there is no particular debate over the "status" of Confederate soldiers in the US Civil War. nobody seriously calls them terrorists. despite the modern Bushisms, "terrorist" does not simply mean "person we don't like". the Confederacy did not (on the whole) engage in terrorist activities. they were rebels, in the same way the Colonial Army were rebels; neither were terrorists. one set won, the other lost.
there's plenty of debate still today over whether the Confederacy was justified in their actions (which is a really interesting topic, legally, constitutionally, and morally; shame they conflated the issue with slavery, which is such a despicable practice), but not about their "status" in your terms.
ah, but reclaim it from - and for - whom? Constantinople stopped being the Queen of Cities when it was sacked in the fourth crusade... by the west, mostly French and English knights. that single event fatally wounded the Byzantine Empire (which was in a direct line of succession from the Roman Empire), leading not long after to the rise of the Ottoman Empire.
Probably a lot of angry stock holders is my future bet.
because, y'know, google stockholders hate making money.
when google announced their intention to purchase YouTube (including the cost), GOOG was at about $426. by the time the acquisition closed, GOOG was a $489; most of that jump was in the two weeks after the announcement, around the middle of october - a period during which there was no other significant news. granted, things have slowed down a bit since then, but the trend still remains significantly positive.
i don't understand what google intends to do with YouTube, but if they want to use their ridiculously over-valued stock to buy ridiculously over-priced companies, i'm willing to give them a chance to show me that they've got something in mind i can't see.
...nowadays you guys have more and more symptoms of an empire in decay.
glad to hear someone else say it. that's exactly what we've got. in my estimation, the problems started right when the civil war ended (when we began the long road towards imperialism by centralizing power under the federal government), and its acceleration is symbolized by revision of the design of our coinage in the first half of the 20th century to get the heads of dead emperors - sorry, presidents - on it (the romans made the same transition, too). that's the point at which we decided the president - not even the office, but some specific men who'd occupied it - was more important than Liberty. by the time Kennedy got on the half dollar - three years after Eisenhower's "Military Industrial Complex" warning and less than a year after his own death - it would have taken a gargantuan effort to undo. i'm no longer sure it's possible.
it's true (afaik) that they were all iraqi citizens, but there's still some pretty serious questions over who's people they really were. an earlier judge in the case was replaced on US insistence, for example, because he seemed to be to fair to Hussein. that level of interference in the judicial system of another country is pretty bad.
and have you missed the reams of cases of US personnel or institutions inflicting punishments outside what's legally allowed them recently? we've even got the US AG advocating torture and indefinite imprisonment, trying to come up with legal loopholes to slide it through.
well, for what it's worth, i've never been directly screwed over by our government (only indirectly, like most of the country), yet i have a much greater contempt for most of the people currently in charge than indicated by the grandparent. i'm wondering, of course, how skewed your own view of the US is. in my experience, having lived in GB for a year and having friends all over the world, the view of the US in most of the "developed" world is better than it should be. mainstream news outlets in europe never report on the astoundingly precarious position we've allowed our currency to be placed in, for example, because they're afraid of the same upheavals that minor actions by, say OPEC or China would have. they seldom report on the erosion of our civil rights, because (at least in large part) the form they take in the US, as federally protected things explicitly part of a larger set of reserved rights, is nearly unique. and nobody reports on the destruction of the balance between States' and Federal rights, because, again, it's a unique situation (and barely any americans have understood it for decades). also, you seem to be assuming that people overseas would be mostly fine with the US if it wasn't for things like Guantanimo (which is not trivial). i think that's a really bad assumption. most folks didn't like the whole idea of us invading a sovereign nation without international support, on obviously falsified and/or absent justification. the ongoing invasion and occupation of iraq is not a "small isolated event", but a multi-year, multi-billion dollar endeavor resulting in hundreds of thousands of deaths. that right there's what pisses people off most, as far as i've been able to tell.
Those of us who work everyday with databases should know the futility of opposing any linkages of all DBs in the world.
nonsense. i think everyone who's had to deal with data integration will tell you the odds of someone wanting to integrate two different databases or data sets is inversely proportional to the level of forethought given to integration issues in those respective databases. the reason the federal government is trying to integrate these databases is because the DMVs/MVAs almost reliably put very little thought into data structure. all they have to do to insure nobody will ever care about integrating their data is make it easy to do so!
even in most "at will" employment states, there are still restrictions. one which applies in every state in which i know anything about employment law (all of which are "at will" states) is that once you give notice, your employer is restricted from firing you. there are exceptions, of course - if they were going to fire you anyway (and can document it), or you stop showing up, for example - and there's a concept of a reasonable period built in (no giving six months notice), and the details vary state-by-state, but that's the general idea.
having worked with iDEN phones a bit, my understanding with the SIM cards is that they weren't intentionally locked to phone versions, but NEXTEL kept changing the specs and the handsets simply weren't designed with support for the changes in mind. more of a failure of vision than intentional locking (certainly that's the impression the folks at NEXTEL we worked with had).
it's hardly accurate to call CDMA2000 the death cry of anything. it's still got a good load of benefits over the comparable GSM tech. i don't really have time for a point-by-point argument, but deployment cost's generally taken to be lower and speeds are generally higher. sure, LTE will likely leapfrog EVDO, but they've been in a back-and-forth for a few years now, with EVDO tending to be ahead in speed and latency; i don't really see anything indicating that's likely to change.
you've identified three separate things which are entirely unrelated, and implied a correlation. first, choice of network technology has nothing to do with application environment. Sprint, for example, is the second largest CDMA operator in the US, and does not sell a BREW phone (to the best of my knowledge; certainly the vast majority, at least, of their phones are Java-based phones). it is true that BREW is a sure sign of a CDMA phone, but the inverse is not true. even on Verizon's network, for example, see the Palm devices as a counter-example: no BREW even available. second, choice of application environment has nothing to do with signing requirements. several operators who have java application environments on their phones require signing or other forms of controlled distribution and application loading for apps to run; see, for example, Nextel. also, nearly every vendor that allows unsigned apps to run on their devices (which is most of them) restricts unsigned apps' access to certain features, most commonly the PIM functions and things relating directly to the phone network, like sending SMS messages. to access those features, every network i've looked at (which is all the major US ones and a small handful of european ones) require signing.
I'm also glad it didn't go CDMA in general -- I don't want to have to call support just to do something simple like change phones.
just as an aside: as a Verizon customer personally, and a fan of CDMA technology overall, what would've been super cool is if Apple had pushed for RUIM cards in a CDMA phone. RUIM is the CDMA equivalent of GSM's SIM cards, and while not popular (non-existent?) in the US, they've started to gain ground in places like China (perhaps because most US GSM operators lock their phones, diminishing the psychological impact of the biggest benefit of a SIM card). anyway, yeah. VZW getting the iPhone would've shocked me, too.
you've missed the point. it's overwhelmingly likely that you'll be able to do exactly that with the iPhone, just like you can with the vast majority of other GSM phones in the states (getting phones unlocked is not tremendously difficult, and when it costs you anything, i've never seen it break about $20). but with a two year contract, i'm tied to paying that operator, like it or not. let's say my bill's $40/month; that's $960. certainly more money than most people are wiling to just eat. the early termination charges on such things are generally ~$300 or more, too. the GSM vs. CDMA thing is certainly a complicating factor, as well; no SIM cards in CDMA phones (generally; some have RUID (right?) cards, but i've never seen one in the US). it's also not just "Americans", of course, but Canadians, Koreans, Indians, and a bunch of other places - even parts of Europe! GSM's certainly the dominant force internationally, but it's incorrect to portray it as the only game around outside the US.
If the FCC had balls and were ethical, that's what they'd have done.
to be fair, the FCC has fairly limited power (for very good reason), and particularly has little power (or rather, power only in constrained circumstances) to make technology mandates. it's entirely likely that by preventing XM and Sirius from merging, they're setting the stage for a market-driven interoperability play.
for transmissions in space, the FCC isn't involved. but the FCC regulates transmissions in the US. the FCC doesn't (inherently) get to dictate what the satellite can or can't do (there may be some other NASA or DoD type agency who does, but i don't know of one), but they get to dictate what it can point at the US.
if a Chinese company owned the satellites, the FCC wouldn't really be able to stop them, unless they had US-based assets as well (like, say, a sales office, or retail distribution facilities, and so on). depending on how the technolgy works, the FCC might also be able to regulate sale and/or use of the receivers.
For the 100+ years since 1750, Tibet was considered to be a province of China.
"considered" by whom? certainly not by Tibet; their own documents at the time are clear on this. i have no problem believing the Chinese portrayed it that way at the time, but that does not make it so.
Their relationship to the imperial government is the same as many other regions like Manchuria and Mongolia.
citing Mongolia as a reference point is interesting, but certainly not a straight-forward support for your case. don't forget that the Mongolians ran China at one point, and were forced back into just modern Mongolia (more or less) by the incoming rival replacement dynasty.
You don't see any kind of foreign agreements with Tibet during that time.
when does this arbitrary period you're defining end? clearly the British thought Tibet was in charge of its own foreign relations in 1904. but then, your next claim...
Now, your information is based upon agreements forced onto China by the British in an attempt to weaken the position of government.
no, it's not. note that the British expidition to Tibet in 1904 was largely based on fear that Tibet would be aligning itself with Russia; clearly not something the British would be worried about if they felt it was under the jurisdiction of China already. the Chinese simply were not party to these agreements, because there was no reason for them to be, any more so than a treaty between Germany and the United States would involve Britain today. the British, in fact, later exerted pressure on both the Tibetans and the Chinese to agree to various things, and the terms of those agreements are, we can presume, not exactly what either party would have liked. regardless, it is true that GB at that point recognized Tibet as an independent state.
At no point did the government of China signed an treaty declaring indepedence of China in 1914. A surrender in 1912 doesn't mean that a country is independent.
the surrender of the forces, combined with their subsequent withdrawal from the country - in accordance with Tibetan wishes, and in contrast to the Chinese - is a pretty good basis. it's not particularly important for China to sign any treaty here (i think you're saying that China never signed Tibet away); if the British never agreed to the close of the American Revolution, that doesn't make the United States any less independent today. or are you similarly going to assert that the ROC still has rightful control over mainland China? after all, they never signed it away by treaty...
Also, I'd like to point out that the treaty in 1904 was not considered valid by other countries hence there was another treaty in 1906 signed with China that reaffirmed the provisions of the 1904 treaty.
"considered" by whom? can you provide a citation by anyone other than the Chinese that asserts the 1904 treaty was invalid?
Actaully all of Mongolia was a part of China as well under the Qing Dynasty. There was a treaty signed in 1949 that recognized the independence of outer Mongolia and China.
1949? is this more revisionism, or are you just ill-informed? Mongolia declared independence from China in 1911, with the fall of the Qing dynasty. their independence and their government was supported by Russia that same year (politically and militarily). the Republic of China officially recognized Mongolia as independent in 1945, and the PRC after its establishment in 1949, but that does nothing to change the fact that Mongolia was, in fact, independent from 1911. I think you're under the impression that China has to decide to let go before a certain territory is, in fact, an independent state. this is not the way the world works. Mongolia was independent from 1911 because they said so, and the "
a fair point. Israel is not, however, actively engaged in rounding up and killing Palestinians on a routine basis; i was attempting to differentiate the genocide being perpetuated by Israel on the Palestinians from that committed by, say, Germany in the middle of the last century or what's going on in Darfur today. the Israeli genocide is no less intentional or real, but is perpetrated through less dramatic means.
china also invaded at least Vietnam in the 1970s. i can't think of any others off-hand. i've not been keeping a running US v. China invasion scorecard, though. i can't really follow your question. yes, the US government has claimed their intentions are good, by their own standards, but so what? they acted well outside the realm of international law in invading another sovereign country and deposing their government. but you question seems to be about the US's justification for being the privilege of having a superior military? that concept's just a little too difficult for me to follow.
okay, fair enough on the name (good clarification), but it certainly didn't describe anything resembling a predecessor state to the current Chinese state(s), which is what i meant. it didn't control anything close to the land currently incorporated into China (even excluding disputed regions), and there's been several breaks in the lineage (where single states were subsequently divided). that last point is the key for disputing the claim of China being the oldest country.
huh. and you know this how? different people put priority on different things, and make different choices accordingly. you're assuming the prioritization of things that you've made is the 'right" one, and that clearly anyone else who has to do similar tasks would clearly make the same ones.
...and I don't mean making a web page in Python or PHP, but actual programming, say C++...
nice. so web development isn't "actual programming"? the fact that some applications get to use an easier method of achieving cross-platform compatibility than others doesn't make them less real programming (clearly there's a lot of trivial stuff out there, and a lot of crap, but that doesn't really help your point any).
Have you heard of why "design by committee" is bad? It's slow? It's the least common denominator of all benefits? The option that won't "offend" anyone?
you seem to be under the impression that OS design is somehow inherently superior to the design of all cross platform solutions. that's just stupid. sure, POSIX has some truly ugly stuff in there, but is it really worse than the Win32 API? and that's just POSIX, probably the most committee-based solution available (okay, OSF, but they're really gone by now, thankfully). are you willing to make the same claims about all cross-platform libraries? plan9port? the Apache runtime thingie? the Mozilla environment? certainly none of these suffer from "design by committee", whatever their other faults.
and, just so i'm clear, you were putting C++ forward as an example of "real" programming before, right? you do, of course, realize that C++ suffers from extensive "design by committee" failures, right?
see, from your tone, this reads like you're trying to make a point by use of sarcasm. i think what you're arguing is that the aggression of some of Israel's neighbors justifies Israel's invasion and occupation of some of their lands. you also seem to think that this is clearly justified, once put in a clear manner.
you're wrong.
modern Israel exists because we (the west, collectively, and Britain, specifically) carved out some land for them to sit on, taking it away from the then-current occupants. the fact that the Jews had a kingdom there centuries ago is irrelevant to that fact. this puts Israel at something of a moral and political disadvantage, right off the bat. Israel currently occupies land taken during multiple conflicts, at least one of which Israel clearly started. any state's moral position is shot to hell when they begin engaging in "preemptive strikes". even if the situation was as you seem to want to portray it - poor innocent Israel, beset upon all sides by those who seek to destroy it - it's highly questionable that occupying the other country's land is justified. certainly, it's beyond the scope of what's recognized by international law for dealing with those sorts of situations. that last point is especially true when Israel has such a hideous record of abusing the human rights of the people in the land they've occupied. they're not engaged in a military campaign against foreign invaders, they're engaged in soft-core genocide.
it's true that the story's more complex than the sound bites generally offered up, but that does very little to address the massive inaccuracies in your representation of the history.
Tibet was formally incorporated into what can be considered imperial China during the Qing dynasty.
(emphasis mine)
"can be" in what way, and by whom? it certainly wasn't by Tibet, as evidenced by contemporary Tibetan records. nor did Tibet cede control of their foreign affairs, as evidenced by contemporary records of their neighbors. the "can be considered" in your statement requires a pretty broad stretch here. the confusion here rises, at least in very large part, from the concept of "suzerainty" being lacking from modern political discourse. that, not "sovereignty", is what China held over Tibet. note also that Chinese political theory, way back when, was entirely based on the idea that their Emperor was the supreme source of all authority in the world, and relations with China were inherently that of tributary states. here, Tibet is in the same bucket as Malaysia, Vietnam, Japan, and a half dozen or so other modern countries; should we hand them all to China, as well?
Yuan signs Tibet as an autonomous territory away in a deal with the UK, who wanted a buffer zone for their India.
this has me curious because i've never heard it before. where did you get the idea that this was a significant component of Tibet's claim of independence?
Tibet's most recent period of clear independence started in 1912 with the surrender of the Chinese (formerly Qing Imperial) troops in Lhasa to the Tibetan authorities; subsequently, contrary to Chinese wishes, all Chinese troops were removed from the country by the end of the year. true, the initial Chinese surrender came after Yuan's election as provisional president of the new republic (by about a month), but this was well before Yuan's agreement with the British, in 1914 - where the British were putting pressure on both the Tibetans and the Chinese to accept the terms of the Tibet-China relation defined. the British had already recognized Tibet's authority to act as a sovereign state, however, signing a treaty with Tibet (not China) in 1904 governing trade between Tibetan and British subjects and their respective lands.
regardless, it's certainly true that from about 1912 through 1950, Tibet was acting as a fully independent sovereign state (confirmed by folks like the International Commission of Jurists, as well as being evidenced by contemporary diplomatic relations). that sovereign state was then invaded by the newly-communist China, and has remained occupied since.
Tibet has been part of China before the independence of the US.
this phrasing is interesting. the verb tense used implies a continuous, unbroken state of Tibet being part of China; this is entirely false. Tibet and China have gone through numerous different types of relationships, including some which are frequently pointed to as placing Tibet in a role subservient to China, but those are interpretations, not acknowledged states. i know of no documentation identifying Tibet as part of China, prior to their most recent invasion, from anyone except the Chinese government (or proxies).
in addition, the most relevant state is Tibet's state at the time of China's invasion, which is nearly uniformly (again, from anyone but China) acknowledged to be that of an independent state from the surrender of the Chinese forces there to the Tibetan authorities in 1912. even if we grant that Tibet was part of China (ignoring for a moment the questionable definition of "China" as a historically linear, coherent entity), that no more makes it justifiably part of China today than saying it's part of Mongolia (it was, after all, ruled by the Mongols at one point - like about a third of the world) or saying America is rightfully the property of the British.
okay, i get largest (by population), but how do you come up with oldest? their government goes back, what, nearly 60 years, and there wasn't even an entity known as "China" less than a thousand years ago (despite what the neo-imperialist propaganda machine claims in their effort to stifle debate over their assimilation of their neighbors).
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there is no particular debate over the "status" of Confederate soldiers in the US Civil War. nobody seriously calls them terrorists. despite the modern Bushisms, "terrorist" does not simply mean "person we don't like". the Confederacy did not (on the whole) engage in terrorist activities. they were rebels, in the same way the Colonial Army were rebels; neither were terrorists. one set won, the other lost.
there's plenty of debate still today over whether the Confederacy was justified in their actions (which is a really interesting topic, legally, constitutionally, and morally; shame they conflated the issue with slavery, which is such a despicable practice), but not about their "status" in your terms.
ah, but reclaim it from - and for - whom? Constantinople stopped being the Queen of Cities when it was sacked in the fourth crusade... by the west, mostly French and English knights. that single event fatally wounded the Byzantine Empire (which was in a direct line of succession from the Roman Empire), leading not long after to the rise of the Ottoman Empire.
when google announced their intention to purchase YouTube (including the cost), GOOG was at about $426. by the time the acquisition closed, GOOG was a $489; most of that jump was in the two weeks after the announcement, around the middle of october - a period during which there was no other significant news. granted, things have slowed down a bit since then, but the trend still remains significantly positive.
i don't understand what google intends to do with YouTube, but if they want to use their ridiculously over-valued stock to buy ridiculously over-priced companies, i'm willing to give them a chance to show me that they've got something in mind i can't see.
it's true (afaik) that they were all iraqi citizens, but there's still some pretty serious questions over who's people they really were. an earlier judge in the case was replaced on US insistence, for example, because he seemed to be to fair to Hussein. that level of interference in the judicial system of another country is pretty bad.
and have you missed the reams of cases of US personnel or institutions inflicting punishments outside what's legally allowed them recently? we've even got the US AG advocating torture and indefinite imprisonment, trying to come up with legal loopholes to slide it through.
well, for what it's worth, i've never been directly screwed over by our government (only indirectly, like most of the country), yet i have a much greater contempt for most of the people currently in charge than indicated by the grandparent.
i'm wondering, of course, how skewed your own view of the US is. in my experience, having lived in GB for a year and having friends all over the world, the view of the US in most of the "developed" world is better than it should be. mainstream news outlets in europe never report on the astoundingly precarious position we've allowed our currency to be placed in, for example, because they're afraid of the same upheavals that minor actions by, say OPEC or China would have. they seldom report on the erosion of our civil rights, because (at least in large part) the form they take in the US, as federally protected things explicitly part of a larger set of reserved rights, is nearly unique. and nobody reports on the destruction of the balance between States' and Federal rights, because, again, it's a unique situation (and barely any americans have understood it for decades).
also, you seem to be assuming that people overseas would be mostly fine with the US if it wasn't for things like Guantanimo (which is not trivial). i think that's a really bad assumption. most folks didn't like the whole idea of us invading a sovereign nation without international support, on obviously falsified and/or absent justification. the ongoing invasion and occupation of iraq is not a "small isolated event", but a multi-year, multi-billion dollar endeavor resulting in hundreds of thousands of deaths. that right there's what pisses people off most, as far as i've been able to tell.
even in most "at will" employment states, there are still restrictions. one which applies in every state in which i know anything about employment law (all of which are "at will" states) is that once you give notice, your employer is restricted from firing you. there are exceptions, of course - if they were going to fire you anyway (and can document it), or you stop showing up, for example - and there's a concept of a reasonable period built in (no giving six months notice), and the details vary state-by-state, but that's the general idea.
having worked with iDEN phones a bit, my understanding with the SIM cards is that they weren't intentionally locked to phone versions, but NEXTEL kept changing the specs and the handsets simply weren't designed with support for the changes in mind. more of a failure of vision than intentional locking (certainly that's the impression the folks at NEXTEL we worked with had).
it's hardly accurate to call CDMA2000 the death cry of anything. it's still got a good load of benefits over the comparable GSM tech. i don't really have time for a point-by-point argument, but deployment cost's generally taken to be lower and speeds are generally higher. sure, LTE will likely leapfrog EVDO, but they've been in a back-and-forth for a few years now, with EVDO tending to be ahead in speed and latency; i don't really see anything indicating that's likely to change.
you've identified three separate things which are entirely unrelated, and implied a correlation.
first, choice of network technology has nothing to do with application environment. Sprint, for example, is the second largest CDMA operator in the US, and does not sell a BREW phone (to the best of my knowledge; certainly the vast majority, at least, of their phones are Java-based phones). it is true that BREW is a sure sign of a CDMA phone, but the inverse is not true. even on Verizon's network, for example, see the Palm devices as a counter-example: no BREW even available.
second, choice of application environment has nothing to do with signing requirements. several operators who have java application environments on their phones require signing or other forms of controlled distribution and application loading for apps to run; see, for example, Nextel. also, nearly every vendor that allows unsigned apps to run on their devices (which is most of them) restricts unsigned apps' access to certain features, most commonly the PIM functions and things relating directly to the phone network, like sending SMS messages. to access those features, every network i've looked at (which is all the major US ones and a small handful of european ones) require signing.
anyway, yeah. VZW getting the iPhone would've shocked me, too.
you've missed the point. it's overwhelmingly likely that you'll be able to do exactly that with the iPhone, just like you can with the vast majority of other GSM phones in the states (getting phones unlocked is not tremendously difficult, and when it costs you anything, i've never seen it break about $20). but with a two year contract, i'm tied to paying that operator, like it or not. let's say my bill's $40/month; that's $960. certainly more money than most people are wiling to just eat. the early termination charges on such things are generally ~$300 or more, too.
the GSM vs. CDMA thing is certainly a complicating factor, as well; no SIM cards in CDMA phones (generally; some have RUID (right?) cards, but i've never seen one in the US). it's also not just "Americans", of course, but Canadians, Koreans, Indians, and a bunch of other places - even parts of Europe! GSM's certainly the dominant force internationally, but it's incorrect to portray it as the only game around outside the US.
for transmissions in space, the FCC isn't involved. but the FCC regulates transmissions in the US. the FCC doesn't (inherently) get to dictate what the satellite can or can't do (there may be some other NASA or DoD type agency who does, but i don't know of one), but they get to dictate what it can point at the US.
if a Chinese company owned the satellites, the FCC wouldn't really be able to stop them, unless they had US-based assets as well (like, say, a sales office, or retail distribution facilities, and so on). depending on how the technolgy works, the FCC might also be able to regulate sale and/or use of the receivers.
hrm. knowing a decent bit about phones (design, networks, &c.), i'm quite skeptical of this claim. any references you can provide?
okay, show me.
"considered" by whom? certainly not by Tibet; their own documents at the time are clear on this. i have no problem believing the Chinese portrayed it that way at the time, but that does not make it so.
citing Mongolia as a reference point is interesting, but certainly not a straight-forward support for your case. don't forget that the Mongolians ran China at one point, and were forced back into just modern Mongolia (more or less) by the incoming rival replacement dynasty.
when does this arbitrary period you're defining end? clearly the British thought Tibet was in charge of its own foreign relations in 1904. but then, your next claim...
no, it's not. note that the British expidition to Tibet in 1904 was largely based on fear that Tibet would be aligning itself with Russia; clearly not something the British would be worried about if they felt it was under the jurisdiction of China already. the Chinese simply were not party to these agreements, because there was no reason for them to be, any more so than a treaty between Germany and the United States would involve Britain today. the British, in fact, later exerted pressure on both the Tibetans and the Chinese to agree to various things, and the terms of those agreements are, we can presume, not exactly what either party would have liked. regardless, it is true that GB at that point recognized Tibet as an independent state.
the surrender of the forces, combined with their subsequent withdrawal from the country - in accordance with Tibetan wishes, and in contrast to the Chinese - is a pretty good basis. it's not particularly important for China to sign any treaty here (i think you're saying that China never signed Tibet away); if the British never agreed to the close of the American Revolution, that doesn't make the United States any less independent today. or are you similarly going to assert that the ROC still has rightful control over mainland China? after all, they never signed it away by treaty...
"considered" by whom? can you provide a citation by anyone other than the Chinese that asserts the 1904 treaty was invalid?
1949? is this more revisionism, or are you just ill-informed?
Mongolia declared independence from China in 1911, with the fall of the Qing dynasty. their independence and their government was supported by Russia that same year (politically and militarily). the Republic of China officially recognized Mongolia as independent in 1945, and the PRC after its establishment in 1949, but that does nothing to change the fact that Mongolia was, in fact, independent from 1911.
I think you're under the impression that China has to decide to let go before a certain territory is, in fact, an independent state. this is not the way the world works. Mongolia was independent from 1911 because they said so, and the "
a fair point. Israel is not, however, actively engaged in rounding up and killing Palestinians on a routine basis; i was attempting to differentiate the genocide being perpetuated by Israel on the Palestinians from that committed by, say, Germany in the middle of the last century or what's going on in Darfur today. the Israeli genocide is no less intentional or real, but is perpetrated through less dramatic means.
china also invaded at least Vietnam in the 1970s. i can't think of any others off-hand. i've not been keeping a running US v. China invasion scorecard, though.
i can't really follow your question. yes, the US government has claimed their intentions are good, by their own standards, but so what? they acted well outside the realm of international law in invading another sovereign country and deposing their government. but you question seems to be about the US's justification for being the privilege of having a superior military? that concept's just a little too difficult for me to follow.
okay, fair enough on the name (good clarification), but it certainly didn't describe anything resembling a predecessor state to the current Chinese state(s), which is what i meant. it didn't control anything close to the land currently incorporated into China (even excluding disputed regions), and there's been several breaks in the lineage (where single states were subsequently divided). that last point is the key for disputing the claim of China being the oldest country.
and, just so i'm clear, you were putting C++ forward as an example of "real" programming before, right? you do, of course, realize that C++ suffers from extensive "design by committee" failures, right?
see, from your tone, this reads like you're trying to make a point by use of sarcasm. i think what you're arguing is that the aggression of some of Israel's neighbors justifies Israel's invasion and occupation of some of their lands. you also seem to think that this is clearly justified, once put in a clear manner.
you're wrong.
modern Israel exists because we (the west, collectively, and Britain, specifically) carved out some land for them to sit on, taking it away from the then-current occupants. the fact that the Jews had a kingdom there centuries ago is irrelevant to that fact. this puts Israel at something of a moral and political disadvantage, right off the bat.
Israel currently occupies land taken during multiple conflicts, at least one of which Israel clearly started. any state's moral position is shot to hell when they begin engaging in "preemptive strikes".
even if the situation was as you seem to want to portray it - poor innocent Israel, beset upon all sides by those who seek to destroy it - it's highly questionable that occupying the other country's land is justified. certainly, it's beyond the scope of what's recognized by international law for dealing with those sorts of situations.
that last point is especially true when Israel has such a hideous record of abusing the human rights of the people in the land they've occupied. they're not engaged in a military campaign against foreign invaders, they're engaged in soft-core genocide.
"can be" in what way, and by whom? it certainly wasn't by Tibet, as evidenced by contemporary Tibetan records. nor did Tibet cede control of their foreign affairs, as evidenced by contemporary records of their neighbors. the "can be considered" in your statement requires a pretty broad stretch here. the confusion here rises, at least in very large part, from the concept of "suzerainty" being lacking from modern political discourse. that, not "sovereignty", is what China held over Tibet.
note also that Chinese political theory, way back when, was entirely based on the idea that their Emperor was the supreme source of all authority in the world, and relations with China were inherently that of tributary states. here, Tibet is in the same bucket as Malaysia, Vietnam, Japan, and a half dozen or so other modern countries; should we hand them all to China, as well?this has me curious because i've never heard it before. where did you get the idea that this was a significant component of Tibet's claim of independence?
Tibet's most recent period of clear independence started in 1912 with the surrender of the Chinese (formerly Qing Imperial) troops in Lhasa to the Tibetan authorities; subsequently, contrary to Chinese wishes, all Chinese troops were removed from the country by the end of the year. true, the initial Chinese surrender came after Yuan's election as provisional president of the new republic (by about a month), but this was well before Yuan's agreement with the British, in 1914 - where the British were putting pressure on both the Tibetans and the Chinese to accept the terms of the Tibet-China relation defined. the British had already recognized Tibet's authority to act as a sovereign state, however, signing a treaty with Tibet (not China) in 1904 governing trade between Tibetan and British subjects and their respective lands.
regardless, it's certainly true that from about 1912 through 1950, Tibet was acting as a fully independent sovereign state (confirmed by folks like the International Commission of Jurists, as well as being evidenced by contemporary diplomatic relations). that sovereign state was then invaded by the newly-communist China, and has remained occupied since.
in addition, the most relevant state is Tibet's state at the time of China's invasion, which is nearly uniformly (again, from anyone but China) acknowledged to be that of an independent state from the surrender of the Chinese forces there to the Tibetan authorities in 1912. even if we grant that Tibet was part of China (ignoring for a moment the questionable definition of "China" as a historically linear, coherent entity), that no more makes it justifiably part of China today than saying it's part of Mongolia (it was, after all, ruled by the Mongols at one point - like about a third of the world) or saying America is rightfully the property of the British.
okay, i get largest (by population), but how do you come up with oldest? their government goes back, what, nearly 60 years, and there wasn't even an entity known as "China" less than a thousand years ago (despite what the neo-imperialist propaganda machine claims in their effort to stifle debate over their assimilation of their neighbors).