Yes indeed the censorship in china is quite ineffective, they dont run any filtering of content at all just various well known webaddress like cnn.com, bbc.co.uk, wenjiancity etc however this can be easily bypassed by using an oversease proxy or bouncing the web pages through akamai.
I was shocked to find thay they dont even block taiwanese news sites! I guess all they can do is go after a few unlucky people and try to make examples of them.
1) Yes this is true. Futher to this asian parents expect a much higher level of peity and obedience from their children. Obviously the asian way is better for parents worse for children and the 'american' way is better for children and worse for parents.
2) This is very much related to the above cultural difference vis. a disparity in the level of respect for authority.
3) True again, and obvious. To take the example of taiwan vs australia you have a population density of about 600 people per sq. km. versus 2 people per sq. km. so its natural that there will be a difference in perception of what constitutes personal space.
4) Yes but the prudishness is a result of over zealous political correctness. Chinese prudishness on the other hand is a result of goverment enforced values. To further confuse the matter, would you consider the japanese to be prudish? no way so its hard to draw precise east-west boundaries on this matter?
5) Yep true. "Whats best for society" vs "Whats best for the individual" ideology is a fairly general asia vs non-asia difference. Its logically impossible to prove that either of these ideologies is better than the other.
6) I think this perception is a result of your own personal experiences, which though valid in your eyes is probably not representative of most members of the population. My perception is that HongKong men are more likely to be obsessive preeners but this is another example of a stereotype influenced by personal experience.
7) I think you are mixing with too many red-necks.
a few pairs of decent quality digital walkie talkies (im assuming u are using analog at present) would probably be a simpler, if not cheaper solution in the long-run.
myabe the number of BScs means they actually intend to get see some results. By the time you get to PhD level producing anything remotely tangible is out of the question!
In any case laws governing the algorithms and communication concepts that programmers can or cannot use when designing some software would be virtually unenforcable wouldnt they? especially when there is no clear legal concensus on what actually constitutes a 'p2p' network.
The sheer thinking of a WORLDWIDE change to the entire email system is actually quite propsterous.
Seriously, if microsoft alone decides that another e-mail protocol would do the trick, then there shall be another email protocol and it will be adopted pretty quickly. This kind of market power is unfortunate i know, and MS has frustrated me many times with their loose interpretation and numerous "optimisations" of some standards. However having said that, in a purely concensus based system no dramatic changes would ever be possible, and even small changes would take aeons to be ratified (think UN and EU).
speaking from experience living in both countries, i think the saddest thing in this whole issue is that the mainland chinese public as whole dont care one bit about taiwan or its people, and as far as most of them realise it is and has always been an administrative region of the peoples republic of china. Modern china is not as repressive as most people would tend to think, however any news in relation to taiwan basically refers to taiwanese president chen shuibian as a "rebel leader" or something of that sort.
And if computers can soon parse logographic languages like Chinese, will it prevent simplification or even conversion to a (arguably better) phonetic alphabet?
Why is this a "potential drawback"? written chinese is a beautiful, expressive language and a phonetic alphabet (there are several around) results in a severe watering down of the meaning attached to any particular word. Having said this, 90% of educated mainland chinese can read romanized pinyin anyway, but few would choose to write with it unless there was a specific need.
I remember attending a series of lectures on sensor technology given by a professor from rtgers university, and one of points he made on the topic of these RF based toll booths in NJ was that given the cost of installation and maintainence it would have been substantially cheaper to PAY motorists a few dollars each time to use the road and not install the system at all!
If only we could harness the power of these cool (and working!) distributed systems to provide efficient peer to peer content distribution or an actual legitimate email system of some sort...
i would have to agree with this. Shannons work is pretty much the basis for all studies on information transfer, even in some cases where it does not involve electronics e.g. economics.
howevere having said that i think the 10 most important papers for me on a desert island would be print-free, very long when unrolled and hopefully nice and soft.
Usually a quick google search on authors name will give you a page of their publications in PDF or PS format.
Even if some papers are only available through paid membership to organisations such as IEEE or ACM, if you know the author name you can usually find similar work on the authors paper website.
The good thing about academic papers is that once you find one paper thats in the general area you are interested in you can just follow the reference trails to find virtually every other paper on the subject (e.g. you have paper 1, its has 15 references, you look up all the references that sound interesting, then look up the references that those references reference...and so on).
$US29K is about $50K+ australian...this is seriously not bad and equivalent to what an engineer with 3-4 yrs of experience would be getting here. I guess it all just depends on where you are...of course a wage of $US 1/hr may seem low to us but to some guy in Somalia its probably enough to live very well.
The USA PATRIOT Act is as despotic as anything Hitler came up with -- even using much of the same language.
I declare this thread to be in gross violation of Godwin's law and demand that all subsequent contributors to the discussion be suitably punished.
probably the most important thing to keep in mind when reading anything off CNN is to remember that it's a Time-Warner subisidiary and as such a bit of a mouthpeice for Warner entertainment in general.
I mean would you instantly agree with an article on FOX news that claims to examine the circumstances leading to the enstatement of Murdoch Jr. as the CEO of britains SKY TV networks?
Learn chinese instead.
The chinese subs version usually comes out ages before any english one and is easier/cheaper to obtain.
Not to mention chinese is much easier to learn than jap (speaking from experience), and translates from jap much better than english.
English is unfortunatley not suited to direct translation from japanese or any non-european language.
This is not simply due to differences in grammatical structure but also due to the fact that there are many elements of japanese/chinese/korean vocabulary that have no easy translation into other languages.
A common and easy example of this is "Qi" or "Ki", something like "life force" or sometimes just "force" in english but it's very context specific and often untranslatable.
I think the whole point is that work in IT is so hard to find that a research degree is just about the only sure way of making sure you dont end up as "data entry" in a law firm (or worse). besides...dunno what you mean about the cost...noone does a phd without a full scholarship and these are worth pretty much the same as a starting engineers salary would be after tax (depending on the level of your supervisor's interactions with industry)
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come on, i had to say something, that was something, so i said it. facts are neither here nor there!
Yes indeed the censorship in china is quite ineffective, they dont run any filtering of content at all just various well known webaddress like cnn.com, bbc.co.uk, wenjiancity etc however this can be easily bypassed by using an oversease proxy or bouncing the web pages through akamai. I was shocked to find thay they dont even block taiwanese news sites! I guess all they can do is go after a few unlucky people and try to make examples of them.
ditto that.
1) Yes this is true. Futher to this asian parents expect a much higher level of peity and obedience from their children. Obviously the asian way is better for parents worse for children and the 'american' way is better for children and worse for parents.
2) This is very much related to the above cultural difference vis. a disparity in the level of respect for authority.
3) True again, and obvious. To take the example of taiwan vs australia you have a population density of about 600 people per sq. km. versus 2 people per sq. km. so its natural that there will be a difference in perception of what constitutes personal space.
4) Yes but the prudishness is a result of over zealous political correctness. Chinese prudishness on the other hand is a result of goverment enforced values. To further confuse the matter, would you consider the japanese to be prudish? no way so its hard to draw precise east-west boundaries on this matter?
5) Yep true. "Whats best for society" vs "Whats best for the individual" ideology is a fairly general asia vs non-asia difference. Its logically impossible to prove that either of these ideologies is better than the other.
6) I think this perception is a result of your own personal experiences, which though valid in your eyes is probably not representative of most members of the population. My perception is that HongKong men are more likely to be obsessive preeners but this is another example of a stereotype influenced by personal experience.
7) I think you are mixing with too many red-necks.
8) ditto above comment.
Only just, given the fact that the bulk of the USAs collective wealth has come at the expense of the populations to which it provides charity.
and hopefully wont run into any, um, spaceballs...
a few pairs of decent quality digital walkie talkies (im assuming u are using analog at present) would probably be a simpler, if not cheaper solution in the long-run.
myabe the number of BScs means they actually intend to get see some results. By the time you get to PhD level producing anything remotely tangible is out of the question!
In any case laws governing the algorithms and communication concepts that programmers can or cannot use when designing some software would be virtually unenforcable wouldnt they? especially when there is no clear legal concensus on what actually constitutes a 'p2p' network.
The sheer thinking of a WORLDWIDE change to the entire email system is actually quite propsterous.
Seriously, if microsoft alone decides that another e-mail protocol would do the trick, then there shall be another email protocol and it will be adopted pretty quickly. This kind of market power is unfortunate i know, and MS has frustrated me many times with their loose interpretation and numerous "optimisations" of some standards. However having said that, in a purely concensus based system no dramatic changes would ever be possible, and even small changes would take aeons to be ratified (think UN and EU).
speaking from experience living in both countries, i think the saddest thing in this whole issue is that the mainland chinese public as whole dont care one bit about taiwan or its people, and as far as most of them realise it is and has always been an administrative region of the peoples republic of china. Modern china is not as repressive as most people would tend to think, however any news in relation to taiwan basically refers to taiwanese president chen shuibian as a "rebel leader" or something of that sort.
And if computers can soon parse logographic languages like Chinese, will it prevent simplification or even conversion to a (arguably better) phonetic alphabet?
Why is this a "potential drawback"? written chinese is a beautiful, expressive language and a phonetic alphabet (there are several around) results in a severe watering down of the meaning attached to any particular word. Having said this, 90% of educated mainland chinese can read romanized pinyin anyway, but few would choose to write with it unless there was a specific need.
I remember attending a series of lectures on sensor technology given by a professor from rtgers university, and one of points he made on the topic of these RF based toll booths in NJ was that given the cost of installation and maintainence it would have been substantially cheaper to PAY motorists a few dollars each time to use the road and not install the system at all!
If only we could harness the power of these cool (and working!) distributed systems to provide efficient peer to peer content distribution or an actual legitimate email system of some sort...
i would have to agree with this. Shannons work is pretty much the basis for all studies on information transfer, even in some cases where it does not involve electronics e.g. economics.
howevere having said that i think the 10 most important papers for me on a desert island would be print-free, very long when unrolled and hopefully nice and soft.
and by the term "paper website" i do of course mean the website listing an authors publications (papers)...not a print-out of their homepage.
Usually a quick google search on authors name will give you a page of their publications in PDF or PS format.
Even if some papers are only available through paid membership to organisations such as IEEE or ACM, if you know the author name you can usually find similar work on the authors paper website.
The good thing about academic papers is that once you find one paper thats in the general area you are interested in you can just follow the reference trails to find virtually every other paper on the subject (e.g. you have paper 1, its has 15 references, you look up all the references that sound interesting, then look up the references that those references reference...and so on).
$US29K is about $50K+ australian...this is seriously not bad and equivalent to what an engineer with 3-4 yrs of experience would be getting here. I guess it all just depends on where you are...of course a wage of $US 1/hr may seem low to us but to some guy in Somalia its probably enough to live very well.
whats next? spamming web discussion boards like slashdot?? come see my sexy webcams at
The USA PATRIOT Act is as despotic as anything Hitler came up with -- even using much of the same language.
I declare this thread to be in gross violation of Godwin's law and demand that all subsequent contributors to the discussion be suitably punished.
probably the most important thing to keep in mind when reading anything off CNN is to remember that it's a Time-Warner subisidiary and as such a bit of a mouthpeice for Warner entertainment in general. I mean would you instantly agree with an article on FOX news that claims to examine the circumstances leading to the enstatement of Murdoch Jr. as the CEO of britains SKY TV networks?
Learn chinese instead. The chinese subs version usually comes out ages before any english one and is easier/cheaper to obtain. Not to mention chinese is much easier to learn than jap (speaking from experience), and translates from jap much better than english. English is unfortunatley not suited to direct translation from japanese or any non-european language. This is not simply due to differences in grammatical structure but also due to the fact that there are many elements of japanese/chinese/korean vocabulary that have no easy translation into other languages. A common and easy example of this is "Qi" or "Ki", something like "life force" or sometimes just "force" in english but it's very context specific and often untranslatable.
paradoxically it seems to be the case that in places where voting COULD change things it IS illegal, and vice versa.
...has about as much power as the ukrainian boy scout association.
I think the whole point is that work in IT is so hard to find that a research degree is just about the only sure way of making sure you dont end up as "data entry" in a law firm (or worse). besides...dunno what you mean about the cost...noone does a phd without a full scholarship and these are worth pretty much the same as a starting engineers salary would be after tax (depending on the level of your supervisor's interactions with industry)