>>it is OK to enter the city for visits and then apply for residence permits This is factually incorrect (Talking of the rural/urban travel of Chinese citizens) That it is not enforced (due to the need for a sub-lower-class workforce to remove garbage and the like in the cities) doesn't change the fact that if you were born in a designated rural area of China you are legally required to obtain a "visa" before entering designated urban areas, said permission being obtainable only by personal visit to PSB offices, which are found only in major cities.
>> But it was entirely legal for me to convert tourist visa to employment one.
Again you are factually incorrect. It was convenient, but it was most certainly not legal, as you would have learned had anyone with significant face with the PSB stood to profit significantly by your being deported. (It would have had to be rather impressively profitable for them mind you, as it would have cost the official whose stamp was used on your documents and photocopies a lot of face as well). The fact that it's easily done and convenient is irrelevant. The law, as written, as currently on the books, is that foreigners may not obtain work visa's while within China unless they already possess a valid FEC, which in turn cannot be obtained unless they already have a valid work visa issued by a Chinese consulate or embassy in their home nation. The FEC's are rarely actually issued at all anymore, having been mostly replaced by the Residence Permit sticker applied alongside the visa in your passport.
Ok, first, your assumption that I'm American (or even in America) is incorrect. Fujian province, China.
Second, I'm not saying all cops are dishonest thugs, though some most certainly are. Rather I'm saying that their word must be assumed to be of no more worth than anyone else's. Where a cops word is taken without other evidence over the word of the person they accuse then you have a corrupted and invalid legal system.
Thirdly, the claim of US superiority? Having lived long term in China, Oz, England, Ireland, and the US (by long term I mean 5 years or more as an adult in each) I have to tell you the US is strongly threatened for third position when it comes to reasonable police officers and courts that I would consider trustworthy.
Fourthly, your English is pretty impressive as a second language, particularly if your spoken is on relative equivalence with your written ability. Certainly beats my French and Chinese into the ground.
Finally, I do not believe, and nothing I've said can be realistically taken to imply, that the police of any nation have anything specific against me. Rather, I am merely reiterating that giving special credence to random authority figures declarations over those of "regular" folks is a severe cultural error. Police are most definitely not better than the average population from which they are drawn. In many cultures and systems they are significantly worse than the people around them in matters of common decency, honesty and justice.
Your English is pretty good, but clearly not your first language, so I'll cut you some slack on your mis-used vocabulary and bizarre colloquialism choices.
Your attitude however, is sickening.
In court the only correct response to "the police officer says" is "What evidence does the police officer offer to corroborate their claims?".
Police officers lie, misrepresent the truth and recollect only what they think they saw (which is usually what they wanted to see) just like every other human being on the planet.
There are good reasons why "police state" is a bad thing. Taking the line that police officers must be believed and/or obeyed without question is supporting a position very far down the way to full police state thinking.
>> "Police officers are expected to be truthful" No, actually they're not. No more so (and commonly a lot less so) than the average human being.
Even if the DMCA doesn't count (and your arguments for that are childish, bordering on nonsensical) basic international copyright law still applies in full and says that you're full of shit.
Copying a server to make it free (as in beer of course) is not actually adding any functionality. And even if it were, who cares? It's still copyright and patent infringement.
As a side note, I recently fired a junior coder with a similar attitude to yours. On top of his other attitude problems there was the constant insistence on lifting chunks of code from other "projects" (by which he meant codebases stolen from various games companies) and pasting it more or less verbatim into his work. In order to get the firing signed off on I had to point out to the boss that "If he is sol cavalier with other peoples code, why should we believe he isn't already releasing ours to all his thieving friends as well?"
>>In the rather distance past, outside people should get the city permit in their local police office for visit; that rule was scrapped quite long ago as I remember.
I believe you'll find on closer inspection that "enforcement" of that rule has been scrapped for quite some time. Certainly just pre-Olympics that rule was enforced with a vengeance, emptying the hosting cities of every homeless person and "non-desirable" by means of loading them into trucks and dumping them a long way out into the countryside under that law.
>> Foreigners need medical exam only if they stay in China for employment. Therefore you can enter China with medical exams, like thousands of tourists every day do, and only do the medical within China when you apply for the working permit. I got one before.
The problem there is that entering China on a non-working visa, and then obtaining the working visa within the country (while extremely common) is also very specifically laid down as being illegal. As are the "HK Runs" so commonly used by English teachers whose employing schools lack the face to get the illegal processing done on the mainland.
Try Ireland. It's neither easy nor automatic, but it is possible both to live in a legally innocent state, and/or through careful restitution restore yourself to such a state if you screw up.
All companies that want to stay in business tend to work hard to remove illegal copies of their servers. That's basic business. I know here (China, not \.) folks try to get away with euphemisms like "open server" and "server emulator", but when you duplicate the functionality of the IP of a company by copying their source code (generally leaked by employees) and try to make out that "writing your own server" function by function with their code in the next window over, well, that doesn't really add up.
If they have created or legally licensed the game then how they charge for it is up to them, and more power to them in shutting down and pursuing legal action against the assholes who copy their stuff illegally.
Most players here are perfectly happy to defeat their opponent by handing over credit card details instead of grinding/learning to play. So why shouldn't the companies make a profit from it?
There are a few countries out there (small ones with governments designed to be ineffective) where it is possible to exist (for brief periods of time) in a legally guilt-free state. Not many, and not often, true.
As opposed to here where a single glance at a persons face tells those in the know which set of pre-stamped arrest forms to use to tie you legally in knots while they decide whether to extract cash from you or disappear you.
And I'm going to take a wild guess that when an officer says "He disturbed the peace", and the bloke who happened to laugh too loudly when the police officer got shat on by a pigeon denies it, the "punk with a badge"'s word is held as truth by default?
Given that gold farming and child labor are already illegal here, it probably won't affect much at all. This is just another "company shakedown law", implemented because simple tax increases are too inflexible and put too many paper trails on the money.
This law is not being created to control "the people". It is not being made to be enforced.
This law, as with well over half of Chinese law, has only one purpose. To ensure that no one may exist in a fully legal state within the borders of China. Seriously. You can't. It is not actually possible to complete all the legal requirements to exist as a citizen, a foreigner or a company in China without committing crimes in other areas of the countries laws. The classic example being that if you try to migrate legally from rural to urban China as a Chinese citizen it will be noted that you either illegally entered a city to visit the offices of the PSB (police dept responsible for all "person location" aspects of control) to fill in the necessary forms, or that you obtained forms illegally removed from PSB offices.
(The equivalent for foreigners is the medical exam. You may not enter China without a full medical exam. Only medical exams performed in Chinese hospitals are legally accepted. (Entry with medical reports from foreign (or S.A.R.) hospitals are routinely accepted, but right there they have all the grounds they need to deport you should you ever try to (for example) take someone rich enough to own a car to court for hitting you with said car.)
But why? Well, that's got two parts to it.
The first is the same as many western states with laws prohibiting things such as "wasting police time", "loitering" and "resisting arrest". Purely so they have something to charge you with if they decide they don't like the look of your face.
The second, closely related, is so that those in power have something to hold over people who they feel are being less than sufficiently forthcoming with the bribes.
"Hey guys, you know how Facebook's been getting away with screwing over the entire world on privacy issues?" "Uh, yeah?" "And you know how our average users are even dumber than theirs?" "Wouldn't have thought it possible if I I hadn't seen it in action, but yeah?" "Well...Why don't we..." "Ohhhhhhhh!"
I don't recall any recently (or indeed ever) where having earphones in and an mp3 player running at the time would have affected matters.
Survival in a commercial airliner accident comes from two things. 1. Pure dumb luck. Nothing else will have you alive and mobile after any significant incident. 2. Being willing and physically able to trample/force your way clear when the wreckage stops moving. If you don't need to do this then it wasn't a significant accident (or you're nine years old and Dutch(See aspect 1, above)).
If that linked quiz is representative of the actual survey then the result is that Students now are less tolerant of bullshit, and more likely to call an error an error rather than pretend that every answer is right.
Seriously, half the questions are simply asking "Do you pretend idiots have valid opinions?", while the other half are "Do you pretend other people don't make mistakes?".
>> He wants all newspapers to go paywalled, so he can try and create an artificial scarcity and maintain pre-internet pricing models.
In essence he wants laws passed and customary behavior established that ensure that no vehicle may travel without at least 2 standard Buggy Whips and a bag of oats aboard.
It's rather more than that actually. It's interesting to note that the place now called Nazareth was so named around 310CE, by relatives of the Roman Emperor who sent them to find it. Prior to that, no-one in the area had heard of any such place. Though a lot of them had heard of the Nazarene Sect, A Judaic sect kinda comparable to our 1960's hippie movement.
Ah, so kind of like how the papacy of 2510CE will be saying "Look, ok, we knew about the child rapists in our employees for decades and did nothing about it, but now that's in the past"?
No actual effort involved? No "penance" (to use the vernacular)? No attempts to establish just how ignorant and backward the RC Church (and religion) has been since day one, or effort to face up to and deal with reality on a timely basis?
Yeah, that's pretty credible behavior from the Vatican. (From any other source it'd be considered less than decent).
Slashdot Mirror
>>it is OK to enter the city for visits and then apply for residence permits
This is factually incorrect (Talking of the rural/urban travel of Chinese citizens)
That it is not enforced (due to the need for a sub-lower-class workforce to remove garbage and the like in the cities) doesn't change the fact that if you were born in a designated rural area of China you are legally required to obtain a "visa" before entering designated urban areas, said permission being obtainable only by personal visit to PSB offices, which are found only in major cities.
>> But it was entirely legal for me to convert tourist visa to employment one.
Again you are factually incorrect.
It was convenient, but it was most certainly not legal, as you would have learned had anyone with significant face with the PSB stood to profit significantly by your being deported. (It would have had to be rather impressively profitable for them mind you, as it would have cost the official whose stamp was used on your documents and photocopies a lot of face as well).
The fact that it's easily done and convenient is irrelevant. The law, as written, as currently on the books, is that foreigners may not obtain work visa's while within China unless they already possess a valid FEC, which in turn cannot be obtained unless they already have a valid work visa issued by a Chinese consulate or embassy in their home nation. The FEC's are rarely actually issued at all anymore, having been mostly replaced by the Residence Permit sticker applied alongside the visa in your passport.
Ok, first, your assumption that I'm American (or even in America) is incorrect. Fujian province, China.
Second, I'm not saying all cops are dishonest thugs, though some most certainly are. Rather I'm saying that their word must be assumed to be of no more worth than anyone else's. Where a cops word is taken without other evidence over the word of the person they accuse then you have a corrupted and invalid legal system.
Thirdly, the claim of US superiority? Having lived long term in China, Oz, England, Ireland, and the US (by long term I mean 5 years or more as an adult in each) I have to tell you the US is strongly threatened for third position when it comes to reasonable police officers and courts that I would consider trustworthy.
Fourthly, your English is pretty impressive as a second language, particularly if your spoken is on relative equivalence with your written ability. Certainly beats my French and Chinese into the ground.
Finally, I do not believe, and nothing I've said can be realistically taken to imply, that the police of any nation have anything specific against me. Rather, I am merely reiterating that giving special credence to random authority figures declarations over those of "regular" folks is a severe cultural error. Police are most definitely not better than the average population from which they are drawn. In many cultures and systems they are significantly worse than the people around them in matters of common decency, honesty and justice.
Your English is pretty good, but clearly not your first language, so I'll cut you some slack on your mis-used vocabulary and bizarre colloquialism choices.
Your attitude however, is sickening.
In court the only correct response to "the police officer says" is "What evidence does the police officer offer to corroborate their claims?".
Police officers lie, misrepresent the truth and recollect only what they think they saw (which is usually what they wanted to see) just like every other human being on the planet.
There are good reasons why "police state" is a bad thing. Taking the line that police officers must be believed and/or obeyed without question is supporting a position very far down the way to full police state thinking.
>> "Police officers are expected to be truthful"
No, actually they're not. No more so (and commonly a lot less so) than the average human being.
Even if the DMCA doesn't count (and your arguments for that are childish, bordering on nonsensical) basic international copyright law still applies in full and says that you're full of shit.
Copying a server to make it free (as in beer of course) is not actually adding any functionality. And even if it were, who cares? It's still copyright and patent infringement.
As a side note, I recently fired a junior coder with a similar attitude to yours. On top of his other attitude problems there was the constant insistence on lifting chunks of code from other "projects" (by which he meant codebases stolen from various games companies) and pasting it more or less verbatim into his work. In order to get the firing signed off on I had to point out to the boss that "If he is sol cavalier with other peoples code, why should we believe he isn't already releasing ours to all his thieving friends as well?"
>>In the rather distance past, outside people should get the city permit in their local police office for visit; that rule was scrapped quite long ago as I remember.
I believe you'll find on closer inspection that "enforcement" of that rule has been scrapped for quite some time. Certainly just pre-Olympics that rule was enforced with a vengeance, emptying the hosting cities of every homeless person and "non-desirable" by means of loading them into trucks and dumping them a long way out into the countryside under that law.
>> Foreigners need medical exam only if they stay in China for employment. Therefore you can enter China with medical exams, like thousands of tourists every day do, and only do the medical within China when you apply for the working permit. I got one before.
The problem there is that entering China on a non-working visa, and then obtaining the working visa within the country (while extremely common) is also very specifically laid down as being illegal.
As are the "HK Runs" so commonly used by English teachers whose employing schools lack the face to get the illegal processing done on the mainland.
Try Ireland. It's neither easy nor automatic, but it is possible both to live in a legally innocent state, and/or through careful restitution restore yourself to such a state if you screw up.
All companies that want to stay in business tend to work hard to remove illegal copies of their servers. That's basic business. I know here (China, not \.) folks try to get away with euphemisms like "open server" and "server emulator", but when you duplicate the functionality of the IP of a company by copying their source code (generally leaked by employees) and try to make out that "writing your own server" function by function with their code in the next window over, well, that doesn't really add up.
If they have created or legally licensed the game then how they charge for it is up to them, and more power to them in shutting down and pursuing legal action against the assholes who copy their stuff illegally.
That's just how things work here.
Most players here are perfectly happy to defeat their opponent by handing over credit card details instead of grinding/learning to play. So why shouldn't the companies make a profit from it?
There are a few countries out there (small ones with governments designed to be ineffective) where it is possible to exist (for brief periods of time) in a legally guilt-free state.
Not many, and not often, true.
As opposed to here where a single glance at a persons face tells those in the know which set of pre-stamped arrest forms to use to tie you legally in knots while they decide whether to extract cash from you or disappear you.
And I'm going to take a wild guess that when an officer says "He disturbed the peace", and the bloke who happened to laugh too loudly when the police officer got shat on by a pigeon denies it, the "punk with a badge"'s word is held as truth by default?
Given that gold farming and child labor are already illegal here, it probably won't affect much at all. This is just another "company shakedown law", implemented because simple tax increases are too inflexible and put too many paper trails on the money.
The point is completely missed.
This law is not being created to control "the people". It is not being made to be enforced.
This law, as with well over half of Chinese law, has only one purpose. To ensure that no one may exist in a fully legal state within the borders of China. Seriously. You can't. It is not actually possible to complete all the legal requirements to exist as a citizen, a foreigner or a company in China without committing crimes in other areas of the countries laws. The classic example being that if you try to migrate legally from rural to urban China as a Chinese citizen it will be noted that you either illegally entered a city to visit the offices of the PSB (police dept responsible for all "person location" aspects of control) to fill in the necessary forms, or that you obtained forms illegally removed from PSB offices.
(The equivalent for foreigners is the medical exam. You may not enter China without a full medical exam. Only medical exams performed in Chinese hospitals are legally accepted.
(Entry with medical reports from foreign (or S.A.R.) hospitals are routinely accepted, but right there they have all the grounds they need to deport you should you ever try to (for example) take someone rich enough to own a car to court for hitting you with said car.)
But why?
Well, that's got two parts to it.
The first is the same as many western states with laws prohibiting things such as "wasting police time", "loitering" and "resisting arrest". Purely so they have something to charge you with if they decide they don't like the look of your face.
The second, closely related, is so that those in power have something to hold over people who they feel are being less than sufficiently forthcoming with the bribes.
"Hey guys, you know how Facebook's been getting away with screwing over the entire world on privacy issues?"
"Uh, yeah?"
"And you know how our average users are even dumber than theirs?"
"Wouldn't have thought it possible if I I hadn't seen it in action, but yeah?"
"Well...Why don't we..."
"Ohhhhhhhh!"
There were no Atari ST nerds. It was a games machine with a keyboard duct-taped on at the last moment.
I don't recall any recently (or indeed ever) where having earphones in and an mp3 player running at the time would have affected matters.
Survival in a commercial airliner accident comes from two things.
1. Pure dumb luck. Nothing else will have you alive and mobile after any significant incident.
2. Being willing and physically able to trample/force your way clear when the wreckage stops moving. If you don't need to do this then it wasn't a significant accident (or you're nine years old and Dutch(See aspect 1, above)).
If that linked quiz is representative of the actual survey then the result is that Students now are less tolerant of bullshit, and more likely to call an error an error rather than pretend that every answer is right.
Seriously, half the questions are simply asking "Do you pretend idiots have valid opinions?", while the other half are "Do you pretend other people don't make mistakes?".
If only Fox and CNN can be persuaded to follow suit with their websites, and maybe move their televised channels to a subscription model as well.
>> He wants all newspapers to go paywalled, so he can try and create an artificial scarcity and maintain pre-internet pricing models.
In essence he wants laws passed and customary behavior established that ensure that no vehicle may travel without at least 2 standard Buggy Whips and a bag of oats aboard.
But they haven't righted their error, at all.
The error was not the ruining of one man's life.
The error is putting fairy tales ahead of reality, and insisting their imaginary friend is real.
All the other scandals, idiocies, horrors and debacles of the Christian churches are merely results of these two intertwined errors.
It's rather more than that actually.
It's interesting to note that the place now called Nazareth was so named around 310CE, by relatives of the Roman Emperor who sent them to find it.
Prior to that, no-one in the area had heard of any such place.
Though a lot of them had heard of the Nazarene Sect, A Judaic sect kinda comparable to our 1960's hippie movement.
Check your translations kiddo.
Jesus the Nazarene != Jesus of Nazareth.
Whether or not he _would_ forgive them at this point became utterly irrelevant quite some time back.
Round about when he died to be exact.
It not like he had some fairy tale thing like a spirit or soul that's been hanging around since then.
Ah, so kind of like how the papacy of 2510CE will be saying "Look, ok, we knew about the child rapists in our employees for decades and did nothing about it, but now that's in the past"?
No actual effort involved? No "penance" (to use the vernacular)? No attempts to establish just how ignorant and backward the RC Church (and religion) has been since day one, or effort to face up to and deal with reality on a timely basis?
Yeah, that's pretty credible behavior from the Vatican. (From any other source it'd be considered less than decent).
Great Scientist's Remains Further Desecrated in Black Magic Ritual Effort to Distract Citizenry.
So, you're saying that they are now forgiving Copernicus for being right all along?
Even as religious statements go that's pretty lame.