Excel had many problems regarding accuracy. That's why you don't see experts in statistics using it. Right now, it looks as though the professional statistics community has flocked to R, which is open source BTW (this does not regard other groups of heavy users of statistics, albeit in a limited way, such as medical doctors). There are papers about this, google and ye shall find.
No, and that is kind of the point. No, the US does not want two nations famous for their censorship of the Internet to have any more control then they already do.
The problem is that whole attitude you've just displayed of "we are righteous, fair and unblemished, and everybody should just do as we say, because we're so right", when in fact, it's all just alienation, lack of self-critique, and cultural isolation. Because, looking at the US from the outside, and looking at things like the Patriot Act, and Guantanamo, I'm not so sure China is so terrible by comparison. Sure, you don't have a single party regime. You have a two party regime!:-) Wow:-) Oh, and you're brain washed by a bad educational system and by violent video-games and movies that have portrayed large groups of brown-skinned individuals as hate-mongers and evil-doers, to be terminated by Soldier Hero. That, my friend, is called Indoctrination. And you had it in China. And you have it in the US. Face it. Look at it. Admit it.
The argument that the US invented the internet is riculous, and therefore, it has "more rights over it" is ridiculous. It is like saying all doctors can't use the scalpel because some guy, from some country, invented it.
Consider that neither do the peoples of the world want a crucial technology like the internet to be in the hands of a nation that arrests journalists that don't kneel to the government, that schemes against and slanders the UN on a periodic basis, and does that as a policy, that promotes pre-emptive wars based on lies, disrespects basic human rights (including kidnapping people abroad, turning them to torture, and abusing prsioners), and that creates some ill-begotten evil thing like the Patriot Act, etc. The fact the Bush administration is worried about this issue already shows which side to choose.
The US is widely mistrusted, for all the right reasons. For instance, if you read the 2002 World Bank World Survey on Trust, conducted with 36,000 people around the world, you'll find that people trust leaders of the U.N. much more than they trust the leaders of the U.S. Also, in 2003, Time Magazine conducted a poll with more than 700,000 responses with the question: "who poses the greatest threat to world peace?" Options were: 1) North Korea; 2) Iraq; 3) The United States. The US was the answer chosen by 86%. (See here). In another international poll, in 2003, the BBC found that 60% of the people "had a very unfavourable, or fairly unfavourable attitude towards the American President." And more up to date, two new world polls from 2005 show the same phenomenom: A poll from here and here show thats the U.S. is "broadly disliked." The last poll, (see here and here), with 23 countries and 23,000 interviewed during 2004, shows that the U.S. comes out last in "positive contribution". And we're not even talking about countries that nest the majority of terrorists. Can you imagine what those feelings are in, say, the Middle East?
The US has a bad reputation, image, and track record. And North-Americans wonder "why"? How about playing along with others, respecting global decisions, promoting health and education (instead of war) and promoting democracy through peace and social change, the only everlasting change. The internet is a crucial asset to the 21st century, and like the printing machines, it's a technology that belongs to mankind. Sorry. Live with it.
Also, MySQL (I know less about RedHat and JBoss) has dual licensing, and I'm sure their product revenues come entirely from the non-GPL side of the business.
Exactly. And RedHat has per-seat licensing. JBoss is licensed under the LGPL. Their business model is support, which also means that the product (last I checked) is not well documented unless you buy support. I can see where they're coming from, but it's pretty obvious that they're defrauding the "Free Software must have Free Documentation" dictum.
So, at the end of the day, it remains to be demonstrated that these enterprises can make money in the Free Software way as defined by the FSF (congruent to the BSD license, BTW - both define the same freeedoms). It's not clear that the GPL can survive in a business envrionment, except if that is taken as meaning "dual-licensing." Which is just a proprietary license. Of course, if you're in the hardware business, like IBM, then the GPL might be non-threatening for your business. Otherwise, if has to either: 1) totally ocupy the ecological niche and replace the proprietary product; 2) or...well, there is no other option for the GPL. We can see how hard it has been for GNU/Linux to replace Microsoft in the business environment. "It's the workflow, stupid."
I believe the BSD license or the LGPL can prosper under an open source and business environment by allowing themselves to mingle with existing proprietary software.
It's a horrible installer, non-intutive. It ate away some BSD aprtition (I'm glad it was an experimental HD) because it behaves like a bully./Me/ thinks old Debian installer was much more flexible (I'm not commenting on hardware detection, of course)
Not really a problem. You're being overly dramatic here. If Debian sinks, people jump on the Ubuntu ship. Code is there. Code doesn't die. Actually, it's not Ubuntu's fault, you know, but Debian has proven itself to be a huge slow boat, because of their design as an organization. I believe the most fundamental flaw in its design was granting every 'comitter' or 'packager', or 'maintainer' (a better term) 'developer' status. This created a situation where people who aren't really that knowledgeable a right to voice their opinion, and that brings about that halt-to-a-grind phenomenom we see every year. And consider that Debian 'developers' do not even tread in more dangerous paths such as protocols, like the BSD developers do. I think the BSDs have achieved a much better model of organization. Part of Ubuntu's success is reshaping the organization, fixed releases being part of that.
Don't blame the builder if he doesn't have the tools. The real problem is that the field of software development is just too young for the sort of meaningful and useful standards and practices needed for solid engineering to have been developed.
Bull. Eiffel has been available for quite some time. Ocaml was used to formally verify the fly-by-wire system in an Airbus plane. A story on Usenet goes that once someone wrote software in Haskell for boss, boss says "great you wrote a spec." Employee says "no, that's code, it's Haskell." You already have stuff available, success stories, benchmarks (look at Ocaml vs gcc, Bigloo Scheme with gcc, compare SML with Java, etc). However, it's unfortunate that the open source community is such a closed-minded one, sticking to old ways (actually, Perl people got to liking Haskell, because of Perl 6).
The problem is education. Formal methods is hard. At college, most of the time it's an optional class, and late in the curriculum, after people are already coding like Linux hackers for 2 years (and remember, regression tests only catch 80% of the bugs tops, or so said the professor). And Algol-derived languages sure don't help.
There are many ways of trying to understand programs. People often rely too much on one way, which is called ``debugging'' and consists of running a partly-understood program to see if it does what you expected. Another way, which ML advocates, is to install some means of understanding in the very programs themselves.
-- Robin Milner in The LittleMLer
The "standard", non-functional programming languages like Fortran, Ada, and C are the bastard progeny of the coupling between a pseudo-mathematical notation and a von Neumann-style random access memory (RAM).
-- Henry Baker in Linear Logic and Permutation Stacks--The Forth Shall Be First
My impression is that they're more compliant with Unix specs (as in OpenGroup). Some BSD developers have a thorough understanding that programming in C is dangerous and have implemented savefty nets around that fact (see Exploit Mitigation Techniques, see a recent discussion on Kernel Trap about OpenBSD's memory allocation:http://kerneltrap.org/node/5584)
Do you really want software made for medical devices, airspace industry or nuclear industry, or the military, done with that philosophy ? I guess it is to bad that one of the main developers of operating systems today thinks that way.
Part of the problem lies in this overuse of C/C++ software and Algol-derived languages. Better languages are available today. Part of the solution is to move away from this dependency of C, without necessarily dropping C. An example is how OCaml was used to formaly verify the C code in the Airbus A340 fly-by-wire system: http://www.astree.ens.fr/ The Linux kernel seems to me like kid's play compared to an Airbus. In hard engineering disciplines, you are not entitled to an "opinion" like Torvald's.
Specs are for real. Lack of formal design of software has lead to the current situation of where a whole industry revolves around bugs. Increase in the use of formal methods is expected to rise, and Microsoft already has hired quite a few smart people (but they have that huge backwards-compatibility problem).
Or how about the mid level Calculus course I took that was taught by a TA who could speak little english, but perfect Russian and often lapsed into it along with weird non-traditional symbols. She routinely exclaimed to us that we were stupid and she should not be teaching a "remedial" class
Ah...Russian math professors. Last week I was having a chat with a guy with a Phd in Physics, and he was telling me about his Calculus class. When people usually use 2 books for calculus, his class was plowing through an advanced 4-volume text (and this was not advanced calculus). This professor, he said, was very sarcastic: "In Russia, this problem is soo easy, we give it to elephants in the Circus, and they'll pick a number with the right answer." The guy said he used to sweat and have nighmares.:-) Surely, his class average was lower than the other students using standard texts. But his class probably was better prepared for what was to come. Back in the days of the USSR, Mir Publication (the official soviet book press) used to sell great translated advanced mathematics books for dirt cheap. I wonder if Mir books have copyright ?
Test of endurance is one thing. Another is having a class with a professor who publishes research in Number Theory, but that stutters and whose handwriting is so bad, you can hardly read it on the blackboard. What was that he wanted you to prove? 2^75-2^3 is odd? Is that 2^78-2^8 ?
Or having TAs in Calculus who don't care about preparing for a class, because they're neck deep in their thesis, and actually hate teaching. Official number of recommended excercises for exam 2 (you have 3 in the semester): 840-plus. Watch engineering students ask amazingly stupid questions (because they learn by memorizing the type of exercise, not by understanding the math). Then 57% pass Calculus 2.
The cruel truth is: engineering departments *want* a high failure rate, so the market isn't overflowed with engineers.
That reminds me of when I bough some CDs by John Cage, because I wanted to learn what it was about. When I mentioned that to a musician I know, that was his answer: "don't be a fuckwit."
HOWEVER, not all musical composition theory sucks. The story goes that Miles Davis' Kind of Blue is based on George Russel's theory (Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization) http://www.georgerussell.com/, and that's a really good record.
Yet another marketing move from Wolfram. And still, nothing changes the fact the Mathematica had a history of bugs (because they used C throughout, instead of writing a kernel in C and then writing a language on top of that). Also, nothing changes the fact the integration with Mathematica produce "weird" results, very different than what you find "by hand." Maple and Maxima produce results that aren't weird. Graphics are prettier in Mathematica. So what? My university mathematics department sticks to Maple, and so do I. No amount of self-promotion by Stephen Wolfram will change that.
You're absoultely right. The USA has a long history of supporting dictators, thugs, assassins and human rights violators - of which I think Bin Laden is probably the best example.
I have read all sorts of Weirdo Logic on the justification for the removal of civil liberties and the so-called War-for-Oil, sorry, I meant the War-On-Terrorism, but justifying Chinese Human Rights violations with the WOT, I had never read that. Very original Bizarro World View.
In Guantanamo Bay, you get a prayer rug and warm, filling meals compliant with your religion. You get clean, running water and state-of-the-art plumbing. You can spit, pee, and throw feces at the guards and not get punished. You are also allowed to read your choice of religious literature. You are never tortured, and have access to ACLU Lawyers. You get all this even though you fought against American troops and you didn't wear a uniform and you didn't fight in the name of any country that exists today.
Yes, isn't Guantanamo great ? I wonder when Disney will have a them park there, with "let's all wear orange and walk in chains" fun ! In Guantanamo, you also get: to be incarcerated without due process, they get to throw the Holy Koran in the toilet for your amusement, or, if you get really lucky or you're a tough guy, they fly you to Egypt or somewhere else, where you can finally get tortured without ACLU lawyers!!
Yes, what a great freedom-lovin' country the USA is!
I don't think the word is "ego-centric", I think it's "ignorant." The school system is definetely a disaster when it comes to History and Geography, it shows up on surveys all the time. In History, they're kind of brainwashed. For instance, I don't think they learn much about the Eastern block. I don't think they won't read the Communist Manifesto in High School, because it's "Evil" and "forbidden." Simple facts like the rise of the USA in economic strenght and the relation to that to WWII is utterly missed (it's just Gawd's Work, ya know.) It just suits the Powers That Be that the general population be so ignorant and smug in Consumerism. That way, they don't have to think about why they wage pre-emptive wars and everybody considers them warmongers, or why they consume 45% of the world's natural resource, or why their vice-president has ties to oil corporations. If you raise those issues, they just call you "terrorist" (it used to be "communist", but they can't use that one anymore), and that's that.
1) Don't operate in China 2) Refuse to cooperate with the police 3) Demand veto rights on cooperation with the police 4) Cooperate
You miss the point of the story. The point is not that Yahoo! has to cooperate. The point is that Yahoo! has to cooperate. The story is how China is ruthless and backwards in human rights. Is that the best environment to trade in? Maybe. Until the State decides, out of the blue, that they might just seize your factory.
Yes, I did RTFA and the fact that The Party can claim "divulging state secrets" is, in my view, nothing less than a symptom for the lack of transparency in their political ways. In other words, it's a totalitarian state.
Shi Tao Aged 37, Shi worked for the daily Dangdai Shang Bao (Contemporary Business News). He was convicted on 30 April of sending foreign-based websites the text of an internal message which the authorities had sent to his newspaper warning journalists of the dangers of social destabilisation and risks resulting from the return of certain dissidents on the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.
Chinese state security insisted during the trial that the message was "Jue Mi" (top secret). Shi admitted sending it out by e-mail but disputed that it was a secret document. He is still being held in a prison in Changsha to which he was sent after his arrest in the northeastern city of Taiyuan on 24 November 2004.
Slashdot Mirror
AbiWord has a plug-in architecture. That's really promising, IMHO.
Excel had many problems regarding accuracy. That's why you don't see experts in statistics using it. Right now, it looks as though the professional statistics community has flocked to R, which is open source BTW (this does not regard other groups of heavy users of statistics, albeit in a limited way, such as medical doctors).
There are papers about this, google and ye shall find.
http://homepage.mac.com/rossetantoine/osirix/Index 2.html
No, and that is kind of the point. No, the US does not want two nations famous for their censorship of the Internet to have any more control then they already do.
:-) Wow :-) Oh, and you're brain washed by a bad educational system and by violent video-games and movies that have portrayed large groups of brown-skinned individuals as hate-mongers and evil-doers, to be terminated by Soldier Hero. That, my friend, is called Indoctrination. And you had it in China. And you have it in the US. Face it. Look at it. Admit it.
The problem is that whole attitude you've just displayed of "we are righteous, fair and unblemished, and everybody should just do as we say, because we're so right", when in fact, it's all just alienation, lack of self-critique, and cultural isolation. Because, looking at the US from the outside, and looking at things like the Patriot Act, and Guantanamo, I'm not so sure China is so terrible by comparison. Sure, you don't have a single party regime. You have a two party regime!
The argument that the US invented the internet is riculous, and therefore, it has "more rights over it" is ridiculous. It is like saying all doctors can't use the scalpel because some guy, from some country, invented it.
Consider that neither do the peoples of the world want a crucial technology like the internet to be in the hands of a nation that arrests journalists that don't kneel to the government, that schemes against and slanders the UN on a periodic basis, and does that as a policy, that promotes pre-emptive wars based on lies, disrespects basic human rights (including kidnapping people abroad, turning them to torture, and abusing prsioners), and that creates some ill-begotten evil thing like the Patriot Act, etc. The fact the Bush administration is worried about this issue already shows which side to choose.
The US is widely mistrusted, for all the right reasons. For instance, if you read the 2002 World Bank World Survey on Trust, conducted with 36,000 people around the world, you'll find that people trust leaders of the U.N. much more than they trust the leaders of the U.S.
Also, in 2003, Time Magazine conducted a poll with more than 700,000 responses with the question: "who poses the greatest threat to world peace?" Options were: 1) North Korea; 2) Iraq; 3) The United States. The US was the answer chosen by 86%. (See here).
In another international poll, in 2003, the BBC found that 60% of the people "had a very unfavourable, or fairly unfavourable attitude towards the American President."
And more up to date, two new world polls from 2005 show the same phenomenom: A poll from here and here show thats the U.S. is "broadly disliked." The last poll, (see here and here), with 23 countries and 23,000 interviewed during 2004, shows that the U.S. comes out last in "positive contribution". And we're not even talking about countries that nest the majority of terrorists. Can you imagine what those feelings are in, say, the Middle East?
The US has a bad reputation, image, and track record. And North-Americans wonder "why"? How about playing along with others, respecting global decisions, promoting health and education (instead of war) and promoting democracy through peace and social change, the only everlasting change. The internet is a crucial asset to the 21st century, and like the printing machines, it's a technology that belongs to mankind. Sorry. Live with it.
It probably saved a lot of dough for publishing houses of mathematics books, such as Springer Verlag, Kluwer and Birkhäuser.
Also, MySQL (I know less about RedHat and JBoss) has dual licensing, and I'm sure their product revenues come entirely from the non-GPL side of the business.
Exactly. And RedHat has per-seat licensing. JBoss is licensed under the LGPL. Their business model is support, which also means that the product (last I checked) is not well documented unless you buy support. I can see where they're coming from, but it's pretty obvious that they're defrauding the "Free Software must have Free Documentation" dictum.
So, at the end of the day, it remains to be demonstrated that these enterprises can make money in the Free Software way as defined by the FSF (congruent to the BSD license, BTW - both define the same freeedoms). It's not clear that the GPL can survive in a business envrionment, except if that is taken as meaning "dual-licensing." Which is just a proprietary license. Of course, if you're in the hardware business, like IBM, then the GPL might be non-threatening for your business. Otherwise, if has to either: 1) totally ocupy the ecological niche and replace the proprietary product; 2) or...well, there is no other option for the GPL. We can see how hard it has been for GNU/Linux to replace Microsoft in the business environment. "It's the workflow, stupid."
I believe the BSD license or the LGPL can prosper under an open source and business environment by allowing themselves to mingle with existing proprietary software.
The operating system is more than just the kernel
The funny thing is Andrew Tanenbaum doesn't agree with you (or Stallman).
It's a horrible installer, non-intutive. It ate away some BSD aprtition (I'm glad it was an experimental HD) because it behaves like a bully. /Me/ thinks old Debian installer was much more flexible (I'm not commenting on hardware detection, of course)
Not really a problem. You're being overly dramatic here. If Debian sinks, people jump on the Ubuntu ship. Code is there. Code doesn't die.
Actually, it's not Ubuntu's fault, you know, but Debian has proven itself to be a huge slow boat, because of their design as an organization.
I believe the most fundamental flaw in its design was granting every 'comitter' or 'packager', or 'maintainer' (a better term) 'developer' status. This created a situation where people who aren't really that knowledgeable a right to voice their opinion, and that brings about that halt-to-a-grind phenomenom we see every year. And consider that Debian 'developers' do not even tread in more dangerous paths such as protocols, like the BSD developers do. I think the BSDs have achieved a much better model of organization. Part of Ubuntu's success is reshaping the organization, fixed releases being part of that.
Don't blame the builder if he doesn't have the tools. The real problem is that the field of software development is just too young for the sort of meaningful and useful standards and practices needed for solid engineering to have been developed.
Bull. Eiffel has been available for quite some time. Ocaml was used to formally verify the fly-by-wire system in an Airbus plane. A story on Usenet goes that once someone wrote software in Haskell for boss, boss says "great you wrote a spec." Employee says "no, that's code, it's Haskell." You already have stuff available, success stories, benchmarks (look at Ocaml vs gcc, Bigloo Scheme with gcc, compare SML with Java, etc). However, it's unfortunate that the open source community is such a closed-minded one, sticking to old ways (actually, Perl people got to liking Haskell, because of Perl 6).
The problem is education. Formal methods is hard. At college, most of the time it's an optional class, and late in the curriculum, after people are already coding like Linux hackers for 2 years (and remember, regression tests only catch 80% of the bugs tops, or so said the professor). And Algol-derived languages sure don't help.
-- Robin Milner in
The LittleMLer
-- Henry Baker in
Linear Logic and Permutation Stacks--The Forth Shall Be First
My impression is that they're more compliant with Unix specs (as in OpenGroup). :http://kerneltrap.org/node/5584)
Some BSD developers have a thorough understanding that programming in C is dangerous and have implemented savefty nets around that fact (see Exploit Mitigation Techniques, see a recent discussion on Kernel Trap about OpenBSD's memory allocation
Do you really want software made for medical devices, airspace industry or nuclear industry, or the military, done with that philosophy ? I guess it is to bad that one of the main developers of operating systems today thinks that way.
Part of the problem lies in this overuse of C/C++ software and Algol-derived languages. Better languages are available today. Part of the solution is to move away from this dependency of C, without necessarily dropping C. An example is how OCaml was used to formaly verify the C code in the Airbus A340 fly-by-wire system: http://www.astree.ens.fr/ The Linux kernel seems to me like kid's play compared to an Airbus. In hard engineering disciplines, you are not entitled to an "opinion" like Torvald's.
Specs are for real. Lack of formal design of software has lead to the current situation of where a whole industry revolves around bugs. Increase in the use of formal methods is expected to rise, and Microsoft already has hired quite a few smart people (but they have that huge backwards-compatibility problem).
Or how about the mid level Calculus course I took that was taught by a TA who could speak little english, but perfect Russian and often lapsed into it along with weird non-traditional symbols. She routinely exclaimed to us that we were stupid and she should not be teaching a "remedial" class
:-) Surely, his class average was lower than the other students using standard texts. But his class probably was better prepared for what was to come.
Ah...Russian math professors. Last week I was having a chat with a guy with a Phd in Physics, and he was telling me about his Calculus class. When people usually use 2 books for calculus, his class was plowing through an advanced 4-volume text (and this was not advanced calculus). This professor, he said, was very sarcastic: "In Russia, this problem is soo easy, we give it to elephants in the Circus, and they'll pick a number with the right answer." The guy said he used to sweat and have nighmares.
Back in the days of the USSR, Mir Publication (the official soviet book press) used to sell great translated advanced mathematics books for dirt cheap. I wonder if Mir books have copyright ?
Test of endurance is one thing. Another is having a class with a professor who publishes research in Number Theory, but that stutters and whose handwriting is so bad, you can hardly read it on the blackboard. What was that he wanted you to prove? 2^75-2^3 is odd? Is that 2^78-2^8 ?
Or having TAs in Calculus who don't care about preparing for a class, because they're neck deep in their thesis, and actually hate teaching. Official number of recommended excercises for exam 2 (you have 3 in the semester): 840-plus. Watch engineering students ask amazingly stupid questions (because they learn by memorizing the type of exercise, not by understanding the math). Then 57% pass Calculus 2.
The cruel truth is: engineering departments *want* a high failure rate, so the market isn't overflowed with engineers.
That reminds me of when I bough some CDs by John Cage, because I wanted to learn what it was about.
When I mentioned that to a musician I know, that was his answer: "don't be a fuckwit."
HOWEVER, not all musical composition theory sucks. The story goes that Miles Davis' Kind of Blue is based on George Russel's theory (Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization) http://www.georgerussell.com/, and that's a really good record.
I much prefer Miles Davis to Stephen Wolfram.
Yet another marketing move from Wolfram.
And still, nothing changes the fact the Mathematica had a history of bugs (because they used C throughout, instead of writing a kernel in C and then writing a language on top of that).
Also, nothing changes the fact the integration with Mathematica produce "weird" results, very different than what you find "by hand." Maple and Maxima produce results that aren't weird.
Graphics are prettier in Mathematica. So what?
My university mathematics department sticks to Maple, and so do I. No amount of self-promotion by Stephen Wolfram will change that.
You're absoultely right. The USA has a long history of supporting dictators, thugs, assassins and human rights violators - of which I think Bin Laden is probably the best example.
I have read all sorts of Weirdo Logic on the justification for the removal of civil liberties and the so-called War-for-Oil, sorry, I meant the War-On-Terrorism, but justifying Chinese Human Rights violations with the WOT, I had never read that. Very original Bizarro World View.
In Guantanamo Bay, you get a prayer rug and warm, filling meals compliant with your religion. You get clean, running water and state-of-the-art plumbing. You can spit, pee, and throw feces at the guards and not get punished. You are also allowed to read your choice of religious literature. You are never tortured, and have access to ACLU Lawyers. You get all this even though you fought against American troops and you didn't wear a uniform and you didn't fight in the name of any country that exists today.
Yes, isn't Guantanamo great ? I wonder when Disney will have a them park there, with "let's all wear orange and walk in chains" fun !
In Guantanamo, you also get: to be incarcerated without due process, they get to throw the Holy Koran in the toilet for your amusement, or, if you get really lucky or you're a tough guy, they fly you to Egypt or somewhere else, where you can finally get tortured without ACLU lawyers!!
Yes, what a great freedom-lovin' country the USA is!
I don't think the word is "ego-centric", I think it's "ignorant." The school system is definetely a disaster when it comes to History and Geography, it shows up on surveys all the time.
In History, they're kind of brainwashed. For instance, I don't think they learn much about the Eastern block. I don't think they won't read the Communist Manifesto in High School, because it's "Evil" and "forbidden." Simple facts like the rise of the USA in economic strenght and the relation to that to WWII is utterly missed (it's just Gawd's Work, ya know.)
It just suits the Powers That Be that the general population be so ignorant and smug in Consumerism. That way, they don't have to think about why they wage pre-emptive wars and everybody considers them warmongers, or why they consume 45% of the world's natural resource, or why their vice-president has ties to oil corporations. If you raise those issues, they just call you "terrorist" (it used to be "communist", but they can't use that one anymore), and that's that.
I suggest a book called Logic and its Limit, by Patrick Shaw. It's logic for the layman. You need it bad, no offense.
1) Don't operate in China
2) Refuse to cooperate with the police
3) Demand veto rights on cooperation with the police
4) Cooperate
You miss the point of the story. The point is not that Yahoo! has to cooperate. The point is that Yahoo! has to cooperate. The story is how China is ruthless and backwards in human rights.
Is that the best environment to trade in? Maybe. Until the State decides, out of the blue, that they might just seize your factory.
Here's the a better version of the reasons behind Shi Tao's arrest (thanks to the poster who linked the Reporters Without Borders story):
Ok, you got me there! Let's make room for England an her consuetudinary laws.