Besides the obvious user reaction about this, I think it should be pointed out that they do not understand the record industry's position at all. The execs at Sharman Networks believe that the RIAA and their contributors only want to legitimize music distribution on the Internet.
They could not be more wrong. The record industry does not care if the artists get paid. It cares if it occupies the lucrative middle-man position in music distribution. If they were to do this deal with Kazaa, they would be sharing their monopoly rents with another greedy group of execs whould could completely usurp their power over their golden egg laying hen. The music industry wants to be the only distributor of music on and offline and in any alternate universe that remains to be discovered.
Therefore, this plan, however wicked and evil to any reasonable person concerned with freedom, is twice as unpalatable to the monopolists working in the offices of the RIAA or any organization that actively contributes money to it.
Obviously, this also means that the execs at Sharman Networks are an untrustworthy ally in the struggle for freedom against the tyranny of ignorance created by copyright law. While that should not have been a surprise, it sounds like more alternative and easy to use clients for serverless P2P networks need to be created (and fast) as insurance from the potential loss of such an important information distribution system.
Giving consumers a choice of Internet service providers would open the door to more competition, and let people choose services with better privacy and less spam.
You mean they are actually allowing capitalism to exist in the USA? Who would have thought the monopolists would ever allow that to happen?
You know, if this trend continues, US citizens might even have (shudder!) freedom again. And companies might actually have to have good service to keep customers interested.
As it stands, we are all rationed cableTV/modem access the way Russians were rationed vodka and food.
I think this webpage is quite old. The IndiX screenshots are from XFree86 4.0.3. The Netscape screenshots are definitely old, too. How could TDIL have "recently released" this?
Would it not be nice if the Chinese government arbitrarily said: Screw your NDA. It is invalid here. We will break your monopoly.... and then proceeded to publish MS's source code on the web or somewhere similarly convenient? Just imagine the end of embrace and extend. Compatibility would be a reality again.
This would be a much better solution to the antitrust violations than the US government is willing to implement.
China has screwed over corporations this way before. One can always dream that they would do so in such a way that would be beneficial to everyone (well, with the exception of MS employees and stock holders, of course).
Do you mean the same First Amendment that has been whittled away by the COPA, the PATRIOT act, the CTEA (and all other copyright law introduced since 1980), and the RIAA's litigation? When we censor ourselves, is that not more like living in fear of the dreaded thought police?
In addition to this, if US citizens do not watch what they say, they risk being branded terrorists by the US government's new Department of Household Surveillance. How has the First Amendment (or the Fourth, for that matter) protected us from that?
Every government is afraid of criticism, and we are all (everybody on Earth) rapidly losing our ability to criticise.
It looks like we have a couple of rogue programmers trying to get their baby out into the world. They will fail because a large corporation wants to suppress competition (why be a capitalist when you can be a monopolist?).
The sad thing about this is that it precisely violates the Constitutional intent of copyright: To cause more ideas to be circulated and therefore increase the rate of development of new ideas. Copyright should never, under any circumstances, be used to suppress information.
The purpose of copyright is to generate information, not to enrich creators. If some information is deemed not to be profitable, it should be given away for free. Maybe someone else will be able to profit or learn from it.
What you are talking about requires malicious intent. Are you saying that Linux was created out of spite?
Hacker means programmer. Just because the knowledge to create includes the knowledge to destroy does not mean that those who create necessarily destroy. Malicious intent is independent of computer knowldege.
...they probably will support multiple operating systems anyway.
You say that as if it would only be good if the support were exclusive to Linux. As long as the support is not exclusive to MS, life is good. More mainstream support for Linux can only be a good thing.
Where would this business be without strong laws to protect intellectual property and more specifically copyrights? I would not be here; none of us in this room would be here.
One can only wish this were true...
Such beautiful things do not actually happen in this world, do they?
Is the Uncoveror trying to compete with The Onion or something?
Perhaps this would be funny if it were not for the fact that the radio stations do not pay royalties to anybody. Broadcasts have been exempted from royalty payments since they were first included in copyright law. Actually, the RIAA members pay the radio stations to play their songs through promoters. Internet radio does not enjoy this exemption. This is why the internet radio crowd was crying foul recently.
So, while the RIAA cracks down on music file sharing, the billion dollar a year radio industry pays nothing.
If Uncoveror is trying to compete with The Onion, they should write more realistic articles.
While this is only a number of articles on a couple of incidents, there is no question that web based file trading was effectively crushed by record industry litigation just a few years ago. With P2P, people thought they were anonymous.
However, the RIAA has consistently misrepresented the "safe harbour" clause. The intent of the "safe harbour" clause was to prevent ISPs from hosting copyrighted material on the ISPs' own servers. The identity part also had to with information hosted on the ISPs' own servers, but it appears that most judges are buying the RIAA's BS.
Considering this subject is entirely about market control and monopolization, you probably should not get so angry about the market being talked about.
MS and Yahoo! have different monopolistic reasons for keeping third party clients off of their network. With MS, it is easy to guess because they have done these sorts of things before. They just want everyone using their software and to undermine Linux/Free Software in any way they can. Yahoo! probably thinks they can sell more advertising with their client, or they just copy every MS business decision they see.
Either way, the market is exactly what it is about. I do not think it is funny either.
This is just more evidence that the Internet is improving our lives. A science project such as this would have been barely imaginablie before the Internet.
It is also probable that the boy's access to information would have been too limited to compelete such a task without the Internet.
If corporations can be prevented from imprisoning this information for their short term profit, progress will be accelerated exponentially. It is essential that communication be kept free. Great discoveries are never made by old scientists (or should I say married scientists?). Therefore, young people need more access to information.
It seems that the monopoly profit model no longer "promote[s] the Progress of Science and useful Arts". Access to all information needs to be guaranteed for the future for progress. Profits are secondary to access.
Finally, if scientists are not tinkerers, what what is their purpose?
That is $15.3 million they owe the Free Software community and free persons the world over for SCO's lies and blackmail. The Canopy Group should be sued by the Free Software community for all of its assets. This money should be used to set up a foundation to defend the world from these corporate armed robbers.
I am getting really tired of quaterly profits being the excuse to sacrifice long term freedom.
Welcome to a world where you own nothing and owe everything.
Since children are probably born with all of the physical hearing capabilities they will ever have, the video games would increase their ability to interpret the signals sent by their hardware (ears). In other words, they are capable of recognizing more sounds.
From a biological standpoint reproductive success is the only form of success.
That's a different standpoint from most civilised people.
Civilized just means cityized. As soon as there are trade centers where there is a sedentary population engaged in trade and not in survival (hunting, gathering, farming, etc.), a culture is civilized. If you are going to argue advanced or something similar to that, it was only recently (the last 200 years or so) that the British were anything but another semi-developed backwater. England was less advanced than China for the vast majority of history. In 1066, for instance, when William the Conqueror invaded England, China already had multi-stage, ship-to-ship, anti-personnel missiles. England did not have these until the 20th Century. By "civilized" standards, that is an advantage.
However, is it China or England that is still barbaric enough to have a monarch?
Try this simple test: hand out leaflets saying that the people in charge of the country are liars and crooks. Call us if you ever get out of jail. Britain has a monarch with no powers, China has absolute dictatorship instead. Much better!
Consider this: The prison population in the USA is greater than that of China. According to the figures
in this article, the USA, which has a population of 260 million, has 1.85 million prisoners. China has a slightly lower figure or 1.4 million despite having a population of 1.2 billion. It appears that the "free world" may not be so free. According to the article, Britain has one of the highest prison populations in Western Europe. China's rate of imprisonment, by these figures, is approximately 117 people per 100,000. This is as opposed to the USA's 680 and Britain's 125 per 100,000. So, maybe you are not as free as you think.
quantity has nothing whatsoever to do with quality
explan again why you think "reproductive success is the only form of success." Use both sides of the paper.
You quoted a fragment of what I wrote. By changing the context, you have altered the meaning. What I said was:
From a biological standpoint reproductive success is the only form of success.
From a survival standpoint, quantity is an indication of quality. Species that exist in greater numbers do so because they are more capable of survival (well, currently, at least). What I was hinting at but did not wish to go into was that, from an anthropological standpoint, all progress is driven by population pressure. If it were possible for everyone to live in the forest hunting and gathering, everyone would still be doing that. Technology and civilization are adaptations to overpopulation. Therefore, biologically successful populations are forced to be the most technologically advanced in order to create a mechanism for survival for increasing segments of the population not devoted to food production. These societies then rely on subsequent technological advances to keep their massive populations from starving. So, the most densely populated areas are predisposed to have the most rapid technological advancement.
This pattern was demonstrated through most of history. It ended in the middle 1800's when Europe had absorbed enough of other culture's technologies to produce things domestically that were useful. The most important one was probably gunpowder, a Chinese invention that came back to bite the Chinese in the Opium war (an unjustified war that the British fought to preserve their drug trade). England had been selling drugs to China because she was too poor to afford to pay for the tea she wanted in silver. So, once again, what is civilized about a bunch of backwater pirates goi
The simple thing is, and I have not seen this commented about, is that there is a difference between human attacks and virus attacks. With Windoze security, any stupid virus can destroy your system.
With Linux, however, the situation is different. Since privelege escalation is not trivial in Linux/Unix/BSD, viruses can generally only exploit userspace. Privelege escalation usually requires human intervention (or, at least, I have never read or heard of a virus that could escalate its priveleges on a Linux/Unix/BSD system). This means that Linux/Unix/BSD systems that are compromised are cracked by deliberate attackers with the attacked system specifically in mind. This is as opposed to some dumb bot that tries to infect everything on the net. Why there are not terms for the differences in these classes of attacks I cannot say, but there is no doubt that they are different. I will call them direct (human) and indirect (virus/bot).
Viruses, with the exception of superviruses, are also generally written to take advantage of one or two security holes. They cannot be written to contain every historical exploit that may exist in the wild. So, human attackers have possibly thousands of methods at their disposal while a virus has a few. One of the most commonly known military defense tactics is to get your enemy to attack you from one defensible point. Any enemy with thousands of entrances will find a weak one.
Direct attacks are much more powerful than indirect attacks.
The simple conclusion is this: If someone knows what they are doing and wants to get in, they are going to get in. However, it is doubtful that Linux will ever be afflicted to any damaging degree by these silly mass mail viruses that damage your email or even wipe your hard drive.
The weakness of Windoze security is that even indirect attacks work on it.
Apart from anything else, those Chinese are long gone and so is their culture.
I suppose thats why Chinese people are a fifth of the world's population. From a biological standpoint reproductive success is the only form of success.
Because we drink vast quantities of it in hundreds of blends. Go to any super market in Britain and you will be able to choose from any one of several dozen teas from around the world. It is even possible to purchase tea blended for the water in your local area without resorting to specialist tea shops.
And as usual, you English believe that you are the only people on Earth who do what you do. Grocery stores all over Asia have tea sections as well. That is like saying, "Because McDonald's has tea, citizens of the United States know more about tea than anybody else." I am glad to hear that I am arguing with someone who purchases their tea at a supermarket, though. Do you purchase your French wine there as well?
The fact that we have actually developed over those 2000 years, instead of spending our energy deciding which master to bend our knee to, helps.
Hahahaha. You have been watching lots of Kungfu movies, have you not? It just so happens that the English have done a lot of knee bending throughout their history, as well. However, is it China or England that is still barbaric enough to have a monarch? Do not the Irish still live in grass rooved huts?
Precisely what has England developed over the last 2000 years? Is the English language even that old? The Romans definitely considered the English to be barbarians as late as 300AD. England has been feudal until, well, now. This is a cultural stage that ended in China in 221BC with its unification and abolishment of manorialism (which to some degree or another still exists in England today). Then again, you might have some other illogical definition for barbaric.
I am not English, I am Northern Irish. Northern Ireland is the area of highest per-capita tea consumption in Britain.
Well, do you want a cookie? I am quite impressed. That must be a very nice place. However, quantity has nothing whatsoever to do with quality, so your attempt to live vicariously through your locality's reputation is summarily denied.
The simple answer to that is that almost no one does: it is a very small market indeed. The vast majority of tea drunk in Britain is normal, Indian, or blended Indian/Chinese tea. My personal experance is that Kenyan tea is improving greatly and some of the best tea now comes from there.
I reiterate: Any tea that needs milk and/or sugar and/or lemon is not worth drinking. This is not a snobbery thing. It is a purity thing. If you say you like tea, you will not defile it other other contaminants. It is very simple.
But, the important point is that British people can enjoy a range of teas which most countries can only dream of and can enjoy them free from snobs and posers intent on telling them what they are supposed to like.
The same goes for China. You probably could not name more that one or two broad categories of tea. In Chinese, you could name none. You are speaking from a position of ignorance. You probably do not even know the name of the botanist sent to China to find tea leaves. His name was Robert Fortune.
Being a poser is about pretending something to impress people. I am not pretending. I know the history of cultures other than Europe. I drink tea for my own pleasure (usually in private with no witnesses -- so, if i am posing, i must be posing for myself, right?). The accusation of snobbery is something that is harder to explain away. However, the assumption without merit that the British know anything of tea is pure snobbery in and of itself. Therefore, I can be no more of a sno
Slashdot Mirror
Besides the obvious user reaction about this, I think it should be pointed out that they do not understand the record industry's position at all. The execs at Sharman Networks believe that the RIAA and their contributors only want to legitimize music distribution on the Internet.
They could not be more wrong. The record industry does not care if the artists get paid. It cares if it occupies the lucrative middle-man position in music distribution. If they were to do this deal with Kazaa, they would be sharing their monopoly rents with another greedy group of execs whould could completely usurp their power over their golden egg laying hen. The music industry wants to be the only distributor of music on and offline and in any alternate universe that remains to be discovered.
Therefore, this plan, however wicked and evil to any reasonable person concerned with freedom, is twice as unpalatable to the monopolists working in the offices of the RIAA or any organization that actively contributes money to it.
Obviously, this also means that the execs at Sharman Networks are an untrustworthy ally in the struggle for freedom against the tyranny of ignorance created by copyright law. While that should not have been a surprise, it sounds like more alternative and easy to use clients for serverless P2P networks need to be created (and fast) as insurance from the potential loss of such an important information distribution system.
You know, if this trend continues, US citizens might even have (shudder!) freedom again. And companies might actually have to have good service to keep customers interested.
As it stands, we are all rationed cableTV/modem access the way Russians were rationed vodka and food.
Finally, there is an extra charge that I agree with.
Finally, there is something I would not mind paying a little extra for.
Finally, there is an extra charge that is not some Harvard Graduate's way to make me pay for something I should have gotten for free.
I like the idea of computer manufacturers actually being responsible for something.
I thought the Pango project, and therefore Gnome 2.x, already supported Devanagari. If that is true, why is this legacy Gnome 1.x project being announced now?
I think this webpage is quite old. The IndiX screenshots are from XFree86 4.0.3. The Netscape screenshots are definitely old, too. How could TDIL have "recently released" this?
Would it not be nice if the Chinese government arbitrarily said: Screw your NDA. It is invalid here. We will break your monopoly. ... and then proceeded to publish MS's source code on the web or somewhere similarly convenient? Just imagine the end of embrace and extend. Compatibility would be a reality again.
This would be a much better solution to the antitrust violations than the US government is willing to implement.
China has screwed over corporations this way before. One can always dream that they would do so in such a way that would be beneficial to everyone (well, with the exception of MS employees and stock holders, of course).
Do you mean the same First Amendment that has been whittled away by the COPA, the PATRIOT act, the CTEA (and all other copyright law introduced since 1980), and the RIAA's litigation? When we censor ourselves, is that not more like living in fear of the dreaded thought police?
In addition to this, if US citizens do not watch what they say, they risk being branded terrorists by the US government's new Department of Household Surveillance. How has the First Amendment (or the Fourth, for that matter) protected us from that?
Every government is afraid of criticism, and we are all (everybody on Earth) rapidly losing our ability to criticise.
It looks like we have a couple of rogue programmers trying to get their baby out into the world. They will fail because a large corporation wants to suppress competition (why be a capitalist when you can be a monopolist?).
The sad thing about this is that it precisely violates the Constitutional intent of copyright: To cause more ideas to be circulated and therefore increase the rate of development of new ideas. Copyright should never, under any circumstances, be used to suppress information.
The purpose of copyright is to generate information, not to enrich creators. If some information is deemed not to be profitable, it should be given away for free. Maybe someone else will be able to profit or learn from it.
Hacker != cracker
What you are talking about requires malicious intent. Are you saying that Linux was created out of spite?
Hacker means programmer. Just because the knowledge to create includes the knowledge to destroy does not mean that those who create necessarily destroy. Malicious intent is independent of computer knowldege.
I thought Bill Gates got a cop fired for giving him a ticket a few years back. Sounds just like his MO to me...
Could this not be used on the living as well? It would bring us closer to that frightening world we saw in Gattica.
Should we be creating identification systems that can ID people with scraps of DNA?
UPDATE: The Onion did have an article like this. Here is an example of what good bogus journalism is about. I got it from this post.
Hilary Rosen:
One can only wish this were true...Such beautiful things do not actually happen in this world, do they?
Is the Uncoveror trying to compete with The Onion or something?
Perhaps this would be funny if it were not for the fact that the radio stations do not pay royalties to anybody. Broadcasts have been exempted from royalty payments since they were first included in copyright law. Actually, the RIAA members pay the radio stations to play their songs through promoters. Internet radio does not enjoy this exemption. This is why the internet radio crowd was crying foul recently.
So, while the RIAA cracks down on music file sharing, the billion dollar a year radio industry pays nothing.
If Uncoveror is trying to compete with The Onion, they should write more realistic articles.
"I tell it the way I remember it, and that's not the way it happened."
(This new sig is from this article, too :)
The article on Lawmeme conveniently forgets the fact that the last round of lawsuits effectively stopped web based file trading.
While this is only a number of articles on a couple of incidents, there is no question that web based file trading was effectively crushed by record industry litigation just a few years ago. With P2P, people thought they were anonymous.
However, the RIAA has consistently misrepresented the "safe harbour" clause. The intent of the "safe harbour" clause was to prevent ISPs from hosting copyrighted material on the ISPs' own servers. The identity part also had to with information hosted on the ISPs' own servers, but it appears that most judges are buying the RIAA's BS.
Welcome back to the Dark Ages.
Considering this subject is entirely about market control and monopolization, you probably should not get so angry about the market being talked about.
MS and Yahoo! have different monopolistic reasons for keeping third party clients off of their network. With MS, it is easy to guess because they have done these sorts of things before. They just want everyone using their software and to undermine Linux/Free Software in any way they can. Yahoo! probably thinks they can sell more advertising with their client, or they just copy every MS business decision they see.
Either way, the market is exactly what it is about. I do not think it is funny either.
This is just more evidence that the Internet is improving our lives. A science project such as this would have been barely imaginablie before the Internet.
It is also probable that the boy's access to information would have been too limited to compelete such a task without the Internet.
If corporations can be prevented from imprisoning this information for their short term profit, progress will be accelerated exponentially. It is essential that communication be kept free. Great discoveries are never made by old scientists (or should I say married scientists?). Therefore, young people need more access to information.
It seems that the monopoly profit model no longer "promote[s] the Progress of Science and useful Arts". Access to all information needs to be guaranteed for the future for progress. Profits are secondary to access.
Finally, if scientists are not tinkerers, what what is their purpose?
That is $15.3 million they owe the Free Software community and free persons the world over for SCO's lies and blackmail. The Canopy Group should be sued by the Free Software community for all of its assets. This money should be used to set up a foundation to defend the world from these corporate armed robbers.
I am getting really tired of quaterly profits being the excuse to sacrifice long term freedom.
Welcome to a world where you own nothing and owe everything.
$12.98?!!
How about $3.
That is about what they are worth. Anything higher than $5 is a monopoly rent.
Who are they kidding?
That headline should probably read:
Since children are probably born with all of the physical hearing capabilities they will ever have, the video games would increase their ability to interpret the signals sent by their hardware (ears). In other words, they are capable of recognizing more sounds.Civilized just means cityized. As soon as there are trade centers where there is a sedentary population engaged in trade and not in survival (hunting, gathering, farming, etc.), a culture is civilized. If you are going to argue advanced or something similar to that, it was only recently (the last 200 years or so) that the British were anything but another semi-developed backwater. England was less advanced than China for the vast majority of history. In 1066, for instance, when William the Conqueror invaded England, China already had multi-stage, ship-to-ship, anti-personnel missiles. England did not have these until the 20th Century. By "civilized" standards, that is an advantage.
Consider this: The prison population in the USA is greater than that of China. According to the figures in this article, the USA, which has a population of 260 million, has 1.85 million prisoners. China has a slightly lower figure or 1.4 million despite having a population of 1.2 billion. It appears that the "free world" may not be so free. According to the article, Britain has one of the highest prison populations in Western Europe. China's rate of imprisonment, by these figures, is approximately 117 people per 100,000. This is as opposed to the USA's 680 and Britain's 125 per 100,000. So, maybe you are not as free as you think.
You quoted a fragment of what I wrote. By changing the context, you have altered the meaning. What I said was:
From a survival standpoint, quantity is an indication of quality. Species that exist in greater numbers do so because they are more capable of survival (well, currently, at least). What I was hinting at but did not wish to go into was that, from an anthropological standpoint, all progress is driven by population pressure. If it were possible for everyone to live in the forest hunting and gathering, everyone would still be doing that. Technology and civilization are adaptations to overpopulation. Therefore, biologically successful populations are forced to be the most technologically advanced in order to create a mechanism for survival for increasing segments of the population not devoted to food production. These societies then rely on subsequent technological advances to keep their massive populations from starving. So, the most densely populated areas are predisposed to have the most rapid technological advancement.
This pattern was demonstrated through most of history. It ended in the middle 1800's when Europe had absorbed enough of other culture's technologies to produce things domestically that were useful. The most important one was probably gunpowder, a Chinese invention that came back to bite the Chinese in the Opium war (an unjustified war that the British fought to preserve their drug trade). England had been selling drugs to China because she was too poor to afford to pay for the tea she wanted in silver. So, once again, what is civilized about a bunch of backwater pirates goi
The simple thing is, and I have not seen this commented about, is that there is a difference between human attacks and virus attacks. With Windoze security, any stupid virus can destroy your system.
With Linux, however, the situation is different. Since privelege escalation is not trivial in Linux/Unix/BSD, viruses can generally only exploit userspace. Privelege escalation usually requires human intervention (or, at least, I have never read or heard of a virus that could escalate its priveleges on a Linux/Unix/BSD system). This means that Linux/Unix/BSD systems that are compromised are cracked by deliberate attackers with the attacked system specifically in mind. This is as opposed to some dumb bot that tries to infect everything on the net. Why there are not terms for the differences in these classes of attacks I cannot say, but there is no doubt that they are different. I will call them direct (human) and indirect (virus/bot).
Viruses, with the exception of superviruses, are also generally written to take advantage of one or two security holes. They cannot be written to contain every historical exploit that may exist in the wild. So, human attackers have possibly thousands of methods at their disposal while a virus has a few. One of the most commonly known military defense tactics is to get your enemy to attack you from one defensible point. Any enemy with thousands of entrances will find a weak one. Direct attacks are much more powerful than indirect attacks.
The simple conclusion is this: If someone knows what they are doing and wants to get in, they are going to get in. However, it is doubtful that Linux will ever be afflicted to any damaging degree by these silly mass mail viruses that damage your email or even wipe your hard drive.
The weakness of Windoze security is that even indirect attacks work on it.
I suppose thats why Chinese people are a fifth of the world's population. From a biological standpoint reproductive success is the only form of success.
And as usual, you English believe that you are the only people on Earth who do what you do. Grocery stores all over Asia have tea sections as well. That is like saying, "Because McDonald's has tea, citizens of the United States know more about tea than anybody else." I am glad to hear that I am arguing with someone who purchases their tea at a supermarket, though. Do you purchase your French wine there as well?
Hahahaha. You have been watching lots of Kungfu movies, have you not? It just so happens that the English have done a lot of knee bending throughout their history, as well. However, is it China or England that is still barbaric enough to have a monarch? Do not the Irish still live in grass rooved huts?
Precisely what has England developed over the last 2000 years? Is the English language even that old? The Romans definitely considered the English to be barbarians as late as 300AD. England has been feudal until, well, now. This is a cultural stage that ended in China in 221BC with its unification and abolishment of manorialism (which to some degree or another still exists in England today). Then again, you might have some other illogical definition for barbaric.
Well, do you want a cookie? I am quite impressed. That must be a very nice place. However, quantity has nothing whatsoever to do with quality, so your attempt to live vicariously through your locality's reputation is summarily denied.
I reiterate: Any tea that needs milk and/or sugar and/or lemon is not worth drinking. This is not a snobbery thing. It is a purity thing. If you say you like tea, you will not defile it other other contaminants. It is very simple.
The same goes for China. You probably could not name more that one or two broad categories of tea. In Chinese, you could name none. You are speaking from a position of ignorance. You probably do not even know the name of the botanist sent to China to find tea leaves. His name was Robert Fortune.
Being a poser is about pretending something to impress people. I am not pretending. I know the history of cultures other than Europe. I drink tea for my own pleasure (usually in private with no witnesses -- so, if i am posing, i must be posing for myself, right?). The accusation of snobbery is something that is harder to explain away. However, the assumption without merit that the British know anything of tea is pure snobbery in and of itself. Therefore, I can be no more of a sno