They've already given out $5,000 for top methods, and there's $15,000 still up for grabs.
Whoa there, big spender! I'm all for serving the public good, but if I was to work all those extra hours and discovered a useful new technique for using this data, and I have to choose between maybe getting somewhat less than what I still owe on my car, or trying to sell the code to the deep pockets of Big Pharma, I know which one I'm going to go with.
So who decided that the Open Source movement was about *not* making money? I thought it was about enlightened self-interest.
If you're talking about Open Source in contradistinction to Free Software, you're quite right. That is a major part of the distinction between the two ideological camps, and as near as I can tell, Linus Torvalds has always been squarely on the ESR/Open Source side of the fence.
Nor is there anything wrong with that, in and of itself, and I say that as someone who is just as squarely on the RMS/Free Software side of the fence, though of course my main motivator isn't enlightened self-interest as much as it is that I believe I have an ethical obligation to share and not to profit from artificial scarcity. There's room for both camps, and more overlap than the acrimony between prominent ideologues would have you believe.
And there's certainly room for businesses to contribute as long as they play by the rules which, it would seem, most of them actually do in this case. At the end of the day, I don't think most users care why the developers are sharing.
There is one kernel stack, yes, but its permutations are almost beyond count. It runs on literally thousands of different hardware devices. Even the major distros all roll their own. So the kernel, while nominally monolithic, varies considerably in practice.
There's only one peanut butter section at the grocery store, and it conforms to the almost infinite variations in the surface texture of different slices of bread. But it's still peanut butter, and you are out of luck if you'd like a ham sandwich, or maybe a bowl of soup. If you look at anything closely enough, whether it's Linux kernels or some sub-sub-sub-genre of dance music, you'll see endless variation. Granted, those variations are mostly inconsequential, but that's the danger with tunnel vision.
One of the defining characteristics of a monoculture is that it's susceptible to system-wide compromise. In short, if you can hack one instance of the monoculture, you can hack them all. That is arguably untrue of the Linux kernel.
If system security (or any other Linux strength) is the only thing you care about, then Linux is perfect. But that's ultimately a tautology. Of course Linux rocks in terms of the things that Linux admirers admire. The problem is that over time -- and I'd argue that we have to some extent reached this point -- the sheer mass of the system is self-reinforcing, and everything new has to be fit into the existing structure or be discarded, and as great as Linux is, there are many imagined and yet-to-be-imagined things that will not fit into the existing structure because they require a fundamentally different framework.
[...] experience teaches us that the Linux kernel seems to have few of the weaknesses of a classic monoculture while retaining many of its strengths.
I'll grant you that Linux has avoided many of traditional monoculture problems, but I suspect that has a lot more to do with the FOSS culture of which it is part than anything else. Being driven by people whose first concern is the quality of their product rather than profit opens up all kinds of possibilities that are simply denied to commercial, closed-source software, and the focus of Linux developers on fixing problems instead of polishing their PR is part of that. The shortcoming of monocultures that concerns me here -- that they tend, by their sheer size and inertia, to stifle innovation -- is no less true of Linux's role in the FOSS ecosystem than it is of any other monoculture.
Again, let me reiterate that I use and enjoy Linux and I'm tremendously grateful to the many people who have helped make it what it is today. My only concern is that it is not -- and cannot be -- a universal solution, and we would all benefit from redirecting some of the community's energy toward exploring new territory. Moreover, since there are far more people who are qualified and willing to work on the kernel than the process can accommodate, Linux development need not suffer any brain drain as a side effect.
No kidding. But thinking constructively, and not just about this particular case but the many others like it in diverse fields, what we need is a broad approach to the underlying problem, which is the way that industries manage to pack the regulatory agencies that oversee them with their own sympathizers. This probably has a lot less to do with whomever is occupying the Oval Office at the moment than with the sucking chest wound in our democracy that is the US Congress. One of the hazards of being a rich country is that there are an abundance of entities capable of marshaling the favors and outright bribes necessary to corrupt as many legislators as necessary. Until we find a way around that problem, we'll keep seeing crap like this no matter whom we elect.
Think about that for a minute, and you'll realize why it hasn't been done.
You'd fly for a long, long time in mostly empty space. When you found an asteroid, most of them would be too large for any conceivable weapon to significantly affect, and the smaller ones wouldn't just break in half, they'd break into hundreds or thousands of smaller chunks, traveling in all directions at high speeds. And those saucers? You'd never even see them, because they'd engage you at a range of several light seconds with beam weapons. Never mind the months and months of travel and complex calculations to be able to approach an asteroid without just hurtling past it.
Real physics is cool, but it doesn't often make for good arcade games.
I think we're pretty well covered as far as development tools go. The problem is that a lot of them aren't terribly well polished and the documentation -- if it exists at all -- is often terrible.
Find a project you like but that needs work and help bring it to maturity. Or go looking through the plethora of abandoned projects out there for something that looks promising and bring it back to life.
The larger problem here isn't that the Linux kernel group is exclusive -- though it probably does manage to deny itself (and its users) some good ideas as a result. It's that the FOSS world has developed a dominant monoculture that very definitely marginalizes alternative approaches that, both in the short term and in the long term, retards progress in other areas. Yes, there are FOSS alternatives to Linux, but we have arrived at a state where there is Linux, and then there is everything else. And that "everything else", excepting perhaps the *BSDs which are competitors in the Unix clone space rather than fundamental alternatives, generally lack maturity and application support.
That's only an acceptable state of affairs if you think Unix (and Linux's implementation of Unix) represent some kind of final end state in OS development. This is by no means a criticism of Linux in and of itself -- it's a fine OS and I'm glad to have it -- but in terms both of user choice and advancing the state of the art, it's no more healthy to have Linux as the overwhelmingly dominant player in the FOSS world than it was to have Windows as the overwhelmingly dominant player in the broader PC world.
Rather than fretting about getting into the inner sanctums of Linux development, more would be OS developers should be looking at the alternatives (or starting their own, if they have the vision for it). Most will fail, of course, but somewhere out there is a project that, like Linus Torvald's ambitious little toy *nix kernel all those years ago, will someday be a game changer. And even in failure, one learns a great deal -- perhaps enough that one might later find entry into more established circles easier.
You know there's a problem with the world when someone has to *explicitly clarify* that Special Relativity isn't being violated.
Hell, I'd be happy if people just got the Second Law of Thermodynamics through their thick skulls, never mind Special Relativity. Fully half of human culture -- the obnoxious, self-destructive half -- would be competing for museum space overnight.
FBI officials told The Post that their own review has found that about half of the 4,400 toll records collected in emergency situations or with after-the-fact approvals were done in technical violation of the law. (emphasis added)
It seldom happens here anymore because of the idea of "technicalities". Certain factions in the US -- chiefly the one that, with unconscious irony, is always calling for "law and order" -- have brainwashed large portions of the public into believing that the law doesn't or at least shouldn't matter in cases where the outcome displeases them. When someone is acquitted because law enforcement agencies trampled all over the law during their investigation, they are regarded as "getting off on a technicality", and it generally triggers a backlash against the rule of law and accusations that the courts in question are "soft on crime". Of course, what has happened is that the courts in question are actually tough on crime even when the crimes are committed by law enforcement, and they are far-sighted enough to know that treating law enforcement agencies as being above the law is the royal road to serfdom, but the yokels don't get it. In their view, the function of the law is to dish out punishment, not to maintain actual order, and anything that gets in the way of punishing people -- often including their actual innocence -- angers them.
Unfortunately, there's not a lot of sympathy among those types for enforcing proper police procedure. They're the same people who hold the view that if you have nothing to hide, you shouldn't care about being searched. And it's true enough that they have nothing to hide inside their trailer parks, so why worry?
I wouldn't expect anything to change until the "law and order" faction grasps the fact that the expression "technical violation of the law" has no actual meaning; something is in violation of the law or it is not, and if the law is to lead to justice, it must apply to everyone equally, whether it's a thug holding up a liquor store or a better-dressed thug illegally wiretapping American citizens.
Are there a lot of ex-Pentagon bureaucrats at Microsoft? Both seem to have an incredibly self-destructive habit of doing anything but owning up to the problems they create, apparently oblivious to the fact that it's a lot better for all involved if they were to just say, "Hey, we fucked up, and we're going to fix it," and then fixing it. It's not like the competing browsers haven't had plenty of security holes, but the difference with -- to pick the one I'm most familiar with -- Firefox is that when a vulnerability is discovered, my first awareness of it is generally a new welcome screen in the morning announcing the fix. With IE, it's listening to users and admins bitch about unresolved issues in browsers that have been in the field for for years.
Oh well, it could be worse. At least aerial defoliants and depleted uranium munitions are not among Microsoft's current offerings.
Not that I'm remotely a fan of Microsoft or their business practices, but to the extent that they do compete on their merits, they don't always suck, and Google could certainly use some competition. I haven't tried Bing yet, but I'll get around to it eventually, and if it's better than Google, at least for some things, I'll use it. And quite frankly, I have been increasingly dismayed by Google's search results lately, which seem to be slanted more and more to driving sales. That would be fine if the only thing I used search engines for was finding products, but I'm often looking for actual information.
In any case, market competition is usually beneficial to the consumer, and having a market overwhelmingly dominated by a single player is usually bad for the consumer. Even when the dominant player is reasonably ethical, as Google is, you end up with the same situation that arises in monarchies: the current king may be a wise and just ruler, but all bets are off on his heirs. Google is a publicly owned company, and if they stick around long enough, it's a statistical certainty that their leadership roles will eventually be filled by someone less competent and/or less ethical than the current incumbents. When that happens, it would be a lot better to have many competitors ready to take their place. (And certainly, we can't count on Microsoft to play the enlightened despot role.)
As far as the present goes, though, I don't think it really matters a lot whether people find their porn and other, less popular products through Bing or Google.
It's worth noting that you can make a complete human being without a Y chromosome. Its main function is to just signal the production of the sex hormones necessary to transform the (by default, female) fetus into a male. In fact, Y chromosomes have been shrinking for some time across species, indicative of the relative importance of their mere presence versus their negligible contents. It may well be that the higher mutation rate is a byproduct of cells saving energy by not doing much repair work on a chromosome whose contents are largely irrelevant.
"Ordinary" light in this case is incoherent light, i.e., light in which the individual waves are not synchronized with each other, either by being out of phase or being of different wavelengths, usually both. This is the kind of light that comes from most light sources. Laser light is coherent: it's (mostly) all one wavelength and the peaks and troughs of the waves are all synchronized.
It's a bigger step backwards than you might think. There were big screen TV systems attempted long before color TV that used essentially the same setup, but using beams of ordinary light instead of lasers. They actually worked surprisingly well for the electromechanical kludges that they were, aside from the size issue. In fact, the degree of similarity is enough, IMHO, to count as prior art.
There are two problems with that approach, and the first is that in a non-democratic system, a few entities are always going to hold most or all of the wealth. The second is that there's usually some sort of patronage system involved. Sure, you may be wealthy enough to have leisure time to plot revolution, but your continued cash flow depends on privileges and licenses granted by the state and which can be yanked at any time, and you may decide that you prefer your big house and nice car more than the prospect of forced labor in a reeducation camp.
Most theories regarding reform in China also revolve around a third error, which is assuming that the Chinese leadership is stupid. Corrupt they may be, but stupid they are not. If nothing else, they managed to do what the Soviets could not: transition to a more functional economic model while maintaining their iron grip on power and the internal cohesion of their society. That's no small accomplishment, and it at least raises the possibility that they are not walking blindly into a clever western trap.
I had a similar idea, only instead of a scanning mirror, I was going to use chunks of neutronium to bend the light beams. I've had a little trouble sourcing the materials, though...
It's not, unless you want to become Amish, and maybe not even then. You'll certainly not be buying any electronics without Chinese-made components.
In any case, boycotts and embargoes mainly harm the little guy who, in a non-democratic society, doesn't get any say in the way things are done. The average Chinese will be thinking about eating his in-laws before any member of the Politburo goes without caviar.
What we should be doing is tying our import tariffs to improvements in Chinese human rights and progress towards democracy instead of blithely rubber-stamping their most favored nation status and pretending that capitalism automatically produces democracy -- which idea always was a load of shit, considering that capitalism was pioneered by monarchies. Democracy tends to produce capitalism, true, but the reverse is not even remotely the case.
One of the things I find most annoying about Slashdot is the knee-jerk reflex some people have to respond to any unflattering comparison of the present day to some time in the past with, "Get off my lawn!" Yet strangely, when such mockery is genuinely appropriate in response to most of the comments here, it's nowhere to be seen.
I don't know what parallel universe most of the commenters are coming from -- whether most of them are childless or just get their version of reality from FOX News, I don't know -- but the environment in which my teenager finds herself is highly competitive, not remotely cocooning or coddling, and in many ways significantly more stressful than the one I grew up in. And I don't have her on any medication.
The thing that strikes me about today's kids is how obsessively schedule-driven they are. My daughter never seems to actually stop thinking about school or what she has to do next, and most of her friends are the same way. I suspect that this is at least partly responsible for the level of anxiety and depression in kids today. Far from lacking competition and discipline, the environment in which they move seems to have a surfeit of it, at least compared to my teenage experience in the 1980's, which was notoriously manic in its time but seems comparatively relaxed today.
Slashdot Mirror
They've already given out $5,000 for top methods, and there's $15,000 still up for grabs.
Whoa there, big spender! I'm all for serving the public good, but if I was to work all those extra hours and discovered a useful new technique for using this data, and I have to choose between maybe getting somewhat less than what I still owe on my car, or trying to sell the code to the deep pockets of Big Pharma, I know which one I'm going to go with.
So who decided that the Open Source movement was about *not* making money? I thought it was about enlightened self-interest.
If you're talking about Open Source in contradistinction to Free Software, you're quite right. That is a major part of the distinction between the two ideological camps, and as near as I can tell, Linus Torvalds has always been squarely on the ESR/Open Source side of the fence.
Nor is there anything wrong with that, in and of itself, and I say that as someone who is just as squarely on the RMS/Free Software side of the fence, though of course my main motivator isn't enlightened self-interest as much as it is that I believe I have an ethical obligation to share and not to profit from artificial scarcity. There's room for both camps, and more overlap than the acrimony between prominent ideologues would have you believe.
And there's certainly room for businesses to contribute as long as they play by the rules which, it would seem, most of them actually do in this case. At the end of the day, I don't think most users care why the developers are sharing.
There is one kernel stack, yes, but its permutations are almost beyond count. It runs on literally thousands of different hardware devices. Even the major distros all roll their own. So the kernel, while nominally monolithic, varies considerably in practice.
There's only one peanut butter section at the grocery store, and it conforms to the almost infinite variations in the surface texture of different slices of bread. But it's still peanut butter, and you are out of luck if you'd like a ham sandwich, or maybe a bowl of soup. If you look at anything closely enough, whether it's Linux kernels or some sub-sub-sub-genre of dance music, you'll see endless variation. Granted, those variations are mostly inconsequential, but that's the danger with tunnel vision.
One of the defining characteristics of a monoculture is that it's susceptible to system-wide compromise. In short, if you can hack one instance of the monoculture, you can hack them all. That is arguably untrue of the Linux kernel.
If system security (or any other Linux strength) is the only thing you care about, then Linux is perfect. But that's ultimately a tautology. Of course Linux rocks in terms of the things that Linux admirers admire. The problem is that over time -- and I'd argue that we have to some extent reached this point -- the sheer mass of the system is self-reinforcing, and everything new has to be fit into the existing structure or be discarded, and as great as Linux is, there are many imagined and yet-to-be-imagined things that will not fit into the existing structure because they require a fundamentally different framework.
[...] experience teaches us that the Linux kernel seems to have few of the weaknesses of a classic monoculture while retaining many of its strengths.
I'll grant you that Linux has avoided many of traditional monoculture problems, but I suspect that has a lot more to do with the FOSS culture of which it is part than anything else. Being driven by people whose first concern is the quality of their product rather than profit opens up all kinds of possibilities that are simply denied to commercial, closed-source software, and the focus of Linux developers on fixing problems instead of polishing their PR is part of that. The shortcoming of monocultures that concerns me here -- that they tend, by their sheer size and inertia, to stifle innovation -- is no less true of Linux's role in the FOSS ecosystem than it is of any other monoculture.
Again, let me reiterate that I use and enjoy Linux and I'm tremendously grateful to the many people who have helped make it what it is today. My only concern is that it is not -- and cannot be -- a universal solution, and we would all benefit from redirecting some of the community's energy toward exploring new territory. Moreover, since there are far more people who are qualified and willing to work on the kernel than the process can accommodate, Linux development need not suffer any brain drain as a side effect.
No kidding. But thinking constructively, and not just about this particular case but the many others like it in diverse fields, what we need is a broad approach to the underlying problem, which is the way that industries manage to pack the regulatory agencies that oversee them with their own sympathizers. This probably has a lot less to do with whomever is occupying the Oval Office at the moment than with the sucking chest wound in our democracy that is the US Congress. One of the hazards of being a rich country is that there are an abundance of entities capable of marshaling the favors and outright bribes necessary to corrupt as many legislators as necessary. Until we find a way around that problem, we'll keep seeing crap like this no matter whom we elect.
Think about that for a minute, and you'll realize why it hasn't been done.
You'd fly for a long, long time in mostly empty space. When you found an asteroid, most of them would be too large for any conceivable weapon to significantly affect, and the smaller ones wouldn't just break in half, they'd break into hundreds or thousands of smaller chunks, traveling in all directions at high speeds. And those saucers? You'd never even see them, because they'd engage you at a range of several light seconds with beam weapons. Never mind the months and months of travel and complex calculations to be able to approach an asteroid without just hurtling past it.
Real physics is cool, but it doesn't often make for good arcade games.
I think we're pretty well covered as far as development tools go. The problem is that a lot of them aren't terribly well polished and the documentation -- if it exists at all -- is often terrible.
Find a project you like but that needs work and help bring it to maturity. Or go looking through the plethora of abandoned projects out there for something that looks promising and bring it back to life.
The larger problem here isn't that the Linux kernel group is exclusive -- though it probably does manage to deny itself (and its users) some good ideas as a result. It's that the FOSS world has developed a dominant monoculture that very definitely marginalizes alternative approaches that, both in the short term and in the long term, retards progress in other areas. Yes, there are FOSS alternatives to Linux, but we have arrived at a state where there is Linux, and then there is everything else. And that "everything else", excepting perhaps the *BSDs which are competitors in the Unix clone space rather than fundamental alternatives, generally lack maturity and application support.
That's only an acceptable state of affairs if you think Unix (and Linux's implementation of Unix) represent some kind of final end state in OS development. This is by no means a criticism of Linux in and of itself -- it's a fine OS and I'm glad to have it -- but in terms both of user choice and advancing the state of the art, it's no more healthy to have Linux as the overwhelmingly dominant player in the FOSS world than it was to have Windows as the overwhelmingly dominant player in the broader PC world.
Rather than fretting about getting into the inner sanctums of Linux development, more would be OS developers should be looking at the alternatives (or starting their own, if they have the vision for it). Most will fail, of course, but somewhere out there is a project that, like Linus Torvald's ambitious little toy *nix kernel all those years ago, will someday be a game changer. And even in failure, one learns a great deal -- perhaps enough that one might later find entry into more established circles easier.
You know there's a problem with the world when someone has to *explicitly clarify* that Special Relativity isn't being violated.
Hell, I'd be happy if people just got the Second Law of Thermodynamics through their thick skulls, never mind Special Relativity. Fully half of human culture -- the obnoxious, self-destructive half -- would be competing for museum space overnight.
Everyone knows the asteroids pass right through each other. It's either been shot or it has collided with a ship.
Honestly, what kind of education are scientists getting these days?
FBI officials told The Post that their own review has found that about half of the 4,400 toll records collected in emergency situations or with after-the-fact approvals were done in technical violation of the law. (emphasis added)
It seldom happens here anymore because of the idea of "technicalities". Certain factions in the US -- chiefly the one that, with unconscious irony, is always calling for "law and order" -- have brainwashed large portions of the public into believing that the law doesn't or at least shouldn't matter in cases where the outcome displeases them. When someone is acquitted because law enforcement agencies trampled all over the law during their investigation, they are regarded as "getting off on a technicality", and it generally triggers a backlash against the rule of law and accusations that the courts in question are "soft on crime". Of course, what has happened is that the courts in question are actually tough on crime even when the crimes are committed by law enforcement, and they are far-sighted enough to know that treating law enforcement agencies as being above the law is the royal road to serfdom, but the yokels don't get it. In their view, the function of the law is to dish out punishment, not to maintain actual order, and anything that gets in the way of punishing people -- often including their actual innocence -- angers them.
Unfortunately, there's not a lot of sympathy among those types for enforcing proper police procedure. They're the same people who hold the view that if you have nothing to hide, you shouldn't care about being searched. And it's true enough that they have nothing to hide inside their trailer parks, so why worry?
I wouldn't expect anything to change until the "law and order" faction grasps the fact that the expression "technical violation of the law" has no actual meaning; something is in violation of the law or it is not, and if the law is to lead to justice, it must apply to everyone equally, whether it's a thug holding up a liquor store or a better-dressed thug illegally wiretapping American citizens.
Are there a lot of ex-Pentagon bureaucrats at Microsoft? Both seem to have an incredibly self-destructive habit of doing anything but owning up to the problems they create, apparently oblivious to the fact that it's a lot better for all involved if they were to just say, "Hey, we fucked up, and we're going to fix it," and then fixing it. It's not like the competing browsers haven't had plenty of security holes, but the difference with -- to pick the one I'm most familiar with -- Firefox is that when a vulnerability is discovered, my first awareness of it is generally a new welcome screen in the morning announcing the fix. With IE, it's listening to users and admins bitch about unresolved issues in browsers that have been in the field for for years.
Oh well, it could be worse. At least aerial defoliants and depleted uranium munitions are not among Microsoft's current offerings.
Either it's placebo from seeing the tower (like a hypochondriac) or they're out for a quick buck. I Vote quick buck.
I don't think you have to choose. The residents are plainly suffering from mass hysteria, and the lawyers are out for a quick buck.
Not that I'm remotely a fan of Microsoft or their business practices, but to the extent that they do compete on their merits, they don't always suck, and Google could certainly use some competition. I haven't tried Bing yet, but I'll get around to it eventually, and if it's better than Google, at least for some things, I'll use it. And quite frankly, I have been increasingly dismayed by Google's search results lately, which seem to be slanted more and more to driving sales. That would be fine if the only thing I used search engines for was finding products, but I'm often looking for actual information.
In any case, market competition is usually beneficial to the consumer, and having a market overwhelmingly dominated by a single player is usually bad for the consumer. Even when the dominant player is reasonably ethical, as Google is, you end up with the same situation that arises in monarchies: the current king may be a wise and just ruler, but all bets are off on his heirs. Google is a publicly owned company, and if they stick around long enough, it's a statistical certainty that their leadership roles will eventually be filled by someone less competent and/or less ethical than the current incumbents. When that happens, it would be a lot better to have many competitors ready to take their place. (And certainly, we can't count on Microsoft to play the enlightened despot role.)
As far as the present goes, though, I don't think it really matters a lot whether people find their porn and other, less popular products through Bing or Google.
It's worth noting that you can make a complete human being without a Y chromosome. Its main function is to just signal the production of the sex hormones necessary to transform the (by default, female) fetus into a male. In fact, Y chromosomes have been shrinking for some time across species, indicative of the relative importance of their mere presence versus their negligible contents. It may well be that the higher mutation rate is a byproduct of cells saving energy by not doing much repair work on a chromosome whose contents are largely irrelevant.
A scientist at Harvard University has developed a clever trick for manipulating the insides of living cells.
And the rest of us had been using money, sex, and beer all these years.
I thought about that, but I've got too much sunk into futures of Handwavium right now.
"Ordinary" light in this case is incoherent light, i.e., light in which the individual waves are not synchronized with each other, either by being out of phase or being of different wavelengths, usually both. This is the kind of light that comes from most light sources. Laser light is coherent: it's (mostly) all one wavelength and the peaks and troughs of the waves are all synchronized.
Excellent point! If I was feeling exceptionally snarky, I'd call FedEx and ask them for their freight rates in Earth masses.
It's a bigger step backwards than you might think. There were big screen TV systems attempted long before color TV that used essentially the same setup, but using beams of ordinary light instead of lasers. They actually worked surprisingly well for the electromechanical kludges that they were, aside from the size issue. In fact, the degree of similarity is enough, IMHO, to count as prior art.
There are two problems with that approach, and the first is that in a non-democratic system, a few entities are always going to hold most or all of the wealth. The second is that there's usually some sort of patronage system involved. Sure, you may be wealthy enough to have leisure time to plot revolution, but your continued cash flow depends on privileges and licenses granted by the state and which can be yanked at any time, and you may decide that you prefer your big house and nice car more than the prospect of forced labor in a reeducation camp.
Most theories regarding reform in China also revolve around a third error, which is assuming that the Chinese leadership is stupid. Corrupt they may be, but stupid they are not. If nothing else, they managed to do what the Soviets could not: transition to a more functional economic model while maintaining their iron grip on power and the internal cohesion of their society. That's no small accomplishment, and it at least raises the possibility that they are not walking blindly into a clever western trap.
You forget Taiwan and South korean manufaturers.
No, I remembered them. But even there, a great many of the individual parts are sourced from mainland China.
I had a similar idea, only instead of a scanning mirror, I was going to use chunks of neutronium to bend the light beams. I've had a little trouble sourcing the materials, though...
I'm ready to stop buying Chinese, if possible.
It's not, unless you want to become Amish, and maybe not even then. You'll certainly not be buying any electronics without Chinese-made components.
In any case, boycotts and embargoes mainly harm the little guy who, in a non-democratic society, doesn't get any say in the way things are done. The average Chinese will be thinking about eating his in-laws before any member of the Politburo goes without caviar.
What we should be doing is tying our import tariffs to improvements in Chinese human rights and progress towards democracy instead of blithely rubber-stamping their most favored nation status and pretending that capitalism automatically produces democracy -- which idea always was a load of shit, considering that capitalism was pioneered by monarchies. Democracy tends to produce capitalism, true, but the reverse is not even remotely the case.
One of the things I find most annoying about Slashdot is the knee-jerk reflex some people have to respond to any unflattering comparison of the present day to some time in the past with, "Get off my lawn!" Yet strangely, when such mockery is genuinely appropriate in response to most of the comments here, it's nowhere to be seen.
I don't know what parallel universe most of the commenters are coming from -- whether most of them are childless or just get their version of reality from FOX News, I don't know -- but the environment in which my teenager finds herself is highly competitive, not remotely cocooning or coddling, and in many ways significantly more stressful than the one I grew up in. And I don't have her on any medication.
The thing that strikes me about today's kids is how obsessively schedule-driven they are. My daughter never seems to actually stop thinking about school or what she has to do next, and most of her friends are the same way. I suspect that this is at least partly responsible for the level of anxiety and depression in kids today. Far from lacking competition and discipline, the environment in which they move seems to have a surfeit of it, at least compared to my teenage experience in the 1980's, which was notoriously manic in its time but seems comparatively relaxed today.
This is either an incredibly cool experiment or an unparalleled exercise in highly-refined, weapons-grade bullshit.