The American news coverage of Iraq is already self-censored. I doubt you can sugar-coat the situation much more than the media already has. Having the news come almost entirely from reporters who are embedded with the troops is possibly the worst conflict of interest possible; let's see you give an objective news repotr on people who you spend 24/7 with and who are in charge of keeping Iraqi insurgents from killing you.
Try watching BBC News, ITV, Deutsche Welle, or even Xinhua (*gasp*, more objective news on Iraq from a brutal totalitarian regieme like China?), and you might get a better story of how things are going.
The newspapers in American seem to be doing a slightly better job.
Regardless of whether you like their business practices or not, I'd have to say having 80%+ share of the desktop and office suit market qualifies it as a market leader.
This is not even counting some of the really innovative stuff Microsoft R&D does.
You don't want your kids using mathematical software to learn math, especially if they're going to be high school seniors/college freshmen. Every single serious math class in college bans the use of calculators and is heavily theory based; it's a lot more important to understand the theoretical underpinnings of statistics (pdf's, poisson processes, transforms, etc..." than it is to calculate the std. deviation from a set of data.
It's trivial to calculate lots of numbers from a formula; it's much more intellectually rewarding to re-derive fundamental equations governing stochastic processes. The same holds of calculus and linear algebra.
The Berkeley Engineering program requires multi-variable calculus, linear algebra, discrete math, and for certain programs, even real/complex canalysis are highly recommended. In not a single one of those classes has a calculator been allowed on tests. There's really no reason to need Mathematica or Matlab unless you're solving transcedental equations or your data set is so complex that you need to solve using iterations.
The US governemtn does NOT recognize Taiwan. The official position of the US is that there is one China.
Sectretary of State Colin Powell himself stated that Taiwan is unequivocally part of China. Check the MSNBC article for the last month regarding his statements.
Can you cite examples of the Mainland's economic warfare against Taiwan?
It was my imperession that there're hundreds of millions of dollars worth of cross-straits investments that'd be devastated by economic crackdowns by the CCP.
It's to the benefit of both governments to maintain stable relations, with peaceful reunification as the eventual goal.
"Instead, imagine the United States claiming that Cuba is part of the United States, because the United States never officially recognized Cuba after the revolution."
Do the Cuban people speak English? Do the Cuban people write in English? Do the Cuban people share 5000 years of cultural history with America? Do the Cuban people possess treasure troves filled with American art spanning millenia? Did the Cuban people take with them the entire treasury of America when they left? Do the Cuban people have a Constitution that includes "reunification with the Mainland" as one of its' highest goals? Do half the Cuban people WANT to reunite with America?
True, China does have it's problems. China censors the media, it has a terrible prison system, and has much to go in the way of democracy.
But the Taiwanese people share the same roots as China; we are of the same culture, we share the same love of calligraphy, we share the same love of poetry.
Would you abandon your country because of 50 years of turbluence? China has united and divided over the past 5000 years; are you going to abandon the culture of your ancestors over 50 years of pain? What about the future; China IS becoming a more free society. This may seem difficult to realize given the current abuses, but compared to 20-30 years ago, the China of today is far freer and more civil.
As long as you speak the Chinese language and you write using Han characters, and you benefitted from when Jiang Jie Shi ran with the entire treasury of China over to Taiwan, you ARE Chinese.
It is disgusting to see you try to justify the Japanese invasion of many Asian countries by saying they didn't destroy your country. Isn't it bad enough that your country was invaded? Isn't it bad enough that the Taiwanese government was turned into a puppet? Have you no respect for your culture?
As long as the Taiwan elite claim Chinese traditional art, Chinese traditional calligraphy, and the entire former treasury of China pre-1949, Taiwan IS part of China.
Taiwan was an under-developed island of farmers before the Mainland Chinese came; now with the help of Jiang Jie Shi delivering the entire treasury of mainland China in 1949, you're a leading economic power.
Just to top it off, keep in mind that over HALF of the Taiwan populace supports re-unification. The Taiwanese constitution itself has the goal of reunification with the Mainland in it.
"And now we realize that half the people that came over weren't even educated or skilled in anything. "
This is total BS and you know it. Taiwan was unimaginaly poor and backwards before the KMT crossed over in '49; now it's an economic and technological powerhouse. I'd like to have seen that happen without the KMT and the hundreds of millions it brought over in gold and silver from the coffers of the Mainland Chinese people.
Seems like using a Poisson Process (or other Renewal Process) to model the arrivals at a stoplight wouldn't be such a bad idea. Poisson Processes (and variations thereof) make great tools for mathematically modeling the arrivals of packets at router nodes, and this doesn't seem too different.
Just a random toss-out, but it seems like it'd be an ok starting point.
Assumption #1 - We have free will because God loves us so much.
Assumption #2 - God is omnipotent.
IF we assume we have free will because of God's love, then our future is unknown and not yet fixed. This by defintiion removes the ability of God to know the future, thus rendering him omnipotent.
IF we assume God is omnipotent, then we do not have free will, because God's knowledge of the future pre-supposes our actions and we assumption #1 is therefore violated.
Therefore free will and God's omnipotence are mutually exclusive.
I can think of a statement offhand when the Bible is taken literally (which so many fundamentalists of course do).
Counting the general dates of the bible don't match up; there is scientific FACT that the earth is more than a few thousand years old.
Also, to counter the BS of people calling evolution "just a THEORY," keep in mind that a theory is very different in science than in layman's terms. A theory in science is a hypothesis that has been rigorously tested and has been found to withstand critical inquiry.
I challenge you to give me peer-reviewed scientific evidence for the accuracy of the Bible.
Practical Explanation?
on
HIV Vaccine
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Let's apply Occam's Razor here.
On one hand, we can claim that the West created a virus designed to kill Africans, but yet still somehow manages to kill millions in North America/Europe; not particularly effective from a genocide point of view.
Another, perhaps more practical point of view, is that sex education and safe-sex practices are far less common in Africa. The lack of knowledge about STD's and the absence of the rule of law in many parts of Africa would make a far more effective explanation.
If we take Ms. Maathai's explanation, then food must obviously also be a genetically engineered weapon, since millions more in Africa die from starvation than those in the West.
"Some are even willing to confess that they formerly hated anything Japanese (including people) due to the nature of the propaganda in its schools."
This is indeed a problem in China, but perhaps some context of this will further explain.
In WWII, Japan engaged in genocide against the Chinese people; I don't use the word genocide lightly, but what happened in China qualifies. Entire cities were put to the sword and thousands of Chinese were used as live guinea pigs in Japanese military hospitals to experiment with bacterial warfare agents. Please read Iris Chang's _The Rape of Nanking_ for more information on this.
While things of 50 years ago may not seem important, they are extremely so for the Chinese people. The Japanese government still refuses to officially acknowledge the problems of WWII, and the conservative Japanese branches of the Diet and the media often-times claim that Japanese genocide against the Chinese during WWII never occured. These same press members also often claim that the Holocaust never occured either.
Perhaps if a formal apology occured (on the same order as the German Chancellor WILLIE BRANDT's actions in front of the Holocaust Memorial - a dignified and graceful man) and Japanese children were no longer lied to about their country's despicable WWII behavior, then we could have peace and better relations.
The breaking up permenantly of China is very unlikely given the history of China. For over 5000 years, since the Xia dynasty, China has been united and split apart over and over again; but it always manages to come back around and recover. Of course, the times spans we're talking about are 100-200 years, but then the racial memory is over 5000 years.
China proper has been unified by a common written language and a national indentity for a long time, and even most of the people of Taiwan and Hong Kong still long to be part of one China, despite what the American media may report about seperatist movememnts there. Recent Taiwanese polls indicate that most Taiwanese resent intervention by the mainland, but believe eventual reunification is good and inevitable.
*Taiwan's own constitution calls for eventual reunification of the mainland!*
A short break-up is possible, but China will once again unite, just like in the opening paragraphs of "The Romance of the Three Kingdoms" - as applicable as it was today as hundreds of years ago.
"There is very little that we can do about this other than refuse to do business with Chinese companies, which is nearly impossible unless you want to go live in a mud hut someplace."
This might seem like a great idea on the surface, but actually does nothing. Putting a trade-embargo on China is actually counter to the improvement of human rights in 2 very serious ways:
#1 - You reinforce the notion of the current Chinese leadership that the entire West is out to get them; Read "China Wakes" by _Kristof_ and _WuDunn_. The current Chinese leadership is still very much wary of the West, and any attempts as to what they see as foreign intervention will only lead to more brutal crackdowns.
If you allow the free exchange of goods and services, the free flow of information can't be stopped.
#2 - You devastate the economy of China and the subsequent living conditions of the middle class Chinese, which is an ESSENTIAL ingredient to a democracy. If you manage to reduce China's economy to pre-1980's conditions, then the people in China won't even have the time to worry about democracy, they'll be too busy starving to notice. Maintaining and expanding the middle class Chinese is the best thing towards creating a real live homegrown non-Western-imposed Chinese democratic society.
One thing many Westerners fail to account for when dealing with the Chinese is the extremely long racial memory of China. You may think of events of 200-300 years ago as things far ago that don't matter; to the average Chinese, the actions of America in the 18th and 19th Century and the Western aggression against Chinese territory during those years still sparks outrage and suspicion. Chinese don't look at a month or even a year as time for change; the Chinese see decades or even centuries as time-frames for change given the 5000 year history of the Chinese people.
"Almost every university I know of sends a copy of your grade card to parents if they're paying for the schooling and request the updates."
This is absolutely false.
Almost every single accredited college in America is subject to a privacy law that prevents the disclosure of grades to anyone besides the students. The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (also called FERPA or the Buckley Amendment) has specific clauses that requires a student to release their grades to their parents.
"Just a reminder: VideoCD (MPEG-1) requires the implementation of The Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft Layer 3 algorithm. This means anyone using a computer to play Video CDs or listen to.MP3 music files may be subject to Fraunhofer licensing restrictions."
This is false. The VCD 2.0 standard, as is commonplace in Asia, does not require MP3 compression at all. The VCD 2.0 (MPEG-1) is based purely on the MPEG algorithm alone; it encodes audio using MPEG-1, Layer TWO, not THREE. The VCD MPEG-1 format is no longer used; I haven't seen a single one for sale in probably over 10 years. VCD's are pretty much clear legally.
Check the bottom of this webpage for a quick helpful table: http://www.digvid.info/media/vcd.php
"...although the typing may scare off most Windows users."
That's exactly the point. If I want to install a Windows version of a piece of software, all I do is surf over to the webpage, download it, and double-click. The rest is a menu-guided GUI walkthrough of the installation process with the "Help" button always within reach at the bottom. Nothing to type; no dependency problems; no obscure flags to look up in man pages. Yes, sometimes it fails and doesn't find a missing DLL or whatever, but out of dual-booting WinXP and Mandrake/SuSE variants, I've encountered far more problems with dependencies than with DLL's.
Installation/removal of software in Linux may be easy for veteran users, but incredibly daunting to newbies. The requirement of typing stuff into a commandline is an absolute no-no when it comes to new users; the Linux software installation system needs to be entirely GUI-based with menu-driven options and help.
Of course China has some rabid nationalists - any country does; the current leadership is also obviously self-delusional at points. Neither one of these two points, however, is relevant.
The US has always criticized China for being oppressive and overtly nationalistic; China has rarely done the same without provocation.
I fail to see how Americans waving US flags and watching Fox News spew back propaganda at them is different from China. Perhaps China is even less nationalistic; I've never seen anyone in China driving with the Red Flag on their car or hanging off of their balcony. Current US policy regarding Guntanomo Bay detentions and unlawful combatants as well as military action in Falluja aren't as bad as Chinese practices of course, but they're now at the level where they're within a degree of comparsion. The application of the death penalty in America has also been always criticized by Amnesty International - the same group that the US State Dept. often quotes to criticize China. (As a sidenote, it's odd that Human Rights condemnations of China get lots of press in America, but those same groups condemning America don't seem to make it into Fox News or CNN).
So I guess my main point is this: to all the Americans who have a flag hanging off their house and car, who proudly sing their national anthem, who consider the cost of regieme-change acceptable , and gladly accept the stuff Fox News spews out: you're not that different from the Chinese People who you've always said were a benighted group needing to be led into the light of democracy. If anything, you're even more nationalistic now.
Check out the website of the NRDC, the Natural Resource Defense Center; it has a chronological ordering of Bush's actions against the environment:
http://www.nrdc.org/bushrecord/
This series of events is from just ONE MONTH in December of 2002; on the website, there's hundreds of documented cases of environmental abuse by Bush:
"December 2002
EPA exempts oil and gas industry from stormwater pollution rules (12/30/02)
Bush administration backtracking on policy of 'no net loss" of wetlands (12/26/02)
Judge deals setback to Bush oil drilling plans in Utah (12/23/02)
Bush administration weakens federal program for cleaning up dirty waters (12/21/02)
Judge slaps restraining order on plan to dredge Snake River (12/20/02)
BLM denies drilling access in Colorado wildlife range (12/20/02)
Judge gives Department of Interior extension on manatee plan (12/19/02)
White House begins process of relaxing government regulations for industry (12/19/02)"
Once again, just a list of cases from one MONTH of his presidency; similar events occur every month.
Don't try to refute this by just saying the NRDC is full of hippies; if you have objections to their claims, please give counter-evidence.
Here's another interesting article I found from Rolling Stone online: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/stor y/_/rnd/1 100911430857/has-player/true/id/5939345/version/6. 0.12.1040 Perhaps the most damning accusation against the Bush administration from above article:
"Under the White House's guidance, the very agencies entrusted to protect Americans from polluters are laboring to destroy environmental laws. Or they've simply stopped enforcing them. Penalties imposed for environmental violations have plummeted under Bush. The EPA has proposed eliminating 270 enforcement staffers, which would drop staff levels to the lowest level ever. Inspections of polluting businesses have dipped fifteen percent. Criminal cases referred for federal prosecution have dropped forty percent. The EPA measures its success by the amount of pollution reduced or prevented as a result of its own actions. Last year, the EPA's two most senior career enforcement officials resigned after decades of service. They cited the administration's refusal to carry out environmental laws."
This still not enough evidence? Just do a quick google search on "bush environmental policy." You'll literally see hundreds of websites crticizing his policies. This is one of the most hostile administrations to a clean America.
Slashdot Mirror
...and by linking to it on Slashdot you've managed to single-handedly do what the entire legal army of Swedish media conglomerates could not...
good work.
The American news coverage of Iraq is already self-censored. I doubt you can sugar-coat the situation much more than the media already has. Having the news come almost entirely from reporters who are embedded with the troops is possibly the worst conflict of interest possible; let's see you give an objective news repotr on people who you spend 24/7 with and who are in charge of keeping Iraqi insurgents from killing you.
Try watching BBC News, ITV, Deutsche Welle, or even Xinhua (*gasp*, more objective news on Iraq from a brutal totalitarian regieme like China?), and you might get a better story of how things are going.
The newspapers in American seem to be doing a slightly better job.
You're equating America's struggle for independence with the right to download "Gigli" from Supernova?
Somehow I think there's a difference.
Regardless of whether you like their business practices or not, I'd have to say having 80%+ share of the desktop and office suit market qualifies it as a market leader.
This is not even counting some of the really innovative stuff Microsoft R&D does.
You don't want your kids using mathematical software to learn math, especially if they're going to be high school seniors/college freshmen. Every single serious math class in college bans the use of calculators and is heavily theory based; it's a lot more important to understand the theoretical underpinnings of statistics (pdf's, poisson processes, transforms, etc..." than it is to calculate the std. deviation from a set of data. It's trivial to calculate lots of numbers from a formula; it's much more intellectually rewarding to re-derive fundamental equations governing stochastic processes. The same holds of calculus and linear algebra. The Berkeley Engineering program requires multi-variable calculus, linear algebra, discrete math, and for certain programs, even real/complex canalysis are highly recommended. In not a single one of those classes has a calculator been allowed on tests. There's really no reason to need Mathematica or Matlab unless you're solving transcedental equations or your data set is so complex that you need to solve using iterations.
The US governemtn does NOT recognize Taiwan. The official position of the US is that there is one China.
Sectretary of State Colin Powell himself stated that Taiwan is unequivocally part of China. Check the MSNBC article for the last month regarding his statements.
It sent quite an uproar across Taiwan.
Can you cite examples of the Mainland's economic warfare against Taiwan?
It was my imperession that there're hundreds of millions of dollars worth of cross-straits investments that'd be devastated by economic crackdowns by the CCP.
It's to the benefit of both governments to maintain stable relations, with peaceful reunification as the eventual goal.
"Instead, imagine the United States claiming that Cuba is part of the United States, because the United States never officially recognized Cuba after the revolution."
Do the Cuban people speak English?
Do the Cuban people write in English?
Do the Cuban people share 5000 years of cultural history with America?
Do the Cuban people possess treasure troves filled with American art spanning millenia?
Did the Cuban people take with them the entire treasury of America when they left?
Do the Cuban people have a Constitution that includes "reunification with the Mainland" as one of its' highest goals?
Do half the Cuban people WANT to reunite with America?
True, China does have it's problems. China censors the media, it has a terrible prison system, and has much to go in the way of democracy.
But the Taiwanese people share the same roots as China; we are of the same culture, we share the same love of calligraphy, we share the same love of poetry.
Would you abandon your country because of 50 years of turbluence? China has united and divided over the past 5000 years; are you going to abandon the culture of your ancestors over 50 years of pain? What about the future; China IS becoming a more free society. This may seem difficult to realize given the current abuses, but compared to 20-30 years ago, the China of today is far freer and more civil.
Give the land of your ancestors more time.
Few people here understand what it's like to be Chinese and/or live in China.
You judge the actions of the past 50 years without sufficient grounding in the thousands of years of history preceding it.
As soon as the Taiwanese President realizes that Taiwan is nothing without their heritage of 5000 years of Chinese Imperial history.
They have no law, no language, no history, no art.
THAT is what it means to be Chinese.
Oh, and the vast quantities of gold and silver the KMT stole from the Mainland Chinese treasury when they ran to Taiwan.
As long as you speak the Chinese language and you write using Han characters, and you benefitted from when Jiang Jie Shi ran with the entire treasury of China over to Taiwan, you ARE Chinese.
It is disgusting to see you try to justify the Japanese invasion of many Asian countries by saying they didn't destroy your country. Isn't it bad enough that your country was invaded? Isn't it bad enough that the Taiwanese government was turned into a puppet? Have you no respect for your culture?
As long as the Taiwan elite claim Chinese traditional art, Chinese traditional calligraphy, and the entire former treasury of China pre-1949, Taiwan IS part of China.
Taiwan was an under-developed island of farmers before the Mainland Chinese came; now with the help of Jiang Jie Shi delivering the entire treasury of mainland China in 1949, you're a leading economic power.
Just to top it off, keep in mind that over HALF of the Taiwan populace supports re-unification. The Taiwanese constitution itself has the goal of reunification with the Mainland in it.
"And now we realize that half the people that came over weren't even educated or skilled in anything. "
This is total BS and you know it. Taiwan was unimaginaly poor and backwards before the KMT crossed over in '49; now it's an economic and technological powerhouse. I'd like to have seen that happen without the KMT and the hundreds of millions it brought over in gold and silver from the coffers of the Mainland Chinese people.
Seems like using a Poisson Process (or other Renewal Process) to model the arrivals at a stoplight wouldn't be such a bad idea. Poisson Processes (and variations thereof) make great tools for mathematically modeling the arrivals of packets at router nodes, and this doesn't seem too different.
Just a random toss-out, but it seems like it'd be an ok starting point.
This is a common apologist comment.
There's a paradox that arises out of this though.
Assumption #1 - We have free will because God loves us so much.
Assumption #2 - God is omnipotent.
IF we assume we have free will because of God's love, then our future is unknown and not yet fixed. This by defintiion removes the ability of God to know the future, thus rendering him omnipotent.
IF we assume God is omnipotent, then we do not have free will, because God's knowledge of the future pre-supposes our actions and we assumption #1 is therefore violated.
Therefore free will and God's omnipotence are mutually exclusive.
I can think of a statement offhand when the Bible is taken literally (which so many fundamentalists of course do).
Counting the general dates of the bible don't match up; there is scientific FACT that the earth is more than a few thousand years old.
Also, to counter the BS of people calling evolution "just a THEORY," keep in mind that a theory is very different in science than in layman's terms. A theory in science is a hypothesis that has been rigorously tested and has been found to withstand critical inquiry.
I challenge you to give me peer-reviewed scientific evidence for the accuracy of the Bible.
Let's apply Occam's Razor here.
On one hand, we can claim that the West created a virus designed to kill Africans, but yet still somehow manages to kill millions in North America/Europe; not particularly effective from a genocide point of view.
Another, perhaps more practical point of view, is that sex education and safe-sex practices are far less common in Africa. The lack of knowledge about STD's and the absence of the rule of law in many parts of Africa would make a far more effective explanation.
If we take Ms. Maathai's explanation, then food must obviously also be a genetically engineered weapon, since millions more in Africa die from starvation than those in the West.
"Some are even willing to confess that they formerly hated anything Japanese (including people) due to the nature of the propaganda in its schools."
This is indeed a problem in China, but perhaps some context of this will further explain.
In WWII, Japan engaged in genocide against the Chinese people; I don't use the word genocide lightly, but what happened in China qualifies. Entire cities were put to the sword and thousands of Chinese were used as live guinea pigs in Japanese military hospitals to experiment with bacterial warfare agents. Please read Iris Chang's _The Rape of Nanking_ for more information on this.
While things of 50 years ago may not seem important, they are extremely so for the Chinese people. The Japanese government still refuses to officially acknowledge the problems of WWII, and the conservative Japanese branches of the Diet and the media often-times claim that Japanese genocide against the Chinese during WWII never occured. These same press members also often claim that the Holocaust never occured either.
Perhaps if a formal apology occured (on the same order as the German Chancellor WILLIE BRANDT's actions in front of the Holocaust Memorial - a dignified and graceful man) and Japanese children were no longer lied to about their country's despicable WWII behavior, then we could have peace and better relations.
The breaking up permenantly of China is very unlikely given the history of China. For over 5000 years, since the Xia dynasty, China has been united and split apart over and over again; but it always manages to come back around and recover. Of course, the times spans we're talking about are 100-200 years, but then the racial memory is over 5000 years.
China proper has been unified by a common written language and a national indentity for a long time, and even most of the people of Taiwan and Hong Kong still long to be part of one China, despite what the American media may report about seperatist movememnts there. Recent Taiwanese polls indicate that most Taiwanese resent intervention by the mainland, but believe eventual reunification is good and inevitable.
*Taiwan's own constitution calls for eventual reunification of the mainland!*
A short break-up is possible, but China will once again unite, just like in the opening paragraphs of "The Romance of the Three Kingdoms" - as applicable as it was today as hundreds of years ago.
"There is very little that we can do about this other than refuse to do business with Chinese companies, which is nearly impossible unless you want to go live in a mud hut someplace."
This might seem like a great idea on the surface, but actually does nothing. Putting a trade-embargo on China is actually counter to the improvement of human rights in 2 very serious ways:
#1 - You reinforce the notion of the current Chinese leadership that the entire West is out to get them; Read "China Wakes" by _Kristof_ and _WuDunn_. The current Chinese leadership is still very much wary of the West, and any attempts as to what they see as foreign intervention will only lead to more brutal crackdowns.
If you allow the free exchange of goods and services, the free flow of information can't be stopped.
#2 - You devastate the economy of China and the subsequent living conditions of the middle class Chinese, which is an ESSENTIAL ingredient to a democracy. If you manage to reduce China's economy to pre-1980's conditions, then the people in China won't even have the time to worry about democracy, they'll be too busy starving to notice. Maintaining and expanding the middle class Chinese is the best thing towards creating a real live homegrown non-Western-imposed Chinese democratic society.
One thing many Westerners fail to account for when dealing with the Chinese is the extremely long racial memory of China. You may think of events of 200-300 years ago as things far ago that don't matter; to the average Chinese, the actions of America in the 18th and 19th Century and the Western aggression against Chinese territory during those years still sparks outrage and suspicion. Chinese don't look at a month or even a year as time for change; the Chinese see decades or even centuries as time-frames for change given the 5000 year history of the Chinese people.
"Almost every university I know of sends a copy of your grade card to parents if they're paying for the schooling and request the updates."
d ex .html
This is absolutely false.
Almost every single accredited college in America is subject to a privacy law that prevents the disclosure of grades to anyone besides the students. The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (also called FERPA or the Buckley Amendment) has specific clauses that requires a student to release their grades to their parents.
See here for more infor:
http://www.ed.gov/policy/gen/guid/fpco/ferpa/in
yeah it's called Facebook:
www.facebook.com
"Just a reminder: VideoCD (MPEG-1) requires the implementation of The Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft Layer 3 algorithm. This means anyone using a computer to play Video CDs or listen to .MP3 music files may be subject to Fraunhofer licensing restrictions."
This is false. The VCD 2.0 standard, as is commonplace in Asia, does not require MP3 compression at all. The VCD 2.0 (MPEG-1) is based purely on the MPEG algorithm alone; it encodes audio using MPEG-1, Layer TWO, not THREE. The VCD MPEG-1 format is no longer used; I haven't seen a single one for sale in probably over 10 years. VCD's are pretty much clear legally.
Check the bottom of this webpage for a quick helpful table:
http://www.digvid.info/media/vcd.php
"Audio Compression MPEG-1 layer 2
Audio Bitrate 224kbps"
DVD/AC3 are pretty accurate though.
"...although the typing may scare off most Windows users."
That's exactly the point. If I want to install a Windows version of a piece of software, all I do is surf over to the webpage, download it, and double-click. The rest is a menu-guided GUI walkthrough of the installation process with the "Help" button always within reach at the bottom. Nothing to type; no dependency problems; no obscure flags to look up in man pages. Yes, sometimes it fails and doesn't find a missing DLL or whatever, but out of dual-booting WinXP and Mandrake/SuSE variants, I've encountered far more problems with dependencies than with DLL's.
Installation/removal of software in Linux may be easy for veteran users, but incredibly daunting to newbies. The requirement of typing stuff into a commandline is an absolute no-no when it comes to new users; the Linux software installation system needs to be entirely GUI-based with menu-driven options and help.
Of course China has some rabid nationalists - any country does; the current leadership is also obviously self-delusional at points. Neither one of these two points, however, is relevant.
The US has always criticized China for being oppressive and overtly nationalistic; China has rarely done the same without provocation.
I fail to see how Americans waving US flags and watching Fox News spew back propaganda at them is different from China. Perhaps China is even less nationalistic; I've never seen anyone in China driving with the Red Flag on their car or hanging off of their balcony. Current US policy regarding Guntanomo Bay detentions and unlawful combatants as well as military action in Falluja aren't as bad as Chinese practices of course, but they're now at the level where they're within a degree of comparsion. The application of the death penalty in America has also been always criticized by Amnesty International - the same group that the US State Dept. often quotes to criticize China. (As a sidenote, it's odd that Human Rights condemnations of China get lots of press in America, but those same groups condemning America don't seem to make it into Fox News or CNN).
So I guess my main point is this: to all the Americans who have a flag hanging off their house and car, who proudly sing their national anthem, who consider the cost of regieme-change acceptable , and gladly accept the stuff Fox News spews out: you're not that different from the Chinese People who you've always said were a benighted group needing to be led into the light of democracy. If anything, you're even more nationalistic now.
Check out the website of the NRDC, the Natural Resource Defense Center; it has a chronological ordering of Bush's actions against the environment:
r y/_/rnd/1 100911430857/has-player/true/id/5939345/version/6. 0.12.1040
http://www.nrdc.org/bushrecord/
This series of events is from just ONE MONTH in December of 2002; on the website, there's hundreds of documented cases of environmental abuse by Bush:
"December 2002
EPA exempts oil and gas industry from stormwater pollution rules (12/30/02)
Bush administration backtracking on policy of 'no net loss" of wetlands (12/26/02)
Judge deals setback to Bush oil drilling plans in Utah (12/23/02)
Bush administration weakens federal program for cleaning up dirty waters (12/21/02)
Judge slaps restraining order on plan to dredge Snake River (12/20/02)
BLM denies drilling access in Colorado wildlife range (12/20/02)
Judge gives Department of Interior extension on manatee plan (12/19/02)
White House begins process of relaxing government regulations for industry (12/19/02)"
Once again, just a list of cases from one MONTH of his presidency; similar events occur every month.
Don't try to refute this by just saying the NRDC is full of hippies; if you have objections to their claims, please give counter-evidence.
Here's another interesting article I found from Rolling Stone online:
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/sto
Perhaps the most damning accusation against the Bush administration from above article:
"Under the White House's guidance, the very agencies entrusted to protect Americans from polluters are laboring to destroy environmental laws. Or they've simply stopped enforcing them. Penalties imposed for environmental violations have plummeted under Bush. The EPA has proposed eliminating 270 enforcement staffers, which would drop staff levels to the lowest level ever. Inspections of polluting businesses have dipped fifteen percent. Criminal cases referred for federal prosecution have dropped forty percent. The EPA measures its success by the amount of pollution reduced or prevented as a result of its own actions. Last year, the EPA's two most senior career enforcement officials resigned after decades of service. They cited the administration's refusal to carry out environmental laws."
This still not enough evidence? Just do a quick google search on "bush environmental policy." You'll literally see hundreds of websites crticizing his policies. This is one of the most hostile administrations to a clean America.