Well son, you just can't stop jumping into wrong and rather paranoid assumptions, do you, and your lack of reading comprehension, or more accurately eagerness to not understand, is the apparent reason.
I said none of the things you paranoidly accuse me of saying, and you should've understood that much if you read even halfway through my message, but instead you come up with the brilliant idea that I must be some kind of a muslim terrorist enemy of America??? I'd laugh if your response wasn't so unfathomably unfunny.
FYI, I wasn't the one "blatantly creating excuses for the actions of murderous extremist terrorists" when I pointed out what pretty much the whole world (sans sections of American "ultra-patriots") understands. That the terrorist attacks were a response to American policy in the region. If you start throwing hissy fits when something so obvious is pointed out to you, you can't be educated or debated with any more than some indoctrinated cult member.
Your ilk of blindly ultra-patriotic Americans created those excuses for the terrorists all by yourselves. Yet your denial of any responsibility while attacking anyone who dares to suggest there's some immorality in American foreign policy explains why the US remains so hugely unpopular around the world. Your extreme religious right is undoubtably proud of you though.
And pretty "classy" way of squiggling out of the Chinese imperialism "debate through arguments". I guess you did succeed in making the brainwashed Chinese militarists look good at some comparative level after all...
I'm not American. (or from any other expansionist country to that matter)
I do condemn all domestic and foreign acts of aggression, but consider killing, invading and annexing foreign peoples "somewhat worse form of behavior" than any strictly domestic form of dictatorship based on anachronistic customs, politics or religion.
I do not consider it to be a valid excuse for China (or Russia) to kill and invade foreign peoples and annex their lands just because 1) their long-gone despot rulers claimed such imperial superiority over others, or 2) because the British and Spanish (et al) invaded and occupied much of the known world in the past centuries, or 3) because even the Nazis tried to create their own criminal empire.
I'm not "anti-China" per se, but when their regime behaves like Nazi-Germany in the 1930s, complete with ruthless military occupation of their neighbouring Tibetans and Uighurs and state-manipulated xenophobic patriotism, I feel that the Chinese people themselves must hold themselves accountable, just as the world held the German people accountable for the crimes of their Nazi rulers.
Now on to your explicit assumptions:
When the Chinese dictatorship is occupying its neighbouring peoples, threatening the democratically-governed Taiwan with war, indoctrinating its people to hate Japan (and to somewhat lesser extent other "foreign imperialists") and proliferating nuclear-capable missile technology to other authoritarian states, surely you can't claim that the nuclear status of the xenophobic and expansionist China is a non-issue and that those anachronistically governed Middle-eastern and African states are somehow worse offenders than China?
Taiwan... "always part of China"...? Or "for the most part of China's history claimed to be the devine possession of China's god-king rulers"? You may not be aware that Taiwan's native inhabitants are not ethnically or culturally Han-chinese, and that Taiwan has been under imperial occupation of some European colonial powers as well as imperial Japan, besides imperial China (and most recently under the occupation of the Kuomintang who fled there from China)? Should the native Taiwanese, or the current amalgation of natives and Chinese refugees, have no say in their own status? Do you have no respect for the idea of peoples self-determination (and democracy), something which the existence of the vast majority of the world's independent nations is based upon? The neo-imperial China has made Taiwan an issue of "domestic ill" because it suits the purposes of China's dictatorial elite, but accepting that argument wipes out the legal and humanitarian basis of the existence of most of the worlds nations which at one time or another were occupied and ruled by some foreign colonial power. Does Great Britain, the world's worst imperial offender of the past centuries, still have valid claim over the lands they once occupied? Or does Great Britain in fact belong to the Germanic tribes which invaded (and ethnically overran) those isles a couple millenia ago? Or does Great Britain perhaps belong to Italians, the modern-day descendants of the imperial Rome which also ruled most of the British isles? Does Pakistan belong to India or perhaps Persia (Iran)? Does Poland belong to Germany or perhaps tsarist Russia? Or could we perhaps agree that the age of imperial expansionism should be over and that peoples should have the right to determine their own future?
How is China's aggression (occupation of neighbours, recent wars against Vietnam, Korea, India etc, killing its own youth over peaceful demonstration against the corruption of their dictators) somehow "far less significant" than a handful of religious extremist attacking the financial centre of the US? Besides that act of terrorism not being state-sponsored but devised by a network of individuals, do you have any inkling why they say they did it? Would they have done it if the US had not been overthrowing governments and propping up pro-american dict
It is also interesting that they should use their right to moderate (i.e. even the Chinese have a "vote" here, outside China) your comments down, in effect pushing their Party-lead domestic censorship upon the rest of the world.
(....) but at least be fair about the criticism, and criticise proportionally to the level of injustice. Those countries listed in this paragraph deserve far more criticism and attention from the media in our world than China.
OK, how many of those countries you listed are expansionist totalitarian states with nuclear arsenal? How many are not just threatening but planning to attack a democratic state? How many are occupying their neighbouring peoples and destroying their national identity, language and religion while ripping off their natural resources? How many are actively agitating their population to hate and blame foreigners for practically every social ill of their own totalitarian making?
Only Russia gets anywhere close to China in terms of crimes committed against neighbouring and "minority" peoples while being totally unapologetic about them.
Many countries in the Middle East and Africa have significant human rights problems indeed, but I believe your prioritizing between domestic social ills based on history and traditions versus unapologetic imperialist aggression against neighbors is simply way off. It is one thing to suffer from anachronistic local leaders and another altogether to be under ruthless foreign occupation aiming to wipe your nation off this planet.
It appears that not kowtowing to the China's dictators ultranationalist/expansionist partyline presses some touchy Chinese buttons. While these believers in totalitarianism and imperialism (if only when operated by the Chinese themselves) aren't interested in having a democratic say domestically, they appear to thrive in using their "voice" (aka modpoints) in foreign venues to deny views opposing their Party masters' doctrines. What a sad bunch they are; especially those who've spent time abroad and could've learned more about humanitarian and independent aspects of China's internal and external crimes but choose to remain brainwashed by the Party's ultranationalist agenda. "All your TIBET are belong to US!!! HA HA HA".
Like the Chinese scholar Cao Chang Qing himself said: "Chinese are a nation of intellectual 8-year olds."
I see you are faithfully following the Chinese Communist Party Doctrine of "debate", i.e. always ignore opposing facts and just regurgitate Party's "facts" ad nauseaum.
"Foreign imperialist pigs are all evil, but our own imperialist invasions and genocides are all oh so completely justified... because China's feudal overlords said so!"
No one can reason with brownshirts who want to believe in their imperial superiority over other peoples.
Thank you for giving me a chance to respond to a "bona fide" brownshirt.
So your claims are based on the fact that your ancestors' feudal omnipotent god-kings (aka emperors) claimed all known territories around China (well actually the whole world) to be their divine possession? But didn't first the Republic and then the Communists already disown such madness last century? But that still gives you the cajones to claim ownership of your neighbouring peoples who are nothing like the Chinese at all?
If imperial invasions are OK, in that case doesn't modern-day Japan also hold a claim over the Chinese and their lands? Or what about the Mongolian descendants of Tsenghis Khan who conquered China and much of the continent (but left Tibet stay uninvaded out of respect!), surely they are China's rightful rulers since they actually ruled and administered China for generations while until its invasion last century China had never ruled or administered over the Tibetan nation. It's scarily amusing to see Chinese brownshirts crying about Japan's brutal invasion when the Chinese are doing that to their smaller neighbors now and every day.
And if a Chinese god-king's wet daydream of owning the whole world is reason enough to destroy and annex foreign people, why is China allowing other neighbours like Korea and Vietnam to be independent? They were also once claimed by China's feudal god-kings as their possession? And surely China doesn't recognize the vast majority of world's nations which have only shed their colonial masters over the last couple of hundred years!
THE Chinese government on both sides of the Taiwan Straits hold opposing political views on most issues, often resorting to tit for tat policies and verbal attacks. On the Tibet issue, however, the two sides cling to the same viewpoint: both claim Chinese sovereignty over Tibet, emphasizing that Tibet has been a part of China since ancient times.
Over the past several decades, these official viewpoints have been instilled in the Chinese people by means of large scale propaganda campaigns waged by the Beijing and Taiwan governments. As a result of this brainwashing, the majority of the Chinese people have lost the ability to discover the truth. However, through a brief review of Chinese history, we can clearly see that Tibet was never a part of China until it was invaded and occupied by China in the 1950s.
[go read the facts and come back..., and change that brown shirt while you're at it!]
Although I was a journalist in China, I did not know the above mentioned historical facts until I came to the United States. Like my fellow Chinese, I had always thought that Tibet was a part of China. All of my knowledge concerning the Tibetan situation has been based on the official Chinese history texts, newspapers, books, and movies. It was only after coming to the USA and reading unbiased history books that I began to understand the truth about Tibet.
The Chinese should pay due heed to the reality of the situation in Tibet today. Since the Chinese occupation of Tibet, the human rights of the Tibetan people have been wantonly trampled upon. Furthermore, the Tibetan people are systematically discriminated against and persecuted by the Chinese colonialists.
Now you've got a choice to make: Either put that brown shirt back on and join the Communist Party-approved riots against the Japanese, or apologize the Tibetan people for the violent and arrogant imperialist invasion of their peaceful country. What the Japanese did in China during their invasion was evil and their government should apologize profusely
Why are the supposedly free and democratic nations bending over backwards to strike deals with a dictatorship which not only oppresses its own people but also holds its neighbouring peoples under brutal occupation? I have mistakenly believed that freedom-loving and supporting countries aren't supposed to play partnership games with such aggressor states.
It started when Nixon first rolled out the red carpet to China's dictators and promtly dumped support for the occupied Tibetans' struggle to regain independence.
The only answer I have so far is greed. It seems that the formerly rather benevolently socialistic India now wants piece of the action, principles and ideals be damned. But hey, if the US and Europe can lick Chinese Communist Party's bottom, why can't the newly-assertive India? This corporate-lead foreign policy must be quite lucrative for the policy-makers too. And the Chinese Party cadres are masters in playing parties against each other.
Why else would the occupied Tibetans and Uighurs be so goddamn dispensable?
Next time you buy a Dell or visit Walmart (or other financiers of the Chinese Communist Party rule), remember that you aren't financing Hitler's autobahn network in the 1930s, but nevertheless something eerily similar.
I was trying to find out if you were fine with others invading Russia the same way Russian expansionism continues to squeeze out Russia's historical neighbours, but no one can argue with the logic of FSB-TV.
Just don't be surprised or feel hurt when Russians aren't universally loved and welcomed by their neighbours (while these neighbours do get along just fine with all their non-Russian neighbours).
I do find it more than a little ironic that while the FSB-loving crowd cries and demands "human rights" (i.e. the right to remain 100% Russian without any degree of integration) for the implanted Russian masses on other nations' lands, that same crowd is fearing the mass migration of Chinese onto the far-eastern parts of the Russian empire (although that is nothing compared to squeezing people out of their historical homelands). But since your government supports the Chinese invasion and oppression of Tibetan and Uighur homelands, surely you're fine with the Chinese also overrunning Siberia.
Would you accept this form of linguistic, cultural and political expansionism if it affected a large part of your remaining national space (try imagining that you weren't slavic but from a peace-loving nation whose living space had been invaded by Russians time and again over the centuries)?
Would you be happy if the chinese or Central Asian muslims (i.e. people with very different language, culture and ideology) squeezed you out of your native lands through relentless migration for whatever reason? Would it be okay if some imam or chairman Mao sent them to your lands, just to expand their influence?
Just try real hard and you'll figure out why Russians' neighbours would be happy with their Russian neighbours if they'd only stick to occupying their own historical neighbourhood.
Unless you're some sort of Stalinist revisionist like the current Soviet Russian Putinist clique, you really should respect your neighbours a lot more.
PS. Please explain to me why the Chechen people and their lands should be controlled by Kremlin and not by the Chechens themselves? Whether they choose to be Wahhabis or buddhists, what does it matter to you?
There are many Shuffle[tm]-sized(*) pocket AM/FM receivers. I've had Philips and Sony AM/FM radios for years since over here all decent channels are broadcast over AM. Since the AM antenna is built into that small case, in some locations the orientation of the radio affects the quality of the signal (fixed with some manual, umm, shuffling), but it's always better than having no radio available on the go at all.
One of these days a manufacturer looking for a new niche will release an "ayXuphle" player with an AM receiver (and standard AAA rechargables and switchable memory cards) and I finally have just one stick for all my AM and.ogg listening needs, not to mention booting Linux...:^)
(*) Rough size comparison:
(W) 25 x (H) 85 x (D) 9.7 (mm) (Copycat Shuffle[tm])
(W) 30 x (H) 80 x (D) 17 (mm) (Sony SRF-M95 AM/FM pocket radio)
Anyone born in the Soviet union could become a Russian citizen with relative ease.
OTOH many of the countries occupied by Soviet Russia can't seem to get their russian-born former masters to leave their newly independent nations. The current Kremlin regime is extremely hostile in its insistance that all these fifth column russians must be allowed to stay on (and yet again give the Russian empire an excuse to intervene in the future...).
And I don't see why the ethnicity should be a factor that determines whether someone should or should not involve in politics in such a diverse country as Russia.
Well, do the minorities really want to stay under Russian domination and continue playing minor roles even in their homelands, that is, when they're not being outright persecuted. Think for a moment: why are there so many "minorities" "within Russia" in the first place?
It might not be well known outside but in many parts of Russia there are fairly large numbers of Ukrainians, Jews, Georgian, Armenians, and others living there (in addition to minorities native to Russian therritories such as those from north caucasus.)
It is also not well known outside Russia that large numbers of Russians and these other nationalities were implanted by Stalin and his successors onto lands Russia grabbed from its neighbors, and continues to hold onto to this day with no intention of ever leaving. FWIW Russia's first democratically elected president Boris Yeltsin actually apologized for Soviet Union's crimes against its neighbors, but the current KGB-clique of Putin has turned that completely around, and these days Stalin and his land grabs are considered a source of ultra-nationalistic pride
Fortunately most (but not all) nations invaded by Stalin have regained at least parts of their native homelands. China is still holding its neighboring Tibetan and Uighur people under such genocidal annexation that would make even Stalin proud.
PS. Isn' the term "minorities native to Russian territories" somewhat of an oxymoron?
MS sold their 20%+ holdings to Vector which is owned by MS co-founder Paul Allen and staffed by executives from MS and other firms which were involved in "advising" Corel (supposedly neutrally, of course) to dump the Linux strategy and later to sell out to Vector at bottom prices. Corel execs decided to collude with the Vector/MS goons, and Corel's chairman James Baillie's law firm even represented Vector against the shareholders! Talk about serving your shareholders' best interest... They rammed the takeover deal through by manipulating the voting procedures and despite having the approval of only a quarter of the shares. The Corel execs even used their share options for the first time in order to scrape together quorum, while most shareholders didn't even know about the vote until it was too late!
Corel may now be nominally private but it sure ain't giving MS anything but a show competition since the takeover.
Perhaps you've forgotten that Microsoft sold its share in Corel to a venture capitalist. Nothing to see here, move along.
The industry's best kept secret, eh?
MS took de facto control of Corel through a series of shady moves worthy of the Groklaw site's attention.
In late 2003 MS dumped their 20% + stake to MS co-founder Paul Allen's venture manipulation firm (Vector) which was staffed with ex-MS executives and other former execs from the company which had earlier "consulted" Corel bosses to commit the Linux U-turn (McKinsey consultancy) and join the MS.NET bandwagon, or another investment banking company which later gave Corel's bosses financial advice to sell out at bottom prices.
As a sugaring on the top, Corel chairman James Baillie's own law firm (Baillie's soul was sold in the transaction too) was hired by the MS goons Vector to fight against Corel's shareholders.
Google for these names and "corelrescue" to learn how MS conducts corporate hijackings of their competitors in broad daylight and without a squeak from the courts or regulators.
One angle to look at it is that Microsoft, with their tens of thousands of employees executing their management's every command, should have the organization and capability to avoid all known IP violations. Especially since they're "players" in the Great IP Game.
Linux and (F)OSS in general is a volunteer-based collaborative effort without comparable IP and patent-vetting infrastructure (or motive), so although the kernel guys are trying to avoid the obvious IP traps they can not be held up to the same standards of scrutiny as the world's largest monopoly corporation. The "non-profit" Linux effort isn't out to "kill competition" and profit from it like corporations, which are based on a different set of operating parameters and agendas. If somebody's "patented brainfart" ends up in the Linux source code, it can and will be worked around pretty quickly. Patent and IP holders have also certain responsibility to "protect" their goodies, and that should be easy in the case of Linux.
What would be interesting is to search for open-source code (and ideas?) inside Microsoft's own products. The more people keep cranking out Free code and dreaming up cool new methods, the sillier MS will look if and when they one day try to ban Linux through the courts "because we own a couple of these cool new methods!! (but reserve the right to use everybody else's free contributions nevertheless)"
Do you personally have anything against Linux and the open source philosophy of open code and standards, or is it simply a fantastically-paid job for you to execute Microsoft's corporate strategy where even the most benevolent of global trends of sharing knowledge is deduced into a plain faceless threat to be annihilated?
This is the extreme opposite of the military-religious "war on/of terror" approach, but it is almost as far from solving the issues that cause all that hatred that leads to terrorism.
Bunch of Irish guys didn't just wake up deranged one morning and decide to create the IRA. They had their reasons for fighting the British establishment.
Bunch of Basque guys didn't just wake up deranged one morning and decide to create the ETA. They had their reasons for fighting the Spanish establishment.
Bunch of Arab guys didn't just wake up deranged one morning and decide to create the Al-Qaeda. They had their reasons for fighting the American establishment.
Bunch of Chechen guys didn't just wake up deranged one morning and decide to create their liberation army. They had their reasons for fighting the Russian establishment.
Bunch of Tibetan guys didn't just wake up deranged one morning and decide to... oh wait, they're freaking non-violent freedom-fighters so they can be conveniently ignored in favour of doing business with their occupiers...
Anyway, there is a certain pattern that would suggest that nations (often large and with imperialist tendencies) which insist on controlling people and territories outside their natural domain tend to be more affected by terrorism ("one man's terrorist is another man's freedom-fighter") than smaller, democratic states which do not project their power outside their natural borders.
Perhaps recognizing and supporting all peoples' right of self-determination would help remove one of the major root causes of "terrorism"? If you lived under foreign occupation, what would you do?
Oh, and I've seen the $2/day figure quoted around here. It's reasonable to say that a month's wages in America can buy a high-quality computer. A month's wages at $2/day is about $60. Remember that this is the first wave of cheap computers for developing nations.
They're already close to the same price point with respect to purchasing power, and they'll get to it very quickly. (emphasis added)
Sorry but the poverty trap isn't solved that easily. What you're trying to get at is disposable income. Unfortunately the poorer you are, the less you can afford to put aside for non-essential spending. At couple of dollars a day practically everything goes towards securing food, clothing and lodging (no computers, simputers or mobiles phones for you). At 10-50 dollars a day, depending on the cost of the basics at your location, you can afford to start putting some money aside for life's sweet luxuries. When you're filthy rich, practically all your income is potentially disposable and you can start buying things at your whim.
People surviving with subsistence level income do not, by definition, have disposable income.
Of course this point is moot wrt. the $100 PC since they're aimed solely at governments and for communal use.
Any recommendations for well-supported (under Linux) SATA or SATA II PCI cards to drive these things? RAID isn't needed here but others might be interested in that as well.
Most motherboards currently in use don't have SATA support built-in, and even the news ones that do may come with chipsets that haven't got complete Linux support yet.
Since my next motherboard and drives may well be all SATA, it would make sense to start adding SATA drives to my current setup using an add-on controller card.
Interesting that you should quote the beacon of truthful and non-partial information, the Official News Agency of the PRC (operated under the aptly titled Ministry of Propaganda), for your data on Tibet's population.
Were your CCP-approved figures meant to paint a cheery picture of Tibetan women still allowed to give birth despite the growing number of Chinese in the chopped-up mini-Tibet as the figures were somewhat vague regarding the number of Tibetan deaths caused by unnatural causes under the Chinese occupation?
Firstly, what in my post consisted of FUD and made you so upset? Is it not a fact that the US and UK militaries have scattered hundreds of tons of DU across Iraq?
Secondly, instead of getting all pissy with your physics 101, how about you google for "depleted uranium" and "health" and then also read some of the material and studies that were done independently of US and UK governments.
If you weren't so religiously trusting of US government's (and principally its military's) own studies,
I'd be worried about your personal lack of concern for the civilians living in the country which your military invaded and still occupies. Then again the US is still refusing to accept responsibility for the Agent Orange catastrophy crippling Vietnam to this day. Care to look up any old studies by the US government on Agent Orange's effects on humans?
IIRC, Iraq was a somewhat stable country still recovering from decades of British imperial occupation when, like with the Iranian Shah a decade earlier, in 1963 a CIA-assisted coup helped install the "friendly" Saddam Hussein in power to that oil-rich country.
And since you mention your hopes for a "cleanup" in the near future, I'd sure hope that the US and UK would try cleaning up what they can of the hundreds of tons of depleted uranium their armed forces have scattered across Iraq.
And why is the totalitarian China (and Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Pakistan etc.) America's "partner" in the "war of terror" when the central asian Uighur people live under the terror of Chinese military occupation, and over a million Tibetans have perished under China's invasion of Tibet?
I still don't see any genuine idealism or pursuit for justice in the US foreign policy, just the same old political and commercial opportunism dressed up to be sold for the ever-so-patriotic american masses.
When asked "how many died in Vietnam war", nine out of ten Americans give the ballpark of "60,000". The two, perhaps three million Vietnamese deaths don't simply register.
Of course the USA still refuses to accept responsibility for the continuing tragedy caused by the massive Agent Orange contamination that is still killing and causing birth defects among the Vietnamese population.
More recently the US and UK war machines have scattered hundreds of tons of toxic and carcinogenic depleted uranium (used in hardening projectile shells) across Iraq. Does anyone think these two countries will ever take responsibility of the devastating consequenses affecting the current and future generations of Iraqi civilians?
While I can reason the deaths and injuries caused by the Indian Ocean Tsunami to be part of the cost of our existance on a living planet (I say this knowing that close friends of mine lost many friends and relatives, and my own relatives holidaying in Thailand only barely escaped death thanks to help by quick thinking locals), I find no good excuses for sending massive war machines to foreign countries to kill massive numbers of locals and to poison their lands for generations to come.
They can't be serious! (paraphrasing John McEnroe)
on
SCO Targets UK Firms
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Since the SCOUndrels have already had their hinds whipped at the litigation mecca of the world (aka U.S.A.) for not having proved a thing, let alone "ownership of Linux IP", surely they can't expect large Linux users in the EU to fall at their mercy, beg forgiveness and pay up just for the fun of it? Even the UK courts aren't expected to be dumb enough not to ask SCO to prove their ownership of the said "intellectual property" before allowing any litigation to proceed.
Mike Davis, senior analyst at Butler Group, said SCO had not explained what users were licensing.
"What is SCO actually giving for the money? With a licensing agreement you'd expect Unix upgrades. So this is back to fear, uncertainty and doubt," he said.
While Linux still can be installed, I wouldn't exactly call it "all being good" if one must jump through various hoops reminiscent of mid 90s to get Linux booting on the pre-G3 "Old World" Powermacs. The need to have an old Mac OS installed? Is it because Apple is still keeping their obsolete (since these machines were never supported by Mac OS X) firmware secrets close to their carbonite chests?
What I find ironic is that while the classic Mac OS introduced to the public the magic of bootable CDs, these systems still can't boot cleanly to Linux, let alone use the increasingly popular Linux live CDs.
I still have an "Old World" 603e Powermac that Jobs said would run "Rhapsody" but when Mac OS X was finally released of course all pre-G3s were abandoned. Grrrr. Those days Apple was known and respected for their good long-term support and the long life span of their machines while MS was already notorious for their "planned obsolescence". Incidentally Apple's approach changed at the time when MS made the competitor-saving investment in Apple, but that shouldn't prevent Apple from divulging their now-obsolete firmware secrets to help keep the many still functioning pre-G3 systems in useful service. If they were easily booted into Linux using e.g. a live CD with light Xfce environment or as terminals booting from a server, these "Old World" machines could be useful for cash-strapped schools or at homes as secondary systems.
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I said none of the things you paranoidly accuse me of saying, and you should've understood that much if you read even halfway through my message, but instead you come up with the brilliant idea that I must be some kind of a muslim terrorist enemy of America??? I'd laugh if your response wasn't so unfathomably unfunny.
FYI, I wasn't the one "blatantly creating excuses for the actions of murderous extremist terrorists" when I pointed out what pretty much the whole world (sans sections of American "ultra-patriots") understands. That the terrorist attacks were a response to American policy in the region. If you start throwing hissy fits when something so obvious is pointed out to you, you can't be educated or debated with any more than some indoctrinated cult member.
Your ilk of blindly ultra-patriotic Americans created those excuses for the terrorists all by yourselves. Yet your denial of any responsibility while attacking anyone who dares to suggest there's some immorality in American foreign policy explains why the US remains so hugely unpopular around the world. Your extreme religious right is undoubtably proud of you though.
And pretty "classy" way of squiggling out of the Chinese imperialism "debate through arguments". I guess you did succeed in making the brainwashed Chinese militarists look good at some comparative level after all...
I'm not American. (or from any other expansionist country to that matter)
I do condemn all domestic and foreign acts of aggression, but consider killing, invading and annexing foreign peoples "somewhat worse form of behavior" than any strictly domestic form of dictatorship based on anachronistic customs, politics or religion.
I do not consider it to be a valid excuse for China (or Russia) to kill and invade foreign peoples and annex their lands just because 1) their long-gone despot rulers claimed such imperial superiority over others, or 2) because the British and Spanish (et al) invaded and occupied much of the known world in the past centuries, or 3) because even the Nazis tried to create their own criminal empire.
I'm not "anti-China" per se, but when their regime behaves like Nazi-Germany in the 1930s, complete with ruthless military occupation of their neighbouring Tibetans and Uighurs and state-manipulated xenophobic patriotism, I feel that the Chinese people themselves must hold themselves accountable, just as the world held the German people accountable for the crimes of their Nazi rulers.
Now on to your explicit assumptions:
When the Chinese dictatorship is occupying its neighbouring peoples, threatening the democratically-governed Taiwan with war, indoctrinating its people to hate Japan (and to somewhat lesser extent other "foreign imperialists") and proliferating nuclear-capable missile technology to other authoritarian states, surely you can't claim that the nuclear status of the xenophobic and expansionist China is a non-issue and that those anachronistically governed Middle-eastern and African states are somehow worse offenders than China?
Taiwan... "always part of China"...? Or "for the most part of China's history claimed to be the devine possession of China's god-king rulers"? You may not be aware that Taiwan's native inhabitants are not ethnically or culturally Han-chinese, and that Taiwan has been under imperial occupation of some European colonial powers as well as imperial Japan, besides imperial China (and most recently under the occupation of the Kuomintang who fled there from China)? Should the native Taiwanese, or the current amalgation of natives and Chinese refugees, have no say in their own status? Do you have no respect for the idea of peoples self-determination (and democracy), something which the existence of the vast majority of the world's independent nations is based upon? The neo-imperial China has made Taiwan an issue of "domestic ill" because it suits the purposes of China's dictatorial elite, but accepting that argument wipes out the legal and humanitarian basis of the existence of most of the worlds nations which at one time or another were occupied and ruled by some foreign colonial power. Does Great Britain, the world's worst imperial offender of the past centuries, still have valid claim over the lands they once occupied? Or does Great Britain in fact belong to the Germanic tribes which invaded (and ethnically overran) those isles a couple millenia ago? Or does Great Britain perhaps belong to Italians, the modern-day descendants of the imperial Rome which also ruled most of the British isles? Does Pakistan belong to India or perhaps Persia (Iran)? Does Poland belong to Germany or perhaps tsarist Russia? Or could we perhaps agree that the age of imperial expansionism should be over and that peoples should have the right to determine their own future?
How is China's aggression (occupation of neighbours, recent wars against Vietnam, Korea, India etc, killing its own youth over peaceful demonstration against the corruption of their dictators) somehow "far less significant" than a handful of religious extremist attacking the financial centre of the US? Besides that act of terrorism not being state-sponsored but devised by a network of individuals, do you have any inkling why they say they did it? Would they have done it if the US had not been overthrowing governments and propping up pro-american dict
OK, how many of those countries you listed are expansionist totalitarian states with nuclear arsenal? How many are not just threatening but planning to attack a democratic state? How many are occupying their neighbouring peoples and destroying their national identity, language and religion while ripping off their natural resources? How many are actively agitating their population to hate and blame foreigners for practically every social ill of their own totalitarian making?
Only Russia gets anywhere close to China in terms of crimes committed against neighbouring and "minority" peoples while being totally unapologetic about them.
Many countries in the Middle East and Africa have significant human rights problems indeed, but I believe your prioritizing between domestic social ills based on history and traditions versus unapologetic imperialist aggression against neighbors is simply way off. It is one thing to suffer from anachronistic local leaders and another altogether to be under ruthless foreign occupation aiming to wipe your nation off this planet.
Like the Chinese scholar Cao Chang Qing himself said: "Chinese are a nation of intellectual 8-year olds."
"Foreign imperialist pigs are all evil, but our own imperialist invasions and genocides are all oh so completely justified... because China's feudal overlords said so!"
No one can reason with brownshirts who want to believe in their imperial superiority over other peoples.
So your claims are based on the fact that your ancestors' feudal omnipotent god-kings (aka emperors) claimed all known territories around China (well actually the whole world) to be their divine possession? But didn't first the Republic and then the Communists already disown such madness last century? But that still gives you the cajones to claim ownership of your neighbouring peoples who are nothing like the Chinese at all?
If imperial invasions are OK, in that case doesn't modern-day Japan also hold a claim over the Chinese and their lands? Or what about the Mongolian descendants of Tsenghis Khan who conquered China and much of the continent (but left Tibet stay uninvaded out of respect!), surely they are China's rightful rulers since they actually ruled and administered China for generations while until its invasion last century China had never ruled or administered over the Tibetan nation. It's scarily amusing to see Chinese brownshirts crying about Japan's brutal invasion when the Chinese are doing that to their smaller neighbors now and every day.
And if a Chinese god-king's wet daydream of owning the whole world is reason enough to destroy and annex foreign people, why is China allowing other neighbours like Korea and Vietnam to be independent? They were also once claimed by China's feudal god-kings as their possession? And surely China doesn't recognize the vast majority of world's nations which have only shed their colonial masters over the last couple of hundred years!
I don't know if your masters allow you to visit the following sites, but here's what a mainland Chinese (overseas scholar) writes about China's imperial claims over neighboring Tibet:
Now you've got a choice to make: Either put that brown shirt back on and join the Communist Party-approved riots against the Japanese, or apologize the Tibetan people for the violent and arrogant imperialist invasion of their peaceful country. What the Japanese did in China during their invasion was evil and their government should apologize profusely
It started when Nixon first rolled out the red carpet to China's dictators and promtly dumped support for the occupied Tibetans' struggle to regain independence.
The only answer I have so far is greed. It seems that the formerly rather benevolently socialistic India now wants piece of the action, principles and ideals be damned. But hey, if the US and Europe can lick Chinese Communist Party's bottom, why can't the newly-assertive India? This corporate-lead foreign policy must be quite lucrative for the policy-makers too. And the Chinese Party cadres are masters in playing parties against each other.
Why else would the occupied Tibetans and Uighurs be so goddamn dispensable?
Next time you buy a Dell or visit Walmart (or other financiers of the Chinese Communist Party rule), remember that you aren't financing Hitler's autobahn network in the 1930s, but nevertheless something eerily similar.
Just don't be surprised or feel hurt when Russians aren't universally loved and welcomed by their neighbours (while these neighbours do get along just fine with all their non-Russian neighbours).
I do find it more than a little ironic that while the FSB-loving crowd cries and demands "human rights" (i.e. the right to remain 100% Russian without any degree of integration) for the implanted Russian masses on other nations' lands, that same crowd is fearing the mass migration of Chinese onto the far-eastern parts of the Russian empire (although that is nothing compared to squeezing people out of their historical homelands). But since your government supports the Chinese invasion and oppression of Tibetan and Uighur homelands, surely you're fine with the Chinese also overrunning Siberia.
Would you be happy if the chinese or Central Asian muslims (i.e. people with very different language, culture and ideology) squeezed you out of your native lands through relentless migration for whatever reason? Would it be okay if some imam or chairman Mao sent them to your lands, just to expand their influence?
Just try real hard and you'll figure out why Russians' neighbours would be happy with their Russian neighbours if they'd only stick to occupying their own historical neighbourhood.
Unless you're some sort of Stalinist revisionist like the current Soviet Russian Putinist clique, you really should respect your neighbours a lot more.
PS. Please explain to me why the Chechen people and their lands should be controlled by Kremlin and not by the Chechens themselves? Whether they choose to be Wahhabis or buddhists, what does it matter to you?
One of these days a manufacturer looking for a new niche will release an "ayXuphle" player with an AM receiver (and standard AAA rechargables and switchable memory cards) and I finally have just one stick for all my AM and .ogg listening needs, not to mention booting Linux... :^)
(*) Rough size comparison:
(W) 25 x (H) 85 x (D) 9.7 (mm) (Copycat Shuffle[tm])
(W) 30 x (H) 80 x (D) 17 (mm) (Sony SRF-M95 AM/FM pocket radio)
OTOH many of the countries occupied by Soviet Russia can't seem to get their russian-born former masters to leave their newly independent nations. The current Kremlin regime is extremely hostile in its insistance that all these fifth column russians must be allowed to stay on (and yet again give the Russian empire an excuse to intervene in the future...).
And I don't see why the ethnicity should be a factor that determines whether someone should or should not involve in politics in such a diverse country as Russia.
Well, do the minorities really want to stay under Russian domination and continue playing minor roles even in their homelands, that is, when they're not being outright persecuted. Think for a moment: why are there so many "minorities" "within Russia" in the first place?
It might not be well known outside but in many parts of Russia there are fairly large numbers of Ukrainians, Jews, Georgian, Armenians, and others living there (in addition to minorities native to Russian therritories such as those from north caucasus.)
It is also not well known outside Russia that large numbers of Russians and these other nationalities were implanted by Stalin and his successors onto lands Russia grabbed from its neighbors, and continues to hold onto to this day with no intention of ever leaving. FWIW Russia's first democratically elected president Boris Yeltsin actually apologized for Soviet Union's crimes against its neighbors, but the current KGB-clique of Putin has turned that completely around, and these days Stalin and his land grabs are considered a source of ultra-nationalistic pride
Fortunately most (but not all) nations invaded by Stalin have regained at least parts of their native homelands. China is still holding its neighboring Tibetan and Uighur people under such genocidal annexation that would make even Stalin proud.
PS. Isn' the term "minorities native to Russian territories" somewhat of an oxymoron?
Corel may now be nominally private but it sure ain't giving MS anything but a show competition since the takeover.
The industry's best kept secret, eh?
MS took de facto control of Corel through a series of shady moves worthy of the Groklaw site's attention.
In late 2003 MS dumped their 20% + stake to MS co-founder Paul Allen's venture manipulation firm (Vector) which was staffed with ex-MS executives and other former execs from the company which had earlier "consulted" Corel bosses to commit the Linux U-turn (McKinsey consultancy) and join the MS.NET bandwagon, or another investment banking company which later gave Corel's bosses financial advice to sell out at bottom prices.
As a sugaring on the top, Corel chairman James Baillie's own law firm (Baillie's soul was sold in the transaction too) was hired by the MS goons Vector to fight against Corel's shareholders.
Google for these names and "corelrescue" to learn how MS conducts corporate hijackings of their competitors in broad daylight and without a squeak from the courts or regulators.
Linux and (F)OSS in general is a volunteer-based collaborative effort without comparable IP and patent-vetting infrastructure (or motive), so although the kernel guys are trying to avoid the obvious IP traps they can not be held up to the same standards of scrutiny as the world's largest monopoly corporation. The "non-profit" Linux effort isn't out to "kill competition" and profit from it like corporations, which are based on a different set of operating parameters and agendas. If somebody's "patented brainfart" ends up in the Linux source code, it can and will be worked around pretty quickly. Patent and IP holders have also certain responsibility to "protect" their goodies, and that should be easy in the case of Linux.
What would be interesting is to search for open-source code (and ideas?) inside Microsoft's own products. The more people keep cranking out Free code and dreaming up cool new methods, the sillier MS will look if and when they one day try to ban Linux through the courts "because we own a couple of these cool new methods!! (but reserve the right to use everybody else's free contributions nevertheless)"
Do you personally have anything against Linux and the open source philosophy of open code and standards, or is it simply a fantastically-paid job for you to execute Microsoft's corporate strategy where even the most benevolent of global trends of sharing knowledge is deduced into a plain faceless threat to be annihilated?
This is the extreme opposite of the military-religious "war on/of terror" approach, but it is almost as far from solving the issues that cause all that hatred that leads to terrorism.
Bunch of Irish guys didn't just wake up deranged one morning and decide to create the IRA. They had their reasons for fighting the British establishment.
Bunch of Basque guys didn't just wake up deranged one morning and decide to create the ETA. They had their reasons for fighting the Spanish establishment.
Bunch of Arab guys didn't just wake up deranged one morning and decide to create the Al-Qaeda. They had their reasons for fighting the American establishment.
Bunch of Chechen guys didn't just wake up deranged one morning and decide to create their liberation army. They had their reasons for fighting the Russian establishment.
Bunch of Tibetan guys didn't just wake up deranged one morning and decide to... oh wait, they're freaking non-violent freedom-fighters so they can be conveniently ignored in favour of doing business with their occupiers...
Anyway, there is a certain pattern that would suggest that nations (often large and with imperialist tendencies) which insist on controlling people and territories outside their natural domain tend to be more affected by terrorism ("one man's terrorist is another man's freedom-fighter") than smaller, democratic states which do not project their power outside their natural borders.
Perhaps recognizing and supporting all peoples' right of self-determination would help remove one of the major root causes of "terrorism"? If you lived under foreign occupation, what would you do?
Sorry but the poverty trap isn't solved that easily. What you're trying to get at is disposable income. Unfortunately the poorer you are, the less you can afford to put aside for non-essential spending. At couple of dollars a day practically everything goes towards securing food, clothing and lodging (no computers, simputers or mobiles phones for you). At 10-50 dollars a day, depending on the cost of the basics at your location, you can afford to start putting some money aside for life's sweet luxuries. When you're filthy rich, practically all your income is potentially disposable and you can start buying things at your whim.
People surviving with subsistence level income do not, by definition, have disposable income.
Of course this point is moot wrt. the $100 PC since they're aimed solely at governments and for communal use.
Most motherboards currently in use don't have SATA support built-in, and even the news ones that do may come with chipsets that haven't got complete Linux support yet.
Since my next motherboard and drives may well be all SATA, it would make sense to start adding SATA drives to my current setup using an add-on controller card.
The sources, including Tibetans themselves, which are not afraid to take into account China's 1951 military invasion of Tibet and the subsequent creation of a mini-Tibet (which the Chinese Communist Party calls the Tibetan "Autonomous" Region or TAR) consisting less than half of independent Tibet's original land area have quite different figures for both the actual extent of Beijing-engineered mass migration of Han Chinese settlers and the Tibetan deaths resulting from the invasion.
Were your CCP-approved figures meant to paint a cheery picture of Tibetan women still allowed to give birth despite the growing number of Chinese in the chopped-up mini-Tibet as the figures were somewhat vague regarding the number of Tibetan deaths caused by unnatural causes under the Chinese occupation?
Secondly, instead of getting all pissy with your physics 101, how about you google for "depleted uranium" and "health" and then also read some of the material and studies that were done independently of US and UK governments.
If you weren't so religiously trusting of US government's (and principally its military's) own studies, I'd be worried about your personal lack of concern for the civilians living in the country which your military invaded and still occupies. Then again the US is still refusing to accept responsibility for the Agent Orange catastrophy crippling Vietnam to this day. Care to look up any old studies by the US government on Agent Orange's effects on humans?
And since you mention your hopes for a "cleanup" in the near future, I'd sure hope that the US and UK would try cleaning up what they can of the hundreds of tons of depleted uranium their armed forces have scattered across Iraq.
And why is the totalitarian China (and Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Pakistan etc.) America's "partner" in the "war of terror" when the central asian Uighur people live under the terror of Chinese military occupation, and over a million Tibetans have perished under China's invasion of Tibet?
I still don't see any genuine idealism or pursuit for justice in the US foreign policy, just the same old political and commercial opportunism dressed up to be sold for the ever-so-patriotic american masses.
Shhh, hush now. You're spoiling it.
When asked "how many died in Vietnam war", nine out of ten Americans give the ballpark of "60,000". The two, perhaps three million Vietnamese deaths don't simply register.
Of course the USA still refuses to accept responsibility for the continuing tragedy caused by the massive Agent Orange contamination that is still killing and causing birth defects among the Vietnamese population.
More recently the US and UK war machines have scattered hundreds of tons of toxic and carcinogenic depleted uranium (used in hardening projectile shells) across Iraq. Does anyone think these two countries will ever take responsibility of the devastating consequenses affecting the current and future generations of Iraqi civilians?
While I can reason the deaths and injuries caused by the Indian Ocean Tsunami to be part of the cost of our existance on a living planet (I say this knowing that close friends of mine lost many friends and relatives, and my own relatives holidaying in Thailand only barely escaped death thanks to help by quick thinking locals), I find no good excuses for sending massive war machines to foreign countries to kill massive numbers of locals and to poison their lands for generations to come.
Mike Davis, senior analyst at Butler Group, said SCO had not explained what users were licensing.
"What is SCO actually giving for the money? With a licensing agreement you'd expect Unix upgrades. So this is back to fear, uncertainty and doubt," he said.
So what's next? The "butler did it" excuse?
Oh Boies, how the greedy legal eagles fall...
What I find ironic is that while the classic Mac OS introduced to the public the magic of bootable CDs, these systems still can't boot cleanly to Linux, let alone use the increasingly popular Linux live CDs.
I still have an "Old World" 603e Powermac that Jobs said would run "Rhapsody" but when Mac OS X was finally released of course all pre-G3s were abandoned. Grrrr. Those days Apple was known and respected for their good long-term support and the long life span of their machines while MS was already notorious for their "planned obsolescence". Incidentally Apple's approach changed at the time when MS made the competitor-saving investment in Apple, but that shouldn't prevent Apple from divulging their now-obsolete firmware secrets to help keep the many still functioning pre-G3 systems in useful service. If they were easily booted into Linux using e.g. a live CD with light Xfce environment or as terminals booting from a server, these "Old World" machines could be useful for cash-strapped schools or at homes as secondary systems.