I think it is a wise idea and you have to applaud Google for it.
Search engine company records are incredibly dangerous, the equivalent of bomb grade nuclear material for an economic war. Google needs to move them to a "money haven" country where there is a reasonable chance of them being protected. One of the islands, perhaps, definitely NOT Switzerland. It's been years since records there have been safe from political pressure.
The money haven's are protected against pressure by the simple fact that you could indict most of the ruling and/or criminal classes/ multinationals of the planet (all countries) if their confidentiality was breached. It is in noones interest to open up their records.
But this action by Google is not relevant to privacy protection from China. If you understand China, you would realize that there is something extremely fishy going on with the whole Senate Committee/China incident that led up to this. China is appearing to behave like an American stereotype of Chinese government, not the realities.
While the stereotype is that the Chinese government is this big well oiled machine that tries to controls the lives of everybody, the reality is that it is less coordinated than most governments, as evidenced by their non existant legal system. (see http://www.icgg.org/downloads/contribution10_schra mm.pdf ). Why would China care about records when their legal system doesn't require them for conviction? For that matter of fact, we are told that they have a whole core of expert hackers monitoring the Internet; you don't think it's THAT hard for one of them to match a email address with a ip address?
The reality is that China is really ruled by a collection of political/social groups (old boy networks) and when you see one of these requests for information, it is far more likely that it is one groups attack against another, not the central governments attempt to supress dissidents. (sorta like republican/democratic infighting, sui generis and in spades since China effectively has millions of political parties/interest groups)
The central government simply doesn't have the bandwidth to handle anything but the most extreme cases, it is mostly concerned these days with trying to maintain even a semblance of control of the country. The Chinese aren't a meek people, a recent attempt to build a small powerplant on some farmlands lead to a major riot. And the only reason for building that powerplant was for the benefit of the people who were rioting!
There are considerable indications (and more has been turning up in the past few days) that the whole privacy rights issue that lead to the senate hearings was blown out of porportion as part of a competitive intelligence operation directed against Google by one or more of their competitors and that everyone involved was being spun.
You hear a lot these days about terrorist transcending national boundaries. What you don't hear is that every other non governmental group seems to have done the same. While competitive intelligence operations are a normal part of business in America, the recent trend to involve foreign governments in what are essentially private fights is very disturbing.
However irrelevant governments may be in the age of multinationals, they still control the use of physical force and the welfare of their people, and the potential for disaster is immense. In the economic history of the world, this blurring of lines between public government/economic warfare issues and private/business issues has happened many times, and the results have never been positive for any of the parties involved.
The recent DPW ports issue is an example of this. No matter what side you are on, the fact is that it is tearing America's political system/government apart and causing enormous damage to America's interests in the wider world.
I can imagine a dozen lawsuits the next day, alleging permanent harm from exposure, followed shortly by a letter from the insurance company, saying it was not an assumable risk under the insurance policies and they would not pay or defend against lawsuits.
Then a visit from the building inspector, asking if this paint was covered under their renovation permits.
Finally a visit from OSHA, asking about risks to employees, then several local news stations with alarmist stories about grey goo, various neighbor tenants and the landlord worried about their insurance, employees, customers, loss of business revenue or whether you had become grey goo (and at least one of them believing it), and then a long, tiresome trek through the courts for the next 15 years. Whats the benefit of that?
Nanotechnology has a lot of wonderful products in it. Most of our entire civil service is designed for the sole purpose of preventing wonderful products from getting to market without being thoroughly checked. The lessons of thalidomide, asbestos, radium and Therac-25 (and pre FDA hot dogs, for that metter of fact) etc. are not lost on our government.
In this case, a fine dust that can absorb significant amounts of electomagnetic energy scares the HECK out of me, even if it is in a paint binder. Where does that energy drain to? If the theatre is near a cell phone tower, will the paint eventually heat up enough to explode or spark? Will it reradiate and interfere with communications, possibly causing an ambulance to lose communications at a critical moment? Many ISM band devices can do that today...its a common complaint among emergency vehicles.
Lead based paints have caused horrible harm among children. What happens to a child that accidentally ingests a nanopaint chip? Thats a known hazard for children. How about storage, disposal...do they need hazmat suits and toxic waste containers if they renovate? And what dump can (and WILL) take the waste legally? What happens if there is a fire; do the police need to evacuate the neighborhood? You wanna be the one telling the street cop you don't know the answer to that?
It will be a generation or two before these issues will be sorted out. Clinical trial studies take years at best.
Actually, it doesn't matter if they are harmful or not. No theatre owner (or any other public gathering place) is going to put anything in their establishment that might scare off paying customers or cause them the risk of a lawsuit. This nanopaint stuff won't take off for at least a generation.
Try taking a look at the current crop of SEDA style ESB's like Mule. Programming a sophisticated, scalable, application is nothing more than wiring components together.
Its been 20 years since the idea of "Software IC's" was proposed, but I think we are getting close.
Of course, if non programmers wanted to program, they would be programmers.
Depends on whether their root servers alias the English.com to the Chinese.com It would make a lot of sense, since they could then prevent any access except those domains they allow simply by shadowing the english.com domains. Try to bypass it by using ICANN root servers and you lose all access to Chinese sites until you clear out the entire chain of delegating DNS servers....
NO, we can't go to other low cost economies in the area. If you believe that, you understand very little about Chinese influence in the area. China has deep ties throughout Asia and the Middle East, you deal with anyone in the Pacific Rim, you deal with China.
And that is not including the fact that the military modernization allows China to project force anywhere in the region, a point not lost on the other countries.
Of course, we can go to low cost economies in OTHER areas. If we can get the Moslem world a little more compatible with the West, we would not only have low cost manufacturers, but a potential market as big as China's. And the Chinese and the Moslems are NOT compatible at all in the long term.
Of course, that would mean "creative destruction" of the present Moslem institutions and that would...
Hmm, isn't that what just happened in Iraq? Never mind.
Anyone know if dropping Wal-Mart's on an enemy is a violation of the Geneva convention?
Correct. China occassionally does things because they think it is something a great power ought to do, and this is one of them. There is a whole shopping list of things they are going to buy simply to shed the last of their image as a third world nation...
For Slashdotters, one of the most interesting items rumored to be on the list is Suse Linux. Better start learning to read Chinese, OSS fans...the next generation of OSS products may not be translated to English.
For that matter of fact, Java is 100% Unicode compatible... the next generation of Java software products may be programmed in Chinese characters.
On the other hand, as a veteran user of Open Source products, it is my expert opinion being written in Chinese probably won't make the documentation any less useful (excepting Postgres, Mule and a few other OSS projects)
For those of you who wanna prepare for the next hot programming language, "How to make out in Chinese" and "Teach yourself Beginning Chinese Script" are cheap and fun choices to start with.
Actually, You're also close but not quite on the money. It is a wedge issue, but you have to look a bit deeper as to why now. I think there is considerable indications that all these fights that Google is getting into recently are being artificially created as part of a competitive intelligence operation by one or more of Google's competitors against Google.
If Google is going to play in the big leagues, they are going to have to learn how to protect themselves. Right now, management respopnses to the CI operations actions are naive at best.
Being an analyst is a horrible responsibility, especially if you work for a NRSRO.
If you estimate a stock too high, such as what happened in the Internet bubble, you can ruin the lives of millions of innocent investorsm and even go to jail yourself.
If you estimate it too low, you can destroy jobs, prevent companies from getting access to the operating capital they need, and even alter the course of history by preventing the exploitation of technology or resources.
What makes it even worse is that there is a tendency for predictions to be self fulfilling. an anayst can save a company (or give it a merciful death) by fudging the estimates slightly....the prediction alone might alter the companies value significantly enough to make a difference.
And then again, there are all sorts of laws about what information can be shared with analysts in advance of the public. Analysts have ways of finding out that information, but they don't dare use it, in fear of being accused of crimes...even when it would prevent serious losses by the public.
Google is real difficult to read right now. They are in a war with a number of groups, ranging from various governments to Microsoft, and none of those groups are known for their niceness. Asking for Googles view of the situation, especially since most of those fights are unecessary and irrelevant to the companies business, is not at all unwarranted. The analysts aren't asking for any secrets (they probably have them anyways), just for Google to comiit to an estimate of what they will earn in the short term and in what areas. At teh end of that term, the comparison of those predictions to what actually happned will make a powerful statement as to how well the company is in control of its business.
Google has gone to the capital markets to ask for money, and gotten it. The investors who gave them that money, and the analysts who advise those investors, have am obligation to monitor their investments. When they haven't (such as in Enron) that money was lost.
If we are on general advice, add that the cardinal rule of development is never install anything newer than a maintenance release of any software package unless you love debugging or your psychotherapy for masochism is not working.
On the subject of shipping an installer: You need to qualify what is an installer. What is needed is not a conventional installer, or even a package manager, but an autonomic manager like IBM is working on.
Lets look at the options you have
Packages (like rpm's) can install but all they really are is styized scripts. If the script writer forgot something (and they invariably do) or got something wrong, they are useless. For example, one custom Ant rpm I ran across put a configuration file in/etc... took me five hours one night to find out why my brand new personal install of Ant was being ignored.
By extension, package managers like Apt, yumex, smart or even YAST can be screwed up by just one badly packaged piece of code.
Installers (by which I define as non packaged based mechanisms) also have lots of problems in practice for the same reason. Anyone who has ever used Oracle Universal Installer (in which Oracle has put in a LOT of skull sweat and hard work) can testify to that.
The commercial and OSS "wizard" installers aren't too bad, provided you don't push their capabilities.
Personally, as far as semi manual installers go, I have found auto*/.configure/make/make install to be the most reliable of this bunch, albeit not to most skill sets or taste. In the Java space maven seems to be a tolerable solution.
IBM style autonomic computing installers would be ideal, but they are far from reality.
What really works nicely is the "plugin" based installation frameworks, like OSGi/Eclipse. Installing a new Eclipse plugin is a snap. If the major distro's adopted an mixed service/dependency injection plugin solution such as an ESB like, say ServiceMix (JBI/JSR208), installers could finally become a real solution, instead of a kludge.
I dunno if I agree about the OS access. Java has a lot of built in OS support (I espcially like the concurrent packages) and covers 95% of everything you want to do with built in API's. For everthing else, there is ProcessBuilder.start() or Runtime.exec(). Granted, you have to be pretty detail oriented to use them properly but I haven't hit anything I could not get working.
Swings PLAF's aren'tthat bad,especially in the latest versions. Its the defaults that are to blame.
Unicode is another matter. Java has GREAT Unicode support. what is doesn't have is many programmemrs that know how to use it properly.
Actually that data exists, in companies like ChoicePoint and Acxiom, in databases ranging from Talon and Telco to Google and Yahoo's caches.
In one demo of this technology a while back, they were able to input a fragment of a license plate number, a partial description and a few other items, and, in the space of a few seconds, search a gigantic database and come up with not only the full files on the person involved, but all friends, relatives and people that person had been in contact with for years previously.
Legend has it that one of the demo's observers was really excited until it was pointed out that it would take years to go through all the data retrieved and there was nowhere near the staffing and manpower avaiable for anything approaching a serious analysis of the range of material retrieved.
Well, at least this ought to solve the unemployment problem...
*Sigh* They are looking for Non Obvious Relationship Analysis (NORA) technology. It would be fairly easy to get up a OSS project to produce it. I actually tried to start up one (Ghandi/Custer) based on Globus GT4, but had to abandon it due to practical considerations involving not starving to death and having a roof over my head...
Most of the technology to do this already exists as Open Source projects. If I were starting it up now, I would probably try to combine an Open Source JBI/JSR ESB (ServiceMix http://incubator.apache.org/servicemix/) with GT4 and either Postgres or MySQL (Postgres has better spatial and language integration, and MySQL has that dual license issue, sophisticated features, and a large user base.).
ServiceMix has a built in rules engine. Properly reworked (an easy task with JBI service integration and drools architecture) it could easily cope with the demands involved (which are pretty extreme). The real trick is to have theoretical knowledge necessary to create the appropriate rules. A lot of OSS developers are working stiffs, and most non academics are not up to date enough on the Logic, Langua and Mathematics necessary to produce something like this.)
As a rule of thumb, the most important issue is multiple JRE/JVM management. If you have any issues with this, use SWT as it is not JVM/JRE dependent. On the other hand, SWT's got it's own set of problems...
Here is some of the issues involved.
Swing versions are JVM/JRE version dependent. You really need to ship a JRE with your app and make sure it is used.
In the real worlds, thats not always possible. Customer policies may prevent user control of the JVM's available.
Even when you can specify the JVM's available on client machines, you cannot always guarantee that the particular one that will be used with your application, or worse yet, that someone won't put in an upgrade to the JVM that breaks everything.
It is not uncommon to patch the JVM for specific fixes like memory leaks. You have no idea whether or not the JVM/JRE you are running on is vanilla or not.
Of course, there are lots of other issues involved with using SWT, mostly due to it's immaturity. Don't try real serious OPENGL stuff unless you wanna do a lot of debugging.
And don't even get me started on embedding Windows apps in SWT programs. It can be done, but, in my experience at least, bug detection requires a Russian Roulette approach unless you write your own code. Some things work, work partially or work for a while and then trash some OTHER program.
One interesting suggestion: If you can pull it off, write your GUI code is some stable environment like VS.NET and call functionality in Java via web services or other remoting technologies.
The talent pool for skilled GUI developers is a lot larger.
Actually no, there is a binary component to SWT because it wraps native widgets. When you download the libraries, you have to download the SWT library appropriate for your platform. 64 bit support for windows is (sorta) under development See bug 57151 for the remaining issues
We are talking about a reporter that several months ago thought the American Association for Retired Persons is (and I quote) "America's most dangerous lobby." http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artic le/2005/11/15/AR2005111501308.html I suggest you read his current article in terms of his credentials and roles within Newsweek. Then read some of his previous positions and decide whether you feel he is credible.
I would like to pose this question to Slashdot readers. Whatever facts you dispute, there definitely will be a lot more Chinese and Indian engineers than American in the future. It is reasonable to assume they will use their native languages more and more as time progresses and non english speakers form the majority of their audience.
What is your reaction if Chinese or Hindi replace English as the primary documentation language, or that the latest open source technologies may only be available to those capable of understanding Asian languages?
Google may think they are being philanthropic, but they haven't thought this one through.
There is a distinct possibility it may be the result of a competitive intelligence operation by Googles competitors.
Lets analyze the political forces involved.
Google is planning to offer, free, various library material that American taxpayers have spent billions of dollars collecting, producing and organizing. This money comes from federal, state, and local public funds as well as various private contributions, all of them usually with some sort of encumbrances.
Its an election year, and funding for schools and libraries are LOCAL politics, sure to be major issues in what promises to be many highly contested elections.
Google goes ahead with their plans. Shortly after the elections, the GAO, various federal, state and local governments announce that they sueing to recover the costs of the material Google made available that was not within the encombrances posed by the original donations of funds. For bonus points, they may include the various penalties imposed by intellectual property acts as various parties assert rights to specific items in the distributed material.
*Poof* no more shortfall in library funding in the US, though Google shareholders might be a tad upset. There probably won't be a Sarbanes Oxley prosecution, and, who knows, a hostile takeover due to a cash flow crisis might be good for Google
I LIKE it... The empire strikes back with a competitive intelligence operation at it's finest. This is so much more fun than, say, a chair being thrown by a CEO or getting some congresspeople to complain about censorship. I can't wait to see if this plays out the way it looks.
Google is normally not this naive; they have competant legal staff who should have pointed all this out. I wonder what else is going on?
Countries act in their own best interest. It isn't the American governments job to worry about anyone but Americans except to the extents that other countries problems affect America. They have enough work to do at home.
The focus on internet search engine companies is specifically because they are making private deals with China, deals China refused to discuss with a congressional delegation when it traveled to China to ask them about it. (see some of my earlier posts.)
Search engine companies are expecially worrisome because they hold the information thats the key to national competitive advantage. More importantly, there are a large but unknown number of "nation sponsored" industrial espionage groups operating here in the United States, not only from China, but from some of the tiniest countries in the world as well. And almost all of them use Internet search engines extensively in some part of their operations, and could do a lot more if they had access to the internal records of a company like Google or Yahoo.
The search engine companies internal records are potentially a lot more dangerous than Acxioms (see some of my earlier posts for why). A lot of people are seriously concerned when foreign nationals start sniffing around them and aren't very transparent about what they are doing.
It is a lot simpler than that...China is very protectionist, and is allowing foreign companies in only as a stopgap measure while their own industries ramp up. In Googles case, Baidu is going to dominate market share, and the major concern that most observers have about Google is what other parts of their business they will ignore, and what they will trade to China in a delusional attempt to gain market share.
No one on both sides cares much about the censorhip issue per se, China is so porous it's effectively nil. What I, and many others, are worried about is what other compromises may be going on and whether or not their scops goes far beyond Google China.
Lets see now...millions of Katrina survivors desperately in need of help. Google wants to help...apparently almost anyone else but them.
If Google really wanted to do something, they could set up projects to develop businesses for those folks to work in...perhaps American distributed call centers? Google already has expertise in that.
Or they could set up training facilities and job programs. I mean, they are indexing entire college libraries onto the net; Why not just buy the IP rights to key texts and help everyone? Yeesh, look at how much WIkipedia could do on a shoestring, think what some real money behind them might achieve? How about setting up an Online University for retraining Katrina folks?
I could go on and on, but the fact of the matter is that there are thousands of projects that Google could finance that could both be very philanthropic, increase shareholder value, and give something back to the country that allowed them to suceed and so desperately could use their help now. Most of these projects could then be exported to the rest of the world a la the Peace Corps approach. I just hope the American based institutional investors start getting a bit more activist about keeping Google focused on whats important.
First of all, I want to state that I think Wikipedia is the single greatest achievement of our age. and to thank everyone involved for it. Even with all the controversies, it has been a learning tool beyond my wildest dreams.
I learned higher math from it (It is the single greatest higher math textbook ever, in my opinion) and for those following the Chinese American economic war, the discussion areas on Chinese topics are often the equivalent of the Daily Show.
But I think they do give themselves a bit too much credit for the why of the Chinese blocking. I doubt that the Chinese cared all that much about massacre articles, the information is all over the net, and half the rumors about the massacre circulating China are far worse than the article. From the PRC's point of view, the article was actually good publicity, comparatively speaking.
What they were probably worried about was the Asian Cup 2004, scheduled to start a few weeks later. In case you are unfamiliar with it, the Asian Cup is the world series of soccer games for the middle and far east countries, with the usual rioting afterwards. Add in the fact that the list of participating countries is a superset of a list of countries supporting terrorism, and the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions a few months earlier igniting cultural tensions, and you get one hypergolic mix ready to explode.
Now toss in the fact that it was being held in China, and Chinese Japanese relations were at their lowest since the Japanese invasion, and you have some very worried politicians in the PRC. They probably looked at incidents like the 1.2 million signature petition against Japan organized by seven Chinese web sites a year earlier http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/3118850.st m and ordered a block on all potentially disruptive web sites until they could figure out what threat to stability the web sites posed and how to prevent it from exploding into riots (which it did, in spite of everything they did to prevent it. http://atimes.com/atimes/Japan/FH10Dh01.html) To their credit, it was a fairly civilized riot, by soccer standards.
When the PRC officials were contacted, they got around to looking at Wikipedia (it was probably just another website on the list, and somewhere near the bottom) and decided it wasn't a threat and immediately removed it from the list.
When you consider how much damage, say, the Danish cartoons have caused, it is not all that unreasonable for authorities to try and delay publication until they can prepare for the possible effects...It's their equivalent of parade permits, not mind control.
As economic convergence and class gaps cause the PRC to be stressed to it's breaking point, the PRC officials are trying to deny the inevitable political instability as best they can, but it is far beyond their abilities to do much. Remember, the vast amount of people and country involved...the riots due in a few years will be the equivalent of a 100 Katrina's all at once.
In addition, remember, Wikipedia is far vaster than most web sites and changes rapidly, and I imagine the PRC spends a lot of time trying to figure out what articles may cause a riot and where. The blocks seem to be when they start falling behind, or some critical event is about to happen and they want some time to catch up with the backlog.
And it is critical for China to manage Japanese relations; the Chinese and Japanese governments need each other, but the Chinese people are still fighting the Japanese in a lot of the PRC. The Chinese government is doing its best to avoid wide scale riots over the Japanese.
It is also important because China is hosting the Olympics in 2008, and class tensions in China are going to be near the flash point by then. It was announced recently that China is training sharpshooters(!) for crowd protection for the Olympics, (probably to prevent a Japanese version of what happened when Germany hosted the Olympics) so this should probably be the first sporting event to come under the Geneva convention...
Yep, it actually does portend the fall of the CPC and possibly the PRC...in 2010, according to some.
However, it's just a symptom, the Internet has little to do with the underlying reasons.
The one key thing you have to understand about China is that it is this big plate...with its south and east ends at sea level and its west end at the highest point on the planet, the Himalaya's. In other worlds, it is slanted. Over the years, most of the topsoil has been washed down the slope, to the point where only 15% of China is habitable...the areas around the seacoast amd the waterways like the Yangtze and Pearl rivers.
This has been true since the earliest days of human habitation, and Chinese culture has long had a coping mechanism to deal with it. When the population gets too large for the ecology, there is a political instability, and people die until the situation becomes tolerable again.
For millenia, this worked out nicely, with the Chinese limiting their population and the "political instability" population adjustments being very mild...until there was a competition between China and Russia over steel production a few decades ago.
The Chinese were lead by, well, an egomaniacal idiot, who ordered all Chinese to produce steel, and have lots of babies so there would be an army of steel workers.
As it turned out, peasant Chinese aren't all that great at producing high grade steel, but were wizzes at producing workers... and the population imbalance was far worse than it ever had been in history.
The succeeding Chinese governments realized the problem, and have tried literally everything to reduce the population... and failed. Based on current trends, there is going to be a "peasant revolution" in about four years, and thats only because of Chinese economic boom. It was expected to happen last year.
The Chinese people realize this; they expect a disaster, the savings rate is extremely high as the ordinary people try to gather resources to help them survive the associated chaos.
The Chinese military also expects this, they have been pouring funds into increasing the military hoping to suppress the revolution when it starts. I mean, what else could they use the military for? All the adjoining nations are nuclear powers or protected by nuclear powers except Afghanistan, and the Americans are in a perfect position to stop an incursion long before it got underway. Why do you think both Russia and American invaded Afghanistan in the first place? Afghanistan doesn't have anything that would interest a major power except location.
Hu JinTao and his followers also expect this. They have a couple of long shots they hope will help (flooding most of Szechuan province using a dam to increase usable land and making trade deals on food), but mostly they are focused on China acquiring as much resources as possible for use after order is restored....and buying time by supressing the peasant revolution as long as possible. But they aren't going to "disappear" anyone. Outside of the practical effect that it might trigger the revolution earlier than 2010, the fact is that they are desperate, not monsters. "Disappearing" a few people wouldn't help, though I have no doubt they would try almost anything to avoid the holocaust a peasant revolution will bring.
The western governments also realize this. You ever wonder why the American government isn't doing much to stop Chinese competition? I mean, they aren't idiots or traitors. The reason is because they hope to use the revolution to gain a serious foothold in the Chinese economy. I would not be surprised if they weren't helping Hu gain assets for that reason.
Which brings up the other important thing about China, the Wallace line (southern boundary of their ecosystem). North of the Wallace line is an ecosystem know to produce diseases that Westerners are very vulnerable to, Asian influenza's, SARS, bird flu most recently. During political instability in the area, we will not only lose the ability to monitor pote
Actually it is a little bit more complicated than people assume.
Google has a vast array of forces arrayed against it at the moment.
Few outsiders realize it, but the anti PRC groups comprise a huge force in American politics, They include most churches (because of China's imprisonment and suppression of practicing Christians,) most unions (because of job losses and protectionism) and most military (because of China's immense buildup of military forces.) Add that in to the fact that most of these organizations also do massive amounts of charitable work and you have a group that can effectively decide most American elections. They are not someone you pick a fight with unless you are really serious about "going to the mattresses".
Now add in the investors. Google has performed admirably well, but it is very high priced, and it is not an index stock. (Index stock in this case means stocks that are part of an index like S&P), That means Google's investors are not the big index funds, (which only trade index stocks) and a lot of Google investors are getting very nervous about being caught up in irrational exuberance without a index fund cushioning price changes.
Googles involvement in China is especially worrisome to investors. Baidu (the Chinese Google) is rapidly increasing in market share, and the Chinese are not known for playing oarticularly nice when it comes to foreign investors versus locals.
There are plenty of other worrisome things as well, but the essential point is that anyone following Google is getting consideably worried that the company is somehow becoming the "Gettysburg" of the Chinese American economic war, when China isn't even one of their major profit centers.
In all fairness, Google management has always been concerned with the long term (an admirable trait in todays economy) and sees China as it major growth area in the future. Whether or not that is an irrational expectation, of course, is another thing. It certainly isn't a sure bet.More importantly, is management being distracted from more significant short terms goals like profit?
And most importantly, will this issue "sop up" most of managements attention for the foreseeable future, thus limiting Googles ability to respond to other events of more immediate concern?
Other American search firms decided that this wasn't a fight they could afford, even though one of them is 8 times the size of Google. Will those other search firms take advantage of Googles preoccupation to regain market share? Certainly Yahoo is turning in an impressive effort in the technology arena recently and if Microsoft ever loosens up their "Windows only" focus, they could easily cause significant shifts in the enterprise software niche with their advanced technology and and highly effective HCI engineering.
I would agree. Just simply because you stand by your rights does not mean you are automatically guilty...or even that you are suspect.
On the other hand, when did I say that was even one of the reasons why I thought Google appeared like it had something to hide?
I also never said Google was guilty of anything, so there never was a presumption of guilt. What I said was there was an appearance. And, for the record, I don't think Google is guilty of anything, but I do think there is quite a bit of information in Googles files that is relevant to the missions of the government agencies involved and do NOT violate any aspects of the social contracts involved.
For the past few days, I have been watching the Katrina hearings on CSPAN, and the horrifying way the government has failed the survivors...and the reasons why.
For the most part, it was because the rules the governmental agencies operate under were never designed to cope with a disaster of Katrina's extent... and civil service is about following the rules.
It can't be any other way; the American government is too vast, too complicated for running things "ad hoc". For the most part, civil servants understand this, and try to do their best in spite of it.
Sometimes they succeed, sometimes they fail, and sometimes the system doesn't work. Maybe it just fails, in the case of Katrina, or it gets abused, as in the case of Abramhoff, or Richard Jewell.
And often, but not always, the system has checks and balances to correct itself. Checks and balances are a GOOD thing.
But an unspoken assumption that the government is always the enemy, even when the system is failing, is not a check or balance, it's a mistake.
You see, like it or not, if you enjoy the vast protections on rights that citizenship in America provides, you also assume some obligations. One of those obligations is that the same government that protects your rights and privileges, also occasionally has to investigate potential violations, and you are obligated to cooperate, at least within the limits of the social contract that applies.
Look, the reasons you need for investigating are far less than the reasons you need for prosecuting, and less than the reasons you need for presumption of guilt. An investigation does not always result in conviction; sometimes it results in proving innocence.
On the other hand, failing to investigate has often resulted in serious harm, such as 9/11, or a thousand other cases. That's why the level of evidence needed for investigation is much lower than that needed for prosecuting.
Please try to understand that public service, or even election to public office, does not automatically turn someone into a insane, raving sociopath, despite what impressions watching CSPAN (or the Daily Show) might give. For the most part, the government is trying to do the best it can, even if it sometimes fails.
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I think it is a wise idea and you have to applaud Google for it.
a mm.pdf ). Why would China care about records when their legal system doesn't require them for conviction? For that matter of fact, we are told that they have a whole core of expert hackers monitoring the Internet; you don't think it's THAT hard for one of them to match a email address with a ip address?
Search engine company records are incredibly dangerous, the equivalent of bomb grade nuclear material for an economic war. Google needs to move them to a "money haven" country where there is a reasonable chance of them being protected. One of the islands, perhaps, definitely NOT Switzerland. It's been years since records there have been safe from political pressure.
The money haven's are protected against pressure by the simple fact that you could indict most of the ruling and/or criminal classes/ multinationals of the planet (all countries) if their confidentiality was breached. It is in noones interest to open up their records.
But this action by Google is not relevant to privacy protection from China. If you understand China, you would realize that there is something extremely fishy going on with the whole Senate Committee/China incident that led up to this. China is appearing to behave like an American stereotype of Chinese government, not the realities.
While the stereotype is that the Chinese government is this big well oiled machine that tries to controls the lives of everybody, the reality is that it is less coordinated than most governments, as evidenced by their non existant legal system. (see http://www.icgg.org/downloads/contribution10_schr
The reality is that China is really ruled by a collection of political/social groups (old boy networks) and when you see one of these requests for information, it is far more likely that it is one groups attack against another, not the central governments attempt to supress dissidents. (sorta like republican/democratic infighting, sui generis and in spades since China effectively has millions of political parties/interest groups)
The central government simply doesn't have the bandwidth to handle anything but the most extreme cases, it is mostly concerned these days with trying to maintain even a semblance of control of the country. The Chinese aren't a meek people, a recent attempt to build a small powerplant on some farmlands lead to a major riot. And the only reason for building that powerplant was for the benefit of the people who were rioting!
There are considerable indications (and more has been turning up in the past few days) that the whole privacy rights issue that lead to the senate hearings was blown out of porportion as part of a competitive intelligence operation directed against Google by one or more of their competitors and that everyone involved was being spun.
You hear a lot these days about terrorist transcending national boundaries. What you don't hear is that every other non governmental group seems to have done the same. While competitive intelligence operations are a normal part of business in America, the recent trend to involve foreign governments in what are essentially private fights is very disturbing.
However irrelevant governments may be in the age of multinationals, they still control the use of physical force and the welfare of their people, and the potential for disaster is immense. In the economic history of the world, this blurring of lines between public government/economic warfare issues and private/business issues has happened many times, and the results have never been positive for any of the parties involved.
The recent DPW ports issue is an example of this. No matter what side you are on, the fact is that it is tearing America's political system/government apart and causing enormous damage to America's interests in the wider world.
Gee.
c king/
1) Balmer threatens to kill Google. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/09/05/chair_chu
2) Google suddently has all these issues with analysts, the government, etc.
3) Microsoft announces search engine.
Naah, nothing suspicous here...
I can imagine a dozen lawsuits the next day, alleging permanent harm from exposure, followed shortly by a letter from the insurance company, saying it was not an assumable risk under the insurance policies and they would not pay or defend against lawsuits.
Then a visit from the building inspector, asking if this paint was covered under their renovation permits.
Finally a visit from OSHA, asking about risks to employees, then several local news stations with alarmist stories about grey goo, various neighbor tenants and the landlord worried about their insurance, employees, customers, loss of business revenue or whether you had become grey goo (and at least one of them believing it), and then a long, tiresome trek through the courts for the next 15 years. Whats the benefit of that?
Nanotechnology has a lot of wonderful products in it. Most of our entire civil service is designed for the sole purpose of preventing wonderful products from getting to market without being thoroughly checked. The lessons of thalidomide, asbestos, radium and Therac-25 (and pre FDA hot dogs, for that metter of fact) etc. are not lost on our government.
In this case, a fine dust that can absorb significant amounts of electomagnetic energy scares the HECK out of me, even if it is in a paint binder. Where does that energy drain to? If the theatre is near a cell phone tower, will the paint eventually heat up enough to explode or spark? Will it reradiate and interfere with communications, possibly causing an ambulance to lose communications at a critical moment? Many ISM band devices can do that today...its a common complaint among emergency vehicles.
Lead based paints have caused horrible harm among children. What happens to a child that accidentally ingests a nanopaint chip? Thats a known hazard for children. How about storage, disposal...do they need hazmat suits and toxic waste containers if they renovate? And what dump can (and WILL) take the waste legally? What happens if there is a fire; do the police need to evacuate the neighborhood? You wanna be the one telling the street cop you don't know the answer to that?
It will be a generation or two before these issues will be sorted out. Clinical trial studies take years at best.
Actually, it doesn't matter if they are harmful or not. No theatre owner (or any other public gathering place) is going to put anything in their establishment that might scare off paying customers or cause them the risk of a lawsuit. This nanopaint stuff won't take off for at least a generation.
Try taking a look at the current crop of SEDA style ESB's like Mule. Programming a sophisticated, scalable, application is nothing more than wiring components together.
Its been 20 years since the idea of "Software IC's" was proposed, but I think we are getting close.
Of course, if non programmers wanted to program, they would be programmers.
Depends on whether their root servers alias the English .com to the Chinese .com It would make a lot of sense, since they could then prevent any access except those domains they allow simply by shadowing the english .com domains. Try to bypass it by using ICANN root servers and you lose all access to Chinese sites until you clear out the entire chain of delegating DNS servers. ...
NO, we can't go to other low cost economies in the area. If you believe that, you understand very little about Chinese influence in the area. China has deep ties throughout Asia and the Middle East, you deal with anyone in the Pacific Rim, you deal with China.
And that is not including the fact that the military modernization allows China to project force anywhere in the region, a point not lost on the other countries.
Of course, we can go to low cost economies in OTHER areas. If we can get the Moslem world a little more compatible with the West, we would not only have low cost manufacturers, but a potential market as big as China's. And the Chinese and the Moslems are NOT compatible at all in the long term.
Of course, that would mean "creative destruction" of the present Moslem institutions and that would...
Hmm, isn't that what just happened in Iraq? Never mind.
Anyone know if dropping Wal-Mart's on an enemy is a violation of the Geneva convention?
Correct. China occassionally does things because they think it is something a great power ought to do, and this is one of them. There is a whole shopping list of things they are going to buy simply to shed the last of their image as a third world nation...
For Slashdotters, one of the most interesting items rumored to be on the list is Suse Linux. Better start learning to read Chinese, OSS fans...the next generation of OSS products may not be translated to English.
For that matter of fact, Java is 100% Unicode compatible... the next generation of Java software products may be programmed in Chinese characters.
On the other hand, as a veteran user of Open Source products, it is my expert opinion being written in Chinese probably won't make the documentation any less useful (excepting Postgres, Mule and a few other OSS projects)
For those of you who wanna prepare for the next hot programming language, "How to make out in Chinese" and "Teach yourself Beginning Chinese Script" are cheap and fun choices to start with.
As a followup, Google reported weak earnings today, and the entire market (according to DJIA) dropped over 100 points.
Actually, You're also close but not quite on the money. It is a wedge issue, but you have to look a bit deeper as to why now. I think there is considerable indications that all these fights that Google is getting into recently are being artificially created as part of a competitive intelligence operation by one or more of Google's competitors against Google.
If Google is going to play in the big leagues, they are going to have to learn how to protect themselves. Right now, management respopnses to the CI operations actions are naive at best.
Being an analyst is a horrible responsibility, especially if you work for a NRSRO.
If you estimate a stock too high, such as what happened in the Internet bubble, you can ruin the lives of millions of innocent investorsm and even go to jail yourself.
If you estimate it too low, you can destroy jobs, prevent companies from getting access to the operating capital they need, and even alter the course of history by preventing the exploitation of technology or resources.
What makes it even worse is that there is a tendency for predictions to be self fulfilling. an anayst can save a company (or give it a merciful death) by fudging the estimates slightly....the prediction alone might alter the companies value significantly enough to make a difference.
And then again, there are all sorts of laws about what information can be shared with analysts in advance of the public. Analysts have ways of finding out that information, but they don't dare use it, in fear of being accused of crimes...even when it would prevent serious losses by the public.
Google is real difficult to read right now. They are in a war with a number of groups, ranging from various governments to Microsoft, and none of those groups are known for their niceness. Asking for Googles view of the situation, especially since most of those fights are unecessary and irrelevant to the companies business, is not at all unwarranted. The analysts aren't asking for any secrets (they probably have them anyways), just for Google to comiit to an estimate of what they will earn in the short term and in what areas. At teh end of that term, the comparison of those predictions to what actually happned will make a powerful statement as to how well the company is in control of its business.
Google has gone to the capital markets to ask for money, and gotten it. The investors who gave them that money, and the analysts who advise those investors, have am obligation to monitor their investments. When they haven't (such as in Enron) that money was lost.
If we are on general advice, add that the cardinal rule of development is never install anything newer than a maintenance release of any software package unless you love debugging or your psychotherapy for masochism is not working.
/etc ... took me five hours one night to find out why my brand new personal install of Ant was being ignored.
On the subject of shipping an installer: You need to qualify what is an installer. What is needed is not a conventional installer, or even a package manager, but an autonomic manager like IBM is working on.
Lets look at the options you have
Packages (like rpm's) can install but all they really are is styized scripts. If the script writer forgot something (and they invariably do) or got something wrong, they are useless. For example, one custom Ant rpm I ran across put a configuration file in
By extension, package managers like Apt, yumex, smart or even YAST can be screwed up by just one badly packaged piece of code.
Installers (by which I define as non packaged based mechanisms) also have lots of problems in practice for the same reason. Anyone who has ever used Oracle Universal Installer (in which Oracle has put in a LOT of skull sweat and hard work) can testify to that.
The commercial and OSS "wizard" installers aren't too bad, provided you don't push their capabilities.
Personally, as far as semi manual installers go, I have found auto*/.configure/make/make install to be the most reliable of this bunch, albeit not to most skill sets or taste. In the Java space maven seems to be a tolerable solution.
IBM style autonomic computing installers would be ideal, but they are far from reality.
What really works nicely is the "plugin" based installation frameworks, like OSGi/Eclipse. Installing a new Eclipse plugin is a snap. If the major distro's adopted an mixed service/dependency injection plugin solution such as an ESB like, say ServiceMix (JBI/JSR208), installers could finally become a real solution, instead of a kludge.
I dunno if I agree about the OS access. Java has a lot of built in OS support (I espcially like the concurrent packages) and covers 95% of everything you want to do with built in API's. For everthing else, there is ProcessBuilder.start() or Runtime.exec(). Granted, you have to be pretty detail oriented to use them properly but I haven't hit anything I could not get working.
Swings PLAF's aren'tthat bad,especially in the latest versions. Its the defaults that are to blame.
Unicode is another matter. Java has GREAT Unicode support. what is doesn't have is many programmemrs that know how to use it properly.
Actually that data exists, in companies like ChoicePoint and Acxiom, in databases ranging from Talon and Telco to Google and Yahoo's caches.
In one demo of this technology a while back, they were able to input a fragment of a license plate number, a partial description and a few other items, and, in the space of a few seconds, search a gigantic database and come up with not only the full files on the person involved, but all friends, relatives and people that person had been in contact with for years previously.
Legend has it that one of the demo's observers was really excited until it was pointed out that it would take years to go through all the data retrieved and there was nowhere near the staffing and manpower avaiable for anything approaching a serious analysis of the range of material retrieved.
Well, at least this ought to solve the unemployment problem...
*Sigh* They are looking for Non Obvious Relationship Analysis (NORA) technology. It would be fairly easy to get up a OSS project to produce it. I actually tried to start up one (Ghandi/Custer) based on Globus GT4, but had to abandon it due to practical considerations involving not starving to death and having a roof over my head...
/JSR ESB (ServiceMix http://incubator.apache.org/servicemix/) with GT4 and either Postgres or MySQL (Postgres has better spatial and language integration, and MySQL has that dual license issue, sophisticated features, and a large user base.).
Most of the technology to do this already exists as Open Source projects. If I were starting it up now, I would probably try to combine an Open Source JBI
ServiceMix has a built in rules engine. Properly reworked (an easy task with JBI service integration and drools architecture) it could easily cope with the demands involved (which are pretty extreme). The real trick is to have theoretical knowledge necessary to create the appropriate rules. A lot of OSS developers are working stiffs, and most non academics are not up to date enough on the Logic, Langua and Mathematics necessary to produce something like this.)
As a rule of thumb, the most important issue is multiple JRE/JVM management. If you have any issues with this, use SWT as it is not JVM/JRE dependent. On the other hand, SWT's got it's own set of problems...
Here is some of the issues involved.
Swing versions are JVM/JRE version dependent. You really need to ship a JRE with your app and make sure it is used.
In the real worlds, thats not always possible. Customer policies may prevent user control of the JVM's available.
Even when you can specify the JVM's available on client machines, you cannot always guarantee that the particular one that will be used with your application, or worse yet, that someone won't put in an upgrade to the JVM that breaks everything.
It is not uncommon to patch the JVM for specific fixes like memory leaks. You have no idea whether or not the JVM/JRE you are running on is vanilla or not.
Of course, there are lots of other issues involved with using SWT, mostly due to it's immaturity. Don't try real serious OPENGL stuff unless you wanna do a lot of debugging.
And don't even get me started on embedding Windows apps in SWT programs. It can be done, but, in my experience at least, bug detection requires a Russian Roulette approach unless you write your own code. Some things work, work partially or work for a while and then trash some OTHER program.
One interesting suggestion:
If you can pull it off, write your GUI code is some stable environment like VS.NET and call functionality in Java via web services or other remoting technologies.
The talent pool for skilled GUI developers is a lot larger.
Actually no, there is a binary component to SWT because it wraps native widgets. When you download the libraries, you have to download the SWT library appropriate for your platform. 64 bit support for windows is (sorta) under development See bug 57151 for the remaining issues
5 1
https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=571
We are talking about a reporter that several months ago thought the American Association for Retired Persons is (and I quote) "America's most dangerous lobby." http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artic le/2005/11/15/AR2005111501308.html I suggest you read his current article in terms of his credentials and roles within Newsweek. Then read some of his previous positions and decide whether you feel he is credible.
I would like to pose this question to Slashdot readers. Whatever facts you dispute, there definitely will be a lot more Chinese and Indian engineers than American in the future. It is reasonable to assume they will use their native languages more and more as time progresses and non english speakers form the majority of their audience.
What is your reaction if Chinese or Hindi replace English as the primary documentation language, or that the latest open source technologies may only be available to those capable of understanding Asian languages?
Google may think they are being philanthropic, but they haven't thought this one through.
n g/funding.htm
There is a distinct possibility it may be the result of a competitive intelligence operation by Googles competitors.
Lets analyze the political forces involved.
Google is planning to offer, free, various library material that American taxpayers have spent billions of dollars collecting, producing and organizing. This money comes from federal, state, and local public funds as well as various private contributions, all of them usually with some sort of encumbrances.
There is always less funding for libraries than is needed, but this year represents a major shortfall. http://www.ala.org/ala/washoff/WOissues/washfundi
Its an election year, and funding for schools and libraries are LOCAL politics, sure to be major issues in what promises to be many highly contested elections.
Google has lots of enemies http://wired.com/wired/archive/13.12/google.html who won't hesitate to take advantage of a situation like this; and they have plenty of lobbyists.
Here is my prediction.
Google goes ahead with their plans. Shortly after the elections, the GAO, various federal, state and local governments announce that they sueing to recover the costs of the material Google made available that was not within the encombrances posed by the original donations of funds. For bonus points, they may include the various penalties imposed by intellectual property acts as various parties assert rights to specific items in the distributed material.
*Poof* no more shortfall in library funding in the US, though Google shareholders might be a tad upset. There probably won't be a Sarbanes Oxley prosecution, and, who knows, a hostile takeover due to a cash flow crisis might be good for Google
I LIKE it... The empire strikes back with a competitive intelligence operation at it's finest. This is so much more fun than, say, a chair being thrown by a CEO or getting some congresspeople to complain about censorship. I can't wait to see if this plays out the way it looks.
Google is normally not this naive; they have competant legal staff who should have pointed all this out. I wonder what else is going on?
Countries act in their own best interest. It isn't the American governments job to worry about anyone but Americans except to the extents that other countries problems affect America. They have enough work to do at home.
p uter_Privacy.html
The focus on internet search engine companies is specifically because they are making private deals with China, deals China refused to discuss with a congressional delegation when it traveled to China to ask them about it. (see some of my earlier posts.)
Search engine companies are expecially worrisome because they hold the information thats the key to national competitive advantage. More importantly, there are a large but unknown number of "nation sponsored" industrial espionage groups operating here in the United States, not only from China, but from some of the tiniest countries in the world as well. And almost all of them use Internet search engines extensively in some part of their operations, and could do a lot more if they had access to the internal records of a company like Google or Yahoo.
A few hours ago, a spammer was sentenced for stealing a 1.6 BILLION customer records from Acxiom, one of the the companies that basically controls what your background check reveals, http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/1700AP_Com
The search engine companies internal records are potentially a lot more dangerous than Acxioms (see some of my earlier posts for why). A lot of people are seriously concerned when foreign nationals start sniffing around them and aren't very transparent about what they are doing.
It is a lot simpler than that...China is very protectionist, and is allowing foreign companies in only as a stopgap measure while their own industries ramp up. In Googles case, Baidu is going to dominate market share, and the major concern that most observers have about Google is what other parts of their business they will ignore, and what they will trade to China in a delusional attempt to gain market share.
No one on both sides cares much about the censorhip issue per se, China is so porous it's effectively nil. What I, and many others, are worried about is what other compromises may be going on and whether or not their scops goes far beyond Google China.
Lets see now...millions of Katrina survivors desperately in need of help. Google wants to help...apparently almost anyone else but them.
If Google really wanted to do something, they could set up projects to develop businesses for those folks to work in...perhaps American distributed call centers? Google already has expertise in that.
Or they could set up training facilities and job programs. I mean, they are indexing entire college libraries onto the net; Why not just buy the IP rights to key texts and help everyone? Yeesh, look at how much WIkipedia could do on a shoestring, think what some real money behind them might achieve? How about setting up an Online University for retraining Katrina folks?
I could go on and on, but the fact of the matter is that there are thousands of projects that Google could finance that could both be very philanthropic, increase shareholder value, and give something back to the country that allowed them to suceed and so desperately could use their help now. Most of these projects could then be exported to the rest of the world a la the Peace Corps approach. I just hope the American based institutional investors start getting a bit more activist about keeping Google focused on whats important.
First of all, I want to state that I think Wikipedia is the single greatest achievement of our age. and to thank everyone involved for it. Even with all the controversies, it has been a learning tool beyond my wildest dreams.
t m and ordered a block on all potentially disruptive web sites until they could figure out what threat to stability the web sites posed and how to prevent it from exploding into riots (which it did, in spite of everything they did to prevent it. http://atimes.com/atimes/Japan/FH10Dh01.html) To their credit, it was a fairly civilized riot, by soccer standards.
I learned higher math from it (It is the single greatest higher math textbook ever, in my opinion) and for those following the Chinese American economic war, the discussion areas on Chinese topics are often the equivalent of the Daily Show.
But I think they do give themselves a bit too much credit for the why of the Chinese blocking. I doubt that the Chinese cared all that much about massacre articles, the information is all over the net, and half the rumors about the massacre circulating China are far worse than the article. From the PRC's point of view, the article was actually good publicity, comparatively speaking.
What they were probably worried about was the Asian Cup 2004, scheduled to start a few weeks later. In case you are unfamiliar with it, the Asian Cup is the world series of soccer games for the middle and far east countries, with the usual rioting afterwards. Add in the fact that the list of participating countries is a superset of a list of countries supporting terrorism, and the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions a few months earlier igniting cultural tensions, and you get one hypergolic mix ready to explode.
Now toss in the fact that it was being held in China, and Chinese Japanese relations were at their lowest since the Japanese invasion, and you have some very worried politicians in the PRC. They probably looked at incidents like the 1.2 million signature petition against Japan organized by seven Chinese web sites a year earlier http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/3118850.s
When the PRC officials were contacted, they got around to looking at Wikipedia (it was probably just another website on the list, and somewhere near the bottom) and decided it wasn't a threat and immediately removed it from the list.
When you consider how much damage, say, the Danish cartoons have caused, it is not all that unreasonable for authorities to try and delay publication until they can prepare for the possible effects...It's their equivalent of parade permits, not mind control.
As economic convergence and class gaps cause the PRC to be stressed to it's breaking point, the PRC officials are trying to deny the inevitable political instability as best they can, but it is far beyond their abilities to do much. Remember, the vast amount of people and country involved...the riots due in a few years will be the equivalent of a 100 Katrina's all at once.
In addition, remember, Wikipedia is far vaster than most web sites and changes rapidly, and I imagine the PRC spends a lot of time trying to figure out what articles may cause a riot and where. The blocks seem to be when they start falling behind, or some critical event is about to happen and they want some time to catch up with the backlog.
And it is critical for China to manage Japanese relations; the Chinese and Japanese governments need each other, but the Chinese people are still fighting the Japanese in a lot of the PRC. The Chinese government is doing its best to avoid wide scale riots over the Japanese.
It is also important because China is hosting the Olympics in 2008, and class tensions in China are going to be near the flash point by then. It was announced recently that China
is training sharpshooters(!) for crowd protection for the Olympics, (probably to prevent a Japanese version of what happened when Germany hosted the Olympics) so this should probably be the first sporting event to come under the Geneva convention...
Yep, it actually does portend the fall of the CPC and possibly the PRC...in 2010, according to some.
However, it's just a symptom, the Internet has little to do with the underlying reasons.
The one key thing you have to understand about China is that it is this big plate...with its south and east ends at sea level and its west end at the highest point on the planet, the Himalaya's. In other worlds, it is slanted. Over the years, most of the topsoil has been washed down the slope, to the point where only 15% of China is habitable...the areas around the seacoast amd the waterways like the Yangtze and Pearl rivers.
This has been true since the earliest days of human habitation, and Chinese culture has long had a coping mechanism to deal with it. When the population gets too large for the ecology, there is a political instability, and people die until the situation becomes tolerable again.
For millenia, this worked out nicely, with the Chinese limiting their population and the "political instability" population adjustments being very mild...until there was a competition between China and Russia over steel production a few decades ago.
The Chinese were lead by, well, an egomaniacal idiot, who ordered all Chinese to produce steel, and have lots of babies so there would be an army of steel workers.
As it turned out, peasant Chinese aren't all that great at producing high grade steel, but were wizzes at producing workers... and the population imbalance was far worse than it ever had been in history.
The succeeding Chinese governments realized the problem, and have tried literally everything to reduce the population... and failed. Based on current trends, there is going to be a "peasant revolution" in about four years, and thats only because of Chinese economic boom. It was expected to happen last year.
The Chinese people realize this; they expect a disaster, the savings rate is extremely high as the ordinary people try to gather resources to help them survive the associated chaos.
The Chinese military also expects this, they have been pouring funds into increasing the military hoping to suppress the revolution when it starts. I mean, what else could they use the military for? All the adjoining nations are nuclear powers or protected by nuclear powers except Afghanistan, and the Americans are in a perfect position to stop an incursion long before it got underway. Why do you think both Russia and American invaded Afghanistan in the first place? Afghanistan doesn't have anything that would interest a major power except location.
Hu JinTao and his followers also expect this. They have a couple of long shots they hope will help (flooding most of Szechuan province using a dam to increase usable land and making trade deals on food), but mostly they are focused on China acquiring as much resources as possible for use after order is restored....and buying time by supressing the peasant revolution as long as possible. But they aren't going to "disappear" anyone. Outside of the practical effect that it might trigger the revolution earlier than 2010, the fact is that they are desperate, not monsters. "Disappearing" a few people wouldn't help, though I have no doubt they would try almost anything to avoid the holocaust a peasant revolution will bring.
The western governments also realize this. You ever wonder why the American government isn't doing much to stop Chinese competition? I mean, they aren't idiots or traitors. The reason is because they hope to use the revolution to gain a serious foothold in the Chinese economy. I would not be surprised if they weren't helping Hu gain assets for that reason.
Which brings up the other important thing about China, the Wallace line (southern boundary of their ecosystem). North of the Wallace line is an ecosystem know to produce diseases that Westerners are very vulnerable to, Asian influenza's, SARS, bird flu most recently. During political instability in the area, we will not only lose the ability to monitor pote
Err... hate to mention this, but the The CIA's Venture Capital arm, In Q Tel (http://www.in-q-tel.com/) lists Google as an insider trader; (http://biz.yahoo.com/t/44/4984.html); i.e. Google owns a significant portion of the company.
Actually it is a little bit more complicated than people assume.
Google has a vast array of forces arrayed against it at the moment.
Few outsiders realize it, but the anti PRC groups comprise a huge force in American politics, They include most churches (because of China's imprisonment and suppression of practicing Christians,) most unions (because of job losses and protectionism) and most military (because of China's immense buildup of military forces.) Add that in to the fact that most of these organizations also do massive amounts of charitable work and you have a group that can effectively decide most American elections. They are not someone you pick a fight with unless you are really serious about "going to the mattresses".
Now add in the investors. Google has performed admirably well, but it is very high priced, and it is not an index stock. (Index stock in this case means stocks that are part of an index like S&P), That means Google's investors are not the big index funds, (which only trade index stocks) and a lot of Google investors are getting very nervous about being caught up in irrational exuberance without a index fund cushioning price changes.
Googles involvement in China is especially worrisome to investors. Baidu (the Chinese Google) is rapidly increasing in market share, and the Chinese are not known for playing oarticularly nice when it comes to foreign investors versus locals.
There are plenty of other worrisome things as well, but the essential point is that anyone following Google is getting consideably worried that the company is somehow becoming the "Gettysburg" of the Chinese American economic war, when China isn't even one of their major profit centers.
In all fairness, Google management has always been concerned with the long term (an admirable trait in todays economy) and sees China as it major growth area in the future.
Whether or not that is an irrational expectation, of course, is another thing. It certainly isn't a sure bet.More importantly, is management being distracted from more significant short terms goals like profit?
And most importantly, will this issue "sop up" most of managements attention for the foreseeable future, thus limiting Googles ability to respond to other events of more immediate concern?
Other American search firms decided that this wasn't a fight they could afford, even though one of them is 8 times the size of Google. Will those other search firms take advantage of Googles preoccupation to regain market share? Certainly Yahoo is turning in an impressive effort in the technology arena recently and if Microsoft ever loosens up their "Windows only" focus, they could easily cause significant shifts in the enterprise software niche with their advanced technology and and highly effective HCI engineering.
I would agree. Just simply because you stand by your rights does not mean you are automatically guilty...or even that you are suspect.
On the other hand, when did I say that was even one of the reasons why I thought Google appeared like it had something to hide?
I also never said Google was guilty of anything, so there never was a presumption of guilt. What I said was there was an appearance. And, for the record, I don't think Google is guilty of anything, but I do think there is quite a bit of information in Googles files that is relevant to the missions of the government agencies involved and do NOT violate any aspects of the social contracts involved.
For the past few days, I have been watching the Katrina hearings on CSPAN, and the horrifying way the government has failed the survivors...and the reasons why.
For the most part, it was because the rules the governmental agencies operate under were never designed to cope with a disaster of Katrina's extent... and civil service is about following the rules.
It can't be any other way; the American government is too vast, too complicated for running things "ad hoc". For the most part, civil servants understand this, and try to do their best in spite of it.
Sometimes they succeed, sometimes they fail, and sometimes the system doesn't work. Maybe it just fails, in the case of Katrina, or it gets abused, as in the case of Abramhoff, or Richard Jewell.
And often, but not always, the system has checks and balances to correct itself. Checks and balances are a GOOD thing.
But an unspoken assumption that the government is always the enemy, even when the system is failing, is not a check or balance, it's a mistake.
You see, like it or not, if you enjoy the vast protections on rights that citizenship in America provides, you also assume some obligations. One of those obligations is that the same government that protects your rights and privileges, also occasionally has to investigate potential violations, and you are obligated to cooperate, at least within the limits of the social contract that applies.
Look, the reasons you need for investigating are far less than the reasons you need for prosecuting, and less than the reasons you need for presumption of guilt. An investigation does not always result in conviction; sometimes it results in proving innocence.
On the other hand, failing to investigate has often resulted in serious harm, such as 9/11, or a thousand other cases. That's why the level of evidence needed for investigation is much lower than that needed for prosecuting.
Please try to understand that public service, or even election to public office, does not automatically turn someone into a insane, raving sociopath, despite what impressions watching CSPAN (or the Daily Show) might give. For the most part, the government is trying to do the best it can, even if it sometimes fails.