The copyright laws themselves are about the same in China as they are everywhere. But enforcement is EXTREMELY lax. Every so often in the news they'll report that a big piracy ring has been busted, but in general piracy is still rampant. Remember that Windows 98 came out in China before it did in the USA?
Look around in the streets of Beijing. You'll see DVDs and VCDs for dirt cheap prices of say 3 RMB (8 RMB = 1 USD). Of course, many of those many not be real, but that's another story. You can walk into a store, and you'll see movies that are still in movie theaters, already in DVD form selling for say 15 RMB, which is about $1.87. You're not going to tell me that the **AA approves of that b/c selling a legal DVD for $1.87 would be preposterous.
The DVDs on the street almost certainly don't work. (Trust me, I've tried to buy many of them). There are stores where you can buy them for cheap, and the quality is more reliable, although you can't be sure.
The parent post is not insightful at all. Maybe funny. If the court of law says you're guilty, you are going to pay the punishment, or else you'll suffer even worse consequences. (Fine -> higher fine -> jail time)
In this case the "fair use" associated with bnetd was basically playing on B.Net using stolen CD keys. This equates to getting the software from Blizzard for free illegally, which equates to stealing, which is beyond any possible definition of fair use. The "appellants waived any fair use defense" b/c no such defense existed.
It's quite possible there is a bounty hunter for the RIAA on your network. Those are people who get paid by the RIAA to expose file-sharers. I know for certain there are some at my school (Caltech), so I'm very careful when using file sharing services on my network.
Ever heard of the saying "beat the child to save the class"? That's what the RIAA is doing. The usage of this technique certainly has plenty of precedent, from schoolteachers to dictators. Its effectiveness varies depending on the situation. I think that it's probably the RIAA's best shot at controlling music piracy, because they can't afford to prosecute everyone who pirates music, but they can't let piracy go either, because then it becomes socially acceptable and banning it would become very difficult (see Prohibition for an example of this). Therefore, they're trying to stir fear into the hearts of the public by going hard after a few people; thus they stem the tide of piracy. People who don't care would pirate anyway, but if the RIAA makes an example it prevents a lot of ordinary people from thinking that it is socially acceptable and thus start doing it.
It is well known that science can be wrong. For example, before about 1900 the model of the universe was based on Galilean relativity, which was proven wrong by Einstein and friends. Those results were based on well-conceived and performed experiments, all of which confirmed their hypothesis (b/c they couldn't get close to light-speed so they couldn't tell).
But if the creationists/intelligent design advocates/Christian fundamentalists want to use this to say that they're right, they're relying on a logical fallacy. Just because a few papers are wrong doesn't mean that their view is correct. Their view of creationism is not the only alternative to the view of evolution present in a few possibly flawed papers. Evolution may work in a way that we aren't sure about, but this doesn't prove that intelligent design is correct.
It is made by compressing buckyballs (C_60), which consist of carbon, just like Diamond. For the record charcoal and graphite are forms of carbon too. All of these things are just carbon atoms arranged in different ways. The name of the substance has the word "diamond" in it b/c it is similar to diamond, but it is not the same as diamond.
The whole censorship thing has been blown out of proportion and has been beaten to death (and beyond) on Slashdot. Please don't bring that up again. Personally, I think that they don't have any moral obligation to oppose censorship, but they do have a moral obligation to follow the laws of the countries that they're doing business with, and so they are justified in complying with Chinese requirements. You can denounce the Chinese internet policies as much as you want, but I don't think you should be blaming Google.
Free wi-fi is a very cool idea, except some cities have tried to do it and the process is getting bogged down in court. It is possible that the same may happen to Google in its attempt.
They still do. It's just that they have much more features now and that the original purpose of a graphing calculator has been obscured. Now for most they are either cheating implements or a glorified Gameboy. Honestly, for mathematical applications I'd rather use Mathematica, because I'd rather have my 2.66 GHz P4 crunch numbers rather than a Motorola 68000 10 MHz processor (this is the processor on a TI-89).
No, I'm not implying that. Everyone reporting news has his own agenda. For example, a totalitarian state will warp battle reports to seems like its army was winning great victories every day. Slashdot has its own agenda of promoting technology and "freedom" (this can apply in many senses so I'm leaving it in quotes), and so it may for example sensationalize stories of people getting prosecuted for IP/DRM violations. However, it is clear that the American media is driven by profit, so its reports will be sensationalized to make more money.
The media will report in a way that sensationalizes the issue, whether it is liberal or conservative. They don't want boring mundane stories. They want interesting groundbreaking stories. So they have to exaggerate. The American media is run by big business, so its intrinsic purpose is NOT to report news like in some places, or be a mouthpiece for the government in some other places. Its purpose is to make money, like all big businesses do, and they do it by reporting news and generating ad revenue. So one should not be surprised when issues are exaggerated in order to seem more important. This is certainly the case here because this study is being blown up to something it probably doesn't actually mean.
Well, not everyone hates Mario Sunshine or Zelda Wind Waker, so you don't need to generalize there. I agree that sequels that are marginally different from their predecessors aren't worth buying, and EA sports games (NBA Live, Madden, etc.) is a good example of that.
However, one example of sequels I think that was done well was Super Smash Bros. SSB Melee had enough new features and changes to keep it interesting, but it was similar enough to the original SSB that it was still very familiar and fun in the same way the original SSB was. That game I think had a very good balance of originality versus reuse of things that are proven to be good.
As a Chinese citizen living and educated in the USA, I completely understand the significance and the magnitude of the Holocaust. However, most people of the West do not share the same understanding of the suffering of the Chinese during World War II. Read the numbers here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Sino-Japanese_ War#Chinese_Casualties
I agree with you on most of your points, but I disagree that the Holocaust dwarfed the Japanese war atrocities. Simply by the numbers you can see that the number killed are similar. In addition, most of the Japanese massacres were orchestrated in an attempt to scare the Chinese into compliance with their policies (this succeeded somewhat, but certainly not as much as they would have liked). Obviously Westerners will think that the Holocaust was more important, but there is no need to denigrate the comparable suffering of the Chinese.
Oh, and before anyone says this, whatever the Communists purportedly did is not relevant in this discussion.
The rape of Nanking was only one incident, and was completely indicative of Japan's atrocities in Asia (China, Korea, SE Asia). See this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Japanese_War_ Atrocities
The people of China and Korea (both of them) will never forgive the Japanese for what they did in World War II during their totally unjustified quest to create the "East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere" i.e. the Japanese Empire.
It is quite interesting how the war is treated differently in regards to the treatment of Japan and Germany. When one talks about Germany during World War II, all he/she usually talks about is the Holocaust and other acts of Nazi brutality. Rarely is the plight of the German people mentioned. This in my opinion is totally justified. However, when one talks about the Japanese, a quite significant number will choose to talk about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and how terrible it was for the Japanese civilians. The story that the first poster put up may be touching, but if you listen to the stories of the many millions of Chinese and Koreans who were brutalized, this story seems trite and insignificant in comparison. In my opinion much more focus should be put on Japan's war atrocities, just like Germany's war atrocities are commonly focused upon.
As a Chinese native living in the USA, I am surprised daily as to how many people feel sympathy for the Japanese b/c they were nukes, because I can never bring myself to feel such sympathy. To sympathize with them, is to denigrate the millions of my countrymen who were brutally slaughtered.
No, it takes exactly the same amount of energy. It's called the 1st Law of Thermodynamics a.k.a. the Conservation of Energy. Where the energy is lost is through the machinery, which is never 100% efficient b/c entropy is always increasing in the universe (2nd Law of Thermodynamics.) Get your chemistry/thermodynamics straight before you say something like that.
You probably don't want to run your car on hydrogen that comes from water, because by the 1st Law of Thermodynamics a.k.a Conservation of Energy you aren't actually gaining any energy by separating water into H2 and O2 and then combusting the H2, in an ideal situation you break even. However, by the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics no perfect Carnot engine exists, so you always lose energy in the process, and thus you will lose energy and money by trying to use hydrogen created by electrolysis of water as fuel. You would be much better off trying to find a natural source of hydrogen somewhere, but such caches are few and far between on Earth.
A lot of the time it is very hard for young children to distinguish between fantasy and reality, especially in a game like GTA that is based off real situations. You could probably even get them to believe that the Warcraft universe is real. How many times have you seen young kids roleplay? It's natural for humans to do that, and with young kids they aren't mature enough to reliably distinguish between fantasy and reality.
Yes, it is very difficult to enforce your IP rights in China, in fact it is hard to do legitimate business in general b/c you're constantly competing against entities who pull weird shit. The morals that should accompany capitalism haven't followed China's developing capitalist economy. (Yes, it is growing towards capitalism.) So, you have restauarant owners who are willing to poison their neighbors' restaurant to kill their business, and end up killing 50 people in the process.
A similar state occurred in the USA in the 19th century. Based what has happened in the US since, I think that if China keeps developing its capitalism it will eventually stabilize and the blatant abuses will be weeded out.
I disagree, good comments are always necessary. Working in a CS research group has allowed me to see how important commenting code actually is. We may think we're all tough and we can read any program from scratch, give yourself a 2000 line program you've never seen before and you'll change your tune. It will take you far too much time and effort to read that program and figure out what it's doing if there are no comments clearly telling you. One of the most important purposes of writing code is so it can be reused, and if you don't write good comments it will be very hard to reuse.
Yes, we are squelching the terrorists' speech, but think about what they're talking about. They're talking about killing us all in a massive holy war and taking over the world. There are limits on what is acceptable speech, and I'm certain most would agree that talking like this is not acceptable.
On the other issue, I think there is a very delicate balance. On one hand, we could just hack the web site/servers and monitor them to monitor the terrorists' movements. However, letting those web servers stay up creates a great danger. Many young prospective terrorists are frustrated with their situation and hate the Americans, but they aren't necessarily convinced to perform terrorist acts until they see Al-Qaeda's recruiting or propaganda. Al-Qaeda uses their web sites to recruit more members faster, because more sympathizers can see the terrorist's message. It works like this with most rebel groups; they need to get their word out in order to more effectively recruit those who sympathize. Without getting their word out many sympathizers would never join up. The Internet is one of the best ways to do that. If we brought the web servers down, it would put a major crimp in their spreading of propaganda and it would slow the flow of young Muslim men signing up to become terrorists.
Personally, I would side with the people who want to bring the web servers down, because I'm certain that the terrorists would quickly find out that they are being hacked if we tried to hack them, and fix the problem, and then we're back to square one.
You're mostly right, but neocons are not necessarily Christian. Neocons are the ones that want to go fight in Iraq/Iran/Afghanistan/Syria/the Moon, a departure from traditional isolationist Republican policy (which has sort of died out). The Christians are the Christians, period. It used to be (up until about 20 years ago) that the Republican party was dominated by business interests, but now with the influence of the evangelicals and the neocons that has fallen by the wayside and we can easily see what the Republicans stand for now.
Agreed. One of the strongest anti-American arguments internationally right now when it comes to human rights is that given the American abuses in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Camp X-Ray, they have no right to criticize others over human rights. The American position on human rights has seriously deteriorated over the last 5 years.
Slashdot Mirror
The copyright laws themselves are about the same in China as they are everywhere. But enforcement is EXTREMELY lax. Every so often in the news they'll report that a big piracy ring has been busted, but in general piracy is still rampant. Remember that Windows 98 came out in China before it did in the USA?
Look around in the streets of Beijing. You'll see DVDs and VCDs for dirt cheap prices of say 3 RMB (8 RMB = 1 USD). Of course, many of those many not be real, but that's another story. You can walk into a store, and you'll see movies that are still in movie theaters, already in DVD form selling for say 15 RMB, which is about $1.87. You're not going to tell me that the **AA approves of that b/c selling a legal DVD for $1.87 would be preposterous.
The DVDs on the street almost certainly don't work. (Trust me, I've tried to buy many of them). There are stores where you can buy them for cheap, and the quality is more reliable, although you can't be sure.
The parent post is not insightful at all. Maybe funny. If the court of law says you're guilty, you are going to pay the punishment, or else you'll suffer even worse consequences. (Fine -> higher fine -> jail time)
In this case the "fair use" associated with bnetd was basically playing on B.Net using stolen CD keys. This equates to getting the software from Blizzard for free illegally, which equates to stealing, which is beyond any possible definition of fair use. The "appellants waived any fair use defense" b/c no such defense existed.
It's quite possible there is a bounty hunter for the RIAA on your network. Those are people who get paid by the RIAA to expose file-sharers. I know for certain there are some at my school (Caltech), so I'm very careful when using file sharing services on my network.
Ever heard of the saying "beat the child to save the class"? That's what the RIAA is doing. The usage of this technique certainly has plenty of precedent, from schoolteachers to dictators. Its effectiveness varies depending on the situation. I think that it's probably the RIAA's best shot at controlling music piracy, because they can't afford to prosecute everyone who pirates music, but they can't let piracy go either, because then it becomes socially acceptable and banning it would become very difficult (see Prohibition for an example of this). Therefore, they're trying to stir fear into the hearts of the public by going hard after a few people; thus they stem the tide of piracy. People who don't care would pirate anyway, but if the RIAA makes an example it prevents a lot of ordinary people from thinking that it is socially acceptable and thus start doing it.
It is well known that science can be wrong. For example, before about 1900 the model of the universe was based on Galilean relativity, which was proven wrong by Einstein and friends. Those results were based on well-conceived and performed experiments, all of which confirmed their hypothesis (b/c they couldn't get close to light-speed so they couldn't tell).
But if the creationists/intelligent design advocates/Christian fundamentalists want to use this to say that they're right, they're relying on a logical fallacy. Just because a few papers are wrong doesn't mean that their view is correct. Their view of creationism is not the only alternative to the view of evolution present in a few possibly flawed papers. Evolution may work in a way that we aren't sure about, but this doesn't prove that intelligent design is correct.
It is made by compressing buckyballs (C_60), which consist of carbon, just like Diamond. For the record charcoal and graphite are forms of carbon too. All of these things are just carbon atoms arranged in different ways. The name of the substance has the word "diamond" in it b/c it is similar to diamond, but it is not the same as diamond.
The whole censorship thing has been blown out of proportion and has been beaten to death (and beyond) on Slashdot. Please don't bring that up again. Personally, I think that they don't have any moral obligation to oppose censorship, but they do have a moral obligation to follow the laws of the countries that they're doing business with, and so they are justified in complying with Chinese requirements. You can denounce the Chinese internet policies as much as you want, but I don't think you should be blaming Google.
Free wi-fi is a very cool idea, except some cities have tried to do it and the process is getting bogged down in court. It is possible that the same may happen to Google in its attempt.
They still do. It's just that they have much more features now and that the original purpose of a graphing calculator has been obscured. Now for most they are either cheating implements or a glorified Gameboy. Honestly, for mathematical applications I'd rather use Mathematica, because I'd rather have my 2.66 GHz P4 crunch numbers rather than a Motorola 68000 10 MHz processor (this is the processor on a TI-89).
No, I'm not implying that. Everyone reporting news has his own agenda. For example, a totalitarian state will warp battle reports to seems like its army was winning great victories every day. Slashdot has its own agenda of promoting technology and "freedom" (this can apply in many senses so I'm leaving it in quotes), and so it may for example sensationalize stories of people getting prosecuted for IP/DRM violations. However, it is clear that the American media is driven by profit, so its reports will be sensationalized to make more money.
The media will report in a way that sensationalizes the issue, whether it is liberal or conservative. They don't want boring mundane stories. They want interesting groundbreaking stories. So they have to exaggerate. The American media is run by big business, so its intrinsic purpose is NOT to report news like in some places, or be a mouthpiece for the government in some other places. Its purpose is to make money, like all big businesses do, and they do it by reporting news and generating ad revenue. So one should not be surprised when issues are exaggerated in order to seem more important. This is certainly the case here because this study is being blown up to something it probably doesn't actually mean.
Well, not everyone hates Mario Sunshine or Zelda Wind Waker, so you don't need to generalize there. I agree that sequels that are marginally different from their predecessors aren't worth buying, and EA sports games (NBA Live, Madden, etc.) is a good example of that.
However, one example of sequels I think that was done well was Super Smash Bros. SSB Melee had enough new features and changes to keep it interesting, but it was similar enough to the original SSB that it was still very familiar and fun in the same way the original SSB was. That game I think had a very good balance of originality versus reuse of things that are proven to be good.
Here is a link to their paper:
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/0504878102v1.pdf
As a Chinese citizen living and educated in the USA, I completely understand the significance and the magnitude of the Holocaust. However, most people of the West do not share the same understanding of the suffering of the Chinese during World War II. Read the numbers here:_ War#Chinese_Casualties
I agree with you on most of your points, but I disagree that the Holocaust dwarfed the Japanese war atrocities. Simply by the numbers you can see that the number killed are similar. In addition, most of the Japanese massacres were orchestrated in an attempt to scare the Chinese into compliance with their policies (this succeeded somewhat, but certainly not as much as they would have liked). Obviously Westerners will think that the Holocaust was more important, but there is no need to denigrate the comparable suffering of the Chinese.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Sino-Japanese
Oh, and before anyone says this, whatever the Communists purportedly did is not relevant in this discussion.
The rape of Nanking was only one incident, and was completely indicative of Japan's atrocities in Asia (China, Korea, SE Asia). See this:_ Atrocities
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Japanese_War
The people of China and Korea (both of them) will never forgive the Japanese for what they did in World War II during their totally unjustified quest to create the "East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere" i.e. the Japanese Empire.
It is quite interesting how the war is treated differently in regards to the treatment of Japan and Germany. When one talks about Germany during World War II, all he/she usually talks about is the Holocaust and other acts of Nazi brutality. Rarely is the plight of the German people mentioned. This in my opinion is totally justified. However, when one talks about the Japanese, a quite significant number will choose to talk about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and how terrible it was for the Japanese civilians. The story that the first poster put up may be touching, but if you listen to the stories of the many millions of Chinese and Koreans who were brutalized, this story seems trite and insignificant in comparison. In my opinion much more focus should be put on Japan's war atrocities, just like Germany's war atrocities are commonly focused upon.
As a Chinese native living in the USA, I am surprised daily as to how many people feel sympathy for the Japanese b/c they were nukes, because I can never bring myself to feel such sympathy. To sympathize with them, is to denigrate the millions of my countrymen who were brutally slaughtered.
No, it takes exactly the same amount of energy. It's called the 1st Law of Thermodynamics a.k.a. the Conservation of Energy. Where the energy is lost is through the machinery, which is never 100% efficient b/c entropy is always increasing in the universe (2nd Law of Thermodynamics.) Get your chemistry/thermodynamics straight before you say something like that.
Not true, the 2nd series of emission from hydrogen (the Balmer Series) are in the visible spectrum.
You probably don't want to run your car on hydrogen that comes from water, because by the 1st Law of Thermodynamics a.k.a Conservation of Energy you aren't actually gaining any energy by separating water into H2 and O2 and then combusting the H2, in an ideal situation you break even. However, by the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics no perfect Carnot engine exists, so you always lose energy in the process, and thus you will lose energy and money by trying to use hydrogen created by electrolysis of water as fuel. You would be much better off trying to find a natural source of hydrogen somewhere, but such caches are few and far between on Earth.
A lot of the time it is very hard for young children to distinguish between fantasy and reality, especially in a game like GTA that is based off real situations. You could probably even get them to believe that the Warcraft universe is real. How many times have you seen young kids roleplay? It's natural for humans to do that, and with young kids they aren't mature enough to reliably distinguish between fantasy and reality.
Yes, it is very difficult to enforce your IP rights in China, in fact it is hard to do legitimate business in general b/c you're constantly competing against entities who pull weird shit. The morals that should accompany capitalism haven't followed China's developing capitalist economy. (Yes, it is growing towards capitalism.) So, you have restauarant owners who are willing to poison their neighbors' restaurant to kill their business, and end up killing 50 people in the process.
A similar state occurred in the USA in the 19th century. Based what has happened in the US since, I think that if China keeps developing its capitalism it will eventually stabilize and the blatant abuses will be weeded out.
I disagree, good comments are always necessary. Working in a CS research group has allowed me to see how important commenting code actually is. We may think we're all tough and we can read any program from scratch, give yourself a 2000 line program you've never seen before and you'll change your tune. It will take you far too much time and effort to read that program and figure out what it's doing if there are no comments clearly telling you. One of the most important purposes of writing code is so it can be reused, and if you don't write good comments it will be very hard to reuse.
Yes, we are squelching the terrorists' speech, but think about what they're talking about. They're talking about killing us all in a massive holy war and taking over the world. There are limits on what is acceptable speech, and I'm certain most would agree that talking like this is not acceptable.
On the other issue, I think there is a very delicate balance. On one hand, we could just hack the web site/servers and monitor them to monitor the terrorists' movements. However, letting those web servers stay up creates a great danger. Many young prospective terrorists are frustrated with their situation and hate the Americans, but they aren't necessarily convinced to perform terrorist acts until they see Al-Qaeda's recruiting or propaganda. Al-Qaeda uses their web sites to recruit more members faster, because more sympathizers can see the terrorist's message. It works like this with most rebel groups; they need to get their word out in order to more effectively recruit those who sympathize. Without getting their word out many sympathizers would never join up. The Internet is one of the best ways to do that. If we brought the web servers down, it would put a major crimp in their spreading of propaganda and it would slow the flow of young Muslim men signing up to become terrorists.
Personally, I would side with the people who want to bring the web servers down, because I'm certain that the terrorists would quickly find out that they are being hacked if we tried to hack them, and fix the problem, and then we're back to square one.
You're mostly right, but neocons are not necessarily Christian. Neocons are the ones that want to go fight in Iraq/Iran/Afghanistan/Syria/the Moon, a departure from traditional isolationist Republican policy (which has sort of died out). The Christians are the Christians, period. It used to be (up until about 20 years ago) that the Republican party was dominated by business interests, but now with the influence of the evangelicals and the neocons that has fallen by the wayside and we can easily see what the Republicans stand for now.
Agreed. One of the strongest anti-American arguments internationally right now when it comes to human rights is that given the American abuses in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Camp X-Ray, they have no right to criticize others over human rights. The American position on human rights has seriously deteriorated over the last 5 years.