No, it wouldn't. Not at all. You can very well have a market economy in a totalitarian state. Chile had one. China has one.
In fact, market economy precedes democracy, and before there is market economy, there can't be democracy.
Furthermore, China IS totalitarian, but it is NOT communist, other than in the name. It has in fact never been communist; there was never a proletarian revolution in China, since there wasn't an industrial proletariat, There has never been any social welfare in China of the kind seen in Eastern Europe, which had free education, free medicaid and so on. In China, you have always paid for you schooling and medical treatment, and if you didnät have money, you were basically fucked. This is still so.
China was Maoist between 1949 to 1976, not Communist.
Right, Americans are dying everyday, but no one asked them to come. It is the same in China. Believe it or not, but most Chinese stand behind the government in principle.
There will be a day when China is ready for democracy, but that is still ahead of us. When the day comes, the instruments (Google and other Internet tools) will be in place to facilitate the regime shift.
Today, our goal is to tie China as tightly as we can to the rest of the world, so as to make it inevitable that democracy is on the roadmap. That is why we want to see Beijing host the olympics. That is why we want China in the WTO. That is why we want Amurcan and other Western companies having a strong presence in China.
Nah, there are tons of movies rotting away in freezers at the *AA associated studios. There is no commercial interest in restoring them and digitizing them, but since THEM have the copyright on it, US will see it be lost forever.
The same applies to digital stuff. People have the only copies and/or the copyright, and it will one day go through the bit bucket because the owner is greedy / mentally insane / depressed / had a fire or what have you.
All the good digital stuff, like Asian 4 You, will eventually go down the same drain as the library in Alexandria.
People in China still rely heavily on diskettes and other gadgets found in computers from the previous century, and I am sure this is more true in India and in Africa. Thus, in 2045 we need look no farther than the poorer parts of the world to find older equipment. Just look at all the 50s cars found in abundance on Cuba.
The question is rather if the USA exists in 2045. There are other, more important questions as well, and this is a non-issue. People who update technology usually transfer their stuff to their new medium. If they don't it just means it is not worth preserving anyway.
While I congratulate the TECH site Slashdot for bringing its content into the realms of somewhat standardized code in a time when most sites have -- at last -- switched to Unicode compliance and XHTML (still a last century technology), I put the coffee in the throat when trying to validate the site:
mp3.baidu.com is foremost used for searching Chinese music, and it is *the* choice for those of us who like Chen Huilin and other Chinese artists. Many Chinese artists, particularly in Honggong and Taiwan, are signed with Western record companies.
Western artists, with a few exceptions, are not that very popular in China. Thus it is not at all like the Chinese are stealing Western stuff, but rather stealing their own shit, and this affects Western as well as Chinese record companies.
In China, very few people actually buy legal CDs. Most people either download mp3 versions or buy a pirated CD/DVD in the many stores along the streets; legal CDs can sometimes be bought in department stores, but in actuality this is rare. I know this since I have been looking like mad for legal copies of Wang Fei's albums, which I had to order online to get hold of.
The way Chinese artists make money is by concerts, where seats are sold for 80 yuan (wayyyyy up arena seats) to 2500 yuan (premium seat front stage), with most on-field tickets sold for 800 yuan and up. This is way more expensive than in the West.
To me it seems like people have given up record sales in favor of other means of making the money. This is actually a sound mentality.
Of course they didn't implement the native Windows widgets. Apple knows how to do UI, so they're just showing Joe Sixpack on his WinXp boxen how it's been done and how it should be done. It doesn't spoil the Windows "user experience", since it is already on a low level.
Now, the other way around would, namely forcing inferior UI widgets onto a superior UI would significantly ruin the user experience (which is what Apple is all about), while that is not true if you force superior UI elements onto an inferior UI.
Mac OS X users have from time to time been exposed to such environmental pollution. For instance, the ugliest port in the world is probably Wenlin, a Chinese study program. It makes me puke everytime I see its ugly Windows widgets, but unfortunately there's no alternative as of now.
Mosty Mac users react very negatively to such UI disturbances. Therefore, apps that do not comply to the Mac UI guidelines WILL fail to be killer apps, no matter how well they perform.
I hope they stay the fuck away from the Mac, and if they still want to do stuff on the platform, they'd better comply 100% to the native UI, using native widgets and native APIs (Cocoa, or go to hell).
Contrary to popular belief, there is not one single MS app that is crucial for the Mac.
Apple was an extremely bad example of yours. Ever heard of Darwin? It is open source, runs on PPC and Intel. You can tweak it as much as you want (like Google wants), and if you are a government employee (like in the remainder of the article) you can just boot up the full Mac OS X to get a usability that linux will never come close to.
We need space weapons in order to defend ourselves against the Goa'uld and the Replicators.
Kidding aside, it is inevitable that we develop such weapons, as it is inevitable that we will someday extend the human race's Lebensraum. Far away from today, there will be en encounter with another world's creatures, and I'd rather be prepared for the worst than be a sitting duck offering the potential enemy a peace pipe.
If a weapon can be devloped, it will be developed. Any weapon that is developed will be deployed.
Nah. Apple just responded to a natural process, namely PC users constantly bringing up clock frequency in Mac / PC death discussions.
I myself used to be one of those mac advocates and zealots, until I found myself going round in circles, missing the whole point.
Someone would say, "oh, I can just go down to Bernie's Custom Depot, get an Athlon 4 GHz motherboard, a cheap SVGA 23" screen, a 500 GB harddrive etc, put it all together and it will dance around your weenie Mac for a third of the price tag"
And I would say, "well, that's fine with me, but that machine can't run Mac OS X, and I simply won't use a Wintel boxen, since it is APITA. I don't want to have virus protection, and I want my stuff to Just Work, and I want it all to be neat and pretty"
Then the argument follows, "bah, stupid lame Mac (l)users, who cares about translucent windows, transparency, anti-aliasing and such nonsense? and for the record, MY wintel box has NEVER had any virus or spyware"
Me, "neither have I"
And, "that's because the Mac market share is, what? 1%? Nobody cares to write viruses for a marginal OS"
Further, "BMW is a marginal car"
But, "that is the usual crap analogy from mac (l)users, BMW is a fine and fast car, MacApple is a slow, what, 1.33 GHz, horse"
And so, "as if this megahertz myth shouldn't be buried a long time ago"
Etc, "why should it, of course a 4 Ghz Pentum is faster than a 1 GHz Mottorola. You notice immediatley how pages fly on Windoze, but are slow as molasses on the Mac"
"They are not comparable architectures, and of course it takes more power to render text with anti-aliasing and ATSUI typography"
"Oh, here we go again with that eye candy, who needs that shit?"
"Who needs metallic colored cars, or cars with design at all?"
"This is not a car, but a computer, a toaster!"
"Same thing"
"Oh yeah, but it is still a slow motherfucker, and you only have a fraction of the apps that are available for the PC"
"Right, specialized DOS programs for accounting or making CD covers"
"Bull, what about games? Can you play games on the mac? AFAIK there are only a few good games for the mac, and they are lousy ports. there's no money in making good games for a marginal platform with inferior technology; i get 60 fps for Quake on my Bernie Custom Special Motherfucker!"
Etc. It follows that all discussions return to the speed issue, and unless you are very tech savvy and can argue about productivity issues like viruses, uptime and so on, you are going to lose the debate. Thus, Jobs needed to kill the megahertz myth to reach the ears of the ignorant masses, who believe a dragster (PC) is better than a BMW (Mac). The former is indeed faster, but the latter is more productive.
Now you know what Apple's 1984 commercial was really about.
Because Big Brother cares about standards just as much as your favorite software company.
Because Big Brother doesn't know the Internet is comprised of standardized protocols and methods.
Because Big Brother is a dump for losers who can't get a job elsewhere where quality matters.
It would be a piece of cake developing a Java version of a tax application. The reason governments don't is that they since long are filials to Microsoft Corp. Although every government have rules concerning monopolies and want diversity, this doesn't apply to the government itself.
And although the government is screaming about security in personal computing, they still use Windows and Internet Explorer, and expect everybody else to do so too. Their standpoint is that Microsoft should better themselves, not to use the already many existing alternatives, which are all better in most regards.
This is an oxymoron, and it will not change. Because this is Big Brother, and Big Brother is big and slow. Get used to it, and try to get back at the government in other ways. I know I always do.
Yeah, in Chinese Microsoft is translated as Weiruan, where "wei" means miniscule, small, tiny and is also the prefix micro, and "ruan" means soft ("software" is accordingly "ruanjian"). Similar with Japanese and other Asian langauges.
Speakers of English can easily infer that the company name is really short for Software for microcomputers, but all in all, Microsoft means small and soft, also in English, if you are to take it literally.
(My humble apologies for being unable to write out characters; Slashdot, this modern and geekily techy site, seems to have some problems chewing representations of anything but Latin 1.)
OpenOffice has a horrible UI, doesn't take advantage of native services, doesn't know what Unicode means on Mac OS X and is a terribly bloated product. It is just a port, nothing more. Much of this also goes for Microsoft Office and other apps.
The only thing that counts on Mac OS X are pure Cocoa apps that take advantage of all Mac OS X technologies (ATSUI, services and so on), and that deliver the smoothest performance and the most elegant rendering, including native UI elements.
Yeah, every nation requires an ID card every now and then, this is normal. But in the socialist cradle-to-grave welfare kingdom of Sveeden you need to show an ID card for the most trivial things. The system is based on your birthdate (yymmdd), two additional numbers (showing birthplace), a number showing sex (odd for male), and a control number (modulo 2 control) of the form yymmdd-xxsc. This number is asked for in the most bizarre circumstances, such as signing up for membership in an online (or offline) club and so on. It is used excessively, not so much by the authorities, but by the whole private sector, who uses it not just for control reasons, but also because it automatically gives sex, age and origin. With this number, you can check a person's income, taxes, and whatever is in the official registers. It is so obvious that anyone can extract vital data from it, unlike the American social security number. I often feel stripped of my identity whenever someone's asking for this "personal number"; it puts you in a diminished position in a way that is hard to explain, but is obvious after living with it for a while.
I have not seen anything like this in any other country, and the least so in China. You would think it was to be on the contrary, but it isn't. In fact, many people have a hukou ID that states a false name. My girlfriend's birthdate is wrong on her ID card. There is total chaos when it comes to ID and such in China.
Foreigners are asked to show their passport if they travel by air or do bank business, otherwise no one cares.
Yeah, I've also grown up with this system, but I still haven't got used to it. In fact, I am more and more aggravated by it. It is a token of a control freak nation, the nation which "caters" its citizens from the cradel to the grave.
I find it an irony of immeasurable proportions that I right now feel so much free in a dictatorship like China, where this kind of system is unheard of.
I don't see the point. Take a look at http://bbs.chinadaily.com.cn/ for an example of Chinese debate on various topics. Although articles can be pulled if deemed too offensive (this is a newspaper, whose existence dependes on the party's benevolence), there are no simple words like democracy or freedom that are forbidden. Chinese censorship simply doesn't operate on that level.
On the site you can see examples, mostly in English and sometimes in Chinese, of pretty straightforward debate on most sensitive issues, and my impression is that anything goes as long as you are informed about the matter you are discussing.
Furthermore, I don't understand how you could ban words. It is easy to circumvent this, because you can just use similar-sounding characters to fool the system; people will still understand that ziyou means freedom, regardless of what characters are used. You could also write it backwards, or use latin letters. Or why not l33t.
If every person reading Slashdot and having a web site made their respective sites compliant with the standards (and thereby with Gecko/KDE browsers) and completely ignored IE, Firefox growth would really explode. It is a common mistake thinking that the mega portals drive the development in the market; it is actually the many many less important sites combined that make a difference.
But even Slashdot people (and other tech savvy people) are so conservative as to still respecting the impact of IE, and since even their web sites generally don't require Gecko/KDE, there's no reason for the more clueless masses to switch. Extensions for spoofing and such do not appeal to the non-savvy people.
It is that simple. We have these great new cars (the Fox, Safari, Mozilla, etc.), but the roads need to be rebuilt to allow these cars to utilize their full power.
Slashdot Mirror
No, it wouldn't. Not at all. You can very well have a market economy in a totalitarian state. Chile had one. China has one.
In fact, market economy precedes democracy, and before there is market economy, there can't be democracy.
Furthermore, China IS totalitarian, but it is NOT communist, other than in the name. It has in fact never been communist; there was never a proletarian revolution in China, since there wasn't an industrial proletariat, There has never been any social welfare in China of the kind seen in Eastern Europe, which had free education, free medicaid and so on. In China, you have always paid for you schooling and medical treatment, and if you didnät have money, you were basically fucked. This is still so.
China was Maoist between 1949 to 1976, not Communist.
Right, Americans are dying everyday, but no one asked them to come. It is the same in China. Believe it or not, but most Chinese stand behind the government in principle.
There will be a day when China is ready for democracy, but that is still ahead of us. When the day comes, the instruments (Google and other Internet tools) will be in place to facilitate the regime shift.
Today, our goal is to tie China as tightly as we can to the rest of the world, so as to make it inevitable that democracy is on the roadmap. That is why we want to see Beijing host the olympics. That is why we want China in the WTO. That is why we want Amurcan and other Western companies having a strong presence in China.
Nah, there are tons of movies rotting away in freezers at the *AA associated studios. There is no commercial interest in restoring them and digitizing them, but since THEM have the copyright on it, US will see it be lost forever.
The same applies to digital stuff. People have the only copies and/or the copyright, and it will one day go through the bit bucket because the owner is greedy / mentally insane / depressed / had a fire or what have you.
All the good digital stuff, like Asian 4 You, will eventually go down the same drain as the library in Alexandria.
Aye. I prefer runestones, although the rune porn is less juicy than MPEG-4.
People in China still rely heavily on diskettes and other gadgets found in computers from the previous century, and I am sure this is more true in India and in Africa. Thus, in 2045 we need look no farther than the poorer parts of the world to find older equipment. Just look at all the 50s cars found in abundance on Cuba.
The question is rather if the USA exists in 2045. There are other, more important questions as well, and this is a non-issue. People who update technology usually transfer their stuff to their new medium. If they don't it just means it is not worth preserving anyway.
Well, it doesn't matter, as long as we get rid of IE.
There is no fairness in real life, and this is WAR.
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script type="text/javascript" language="javascript" src="http://a.as-us.falkag.
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While I congratulate the TECH site Slashdot for bringing its content into the realms of somewhat standardized code in a time when most sites have -- at last -- switched to Unicode compliance and XHTML (still a last century technology), I put the coffee in the throat when trying to validate the site:
a shdot.org%2F
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fsl
I got the following unexpected response when trying to retrieve http://slashdot.org/>:
403 Forbidden
User-agent: Baiduspider /m
Disallow:
mp3.baidu.com is foremost used for searching Chinese music, and it is *the* choice for those of us who like Chen Huilin and other Chinese artists. Many Chinese artists, particularly in Honggong and Taiwan, are signed with Western record companies.
Western artists, with a few exceptions, are not that very popular in China. Thus it is not at all like the Chinese are stealing Western stuff, but rather stealing their own shit, and this affects Western as well as Chinese record companies.
In China, very few people actually buy legal CDs. Most people either download mp3 versions or buy a pirated CD/DVD in the many stores along the streets; legal CDs can sometimes be bought in department stores, but in actuality this is rare. I know this since I have been looking like mad for legal copies of Wang Fei's albums, which I had to order online to get hold of.
The way Chinese artists make money is by concerts, where seats are sold for 80 yuan (wayyyyy up arena seats) to 2500 yuan (premium seat front stage), with most on-field tickets sold for 800 yuan and up. This is way more expensive than in the West.
To me it seems like people have given up record sales in favor of other means of making the money. This is actually a sound mentality.
Of course they didn't implement the native Windows widgets. Apple knows how to do UI, so they're just showing Joe Sixpack on his WinXp boxen how it's been done and how it should be done. It doesn't spoil the Windows "user experience", since it is already on a low level.
Now, the other way around would, namely forcing inferior UI widgets onto a superior UI would significantly ruin the user experience (which is what Apple is all about), while that is not true if you force superior UI elements onto an inferior UI.
Mac OS X users have from time to time been exposed to such environmental pollution. For instance, the ugliest port in the world is probably Wenlin, a Chinese study program. It makes me puke everytime I see its ugly Windows widgets, but unfortunately there's no alternative as of now.
Mosty Mac users react very negatively to such UI disturbances. Therefore, apps that do not comply to the Mac UI guidelines WILL fail to be killer apps, no matter how well they perform.
Microsoft doesn't know shyte about UI design.
I hope they stay the fuck away from the Mac, and if they still want to do stuff on the platform, they'd better comply 100% to the native UI, using native widgets and native APIs (Cocoa, or go to hell).
Contrary to popular belief, there is not one single MS app that is crucial for the Mac.
Apple was an extremely bad example of yours. Ever heard of Darwin? It is open source, runs on PPC and Intel. You can tweak it as much as you want (like Google wants), and if you are a government employee (like in the remainder of the article) you can just boot up the full Mac OS X to get a usability that linux will never come close to.
Search results for...
the Chinese word "bi1" (meaning cunt):
Google: 439,000
Yahoo: 402,000
the Cantonese word "len" (meaning cock):
Google: error
Yahoo: 0
We need space weapons in order to defend ourselves against the Goa'uld and the Replicators.
Kidding aside, it is inevitable that we develop such weapons, as it is inevitable that we will someday extend the human race's Lebensraum. Far away from today, there will be en encounter with another world's creatures, and I'd rather be prepared for the worst than be a sitting duck offering the potential enemy a peace pipe.
If a weapon can be devloped, it will be developed. Any weapon that is developed will be deployed.
Nah. Apple just responded to a natural process, namely PC users constantly bringing up clock frequency in Mac / PC death discussions.
I myself used to be one of those mac advocates and zealots, until I found myself going round in circles, missing the whole point.
Someone would say, "oh, I can just go down to Bernie's Custom Depot, get an Athlon 4 GHz motherboard, a cheap SVGA 23" screen, a 500 GB harddrive etc, put it all together and it will dance around your weenie Mac for a third of the price tag"
And I would say, "well, that's fine with me, but that machine can't run Mac OS X, and I simply won't use a Wintel boxen, since it is APITA. I don't want to have virus protection, and I want my stuff to Just Work, and I want it all to be neat and pretty"
Then the argument follows, "bah, stupid lame Mac (l)users, who cares about translucent windows, transparency, anti-aliasing and such nonsense? and for the record, MY wintel box has NEVER had any virus or spyware"
Me, "neither have I"
And, "that's because the Mac market share is, what? 1%? Nobody cares to write viruses for a marginal OS"
Further, "BMW is a marginal car"
But, "that is the usual crap analogy from mac (l)users, BMW is a fine and fast car, MacApple is a slow, what, 1.33 GHz, horse"
And so, "as if this megahertz myth shouldn't be buried a long time ago"
Etc, "why should it, of course a 4 Ghz Pentum is faster than a 1 GHz Mottorola. You notice immediatley how pages fly on Windoze, but are slow as molasses on the Mac"
"They are not comparable architectures, and of course it takes more power to render text with anti-aliasing and ATSUI typography"
"Oh, here we go again with that eye candy, who needs that shit?"
"Who needs metallic colored cars, or cars with design at all?"
"This is not a car, but a computer, a toaster!"
"Same thing"
"Oh yeah, but it is still a slow motherfucker, and you only have a fraction of the apps that are available for the PC"
"Right, specialized DOS programs for accounting or making CD covers"
"Bull, what about games? Can you play games on the mac? AFAIK there are only a few good games for the mac, and they are lousy ports. there's no money in making good games for a marginal platform with inferior technology; i get 60 fps for Quake on my Bernie Custom Special Motherfucker!"
Etc. It follows that all discussions return to the speed issue, and unless you are very tech savvy and can argue about productivity issues like viruses, uptime and so on, you are going to lose the debate. Thus, Jobs needed to kill the megahertz myth to reach the ears of the ignorant masses, who believe a dragster (PC) is better than a BMW (Mac). The former is indeed faster, but the latter is more productive.
Now you know what Apple's 1984 commercial was really about.
Because Big Brother cares about standards just as much as your favorite software company.
Because Big Brother doesn't know the Internet is comprised of standardized protocols and methods.
Because Big Brother is a dump for losers who can't get a job elsewhere where quality matters.
It would be a piece of cake developing a Java version of a tax application. The reason governments don't is that they since long are filials to Microsoft Corp. Although every government have rules concerning monopolies and want diversity, this doesn't apply to the government itself.
And although the government is screaming about security in personal computing, they still use Windows and Internet Explorer, and expect everybody else to do so too. Their standpoint is that Microsoft should better themselves, not to use the already many existing alternatives, which are all better in most regards.
This is an oxymoron, and it will not change. Because this is Big Brother, and Big Brother is big and slow. Get used to it, and try to get back at the government in other ways. I know I always do.
Testing... HTML entitites...
Yeah, in Chinese Microsoft is translated as Weiruan, where "wei" means miniscule, small, tiny and is also the prefix micro, and "ruan" means soft ("software" is accordingly "ruanjian"). Similar with Japanese and other Asian langauges.
Speakers of English can easily infer that the company name is really short for Software for microcomputers, but all in all, Microsoft means small and soft, also in English, if you are to take it literally.
(My humble apologies for being unable to write out characters; Slashdot, this modern and geekily techy site, seems to have some problems chewing representations of anything but Latin 1.)
Surely a flamebait?
OpenOffice has a horrible UI, doesn't take advantage of native services, doesn't know what Unicode means on Mac OS X and is a terribly bloated product. It is just a port, nothing more. Much of this also goes for Microsoft Office and other apps.
The only thing that counts on Mac OS X are pure Cocoa apps that take advantage of all Mac OS X technologies (ATSUI, services and so on), and that deliver the smoothest performance and the most elegant rendering, including native UI elements.
Yeah, every nation requires an ID card every now and then, this is normal. But in the socialist cradle-to-grave welfare kingdom of Sveeden you need to show an ID card for the most trivial things. The system is based on your birthdate (yymmdd), two additional numbers (showing birthplace), a number showing sex (odd for male), and a control number (modulo 2 control) of the form yymmdd-xxsc. This number is asked for in the most bizarre circumstances, such as signing up for membership in an online (or offline) club and so on. It is used excessively, not so much by the authorities, but by the whole private sector, who uses it not just for control reasons, but also because it automatically gives sex, age and origin. With this number, you can check a person's income, taxes, and whatever is in the official registers. It is so obvious that anyone can extract vital data from it, unlike the American social security number. I often feel stripped of my identity whenever someone's asking for this "personal number"; it puts you in a diminished position in a way that is hard to explain, but is obvious after living with it for a while.
I have not seen anything like this in any other country, and the least so in China. You would think it was to be on the contrary, but it isn't. In fact, many people have a hukou ID that states a false name. My girlfriend's birthdate is wrong on her ID card. There is total chaos when it comes to ID and such in China.
Foreigners are asked to show their passport if they travel by air or do bank business, otherwise no one cares.
Yeah, I've also grown up with this system, but I still haven't got used to it. In fact, I am more and more aggravated by it. It is a token of a control freak nation, the nation which "caters" its citizens from the cradel to the grave.
I find it an irony of immeasurable proportions that I right now feel so much free in a dictatorship like China, where this kind of system is unheard of.
I don't see the point. Take a look at http://bbs.chinadaily.com.cn/ for an example of Chinese debate on various topics. Although articles can be pulled if deemed too offensive (this is a newspaper, whose existence dependes on the party's benevolence), there are no simple words like democracy or freedom that are forbidden. Chinese censorship simply doesn't operate on that level.
On the site you can see examples, mostly in English and sometimes in Chinese, of pretty straightforward debate on most sensitive issues, and my impression is that anything goes as long as you are informed about the matter you are discussing.
Furthermore, I don't understand how you could ban words. It is easy to circumvent this, because you can just use similar-sounding characters to fool the system; people will still understand that ziyou means freedom, regardless of what characters are used. You could also write it backwards, or use latin letters. Or why not l33t.
No.
No, no, no! It is way better, dude. Now you can get your girlfriend a diamond dildo! Won't get any harder!
If every person reading Slashdot and having a web site made their respective sites compliant with the standards (and thereby with Gecko/KDE browsers) and completely ignored IE, Firefox growth would really explode. It is a common mistake thinking that the mega portals drive the development in the market; it is actually the many many less important sites combined that make a difference.
But even Slashdot people (and other tech savvy people) are so conservative as to still respecting the impact of IE, and since even their web sites generally don't require Gecko/KDE, there's no reason for the more clueless masses to switch. Extensions for spoofing and such do not appeal to the non-savvy people.
It is that simple. We have these great new cars (the Fox, Safari, Mozilla, etc.), but the roads need to be rebuilt to allow these cars to utilize their full power.