But would heat sterilization before brewing kill the virus so that your yeast could ferment?
I don't homebrew (yet -- I'd like to try it some time), so there may be a reason why you wouldn't want to sterilize with the virus then boil the equipment before brewing, but it was just a thought.
...about strong central governments, surveillance and police states?
1) What is unthinkable now will eventually become normal.
2) If something can be abused, it will be.
3) "Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely." --Lord Acton
4) Temporary measures never are.
5) "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (Who watches the watchers?) --Decimus Junius Juvenal.
Think very carefully before deciding that the questionable "security" that such large-scale, coordinated surveillance offers is worth the potential for abuse.
Depends upon what part of Alaska you live in. In Anchorage, where I live it's reasonably close to 50/50. In Bush Alaska, yeah, that's about right.
Quote: Why aren't there large groups of angry young Alaskans commiting acts of terrorism?
Because for most of the year, it's too frigging cold to start an Al Qaeda style training camp?
Quote: I'll tell you why. Because in Alaska, they get Comcast On-Demand porn.
No, Comcast doesn't provide service here. Throughout most of populated Alaska (Anchorage, Fairbanks, Juneau and outlying communities) it's one of the 2 larger local companies, ACS or GCI. Clearwire is starting to make inroads here, as well. In rural areas, it's usually either GCI or the really small companies like Unicom, Astech, Alaska Fiberstar, Borealis, etc. A few locations use satellite through Lyman Brothers or Starband.
Okay, okay, I'm being a spoilsport -- your comment *was* really funny!
Quote: Eventually there's going to be an arrest made & it'll get tied to the NSA.
Not if the arrestee is quietly shipped off to Gitmo. Remember, G.W.'s pit bull, Alberto Gonzales, has already decreed that the Constitution does not guarantee you the right to a writ of Habeas Corpus.
Cryptography isn't my strong suit, and yes, I understand that there are better ways to encrypt things, but given a sufficiently long cipher key (say a novel) or obtaining a non-repetitive key for each use (say downloading your favorite RSS feed or./ headlines), then using XOR to encrypt your message wouldn't you essentially have a one-time pad? That's certainly not bad cryptography.
Are the "green" policies written by someone who actually knows what they are talking about or by some idiot PHB? Yes, I know that's redundant.
Most computers I've seen in the last, well, decade allow you to set configuration options to power down hard drives, monitors, and the CPU(s) to conserve energy when the system isn't being used. Your power drain overnight on such a machine -- assuming it is properly configured -- should be minimal. Consequently, it would seem to me that the argument for powering down all of the equipment every night, especially when balanced against choosing an hour or two of downtime every patch Tuesday, is tenuous at best.
Sheesh...you pay by the gallon, you are getting a gallon. If that means that gas prices are slightly higher in the summer because gas pumps are calibrated for a temperature that is slightly less than ambient in the tank, then so freaking what?
Some sleazy class-action lawyer thinks he can make a cool couple of million by getting consumers riled up over gas prices, and everyone here is falling for it. All this means is that the lawyer(s) handling the class action suit get rich, gas customers make an extra hundred bucks when the lawsuit is finished, the gas companies eat a few million dollars, but raise gas prices even more to compensate, gas stations install expensive temperature compensating devices to make sure the pumps are metering "fairly" and the cost of the new equipment forces gas stations to raise costs even more. Besides, in the winter time, when temperatures are well below 60 degrees F, aren't you getting more than you pay for from the gas pump?
So what exactly do we accomplish by all of this???
Quote: Most of IBM's equipment can be equipped to dial home when a hardware failure occurs.
As were ours. However, we typically would have an IBM tech call us when the AS/400 dialed home. The sys admin or computer operator on duty would run some diagnostics (failed DASD was an exception; that was pretty straightforward) and *then* if needed, the tech would show up on-site. In any case, our sys admins were still responsible for monitoring system logs, adding and deleting user accounts, establishing and verifying security procedures, tuning the system, etc. -- all the kinds of things that sys admins on any business computing platform is responsible for doing.
I've used AS/400s in two different shops, and I use x86's with Linux now. I've never worked in a shop where we didn't need or have sys admins, and we had a couple of DBA's in one of the AS/400 shops as well (the other was too small to hire a DBA, and probably would have been more efficiently served with x86 machines, anyway).
Don't get me wrong. I loved working on the AS/400s -- they are really cool machines with one of the best designed operating systems I've ever used -- but they *don't* run themselves. You need someone with a clue on board to handle the occasional drive failures (yes, even DASD sometimes throws a disk), and you need someone who knows how to verify data integrity when it all hits the fan, even if you have a support contract with IBM.
>if I'm not completely mistaken then N20 or Nitrous Oxide a.k.a. Laughing Gas is the stuff car tuners use to punch some more horse powers out of their engines with.
Correct. N2O is used by tuners to get more power from a given engine. To keep it from being abused for getting high, a chemical irritant is added to N2O sold for this purpose.
>Isn't it highly flammable?
Not exactly. It is an oxidizer, not a fuel. It doesn't burn, but it most definitely helps other fuels burn hotter and faster.
As a result, I'm very curious what would happen to a "non-lethal" bullet that began leaking N2O as the bullet was fired. Would you just get an excessive muzzle velocity from that round? Would the gun barrel explode? Or would there be too little N2O to make a difference?
With all due respect, I somewhat disagree with your comment above. For Exxon to use the threat of a lawsuit to enact censorship is nowhere near equivalent to the U.S. government itself engaging in censorship.
In an ideal world, and I admit that we are far from that ideal, then if someone was clearly covered under provisions to copyright law, such as by means of parody as in this case, then they would have little to fear from a lawsuit, because they could easily show that there is no violation under the law. Therefore, the threat of government action is significantly less than the government acting itself, particularly in a political climate like we have right now where the judicial branch of government is essentially in bed with the executive branch.
Since we do not live in an ideal world, then it is very possible -- likely, even -- that Exxon would win. And that is the *real* problem here. This isn't a censorship issue. It's a problem with our civil law system. When big corporations can consistently win by intimidation before even going to trial, then there is something wrong and it needs to be fixed.
What's the basis of your statement that the Tunguska Fireball was "likely mostly ice/volatiles"?
I'm a computer geek, not an astronomer or geologist, so take this for what it's worth, but I would be really surprised to learn that any meteorite was a mixture of ice and volatiles. First, every astronomy book I've ever read claims that most meteorites are made of nickel, iron and other metals, not ice and other volatiles (that's the composition of comets). Second, falling through the atmosphere generally tends to generate a lot of frictional heating -- after all, the vast majority of meteors don't hit they earth, but instead burn up in the atmosphere -- and therefore I would suspect that, unless it were originally very, very large, most of the material from a comet wouldn't survive reentry, and would instead vaporize in the upper atmosphere.
I'm an amateur musician who has written, recorded and performed (live) some of his own music. I have a good friend who is also a musician who has written, recorded and performed his own music. He has a myspace site, and keeps trying to talk me into building a myspace site for my music, too. As a geek, I've built my own web site on my own server, and I've posted some of my music on Soundclick, but I just can't bring myself to create a myspace site. While I see how it could be a useful tool to promote my music, I really feel...well, out of place, I guess...on myspace. I'm in my mid thirties, so I'd feel like a creepy old man hanging out with all the emo pre-teens if I were to spend any time there.
Snuff films are an urban legend. See snopes.com for a detailed analysis.
Rape and torture, however...yeah, there's not much difference except that a grown adult probably has a better chance of defending him/her -self against a predator than a child. Even a petite woman defending herself against a bouncer or linebacker has a better chance of self-defense than the average small child has against an adult.
This is what makes crimes against children so heinous. I've known adults who were physically abused as children and adults who were sexually abused as children. Of these people that I've known, those who were sexually abused as children carried much deeper scars. Therefore in my mind, sexual abuse of a child -- including kiddie porn -- is the epitome of all evil. However, this is anecdote rather than data, so take it for what it's worth.
Yes, there is indeed a deluge of e-mail flying across the net, but there are also a number of tools that can be used to reduce the amount of work needed to process all that data. For example, I remember reading about software a little while back that could be used to correlate seemingly unrelated pieces of information (sorry, I don't remember where I read about it or what it was called, or I'd post a link). Couple this with keyword searches or meta-data from the e-mails (sender, recipient, date/time stamps, etc.) or with other intel sources and now you have the ability to flag "suspicious" e-mails. To this, add the ability to build massive hard drive arrays and extremely fast multi-processing computers, and it becomes possible to store and search through gobs of data. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the consensus was that this is exactly the type of processing that the NSA wiretapping nonsense was supposed to be doing.
In short, I think that yes, this information could be mined, and that yes, this is exactly the type of thing that Americans should be very, very worried about. The Constitution was written in such a way as to prevent this kind of abuse for a reason.
Interesting. The company I work for buys a lot of Dell laptops, desktops and servers, and we've had exactly the opposite experience from them.
With one or two exceptions, all of our servers run Gentoo -- which Dell doesn't offer -- even though Dell does offer RHEL on their servers. On the few occasions where I've had to call their support lines, I've had nothing but good luck getting someone with Linux experience who was willing to work with me until we could figure out what was wrong, even if it took a somewhat circuitous route to get there since we were running an unsupported OS.
Call me a heretic, but yes, I do like the 2007 Corvette better than the '60s models, and yes, I do like the 2007 Mustang better than a '60s model (but a 1970-71 Mustang is a whole other story).
Having said that, yes, most modern cars are just fugly from the outside. But, I think that's always been the case. You can pick a handful of really gorgeous cars from any era you choose, but most of them at any given time aren't particularly inspiring.
Be that as it may, our current president seems intent upon trampling all over the Bill of Rights and the articles of the Constitution itself. Maybe I'm just cynical, but somehow I don't think that a government that:
1) allowed the NSA monitoring program to continue in spite of the fourth amendment, and
2) determined that since the Constitution only prohibits suspending a writ of habeas corpus rather than explicitly granting a writ of habeas corpus, then a writ of habeas corpus is not guaranteed by the Constitution
...is going to get all worked up over a (relatively) obscure interpretation of the 14th amendment.
I hope I'm wrong, but the evidence so far suggests otherwise.
Yeah, I was shooting from the hip -- might be a little high. After the sticker shock of my last biennial flight review, my dad and I bought a little experimental together, so I haven't priced 152's lately.
Or you can do like I did in my mid twenties, rent a Cessna 152 (currently ~$100 per hour in the U.S.) and simulate zero Gs yourself until you make yourself puke:)
Granted, earning the pilot's license will cost more than a single flight in the 727's, but you aren't limited to a single flight, either.
I believe that's being challenged right now. Wasn't there a guy recently arrested for refusing to turn over information requested in a National Security Letter and for contacting a lawyer to have the NSL challenged? I'm too lazy to look it up right now, but I believe I read that here on/. The bottom line is, until SCOTUS rules on the legality of NSLs, their validity is in question. So, for now, my response to an NSL would be: http://www.gecko-ak.org/SpecialPurposeSigFile.txt:)
In any case, your point is taken -- there are plenty of people who will cave under even the slightest pressure, unfortunately.
Most ISPs assign dynamic IP addresses to the majority of their customers. Where I used to work, we used RADIUS to provide dynamic IP addressing to our customers, and we would keep logs that would let us determine which customer had any given IP address on any given day and time. This data was used to help troubleshoot customer login problems, resolve billing disputes with customers, suspend and/or warn customers who had violated our terms and conditions of use, and yes, to fulfill subpoena requests.
However, we absolutely, positively refused to provide subscriber information without a court order of some kind, however. I would like to think that most ISPs operate to the same standards we did.
I have two problems with your argument:
1) You obviously are used to living in a free country where it's not that difficult to decide where you want to live. In a totalitarian country, it's frequently not so easy to decide you want to pack up and move somewhere else. Remember the wall around Berlin before East and West Germany unified in the 90's? That wasn't to keep West Germans from infiltrating East Germany and voting the Communist Party out; it was to keep the East Germans in. What makes you think it would be any easier to leave China?
2) While I am a big fan of law and order (the realities of living in a civil society, not the tv show), laws absolutely must come second to conscience/morality/whatever. I agree that we should live within the law to the best of our availability and that we should work within the legal system as much as possible to change bad laws, civil disobedience is an acceptable catalyst for change. I believe "I was only following orders!" was the defense used (unsuccessfully, I might add) by many of those tried for crimes against humanity after WWII. It was then, and still is now, a pathetic excuse by those who lack the backbone to stand up for what's right.
My boss has a Mercedes SUV that will not start the engine if the engine computer detects that any of the three brake light bulbs have burned out. Now, there's a good idea -- when you burn out a brake light, you can't even drive to the store to buy a replacement.
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But would heat sterilization before brewing kill the virus so that your yeast could ferment?
I don't homebrew (yet -- I'd like to try it some time), so there may be a reason why you wouldn't want to sterilize with the virus then boil the equipment before brewing, but it was just a thought.
...about strong central governments, surveillance and police states?
1) What is unthinkable now will eventually become normal.
2) If something can be abused, it will be.
3) "Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely." --Lord Acton
4) Temporary measures never are.
5) "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (Who watches the watchers?) --Decimus Junius Juvenal.
Think very carefully before deciding that the questionable "security" that such large-scale, coordinated surveillance offers is worth the potential for abuse.
Quote: Alaska... 5 males for every 1 female.
Depends upon what part of Alaska you live in. In Anchorage, where I live it's reasonably close to 50/50. In Bush Alaska, yeah, that's about right.
Quote: Why aren't there large groups of angry young Alaskans commiting acts of terrorism?
Because for most of the year, it's too frigging cold to start an Al Qaeda style training camp?
Quote: I'll tell you why. Because in Alaska, they get Comcast On-Demand porn.
No, Comcast doesn't provide service here. Throughout most of populated Alaska (Anchorage, Fairbanks, Juneau and outlying communities) it's one of the 2 larger local companies, ACS or GCI. Clearwire is starting to make inroads here, as well. In rural areas, it's usually either GCI or the really small companies like Unicom, Astech, Alaska Fiberstar, Borealis, etc. A few locations use satellite through Lyman Brothers or Starband.
Okay, okay, I'm being a spoilsport -- your comment *was* really funny!
Quote: Eventually there's going to be an arrest made & it'll get tied to the NSA.
/shudders
Not if the arrestee is quietly shipped off to Gitmo. Remember, G.W.'s pit bull, Alberto Gonzales, has already decreed that the Constitution does not guarantee you the right to a writ of Habeas Corpus.
Cryptography isn't my strong suit, and yes, I understand that there are better ways to encrypt things, but given a sufficiently long cipher key (say a novel) or obtaining a non-repetitive key for each use (say downloading your favorite RSS feed or ./ headlines), then using XOR to encrypt your message wouldn't you essentially have a one-time pad? That's certainly not bad cryptography.
Just wondering...
Are the "green" policies written by someone who actually knows what they are talking about or by some idiot PHB? Yes, I know that's redundant.
Most computers I've seen in the last, well, decade allow you to set configuration options to power down hard drives, monitors, and the CPU(s) to conserve energy when the system isn't being used. Your power drain overnight on such a machine -- assuming it is properly configured -- should be minimal. Consequently, it would seem to me that the argument for powering down all of the equipment every night, especially when balanced against choosing an hour or two of downtime every patch Tuesday, is tenuous at best.
Sheesh...you pay by the gallon, you are getting a gallon. If that means that gas prices are slightly higher in the summer because gas pumps are calibrated for a temperature that is slightly less than ambient in the tank, then so freaking what?
Some sleazy class-action lawyer thinks he can make a cool couple of million by getting consumers riled up over gas prices, and everyone here is falling for it. All this means is that the lawyer(s) handling the class action suit get rich, gas customers make an extra hundred bucks when the lawsuit is finished, the gas companies eat a few million dollars, but raise gas prices even more to compensate, gas stations install expensive temperature compensating devices to make sure the pumps are metering "fairly" and the cost of the new equipment forces gas stations to raise costs even more. Besides, in the winter time, when temperatures are well below 60 degrees F, aren't you getting more than you pay for from the gas pump?
So what exactly do we accomplish by all of this???
Quote: Most of IBM's equipment can be equipped to dial home when a hardware failure occurs.
As were ours. However, we typically would have an IBM tech call us when the AS/400 dialed home. The sys admin or computer operator on duty would run some diagnostics (failed DASD was an exception; that was pretty straightforward) and *then* if needed, the tech would show up on-site. In any case, our sys admins were still responsible for monitoring system logs, adding and deleting user accounts, establishing and verifying security procedures, tuning the system, etc. -- all the kinds of things that sys admins on any business computing platform is responsible for doing.
You don't need sys admins or DBA's?!?!?
I've used AS/400s in two different shops, and I use x86's with Linux now. I've never worked in a shop where we didn't need or have sys admins, and we had a couple of DBA's in one of the AS/400 shops as well (the other was too small to hire a DBA, and probably would have been more efficiently served with x86 machines, anyway).
Don't get me wrong. I loved working on the AS/400s -- they are really cool machines with one of the best designed operating systems I've ever used -- but they *don't* run themselves. You need someone with a clue on board to handle the occasional drive failures (yes, even DASD sometimes throws a disk), and you need someone who knows how to verify data integrity when it all hits the fan, even if you have a support contract with IBM.
>if I'm not completely mistaken then N20 or Nitrous Oxide a.k.a. Laughing Gas is the stuff car tuners use to punch some more horse powers out of their engines with.
Correct. N2O is used by tuners to get more power from a given engine. To keep it from being abused for getting high, a chemical irritant is added to N2O sold for this purpose.
>Isn't it highly flammable?
Not exactly. It is an oxidizer, not a fuel. It doesn't burn, but it most definitely helps other fuels burn hotter and faster.
As a result, I'm very curious what would happen to a "non-lethal" bullet that began leaking N2O as the bullet was fired. Would you just get an excessive muzzle velocity from that round? Would the gun barrel explode? Or would there be too little N2O to make a difference?
With all due respect, I somewhat disagree with your comment above. For Exxon to use the threat of a lawsuit to enact censorship is nowhere near equivalent to the U.S. government itself engaging in censorship.
In an ideal world, and I admit that we are far from that ideal, then if someone was clearly covered under provisions to copyright law, such as by means of parody as in this case, then they would have little to fear from a lawsuit, because they could easily show that there is no violation under the law. Therefore, the threat of government action is significantly less than the government acting itself, particularly in a political climate like we have right now where the judicial branch of government is essentially in bed with the executive branch.
Since we do not live in an ideal world, then it is very possible -- likely, even -- that Exxon would win. And that is the *real* problem here. This isn't a censorship issue. It's a problem with our civil law system. When big corporations can consistently win by intimidation before even going to trial, then there is something wrong and it needs to be fixed.
Interesting. I hadn't read that it was thought Tunguska was a chunk of a comet, but I haven't researched Tunguska especially thoroughly.
:)
Thanks for the enlightenment!
What's the basis of your statement that the Tunguska Fireball was "likely mostly ice/volatiles"?
I'm a computer geek, not an astronomer or geologist, so take this for what it's worth, but I would be really surprised to learn that any meteorite was a mixture of ice and volatiles. First, every astronomy book I've ever read claims that most meteorites are made of nickel, iron and other metals, not ice and other volatiles (that's the composition of comets). Second, falling through the atmosphere generally tends to generate a lot of frictional heating -- after all, the vast majority of meteors don't hit they earth, but instead burn up in the atmosphere -- and therefore I would suspect that, unless it were originally very, very large, most of the material from a comet wouldn't survive reentry, and would instead vaporize in the upper atmosphere.
Exactly.
I'm an amateur musician who has written, recorded and performed (live) some of his own music. I have a good friend who is also a musician who has written, recorded and performed his own music. He has a myspace site, and keeps trying to talk me into building a myspace site for my music, too. As a geek, I've built my own web site on my own server, and I've posted some of my music on Soundclick, but I just can't bring myself to create a myspace site. While I see how it could be a useful tool to promote my music, I really feel...well, out of place, I guess...on myspace. I'm in my mid thirties, so I'd feel like a creepy old man hanging out with all the emo pre-teens if I were to spend any time there.
Snuff films are an urban legend. See snopes.com for a detailed analysis.
Rape and torture, however...yeah, there's not much difference except that a grown adult probably has a better chance of defending him/her -self against a predator than a child. Even a petite woman defending herself against a bouncer or linebacker has a better chance of self-defense than the average small child has against an adult.
This is what makes crimes against children so heinous. I've known adults who were physically abused as children and adults who were sexually abused as children. Of these people that I've known, those who were sexually abused as children carried much deeper scars. Therefore in my mind, sexual abuse of a child -- including kiddie porn -- is the epitome of all evil. However, this is anecdote rather than data, so take it for what it's worth.
Yes, there is indeed a deluge of e-mail flying across the net, but there are also a number of tools that can be used to reduce the amount of work needed to process all that data. For example, I remember reading about software a little while back that could be used to correlate seemingly unrelated pieces of information (sorry, I don't remember where I read about it or what it was called, or I'd post a link). Couple this with keyword searches or meta-data from the e-mails (sender, recipient, date/time stamps, etc.) or with other intel sources and now you have the ability to flag "suspicious" e-mails. To this, add the ability to build massive hard drive arrays and extremely fast multi-processing computers, and it becomes possible to store and search through gobs of data. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the consensus was that this is exactly the type of processing that the NSA wiretapping nonsense was supposed to be doing.
In short, I think that yes, this information could be mined, and that yes, this is exactly the type of thing that Americans should be very, very worried about. The Constitution was written in such a way as to prevent this kind of abuse for a reason.
Interesting. The company I work for buys a lot of Dell laptops, desktops and servers, and we've had exactly the opposite experience from them.
With one or two exceptions, all of our servers run Gentoo -- which Dell doesn't offer -- even though Dell does offer RHEL on their servers. On the few occasions where I've had to call their support lines, I've had nothing but good luck getting someone with Linux experience who was willing to work with me until we could figure out what was wrong, even if it took a somewhat circuitous route to get there since we were running an unsupported OS.
Call me a heretic, but yes, I do like the 2007 Corvette better than the '60s models, and yes, I do like the 2007 Mustang better than a '60s model (but a 1970-71 Mustang is a whole other story).
Having said that, yes, most modern cars are just fugly from the outside. But, I think that's always been the case. You can pick a handful of really gorgeous cars from any era you choose, but most of them at any given time aren't particularly inspiring.
Be that as it may, our current president seems intent upon trampling all over the Bill of Rights and the articles of the Constitution itself. Maybe I'm just cynical, but somehow I don't think that a government that:
...is going to get all worked up over a (relatively) obscure interpretation of the 14th amendment.
1) allowed the NSA monitoring program to continue in spite of the fourth amendment, and
2) determined that since the Constitution only prohibits suspending a writ of habeas corpus rather than explicitly granting a writ of habeas corpus, then a writ of habeas corpus is not guaranteed by the Constitution
I hope I'm wrong, but the evidence so far suggests otherwise.
Yeah, I was shooting from the hip -- might be a little high. After the sticker shock of my last biennial flight review, my dad and I bought a little experimental together, so I haven't priced 152's lately.
Or you can do like I did in my mid twenties, rent a Cessna 152 (currently ~$100 per hour in the U.S.) and simulate zero Gs yourself until you make yourself puke :)
Granted, earning the pilot's license will cost more than a single flight in the 727's, but you aren't limited to a single flight, either.
I believe that's being challenged right now. Wasn't there a guy recently arrested for refusing to turn over information requested in a National Security Letter and for contacting a lawyer to have the NSL challenged? I'm too lazy to look it up right now, but I believe I read that here on /. The bottom line is, until SCOTUS rules on the legality of NSLs, their validity is in question. So, for now, my response to an NSL would be: http://www.gecko-ak.org/SpecialPurposeSigFile.txt :)
In any case, your point is taken -- there are plenty of people who will cave under even the slightest pressure, unfortunately.
There's a little more to it than that.
Most ISPs assign dynamic IP addresses to the majority of their customers. Where I used to work, we used RADIUS to provide dynamic IP addressing to our customers, and we would keep logs that would let us determine which customer had any given IP address on any given day and time. This data was used to help troubleshoot customer login problems, resolve billing disputes with customers, suspend and/or warn customers who had violated our terms and conditions of use, and yes, to fulfill subpoena requests.
However, we absolutely, positively refused to provide subscriber information without a court order of some kind, however. I would like to think that most ISPs operate to the same standards we did.
I have two problems with your argument:
1) You obviously are used to living in a free country where it's not that difficult to decide where you want to live. In a totalitarian country, it's frequently not so easy to decide you want to pack up and move somewhere else. Remember the wall around Berlin before East and West Germany unified in the 90's? That wasn't to keep West Germans from infiltrating East Germany and voting the Communist Party out; it was to keep the East Germans in. What makes you think it would be any easier to leave China?
2) While I am a big fan of law and order (the realities of living in a civil society, not the tv show), laws absolutely must come second to conscience/morality/whatever. I agree that we should live within the law to the best of our availability and that we should work within the legal system as much as possible to change bad laws, civil disobedience is an acceptable catalyst for change. I believe "I was only following orders!" was the defense used (unsuccessfully, I might add) by many of those tried for crimes against humanity after WWII. It was then, and still is now, a pathetic excuse by those who lack the backbone to stand up for what's right.
My boss has a Mercedes SUV that will not start the engine if the engine computer detects that any of the three brake light bulbs have burned out. Now, there's a good idea -- when you burn out a brake light, you can't even drive to the store to buy a replacement.