You really didn't read what I wrote, did you. Consumers get wealthier, not poorer, as a result of free trade. We pay lower prices for world produced goods than we do for goods produced domestically. Even if (and this is a big if) our salaries drop somewhat, it doesn't matter if the our cost of living goes down by a greater amount.
If an industry is not competitive in the US, it won't be done in the US. But lots of industries are competetive in the US.
I'm not going to say anything more about this, because it's pretty obvious to me that you're not reading anything I write.
Of course, you're completely correct. But because you have not personally patched your new system, and, with the exception of some of the big stuff (like SP2) you generally won't be getting a comprehensive list from your OEM of exactly what patches they've installed, the safe thing to do from a security perspective is to assume that none have been installed.
It's true that there are a lot of anti-Windows folks on Slashdot that use the "exploited in under a second" statistic to make Windows look bad, ignore them. It has a much more important use: scaring the technically illiterate (and semi-literate, as it happens) into taking updates seriously.
I personally am not a Windows fan (don't use it, actually), but what people seem to forget about around here is that even if MS released a version of Windows with OpenBSD-like security today we'd still have to deal with this virus shit for years because mom and pop don't like to update their system. You can't really blame MS for this. It's kind of like cars (oh god, not another car analogy): people who understand cars "tune them up" with relative frequency, and the other 99% take the car into the shop only when there's a weird sound or the sucker just stops working.
The analogy even holds for people: lots of folks only go to the doctor when they're obviously sick.
I'm tempted to say that it's human nature. Computers are scary for lots of people. Saying, "download the updates and run a virus check, an unpatched Windows machine is compromised on average less than a minute from being attached to the internet, and sometimes in under a second" puts the fear of god into people who don't understand computers well (and those of us that do, too). Think of it as "motivational persuasion."
Ignore the slashbots dogging on Windows. We don't have the stats, but from what I understand, over 80% of Slashdot hits are from MSIE. So yeah, lots of posers around. Having a Gentoo box in your basement that you use from time to time to uhh, compile things doesn't make you a Linux user, if you do all your real work on Windows. (Oh no, I'm an elitist!)
If you're going to be pendantic, it ought to be Ich begrüße (note the lack of ending n). But then everyone in this thread is just having fun with babelfish anyway.
Ok, maybe you didn't read my comment: "It's about balance and also realising that the more industries you do it to the poorer your consumers get and ergo they buy less, reducing profits." This is patently false. There may be a redistribution of wealth, maybe, but ultimately, I'm selling my products to more people as a result of cutting costs.
I also don't have any "crazy idea that corporations couldn't make a profit or consumers afford to buy them [goods] until jobs were shipped abroad", nice straw man. I never said that, but I'm beginning to think that you didn't actually read what I wrote, which doesn't really surprise me very much. It's about market efficency. Consider the US prices for sugar, relative to the world price. Fact: the US sugar manufacturers are not all that competitive with global sugar manufacturers. Fact: the industry does not want to compete with global prices. Fact: they lobbied the US government to get protectionist policies passed that keep prices in the US high (via quotas, IIRC). The result is, US consumers pay more for sugar than the world average, an estimated 3 billion USD more per year. Spread out over the entire population of the US, that's not much per person, but what you have to understand is, this is a transfer of wealth: from you, the consumer, to the huge behemoth-like sugar producing corporations. You pay more so that they don't have to restructure to compete more efficiently. Do you understand this? In order to let them make more money, you are paying more, and the government guarantees it.
When you ask for trade restrictions, you're asking for more of this, in more industries. It's bad for us, the people. Trade restrictions only benefit the corporations and the industries they protect. Everyone else picks up the slack.
As for your armchair opinion of sweatshops, as it happens, I live in the developing world. China, specifically. Over the last several years, I have seen, first hand, what foreign investment does to the local economy. Don't knock it. Twenty years ago, these people were starving. Now they're getting wealthy, and the outlook is one of hope. Supply and demand set wages, you know. When a country is very poor, wages are low, but as more and more companies step in to try to take advantage of the wealth disparity, there is an upward pressure on wages that drives the wages and benefits of the local people upward. The companies that aren't willing to raise wages to compete either go out of business or take their money elsewhere. But the world is a small place, and they're running out of "elsewheres" to go.
Using cameras as an example of a product produced overseas was just that, an example. Replace it with any other product.
As for your ridiculous assertion that I would suggest that before 1991 "no one poor owned a TV", well, again, it's a straw man. I didn't say that, but I'll tell you this: relative to the world standard, there is essentially no one poor in the USA. That's relative to the world standard, mind you. Which is not to say that poverty does not exist in the US, because it does. This is not to say that poverty isn't a problem in the US, because it is. But before 1991, many people in say, China and Vietnam, could not afford TVs. Your assertion that the people manufacturing things in the developing world can't afford the products they produce is ridiculous. When Ford first produced the automobile in the US, it was an expensive product, and yet his assembly-line workers scrimped and saved to purchase them. TVs, cameras, nice clothes, you name it -- these "commodity" items remain expensive for much of the world, but every decrease makes them more affordable. Before 1995 personal computers in China were limited to all but the wealthiest people and to government ministries. Now, everyone and their mom has one.
"I'm not just focusing on one industry, I'm focusing on all of them." This is an interesting statement. First off, what's true for one indus
It's really amazing what some Slashdotters will spout, seriously. He didn't even have the decency to preface it with "some people think" or similar. Now the rest of the historically and politically illiterate Slashdot masses will take him at his word. What a shame. Mods, mod the parent up so that we don't have this kind of hooey polluting the minds of our youth.
I think that the GP got caught up in a game of telephone, you know, the whole he-said-she-said routine, where the story grows in the telling. There are some people that believe that FDR goaded the Japanese into believing that they could invade the US, thus tempting them into a first strike, as an excuse to get inolved in WWII. It's not a widely held belief, but it is generally noted that the US would probably not have ever gotten involved with WWII had it not been for the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. We'd just lost a lot of boys in WWI and Americans overwhelmingly were not interested in getting involved (officially) with another European war. On top of this, we were in the midst of the great depression, things were bad, etc, etc.
The story goes that FDR and his entourage wanted the US to be involved in WWII in Europe, but knew that they hadn't a hope in hell of convincing the American people that it was worth it. There may have been a number of reasons for this. One, J.M. Keynes, a British Economist who believed that expansionary fiscal policy during a recession was the key to preventing an economy from coming to equilibrium with unemployment well below the natural rate, had suggested to FDR that vast government spending, powered by what economists call the [Keynesian] multiplier, would trigger investment and thus pull the US out of the great depression. Indeed, it is the consensus of all modern economists (although their interpretations vary) that world involvement in the second world war was the catalyst that ended the great depression (it was going on in Europe as well).
Another reason, perhaps less selfish, was the growing concern about Hitler and his intentions. The American Jewry, certainly, was very concerned about news and rumors trickling across the pond of the planned Endloesung, but it's fair to say that the vast majority of Americans didn't give a shit. Anti-semitism, you see, only became a cultural taboo after Hitler took it too far -- before the Holocaust, hating Jews was a downhome American/European passtime.
There wasn't much danger that Hitler would attempt a direct strike against the US until he had consolidated power in Europe, and even then, it seemed unlikely. Germany, having fought the US just 25 years earlier, was not about to risk antagonizing us. They were all too well aware how massive the US was, how many resources we had at our disposal, and how easily annoyed we were by other countries pushing our buttons. So if FDR was hoping for an attack on the US to get the American people involved in the war, Germany was not a likely threat.
Japan, on the other hand, was perfect: they were far away, knew next to nothing about the US (there's an anecdote about a Japanese army general vacationing in the US some years after the war, and essentially saying something along the lines of "I can't believe we were stupid enough to think we could invade a country this size" -- possibly apocryphal), and were interested in expansion into the Pacific. Hawai'i is not far from Japan, relatively speaking.
So the conspiracy theory is that somehow, FDR used political machinations to convince the Japanese that the US did not present an insurmountable threat, that a quick and devestating defeat at the hands of the Japanese (Pearl Harbor certainly qualifies) would break American will, etc, etc. And then, because Japan and Nazi Germany were allies, the US, by declaring war on Japan, would also be declaring war on Germany.
It's a nice story, but other than the appeal, there really doesn't appear to be much evidence to back it up. There's a lot of debate in historical cir
You're comment is incredibly naive, I don't even know where to begin. First, "The buggy whip manufacturers were put out of business by an industry that created many more good jobs than it destroyed." This is certainly true. However, the vast majority of buggy whip manufacturers were unable to take advantage of these new positions in this new industry because the skillset required to make buggy whips was not the same as the skillset to make automobiles. This is what economists refer to as "structural unemployment" -- unemployment that results not from an absence of willing labour, but from the lack of demand for the skillset that willing labour possesses. The buggy whip manufacturers, in your example, were still shit out of luck.
Then there's the labour mobility issue: a high quality buggy whip requires good leather craftsmanship, etc, etc. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that the center of the lucrative buggy whip manufacturing industry wasn't the same center as the center of the automotive industry. It isn't like the buggy whip plant closed and all the buggy whip technicians walked down the street and got a job at Ford thinking, "Man, this is great, now we have a better industry to participate in!" In reality, they lost their jobs and were up shit creek without a paddle. All your thoughts about a better industry were of precious little consolation to them.
"Lower prices are only good if wages go up or stay the same." Are you daft? This is just ridiculous. How much you make is of absolutely no consequence: it's how much you have to spend that is important, and how much you can buy for each dollar you earn. Sure, the people who used to make shirts for twenty dollars an hour are, like the buggy whip manufacturers, shit out of luck, when their jobs are replaced by someone in Thailand who is willing to do the same work for 20 cents an hour. But with that 100-fold decrease in labour price, offset by an increase in import/shipping costs and what have you, the average consumer, who does not work in textiles, is paying far less than what he previously paid.
On average, people's salaries may go down, but if the cost of living -- defined by the cost of goods that an individual needs/wants to maintain his desired lifestyle -- drops by an even greater amount, you're still coming out on top.
It's important that you think about this and let it sink in: if your 10 dollar t-shirt were made in the US and not in Pakistan, you would end up paying 30 or 40 bucks for it, instead of 10. Your salary, on the other hand, which is not affected by the textiles industry (because I'm assuming you don't work in textiles) would still be the same. So where you could previously buy 3 or 4 shirts you now have to make do with one. The only people that benefit from this are people in textiles in the US. Everyone else suffers higher prices. So the question is, in order to protect an industry that is both inefficient and expensive, should everyone (including you) have to pay two to three times as much for goods? Is that a good way to work things out?
And don't use the term "sweat shop", it's a loaded word, and stupid. Anyone who has ever been to the developing world where they have these "sweat shops" will realize that 20 cents per hour is a very good wage relative to the local economy in many of these places. People actually fight for these jobs because relatively speaking, the wages are actually high. The US is the richest country in the world, the most economically powerful, and the dollar is extremely valuable. It's difficult to overstate this.
We say things like, "but but but, they don't get medical, they don't get dental, and they work 60 hours a week for almost nothing" without realizing that where they live, no one gets medical or dental, the "almost nothing" they get paid is twice what the local guy next door pays, and 60 hours per week is better than the 80 they were working before hawking goods on the side of the road try
It's worth noting that free trade isn't as bad as you think it is. Consider the USA -- you don't hear Americans (I'm assuming you are one, if you're not, excuse me) complaining about their jobs "being outsourced to Minnesota", or wherever else. But the fact remains, not all states are created equal, from a business perspective: they have different laws, different tax codes, differently skilled populaces, and as a result, states have "economies", just like nations, and everyone in the US benefits from the specialization. Florida oranges are cheap in Montana, where oranges don't grow easily.
You don't here people advocating greater regulation of interstate commerce. I think everyone knows how idiotic that would be. Everyone benefits from the free trade between the states.
Of course, the difference between California and New York and California and, say, China, is much bigger, and the reason isn't simply cultural or political: it's a lack of labour mobility. If you're a resident of Minnesota and your entire industry relocates to Wisconsin, or even somewhere further, say, Georgia, it is possible to relocate your entire family with a minimum amount of pain (and even then, there will be some pain, as the two places do have their cultural distinctions, to put it mildly) and continue to work as you did before.
This is possible because labour marketable in Minnesota is by and large also marketable in Georgia. It isn't as simple when you need to relocate to say, China. For one, there's the linguistic and cultural issue; learning another language is both necessary and impossible for the vast majority of would-be migrant workers. Being fluent enough in a foreign tongue to be productive in a work environment using that language exclusively requires at the very least many years of hard work, and for many people speaking only one language who are middle aged, it is close to impossible (simply learning a new skillset is in fact easier).
But there's also the question of legality. The fact that it is possible to easily relocate to another state without interference from the government (either federal or state) is important; when moving to another nation, work permits, visas, residency -- all these things must be considered.
Put simply, the problem with free trade is that money is completely mobile, but labour is not. In order for the world to fully gain on both a societal and individual basis from free trade, labour must be as mobile as money. This is impossible.
However, there's something important to recognize here: the structural unemployment that results from nations specializing in industries they excel at is a short-run phenomenon. In the long term, there is no doubt -- even without labour mobility -- that specialization will be as benefical to people everywhere as unrestricted (mostly) interstate commerce has been in the US. It's easy to see why. For example, the US is simply not competitive on a cost-benefit basis in textiles (generally speaking), whereas China and Indonesia are. The result of free trade is that textiles moves overseas, because there are no impedements to free trade. The result is the US consumers, on a whole, pay less for the same products (sometimes much less for inferior products, but this is a quality control problem, not a free trade problem). A small number of US citizens do not benefit -- those in the textiles industry who previously made their living sewing in a factory. In the short term, they are SOL, like the buggy whip manufacturers before them. In the long term, no one born in the US goes into textiles. There's no money in the industry. So you see that the "growing pains" resulting from free trade exist only in the short term, and in the long term, they disappear.
The problem is, to quote Keynes, that "in the long run, we're all dead."
So in the meantime, the short term negative impact of free trade can be lessened by increasing labour mobility as much as possible. The EU has done a good job of this. A c
Because spending tons and tons of money on something that we have neither the technology nor the materials to build is good Slashdot policy. Oh, wait, I forgot, we can build it from Buckminster fullerenes! Nevermind that they're well below the physical tensile strength required to build a space elevator. Nevermind that we can't even build a bridge out of them, or anything else. You have to understand that there's a Slashdot Reality Distortion Field that is generated by too much Science Fiction (don't get me wrong, I love the stuff) and not enough actual science education. People here seem to think that reading a little wikipedia and googling for "space elevator feasible" makes them experts of the subject, when pretty much everyone that actually studies this stuff for a living says that space elevators are something of a pipe dream at this point in our development.
But here's an idea: go to the moon, build a space elevator there. Lower gravity, no atmosphere, it would be much, much simpler, and we could get some of the kinks worked out, assuming that materials science advances far enough that building a beanstalk on earth is eventually feasible. Even if that doesn't turn out to be the case, mining the moon will likely be a very profitable enterprise in the future, once the infrastructure is built, and having a cheap(er) way to lift raw materials off the surface would be beneficial (getting them to earth to be sold shouldn't be too hard, potential energy is in their favor). But it's not really much of a priority. At 1/6th the earth's gravity, getting into orbit doesn't take much.
Research that would be useful: figuring out how to get around the gamma radiation problem that is keeping us from any real human presence in space. Figuring out whether or not human children can develop in low gravity environments without substantial developmental disabilites, and if not, whether there's a feasible way to counteract those effects. Working the kinks out of large hydroponic growth facilities needed to feed colonists. Developing mining techniques that do not depend on the presence of an atmosphere and/or water. All of these things (and there are many others) are things that would be 1) immediately useful 2) of absolute necessity and 3) are actually within our means.
Building a space elevator out of "unobtainium" or building large orbital solar power grids that microwave energy to the surface are cool, when you're reading Sci Fi. In the real world though, we need to actually tackle these things as engineering problems, and when everyone that understands the stuff says "it's not possible with today's technology", maybe we should start doing other stuff that would arguably be more useful anyway that is.
I mean after all, what good is a space elevator if extended human presence outside the earth's magnetosphere is essentially not workable?
Gan Huai Shi in Mandarin means 'does bad things.' (Of course, it could be a total coincidence, without the characters it's impossible to tell, but I'm not familiar with a last name Gan).
Honestly, any species that has the technology to bridge the interstellar gulf is not going to have any trouble whatsoever destroying the lot of us. I mean, really. Is it worth spending money trying to plan for that eventuality?
To paraphrase that guy from the War of the Worlds, it wouldn't be a war anymore than there's a war between men and maggots.
I think you're overstating the importance of what is essentially just a book to most Christians. Now, I realize that this goes counter to your beliefs, and I respect your beliefs, so don't get upset just yet. Let's assume for a moment that Jesus Christ is in fact the son of God, died for our sins and our salvation, and is the Messiah predicted in the Old Testament.
What on earth does any of this have to do with the written record?
God allows evil to exist in the world -- most Christians believe this is because he affords us free will and the right to make our own decisions, even if they be bad, and that we will be judged when we die (most likely not before). That's why lots of obviously sinful people are able to live such carefree lives, right? They chose the path of Satan and will be hanging out with him in the afterlife. Their call.
Now suppose for a moment that the written record depicting the life of Jesus of Nazareth was manipulated by men with goals -- perhaps even sinful goals. We'd all like to believe that God would not allow this, but can we be sure? It's worth noting that there are many, many different versions of the Bible, all with there own interpretations and subtle contradictions. Which is right? We all hope it's the version we read, but can we be certain? It's hard to say.
It's hard to say what's been added and what hasn't been, because the Bible is so old. It also seems as though much of it was written by different people at different times. There's very little doubt in any believer's mind, I think, that the stories in the Bible teach valuable Christian morals. But are they accurate, in the sense that what is depicted in them actually happened?
More importantly, does it matter?
Religion is, by definition, a matter of faith. The extent of people's faith, even among those that call themselves Christian, varies substantially. Some people believe the Bible (usually a specific edition, such as the King James) to be the unerring word of God. Others believe that it represents the work of men, some of whom were prophets, others who were apostles, and others who may have simply been charlatans trying to manipulate faith for their own ends, and all of whom, unlike Jesus, were falliable. If your subscribe to this viewpoint, then it stands to reason that 1) you believe that Jesus is the son of God, 2) that he died for our sins, and 3) that on the third day he rose again, etc, etc. You believe these things happened, but you allow for the possibility that they did not happen for exactly the reasons or exactly the way the Bible said they did.
Consider that at the time of Christ's crucifixion, Peter denied not once, not twice, but thrice that he knew Jesus, just as was predicted at the last supper. That a man so close to Jesus, and I think you'll agree as holy as any mortal man can hope to be, could be so easily swayed by his own fear to deny Christ before his death I think demonstrates readily well that even the best of us are sometimes at our worst. The Bible has been through a lot of editing by a lot of people in the last two millenia. That inaccuracies have found there way into it seems inevitable, unless you believe that God personally ensures that the Word remains true.
Which is a perfectly reasonable view to take, although it begs the question: which of the many editions is the true one? But that's a discussion of a person's belief and I don't think we should get into it.
What I'm hoping you'll understand, though, is that you can believe the things you asked in your post without expressly believing every word of the NT, for lots of completely logical reasons. You're of course free to judge others for this apparent shortcoming, but I think if you're tempted to do that, a WWJD moment might be in order.
Not only that, but all browsers (including all PNG-supporting versions of IE) support 8-bit PNG with transparency -- these are functionally equivalent to GIF, that is, you're limited to 256 colors and can choose one of those colors to mean "transparent" if you need it (of course there's no alpha blending, it's either fully transparent or not transparent at all).
What this means in practice is that there is no reason whatsoever to use GIF. PNGs are smaller in virtually all cases, they are free and patent unencumbered, and are a W3C standard. The whole notion that PNGs are broken is limited to features that PNG supports that GIF does not support, like alpha blending. Furthermore, if you can forgo alpha, you can use all sorts of features with PNG that GIF does not support (the most obvious being more than 256 colors).
The reason I think so few people realize this is because for some reason, creating 8-bit PNGs in most software suites seems to be a pain in the ass. I haven't done web dev for a while now, but I remember creating PNGs in the GIMP, drawing them out using only full opacity/full transparency, and still getting an 8-bit alpha channel (which of course produces the ugly gray blotches in IE a previous poster was talking about) when saving them with the GIMP. The answer of course was to tweak them with pngcrush from the command line.
More pain than it's worth, certainly, but as soon as you get 8-bit PNGs with only a 1-bit alpha channel, they display just fine in all browsers except the text-based ones.
Don't use GIF. The patent issue is moot now, but the compression used in PNGs is much better than GIFs and if your site gets accessed at all frequently you will save money on bandwidth using PNG.
Of course what you say is true. Normally, however, when a person is exercizing their consitutionally protected right to free speech, especially when said speech is of a political but unpopular nature, the government is supposed to keep the peace.
You and I both know that the person distributing the flyers would get his ass kicked, and the cops wouldn't do anything, even if they could. Nevermind that assault is illegal. Nevermind that as long as his actions were peaceful, the police should protect him.
This sort of thing has lamentably always been true (and not just in the US). Free speech is a noble idea, but in practice, people with extremely unpopular ideas get shafted. This is not right or fair, but pretending that it isn't the case is really sort of silly.
I'm not sure what you mean about our demands for reparations at the start of WWII. The GP's point, I believe, was that the US were one of the supporters of the Treaty of Versailles, whose extreme reparation requirements bankrupted the post WWI German economy and is generally credited with creating the economic and political climate that allowed a maniac like Adolf Hitler to rise to power.
Of course, what the GP blissfully ignored was that most of the Allies at the time were in favor of such reparations, not just the US. We all believed at the time that bankrupting a nation that had been involved as an agressor in many of the pre-WWI European conflicts would prevent another uprising. The GP also ignored that one of the main reasons that Adolf Hitler was able to turn the ashes of the Weimar Republic into the devestating war machine it turned out to be was because he was funded -- both militarily and financially -- by Britain, France, and yes, the United States. Why? Because we were all afraid of Stalin, even then, and Hitler was lots of things but pro-communist certainly wasn't one of them. We allowed him to invade Czechoslovakia and Poland because we considered Hitler a "useful idiot". That backfired pretty seriously.
Of course, revisionist history is all around us. The truth of the matter is that we didn't really spend that much money, in the grand scheme of things: WWII turned us into the military superpower we are today, and despite the colossal amount of money we spent rebuilding Europe after the war, we came out on top. That money wasn't free, either -- it was understood at the time that Europe would need to pay us back for our efforts, and we only forgave that debt relatively recently.
Of course (and this is one of the most egregious examples of propaganda I've ever come across, growing up in the US) the truth is that we did not handle Europe very well at all. As a previous poster mentioned, we showed up late (although that's not really a fair accusation as, after all, it wasn't really our war and we had a lot of "volunteer" troops fighting in Britain before our offical engagement). Once we showed up, we defended Britain for a bit, until D-day. Then we invaded France. That's it! Amazingly, my freshman World History professor (in High School) described WWII as "the US going in and kicking ass".
Not to speak badly of the brave men and women who died for the liberation of Europe, but that's a really interesting (ie, inaccurate) way of looking at it. The truth is, the Soviet Union, that nation we all love to hate, had essentially finished Germany by the time we invaded. They lost 27 million people in that war. That's more than everyone else combined. My grandfather was a German footsoldier on the eastern front, so I'm getting this info first hand (although today's serious history books agree with me). And the invasion of Normandy? One of the most horribly executed plans in history. It's mostly remembered for how many people died there, but with the way we went about it, it's amazing our entire military wasn't killed.
Thank goodness for the French Resistance. Oh, yeah, another huge aspect of the war that we either don't learn about in school or laugh about as if it were a joke. The truth is, the Germans had been suffering a long standing insurgent and terrorist campaign at the hands of the French resistance, who took out their supply lines, mined roads, etc, etc, and just generally made it very difficult for the Germans left in France to engage the Allies when they invaded. The only reason D-day was successful at all is because of them, and yet they get no credit, and are generally laughed at. But France in those days was like Iraq today -- quickly invaded but once invaded not much fun to hold. And the Germans were already stretched thin and undermanned by this time because when we entered France Soviet Russia was already invading Germany.
We like to go on and and on about how badass we were in WWII, and we wer
Re:To kill DRM, make Joe Consumer Mad...
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Bad Day To Be Sony
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Big companies, who sell castor oil, have more money than the average person, who doesn't like castor oil. Therefore, castor oil will never go away.
Except it did, didn't it? People realized that castor oil just tasted revoltingly bad and wasn't even good for you, despite what it says on the bottle. Having a lot of money certainly means that you can fight things for longer, but make no mistake -- businesses are dependent on consumers for their income. Piss off consumers enough, and their industry will simply disappear, or become irrelevant. I'm sure you can still buy castor oil, somewhere. But it doesn't matter. The only place we're ever exposed to it now is in Mark Twain novels.
Ultimately, the average consumer will not buy DRM'd products if he believes they will interfere with his ability to enjoy that product. Copy protection schemes have been around for a long time -- they used to have them on some VHS tapes, too -- but they simply never became invasive because that would royally piss off the consumer.
The thing about DRM is that it really will royally piss off the consumer. This isn't about keeping geeks (a tiny segment of the population) from playing DVDs on Linux. This is about the average consumer being unable to make a mix tape (CD, whatever) for his car or put music on his iPod. They will care. A lot. Don't be so cynical. This Sony thing is proof.
Obviously, you're right. There's no question that it is impossible, especially for an outsider, to gauge with one hundred percent accuracy how the population feels. It's rather hard to have honest political discussions with complete strangers, especially vith people who are slightly older and remember the days when speaking your mind was not well regarded. So obviously my opinions don't come from folks on the bus.
I will freely admit that my experience with people from Xinjiang and Tibet has been limited. I know several people from Xinjiang, but only one of them is not Han -- and while he doesn't seem upset to be considered Chinese I cannot in good faith take his opinion to be representative, especially when you do hear stories about Xinjiang separatists. Tibet, obviously, is a completely different story. Infrastructurally, Tibet has probably benefited from Han Chinese rule, but culturally, well, it's been devestating. I would not be surprised if the vast majority of Tibetans are unhappy with the status quo. But it's worth noting that they would have been unhappy with any status quo that involves their once-sovreign nation being occupied by a nation culturally, ethnically, and religiously distinct from their own.
I have lived in extremely rural areas -- places with no running water or sewage -- and while I haven't lived everywhere (because that would be impossible) I have certainly had fairly diverse experiences.
The second child thing is sort of irrelevant, in the grand scheme of things, because outside of the cities, there's really no enforcement of the one-child rule that I've seen. Most rural villages still have families with several children (the family I lived with in the rural farming community I spoke of had two kids) and anyway from what I understand the government is relaxing the one-child policy because of what it's done to the nation's gender distribution.
Political prisoners obviously would be unhappy with the government (true in any nation, regardless of how progressive or free it is -- and I'm not claiming the PRC is any of these things).
Taiwan is, well, not part of China. (Oh no, I said it! Don't arrest me!) I haven't spent enough time in Hong Kong to really know what folks there think, but the few people I do know seem to think that as long as Article 23 of the Basic Law doesn't get rammed down their throats (Beijing tried it, once, but gave up after massive protesting) being Chinese is better than being British. This view may be changing though. So far the PRC has been pretty good about not getting too involved with Hong Kong (though less good than they promised they would be, but that should have been expected by all parties involved).
You touch on an important point, though -- because the Chinese are proud, they are more likely to praise the government to a foreigner than they are to a Chinese person. They may actually hate the government, for all I know, and simply be telling me that China is a great place because to do otherwise would be to lose face.
There's not much you can do about stuff like this. Which is why all these views I have are just that -- views. I can't guarantee 100% that any of them are right or real, but so far, the theory seems to fit the data well.
Thanks for the Martin Luther King, Jr. quote. I hadn't seen it before, and it's quite on the mark. I think the crux of my view on the matter lies in the last sentence of your post, though: "Wouldn't it be convenient for us, and our interests and agendas, if that were actually the case?"
I believe that it is the case. From my own experiences.
You see... whereas things in the US in the 1960s were not getting better for black people very quickly at all, and MLK was lamenting the complacency of moderate whites, a group not directly affected by racism and therefore relatively unable to relate to it (a problem that persists with most white Americans today, sadly), in China we have a completely different situation. The Chinese themselves -- the ones directly affected by the government's lack of respect for human rights -- are for the most part supportive of the government, extremely nationalistic, and hopeful about the future.
Of course you can write this off to propaganda, but when you grow up as a kid listening to stories from your dad how when he was a kid, people were allowed one (!) mantou per day and that his grandfather used to give him his and eat treebark instead -- true story -- you start thinking, shit, things are pretty good at the moment. I hear a lot of, "I don't know much about politics, but I want the reform to continue. It's good for China" from the youth of today.
The situation in the 1960s was markedly different. Most whites who knew no black people were completely detached from the situation. "So people don't treat you the way they ought to. That sucks, but they'll get better in time, and right now, I don't want to cause a ruckus," says Whitey. Easy for him to say, he's not the one who has to move to the back of the bus.
A much better analogy (and I'm rather convinced you won't be able to find one) would be a majority of blacks saying, "Hey, these Jim Crow laws aren't half bad! Hell, I don't mind sitting on the back of the bus, because I'm sure things'll get better any day now." That is, the person affected by the "regime" complaining.
Don't get me wrong, the PRC government has at times been quite the bully, and is not respectful of human rights by any stretch. And the Chinese are not unaware of this, nor are they uncritical. But they see improvement -- much improvement -- and are hopeful it will continue. It shows no signs of stopping. Why rock the boat? If things appeared to stagnate, if the government said, "Hell, fuck this capitalism shit, it's back to piao and lining up at the co-op for rice", there would be a revolt, no question. But at the moment, things are stable, and getting better, and not at all slowly.
As for the Cisco/Google/Yahoo BS, I agree completely, it's despicable. We Americans, who are from the "land of the free", have an obligation to hold ourselves to a higher moral standard than the PRC government. The Cisco routers thing in particular is bad, because, had Cisco refused to do it, no one in the PRC would have been worse for wear. The government would have developed its own solution or found someone else to do it, certainly, but at least Cisco wouldn't have been pricks. The Yahoo/Google situation is a little more difficult to judge. If Google had for example done the right thing and refused the PRC's terms, they would have been unable to operate in China. Yahoo is the same. As I mentioned in my post, the vast majority of things blocked by the Chinese internet censorship system are completely irrelevant, outdated, and stupid. The really juicy stuff is all in Chinese and most of it is not blocked. Google and Yahoo make finding this information easy, until some lazy government official notices and orders them to block it. During that period of time, which may be months, ordinary Chinese people are able to find the info using Google and Yahoo's services.
Had they "done the right thing", that would not be the case. People would have to use sohu or baidu which are
With all due respect, coaxial, I live in China and as I noted in my post I lived in very, very rural conditions for an extended period of time. I am not a US businessman that went to Shanghai, saw Lujiazui, and said to himself, everything in the PRC is hunky-dory. I speak fluent Chinese, and I have been off the beaten track. Your "if you talk to any sub-30-year-old Chinese, as I have" comment is a little bit condescending. I don't pretend to know what your experiences in China are, but I am certainly not someone who has never spoken to anyone in China below 30 years of age.
All I can say is, you apparently don't speak to enough people. There are people who don't care about their freedoms in the US, too. And the Chinese are wary of openly discussing extremely sensitive subjects to westerners. Especially incidents which (like Tiananmen) are widely regarded as having caused the PRC to lose face. The Chinese are proud and nationalistic. You need to make them understand that you too think China is a great nation and that the Chinese are a great people before they will start criticizing themselves in your presence. Many Americans, unfortunately, are like this too. Look at Slashdot. A European or Canadian makes a completely sane and logical criticism of US policy, law, or government, and 100 Slashbots make quips about Soviet Britain and "well if it weren't for US you frogs would all be speaking German." People are proud.
It sounds to me from the tone of your post (and if this is not the case then I appologize) that you are quite critical of the PRC and if you speak to Chinese with the same tone -- which will be especially obvious if you do not speak Mandarin well -- you will get absolutely nowhere with anyone who isn't extremely radical.
Alcatel is a French company. As for Halliburton, well... I guess all I can say is that I'm not surprised. In all likelyhood you can get a waver for those sorts of trade restrictions from the US department of treasury. In the case of a huge oil company like Halliburton, what with Iran in the Middle East and oil being so important to the US economy, it doesn't surprise me at all that the government would step out of the way. Goodness, they practically gave Iraq to Halliburton.
Yes, thanks for the spelling comment. I hate making stupid mistakes like that. I also reside in Shanghai at the immediate moment (although Shanghai, regrettably, is not China... but it is an example of what China could be.)
That's ridiculous. Murderers don't give their victims "due process", either, but we still extend them that right. The reason is simple: as despicable as their crimes may be, there always exists the remote possibility (often times not so remote, lamentably) that the person may not be guilty of the crimes he was accused of.
While (as an American) I think the whole Gitmo thing gets brought up a little bit frivolously here on Slashdot, the fact of the matter is that for one reason or another the government of the United States of America does not believe that they would be able to convict these people if due process were observed. Why else would they suffer through the bad press and tarnished national image that having an institution like the one in Cuba has brought upon them?
This is the problem, you see. These "obviously guilty" terrorists are apparently not "obviously guilty" enough. Either that, or the USA is (essentially) publically admitting that its judicial system is inadequate.
Either situation frightens me quite a bit, frankly.
Slashdot Mirror
You really didn't read what I wrote, did you. Consumers get wealthier, not poorer, as a result of free trade. We pay lower prices for world produced goods than we do for goods produced domestically. Even if (and this is a big if) our salaries drop somewhat, it doesn't matter if the our cost of living goes down by a greater amount.
If an industry is not competitive in the US, it won't be done in the US. But lots of industries are competetive in the US.
I'm not going to say anything more about this, because it's pretty obvious to me that you're not reading anything I write.
Dude, have you ever heard the expression, "Don't feed the trolls?" You're making yourself look like an idiot.
YHBT, HAND.
Of course, you're completely correct. But because you have not personally patched your new system, and, with the exception of some of the big stuff (like SP2) you generally won't be getting a comprehensive list from your OEM of exactly what patches they've installed, the safe thing to do from a security perspective is to assume that none have been installed.
It's true that there are a lot of anti-Windows folks on Slashdot that use the "exploited in under a second" statistic to make Windows look bad, ignore them. It has a much more important use: scaring the technically illiterate (and semi-literate, as it happens) into taking updates seriously.
I personally am not a Windows fan (don't use it, actually), but what people seem to forget about around here is that even if MS released a version of Windows with OpenBSD-like security today we'd still have to deal with this virus shit for years because mom and pop don't like to update their system. You can't really blame MS for this. It's kind of like cars (oh god, not another car analogy): people who understand cars "tune them up" with relative frequency, and the other 99% take the car into the shop only when there's a weird sound or the sucker just stops working.
The analogy even holds for people: lots of folks only go to the doctor when they're obviously sick.
I'm tempted to say that it's human nature. Computers are scary for lots of people. Saying, "download the updates and run a virus check, an unpatched Windows machine is compromised on average less than a minute from being attached to the internet, and sometimes in under a second" puts the fear of god into people who don't understand computers well (and those of us that do, too). Think of it as "motivational persuasion."
Ignore the slashbots dogging on Windows. We don't have the stats, but from what I understand, over 80% of Slashdot hits are from MSIE. So yeah, lots of posers around. Having a Gentoo box in your basement that you use from time to time to uhh, compile things doesn't make you a Linux user, if you do all your real work on Windows. (Oh no, I'm an elitist!)
If you're going to be pendantic, it ought to be Ich begrüße (note the lack of ending n). But then everyone in this thread is just having fun with babelfish anyway.
Ok, maybe you didn't read my comment: "It's about balance and also realising that the more industries you do it to the poorer your consumers get and ergo they buy less, reducing profits." This is patently false. There may be a redistribution of wealth, maybe, but ultimately, I'm selling my products to more people as a result of cutting costs.
I also don't have any "crazy idea that corporations couldn't make a profit or consumers afford to buy them [goods] until jobs were shipped abroad", nice straw man. I never said that, but I'm beginning to think that you didn't actually read what I wrote, which doesn't really surprise me very much. It's about market efficency. Consider the US prices for sugar, relative to the world price. Fact: the US sugar manufacturers are not all that competitive with global sugar manufacturers. Fact: the industry does not want to compete with global prices. Fact: they lobbied the US government to get protectionist policies passed that keep prices in the US high (via quotas, IIRC). The result is, US consumers pay more for sugar than the world average, an estimated 3 billion USD more per year. Spread out over the entire population of the US, that's not much per person, but what you have to understand is, this is a transfer of wealth: from you, the consumer, to the huge behemoth-like sugar producing corporations. You pay more so that they don't have to restructure to compete more efficiently. Do you understand this? In order to let them make more money, you are paying more, and the government guarantees it.
When you ask for trade restrictions, you're asking for more of this, in more industries. It's bad for us, the people. Trade restrictions only benefit the corporations and the industries they protect. Everyone else picks up the slack.
As for your armchair opinion of sweatshops, as it happens, I live in the developing world. China, specifically. Over the last several years, I have seen, first hand, what foreign investment does to the local economy. Don't knock it. Twenty years ago, these people were starving. Now they're getting wealthy, and the outlook is one of hope. Supply and demand set wages, you know. When a country is very poor, wages are low, but as more and more companies step in to try to take advantage of the wealth disparity, there is an upward pressure on wages that drives the wages and benefits of the local people upward. The companies that aren't willing to raise wages to compete either go out of business or take their money elsewhere. But the world is a small place, and they're running out of "elsewheres" to go.
Using cameras as an example of a product produced overseas was just that, an example. Replace it with any other product.
As for your ridiculous assertion that I would suggest that before 1991 "no one poor owned a TV", well, again, it's a straw man. I didn't say that, but I'll tell you this: relative to the world standard, there is essentially no one poor in the USA. That's relative to the world standard, mind you. Which is not to say that poverty does not exist in the US, because it does. This is not to say that poverty isn't a problem in the US, because it is. But before 1991, many people in say, China and Vietnam, could not afford TVs. Your assertion that the people manufacturing things in the developing world can't afford the products they produce is ridiculous. When Ford first produced the automobile in the US, it was an expensive product, and yet his assembly-line workers scrimped and saved to purchase them. TVs, cameras, nice clothes, you name it -- these "commodity" items remain expensive for much of the world, but every decrease makes them more affordable. Before 1995 personal computers in China were limited to all but the wealthiest people and to government ministries. Now, everyone and their mom has one.
"I'm not just focusing on one industry, I'm focusing on all of them." This is an interesting statement. First off, what's true for one indus
It's really amazing what some Slashdotters will spout, seriously. He didn't even have the decency to preface it with "some people think" or similar. Now the rest of the historically and politically illiterate Slashdot masses will take him at his word. What a shame. Mods, mod the parent up so that we don't have this kind of hooey polluting the minds of our youth.
I think that the GP got caught up in a game of telephone, you know, the whole he-said-she-said routine, where the story grows in the telling. There are some people that believe that FDR goaded the Japanese into believing that they could invade the US, thus tempting them into a first strike, as an excuse to get inolved in WWII. It's not a widely held belief, but it is generally noted that the US would probably not have ever gotten involved with WWII had it not been for the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. We'd just lost a lot of boys in WWI and Americans overwhelmingly were not interested in getting involved (officially) with another European war. On top of this, we were in the midst of the great depression, things were bad, etc, etc.
The story goes that FDR and his entourage wanted the US to be involved in WWII in Europe, but knew that they hadn't a hope in hell of convincing the American people that it was worth it. There may have been a number of reasons for this. One, J.M. Keynes, a British Economist who believed that expansionary fiscal policy during a recession was the key to preventing an economy from coming to equilibrium with unemployment well below the natural rate, had suggested to FDR that vast government spending, powered by what economists call the [Keynesian] multiplier, would trigger investment and thus pull the US out of the great depression. Indeed, it is the consensus of all modern economists (although their interpretations vary) that world involvement in the second world war was the catalyst that ended the great depression (it was going on in Europe as well).
Another reason, perhaps less selfish, was the growing concern about Hitler and his intentions. The American Jewry, certainly, was very concerned about news and rumors trickling across the pond of the planned Endloesung, but it's fair to say that the vast majority of Americans didn't give a shit. Anti-semitism, you see, only became a cultural taboo after Hitler took it too far -- before the Holocaust, hating Jews was a downhome American/European passtime.
There wasn't much danger that Hitler would attempt a direct strike against the US until he had consolidated power in Europe, and even then, it seemed unlikely. Germany, having fought the US just 25 years earlier, was not about to risk antagonizing us. They were all too well aware how massive the US was, how many resources we had at our disposal, and how easily annoyed we were by other countries pushing our buttons. So if FDR was hoping for an attack on the US to get the American people involved in the war, Germany was not a likely threat.
Japan, on the other hand, was perfect: they were far away, knew next to nothing about the US (there's an anecdote about a Japanese army general vacationing in the US some years after the war, and essentially saying something along the lines of "I can't believe we were stupid enough to think we could invade a country this size" -- possibly apocryphal), and were interested in expansion into the Pacific. Hawai'i is not far from Japan, relatively speaking.
So the conspiracy theory is that somehow, FDR used political machinations to convince the Japanese that the US did not present an insurmountable threat, that a quick and devestating defeat at the hands of the Japanese (Pearl Harbor certainly qualifies) would break American will, etc, etc. And then, because Japan and Nazi Germany were allies, the US, by declaring war on Japan, would also be declaring war on Germany.
It's a nice story, but other than the appeal, there really doesn't appear to be much evidence to back it up. There's a lot of debate in historical cir
You're comment is incredibly naive, I don't even know where to begin. First, "The buggy whip manufacturers were put out of business by an industry that created many more good jobs than it destroyed." This is certainly true. However, the vast majority of buggy whip manufacturers were unable to take advantage of these new positions in this new industry because the skillset required to make buggy whips was not the same as the skillset to make automobiles. This is what economists refer to as "structural unemployment" -- unemployment that results not from an absence of willing labour, but from the lack of demand for the skillset that willing labour possesses. The buggy whip manufacturers, in your example, were still shit out of luck.
Then there's the labour mobility issue: a high quality buggy whip requires good leather craftsmanship, etc, etc. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that the center of the lucrative buggy whip manufacturing industry wasn't the same center as the center of the automotive industry. It isn't like the buggy whip plant closed and all the buggy whip technicians walked down the street and got a job at Ford thinking, "Man, this is great, now we have a better industry to participate in!" In reality, they lost their jobs and were up shit creek without a paddle. All your thoughts about a better industry were of precious little consolation to them.
"Lower prices are only good if wages go up or stay the same." Are you daft? This is just ridiculous. How much you make is of absolutely no consequence: it's how much you have to spend that is important, and how much you can buy for each dollar you earn. Sure, the people who used to make shirts for twenty dollars an hour are, like the buggy whip manufacturers, shit out of luck, when their jobs are replaced by someone in Thailand who is willing to do the same work for 20 cents an hour. But with that 100-fold decrease in labour price, offset by an increase in import/shipping costs and what have you, the average consumer, who does not work in textiles, is paying far less than what he previously paid.
On average, people's salaries may go down, but if the cost of living -- defined by the cost of goods that an individual needs/wants to maintain his desired lifestyle -- drops by an even greater amount, you're still coming out on top.
It's important that you think about this and let it sink in: if your 10 dollar t-shirt were made in the US and not in Pakistan, you would end up paying 30 or 40 bucks for it, instead of 10. Your salary, on the other hand, which is not affected by the textiles industry (because I'm assuming you don't work in textiles) would still be the same. So where you could previously buy 3 or 4 shirts you now have to make do with one. The only people that benefit from this are people in textiles in the US. Everyone else suffers higher prices. So the question is, in order to protect an industry that is both inefficient and expensive, should everyone (including you) have to pay two to three times as much for goods? Is that a good way to work things out?
And don't use the term "sweat shop", it's a loaded word, and stupid. Anyone who has ever been to the developing world where they have these "sweat shops" will realize that 20 cents per hour is a very good wage relative to the local economy in many of these places. People actually fight for these jobs because relatively speaking, the wages are actually high. The US is the richest country in the world, the most economically powerful, and the dollar is extremely valuable. It's difficult to overstate this.
We say things like, "but but but, they don't get medical, they don't get dental, and they work 60 hours a week for almost nothing" without realizing that where they live, no one gets medical or dental, the "almost nothing" they get paid is twice what the local guy next door pays, and 60 hours per week is better than the 80 they were working before hawking goods on the side of the road try
It's worth noting that free trade isn't as bad as you think it is. Consider the USA -- you don't hear Americans (I'm assuming you are one, if you're not, excuse me) complaining about their jobs "being outsourced to Minnesota", or wherever else. But the fact remains, not all states are created equal, from a business perspective: they have different laws, different tax codes, differently skilled populaces, and as a result, states have "economies", just like nations, and everyone in the US benefits from the specialization. Florida oranges are cheap in Montana, where oranges don't grow easily.
You don't here people advocating greater regulation of interstate commerce. I think everyone knows how idiotic that would be. Everyone benefits from the free trade between the states.
Of course, the difference between California and New York and California and, say, China, is much bigger, and the reason isn't simply cultural or political: it's a lack of labour mobility. If you're a resident of Minnesota and your entire industry relocates to Wisconsin, or even somewhere further, say, Georgia, it is possible to relocate your entire family with a minimum amount of pain (and even then, there will be some pain, as the two places do have their cultural distinctions, to put it mildly) and continue to work as you did before.
This is possible because labour marketable in Minnesota is by and large also marketable in Georgia. It isn't as simple when you need to relocate to say, China. For one, there's the linguistic and cultural issue; learning another language is both necessary and impossible for the vast majority of would-be migrant workers. Being fluent enough in a foreign tongue to be productive in a work environment using that language exclusively requires at the very least many years of hard work, and for many people speaking only one language who are middle aged, it is close to impossible (simply learning a new skillset is in fact easier).
But there's also the question of legality. The fact that it is possible to easily relocate to another state without interference from the government (either federal or state) is important; when moving to another nation, work permits, visas, residency -- all these things must be considered.
Put simply, the problem with free trade is that money is completely mobile, but labour is not. In order for the world to fully gain on both a societal and individual basis from free trade, labour must be as mobile as money. This is impossible.
However, there's something important to recognize here: the structural unemployment that results from nations specializing in industries they excel at is a short-run phenomenon. In the long term, there is no doubt -- even without labour mobility -- that specialization will be as benefical to people everywhere as unrestricted (mostly) interstate commerce has been in the US. It's easy to see why. For example, the US is simply not competitive on a cost-benefit basis in textiles (generally speaking), whereas China and Indonesia are. The result of free trade is that textiles moves overseas, because there are no impedements to free trade. The result is the US consumers, on a whole, pay less for the same products (sometimes much less for inferior products, but this is a quality control problem, not a free trade problem). A small number of US citizens do not benefit -- those in the textiles industry who previously made their living sewing in a factory. In the short term, they are SOL, like the buggy whip manufacturers before them. In the long term, no one born in the US goes into textiles. There's no money in the industry. So you see that the "growing pains" resulting from free trade exist only in the short term, and in the long term, they disappear.
The problem is, to quote Keynes, that "in the long run, we're all dead."
So in the meantime, the short term negative impact of free trade can be lessened by increasing labour mobility as much as possible. The EU has done a good job of this. A c
Because spending tons and tons of money on something that we have neither the technology nor the materials to build is good Slashdot policy. Oh, wait, I forgot, we can build it from Buckminster fullerenes! Nevermind that they're well below the physical tensile strength required to build a space elevator. Nevermind that we can't even build a bridge out of them, or anything else. You have to understand that there's a Slashdot Reality Distortion Field that is generated by too much Science Fiction (don't get me wrong, I love the stuff) and not enough actual science education. People here seem to think that reading a little wikipedia and googling for "space elevator feasible" makes them experts of the subject, when pretty much everyone that actually studies this stuff for a living says that space elevators are something of a pipe dream at this point in our development.
But here's an idea: go to the moon, build a space elevator there. Lower gravity, no atmosphere, it would be much, much simpler, and we could get some of the kinks worked out, assuming that materials science advances far enough that building a beanstalk on earth is eventually feasible. Even if that doesn't turn out to be the case, mining the moon will likely be a very profitable enterprise in the future, once the infrastructure is built, and having a cheap(er) way to lift raw materials off the surface would be beneficial (getting them to earth to be sold shouldn't be too hard, potential energy is in their favor). But it's not really much of a priority. At 1/6th the earth's gravity, getting into orbit doesn't take much.
Research that would be useful: figuring out how to get around the gamma radiation problem that is keeping us from any real human presence in space. Figuring out whether or not human children can develop in low gravity environments without substantial developmental disabilites, and if not, whether there's a feasible way to counteract those effects. Working the kinks out of large hydroponic growth facilities needed to feed colonists. Developing mining techniques that do not depend on the presence of an atmosphere and/or water. All of these things (and there are many others) are things that would be 1) immediately useful 2) of absolute necessity and 3) are actually within our means.
Building a space elevator out of "unobtainium" or building large orbital solar power grids that microwave energy to the surface are cool, when you're reading Sci Fi. In the real world though, we need to actually tackle these things as engineering problems, and when everyone that understands the stuff says "it's not possible with today's technology", maybe we should start doing other stuff that would arguably be more useful anyway that is.
I mean after all, what good is a space elevator if extended human presence outside the earth's magnetosphere is essentially not workable?
There are other more pressing problems.
Gan Huai Shi in Mandarin means 'does bad things.' (Of course, it could be a total coincidence, without the characters it's impossible to tell, but I'm not familiar with a last name Gan).
Pretty funny that no one noticed this.
Honestly, any species that has the technology to bridge the interstellar gulf is not going to have any trouble whatsoever destroying the lot of us. I mean, really. Is it worth spending money trying to plan for that eventuality?
To paraphrase that guy from the War of the Worlds, it wouldn't be a war anymore than there's a war between men and maggots.
I think you're overstating the importance of what is essentially just a book to most Christians. Now, I realize that this goes counter to your beliefs, and I respect your beliefs, so don't get upset just yet. Let's assume for a moment that Jesus Christ is in fact the son of God, died for our sins and our salvation, and is the Messiah predicted in the Old Testament.
What on earth does any of this have to do with the written record?
God allows evil to exist in the world -- most Christians believe this is because he affords us free will and the right to make our own decisions, even if they be bad, and that we will be judged when we die (most likely not before). That's why lots of obviously sinful people are able to live such carefree lives, right? They chose the path of Satan and will be hanging out with him in the afterlife. Their call.
Now suppose for a moment that the written record depicting the life of Jesus of Nazareth was manipulated by men with goals -- perhaps even sinful goals. We'd all like to believe that God would not allow this, but can we be sure? It's worth noting that there are many, many different versions of the Bible, all with there own interpretations and subtle contradictions. Which is right? We all hope it's the version we read, but can we be certain? It's hard to say.
It's hard to say what's been added and what hasn't been, because the Bible is so old. It also seems as though much of it was written by different people at different times. There's very little doubt in any believer's mind, I think, that the stories in the Bible teach valuable Christian morals. But are they accurate, in the sense that what is depicted in them actually happened?
More importantly, does it matter?
Religion is, by definition, a matter of faith. The extent of people's faith, even among those that call themselves Christian, varies substantially. Some people believe the Bible (usually a specific edition, such as the King James) to be the unerring word of God. Others believe that it represents the work of men, some of whom were prophets, others who were apostles, and others who may have simply been charlatans trying to manipulate faith for their own ends, and all of whom, unlike Jesus, were falliable. If your subscribe to this viewpoint, then it stands to reason that 1) you believe that Jesus is the son of God, 2) that he died for our sins, and 3) that on the third day he rose again, etc, etc. You believe these things happened, but you allow for the possibility that they did not happen for exactly the reasons or exactly the way the Bible said they did.
Consider that at the time of Christ's crucifixion, Peter denied not once, not twice, but thrice that he knew Jesus, just as was predicted at the last supper. That a man so close to Jesus, and I think you'll agree as holy as any mortal man can hope to be, could be so easily swayed by his own fear to deny Christ before his death I think demonstrates readily well that even the best of us are sometimes at our worst. The Bible has been through a lot of editing by a lot of people in the last two millenia. That inaccuracies have found there way into it seems inevitable, unless you believe that God personally ensures that the Word remains true.
Which is a perfectly reasonable view to take, although it begs the question: which of the many editions is the true one? But that's a discussion of a person's belief and I don't think we should get into it.
What I'm hoping you'll understand, though, is that you can believe the things you asked in your post without expressly believing every word of the NT, for lots of completely logical reasons. You're of course free to judge others for this apparent shortcoming, but I think if you're tempted to do that, a WWJD moment might be in order.
Cheers.
Not only that, but all browsers (including all PNG-supporting versions of IE) support 8-bit PNG with transparency -- these are functionally equivalent to GIF, that is, you're limited to 256 colors and can choose one of those colors to mean "transparent" if you need it (of course there's no alpha blending, it's either fully transparent or not transparent at all).
What this means in practice is that there is no reason whatsoever to use GIF. PNGs are smaller in virtually all cases, they are free and patent unencumbered, and are a W3C standard. The whole notion that PNGs are broken is limited to features that PNG supports that GIF does not support, like alpha blending. Furthermore, if you can forgo alpha, you can use all sorts of features with PNG that GIF does not support (the most obvious being more than 256 colors).
The reason I think so few people realize this is because for some reason, creating 8-bit PNGs in most software suites seems to be a pain in the ass. I haven't done web dev for a while now, but I remember creating PNGs in the GIMP, drawing them out using only full opacity/full transparency, and still getting an 8-bit alpha channel (which of course produces the ugly gray blotches in IE a previous poster was talking about) when saving them with the GIMP. The answer of course was to tweak them with pngcrush from the command line.
More pain than it's worth, certainly, but as soon as you get 8-bit PNGs with only a 1-bit alpha channel, they display just fine in all browsers except the text-based ones.
Don't use GIF. The patent issue is moot now, but the compression used in PNGs is much better than GIFs and if your site gets accessed at all frequently you will save money on bandwidth using PNG.
Based on? I thought it was V7 UNIX?
I kid, I kid. I hate HP-UX.
Of course what you say is true. Normally, however, when a person is exercizing their consitutionally protected right to free speech, especially when said speech is of a political but unpopular nature, the government is supposed to keep the peace.
You and I both know that the person distributing the flyers would get his ass kicked, and the cops wouldn't do anything, even if they could. Nevermind that assault is illegal. Nevermind that as long as his actions were peaceful, the police should protect him.
This sort of thing has lamentably always been true (and not just in the US). Free speech is a noble idea, but in practice, people with extremely unpopular ideas get shafted. This is not right or fair, but pretending that it isn't the case is really sort of silly.
I'm not sure what you mean about our demands for reparations at the start of WWII. The GP's point, I believe, was that the US were one of the supporters of the Treaty of Versailles, whose extreme reparation requirements bankrupted the post WWI German economy and is generally credited with creating the economic and political climate that allowed a maniac like Adolf Hitler to rise to power.
Of course, what the GP blissfully ignored was that most of the Allies at the time were in favor of such reparations, not just the US. We all believed at the time that bankrupting a nation that had been involved as an agressor in many of the pre-WWI European conflicts would prevent another uprising. The GP also ignored that one of the main reasons that Adolf Hitler was able to turn the ashes of the Weimar Republic into the devestating war machine it turned out to be was because he was funded -- both militarily and financially -- by Britain, France, and yes, the United States. Why? Because we were all afraid of Stalin, even then, and Hitler was lots of things but pro-communist certainly wasn't one of them. We allowed him to invade Czechoslovakia and Poland because we considered Hitler a "useful idiot". That backfired pretty seriously.
Of course, revisionist history is all around us. The truth of the matter is that we didn't really spend that much money, in the grand scheme of things: WWII turned us into the military superpower we are today, and despite the colossal amount of money we spent rebuilding Europe after the war, we came out on top. That money wasn't free, either -- it was understood at the time that Europe would need to pay us back for our efforts, and we only forgave that debt relatively recently.
Of course (and this is one of the most egregious examples of propaganda I've ever come across, growing up in the US) the truth is that we did not handle Europe very well at all. As a previous poster mentioned, we showed up late (although that's not really a fair accusation as, after all, it wasn't really our war and we had a lot of "volunteer" troops fighting in Britain before our offical engagement). Once we showed up, we defended Britain for a bit, until D-day. Then we invaded France. That's it! Amazingly, my freshman World History professor (in High School) described WWII as "the US going in and kicking ass".
Not to speak badly of the brave men and women who died for the liberation of Europe, but that's a really interesting (ie, inaccurate) way of looking at it. The truth is, the Soviet Union, that nation we all love to hate, had essentially finished Germany by the time we invaded. They lost 27 million people in that war. That's more than everyone else combined. My grandfather was a German footsoldier on the eastern front, so I'm getting this info first hand (although today's serious history books agree with me). And the invasion of Normandy? One of the most horribly executed plans in history. It's mostly remembered for how many people died there, but with the way we went about it, it's amazing our entire military wasn't killed.
Thank goodness for the French Resistance. Oh, yeah, another huge aspect of the war that we either don't learn about in school or laugh about as if it were a joke. The truth is, the Germans had been suffering a long standing insurgent and terrorist campaign at the hands of the French resistance, who took out their supply lines, mined roads, etc, etc, and just generally made it very difficult for the Germans left in France to engage the Allies when they invaded. The only reason D-day was successful at all is because of them, and yet they get no credit, and are generally laughed at. But France in those days was like Iraq today -- quickly invaded but once invaded not much fun to hold. And the Germans were already stretched thin and undermanned by this time because when we entered France Soviet Russia was already invading Germany.
We like to go on and and on about how badass we were in WWII, and we wer
Big companies, who sell castor oil, have more money than the average person, who doesn't like castor oil. Therefore, castor oil will never go away.
Except it did, didn't it? People realized that castor oil just tasted revoltingly bad and wasn't even good for you, despite what it says on the bottle. Having a lot of money certainly means that you can fight things for longer, but make no mistake -- businesses are dependent on consumers for their income. Piss off consumers enough, and their industry will simply disappear, or become irrelevant. I'm sure you can still buy castor oil, somewhere. But it doesn't matter. The only place we're ever exposed to it now is in Mark Twain novels.
Ultimately, the average consumer will not buy DRM'd products if he believes they will interfere with his ability to enjoy that product. Copy protection schemes have been around for a long time -- they used to have them on some VHS tapes, too -- but they simply never became invasive because that would royally piss off the consumer.
The thing about DRM is that it really will royally piss off the consumer. This isn't about keeping geeks (a tiny segment of the population) from playing DVDs on Linux. This is about the average consumer being unable to make a mix tape (CD, whatever) for his car or put music on his iPod. They will care. A lot. Don't be so cynical. This Sony thing is proof.
Obviously, you're right. There's no question that it is impossible, especially for an outsider, to gauge with one hundred percent accuracy how the population feels. It's rather hard to have honest political discussions with complete strangers, especially vith people who are slightly older and remember the days when speaking your mind was not well regarded. So obviously my opinions don't come from folks on the bus.
I will freely admit that my experience with people from Xinjiang and Tibet has been limited. I know several people from Xinjiang, but only one of them is not Han -- and while he doesn't seem upset to be considered Chinese I cannot in good faith take his opinion to be representative, especially when you do hear stories about Xinjiang separatists. Tibet, obviously, is a completely different story. Infrastructurally, Tibet has probably benefited from Han Chinese rule, but culturally, well, it's been devestating. I would not be surprised if the vast majority of Tibetans are unhappy with the status quo. But it's worth noting that they would have been unhappy with any status quo that involves their once-sovreign nation being occupied by a nation culturally, ethnically, and religiously distinct from their own.
I have lived in extremely rural areas -- places with no running water or sewage -- and while I haven't lived everywhere (because that would be impossible) I have certainly had fairly diverse experiences.
The second child thing is sort of irrelevant, in the grand scheme of things, because outside of the cities, there's really no enforcement of the one-child rule that I've seen. Most rural villages still have families with several children (the family I lived with in the rural farming community I spoke of had two kids) and anyway from what I understand the government is relaxing the one-child policy because of what it's done to the nation's gender distribution.
Political prisoners obviously would be unhappy with the government (true in any nation, regardless of how progressive or free it is -- and I'm not claiming the PRC is any of these things).
Taiwan is, well, not part of China. (Oh no, I said it! Don't arrest me!) I haven't spent enough time in Hong Kong to really know what folks there think, but the few people I do know seem to think that as long as Article 23 of the Basic Law doesn't get rammed down their throats (Beijing tried it, once, but gave up after massive protesting) being Chinese is better than being British. This view may be changing though. So far the PRC has been pretty good about not getting too involved with Hong Kong (though less good than they promised they would be, but that should have been expected by all parties involved).
You touch on an important point, though -- because the Chinese are proud, they are more likely to praise the government to a foreigner than they are to a Chinese person. They may actually hate the government, for all I know, and simply be telling me that China is a great place because to do otherwise would be to lose face.
There's not much you can do about stuff like this. Which is why all these views I have are just that -- views. I can't guarantee 100% that any of them are right or real, but so far, the theory seems to fit the data well.
Good point.
The major, major example is Britain.
Thanks for the Martin Luther King, Jr. quote. I hadn't seen it before, and it's quite on the mark. I think the crux of my view on the matter lies in the last sentence of your post, though: "Wouldn't it be convenient for us, and our interests and agendas, if that were actually the case?"
I believe that it is the case. From my own experiences.
You see... whereas things in the US in the 1960s were not getting better for black people very quickly at all, and MLK was lamenting the complacency of moderate whites, a group not directly affected by racism and therefore relatively unable to relate to it (a problem that persists with most white Americans today, sadly), in China we have a completely different situation. The Chinese themselves -- the ones directly affected by the government's lack of respect for human rights -- are for the most part supportive of the government, extremely nationalistic, and hopeful about the future.
Of course you can write this off to propaganda, but when you grow up as a kid listening to stories from your dad how when he was a kid, people were allowed one (!) mantou per day and that his grandfather used to give him his and eat treebark instead -- true story -- you start thinking, shit, things are pretty good at the moment. I hear a lot of, "I don't know much about politics, but I want the reform to continue. It's good for China" from the youth of today.
The situation in the 1960s was markedly different. Most whites who knew no black people were completely detached from the situation. "So people don't treat you the way they ought to. That sucks, but they'll get better in time, and right now, I don't want to cause a ruckus," says Whitey. Easy for him to say, he's not the one who has to move to the back of the bus.
A much better analogy (and I'm rather convinced you won't be able to find one) would be a majority of blacks saying, "Hey, these Jim Crow laws aren't half bad! Hell, I don't mind sitting on the back of the bus, because I'm sure things'll get better any day now." That is, the person affected by the "regime" complaining.
Don't get me wrong, the PRC government has at times been quite the bully, and is not respectful of human rights by any stretch. And the Chinese are not unaware of this, nor are they uncritical. But they see improvement -- much improvement -- and are hopeful it will continue. It shows no signs of stopping. Why rock the boat? If things appeared to stagnate, if the government said, "Hell, fuck this capitalism shit, it's back to piao and lining up at the co-op for rice", there would be a revolt, no question. But at the moment, things are stable, and getting better, and not at all slowly.
As for the Cisco/Google/Yahoo BS, I agree completely, it's despicable. We Americans, who are from the "land of the free", have an obligation to hold ourselves to a higher moral standard than the PRC government. The Cisco routers thing in particular is bad, because, had Cisco refused to do it, no one in the PRC would have been worse for wear. The government would have developed its own solution or found someone else to do it, certainly, but at least Cisco wouldn't have been pricks. The Yahoo/Google situation is a little more difficult to judge. If Google had for example done the right thing and refused the PRC's terms, they would have been unable to operate in China. Yahoo is the same. As I mentioned in my post, the vast majority of things blocked by the Chinese internet censorship system are completely irrelevant, outdated, and stupid. The really juicy stuff is all in Chinese and most of it is not blocked. Google and Yahoo make finding this information easy, until some lazy government official notices and orders them to block it. During that period of time, which may be months, ordinary Chinese people are able to find the info using Google and Yahoo's services.
Had they "done the right thing", that would not be the case. People would have to use sohu or baidu which are
With all due respect, coaxial, I live in China and as I noted in my post I lived in very, very rural conditions for an extended period of time. I am not a US businessman that went to Shanghai, saw Lujiazui, and said to himself, everything in the PRC is hunky-dory. I speak fluent Chinese, and I have been off the beaten track. Your "if you talk to any sub-30-year-old Chinese, as I have" comment is a little bit condescending. I don't pretend to know what your experiences in China are, but I am certainly not someone who has never spoken to anyone in China below 30 years of age.
All I can say is, you apparently don't speak to enough people. There are people who don't care about their freedoms in the US, too. And the Chinese are wary of openly discussing extremely sensitive subjects to westerners. Especially incidents which (like Tiananmen) are widely regarded as having caused the PRC to lose face. The Chinese are proud and nationalistic. You need to make them understand that you too think China is a great nation and that the Chinese are a great people before they will start criticizing themselves in your presence. Many Americans, unfortunately, are like this too. Look at Slashdot. A European or Canadian makes a completely sane and logical criticism of US policy, law, or government, and 100 Slashbots make quips about Soviet Britain and "well if it weren't for US you frogs would all be speaking German." People are proud.
It sounds to me from the tone of your post (and if this is not the case then I appologize) that you are quite critical of the PRC and if you speak to Chinese with the same tone -- which will be especially obvious if you do not speak Mandarin well -- you will get absolutely nowhere with anyone who isn't extremely radical.
Just my thoughts.
Alcatel is a French company. As for Halliburton, well... I guess all I can say is that I'm not surprised. In all likelyhood you can get a waver for those sorts of trade restrictions from the US department of treasury. In the case of a huge oil company like Halliburton, what with Iran in the Middle East and oil being so important to the US economy, it doesn't surprise me at all that the government would step out of the way. Goodness, they practically gave Iraq to Halliburton.
Anyway... what was your point?
Yes, thanks for the spelling comment. I hate making stupid mistakes like that. I also reside in Shanghai at the immediate moment (although Shanghai, regrettably, is not China ... but it is an example of what China could be.)
That's ridiculous. Murderers don't give their victims "due process", either, but we still extend them that right. The reason is simple: as despicable as their crimes may be, there always exists the remote possibility (often times not so remote, lamentably) that the person may not be guilty of the crimes he was accused of.
While (as an American) I think the whole Gitmo thing gets brought up a little bit frivolously here on Slashdot, the fact of the matter is that for one reason or another the government of the United States of America does not believe that they would be able to convict these people if due process were observed. Why else would they suffer through the bad press and tarnished national image that having an institution like the one in Cuba has brought upon them?
This is the problem, you see. These "obviously guilty" terrorists are apparently not "obviously guilty" enough. Either that, or the USA is (essentially) publically admitting that its judicial system is inadequate.
Either situation frightens me quite a bit, frankly.