify the xconf. I can not change the date and time of the system, I can not configure a new printer, I can not use some of the space in the computer hard disk (I have some space allocated in a network drive mounted at my ~/ dir which is the only place I have write access) [I made a directory in the tmp directory which is IN the hard drive and then pointed a link to it, it was a nice workaround].
You can install programs in your home directory. Yeah I know you can't use all the space in the computer hard disk, but that's not a problem of Linux. A normal user without quota can eat up all the space in a partition that he has write acccess. That's a configuration problem. Blame your sysadmin. And if you're complaining about not having write access to the system... well, are you SURE you had write access to C:\program files, C:\windows when you were using a Windows machine? If you did, you were running a user which had (some) administrator priviledges. And that meant that you had the priveldges to fsck up your system, which requires attention from the sysadmin to repair the system.
Date and Time of the system. Two things: 1. If you wanted to change it because the system time was inaccurate, your sysadmin should have used NTP. Why would you want to change it to a wrong time? 2. If I remember correctly, an unpriveledged user on WinXP Pro cannot change the system time. I'm not sure about Win2k but I suspect the behavior is similar. Windows is the same as Linux on this issue.
Resolution. Well if your system was correctly set up, you can change the resolution to whatever is supported by your hardware. Either your system was not correctly set up, or you simply couldn't find out how to switch resolutions, or a high resolution is not supported by linux for your hardware. If in the last case, tough luck. It's not an inherit problem of the way Linux is designed.
For printers, I am not sure how well the stuff is supported on Linux, but AFAIK the infrastructure exists to support printers without having to resort to root every time you configure a new printer. Correct me if I'm wrong here, since I haven't used a printer on Linux for ages.
And as a last point, perhaps some of my points were not really that strong, but I don't think I was trolling. To be honest, I seriously doubt whether you had sufficient sysadmin experience to label somebody as a troll on this topic.
Not saying that those small tools are bad. But they sure aren't the appropriate applications for a Win98 user.....
Assuming the guy has the prerequisite knowledge, managing Linux desktops is much more simpler than managing Windows desktops.
For one, users will and can run as a normal user instead of as root, and no applications will ever break. Try that with Windows, where all users eventually have to have administrator priviledges, and install dozens of spyware and adware on their machines, bringing in dozens of trojans and worms.
Installing and upgrading the systems will be much easier too. Instead of having to go to the machine physically to install/remove applications or change settings, the admin can ssh. (yes I know there are similar ways to manage such things on Windows remotely but it's more work than ssh and apt-get)
As for the user complaining, things will get better after you tell them straight that "it's our policy to use Linux. Live with it, coz we're not going to install MS Office for you" for a few times.
It's not the Desktop Environment. It's the applications.
WWW? Firefox will take out those 64MB easily.
Mail? Same for thunderbird.
Office? OpenOffice will eat 64MB and more. KOffice will load the KDE libs. The GTK2 versions of AbiWord and Gnumeric are not too light either (though they probably depend on the least number of libs). Sure you can use older versions of those apps, but then why not simply use the older windows?
Unless you're using the system mainly to open xterms, and are okay with pine, lynx and vi (or emacs if you will), a 64MB *usable* desktop system on Linux is SLOW SLOW SLOW.
What good is being ACID2 compliant, when they failed to handle some trivial (and common) code?
h tml
http://cuhk.hkoi.org/~sydneyfong/public/operabug.
Opera may claim to be standards compliant, but my collegues have run into some critical bugs in Opera 9 which Opera failed (declined) to fix.
h tml
http://cuhk.hkoi.org/~sydneyfong/public/operabug.
You'll see why this is a frustrating bug to us if you look at my homepage url.
(Note: I've only been on the project for a short while, and the decision to switch to gnumeric as a backend was already made back then. But I'll take "you" in your comment to refer to the project as a whole)
;-p
;-p
For the speed issue, online Javascript apps are inherently slow. If you simply want your spreadsheet to be accessible anywhere on the web, just find a reliable fileserver and whenever you want to open it, just download it and open it with Excel, OO.org Calc, or whatever. When you're done, upload it back. The main advantage of these types of spreadsheets is the network - you can open a sheet and get instant updates (eg. stocks as I've mentioned), or multiple persons editing the same spreadsheet, etc. These things are not possibile with the traditional local office application. (Of course, it is entirely possible to do calculations in javascript, but the point I am making is that online spreadsheets are not to entirely displace Excel)
As mentioned by many others, online apps like this are not (yet) in a position to displace Excel in entirety. A locally run native application has many advantages in speed and flexibility, whereas an online application main selling point is its network capabilities. There is quite a bit of overlap between the two, but I don't think these online apps are going to kill MS Office any time soon.
Actually, I have just obtained a google spreadsheet account, and from what I see, google is also doing the calculations on the backend (I am not sure, correct me if I am wrong). Not to say that whatever google is doing is correct, but hey, they do it that way, we can't be too wrong can we
I guess you are quite right on the scalability issue though. But then, being a relatively new site, we haven't (yet) run into major scalability problems, and would be happy to. We actually made some arrangements to our site after we knew about googlespreadsheets (a couple of hours before the news came on slashdot) just in case some thoughtful submitter added a link to our website when he submitted news about google spreadsheet
While you are waiting for the invitations to Google Spreadsheet, why not try out some existing ones?
EditGrid has been out there for two months, and has cool features such as gnumeric import support (we actually use the core library of Gnumeric as our backend, and therefore support all functions that gnumeric supports), and additional stuff like automatic updated stock price data in a spreadsheet.
[ Disclaimer: I am currently working as a developer of EditGrid, see my "homepage" URL ]
> Treated like shit is treated like shit.
I'm sorry if you were treated like shit by any Chinese persons. I would venture to think that if you didn't treat others like shit and didn't act like an asshole, they wouldn't treat you as such.
> Not only is that not true, it occurs to me that people tend to
> be assholes based on how they view you.
Aha! That's why you're being such an asshole.
LOL.
> Whats happening here is that China has been believing its own
> propaganda too much
Nobody in China really believes in the propaganda. Just like how you wouldn't believe in what your elected president says before the election. Or like how much you'd trust your mass media (you don't trust them to provide accurate information do you?)
> honestly believed the rest of the world would bend over because of the innate
> superiority of their offering and the fact that China is the centre of the world
Are you living in the 19th century? Anybody with some basic knowledge of modern Chinese history knows that the Chinese learnt this lesson the hard way a hundred years ago. Do you seriously believe that anyone at all in China literally uses "zhong gwo" as such?
> I call em like I see em, son. I have no need to claim innocence, since I was never
> guilty in the first place, of whatever crime you seem to be accusing me of.
> Probably one of your infamous "thought crimes".
Sure you never committed any crime, but the GP never said you were. It's just that your claim that all Chinese treat others like shit makes you an ignorant asshole, no matter how you claim "innocence" to an unneccessary insult to at least a fourth of the whole world.
> You mean Taiwanese and Hong Kongese industrialists and investors pumping
> capital into the backward mainland changing the world.
This makes me laugh. I'm live in Hong Kong, and basically a large part of our economy depends on the mainland. It's the mainland who is pumping capital into Hong Kong's economy. From what I know, Taiwan has a similar dependence on the mainland, instead of the other way round.
You still think China is the way it is three decades ago. Sure you're free to believe so, just in case you also that believe the world is flat and angels guide the movement of the stars which revolve around the Earth.
when I read this post....
Mod up
> he is a curious sort of animal able to escape those forms of nature and create
> new configurations of need and choice.
Then you probably do not understand "nature". The more one learns about animals, the less he could think that he is different qualitatively in any way. Yes we may be smarter, but that's probably all.
If only the US people knew how to apply the same reasoning to "the rest of the world"...
Interesting.
Let me get it straight:
1. The Chinese government oppresses their people. No freedoms, no rights.
2. And then demonstrations which should be evidence (at least to some extent!) of freedom of assembly and rights to cricitize government are framed as "uprisings", purportedly evidence that people are trying to overthrow the government, and thus supporting claim #1.
Is it what they're (or the G...GP, which my initial reply was towards) saying?
That logic escapes me.
Thanks.
I am not familiar with Chinese laws, but I have heard that they have a habit of categorizing ad hoc crimes under revolutionary crimes.
Or are they really "uprisings" in the ordinary meaning?
I'd like to know.
Sigh. I'm not saying your argument is wrong, but I would like to add a few points.
It is true that in the USA, you won't get put into jail for protesting the war in Iraq. It is true that you won't even get put into jail for calling the President to step down.
HOWEVER.
Protests in the USA mean nothing. People protest against the war in Iraq? So what? Bush gets re-elected, and boasts proudly how the war has helped the world. In the USA, protests has become a means for citizens to vent their anger and to put them under the impression that they have "done something" for their cause -- but just look at what effect that has.
The "protests" that happened in Tienanmen back then was much, much, more serious than what you normally have in mind for a "protest".
I am not old enough to remember what happened in 1989. I live in Hong Kong, and my parents told me that scary things happened even that Hong Kong wasn't part of the PRC back then. There were riots in Hong Kong, home made bombs scattered around. I couldn't imagine what was happening in the mainland back then -- but I'm pretty sure the situation was worse. (a sidenote: the British colonial govt imposed a curfew in Hong Kong back then, so it's not something funny)
From my personal understanding, the students who protested back then took the protest seriously. They really thought the protests "meant something". They really were asking for change. They really believed in their cause. They demanded change, they demanded action, and they demanded to see it. And a substantial part of the rest of the country sympathized with and supported them. And at that time if there were any people who really believe in the ideologies and all that stuff and pursued the ideology with courage and vigor it was these student protestors.
The unfortunate thing was that the reality in China was far from ideal. Yes, I have no doubts whatsoever that the claims of corruption were substantially true. I have no doubts that corruption is a major problem in China till this day (and nobody is denying that. Former Premier Chu (among other top leaders) has spoken about his determination to fight corruption many times before).
So, what you have is a group of determined students who demanded nothing short of immediate change and action, and the unfortunate reality that the problems were so serious and deeply rooted that nothing short of a revolution at the national scale would solve them*. If the protesters were Americans, they'd have sat there for an afternoon or so and returned home thinking "tough luck we didn't get the message through". But no, the protesters stayed. For days. For weeks. And the situation grew tense. And at one point the government realized it's either another revolution in the national scale (read "devastating") unless they did something about it. And the "tank man" is the perfect illustration that nothing less than what was done would suffice.
It's a sad story. I'm not saying that stomping out your own citizens with tanks is "justified", but there really was no other alternative. In China, revolutions are not glorious. They are seen to be (and rightly so) bloody, endless wars, and cause major disasters to society. If a revolution was really to happen, millions of people would have been killed.
Since that event, everybody learnt a lesson. I'm not sure what the lesson was exactly, but I'm sure as hell that extreme cautions were made to avoid the same thing from happening again. And people from outside encouraging something similar to happen again definitely doesn't help.
*: and believe me, a revolution doesn't always help. A look at Chinese history reveals that. And Chinese are "experts" in revolutions... just take a quick glance at Chinese history if you don't know what I mean. The American revolutions are child's play compared with the scale of revolutions that happened in China.