"Build it and they will come" might be an OK premise for a movie but it makes *no* sense for a multi-billion-yuan science project. I have to believe there is something else to this story than is being described, because it's too crazy/irresponsible to be what it seems.
I agree that skepticism is probably merited here, but I can also tell you that if somebody or multiple somebodies high up enough in the Chinese Communist Party wanted it done for prestige reasons (ie. "We have a big telescope too!"), nobody would dare raise these questions until it got done. Remember, this the country that has built cities that almost nobody has ever moved into and shopping malls that have no customers or stores in them.
The only ones who win are the (Ukranian) lawyers. Nice.
I haven't been to Ukraine in a decade so my perceptions are not up to date, but in the previous decade the Ukrainian judicial system had a lot of corruption. You want a specific verdict? Just get to the judge in private, "accidentally" leave a bag of sufficient cash, and then the trial mysteriously always seems to go your way. I've even heard from sources I trusted, although I could not personally verify the stories, that it was even possible to bribe your way out of a murder charge. I can tell you that twice I was in a car as a passenger when the car was pulled over for a "violation" the policeman made up on the spot and after a payment equivalent to about $10 US was made, the car that just moments ago simply had to be pulled over was suddenly OK to leave. Good luck to those suing, but my guess is that the company will pay the judge as quickly as possible and this isn't going to end well for the plaintiffs.
The article is awful but if you trudge through it, they are talking about the previously announced delay that got made known some months ago. There is no additional delay at all. The show will still debut in late September as scheduled. My understanding is that there will be a split season with something like 7 or so episodes shown this year, a gap of some months as they do special effects and such on the remaining episodes, and then sometime in 2018 they will show the final episodes of the season.
PGP was introduced in 1991. Now it's 2017 and we still don't know how to make sure we are talking to the person we think we are talking to. *weep*
I work in what might best be described as an internal IT support job for a US based Fortune 500 company. Every now and then the particular product I support has a customer with a problem and I have to jump in and try to help. We only sell this product in North America and the vast majority of that within the USA. I say that because when there are problems I have to talk to IT staff who work for our customers and I want it understood that I'm not talking about dealing with companies in undeveloped countries here.. You would not believe how many companies out there can't get PGP working, which we do support in our product. Many times we've had to change over to another file transfer method that uses encrypted channels for communication because the customer can't decrypt anything we send them that was PGP encrypted. We've had a few customers who actually built a server on their site from scratch so we could drop files off to it and avoid using PGP because they decided that they'd rather do that than learn how to use PGP/GPG. So yes, I totally get how PGP was introduced in 1991 and some people still don't know how to use it.
"All user data is obtained without their permission, sure, but it's sent securely via encrypted transmission methods. Further, I assure all of our customers that the Chinese Communist Party servers that keep and analyze this data are under the highest security standards and the CCP does not share its data or findings with outside parties. So there is nothing to worry about. Our phones are doing exactly what our masters in the CCP are requiring them to do and doing so in a very secure manner."
Man this crew is setting some records! I wonder how many more they'll set before the summers out. All this entertainment and still haven't passed anything of mention.
Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame) has a link to a Reddit article that listed something like more than 50 "accomplishments" that Trump has done with the article being created to specifically rebut the idea that he's done nothing. About half of them were executive orders Trump signed and I honestly right now have no way to know if those are accomplishing anything or not. He's been pretty busy deporting illegal immigrants, and I have one friend who supports Trump who really likes this a lot. So I'm just pointing out that Trump supporters have the view that he's out there changing stuff for the better and making a difference just about every day and the rest of us who say "What exactly has he done beside deport a bunch of people?" are delusional.
I disagree with your assessment. I speak Russian rather well and in the previous decade I spent a decent amount of time in the ex-USSR and I got to talk to a lot of people from different walks of life and see all kinds of places that tourists usually don't get to.
The main freedom that Russians have and care about, and this is more or less true in China, is that of free travel. In the old communist systems you couldn't leave for any reason unless you were highly vetted and they were pretty sure you were coming back because defectors made them look bad. Russians are free to leave Russia and visit whatever country they want and even move there if they have the means. This is very important to a lot of people and it has released a lot of pressure from society to allow this.
I don't really understand this, but Russians have a real history that goes back into the tsarist era of believing that the top guy running the show is a really good person and when things go wrong, it's the fault of the people under him and oh if only he knew what those worthless people working for him were doing. North Korea has this too. Large numbers of defectors have praised whatever Kim was in charge at the time they left while blasting other parts of society. You'll still find people in Russia who think that Stalin was fantastic instead of correctly realizing he was a homicidal maniac and a guy who gives Hitler a great run for the money for the prize of being the most evil ruler of all time. Russian elections are mostly, but not completely, free because most people actually love Putin, as they always love the guy in charge, and Putin does legitimately win his elections. There may be some election fraud, but even if they cleaned up all of it, Putin would still win.
Corruption is a big problem in all the ex-USSR except maybe the Baltic States. I say maybe because I haven't been there. People grow up with it and they don't really care. It's a normal thing to them because they've never known anything else. And they don't really seem to care that thugs run everything because the USSR was run by thugs to a certain extent anyway and with no travel restrictions, if they can't deal with it they can legally immigrate and just make that somebody else's problem. As long Putin pays the pensions for old people and thumbs his nose at the west, that's really all they care about. He feeds their feeling (some might say "delusion") that they can once again push around significant chunks of the world and that is important to them.
Not the FEDERAL government, certainly. States can enact policies supported by their individual populations however.
That sounds great, but in reality it isn't. State governments are almost always even worse than the Federal government. My state has had terrible people in the state legislature for as long as I've lived here and the only reason anything sensible ever gets done is because we have good governors. Even the "worst" governor in relative terms that I can think of while living here was still pretty good overall. Our state legislature is held hostage by rural representatives and senators and one party outnumbers the other by something like 2 to 1 overall, so we have a whole lot of effort spent on stupidity in the state legislature. I know that in some other states counties or cities have tried to improve local internet and we've had articles about how Verizon or whoever just threw a bunch of money at the state legislators and then suddenly they began to pass bills making it illegal for cites and counties to do anything about offering internet service.
The Lesson: Do your crime in Russia and stay in Russia.
It's a big country, don't they have nice beaches ?
I think you're kidding, but the answer is actually "Not really". They have Sochi and that's about it. Sochi is a crummy small town that nobody would pay attention to had Putin not developed some kind of rapport for it and elevated it far above its status. It's not the main reason that Russia wanted Crimea back, but I'd say that at least a small component of that land grab was that it has basically served as Russia's version of Florida for quite a long time now. Prior to the takeover a significant portion of tourist traffic in the Crimean beaches was due to Russian tourists.
like push notifications, offline support, and app loading screens
Push notifications are evil. I have one iphone app that I turned them on for, then turned them off, and they still come through any way from time to time. Now I'm starting to see more and more websites that want to send them. I don't need offline support. Who does? And what are "app loading screens" and why do I supposedly need them? All this post has done is make me very grateful to Apple.
While that means less than 20% of the jobs saved from moving them to Mexico are going to still exist, they got to keep there job for over 6 months extra while knowing that they were likely going to need a new job anyway. It's too bad the people who are lashing out against this didn't pay attention to the fact that the automation of some jobs was coming as an alternative. Oh well, if you only believe in reading headlines you're bound to be disappointed when the details hit you personally.
With FoxConn either they build the plant or they don't. And yes, Trump will likely move on, but that means local govt, media and citizens need to keep vigilant watch and spam Paul Ryan's office with calls and emails if it seems like Foxconn is not following through.
I read an article today where somebody (NY Times I think) talked to people at the Carrier site who just got laid off and a whole lot of them were really surprised by the action, including a lot of Trump backers who got the axe. I can't speak to whether these people were stupid or delusional, but they certainly seemed surprised to me.
Yeah, I'm sure that a bunch of citizens contacting Paul Ryan's office is totally going to change things when Foxconn ends up doing nothing. Not.
I also wouldn't rule out that this is simply another check box on something Obama did that he can undo. It does seem that he is super OCD about trying to undo everything he possibly can that Obama did.
Not surprised by this at all. I've been a long time customer and I currently have Uverse, so they provide my TV and internet. I'm not really happy with what I'm paying, although I do like the TV channels I get and the internet is plenty fast for my needs. So some months ago I talked to them and told them that they had to get my rates down or I would leave and go to Comcast, my only other choice where I live. AT&T told me that I had to move over to DirecTV to save any money, but they offered me a pretty good savings if I would switch and I'd get equivalent channels. I warned them that I live in a heavily wooded area with very high trees. "Don't worry. We have plenty of customers like you." Service guy comes out. Says he can't get a good signal anywhere. No DirecTV for me. No discount either. Now I want to be clear that I told AT&T if they didn't drop my rates that I was leaving. They really don't care. It makes no sense, but they are running their business where they would rather lose existing customers completely than give them a discount.
So I contacted Comcast. I can get the exact same TV channels or close enough and maybe slightly faster internet (not really a big deal to me - again, current internet is fast enough for my needs) but at exactly what I'm paying AT&T. Oh - you can't actually talk to anybody at Comcast. You have to use a chat window. So Comcast drone says "What do you think of that price? Isn't that great?" and I said "Not really." and disconnected them. I'm getting to the point where I may give AT&T one last chance to keep me, which I expect to fail, and then I'll just go to Comcast and pay exactly the same as I'm paying now or I'll just cut the cord altogether. Not sure which yet. But it is very clear to me that AT&T doesn't value my business at all and I'm not willing to stay there much longer without a discount.
The number of Russian students gong to US universities will skyrocket. These classes will have a rather significant amount of foreign students from China, Russia and India attending. At least the last one of those seems to like us for now. Then after graduation they will return home and a few years down the road Congress will hold hearings and express their anger at how nobody at the time thought that restricting access to these classes to only US citizen students was a good idea and how they can't believe that schools willingly taught our adversaries skills they could use against us.
I'd rather have a cheaper flight.
Or a more comfortable flight.
Or a more private flight (fewer passengers sat on top of me).
A quicker flight is very low on my list of priorities. Flights are already pretty fast.
Says the guy who has never flown outside the continental United States. Cheaper, I get. But faster would be really nice. And for the record in the previous decade I once flew on what was the longest regularly scheduled non-stop passenger flight in the world, Singapore Airlines Newark to Singapore flight. Last time I checked, no current regularly scheduled non-stop passenger flight is longer than that was. Sadly, Singapore Airlines decided to convert it to all business class and really misread the demand for that, leading to the entire flight being canceled due to "lack of demand" at the much higher prices.
You guys seem to think that this is bad. I was in BestBuy the other day to buy a new keyboard and mouse. I decided to look up reviews while i was standing there and noticed that the price on the BestBuy website beat the one in the store for the keyboard by $30, the mouse by $15, and the mouse pad I was also grabbing by $5. I HAD TO ASK THEM TO PRICE MATCH THEIR OWN DAMN WEBSITE!
I want to be clear that my response is not a joke. You actually found a worker to complain to? The last time I was in Best Buy I had to go to the greeter guy at the front of the store and demand that he send a drone to the only cash register they had open so we could actually check out. The 2 guys in front of me apparently had been there for 5+ minutes waiting for somebody to actually work the cash register. I saw maybe 5 or 6 workers in the entire store. One of the big problems of retail now is that they have stuff they want to sell you, but they can't afford to pay people to actually work there any more so you have to wander all over the store to find somebody who can help you if need it or even find somebody willing to check you out.
Both Perlman and LaSalle have been screwed over here, and they both deserve some of the blame for this. Neither one appears to have understood how to commercialize the technology. They were good friends, but they were not able to separate the ups and downs of friendship from their business relationship.
Thanks for that info that the Hollywood Reporter has a series on this (I didn't quote that part of your post to save space). Yeah, from reading the article this seemed to me to be more about spillover from the Perlman vs. LaSalle case than "Disney stole my stuff because they are EVIL!" Disney has a really good legal team so my guess is that Perlman gets paid off, but nowhere near close to what he thinks he'll get, and everything is resolved confidentially. Probably won't be in his best interests to fight this in court and potentially end up with a ruling that he doesn't own squat and on top of that he just ran up a gigantic legal bill.
If the EU laws work outside Europe, won't China'a laws work outside of China? Why pay for the big firewall, they could just demand removal of all "objectionable" content! Be careful what you wish for....
It's a good question, but I can assure you that they don't care if doing this allows China to do that to them. There's no protected free speech in the EU so the idea is pretty entrenched that speech can and should be restricted/regulated in the EU and France in particular has been pretty keen to insist that its laws apply everywhere. There was a case some years ago where France tried to block Ebay from any listings anywhere in the world for Nazi memorabilia although selling such is and has been perfectly legal in the USA.
Tell me, how do they intercept the data, figure out what it is - and how they get around disguising the data in so far as possibly stripping out any headers identifying file types...
I know one way they could do it. People assume this censorship applies to everybody in China, but it could actually be restricted and implemented in a real low tech way that makes people think it applies to everybody when it only applies to a select few. Imagine a Man In The Middle approach. It seems logical to me that certain users are likely known by the government to post objectionable things from time to time, so if you don't have an exceptionally large number of such people to keep an eye on, you could implement a MITM approach and send all their communications through a central party I'll call a "watcher" who sees the communication in real time and has the ability to pass on the communication untouched and also has the ability to edit out objectionable content before passing it on. Maybe the spied on person only uses WeChat for, say, 30 minutes, so the watcher moves on at the end of that to another user. You could just restrict the watchers to say 100 or maybe 1000 such people and if you make sure they watch the people who consistently post the most objectionable content (yet never advocate overthrown of the government as that would get them arrested and no need to watch them anymore), you could certainly keep tabs on those few individuals They'll figure it out and complain and then everybody assumes that everybody is being watched when in fact you're doing this as low tech as possible with big time human intervention needed and people just assume some massively smart and obtrusive computer program is scanning literally everything. We have had people here on Slashdot who honestly believe the US government has people who read every email sent by every person in the USA, so all it would take is a few Chinese users to complain about this and the government laughs as the sheeple get too scared to do anything controversial and the actual scope of the watching is far lower than suspected.
Next time I'm not putting my education on my resume.
Your story was pretty interesting and a good cautionary tale to share with us, but that's not the conclusion I would advise. If you're in IT, I want to warn you that for some time now many IT jobs flat out require a college degree just to even talk to them about the opening, let alone get hired. I've worked with guys over 50 who don't have college degrees but do have decades in the field and in some cases they get sort of grandfathered in based on experience, but I have also known of one of the guys getting turned down for jobs he could do with no interview at all simply because he didn't have a college degree. And your school sounds like some kind of fly by night school like a tech school rather than a real university. I notice that you don't say much about what kind of school it is. All I can tell you is that a real accredited university would not be expected to lose track of your education. My university certainly knows when I graduated as they beg me for money every year and I do give them some and the mailer always has my year of graduation on it. You call it "college" but I don't know. Sounds to me to be something like "DeVry University" or a similar school rather than Insert Name Of Your State Here University.
With maybe the difference that in closed source, nobody can pick up the slack and continue if he feels the software is worth supporting. Closed source maker going under, software is dead in the water. Sucks to be you if you depended on it.
Yep. As an example. a few years ago ArcSoft abandoned their media playing products, including the excellent Total Media Theater which I bought. I didn't use a warez copy, I paid for it. Still have it on my PC. Still use it at times. It was great because if you ripped a BluRay, it would play the rip without any questions. The only realistic commercial alternatives to TMT are WinDVD and PowerDVD and both refuse to pay rips. In fact, both are determined to do everything that the MPAA wants to make sure that their products are as barely useful as possible.
I used MPC-HC some years ago but the only real advantage it had was for me over VLC was that it could "play" AviSynth scripts and you could see the output you would get from the script kind of in slow motion without having to run the script on the whole video (which could take hours depending on what you were doing) and then check the output. AviSynth is a scripting tool that lets you do rather complex operations on video and audio, mostly video, like if you need to re-encode something to different resolution.
Sucking up to them like Hollywood does putting Chinese actors in their films for no reason, or like Zuckerberg did trying to speak Mandarin, doesn't work, either. They see through it a mile away. They have more respect for people who love their own countries and don't take any shit from them. It's no coincidence that the word kowtow came into English from their language.
Well, your criticism of Zuckerberg is spot on, but he's mostly doing that through greed because getting access to China would get him access to a lot of money. Facebook won't ever be allowed in China under the current regime unless Zuckerberg does a PR disaster type sell out that offers a greatly crippled Facebook that the PRC completely controls. The main reason Facebook isn't allowed in China is that the Chinese Communist Party's greatest fear is being overthrown by spontaneous protests and they won't allow it in as it is now because Facebook tools could be used to spread protests easily.
However, I think you're way off base in the film industry criticism. Things are getting better for black people in Hollywood now. I'm not saying they are perfect, but they are certainly a lot better than, say, 10 years ago. Asian and HIspanic people are very badly underrepresented in Hollywood right now and I'm not going to complain about anything that gets them more exposure. I'm an American caucasian, but I like the film industries of China, Japan and South Korea in general and watch their films from time to time. So for me, if there are more Asians on the screen, that is a good thing, wherever they are from. You need to understand too that China in particular is a massive market with a foreign film quota system and Hollywood is severely limited in what it can even show there. For this reason, Hollywood is actively seeking major financial backing from Chinese investors because if Chinese companies help pay for a Hollywood production, that can be used to get the film considered as a "local" production and get past the quota. So if these investors require as a condition that more Asian actors get used, more power to them. And some American productions deliberately use big name Asian actors (ie. Rogue One) as a drawing card for getting more butts in theaters in Asia. I'm not seeing anything wrong with that. If a guy like John Cho gets better roles as a result of this kind of thing, I'm seeing that as a big plus.
We don't even have a ship capable of putting a man in space anymore. So pretty much all of them.
Not necessarily true. Space X might actually be able to do it as soon as they could get a possible launch vehicle assembled and fueled, however long that takes (Days?). They're supposed to be starting tests of manned flights in the very near future. In theory Orion and that "heavy lifter" rocket, or whatever they call it might be able to do it too if this was a case of "We HAVE to launch a rocket NOW to get important person X to the ISS NOW or humanity will be wiped out!" Additionally I believe that only China and Russia currently have systems in use that have gotten people into space fairly recently, so not like there is just this amazing number of space faring nations we are falling behind. Maybe you believe North Korean media reports too much.
The fact that Zuckerberg's particular set of talents happen to be financially lucrative does not automatically make him more extraordinary than anyone else with a different set of talents.
I fully agree with you, but what I keep reading and hearing is that there is a general perception by others that because he's been really good at running Facebook (even if you hate Facebook, I don't see how you can't admit that it's been successful) that means that he is a genius at everything. Everything. This has definitely gotten into his own head. Honestly, the more I read about him, the more I dislike him. He's what the Seinfeld TV show called "a hipster doofus". He definitely is like most of his generation in thinking that everybody older than him is an idiot. From my perspective it could be that the only thing he's really good at is running Facebook, but himself and others seem to think he is the living embodiment of The Most Interesting Man In The World.
...what are they afraid of them learning on the open internet?
All kinds of things. But they are actually more afraid, believe it or not, of the power of social media to encourage wild cat demonstrations against the government. The main job of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) is not really to make China better. They do want to do that, but the main job is to protect the CCP itself at any cost. Did you know that the Chinese constitution (yes, they have one) actually has something in it pledging the military (so called People's Liberation Army) to protect the CCP? Not the country. The CCP. Anyway, things China doesn't want its citizens to know, include...
1) The truth about the government surpression of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. By the way, these are known in China as "the student protests of 1989" or "the student protests of June 1989". If you use the term "Tiananmen Square protests" to people raised in China, they may not know what you are referring to.
2) Anything at all about Falun Gong. Different sources disagree on exactly why the PRC (People's Republic of China) has a problem with it, but it may mostly be because it showed years ago a very strong ability to have large numbers of protesters show up and the CCP fears being overthrown in a spontaneous revolution.
3) Information about corruption by government officials and their family members as it threatens the stability of the CCP.
4) Any meaningful contact and knowledge of Taiwan beyond the superficial because greater knowledge of Taiwan's democratic processes are a threat to the CCP's very existence.
That's not a complete list but it'll do for here. You can see a general thread of paranoia in everything that the CCP might be overthrown quickly by a spontaneous protest that spins out of control faster than the PLA can stop it (and some members might join in anyway). It's not really aimed at secret keeping so much as making sure people can't organize to overthrow the government.
Slashdot Mirror
"Build it and they will come" might be an OK premise for a movie but it makes *no* sense for a multi-billion-yuan science project. I have to believe there is something else to this story than is being described, because it's too crazy/irresponsible to be what it seems.
I agree that skepticism is probably merited here, but I can also tell you that if somebody or multiple somebodies high up enough in the Chinese Communist Party wanted it done for prestige reasons (ie. "We have a big telescope too!"), nobody would dare raise these questions until it got done. Remember, this the country that has built cities that almost nobody has ever moved into and shopping malls that have no customers or stores in them.
The only ones who win are the (Ukranian) lawyers. Nice.
I haven't been to Ukraine in a decade so my perceptions are not up to date, but in the previous decade the Ukrainian judicial system had a lot of corruption. You want a specific verdict? Just get to the judge in private, "accidentally" leave a bag of sufficient cash, and then the trial mysteriously always seems to go your way. I've even heard from sources I trusted, although I could not personally verify the stories, that it was even possible to bribe your way out of a murder charge. I can tell you that twice I was in a car as a passenger when the car was pulled over for a "violation" the policeman made up on the spot and after a payment equivalent to about $10 US was made, the car that just moments ago simply had to be pulled over was suddenly OK to leave. Good luck to those suing, but my guess is that the company will pay the judge as quickly as possible and this isn't going to end well for the plaintiffs.
The article is awful but if you trudge through it, they are talking about the previously announced delay that got made known some months ago. There is no additional delay at all. The show will still debut in late September as scheduled. My understanding is that there will be a split season with something like 7 or so episodes shown this year, a gap of some months as they do special effects and such on the remaining episodes, and then sometime in 2018 they will show the final episodes of the season.
PGP was introduced in 1991. Now it's 2017 and we still don't know how to make sure we are talking to the person we think we are talking to. *weep*
I work in what might best be described as an internal IT support job for a US based Fortune 500 company. Every now and then the particular product I support has a customer with a problem and I have to jump in and try to help. We only sell this product in North America and the vast majority of that within the USA. I say that because when there are problems I have to talk to IT staff who work for our customers and I want it understood that I'm not talking about dealing with companies in undeveloped countries here.. You would not believe how many companies out there can't get PGP working, which we do support in our product. Many times we've had to change over to another file transfer method that uses encrypted channels for communication because the customer can't decrypt anything we send them that was PGP encrypted. We've had a few customers who actually built a server on their site from scratch so we could drop files off to it and avoid using PGP because they decided that they'd rather do that than learn how to use PGP/GPG. So yes, I totally get how PGP was introduced in 1991 and some people still don't know how to use it.
"All user data is obtained without their permission, sure, but it's sent securely via encrypted transmission methods. Further, I assure all of our customers that the Chinese Communist Party servers that keep and analyze this data are under the highest security standards and the CCP does not share its data or findings with outside parties. So there is nothing to worry about. Our phones are doing exactly what our masters in the CCP are requiring them to do and doing so in a very secure manner."
Man this crew is setting some records! I wonder how many more they'll set before the summers out. All this entertainment and still haven't passed anything of mention.
Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame) has a link to a Reddit article that listed something like more than 50 "accomplishments" that Trump has done with the article being created to specifically rebut the idea that he's done nothing. About half of them were executive orders Trump signed and I honestly right now have no way to know if those are accomplishing anything or not. He's been pretty busy deporting illegal immigrants, and I have one friend who supports Trump who really likes this a lot. So I'm just pointing out that Trump supporters have the view that he's out there changing stuff for the better and making a difference just about every day and the rest of us who say "What exactly has he done beside deport a bunch of people?" are delusional.
I disagree with your assessment. I speak Russian rather well and in the previous decade I spent a decent amount of time in the ex-USSR and I got to talk to a lot of people from different walks of life and see all kinds of places that tourists usually don't get to.
The main freedom that Russians have and care about, and this is more or less true in China, is that of free travel. In the old communist systems you couldn't leave for any reason unless you were highly vetted and they were pretty sure you were coming back because defectors made them look bad. Russians are free to leave Russia and visit whatever country they want and even move there if they have the means. This is very important to a lot of people and it has released a lot of pressure from society to allow this.
I don't really understand this, but Russians have a real history that goes back into the tsarist era of believing that the top guy running the show is a really good person and when things go wrong, it's the fault of the people under him and oh if only he knew what those worthless people working for him were doing. North Korea has this too. Large numbers of defectors have praised whatever Kim was in charge at the time they left while blasting other parts of society. You'll still find people in Russia who think that Stalin was fantastic instead of correctly realizing he was a homicidal maniac and a guy who gives Hitler a great run for the money for the prize of being the most evil ruler of all time. Russian elections are mostly, but not completely, free because most people actually love Putin, as they always love the guy in charge, and Putin does legitimately win his elections. There may be some election fraud, but even if they cleaned up all of it, Putin would still win.
Corruption is a big problem in all the ex-USSR except maybe the Baltic States. I say maybe because I haven't been there. People grow up with it and they don't really care. It's a normal thing to them because they've never known anything else. And they don't really seem to care that thugs run everything because the USSR was run by thugs to a certain extent anyway and with no travel restrictions, if they can't deal with it they can legally immigrate and just make that somebody else's problem. As long Putin pays the pensions for old people and thumbs his nose at the west, that's really all they care about. He feeds their feeling (some might say "delusion") that they can once again push around significant chunks of the world and that is important to them.
Not the FEDERAL government, certainly. States can enact policies supported by their individual populations however.
That sounds great, but in reality it isn't. State governments are almost always even worse than the Federal government. My state has had terrible people in the state legislature for as long as I've lived here and the only reason anything sensible ever gets done is because we have good governors. Even the "worst" governor in relative terms that I can think of while living here was still pretty good overall. Our state legislature is held hostage by rural representatives and senators and one party outnumbers the other by something like 2 to 1 overall, so we have a whole lot of effort spent on stupidity in the state legislature. I know that in some other states counties or cities have tried to improve local internet and we've had articles about how Verizon or whoever just threw a bunch of money at the state legislators and then suddenly they began to pass bills making it illegal for cites and counties to do anything about offering internet service.
The Lesson: Do your crime in Russia and stay in Russia.
It's a big country, don't they have nice beaches ?
I think you're kidding, but the answer is actually "Not really". They have Sochi and that's about it. Sochi is a crummy small town that nobody would pay attention to had Putin not developed some kind of rapport for it and elevated it far above its status. It's not the main reason that Russia wanted Crimea back, but I'd say that at least a small component of that land grab was that it has basically served as Russia's version of Florida for quite a long time now. Prior to the takeover a significant portion of tourist traffic in the Crimean beaches was due to Russian tourists.
Push notifications are evil. I have one iphone app that I turned them on for, then turned them off, and they still come through any way from time to time. Now I'm starting to see more and more websites that want to send them. I don't need offline support. Who does? And what are "app loading screens" and why do I supposedly need them? All this post has done is make me very grateful to Apple.
While that means less than 20% of the jobs saved from moving them to Mexico are going to still exist, they got to keep there job for over 6 months extra while knowing that they were likely going to need a new job anyway. It's too bad the people who are lashing out against this didn't pay attention to the fact that the automation of some jobs was coming as an alternative. Oh well, if you only believe in reading headlines you're bound to be disappointed when the details hit you personally. With FoxConn either they build the plant or they don't. And yes, Trump will likely move on, but that means local govt, media and citizens need to keep vigilant watch and spam Paul Ryan's office with calls and emails if it seems like Foxconn is not following through.
I read an article today where somebody (NY Times I think) talked to people at the Carrier site who just got laid off and a whole lot of them were really surprised by the action, including a lot of Trump backers who got the axe. I can't speak to whether these people were stupid or delusional, but they certainly seemed surprised to me.
Yeah, I'm sure that a bunch of citizens contacting Paul Ryan's office is totally going to change things when Foxconn ends up doing nothing. Not.
I also wouldn't rule out that this is simply another check box on something Obama did that he can undo. It does seem that he is super OCD about trying to undo everything he possibly can that Obama did.
Not surprised by this at all. I've been a long time customer and I currently have Uverse, so they provide my TV and internet. I'm not really happy with what I'm paying, although I do like the TV channels I get and the internet is plenty fast for my needs. So some months ago I talked to them and told them that they had to get my rates down or I would leave and go to Comcast, my only other choice where I live. AT&T told me that I had to move over to DirecTV to save any money, but they offered me a pretty good savings if I would switch and I'd get equivalent channels. I warned them that I live in a heavily wooded area with very high trees. "Don't worry. We have plenty of customers like you." Service guy comes out. Says he can't get a good signal anywhere. No DirecTV for me. No discount either. Now I want to be clear that I told AT&T if they didn't drop my rates that I was leaving. They really don't care. It makes no sense, but they are running their business where they would rather lose existing customers completely than give them a discount.
So I contacted Comcast. I can get the exact same TV channels or close enough and maybe slightly faster internet (not really a big deal to me - again, current internet is fast enough for my needs) but at exactly what I'm paying AT&T. Oh - you can't actually talk to anybody at Comcast. You have to use a chat window. So Comcast drone says "What do you think of that price? Isn't that great?" and I said "Not really." and disconnected them. I'm getting to the point where I may give AT&T one last chance to keep me, which I expect to fail, and then I'll just go to Comcast and pay exactly the same as I'm paying now or I'll just cut the cord altogether. Not sure which yet. But it is very clear to me that AT&T doesn't value my business at all and I'm not willing to stay there much longer without a discount.
The number of Russian students gong to US universities will skyrocket. These classes will have a rather significant amount of foreign students from China, Russia and India attending. At least the last one of those seems to like us for now. Then after graduation they will return home and a few years down the road Congress will hold hearings and express their anger at how nobody at the time thought that restricting access to these classes to only US citizen students was a good idea and how they can't believe that schools willingly taught our adversaries skills they could use against us.
I'd rather have a cheaper flight. Or a more comfortable flight. Or a more private flight (fewer passengers sat on top of me).
A quicker flight is very low on my list of priorities. Flights are already pretty fast.
Says the guy who has never flown outside the continental United States. Cheaper, I get. But faster would be really nice. And for the record in the previous decade I once flew on what was the longest regularly scheduled non-stop passenger flight in the world, Singapore Airlines Newark to Singapore flight. Last time I checked, no current regularly scheduled non-stop passenger flight is longer than that was. Sadly, Singapore Airlines decided to convert it to all business class and really misread the demand for that, leading to the entire flight being canceled due to "lack of demand" at the much higher prices.
You guys seem to think that this is bad. I was in BestBuy the other day to buy a new keyboard and mouse. I decided to look up reviews while i was standing there and noticed that the price on the BestBuy website beat the one in the store for the keyboard by $30, the mouse by $15, and the mouse pad I was also grabbing by $5. I HAD TO ASK THEM TO PRICE MATCH THEIR OWN DAMN WEBSITE!
I want to be clear that my response is not a joke. You actually found a worker to complain to? The last time I was in Best Buy I had to go to the greeter guy at the front of the store and demand that he send a drone to the only cash register they had open so we could actually check out. The 2 guys in front of me apparently had been there for 5+ minutes waiting for somebody to actually work the cash register. I saw maybe 5 or 6 workers in the entire store. One of the big problems of retail now is that they have stuff they want to sell you, but they can't afford to pay people to actually work there any more so you have to wander all over the store to find somebody who can help you if need it or even find somebody willing to check you out.
Both Perlman and LaSalle have been screwed over here, and they both deserve some of the blame for this. Neither one appears to have understood how to commercialize the technology. They were good friends, but they were not able to separate the ups and downs of friendship from their business relationship.
Thanks for that info that the Hollywood Reporter has a series on this (I didn't quote that part of your post to save space). Yeah, from reading the article this seemed to me to be more about spillover from the Perlman vs. LaSalle case than "Disney stole my stuff because they are EVIL!" Disney has a really good legal team so my guess is that Perlman gets paid off, but nowhere near close to what he thinks he'll get, and everything is resolved confidentially. Probably won't be in his best interests to fight this in court and potentially end up with a ruling that he doesn't own squat and on top of that he just ran up a gigantic legal bill.
If the EU laws work outside Europe, won't China'a laws work outside of China? Why pay for the big firewall, they could just demand removal of all "objectionable" content! Be careful what you wish for....
It's a good question, but I can assure you that they don't care if doing this allows China to do that to them. There's no protected free speech in the EU so the idea is pretty entrenched that speech can and should be restricted/regulated in the EU and France in particular has been pretty keen to insist that its laws apply everywhere. There was a case some years ago where France tried to block Ebay from any listings anywhere in the world for Nazi memorabilia although selling such is and has been perfectly legal in the USA.
Tell me, how do they intercept the data, figure out what it is - and how they get around disguising the data in so far as possibly stripping out any headers identifying file types ...
I know one way they could do it. People assume this censorship applies to everybody in China, but it could actually be restricted and implemented in a real low tech way that makes people think it applies to everybody when it only applies to a select few. Imagine a Man In The Middle approach. It seems logical to me that certain users are likely known by the government to post objectionable things from time to time, so if you don't have an exceptionally large number of such people to keep an eye on, you could implement a MITM approach and send all their communications through a central party I'll call a "watcher" who sees the communication in real time and has the ability to pass on the communication untouched and also has the ability to edit out objectionable content before passing it on. Maybe the spied on person only uses WeChat for, say, 30 minutes, so the watcher moves on at the end of that to another user. You could just restrict the watchers to say 100 or maybe 1000 such people and if you make sure they watch the people who consistently post the most objectionable content (yet never advocate overthrown of the government as that would get them arrested and no need to watch them anymore), you could certainly keep tabs on those few individuals They'll figure it out and complain and then everybody assumes that everybody is being watched when in fact you're doing this as low tech as possible with big time human intervention needed and people just assume some massively smart and obtrusive computer program is scanning literally everything. We have had people here on Slashdot who honestly believe the US government has people who read every email sent by every person in the USA, so all it would take is a few Chinese users to complain about this and the government laughs as the sheeple get too scared to do anything controversial and the actual scope of the watching is far lower than suspected.
Next time I'm not putting my education on my resume.
Your story was pretty interesting and a good cautionary tale to share with us, but that's not the conclusion I would advise. If you're in IT, I want to warn you that for some time now many IT jobs flat out require a college degree just to even talk to them about the opening, let alone get hired. I've worked with guys over 50 who don't have college degrees but do have decades in the field and in some cases they get sort of grandfathered in based on experience, but I have also known of one of the guys getting turned down for jobs he could do with no interview at all simply because he didn't have a college degree. And your school sounds like some kind of fly by night school like a tech school rather than a real university. I notice that you don't say much about what kind of school it is. All I can tell you is that a real accredited university would not be expected to lose track of your education. My university certainly knows when I graduated as they beg me for money every year and I do give them some and the mailer always has my year of graduation on it. You call it "college" but I don't know. Sounds to me to be something like "DeVry University" or a similar school rather than Insert Name Of Your State Here University.
Because that never happened with closed source...
With maybe the difference that in closed source, nobody can pick up the slack and continue if he feels the software is worth supporting. Closed source maker going under, software is dead in the water. Sucks to be you if you depended on it.
Yep. As an example. a few years ago ArcSoft abandoned their media playing products, including the excellent Total Media Theater which I bought. I didn't use a warez copy, I paid for it. Still have it on my PC. Still use it at times. It was great because if you ripped a BluRay, it would play the rip without any questions. The only realistic commercial alternatives to TMT are WinDVD and PowerDVD and both refuse to pay rips. In fact, both are determined to do everything that the MPAA wants to make sure that their products are as barely useful as possible. I used MPC-HC some years ago but the only real advantage it had was for me over VLC was that it could "play" AviSynth scripts and you could see the output you would get from the script kind of in slow motion without having to run the script on the whole video (which could take hours depending on what you were doing) and then check the output. AviSynth is a scripting tool that lets you do rather complex operations on video and audio, mostly video, like if you need to re-encode something to different resolution.
Sucking up to them like Hollywood does putting Chinese actors in their films for no reason, or like Zuckerberg did trying to speak Mandarin, doesn't work, either. They see through it a mile away. They have more respect for people who love their own countries and don't take any shit from them. It's no coincidence that the word kowtow came into English from their language.
Well, your criticism of Zuckerberg is spot on, but he's mostly doing that through greed because getting access to China would get him access to a lot of money. Facebook won't ever be allowed in China under the current regime unless Zuckerberg does a PR disaster type sell out that offers a greatly crippled Facebook that the PRC completely controls. The main reason Facebook isn't allowed in China is that the Chinese Communist Party's greatest fear is being overthrown by spontaneous protests and they won't allow it in as it is now because Facebook tools could be used to spread protests easily.
However, I think you're way off base in the film industry criticism. Things are getting better for black people in Hollywood now. I'm not saying they are perfect, but they are certainly a lot better than, say, 10 years ago. Asian and HIspanic people are very badly underrepresented in Hollywood right now and I'm not going to complain about anything that gets them more exposure. I'm an American caucasian, but I like the film industries of China, Japan and South Korea in general and watch their films from time to time. So for me, if there are more Asians on the screen, that is a good thing, wherever they are from. You need to understand too that China in particular is a massive market with a foreign film quota system and Hollywood is severely limited in what it can even show there. For this reason, Hollywood is actively seeking major financial backing from Chinese investors because if Chinese companies help pay for a Hollywood production, that can be used to get the film considered as a "local" production and get past the quota. So if these investors require as a condition that more Asian actors get used, more power to them. And some American productions deliberately use big name Asian actors (ie. Rogue One) as a drawing card for getting more butts in theaters in Asia. I'm not seeing anything wrong with that. If a guy like John Cho gets better roles as a result of this kind of thing, I'm seeing that as a big plus.
which space other program is better than NASA?
We don't even have a ship capable of putting a man in space anymore. So pretty much all of them.
Not necessarily true. Space X might actually be able to do it as soon as they could get a possible launch vehicle assembled and fueled, however long that takes (Days?). They're supposed to be starting tests of manned flights in the very near future. In theory Orion and that "heavy lifter" rocket, or whatever they call it might be able to do it too if this was a case of "We HAVE to launch a rocket NOW to get important person X to the ISS NOW or humanity will be wiped out!" Additionally I believe that only China and Russia currently have systems in use that have gotten people into space fairly recently, so not like there is just this amazing number of space faring nations we are falling behind. Maybe you believe North Korean media reports too much.
The fact that Zuckerberg's particular set of talents happen to be financially lucrative does not automatically make him more extraordinary than anyone else with a different set of talents.
I fully agree with you, but what I keep reading and hearing is that there is a general perception by others that because he's been really good at running Facebook (even if you hate Facebook, I don't see how you can't admit that it's been successful) that means that he is a genius at everything. Everything. This has definitely gotten into his own head. Honestly, the more I read about him, the more I dislike him. He's what the Seinfeld TV show called "a hipster doofus". He definitely is like most of his generation in thinking that everybody older than him is an idiot. From my perspective it could be that the only thing he's really good at is running Facebook, but himself and others seem to think he is the living embodiment of The Most Interesting Man In The World.
...what are they afraid of them learning on the open internet?
All kinds of things. But they are actually more afraid, believe it or not, of the power of social media to encourage wild cat demonstrations against the government. The main job of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) is not really to make China better. They do want to do that, but the main job is to protect the CCP itself at any cost. Did you know that the Chinese constitution (yes, they have one) actually has something in it pledging the military (so called People's Liberation Army) to protect the CCP? Not the country. The CCP. Anyway, things China doesn't want its citizens to know, include...
1) The truth about the government surpression of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. By the way, these are known in China as "the student protests of 1989" or "the student protests of June 1989". If you use the term "Tiananmen Square protests" to people raised in China, they may not know what you are referring to.
2) Anything at all about Falun Gong. Different sources disagree on exactly why the PRC (People's Republic of China) has a problem with it, but it may mostly be because it showed years ago a very strong ability to have large numbers of protesters show up and the CCP fears being overthrown in a spontaneous revolution.
3) Information about corruption by government officials and their family members as it threatens the stability of the CCP.
4) Any meaningful contact and knowledge of Taiwan beyond the superficial because greater knowledge of Taiwan's democratic processes are a threat to the CCP's very existence.
That's not a complete list but it'll do for here. You can see a general thread of paranoia in everything that the CCP might be overthrown quickly by a spontaneous protest that spins out of control faster than the PLA can stop it (and some members might join in anyway). It's not really aimed at secret keeping so much as making sure people can't organize to overthrow the government.