The Free Software Foundation basically started the community and created the GPL for it. In fact, in many cases, using the term "Free Software" is implying that someone sides with the FSF and GPL over other open source licenses. The GPL takes a hard-line stance against other licenses that would allow the code to be swallowed up and packaged into proprietary software. This is the natural policy for developers who want the code to always remain open.
But it used to be about nerdy things. Real nerd things, not just video games and politics. The typical article 8 years ago was Linux running on some guy's toaster, or a review of a new programming language book. Now it's all about demonizing China, bashing religion, American politics, or ridiculous nonsense posted to Idle. There is so much anger and so little curiosity and constructiveness. That's fine for other news sites, but Slashdot is supposed to be special and different.
The guilty pleasure of Unix command-line geekiness, and the love of strange and interesting computer hardware for its own sake, has taken a big plunge on Slashdot. Maybe it's because everyone uses Ubuntu instead of Debian and Gentoo. Maybe it's because LAMP isn't anything new, and people can just cobble together pre-made solutions to everything. Or maybe it's the genuine end of an era of geeky computing fun. Whatever it is, it makes me sad and I wish Slashdot could go back to its roots. Even random articles about Mini-ITX motherboards fitted into random objects would be better than what we regularly get here.
Please, Slashdot, just kill Idle. It would make Slashdot a better place (again).
1. He doesn't make predictions himself, the program does, given input data about the players involved. 2. The issues being predicted are non-obvious, such as surprise outcomes in Indian politics, made for the CIA. 3. The issues are not arbitrary, but rather limited to rational decisions made by a number of people, but this may be in the hundreds.
This is really about going beyond educated guessing, and the number of factors that a human mind could consider. It is about predicting group behavior, and relies on large amounts of accurate input data. It is not something that can be gleaned just from watching the news.
It's obvious from your post that you didn't even bother to glean the article in question, so I shouldn't have expected much. How you got "5 insightful" is beyond me, but I assume it is due to the "know-it-all" factor on Slashdot, where any geek expressing the popular opinion can remain ignorant and feed off popular sentiments. In some cases this can work, and comments can still be insightful and relevant, but an article such as this is not one of those cases. Your comment might as well be addressing Uri Geller or a local fortune teller. It has nothing to do with this methodology or its underlying ideas, which are more related to mathematics and sociology.
He doesn't claim to be able to simply "predict the future." Accurate information is only given in situations where a limited number of people are making a decision, and where accurate information is available on them for input. The key is basically that it assumes that serious decisions are made primarily according to the players' own interests (a reasonable assumption). Given the limited problem set, it doesn't seem too unrealistic to believe that one could make a very simple, basic model with some level of accuracy. Even without elegant theories, if accurate inputs and outputs from past events were available, a statistical model could probably be generated automatically.
I wonder if eventually every government will spend significant time consulting these machine-oracles? It reminds me of the various mathematical methods of prediction that still exist in China and India. Some of the Chinese models still require a significant amount of abacus shuffling, and a large set of reference books for all the possibilities. These were probably formed from similar basic methods of trying to gather data, compare it, and map inputs to outputs.
Actually, Google is by far more popular than Baidu amongst younger people here. I asked a class of my Chinese students if they use Baidu, and they all laughed and told me that they love Google. They were worried about Google leaving, which prompted the question in the first place. Just the other day, a fellow teacher said, "Thank God for Google," because they depend on the site so much.
Baidu is still more popular overall, but much of this is due to the large number of people overall who use the Internet. For example, most elderly people surf the Web, and are very adept at learning new technology. When I first arrived in China, a long-time American expat living in Beijing remarked to me that the Chinese are "knowledge people." After seeing people packed into the bookstores here, I'm inclined to agree. They really are pretty nerdy people overall, despite the popular misconception on Slashdot that they are the unwashed ignorant masses.
However, I've found that there is a huge gap of understanding between the cultures of China and the West. Neither side really understands the other. The misconceptions about the West are about as pronounced as western misconceptions about China.
Ha, right. The guy who invented semaphores and solved some of the most difficult theoretical problems in Computer Science was a "self-declared legend." Are you serious? Sure, Dijkstra was opinionated and arrogant, but he was also a genius. He came through with rigorous solutions to the problems that really plagued the field of CS. That doesn't mean that he had perfect perspective, by any measure of the imagination. For example, he argued that first year Computer Science students should not even be allowed access to a computer. Rather, that they should just formally prove the correctness of the programs they write. I think fellow Computer Scientist Alan Kay said it best:
I don't know how many of you have ever met Dijkstra, but you probably know that arrogance in computer science is measured in nano-Dijkstras.
Now since I mentioned Alan Kay, I should mention that Squeak / Smalltalk and Scheme are perfectly good alternatives to BASIC. They are refined and elegant in a way that BASIC, Python, and their ilk could not hope to be. They also give people powerful tools without a myriad of special cases, alternative syntax, and back-room slop. For example, Scheme is a very simple language, but by default supports arbitrary precision and limitless recursion. The last time I put Python's recursion to the test, it crashed pretty quickly.
For Chinese, just using a character dictionary is better because the translations in Google are so bad. Unfortunately, I must do this on a daily basis. Google is good at search, but cataloging the entire Web is a much easier job than learning Chinese.
The world is a lot bigger than the three major abrahamic religions in the west. Sometimes I imagine that the angry atheist Slashdot postings about religion, are addressed against Jainism or Shintoism. They don't make very much sense in that context, and it's obvious then how much this is an issue of western culture. Especially for people acting in reaction against the evangelical Christianity in America. If you go to some other places in the world, these things just don't make very much sense. For example, would anyone ever become angry about Shingon Buddhism? Or the native Bon Religion of Tibet?
That's true, there has been a very respectable minority in the older generation that has had things more or less right for a long time. Chomsky is probably the most dramatic example, because his message has basically been the same prescient combination of facts and logic since the 1950's. It's almost scary to watch him tear William F. Buckley apart in their debate about Vietnam.
Yeah, I made that small mistake. I was incorrectly thinking of the third edition for one sentence, and then got the number correct for the next sentence about the fourth edition.:-P
Despite all the flack that China gets in the western world constantly, it is quite a peaceful country (internationally) compared to the U.S. How many wars, "conflicts", or secret wars has the U.S. been involved with in the last 50 years? Yet we always seem to take ourselves to be a constant benevolent force working to liberate these conveniently oil-rich countries from their own governments. Say what you will about China, but on the international scene, but it's something of a sleeping dragon. The rule for China is "don't rock the boat", and that could be a welcome break from all the war and conflict. I don't think the U.S. was ever really ready to have superpower status, and maybe when it has to start playing nicely with everyone else, it will be a relief for everyone.
Do people seriously still believe that the U.S. is genuinely concerned with fighting evil in the world? That the conflicts between it and the Middle East are not due to culture, religion, and oil? Or that North Korea isn't just about nuclear dominance and Cold War, part 2? I hope that the younger generation on Slashdot is not so naive, and that it has been able to learn from recent history. Lord knows the U.S. could use a little wisdom and insight, which the older generations seem to sadly lack.:-(
They use the same animal on more than one cover, if they are from different series. For example, their famous tarsier is used for both "Learning the vi Editor" and for "UNIX in a Nutshell." The python is used for three: "Programming Python", "Python in a Nutshell", and "Python Pocket Reference."
The first edition of "Programming Python" (which uses the famous python image) was from 1996, and the first edition of "Learning Python" was in 1999. They are both from the same general series, so they couldn't use the same python image. My guess is that the mouse was used because pythons often eat mice, and a mouse is a small, timid animal (good for a beginner's book). Then an alligator was used for "Python Programming for Win32 Systems", which is no longer published today. So in the early years they had these three animals: the python, the mouse, and the alligator. Although many people would expect a continuation of snakes for these books, most O'Reilly titles only have animals tangentially related to their subject.
Interestingly, it appears as though O'Reilly has found some extra boa constrictor and python images that they have used more recently in Python books.
Sadly, "Learning Python" has grown from a book less than 400 pages, to one over 1200. It used to be that people would buy "Learning Python" if they wanted a reasonable sized learning book, and the big 1200 page "Programming Python" if they were truly crazy. Now "Programming Python" is over 1600 pages, and "Learning Python" is over 900. I wish they would enforce some editing decisions and call some difficult shots. Even a quota for how long a "Learning" book can be, would be very helpful. Nobody wants to sift through a 1200 page book just to learn a scripting language.:-(
Why not? Books automatically have their copyrights expire after a certain period. Why shouldn't unclaimed orphaned books become part of the public domain? For example, if a book is unclaimed and has been orphaned for five years, it should be in the public domain. This would be beneficial to everyone, giving the authors some fame and prestige, giving us some rare books otherwise unavailable, and not hurting any publishers who aren't making money from them anyways. It would be good for all of society.
The Google settlement is only good for Google, and those who don't mind asking Google if they can read books through a glass window. After all, Google will not allow anyone to download these books. Their job is to hoard information, and to make it available in a way that is convenient enough for individuals, but inconvenient enough that no one could download the data and compete with them. Lazy people think it's okay because it's better than the scraps we have otherwise, but giving one company control of these books is not a solution.
It was great to read that the Internet Archive had what was viewed as the best and most cohesive argument. However, I think they are playing a weak card by not arguing for turning the works into the public domain. In the end, these books on Google's servers are not really free, they are only free for Google to keep, and for you to look at behind glass. If they were actually turned over into the public domain, then everyone could use them and benefit. They could be hosted at the Internet Archive, or on Project Gutenberg in various formats available to everyone. This is what I would really like, not just freedom for one company to profit from a special privilege.
Why do we hate them, now? Because they may have broken into Gmail? Because we don't like the government system they have for themselves, on the other side of the world? Because the people don't view their government as their enemy? Because they don't share the same ideas about human rights that we do? Is that really a good reason to hate another country? It seems like Slashdot has so much venom and hatred for China just in recent months. I wonder how many Slashdotters have actually visited China?
As I see it, judging China by Tiananmen Square and the Google hacks is like judging the U.S. by Vietnam and the Patriot Act.
A less 19th century European perspective might be that the Chinese mandated the continuity of their literary tradition, and thus words used 2000 years before still needed to be mastered. Of course this was difficult, but this was also in a culture where scholars memorized the Confucian classics as children. The scholar class had the job of studying and passing on literature, just as the Brahmans in India had the difficult task of memorizing the Vedas precisely. Or how Buddhist monks memorized massive sutras in recitation. In cultures such as this that have extremely old languages, the method of learning language and their use was utterly different. I don't think it should be looked at with a Marxist upper class vs. lower class dichotomy, which ignores all the practical matters involved with transmitting culture.
My favorite is for Chinese literature, which it is horrendously bad at. Take a line from the Diamond Sutra, which is a model piece of Chinese literature. This is what Google Translate spews out for one line:
All Xian Sheng, begin with a difference non-action law.
Now for a human translation:
All worthy sages vary only in their mastery of the unconditioned Dharma.
Google Translate's version means nothing whatsoever, not even giving a hint about the actual meaning.
It's different because it's China, and China is the new Evil Empire. As soon as it became clear that we weren't going to be able to destroy every last terrorist, people got bored with blaming everything on them. Now it's the Chinese who are apparently the soulless bad guys who are attacking the very foundations of the Free World. Oh, the humanity.
Written English is more or less formalized and uses a fairly standard grammar. It is actually much more loose and flexible than most other languages in the world. Exactly which part of the formal grammar is failing to keep up with "modern society"? And why would society being modern have anything to do with it? As it is now, I fail to see any "we're so advanced that we're transcending grammar!" argument as having any validity. English is an enormously huge language with incredible flexibility, even in its most rigid written form. However, statements must be clear, and for this we rely on basic grammar, punctuation, etc.
It just sounds like a bunch of ignorant children never learned their mother tongue. Would anyone want to buy a book or read a thesis that was written by someone who can't even write competently? How can any self-respecting English speaker not cringe at the sight of texting abbreviations or emoticons in formal writing?
There is no historical biography of Confucius, because relatively little is known about his life. We only really have some of his writings, which are all humanistic philosophy, and it's unknown exactly which classics he wrote or edited, and which were later works. We know which state he lived in, and the time when he lived, but not a lot more than that. There was a fair amount of confusion about this in imperial China as well. With no real biography to speak of, I am presuming they are either basing the story off some manner of later "biography", or simply a fictional one written for the film.
As for Confucius himself, he always portrayed himself as a great lover of antiquity (philosophy and history, primarily), who invented nothing and only transmitted the learning and classics of ancient times. As an interesting anecdote, during the time of Confucius, Daoism and Confucianism did not exist. There were no such distinct schools until hundreds of years later during the Han dynasty.
In most places those bikes are cheap even for the average person. Only the truly poor people would have any problems getting one, as they are only $200. It's cars that are the real status symbol, and people are so proud that they won't even buy a used car. The only acceptable car is a brand new car (think $50,000-75,000 in equivalent U.S. value), often a nice BMW or similar luxury European car. They will even borrow money from family and friends, but usually not a bank (that's looked down upon), all so they can buy something new and special to show off. The way cars and clothes are used as status symbols here is terrible. If you want to see vanity at its worst, come to China and look at the rich people. I don't even feel comfortable around the middle class people, really.
You do realize that in a truly free market there wouldn't be any governmental oversight, right? As soon as the government starts throwing its weight around a certain amount of freedom is lost. Sometimes this is a good thing, but don't try to twist that into being more free.
Freedom lost for who? For corporations like Microsoft? For small businesses who want to compete? For customers? For people who are not customers? Freedom is not some magic buzzword that trumps everything else. The term should be accompanied by a designation of exactly whose freedom, and how this impacts others. Personally, I doubt people would be so sympathetic if we suddenly started speaking of the precious freedoms of corporate tech companies.
I don't think Korea is competing with China and India in this field. South Korea is a wealthy country rather like Japan, and I don't believe that any computers exist in North Korea.
You can get this temporary lock-out on Wikipedia as well by trying to access certain articles. I mentioned this on Slashdot previously, but I didn't understand what was happening at the time. I also get locked out of Google occasionally, but I never recognized it as being the same phenomenon. I'm fairly certain, then, that there is nothing specific to Baidu in this case.
Slashdot Mirror
The Free Software Foundation basically started the community and created the GPL for it. In fact, in many cases, using the term "Free Software" is implying that someone sides with the FSF and GPL over other open source licenses. The GPL takes a hard-line stance against other licenses that would allow the code to be swallowed up and packaged into proprietary software. This is the natural policy for developers who want the code to always remain open.
But it used to be about nerdy things. Real nerd things, not just video games and politics. The typical article 8 years ago was Linux running on some guy's toaster, or a review of a new programming language book. Now it's all about demonizing China, bashing religion, American politics, or ridiculous nonsense posted to Idle. There is so much anger and so little curiosity and constructiveness. That's fine for other news sites, but Slashdot is supposed to be special and different.
The guilty pleasure of Unix command-line geekiness, and the love of strange and interesting computer hardware for its own sake, has taken a big plunge on Slashdot. Maybe it's because everyone uses Ubuntu instead of Debian and Gentoo. Maybe it's because LAMP isn't anything new, and people can just cobble together pre-made solutions to everything. Or maybe it's the genuine end of an era of geeky computing fun. Whatever it is, it makes me sad and I wish Slashdot could go back to its roots. Even random articles about Mini-ITX motherboards fitted into random objects would be better than what we regularly get here.
Please, Slashdot, just kill Idle. It would make Slashdot a better place (again).
1. He doesn't make predictions himself, the program does, given input data about the players involved.
2. The issues being predicted are non-obvious, such as surprise outcomes in Indian politics, made for the CIA.
3. The issues are not arbitrary, but rather limited to rational decisions made by a number of people, but this may be in the hundreds.
This is really about going beyond educated guessing, and the number of factors that a human mind could consider. It is about predicting group behavior, and relies on large amounts of accurate input data. It is not something that can be gleaned just from watching the news.
It's obvious from your post that you didn't even bother to glean the article in question, so I shouldn't have expected much. How you got "5 insightful" is beyond me, but I assume it is due to the "know-it-all" factor on Slashdot, where any geek expressing the popular opinion can remain ignorant and feed off popular sentiments. In some cases this can work, and comments can still be insightful and relevant, but an article such as this is not one of those cases. Your comment might as well be addressing Uri Geller or a local fortune teller. It has nothing to do with this methodology or its underlying ideas, which are more related to mathematics and sociology.
He doesn't claim to be able to simply "predict the future." Accurate information is only given in situations where a limited number of people are making a decision, and where accurate information is available on them for input. The key is basically that it assumes that serious decisions are made primarily according to the players' own interests (a reasonable assumption). Given the limited problem set, it doesn't seem too unrealistic to believe that one could make a very simple, basic model with some level of accuracy. Even without elegant theories, if accurate inputs and outputs from past events were available, a statistical model could probably be generated automatically.
I wonder if eventually every government will spend significant time consulting these machine-oracles? It reminds me of the various mathematical methods of prediction that still exist in China and India. Some of the Chinese models still require a significant amount of abacus shuffling, and a large set of reference books for all the possibilities. These were probably formed from similar basic methods of trying to gather data, compare it, and map inputs to outputs.
Actually, Google is by far more popular than Baidu amongst younger people here. I asked a class of my Chinese students if they use Baidu, and they all laughed and told me that they love Google. They were worried about Google leaving, which prompted the question in the first place. Just the other day, a fellow teacher said, "Thank God for Google," because they depend on the site so much.
Baidu is still more popular overall, but much of this is due to the large number of people overall who use the Internet. For example, most elderly people surf the Web, and are very adept at learning new technology. When I first arrived in China, a long-time American expat living in Beijing remarked to me that the Chinese are "knowledge people." After seeing people packed into the bookstores here, I'm inclined to agree. They really are pretty nerdy people overall, despite the popular misconception on Slashdot that they are the unwashed ignorant masses.
However, I've found that there is a huge gap of understanding between the cultures of China and the West. Neither side really understands the other. The misconceptions about the West are about as pronounced as western misconceptions about China.
Now since I mentioned Alan Kay, I should mention that Squeak / Smalltalk and Scheme are perfectly good alternatives to BASIC. They are refined and elegant in a way that BASIC, Python, and their ilk could not hope to be. They also give people powerful tools without a myriad of special cases, alternative syntax, and back-room slop. For example, Scheme is a very simple language, but by default supports arbitrary precision and limitless recursion. The last time I put Python's recursion to the test, it crashed pretty quickly.
For Chinese, just using a character dictionary is better because the translations in Google are so bad. Unfortunately, I must do this on a daily basis. Google is good at search, but cataloging the entire Web is a much easier job than learning Chinese.
Buddhism, Daoism, Jainism, Shintoism, etc.
The world is a lot bigger than the three major abrahamic religions in the west. Sometimes I imagine that the angry atheist Slashdot postings about religion, are addressed against Jainism or Shintoism. They don't make very much sense in that context, and it's obvious then how much this is an issue of western culture. Especially for people acting in reaction against the evangelical Christianity in America. If you go to some other places in the world, these things just don't make very much sense. For example, would anyone ever become angry about Shingon Buddhism? Or the native Bon Religion of Tibet?
"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power."
- Benito Mussolini.
That's true, there has been a very respectable minority in the older generation that has had things more or less right for a long time. Chomsky is probably the most dramatic example, because his message has basically been the same prescient combination of facts and logic since the 1950's. It's almost scary to watch him tear William F. Buckley apart in their debate about Vietnam.
Yeah, I made that small mistake. I was incorrectly thinking of the third edition for one sentence, and then got the number correct for the next sentence about the fourth edition. :-P
Despite all the flack that China gets in the western world constantly, it is quite a peaceful country (internationally) compared to the U.S. How many wars, "conflicts", or secret wars has the U.S. been involved with in the last 50 years? Yet we always seem to take ourselves to be a constant benevolent force working to liberate these conveniently oil-rich countries from their own governments. Say what you will about China, but on the international scene, but it's something of a sleeping dragon. The rule for China is "don't rock the boat", and that could be a welcome break from all the war and conflict. I don't think the U.S. was ever really ready to have superpower status, and maybe when it has to start playing nicely with everyone else, it will be a relief for everyone.
:-(
Do people seriously still believe that the U.S. is genuinely concerned with fighting evil in the world? That the conflicts between it and the Middle East are not due to culture, religion, and oil? Or that North Korea isn't just about nuclear dominance and Cold War, part 2? I hope that the younger generation on Slashdot is not so naive, and that it has been able to learn from recent history. Lord knows the U.S. could use a little wisdom and insight, which the older generations seem to sadly lack.
They use the same animal on more than one cover, if they are from different series. For example, their famous tarsier is used for both "Learning the vi Editor" and for "UNIX in a Nutshell." The python is used for three: "Programming Python", "Python in a Nutshell", and "Python Pocket Reference."
:-(
The first edition of "Programming Python" (which uses the famous python image) was from 1996, and the first edition of "Learning Python" was in 1999. They are both from the same general series, so they couldn't use the same python image. My guess is that the mouse was used because pythons often eat mice, and a mouse is a small, timid animal (good for a beginner's book). Then an alligator was used for "Python Programming for Win32 Systems", which is no longer published today. So in the early years they had these three animals: the python, the mouse, and the alligator. Although many people would expect a continuation of snakes for these books, most O'Reilly titles only have animals tangentially related to their subject.
Interestingly, it appears as though O'Reilly has found some extra boa constrictor and python images that they have used more recently in Python books.
Sadly, "Learning Python" has grown from a book less than 400 pages, to one over 1200. It used to be that people would buy "Learning Python" if they wanted a reasonable sized learning book, and the big 1200 page "Programming Python" if they were truly crazy. Now "Programming Python" is over 1600 pages, and "Learning Python" is over 900. I wish they would enforce some editing decisions and call some difficult shots. Even a quota for how long a "Learning" book can be, would be very helpful. Nobody wants to sift through a 1200 page book just to learn a scripting language.
Why not? Books automatically have their copyrights expire after a certain period. Why shouldn't unclaimed orphaned books become part of the public domain? For example, if a book is unclaimed and has been orphaned for five years, it should be in the public domain. This would be beneficial to everyone, giving the authors some fame and prestige, giving us some rare books otherwise unavailable, and not hurting any publishers who aren't making money from them anyways. It would be good for all of society.
The Google settlement is only good for Google, and those who don't mind asking Google if they can read books through a glass window. After all, Google will not allow anyone to download these books. Their job is to hoard information, and to make it available in a way that is convenient enough for individuals, but inconvenient enough that no one could download the data and compete with them. Lazy people think it's okay because it's better than the scraps we have otherwise, but giving one company control of these books is not a solution.
It was great to read that the Internet Archive had what was viewed as the best and most cohesive argument. However, I think they are playing a weak card by not arguing for turning the works into the public domain. In the end, these books on Google's servers are not really free, they are only free for Google to keep, and for you to look at behind glass. If they were actually turned over into the public domain, then everyone could use them and benefit. They could be hosted at the Internet Archive, or on Project Gutenberg in various formats available to everyone. This is what I would really like, not just freedom for one company to profit from a special privilege.
Why do we hate them, now? Because they may have broken into Gmail? Because we don't like the government system they have for themselves, on the other side of the world? Because the people don't view their government as their enemy? Because they don't share the same ideas about human rights that we do? Is that really a good reason to hate another country? It seems like Slashdot has so much venom and hatred for China just in recent months. I wonder how many Slashdotters have actually visited China?
As I see it, judging China by Tiananmen Square and the Google hacks is like judging the U.S. by Vietnam and the Patriot Act.
A less 19th century European perspective might be that the Chinese mandated the continuity of their literary tradition, and thus words used 2000 years before still needed to be mastered. Of course this was difficult, but this was also in a culture where scholars memorized the Confucian classics as children. The scholar class had the job of studying and passing on literature, just as the Brahmans in India had the difficult task of memorizing the Vedas precisely. Or how Buddhist monks memorized massive sutras in recitation. In cultures such as this that have extremely old languages, the method of learning language and their use was utterly different. I don't think it should be looked at with a Marxist upper class vs. lower class dichotomy, which ignores all the practical matters involved with transmitting culture.
Now for a human translation:
Google Translate's version means nothing whatsoever, not even giving a hint about the actual meaning.
It's different because it's China, and China is the new Evil Empire. As soon as it became clear that we weren't going to be able to destroy every last terrorist, people got bored with blaming everything on them. Now it's the Chinese who are apparently the soulless bad guys who are attacking the very foundations of the Free World. Oh, the humanity.
Written English is more or less formalized and uses a fairly standard grammar. It is actually much more loose and flexible than most other languages in the world. Exactly which part of the formal grammar is failing to keep up with "modern society"? And why would society being modern have anything to do with it? As it is now, I fail to see any "we're so advanced that we're transcending grammar!" argument as having any validity. English is an enormously huge language with incredible flexibility, even in its most rigid written form. However, statements must be clear, and for this we rely on basic grammar, punctuation, etc.
It just sounds like a bunch of ignorant children never learned their mother tongue. Would anyone want to buy a book or read a thesis that was written by someone who can't even write competently? How can any self-respecting English speaker not cringe at the sight of texting abbreviations or emoticons in formal writing?
There is no historical biography of Confucius, because relatively little is known about his life. We only really have some of his writings, which are all humanistic philosophy, and it's unknown exactly which classics he wrote or edited, and which were later works. We know which state he lived in, and the time when he lived, but not a lot more than that. There was a fair amount of confusion about this in imperial China as well. With no real biography to speak of, I am presuming they are either basing the story off some manner of later "biography", or simply a fictional one written for the film.
As for Confucius himself, he always portrayed himself as a great lover of antiquity (philosophy and history, primarily), who invented nothing and only transmitted the learning and classics of ancient times. As an interesting anecdote, during the time of Confucius, Daoism and Confucianism did not exist. There were no such distinct schools until hundreds of years later during the Han dynasty.
In most places those bikes are cheap even for the average person. Only the truly poor people would have any problems getting one, as they are only $200. It's cars that are the real status symbol, and people are so proud that they won't even buy a used car. The only acceptable car is a brand new car (think $50,000-75,000 in equivalent U.S. value), often a nice BMW or similar luxury European car. They will even borrow money from family and friends, but usually not a bank (that's looked down upon), all so they can buy something new and special to show off. The way cars and clothes are used as status symbols here is terrible. If you want to see vanity at its worst, come to China and look at the rich people. I don't even feel comfortable around the middle class people, really.
You do realize that in a truly free market there wouldn't be any governmental oversight, right? As soon as the government starts throwing its weight around a certain amount of freedom is lost. Sometimes this is a good thing, but don't try to twist that into being more free.
Freedom lost for who? For corporations like Microsoft? For small businesses who want to compete? For customers? For people who are not customers? Freedom is not some magic buzzword that trumps everything else. The term should be accompanied by a designation of exactly whose freedom, and how this impacts others. Personally, I doubt people would be so sympathetic if we suddenly started speaking of the precious freedoms of corporate tech companies.
I don't think Korea is competing with China and India in this field. South Korea is a wealthy country rather like Japan, and I don't believe that any computers exist in North Korea.
You can get this temporary lock-out on Wikipedia as well by trying to access certain articles. I mentioned this on Slashdot previously, but I didn't understand what was happening at the time. I also get locked out of Google occasionally, but I never recognized it as being the same phenomenon. I'm fairly certain, then, that there is nothing specific to Baidu in this case.