Great idea... but if someone would have the wits and knowledge to look for this plugin, wouldn't they be using FF already? If websites prevented stuff from working without this plugin, wouldn't that just turn off viewers? Not sure how this is going to help, people have been harping at Microsoft about standards for years and all they've done is move towards them at the pace of a snail.
However, the problem with that is that Rolls Royces are made and designed for a small group of people (the very rich) but Firefox is supposed to be for mass consumption. One of the main purposes of FF is to make the internet a better place, b/c so many unscrupulous vendors are using adware/spyware/worms/viruses to take advantage of the security holes present in IE, and converting to FF will eliminate many of those holes. If the vast majority don't use IE then FF has failed in this very important purpose.
If they're going to fire the Chief of Staff of the Congressman for small issues like that, they're going to have to sack the staffs of most congressmen. There are much more important ethical issues going on (i.e. Abramoff) to be worried about Congressmen changing their own Wikipedia entries. Honestly, I don't think it's unethical at all. By Wikipedia's design anybody can change entries, and the Congressmen are people. Besides, it's just an extension of what they do in campaigns to project themselves with a certain image. If you're upset with it, get in an edit war with them and if you lose, that's too bad for you.
This amendment has been rendered essentially useless because of the Commerce Clause, which allows Congress to regulate interstate commerce; nowadays pretty much everything involves interstate commerce and the Court has allowed it to be interpreted this way. If they don't do that, Congress can use federal funding as a carrot for states to do what they say. See here:
Don't even try to bring Uncle Tom into this, the situations are totally unrelated. And since you clearly aren't Chinese, you shouldn't comment about what a Chinese person would think. Not all Chinese oppose the great firewall either, it seems to be accepted as fact that all Chinese people dislike the firewall while that is totally untrue. Most really don't mind it at all.
"Bled to preserve liberties?" So you're saying that instituting Islamic government in Iraq is "preserving liberties?" Creating a corrupt puppet government and then ripping it down to create another corrupt puppet government in S. Vietnam is "preserving liberties?" Supporting muhajadeen who would ultimately create the Taliban in Afghanistan is "preserving liberties?" (for the record, Reagan called the muhajadeen (incluing the #1 wanted Bin Laden) "freedom fighters.") Selling weapons to Iran so that the Contras could fight in El Salvador is "preserving liberties?"
The U.S. is not even close to having a clear conscience to be promoting liberty. At least Bush is de facto acknowledging this now by not claiming human rights as a major issue, like previous administrations have.
China has bought hundreds of billions of dollars worth of treasury bonds and straight US currency in order to keep its currency tied to the US currency. If they so wanted (for example during a war between US and China) they could dump all of their US bills on the open market and greatly depreciate the value of the US dollar, or call in all of the bonds at once and force the US government to default, thus ruining the credit of the US government.
The majority of people in China would completely disagree with you for saying that "the West sucking up to China." The west is taking advantage of China just like China is taking advantage of the west. Why are consumer goods so cheap now? Because they're made in China, and in other places where the cost of labor and production is lower than it is in the states. The American consumer benefits greatly from trade with China, as do the American companies who engage in that trade, while Chinese companies are currently in the process of getting screwed by free trade. Many people who have been laid off from their jobs would love to go back to the era of Chairman Mao when everyone had a job and society was even.
In a word, yes. The market for internet services in China can potentially bigger than the market for internet services in the US, and much of it is still untapped.
Here's the most important part of the article: "There is one big problem, however: the experiment doesn't always work, and the group is not sure why." Until they figure out what's going on, the group really hasn't advanced much beyond what is already there.
Also I'm interested in seeing other try to replicate their experiment. That will be the ultimate test as to whether their methods are valid or not.
It's hard to comment on an account that is so completely biased, slanted, and completely misrepresents the situation in China. Why it has been moderated insightful is totally beyond me. But as someone else who has lived for long periods in China, I'll try.
You generalize from your family, and the people immediately surrounding your family, to the 1.3 billion people in China. This is a logical fallacy, and is alone enough to discredit your argument. What proof do you have that the majority of the 1.3 billion people suffer through the same troubles that you do? You don't, because your claim is false, and you're justifying it through the use of logical fallacies.
I'd comment more but to comment on the rest of your post would cause the discussion to become a hissy fit between a communist sympathizer and an anti-communist.
Yes, Falun Gong has killed people. Their belief of not going to hospitals to treat illnesses have killed on the order of thousands of people. See this:
In fact I have lived in China for long stretches, and get along just fine with the banning of websites. Anything that I need I can get. One does not need Wikipedia to do their work; they should be able to find their information elsewhere (unless of course that information is related to counter-revolutionary activities, in which case there is a reason they're blocked...)
If anyone considers Wikipedia a legitimate source for a thesis, they must be crazy. As an inspiration for ideas, and for general knowledge, it is a good source of information. But if you try to cite Wikipedia as a source on a serious thesis or other scholarly article, your work will not be accepted. It would be equivalent to citing some random web site as fact. It will take a long time and a lot of effort on wikipedia's part for people to even think of wikipedia as possibly being a legitimate source, and even then many will doubt the quality produced by the community-edited encyclopedia.
I doubt the veracity of that article. Just because something is written down doesn't mean it's true. I mean, there are political arguments written all the time designed to refuse other written political arguments.
Chernobyl was a bigger problem than it should have been because the USSR covered it up. The risk of accidents or terrorists is not high.
You're really funny. What makes you think that I'm getting paid? What makes you think that the Chinese government cares enough about a bunch of random nerds in the west (i.e. Slashdot audience) to have their own paid agents to post there? Money does not grow on trees, and the government needs it to do better things. As far as the Chinese government is concerned, it could care less about the Slashdot audience. I'm just posting b/c I don't like random anti-Chinese flamebait.
Wow, you are so wrong and misguided it isn't even funny. The Korean War was fought because the UN (read USA) forces were encroaching far too close to our borders; in fact some border towns on our side were bombed. We had no choice but to intervene given the circumstances of the UN invasion of North Korea. The UN was there to overturn the communist government, and were essentially encroaching on our borders; who knew if they would push their advantage into China or not? Several US generals were certainly in favor of it; of course this is not what actually happened but hindsight is almost 20/20. You can't tell me with a straight face that seeing an army on your doorstep out to end your form of government wouldn't make you think that this army was going to attack you.
The war against India was not imperialistic at all; it was a border dispute that India was getting too agressive about; we attacked them, taught them a lesson, and backed out. If we were so imperialistic, why don't we hold any Indian territory today? In fact those same territories that were under dispute then are still under dispute now.
Oh, if you think China funded the Afghanistan muhajadeen, guess who funded them much much more? That's right, Uncle Sam, your bastion of democracy and freedom. And wait, weren't Osama Bin Laden and Mullah Mohammed Omar (head of Taliban) among them?
We haven't fought Japan in a war since World War II, and we fought them b/c they attacked us to try to wipe us out. If you are going to criticize us for that, why not criticize Uncle Sam for fighting Japan after they bombed Pearl Harbor?
Hey, didn't the USA openly support Ngo Dinh Diem and then have him assasinated when he became corrupt and was of no further use? Oh right, they supported Batista too, the corrupt dictator of Cuba who was overthrown by Castro. I could go on and on in the list of corrupt leaders Uncle Sam supported at one time.
And there was never a war in Tibet, we went there to reinstate our rightful authority there given the fact that Tibet was a province of China under the Empire, and since the PRC is a successor state i.e. is in a chain of replacement governemnts of the Empire, the PRC is legally in control of Tibet. So what you're saying is basically the equivalent of saying that China can't send troops to its own territory.
Maybe you could at least look up the information more thoroughly before posting random anti-China crap like this.
Parent is not insightful at all. It's flamebait that the Slashdot audience agrees with, just like random anti-Microsoft bashing.
Not everyone wants the "freedom" that the American military is exporting. Look at Iraq now for example. The constitution that they came up with is certainly not at all what the Americans wanted. Pure and simple, Iraqis don't want the "freedom" the Americans have. They want to live by their Islamic law. So let them. If you force "freedom" on Iraq, it is becomes something far more sinister; imperialism. Saying that the Americans need to export "freedom," where freedom is their particular implementation of it that the rest of the world may not agree with, is equivalent to saying that the Americans are better than everyone else and needs to take care of them. Wait, we've heard this line of reasoning before; it's the classic "White Man's Burden" argument for Europeans to justify conquering Africa, and it's been discredited already. The situation in China is similar; American media reports on the matter are heavily skewed and are not to be relied upon.
Students in China did not "die for freedom" in Tian'an men Square. This is a Western myth. They were mere puppets, and their strings were being pulled by crime organizations and Western governments. Quite simply, the Western governments wished to topple the Chinese government, just like they did to the USSR. Look at what has happened to Russia. Obviously it's better for Americans that the USSR is not there anymore, but Russia has been in a shithole for the last 15 years, and is only beginning to climb out of it. Put another way, those students were traitors. And do your research; we gave them plenty of opportunities to stand down, and they refused. They weren't even unarmed; they had taken over a munitions truck that was supposed to protect the people inside Zhong Nan Hai (the government complex). The western coverage of the incident was so biased that it is totally unreliable.
It's been repeated over and over that one doesn't need to be clean to make money. There's no need to even make the opposite argument.
You can't enforce US law in China, but you can enforce treaties that both the USA and China have signed, like the international treaties regarding copyrights and intellectual property rights. This is what the Americans are purportedly doing.
Personally, I see this as another thing which will end up on the bargaining table when leaders of the countries meet. In China, for instance, you could very well see under the table agreements where China agrees to tighten anti-piracy enforcement while the USA backs off a bit on Taiwan, or shuts up about the supposed human rights issues for a while. I know that you will say that this shouldn't be happening b/c the issues aren't in any way related, but that's how international politics works.
Slashdot Mirror
Are they really the same company, run by the same people, or two separate entities? They seem to be doing the same things....
Great idea... but if someone would have the wits and knowledge to look for this plugin, wouldn't they be using FF already? If websites prevented stuff from working without this plugin, wouldn't that just turn off viewers? Not sure how this is going to help, people have been harping at Microsoft about standards for years and all they've done is move towards them at the pace of a snail.
However, the problem with that is that Rolls Royces are made and designed for a small group of people (the very rich) but Firefox is supposed to be for mass consumption. One of the main purposes of FF is to make the internet a better place, b/c so many unscrupulous vendors are using adware/spyware/worms/viruses to take advantage of the security holes present in IE, and converting to FF will eliminate many of those holes. If the vast majority don't use IE then FF has failed in this very important purpose.
It's really too bad that Dilbert was taken off the air. That show was the shit.
If they're going to fire the Chief of Staff of the Congressman for small issues like that, they're going to have to sack the staffs of most congressmen. There are much more important ethical issues going on (i.e. Abramoff) to be worried about Congressmen changing their own Wikipedia entries. Honestly, I don't think it's unethical at all. By Wikipedia's design anybody can change entries, and the Congressmen are people. Besides, it's just an extension of what they do in campaigns to project themselves with a certain image. If you're upset with it, get in an edit war with them and if you lose, that's too bad for you.
This amendment has been rendered essentially useless because of the Commerce Clause, which allows Congress to regulate interstate commerce; nowadays pretty much everything involves interstate commerce and the Court has allowed it to be interpreted this way. If they don't do that, Congress can use federal funding as a carrot for states to do what they say. See here:
h e_United_States_Constitution
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenth_Amendment_to_t
Don't even try to bring Uncle Tom into this, the situations are totally unrelated. And since you clearly aren't Chinese, you shouldn't comment about what a Chinese person would think. Not all Chinese oppose the great firewall either, it seems to be accepted as fact that all Chinese people dislike the firewall while that is totally untrue. Most really don't mind it at all.
And then the Chinese would retaliate by seizing and nationalizing all the assets of US companies on Chinese soil.
"Bled to preserve liberties?" So you're saying that instituting Islamic government in Iraq is "preserving liberties?" Creating a corrupt puppet government and then ripping it down to create another corrupt puppet government in S. Vietnam is "preserving liberties?" Supporting muhajadeen who would ultimately create the Taliban in Afghanistan is "preserving liberties?" (for the record, Reagan called the muhajadeen (incluing the #1 wanted Bin Laden) "freedom fighters.") Selling weapons to Iran so that the Contras could fight in El Salvador is "preserving liberties?"
The U.S. is not even close to having a clear conscience to be promoting liberty. At least Bush is de facto acknowledging this now by not claiming human rights as a major issue, like previous administrations have.
China has bought hundreds of billions of dollars worth of treasury bonds and straight US currency in order to keep its currency tied to the US currency. If they so wanted (for example during a war between US and China) they could dump all of their US bills on the open market and greatly depreciate the value of the US dollar, or call in all of the bonds at once and force the US government to default, thus ruining the credit of the US government.
Again, I ask this question; the parent post, blatant flamebait, is rated insightful because the slashdot audience agrees with it. Why?
You exaggerate greatly. Most likely they'd just end up with a fine. Only for severe cases does China put people in jail or execute them.
Why does slashdot continuously moderate flamebait that is agreeable to the slashdot audience as insightful?
The majority of people in China would completely disagree with you for saying that "the West sucking up to China." The west is taking advantage of China just like China is taking advantage of the west. Why are consumer goods so cheap now? Because they're made in China, and in other places where the cost of labor and production is lower than it is in the states. The American consumer benefits greatly from trade with China, as do the American companies who engage in that trade, while Chinese companies are currently in the process of getting screwed by free trade. Many people who have been laid off from their jobs would love to go back to the era of Chairman Mao when everyone had a job and society was even.
"Is it worth selling out?"
In a word, yes. The market for internet services in China can potentially bigger than the market for internet services in the US, and much of it is still untapped.
Here's the most important part of the article: "There is one big problem, however: the experiment doesn't always work, and the group is not sure why." Until they figure out what's going on, the group really hasn't advanced much beyond what is already there.
Also I'm interested in seeing other try to replicate their experiment. That will be the ultimate test as to whether their methods are valid or not.
It's hard to comment on an account that is so completely biased, slanted, and completely misrepresents the situation in China. Why it has been moderated insightful is totally beyond me. But as someone else who has lived for long periods in China, I'll try.
You generalize from your family, and the people immediately surrounding your family, to the 1.3 billion people in China. This is a logical fallacy, and is alone enough to discredit your argument. What proof do you have that the majority of the 1.3 billion people suffer through the same troubles that you do? You don't, because your claim is false, and you're justifying it through the use of logical fallacies.
I'd comment more but to comment on the rest of your post would cause the discussion to become a hissy fit between a communist sympathizer and an anti-communist.
Yes, Falun Gong has killed people. Their belief of not going to hospitals to treat illnesses have killed on the order of thousands of people. See this:
http://www.falungonginfo.org/index.html
In fact I have lived in China for long stretches, and get along just fine with the banning of websites. Anything that I need I can get. One does not need Wikipedia to do their work; they should be able to find their information elsewhere (unless of course that information is related to counter-revolutionary activities, in which case there is a reason they're blocked...)
If anyone considers Wikipedia a legitimate source for a thesis, they must be crazy. As an inspiration for ideas, and for general knowledge, it is a good source of information. But if you try to cite Wikipedia as a source on a serious thesis or other scholarly article, your work will not be accepted. It would be equivalent to citing some random web site as fact. It will take a long time and a lot of effort on wikipedia's part for people to even think of wikipedia as possibly being a legitimate source, and even then many will doubt the quality produced by the community-edited encyclopedia.
I doubt the veracity of that article. Just because something is written down doesn't mean it's true. I mean, there are political arguments written all the time designed to refuse other written political arguments.
Chernobyl was a bigger problem than it should have been because the USSR covered it up. The risk of accidents or terrorists is not high.
You're really funny. What makes you think that I'm getting paid? What makes you think that the Chinese government cares enough about a bunch of random nerds in the west (i.e. Slashdot audience) to have their own paid agents to post there? Money does not grow on trees, and the government needs it to do better things. As far as the Chinese government is concerned, it could care less about the Slashdot audience. I'm just posting b/c I don't like random anti-Chinese flamebait.
Wow, you are so wrong and misguided it isn't even funny. The Korean War was fought because the UN (read USA) forces were encroaching far too close to our borders; in fact some border towns on our side were bombed. We had no choice but to intervene given the circumstances of the UN invasion of North Korea. The UN was there to overturn the communist government, and were essentially encroaching on our borders; who knew if they would push their advantage into China or not? Several US generals were certainly in favor of it; of course this is not what actually happened but hindsight is almost 20/20. You can't tell me with a straight face that seeing an army on your doorstep out to end your form of government wouldn't make you think that this army was going to attack you.
The war against India was not imperialistic at all; it was a border dispute that India was getting too agressive about; we attacked them, taught them a lesson, and backed out. If we were so imperialistic, why don't we hold any Indian territory today? In fact those same territories that were under dispute then are still under dispute now.
Oh, if you think China funded the Afghanistan muhajadeen, guess who funded them much much more? That's right, Uncle Sam, your bastion of democracy and freedom. And wait, weren't Osama Bin Laden and Mullah Mohammed Omar (head of Taliban) among them?
We haven't fought Japan in a war since World War II, and we fought them b/c they attacked us to try to wipe us out. If you are going to criticize us for that, why not criticize Uncle Sam for fighting Japan after they bombed Pearl Harbor?
Hey, didn't the USA openly support Ngo Dinh Diem and then have him assasinated when he became corrupt and was of no further use? Oh right, they supported Batista too, the corrupt dictator of Cuba who was overthrown by Castro. I could go on and on in the list of corrupt leaders Uncle Sam supported at one time.
And there was never a war in Tibet, we went there to reinstate our rightful authority there given the fact that Tibet was a province of China under the Empire, and since the PRC is a successor state i.e. is in a chain of replacement governemnts of the Empire, the PRC is legally in control of Tibet. So what you're saying is basically the equivalent of saying that China can't send troops to its own territory.
Maybe you could at least look up the information more thoroughly before posting random anti-China crap like this.
Or call it Seamonkey instead, b/c Mozilla Suite isn't supported by the foundation any more, and they only put out security updates.
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey/
Parent is not insightful at all. It's flamebait that the Slashdot audience agrees with, just like random anti-Microsoft bashing.
Not everyone wants the "freedom" that the American military is exporting. Look at Iraq now for example. The constitution that they came up with is certainly not at all what the Americans wanted. Pure and simple, Iraqis don't want the "freedom" the Americans have. They want to live by their Islamic law. So let them. If you force "freedom" on Iraq, it is becomes something far more sinister; imperialism. Saying that the Americans need to export "freedom," where freedom is their particular implementation of it that the rest of the world may not agree with, is equivalent to saying that the Americans are better than everyone else and needs to take care of them. Wait, we've heard this line of reasoning before; it's the classic "White Man's Burden" argument for Europeans to justify conquering Africa, and it's been discredited already. The situation in China is similar; American media reports on the matter are heavily skewed and are not to be relied upon.
Students in China did not "die for freedom" in Tian'an men Square. This is a Western myth. They were mere puppets, and their strings were being pulled by crime organizations and Western governments. Quite simply, the Western governments wished to topple the Chinese government, just like they did to the USSR. Look at what has happened to Russia. Obviously it's better for Americans that the USSR is not there anymore, but Russia has been in a shithole for the last 15 years, and is only beginning to climb out of it. Put another way, those students were traitors. And do your research; we gave them plenty of opportunities to stand down, and they refused. They weren't even unarmed; they had taken over a munitions truck that was supposed to protect the people inside Zhong Nan Hai (the government complex). The western coverage of the incident was so biased that it is totally unreliable.
It's been repeated over and over that one doesn't need to be clean to make money. There's no need to even make the opposite argument.
You can't enforce US law in China, but you can enforce treaties that both the USA and China have signed, like the international treaties regarding copyrights and intellectual property rights. This is what the Americans are purportedly doing.
Personally, I see this as another thing which will end up on the bargaining table when leaders of the countries meet. In China, for instance, you could very well see under the table agreements where China agrees to tighten anti-piracy enforcement while the USA backs off a bit on Taiwan, or shuts up about the supposed human rights issues for a while. I know that you will say that this shouldn't be happening b/c the issues aren't in any way related, but that's how international politics works.