The only reason I can dream of for the lack of bittorrent on things like this is that the media witchhunt has made people feel that: Admitting Knowledge of Bittorrent = Theft. This is far from the first time a big file has been stupidly distributed when bittorent would be the obvious solution, but it is, as always, quite disappointing.
(I suppose there's a possibility that NO ONE associated with this knows about bittorrent, but that strikes me as quite unlikely.)
It doesn't make a lot of sense to ban "Osama" and "binladen" to me, unless they were taking a much more aggressive approach on the issue of hateful usernames.
Now, if I were running Yahoo, I would certainly see the value of blaocking "Allah," assuming I wasn't even willing to set up an actual review of usernames. The words that are probably the most subject to abuse in Yahoo screennames and on the internet generally would all make my list, if I were going to have one. Probably (assuming I made such a list at all), it would look like this: nigger, fag, dyke, kike, allah, raghead, retard, spic, wetback, hitler, chink, gook.
Of course, I am not familiar with all the common racial slurs etc. out there, but I think including all those would make sense, based on the kind of morons you see on yahoo games.
The best system, however, if they want to limit user names, is to create a somewhat larger list, and force anyone who wants a username with a wide range of potentially offensive words in it to wait a day while their name is reviewed. This would of course end up causing a huge scandal, because people like to get pissed off about stuff, but it seems that it would be the best way to go.
Oh, and by the way, "anti-semitism" (which despite sounding scientific still bizarrely has the built-in assumption of Jews as the only Semites) is no more a hate crime than "anti-Muslim feeling" is. Beating someone up because of either of those two things would be a hate crime, being guilty of those things is just in bad taste (and unethical, I think, but that is my personal judgment).
cast the first stone. Sure, that's a great moral philosophy, and it would be nice if people weren't so sanctimonious, but it runs into problems when used to dissuage VERBAL criticism.
When you say that people in America or Europe who try to lesson the damage they are doing to the planet shouldn't bother trying to convince other people to do the same through social pressure, you are basically saying that it's not worth doing any good unless you can do infinte good. Your foolish rhetoric can be used to justify any amount of waste, and to (bizarrely) criticize those who are TRYING to act ethically.
If the social pressures of the Left in America were to reduce the ecological footprint of everyone from 60 times that villagers to 50 times that villagers, a few hundred million villagers would be able to increase their consumption of the Earth's resources by 10-fold with no extra strain on the environment over the current model.
Furthermore, pressures for ecological soundness would, as has been shown in most market situations, drive further innovation in that direction, the opposite of the effect that SUV purchases have.
If you are unwilling to understand that small improvements are better than no improvements, you might as well just kill yourself now, since the logical extension of your espoused philosophy would be that if your life is not perfect in every way, none of the good in it matters.
"All microprocessor chips have a core. The current Intel core, the Pentium, is on its way out, to be replaced by a new core, called "Core".
It all sounds a bit like Intel's hijacking a technical term and trying to turn it into a brand name."
I've never really thought about this, but could it lead to confusion and/or lawsuits with regards to the AMD multi-core chips? I certainly wouldn't put such a hope past Intel.
Why is that modded "Insightful" ?!? It's a joke. If it were meant to be insightful, he would have given a reason. There's no reason to believe this trend will go away, considering that the penetration of the internet into Japanese society could grow greater, leading to more lonely people finding each other online.
(My opinion on this info, btw: As other people have pointed out, at least this is healthier than channeling their loneliness into killing sprees, etc.)
The current rule in US copyrights is that anything copyrighted after Mickey Mouse will always be copyrighted, as Disney manages to rent Congress whenever the latest extension is about to expire. Will this have to be changed to the Oswald the Lucky Bunny Rule, once they start marketing this motherfucker like he's new?
So now searche engine listing has become Politics. No longer is it abouat organizing information, it's whether or not they want you listed. So if Google doesn't like you (alternate situtaion, not this one) they can remove you from what normal people think of as "on the internet"? Seems unfair to me, maybe they could have lowered it's rating, but remove it?
Politics? No, Google is taking reasonable action protecting the value of their search engine, by disallowing page-rank abuse. The reason this is news is that BMW is a giant company, getting called on the kind of shit you expect from two-bit porn sites and the like. No one complains when they delist Tommy's Tits And Underage Bits for doing things like this, because it's reasonable behavior. It is, however, an occasion to look at the growing power of Google (and remember, perhaps, that such a large amount of power in the hands of one company can be dangerous, regardless of intent).
Well, since the Spanish continued to have slaves, and write a lot about them, and leave lots of artifacts, and the Aztecs *mysteriously* disappeared, I think it's safe to assume that the relative lack of knowledge about the topic might have contributed to the paucity of writing about Aztec slavery vs. well-documented European slavery.
Sorry if my sarcasm wasn't clear, it was clear in my head, though my post was a bit more muddled than it should have been. I agree with you completely.
as if there is anyone that has not heard about it yet, including the terrorists who were being tapped that have since found other means of communication.
thank you New York Times...
Are you stupid? Somehow the terrorists never suspected that phone calls were being tapped until the media IRRESPONSIBLY reported the truth to the public, allowing us to hold our Dear Leaders slightly accountable. Jesus H. Christ, try rubbing both those brain cells together harder, maybe you can start a fire. (yes, this was not the nicest way to say this, feel free to be unhappy about that)
I didn't just pull 'q = ch' out of my ass, it's the standard-use pinyin.
The reasons they chose to use 'q' are that: a) it wasn't taken for any other sound, as it doesn't represent a unique sound in English b) it is recognized as a separate sound by native speakers than the one spelled "ch." They appear in a complimentary distribution, hinting that in the past they were the same sound, and different following vowels affected that sound in different ways. I haven't studied the history of Chinese much, but I do have a degree in Linguistics, so take this however you want c) it isn't exactly the same as the English "ch," so using that spelling would be confusing. That sound can be spelled many different ways with the roman alphabet, no need to use English as a guide anyway.
In summation, look it up on wikipedia, or read the other posts for some more info.
Yes, but that was inevitable. I was trying to point out the lack of moral equivalency between homosexuality and other behaviors, but of course for people with a significantly different moral framework, this argument won't make sense.
My argument was intended to be aimed at people who try to argue that homosexuality is wrong based on some shared cultural/moral values, not those that accept it as true and axiomatic. Some people might use Euclid's axioms to prove a theorem about triangles, and with those people one can argue. Others just add a new axiom about triangles, and thus it is impossible to argue with them within that framework.
(Disclaimer: I am heterosexual, with certain morals that will be clear here)
One problem in a lot of arguments against homosexuality is that people believe that by saying that homosexuality is not 'natural' that somehow that makes it wrong. This is a fallacious assumption. Furthermore, defining something that people do as 'unnatural' based on (flawed) analogies to the rest of the natural world results in specious claims of whether behavior is 'natural' or not.
For instance: The strongest lion kills the children of its rivals within the pride to increase the chances of its genes. Ergo, when men beat/kill their stepchildren, this is 'natural.' Furthermore, we can assume that, being natural, this behavior should be subject to no censure or punishment.
That is another flawed argument, following the same conventions used when attacking homosexuality as 'unnatural.'
The parallels to pedophilia, bestiality, premarital sex, etc. are all correct in stating that homosexual behavior is subject to the choice of the actor. However, it differs from those in various important ways: *Pedophilia: non-consensual (by definition under the law), exploitative of children, often meets the most narrow definition of rape. *Bestiality: essentially masturbation + cruelty (in some cases) to animals. While I find it distasteful, I feel it should only be disallowed in violent/cruel circumstances, if the human involved is an adult. Anyway, only one person involved here, so it could be just as easily paralleled to hetero sex, in terms of badness. *Premarital (Straight) Sex: equivalent to gay sex, except with an odd number of dicks involved. also, they can sometimes make babies (not always).
I hope this makes it clear to you, and to anyone else who wants to attack homosexuality in general, what flaws are most common in your(plural) arguments, and thus engender more logical debate on the topic.
And the reason a 'straight guild' would seem stupid, and obviously intended to arouse passions (a Troll Guild, as it were), is that 9/10 of all people are straight. It's like if at a Chinese University they started a "Asian Eyes Club," clearly intended to keep the whitey/indian/black folk in their midst 'in their place.' The media would have a field day with "Chinese Racism," because it would be a jackass thing for those Chinese students to do.
Well, unlike Coca-Cola, Google provides a useful service, not a luxury good. Furthermore, unlike almost every America clothing etc. company, Google isn't taking advantage of the labor situation in Third World countries to have, in effect, wage slaves in terrible working conditions. Though an argument could be made not to do business in countries with bad human rights records, including China, it seems weaker for Google than it is for Coke, or Nike (which is never brought up anymore), etc.
In Chinese, a single character ( for example -- though I'm not sure if this will display properly) represents a whole syllable (as well as a meaning or idea), rather than a consonant or vowel, as most English letters do (some are unpronounced, or just change the sound of another letter).
This eliminates certain types of bad spellings, obviously, but opens certain avenues that aren't available in English, such as choosing characters with similar meanings but different sounds, or similar sounds but different meanings.
For the Tiananmen example, the characters for TianAnMen () mean "Heaven," "Peace," "Gate." Heaven could be replaced with "Sky," which has a completely different sound, or "Money," which (if I rcall correctly) is pronounced "Qian" (Q sounds close to English CH). This could also happen with with the other two characters in this word, and of course for many other 'bad' words.
The reason that common words like "pr0n" have become associated with porn, or other examples, is that a community of users agreed upon a certain misspelling of those words, and the same can and WILL happen in China to evade whatever filters search engines use. There is no way to have an even semi-open search system that doesn't allow human ingenuity to overcome its filters, and the brief history of the internet in the west indicates that these filters will, ultimately, be only partially and temporarily effective.
Well, I didn't mean to imply that the farmers now are all currently slaves (though a lot of them are in very tough situations on the large agri-businesses of American and other foreign companies), just that if we so desired, it would be within the power of the West's powerful companies.
WRT dictatorships: there are lot of bad governments in the world, and I'm not saying that giving more market power to agriculture would get rif of them. I'm just pointing out that it would get rid of a lot of the outside interference and internal oil-related-wealth-discrepancies in the Middle East.
I think that if agriculture, rather than oil, were such an important source of wealth, it might be better for the countries producing it than oil has been. Oil can be produced in a smaller area with fewer people per dollar of wealth generated than ethanol, allowing for greater concentration of power and money in the hands of the corrupt leaders of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Indonesia, &c.
Obviously a revolution in Saudi Arabia would still leave it mostly Muslim, but perhaps more democratic (it could hardly become less) and at least not Wahabbist. No longer having US troops propping up the unpopular and corrupt government would also give the people in Saudi Arabia and the Muslim world one less reason to dislike the US.
Transfers of money are indicative of the movement of people (though obviously not a 1-1 correlation). Finding patterns of money's travel will also show patterns of possible disease spread, as those moving the money are possible vectors of contagion.
Diseases SUCCEED in poor places because the lack of nutrition/clean water/medicine/education/rape-prevention etc. A new (or significantly different variation of a current) disease, however, that is transfered by, say, touch or close proximity (airborn transmission with a short life outside the host's body, for instance) would not be nearly as ghetto-ized as our current treatable-but-not-treated-in-poor-places diseases.
This won't be perfect, obviously, but statistics and Where's George are a match made in heaven.
The answer to the question is no, because this is just a half-way measure at best, even given a lack of morality with regard to the people in foreign. As you pointed out, we can turn the Third World into our ethanol-farming slaves (but it's not ACTUALLY going to be very environmentally friendly), and we'll have to start getting bananas, coffee, cocaine, and other important crops somewhere else.
The great thing about ethanol, if it replaced oil, is that we would no longer have to support evil dictatorships like Saudi Arabia (and have less incentive to interfere in the Mid-East in general), and we could let the revolutions that have been waiting to happen finally happen. The house of Saud would be SOL in 10 years if the US withdrew its support.
Totalitarianism is ok in: a) any country with a useful resource and a friendly-to-us government (see: Saudi Arabia) b) any country that would be kind of a pain to invade with no clear benefit (see: most totalitarian countries) c) any country that would be a total bitch to invade (see: N. Korea) despite possible security benefits for us and our allies/helpers.
I am speaking of US policy hear, but generally, governments in the west follow these policies. I hate that people think that China gets a blind eye. The human rights and legal situations in China are probably the most talked about and scrutinized in the west of any non-democratic country (besides Iraq). But what the hell do you expect countries to do?
There's a goodly amount of international pressure on China as-is, and while I wouldn't be against ramping that up, I think an invasion there would be pretty much 130% Grade-A insane.
While this has been a bit off-topic, it does apply. Google has to deal with the country the way it is (as our national governments do), and the other choice is to let some other non-blocked IP become China's Google. The real test of their principles will be whether they use their market share there, once gained, to try to stand up for greater freedom of information. 'Standing up' to the government on this issue now would provide nothing besides a little bit of good PR here in the west, no substantive gain for the Chinese people.
From TFA (words in the description that help or hurt it):
"Golden: academic, accomplished, bedroom, complex, dialogue, dream, death, focus, girl, human, high, journey, love, mother, narrative, romance, relationship, superbly, sex, ultimately.
Kiss of death: Africa, America, American, beautiful, black, best, emotional, fascinating, great, inspired, lake, new, riveting, Sundance, sexy, story, subtitles, truth, vision, world."
So, they want complex, academic films about girl-mother relationships with a strong narrative of romance and sex.
Nothing about beautiful black people in Africa or America with any sort of interest in visions, truth, or the world, especially if said black people are sexy and live near a great, nay, the best lake.
It's been about a decade since I read it, but I think there was a trust of his, and the managers invested reasonably well, and it eventually gained a majority of the world's wealth. Again, been a long time, so I don't want to swear on too many details.
Slashdot Mirror
The only reason I can dream of for the lack of bittorrent on things like this is that the media witchhunt has made people feel that:
Admitting Knowledge of Bittorrent = Theft.
This is far from the first time a big file has been stupidly distributed when bittorent would be the obvious solution, but it is, as always, quite disappointing.
(I suppose there's a possibility that NO ONE associated with this knows about bittorrent, but that strikes me as quite unlikely.)
It doesn't make a lot of sense to ban "Osama" and "binladen" to me, unless they were taking a much more aggressive approach on the issue of hateful usernames.
Now, if I were running Yahoo, I would certainly see the value of blaocking "Allah," assuming I wasn't even willing to set up an actual review of usernames. The words that are probably the most subject to abuse in Yahoo screennames and on the internet generally would all make my list, if I were going to have one. Probably (assuming I made such a list at all), it would look like this: nigger, fag, dyke, kike, allah, raghead, retard, spic, wetback, hitler, chink, gook.
Of course, I am not familiar with all the common racial slurs etc. out there, but I think including all those would make sense, based on the kind of morons you see on yahoo games.
The best system, however, if they want to limit user names, is to create a somewhat larger list, and force anyone who wants a username with a wide range of potentially offensive words in it to wait a day while their name is reviewed. This would of course end up causing a huge scandal, because people like to get pissed off about stuff, but it seems that it would be the best way to go.
Oh, and by the way, "anti-semitism" (which despite sounding scientific still bizarrely has the built-in assumption of Jews as the only Semites) is no more a hate crime than "anti-Muslim feeling" is. Beating someone up because of either of those two things would be a hate crime, being guilty of those things is just in bad taste (and unethical, I think, but that is my personal judgment).
cast the first stone. Sure, that's a great moral philosophy, and it would be nice if people weren't so sanctimonious, but it runs into problems when used to dissuage VERBAL criticism.
When you say that people in America or Europe who try to lesson the damage they are doing to the planet shouldn't bother trying to convince other people to do the same through social pressure, you are basically saying that it's not worth doing any good unless you can do infinte good. Your foolish rhetoric can be used to justify any amount of waste, and to (bizarrely) criticize those who are TRYING to act ethically.
If the social pressures of the Left in America were to reduce the ecological footprint of everyone from 60 times that villagers to 50 times that villagers, a few hundred million villagers would be able to increase their consumption of the Earth's resources by 10-fold with no extra strain on the environment over the current model.
Furthermore, pressures for ecological soundness would, as has been shown in most market situations, drive further innovation in that direction, the opposite of the effect that SUV purchases have.
If you are unwilling to understand that small improvements are better than no improvements, you might as well just kill yourself now, since the logical extension of your espoused philosophy would be that if your life is not perfect in every way, none of the good in it matters.
Well, actually, chance can get heads 100 times in a row of a coin flip. He probably meant it was within the margin of error.
"All microprocessor chips have a core. The current Intel core, the Pentium, is on its way out, to be replaced by a new core, called "Core".
It all sounds a bit like Intel's hijacking a technical term and trying to turn it into a brand name."
I've never really thought about this, but could it lead to confusion and/or lawsuits with regards to the AMD multi-core chips? I certainly wouldn't put such a hope past Intel.
"Not a problem. The trend will die out."
Why is that modded "Insightful" ?!? It's a joke. If it were meant to be insightful, he would have given a reason. There's no reason to believe this trend will go away, considering that the penetration of the internet into Japanese society could grow greater, leading to more lonely people finding each other online.
(My opinion on this info, btw: As other people have pointed out, at least this is healthier than channeling their loneliness into killing sprees, etc.)
The copyrights protect Mickey Mouse films, not Mickey himself (so it seems), who is actually fine just under trademark. Here's an interesting FindLaw article on the issue: http://writ.news.findlaw.com/commentary/20020305_s prigman.html
The current rule in US copyrights is that anything copyrighted after Mickey Mouse will always be copyrighted, as Disney manages to rent Congress whenever the latest extension is about to expire. Will this have to be changed to the Oswald the Lucky Bunny Rule, once they start marketing this motherfucker like he's new?
Pigeons cover a wide variety of altitudes far better than light posts do. This makes the data they provide potentially much more valuable.
Well, since the Spanish continued to have slaves, and write a lot about them, and leave lots of artifacts, and the Aztecs *mysteriously* disappeared, I think it's safe to assume that the relative lack of knowledge about the topic might have contributed to the paucity of writing about Aztec slavery vs. well-documented European slavery.
Sorry if my sarcasm wasn't clear, it was clear in my head, though my post was a bit more muddled than it should have been. I agree with you completely.
Yes. They are the rule in Japan, rather than the exception. No clue why, not being Japanese and apparently not curious enough to find this shit out.
I didn't just pull 'q = ch' out of my ass, it's the standard-use pinyin.
The reasons they chose to use 'q' are that:
a) it wasn't taken for any other sound, as it doesn't represent a unique sound in English
b) it is recognized as a separate sound by native speakers than the one spelled "ch." They appear in a complimentary distribution, hinting that in the past they were the same sound, and different following vowels affected that sound in different ways. I haven't studied the history of Chinese much, but I do have a degree in Linguistics, so take this however you want
c) it isn't exactly the same as the English "ch," so using that spelling would be confusing. That sound can be spelled many different ways with the roman alphabet, no need to use English as a guide anyway.
In summation, look it up on wikipedia, or read the other posts for some more info.
Yes, but that was inevitable. I was trying to point out the lack of moral equivalency between homosexuality and other behaviors, but of course for people with a significantly different moral framework, this argument won't make sense.
My argument was intended to be aimed at people who try to argue that homosexuality is wrong based on some shared cultural/moral values, not those that accept it as true and axiomatic. Some people might use Euclid's axioms to prove a theorem about triangles, and with those people one can argue. Others just add a new axiom about triangles, and thus it is impossible to argue with them within that framework.
(Disclaimer: I am heterosexual, with certain morals that will be clear here)
One problem in a lot of arguments against homosexuality is that people believe that by saying that homosexuality is not 'natural' that somehow that makes it wrong. This is a fallacious assumption. Furthermore, defining something that people do as 'unnatural' based on (flawed) analogies to the rest of the natural world results in specious claims of whether behavior is 'natural' or not.
For instance: The strongest lion kills the children of its rivals within the pride to increase the chances of its genes. Ergo, when men beat/kill their stepchildren, this is 'natural.' Furthermore, we can assume that, being natural, this behavior should be subject to no censure or punishment.
That is another flawed argument, following the same conventions used when attacking homosexuality as 'unnatural.'
The parallels to pedophilia, bestiality, premarital sex, etc. are all correct in stating that homosexual behavior is subject to the choice of the actor. However, it differs from those in various important ways:
*Pedophilia: non-consensual (by definition under the law), exploitative of children, often meets the most narrow definition of rape.
*Bestiality: essentially masturbation + cruelty (in some cases) to animals. While I find it distasteful, I feel it should only be disallowed in violent/cruel circumstances, if the human involved is an adult. Anyway, only one person involved here, so it could be just as easily paralleled to hetero sex, in terms of badness.
*Premarital (Straight) Sex: equivalent to gay sex, except with an odd number of dicks involved. also, they can sometimes make babies (not always).
I hope this makes it clear to you, and to anyone else who wants to attack homosexuality in general, what flaws are most common in your(plural) arguments, and thus engender more logical debate on the topic.
And the reason a 'straight guild' would seem stupid, and obviously intended to arouse passions (a Troll Guild, as it were), is that 9/10 of all people are straight. It's like if at a Chinese University they started a "Asian Eyes Club," clearly intended to keep the whitey/indian/black folk in their midst 'in their place.' The media would have a field day with "Chinese Racism," because it would be a jackass thing for those Chinese students to do.
Well, unlike Coca-Cola, Google provides a useful service, not a luxury good. Furthermore, unlike almost every America clothing etc. company, Google isn't taking advantage of the labor situation in Third World countries to have, in effect, wage slaves in terrible working conditions. Though an argument could be made not to do business in countries with bad human rights records, including China, it seems weaker for Google than it is for Coke, or Nike (which is never brought up anymore), etc.
In Chinese, a single character ( for example -- though I'm not sure if this will display properly) represents a whole syllable (as well as a meaning or idea), rather than a consonant or vowel, as most English letters do (some are unpronounced, or just change the sound of another letter).
This eliminates certain types of bad spellings, obviously, but opens certain avenues that aren't available in English, such as choosing characters with similar meanings but different sounds, or similar sounds but different meanings.
For the Tiananmen example, the characters for TianAnMen () mean "Heaven," "Peace," "Gate." Heaven could be replaced with "Sky," which has a completely different sound, or "Money," which (if I rcall correctly) is pronounced "Qian" (Q sounds close to English CH). This could also happen with with the other two characters in this word, and of course for many other 'bad' words.
The reason that common words like "pr0n" have become associated with porn, or other examples, is that a community of users agreed upon a certain misspelling of those words, and the same can and WILL happen in China to evade whatever filters search engines use. There is no way to have an even semi-open search system that doesn't allow human ingenuity to overcome its filters, and the brief history of the internet in the west indicates that these filters will, ultimately, be only partially and temporarily effective.
Well, I didn't mean to imply that the farmers now are all currently slaves (though a lot of them are in very tough situations on the large agri-businesses of American and other foreign companies), just that if we so desired, it would be within the power of the West's powerful companies.
WRT dictatorships: there are lot of bad governments in the world, and I'm not saying that giving more market power to agriculture would get rif of them. I'm just pointing out that it would get rid of a lot of the outside interference and internal oil-related-wealth-discrepancies in the Middle East.
I think that if agriculture, rather than oil, were such an important source of wealth, it might be better for the countries producing it than oil has been. Oil can be produced in a smaller area with fewer people per dollar of wealth generated than ethanol, allowing for greater concentration of power and money in the hands of the corrupt leaders of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Indonesia, &c.
Obviously a revolution in Saudi Arabia would still leave it mostly Muslim, but perhaps more democratic (it could hardly become less) and at least not Wahabbist. No longer having US troops propping up the unpopular and corrupt government would also give the people in Saudi Arabia and the Muslim world one less reason to dislike the US.
Transfers of money are indicative of the movement of people (though obviously not a 1-1 correlation). Finding patterns of money's travel will also show patterns of possible disease spread, as those moving the money are possible vectors of contagion.
Diseases SUCCEED in poor places because the lack of nutrition/clean water/medicine/education/rape-prevention etc. A new (or significantly different variation of a current) disease, however, that is transfered by, say, touch or close proximity (airborn transmission with a short life outside the host's body, for instance) would not be nearly as ghetto-ized as our current treatable-but-not-treated-in-poor-places diseases.
This won't be perfect, obviously, but statistics and Where's George are a match made in heaven.
The answer to the question is no, because this is just a half-way measure at best, even given a lack of morality with regard to the people in foreign. As you pointed out, we can turn the Third World into our ethanol-farming slaves (but it's not ACTUALLY going to be very environmentally friendly), and we'll have to start getting bananas, coffee, cocaine, and other important crops somewhere else.
The great thing about ethanol, if it replaced oil, is that we would no longer have to support evil dictatorships like Saudi Arabia (and have less incentive to interfere in the Mid-East in general), and we could let the revolutions that have been waiting to happen finally happen. The house of Saud would be SOL in 10 years if the US withdrew its support.
Totalitarianism is ok in:
a) any country with a useful resource and a friendly-to-us government (see: Saudi Arabia)
b) any country that would be kind of a pain to invade with no clear benefit (see: most totalitarian countries)
c) any country that would be a total bitch to invade (see: N. Korea) despite possible security benefits for us and our allies/helpers.
I am speaking of US policy hear, but generally, governments in the west follow these policies. I hate that people think that China gets a blind eye. The human rights and legal situations in China are probably the most talked about and scrutinized in the west of any non-democratic country (besides Iraq). But what the hell do you expect countries to do?
There's a goodly amount of international pressure on China as-is, and while I wouldn't be against ramping that up, I think an invasion there would be pretty much 130% Grade-A insane.
While this has been a bit off-topic, it does apply. Google has to deal with the country the way it is (as our national governments do), and the other choice is to let some other non-blocked IP become China's Google. The real test of their principles will be whether they use their market share there, once gained, to try to stand up for greater freedom of information. 'Standing up' to the government on this issue now would provide nothing besides a little bit of good PR here in the west, no substantive gain for the Chinese people.
From TFA (words in the description that help or hurt it): "Golden: academic, accomplished, bedroom, complex, dialogue, dream, death, focus, girl, human, high, journey, love, mother, narrative, romance, relationship, superbly, sex, ultimately. Kiss of death: Africa, America, American, beautiful, black, best, emotional, fascinating, great, inspired, lake, new, riveting, Sundance, sexy, story, subtitles, truth, vision, world." So, they want complex, academic films about girl-mother relationships with a strong narrative of romance and sex. Nothing about beautiful black people in Africa or America with any sort of interest in visions, truth, or the world, especially if said black people are sexy and live near a great, nay, the best lake.
It's been about a decade since I read it, but I think there was a trust of his, and the managers invested reasonably well, and it eventually gained a majority of the world's wealth. Again, been a long time, so I don't want to swear on too many details.