I live in China and access Slashdot frequently. I've never seen it blocked. Most foreign news sites are rarely blocked in China, and even negative articles about China's government are usually accessible. The exception is news sites with a lot of articles in Chinese, those are often blocked. And around certain important dates some news sites like the BBC may be inaccessible for several days.
I'm an American who has lived in China for 7 years.
Most ordinary people in China believe the firewall is only for blocking pornography and dangerous information from terrorists. They don't believe political discussion is being blocked. In fact, there are many blogs and social networking sites in China full of political discussion, which are of course censored, but it is only a few sensitive topics that will be removed, so most users will never notice the censorship.
From the comments in this thread, it seems like most US internet users (even the savvy users on Slashdot) likewise believe that US web censorship is only for blocking IP infringement, and never for censoring political discussion.
So it would seem that Chinese and US internet users are equally misinformed and complacent about their own governments' internet censorship.
Emachineshop looks like a really awesome and reasonably-priced service, although some of our customers have complained that their quoted lead times are way too long. Perhaps it's because business is going really well for them, so they have more customers than they can handle in a timely manner.
We do plastic injection molding in China, but we often machine metal or plastic prototypes for our customers as well. Lead times for prototypes are often as short as 5 days, plus 2-3 days to ship to the customer by FedEx.
I have been living in China for two years and speak fluent Chinese, so I have a first hand perspective. Yes, it is true that most Chinese are aware of their government's faults. However, they never resist because in Chinese culture the word of authority is final. It doesn't matter if the authority is the government, the boss, or one's parents. Their command, no matter how misguided or unfair, must be followed without question.
Also, the Chinese tend to have a very detached attitude about the environment they live in. They would rather endure hardships than complain about them openly. For example, the street at a bus stop that I pass by everyday became flooded with sewage from a clogged sewer. The entire area, in the middle of a large city, was enveloped in putrid stench. But the crowds of people waiting for their buses just stood there pretending like they didn't notice. No one complained and the sewer spurted sewage continuously for two weeks before it was fixed.
Such attitudes are deeply ingrained in Chinese culture. I think it may take generations for them to change to the point where the Chinese are willing to resist on a large scale.
You're probably correct if you're sending it to a part of China like Beijing where Mandarin is their first language, but where I live Mandarin is not most people's first language and the people that deliver the mail typically don't understand pinyin. China Post does employ people that read the pinyin and write in the characters next to it, but they usually do a pretty sloppy job and I frequently have problems with such mail being misdirected or delayed.
I have a friend at a school here who frequently gets mail from foreign countries. Now when any mail addressed in English or pinyin is sent to someone at the school it ends up in her box, because the mail room just assumes it must be for her. It's a pretty annoying situation for her.
I ordered a Firefox T-shirt from the Mozilla Store with international shipping to China. I filled out the shipping address in Chinese characters, but a few days later they sent me an email that said the address just showed up as a bunch of question marks in their software. Thankfully they agreed to let me email them the address as a gif image and they printed out the gif and stuck it on the package. I received the shipment about ten days later.
If you provide the option of international shipping you should really make sure your software works with international character sets.
Although the code is reasonably simple, it is very mathematical, and that is not something modern children can understand.
Modern children can understand math quite well, they just need to be shown how fun and interesting it can be. I think this could be a great opportunity to do just that. Generate a fractal such as the Mandelbrot Set where a very simple mathematical formula produces beautiful images. Kids could experiment with zooming in to find interesting regions of the set. More advanced kids could try changing the formula slightly to produce new interesting fractals (for example, z=z^3+c instead of z=z^2+c).
To make the code simpler and more clear to beginners you would probably want to use a programming language that supports complex variables and has simple graphing commands.
It's not like it's somehow better for the environment to throw compost in the trash than it is to pitch banana peels - they will decompose in the landfill just as nicely as they decomposed in your kitchen
Not true. Landfills are sealed to avoid polluting ground water. Thus a landfill is an environment mostly free of water and oxygen, so organic wastes do not decompose readily. This site has some good information on landfill decay, including this interesting fact:
"Only one-third to one-half of even easily decomposed materials such as lawn, garden and food waste is decomposed after 20 years."
Unfortunately that is the solution the government here in Hangzhou, China uses. During summer 2004 when the temperature was over 100 every day and everyone was using air conditioners, many factories and residences had their power cut off three or four days a week. Most of the larger factories I work with have generators, but when all the factories here have their generators running it makes the air pollution even worse than normal.
Things might be even worse this coming summer due to El Niño. Perhaps what the Chinese government should do is raise energy prices just like the rest of the world is doing, according to supply and demand. But so far their strategy is mostly forced electricity usage limits instead of price-induced ones.
Most professors wouldn't want to see any encyclopedia cited as a reference for a project or paper. Encyclopedias give an overview of a broad range of topics, not in-depth information on any one topic. They do not provide the sort of information one would need to actually do worthwhile research on a subject.
I do feel free here, yes. I suppose that might change if I were to get into some kind of trouble, like being wrongfully accused of a major crime, but I think the chance of that is incredibly small. The Chinese government rarely intrudes on the lives of ordinary people, especially here in Southern China. In fact, I often wish there was more government regulation and law enforcement here. For example, it would be nice to see them crack down on the theft, blatant violation of traffic laws, illegal waste dumping, and unsafe food production that is so common here. But unfortunately the police just turn a blind eye on all but major crimes.
Yes it's true that a few websites are blocked from China, including the BBC. But I don't think this is a really big deal compared to the other problems China has.
Also, it's easy to blame the Chinese government for all of these problems, but I feel the root cause is Chinese culture itself. Westerners see the Chinese government as horribly authoritarian, but similar structures of strict hierarchical control can be be seen everywhere in Chinese non-government groups as well, including businesses, schools, and families. The corruption and crime prevalent in China can also be explained by culture. The Chinese have experienced generations of having to struggle to survive, and the result is a culture where individuals do not value the welfare of anyone besides self and immediate friends and family.
Anyway, these are just my opinions developed after living in China for a total of over a year. If anyone disagrees with me I'd love to hear their reasoning, but please don't flame.
I work in Hangzhou on behalf of a small manufacturing outsourcing company. Conditions for workers here in China are much better now than in the past, but there are still problems. Perhaps one of the biggest hardships for them is that most buildings in Hangzhou are not heated in winter, and it gets fairly cold here, dropping below freezing outside several times per month. Often even areas where the white collar workers are located have no heat, and sometimes I think they have it the worst, because at least the unskilled laborers are constantly moving instead of sitting motionless at a computer.
The point is, in a developing country some hardships can not be avoided. Unfortunately China's thirst for electricity is much more than can be supplied, thus it is not feasible to heat most buildings here in the south during winter. As it is, there are frequent scheduled blackouts in many areas to solve the problem that there is not enough electricity to go around. But they can't just all stop work and wait for spring. Sometimes I think people don't realize this when they get mad about working conditions in developing countries. Yes conditions are less than ideal in China, but they are improving, and it isn't possible for everyone to just quit working and wait for conditions to become like they are in the West. Change has to happen gradually and economic growth is the only way that it is going to happen at all.
Numbers are not supposed to be patentable either. US Patent 5373560 was registered by a member of the League for Programming Freedom in order to demonstrate how easy it is to obtain a frivolous software patent.
because no mom with 3 kids hanging on the shopping cart is going to buy one
Why not? It seems like the perfect computer to introduce kids to computing, as it's a laptop so it doesn't take up much space and it's portable so kids can carry it on car trips, etc. Plus it's cheap so it's not that big of a deal if the kids break it.
That's what the Bible says, but some people forget this and angrily defend the exact words of the Bible as God's absolute truth, thus refusing to allow their faith to be tested.
Here is a Bible Test for those who want their faith in the Bible tested.
I just stumbled upon this test some time ago and thought it looked interesting, although I have nothing to do with FFRF and don't know what they're all about.
We do not require a commitment for large orders, but we require the customer to pay the costs of producing necessary tooling such as molds, dies, etc. The cost of the tooling is usually refunded the customer after orders total 300 thousand units or more. Also, manufacturing such tooling is usually much cheaper in China due to low labor costs.
You can outsource manufacturing to China and get the same device for pennies on the dollar, but Chinese won't talk to you unless you place an order for a million.
Not necessarily true. My company, ChinaForge.com helps businesses manufacture China. Our customers will often only order small quantities at first. The Chinese factories that we use are willing to take small orders (often less than 5000 units) if it looks like the product could be successful eventually. Prices are still fairly low in the hope that if the product is successful in the marketplace much larger orders will be made in the future.
WHY exactly is global warming bad? Wont it give more landmass (eg, melts permafrost siberia) and lessen the "nice tropical -120F on antartica?
Actually melting the permafrost is likely to produce less usable landmass. According to the article:
"Oil and gas deposits on land are likely to be harder to extract as tundra thaws, limiting the frozen season when drilling convoys can traverse the otherwise spongy ground, the report says. Alaska has already seen the "tundra travel" season on the North Slope shrink to 100 days from about 200 days a year in 1970."
Music downloads are still a very long way from being as convenient as you make out, and they could be. I'm sure the more convenient they get, the more they will eat into traditional retail.
Music downloading is already extremely convenient in China, as I know from living there most of the time due to my business. China's most popular search engine, Baidu.com has an MP3 search feature built right in and you can find just about any popular Chinese music on it, and many western songs too. Everyone uses it, and download speeds tend to be extremely fast, which is quite impressive considering China's large online population.
I don't believe this will have a large impact on Chinese artists however; the fact is that Chinese people have always been able to purchase pirated music CDs for a couple dollars each. Stores selling such music are everywhere in China, even on the campuses of public universities. Clearly the ability to download music won't change much from the Chinese artists' perspective, and might actually help them by increasing the popularity of their music.
Slashdot Mirror
I live in China and access Slashdot frequently. I've never seen it blocked. Most foreign news sites are rarely blocked in China, and even negative articles about China's government are usually accessible. The exception is news sites with a lot of articles in Chinese, those are often blocked. And around certain important dates some news sites like the BBC may be inaccessible for several days.
I'm an American who has lived in China for 7 years.
Most ordinary people in China believe the firewall is only for blocking pornography and dangerous information from terrorists. They don't believe political discussion is being blocked. In fact, there are many blogs and social networking sites in China full of political discussion, which are of course censored, but it is only a few sensitive topics that will be removed, so most users will never notice the censorship.
From the comments in this thread, it seems like most US internet users (even the savvy users on Slashdot) likewise believe that US web censorship is only for blocking IP infringement, and never for censoring political discussion.
So it would seem that Chinese and US internet users are equally misinformed and complacent about their own governments' internet censorship.
Emachineshop looks like a really awesome and reasonably-priced service, although some of our customers have complained that their quoted lead times are way too long. Perhaps it's because business is going really well for them, so they have more customers than they can handle in a timely manner.
We do plastic injection molding in China, but we often machine metal or plastic prototypes for our customers as well. Lead times for prototypes are often as short as 5 days, plus 2-3 days to ship to the customer by FedEx.
I have been living in China for two years and speak fluent Chinese, so I have a first hand perspective. Yes, it is true that most Chinese are aware of their government's faults. However, they never resist because in Chinese culture the word of authority is final. It doesn't matter if the authority is the government, the boss, or one's parents. Their command, no matter how misguided or unfair, must be followed without question.
Also, the Chinese tend to have a very detached attitude about the environment they live in. They would rather endure hardships than complain about them openly. For example, the street at a bus stop that I pass by everyday became flooded with sewage from a clogged sewer. The entire area, in the middle of a large city, was enveloped in putrid stench. But the crowds of people waiting for their buses just stood there pretending like they didn't notice. No one complained and the sewer spurted sewage continuously for two weeks before it was fixed.
Such attitudes are deeply ingrained in Chinese culture. I think it may take generations for them to change to the point where the Chinese are willing to resist on a large scale.
Slashdot is not blocked in China. I live in China and read it every day.
A Study in Scarlet is a good legitimate source...
:)
You're probably correct if you're sending it to a part of China like Beijing where Mandarin is their first language, but where I live Mandarin is not most people's first language and the people that deliver the mail typically don't understand pinyin. China Post does employ people that read the pinyin and write in the characters next to it, but they usually do a pretty sloppy job and I frequently have problems with such mail being misdirected or delayed.
I have a friend at a school here who frequently gets mail from foreign countries. Now when any mail addressed in English or pinyin is sent to someone at the school it ends up in her box, because the mail room just assumes it must be for her. It's a pretty annoying situation for her.
I ordered a Firefox T-shirt from the Mozilla Store with international shipping to China. I filled out the shipping address in Chinese characters, but a few days later they sent me an email that said the address just showed up as a bunch of question marks in their software. Thankfully they agreed to let me email them the address as a gif image and they printed out the gif and stuck it on the package. I received the shipment about ten days later.
If you provide the option of international shipping you should really make sure your software works with international character sets.
Modern children can understand math quite well, they just need to be shown how fun and interesting it can be. I think this could be a great opportunity to do just that. Generate a fractal such as the Mandelbrot Set where a very simple mathematical formula produces beautiful images. Kids could experiment with zooming in to find interesting regions of the set. More advanced kids could try changing the formula slightly to produce new interesting fractals (for example, z=z^3+c instead of z=z^2+c).
To make the code simpler and more clear to beginners you would probably want to use a programming language that supports complex variables and has simple graphing commands.
Not true. Landfills are sealed to avoid polluting ground water. Thus a landfill is an environment mostly free of water and oxygen, so organic wastes do not decompose readily. This site has some good information on landfill decay, including this interesting fact:
"Only one-third to one-half of even easily decomposed materials such as lawn, garden and food waste is decomposed after 20 years."Unfortunately that is the solution the government here in Hangzhou, China uses. During summer 2004 when the temperature was over 100 every day and everyone was using air conditioners, many factories and residences had their power cut off three or four days a week. Most of the larger factories I work with have generators, but when all the factories here have their generators running it makes the air pollution even worse than normal.
Things might be even worse this coming summer due to El Niño. Perhaps what the Chinese government should do is raise energy prices just like the rest of the world is doing, according to supply and demand. But so far their strategy is mostly forced electricity usage limits instead of price-induced ones.
Most professors wouldn't want to see any encyclopedia cited as a reference for a project or paper. Encyclopedias give an overview of a broad range of topics, not in-depth information on any one topic. They do not provide the sort of information one would need to actually do worthwhile research on a subject.
I do feel free here, yes. I suppose that might change if I were to get into some kind of trouble, like being wrongfully accused of a major crime, but I think the chance of that is incredibly small. The Chinese government rarely intrudes on the lives of ordinary people, especially here in Southern China. In fact, I often wish there was more government regulation and law enforcement here. For example, it would be nice to see them crack down on the theft, blatant violation of traffic laws, illegal waste dumping, and unsafe food production that is so common here. But unfortunately the police just turn a blind eye on all but major crimes.
Yes it's true that a few websites are blocked from China, including the BBC. But I don't think this is a really big deal compared to the other problems China has.
Also, it's easy to blame the Chinese government for all of these problems, but I feel the root cause is Chinese culture itself. Westerners see the Chinese government as horribly authoritarian, but similar structures of strict hierarchical control can be be seen everywhere in Chinese non-government groups as well, including businesses, schools, and families. The corruption and crime prevalent in China can also be explained by culture. The Chinese have experienced generations of having to struggle to survive, and the result is a culture where individuals do not value the welfare of anyone besides self and immediate friends and family.
Anyway, these are just my opinions developed after living in China for a total of over a year. If anyone disagrees with me I'd love to hear their reasoning, but please don't flame.
I work in Hangzhou on behalf of a small manufacturing outsourcing company. Conditions for workers here in China are much better now than in the past, but there are still problems. Perhaps one of the biggest hardships for them is that most buildings in Hangzhou are not heated in winter, and it gets fairly cold here, dropping below freezing outside several times per month. Often even areas where the white collar workers are located have no heat, and sometimes I think they have it the worst, because at least the unskilled laborers are constantly moving instead of sitting motionless at a computer.
The point is, in a developing country some hardships can not be avoided. Unfortunately China's thirst for electricity is much more than can be supplied, thus it is not feasible to heat most buildings here in the south during winter. As it is, there are frequent scheduled blackouts in many areas to solve the problem that there is not enough electricity to go around. But they can't just all stop work and wait for spring. Sometimes I think people don't realize this when they get mad about working conditions in developing countries. Yes conditions are less than ideal in China, but they are improving, and it isn't possible for everyone to just quit working and wait for conditions to become like they are in the West. Change has to happen gradually and economic growth is the only way that it is going to happen at all.
Numbers are not supposed to be patentable either. US Patent 5373560 was registered by a member of the League for Programming Freedom in order to demonstrate how easy it is to obtain a frivolous software patent.
What happened to not being able to patent a mathematical formula? Isn't something like this basically just a math trick?
Why not? It seems like the perfect computer to introduce kids to computing, as it's a laptop so it doesn't take up much space and it's portable so kids can carry it on car trips, etc. Plus it's cheap so it's not that big of a deal if the kids break it.
Here is a Bible Test for those who want their faith in the Bible tested.
I just stumbled upon this test some time ago and thought it looked interesting, although I have nothing to do with FFRF and don't know what they're all about.
We do not require a commitment for large orders, but we require the customer to pay the costs of producing necessary tooling such as molds, dies, etc. The cost of the tooling is usually refunded the customer after orders total 300 thousand units or more. Also, manufacturing such tooling is usually much cheaper in China due to low labor costs.
Not necessarily true. My company, ChinaForge.com helps businesses manufacture China. Our customers will often only order small quantities at first. The Chinese factories that we use are willing to take small orders (often less than 5000 units) if it looks like the product could be successful eventually. Prices are still fairly low in the hope that if the product is successful in the marketplace much larger orders will be made in the future.
Or how about graphing fractals? My personal favorite is the Mandelbrot Set.
Actually melting the permafrost is likely to produce less usable landmass. According to the article:
"Oil and gas deposits on land are likely to be harder to extract as tundra thaws, limiting the frozen season when drilling convoys can traverse the otherwise spongy ground, the report says. Alaska has already seen the "tundra travel" season on the North Slope shrink to 100 days from about 200 days a year in 1970."
Exactly, Bin Laden is Bush's Emanuel Goldstein.
Music downloading is already extremely convenient in China, as I know from living there most of the time due to my business. China's most popular search engine, Baidu.com has an MP3 search feature built right in and you can find just about any popular Chinese music on it, and many western songs too. Everyone uses it, and download speeds tend to be extremely fast, which is quite impressive considering China's large online population.
I don't believe this will have a large impact on Chinese artists however; the fact is that Chinese people have always been able to purchase pirated music CDs for a couple dollars each. Stores selling such music are everywhere in China, even on the campuses of public universities. Clearly the ability to download music won't change much from the Chinese artists' perspective, and might actually help them by increasing the popularity of their music.