Zmodem or Xmodem? Or...Ymodem?
Now downloading is all point and click, but back then you had to choose your packet size or else waste another half hour on that 500k download. Good times.
Sounds like a defense of CORPORATIONS rights, which are more and more behind the scenes, creating laws and running the country. We have separation of church and state - we need separation of business and state as well.
Google has a list of domains and sites they block for their Chinese site. The responsible thing to do is make this list available for public viewing for non-Chinese users (and Chinese users savvy enough to break through).
This would server two purposes:
1. Google would be more responsible and honest about the situation, which is probably the best option they have here.
2. Alert the rest of the world to the censorship in a delicate and interesting way - ala a "Banned Books" list.
Now that Google is a publicly held stock, they have a law-bound duty to uphold the interests of their stockholders, which means abiding by the Chinese government's restrictions.
If they gave the ol' middle finger to China, they would be banned from China, which is the most populous country in the world. For this, Google would be held liable and John Q. Public could sue Google for negligence.
The problem is really a problem with the institution of the corporation. I recommend watching The Corporation - an eye-opening documentary. My favorite line from this movie compares corporations to sharks - they are not necessarily evil, but are designed by their nature to do harm for their own benefit. The sad truth is, Google doesn't have the option to be a benevolent ubersite anymore.
The Internet lays bare an interesting human trait - that people are willing to pay for a product in a physical form that they could grasp from the ether for free.
Examples: People who bought RedHat in the store for the box, the manual, and the CD, rather than downloading it. Same thing when people buy the PDF version of an online article so they can print it out or just "keep" it - people do this more than you would think.
I think there is real value added by having a physical product, and some of the bigger open source software projects should do this if possible. Not only is it another way to get funding for the project, but it's actually something a lot of people want. Wouldn't you like to have Wikipedia 1.0 sitting over your desk?
At some point in high school I realized that the skills kids learned for themselves were more important than the knowledge in the books - and sad to say, the people that were successful in high school through cheating or using study guides were likely to be more successful in work life than the kids with their studious flash cards and study groups. Think of the ladder jumpers at your workplace - it usually involves a lot of backstabbing and laying claim to other people's work.
There's also the question of sites like http://www.bookrags.com/, which have mostly accepted stuff like Cliffs Notes, but also essays and essay editing. The thing is, if a student spends hours cobbling together and rewriting other people's essays, they're probably learning useful skills--different from the ones intended, but not too different from a heavy research paper. Just a thought.
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Zmodem or Xmodem? Or...Ymodem? Now downloading is all point and click, but back then you had to choose your packet size or else waste another half hour on that 500k download. Good times.
Sounds like a defense of CORPORATIONS rights, which are more and more behind the scenes, creating laws and running the country. We have separation of church and state - we need separation of business and state as well.
This would server two purposes:
1. Google would be more responsible and honest about the situation, which is probably the best option they have here.
2. Alert the rest of the world to the censorship in a delicate and interesting way - ala a "Banned Books" list.
If they gave the ol' middle finger to China, they would be banned from China, which is the most populous country in the world. For this, Google would be held liable and John Q. Public could sue Google for negligence. The problem is really a problem with the institution of the corporation. I recommend watching The Corporation - an eye-opening documentary. My favorite line from this movie compares corporations to sharks - they are not necessarily evil, but are designed by their nature to do harm for their own benefit. The sad truth is, Google doesn't have the option to be a benevolent ubersite anymore.
The Internet lays bare an interesting human trait - that people are willing to pay for a product in a physical form that they could grasp from the ether for free.
Examples: People who bought RedHat in the store for the box, the manual, and the CD, rather than downloading it. Same thing when people buy the PDF version of an online article so they can print it out or just "keep" it - people do this more than you would think.
I think there is real value added by having a physical product, and some of the bigger open source software projects should do this if possible. Not only is it another way to get funding for the project, but it's actually something a lot of people want. Wouldn't you like to have Wikipedia 1.0 sitting over your desk?
At some point in high school I realized that the skills kids learned for themselves were more important than the knowledge in the books - and sad to say, the people that were successful in high school through cheating or using study guides were likely to be more successful in work life than the kids with their studious flash cards and study groups. Think of the ladder jumpers at your workplace - it usually involves a lot of backstabbing and laying claim to other people's work.
There's also the question of sites like http://www.bookrags.com/, which have mostly accepted stuff like Cliffs Notes, but also essays and essay editing. The thing is, if a student spends hours cobbling together and rewriting other people's essays, they're probably learning useful skills--different from the ones intended, but not too different from a heavy research paper. Just a thought.