As a citizen here I found myself responsible for clarifying some of the misunderstandings slashdotters have on Hong Kong:
- HK's judiciary system is definitely, entirely, totally different from that in China. It is inherited from the British colony before 1997, much more "civilized", transparent (= costly), and, in some sense, fair. This is what "one country, two systems" is for.
- I can say nearly 99% of bittorrent activities here were for copyrighted materials. My confession: I occasionally do that myself, although more often to get a copy of ubuntu. Yes, we have many (compared with western countries) pirate shops here, but 1) there are really not that many, and they are concentrated in some areas; 2) almost all of them are ran by the gangs; we all recognize that buying pirates from them is equivalent to funding them to do illegal activities. So bittorrent is quite popular recently here, kind of like helping each others.
- This is definitely not the first time prosecuting someone for violating the copyright law. I remember some guys here sharing mp3 via ftp and got caught. This time it goes into headline in HK newspaper and even in slashdot simply because the technology used here: bittorrent, which was believed (at least by many) to be difficult to get caught.
- After the caught of that guy, the number of seeders, who were scared, dropped by at least 90%. The "random" warning letters help too (no, I haven't received any, poor luck~). However, we all know that we can still find many of them in websites in China...
- Littering in HK is actually fined HK$1500. This is severe because of SARS outbreak.
Spectrum is parcelled out in this way under the assumption that more than one signal on the same frequency results in interference. This has been true until recently, but today radios with cheap microprocessors can pick out competing signals intelligently, just as the human ear can make sense of a conversation in a noisy bar. The result is that new technology has made the sharing of spectrum possible -- radio waves could be a non-rivalrous good -- if only this were legally permitted and engineered into the software that runs the wireless devices.
Is he talking about CDMA? This really sounds odd to say it's a kind of "sharing" spectrum and compare it with open source and P2P.
The title suggests the possibility of this new book: Opensource Society And Its Enemies.
Instead of Plato, Hegel and Marx, who will be criticized in this new book?
Closing the entire EEE department?
Your friend were absolutely just kidding... and it amzed me that you seems really be serious!
I am an EEE PG student in Hong Kong (not HKU though) and I haven't heard of any related news before.
If they were closing EEE then they have to close the Computer Science dept. as well, because many courses are shared. If CS was closed, why not other engineering majors? Why not pure science? Maths???...
Slashdot Mirror
As a citizen here I found myself responsible for clarifying some of the misunderstandings slashdotters have on Hong Kong:
- HK's judiciary system is definitely, entirely, totally different from that in China. It is inherited from the British colony before 1997, much more "civilized", transparent (= costly), and, in some sense, fair. This is what "one country, two systems" is for.
- I can say nearly 99% of bittorrent activities here were for copyrighted materials. My confession: I occasionally do that myself, although more often to get a copy of ubuntu. Yes, we have many (compared with western countries) pirate shops here, but 1) there are really not that many, and they are concentrated in some areas; 2) almost all of them are ran by the gangs; we all recognize that buying pirates from them is equivalent to funding them to do illegal activities. So bittorrent is quite popular recently here, kind of like helping each others.
- This is definitely not the first time prosecuting someone for violating the copyright law. I remember some guys here sharing mp3 via ftp and got caught. This time it goes into headline in HK newspaper and even in slashdot simply because the technology used here: bittorrent, which was believed (at least by many) to be difficult to get caught.
- After the caught of that guy, the number of seeders, who were scared, dropped by at least 90%. The "random" warning letters help too (no, I haven't received any, poor luck~). However, we all know that we can still find many of them in websites in China...
- Littering in HK is actually fined HK$1500. This is severe because of SARS outbreak.
Is he talking about CDMA? This really sounds odd to say it's a kind of "sharing" spectrum and compare it with open source and P2P.
The title suggests the possibility of this new book: Opensource Society And Its Enemies. Instead of Plato, Hegel and Marx, who will be criticized in this new book?
Disabled it, my firefox display the fake popup...
Closing the entire EEE department? Your friend were absolutely just kidding... and it amzed me that you seems really be serious!
I am an EEE PG student in Hong Kong (not HKU though) and I haven't heard of any related news before.
If they were closing EEE then they have to close the Computer Science dept. as well, because many courses are shared. If CS was closed, why not other engineering majors? Why not pure science? Maths???...