Ah, but these binary-choice interfaces are very rarely "yes/no". More often than not they represent two most popular choices out of a much larger menu, except that this doesn't work nearly as well as it sounds when you've got menus were all items are equally used.
Personally I have never seen a "yes/no" presented to me on a cell phone like that.
Besides, if you have a touch screen, there's really no need for other buttons - that yes/no question you need answered can just be two big buttons on the screen.
Heck, Windows has no way of mounting images as virtual drives without the installation of extra software. And AFAIK it can't burn disk images without extra software also! Both of these features I've used heavily in OSX.
Look at that HTC Touch pic. See those two buttons on the bottom? This is proof conclusive, to me anyway, that these guys just don't get it. You have a touch screen for God's sake, why in the world are you still dealing with the "binary choice" UI of old phones? That is absolutely one thing I despise the most about current cell phone UI - they have all adopted the two-button interface. For every menu you are in, there are only ever two choices (unless you want to risk bringing up yet another menu). Sure, this is a limitation due to hardware, so why are we keeping it now that we have the freedom to allow the user to interact in ANY way with the device?
Like you, I am also a college student living on campus, except in Canada, though WiFi is also ubiquitous here. It is clear we have vastly different experiences. I believe the iPhone targets people like me:
A - I don't have my laptop with me when I go out with friends. Why would I lug that thing around, especially if I'm out drinking? Recipe for disaster.
B - Free public computers only exist on campus. Honestly, is campus really that exciting that you spend the vast majority of your off hours there?
1 - Plans change. This sounds like one of the initial arguments against cell phones. "I always plan ahead, so there's no need for a barrage of phone calls on the go!". Well, invariably someone screws up, or something unforeseen happens (bar closes, buddy gets run over, movie theater's closed, etc etc). Since getting my phone I've had an infinitely easier time socializing with my friends than before, and I suspect this will up the ante for that even further.
2 - 411 is $1 a call. Around here, it means dialing it, waiting. Waiting. Waiting. Describing what you're trying to find. Waiting. Waiting. Getting your answer (texted to your phone, nice), and then turning around and calling THAT number to find the actual information you need... Oh, and you might have to hold there too. With the internet at your fingertips, it's "free" (save data costs... but considering how much I plan to use the service, it's more than worth it compared to 411).
3 - Yes, because my friends are my bitches who should look up movie schedules on-call. Not that I wouldn't if I were in a real pinch, but this allows me to find the information I need independently. It also allows me to skim a page for the info I need, instead of forcing my dear friend here to recite it to me.
4 - I suppose this is where we differ. When I "hang out with friends", we hit pubs, bars, movies, restaurants, pool joints, concerts, and any other number of events and weird places. We like to explore a lot, and we bus ourselves to nearby strange cities to take in their sights and sounds. An iPhone-like device would be extremely helpful for us.
Allow me to point out a very recent example. I just returned from Toronto (Canada), where my girlfriend and I went to see the grand re-opening of the Royal Ontario Museum (highly recommended visit for anyone in the area, seriously). After taking a look at the brand spankin' new museum, we decided to take in a movie, but wanted to check the movie schedule, as well as if we'd miss the last bus out of the city. Well, unfortunately that meant:
A - Trudging down the street to the movie theatre. It's only a few blocks, but still 10 minutes wasted if I had access to their site at my fingertips.
B - Trudging to the nearest subway terminal, which has a kiosk where you can look up inter-city bus schedules.
Not rocket science by any measure, but you can start to see how an iPhone would have been useful here. A half hour information trek could've been reduced to 30 seconds. Heck, while perusing the museum we wondered about certain things, and if I had Wikipedia at my fingertips...
How is the iPhone required for use while walking? Personally I don't imagine the iPhone being used much while walking (except while listening or chatting) at all. The big selling point is both email and Google Maps. There have been *so* many occasions when I've gathered with friends, and wondered "where's the nearest burger joint?" or "when's the movie showing tonight so we know when to leave the bar?". Things of that sort - none of us know the cinema's hotline (there is one) by heart, so Google and GMaps is crucial for us.
None of that requires use while walking. But it does require use while a laptop or other source of internet is not easily accessible!
I don't think the iPhone is about bringing anything completely revolutionary and unseen onto the table. Rather, it fills a very real ache in the market that nobody has so far been able to fill: true internet on mobiles. I've used browsers on cell phones, they are a pain in the ass. I've also used a Blackberry, and while they're a bit better off, the internet is still far from useful on them.
Looking back, the iPod didn't bring in anything horribly new either. MP3 players have already existed for some time since then, but Apple rolled in a slick user interface, and an end-to-end music management service (iTunes). Apple has always built their products on being end-to-end integrated, with software working in tandem with hardware, as opposed to being two disparate parts of the same process. The success of the iPod wasn't that Apple had some absolutely revolutionary technology, it was that they took technology and brought it down to the average man.
The iPhone is in for some tougher competition - the mobile market is a lot more mature than the music player market was at the launch of the iPod. But having used a lot of cell phones (both internet enabled and otherwise), I can say for sure that the market has a LOT of room for a phone (even one without the iPod!) that has as slick a UI as the iPhone seems to have. Goodbye convoluted two-button interfaces! Goodbye crappy browsers! Goodbye the infamous Motorola UI lag!
"Fluff"? I would say that the physical device interaction is the coolest part of the whole deal.
Oops sorry, I'm not following the Slashdot groupthink. *clears throat* Rah! Rah! Microsoft evil! Microsoft steal idea! Microsoft does no innovation! Rah!~
Woah woah woah, wait. A computer when making a decision is also often not constrained to a single choice, and in the case of optimization-based algorithms, the computer will use a complex weighting or logic system to choose between available choices.
Does my machine have free will?
I'm afraid when studying such vague subjects that people observe natural phenomena (impressive as they may be) and start to anthropomorphize what they see. A fly may be making an educated choice, but is that really our definition of free will, or dare I say, consciousness?
As a former Apple employee, I can tell you without a doubt that they don't distribute this type of information in memos. The grunts like us are not privy to release dates for anything except pretty much our own assigned products. The only people who are at any point aware of big-picture information like this are the suits, and I doubt any of them would leak (especially considering you can count them on two hands).
Like the iPhone, Apple employees rely on the same sources regular joes do to find out about new releases. Nobody besides the iPhone team even knew what an iPhone looked like before it was shown at MacWorld.
Agreed, though "below average" for developers is at least somewhat livable. From what I've seen (I've known many people who've worked QA), the pay is minimum wage. I know guys flipping burgers at McDonalds making more money than a tester at EA. Unless you are a senior QA tester (such a term is hardly heard of), do not expect to support yourself with a QA job.
I've known some people who have "broken in" to development after spending a lot of (grueling, low-pay, poor security) time in QA. Which is to say... it is possible to get into dev through QA.
That said, I've known many a game developer, and the general consensus is that, while it is possible, the possibility is also remote enough that it's a pretty crappy idea. A lot of game development, from the code side anyway (I'm assuming since this is Slashdot that this is the case), require extensive understanding of computer science fundamentals, so unless you are some genius self-trained uber-coder, it's probably best if you go to school and learn the nuts and bolts necessary in this industry.
The fundamental problem I see with people who are anti-arms in this argument is that you're assuming that we're advocating that we give guns to EVERYONE willy-nilly. Giving every person a gun is just stupid, nobody is really advocating that. What I think people *are* advocating is that we arm people who are willing to get trained in safety, engagement, and everything else that makes them a better shooter and more capable under these circumstances.
Yeah, average Joe will probably shoot a friendly than the gunman simply by accident. Trained average Joe probably will not.
You don't need the keyboard attachment... I have a USB keyboard (an Apple USB Keyboard no less...) hooked up to my 360 and it works great when I'm trying to IM someone.
If it was true that Blizzard using my outbound bandwidth is saving me money, then sure, it's an effective compromise (except that many ISPs are now blocking upload BT traffic in an attempt to kill Torrent, but that's another point entirely). I for one am not convinced that this is the case.
We've all heard the BS before. Episodic gaming! You get games at regular intervals, keeping you hooked and interested, and you the customers supply us with a steadier revenue stream so we don't have to suck $50 out of you at once! Sounds good until you realize that the $50 game has now turned into 5x $20 episodes. Oops!
Support online distribution! By eliminating the eeeeevil publishing middlemen, we can turn a healthier profit and pass the savings on to you the consumers! Oops, nope, online games still cost as much as their brick-n-mortar shelf counterparts. Considering I'm paying the exact same price, I'd rather get a box, manual, and support local businessmen (and high school clerks with part time jobs) while I'm at it.
The game industry has promised us a lot of things, promised us cost savings, but in the end none of that has ever materialized. Even if Blizzard came out and tried to justify BTing their patches, it won't prevent the inevitable price hike.
"The Taiwan government isn't an American-styled democracy."
It is, more than you might imagine. Sun Yat-Sen, the founding father of modern Chinese democracy, studied in the US and modeled much of his system of government after it. Case in point: Taiwanese government is divided into 4 branches, 3 of which are direct clones from the American model: legislative, executive, and judiciary. The only major change there is the addition of a 4th "oversight" branch of government. Much of the constitution is also inspired largely by the American constitution.
"And no, calling people from Taiwan Chinese is not insulting."
You're right, it's not. Us Taiwanese do not object to being called Chinese - because ethnically that is what we are. But of course, that isn't what you said in your post. You said: "When I was living in Taiwan, which isn't China but it's close enough". There's a fundamental difference here. To compare the relatively free Taiwanese society, of educated individuals and an extremely well developed social welfare system, with representative government and free elections... to a country like China, where oppression and fear still reign supreme, education is still limited to the elite, and no significant representation exists in government... that is the true insult. We have fought long and hard for these freedoms, and we still live in the shadow of Chinese communist annihilation every day. The least you can do is not lump the two countries into the same damned category.
"Taiwan government considers its territory Zhongguo"
The Taiwanese government has not made claims to China in a very long time. Way to be stuck in the 60s.
"and by extension, the people who live under it are Zhongguoren, which pretty much translates into Chinese"
I really don't think you understand Chinese-Taiwanese geopolitics very well, despite apparently having lived there. The Taiwanese identify themselves as Chinese by ethnicity, but the Taiwanese government does not assert right of rule over the people of China. As far as the Taiwanese government is concerned, Taiwan is its own separate country with self-rule, and China is its own thing. The Taiwanese claim over all of China has not been exercised since a LONG time ago.
I greatly object to the fact that you equated the *countries* of Taiwan and China, not the ethnicities or cultural groups. It is no lie that ethnically the Taiwanese and southern Chinese are one and the same. But to pretend like the two places share the same lifestyle, freedoms, and government is just ignorant.
Also of interest (and something slightly more on-topic) is that Taiwan does have recognized and actively enforced copyright and intellectual property laws. Most IP theft occurs in a strictly illegal context and is not representative of a government that does not recognize copyrights. What we do not recognize is the patent or exclusivity of a particular product type. To take your example of a popular dessert being introduced, and spawning imitators within weeks, culturally and legally we do not recognize a pastry creation as being deserving of exclusive rights. On the other hand, stealing PCB designs and prints to a turbine is a strict no-no.
"When I was living in Taiwan, which isn't China but it's close enough"
As an ethnic Taiwanese... no... no it's not. Do not confuse a totalitarian dictatorship with no semblance of human rights with an American-styled democracy. Please. It insults all of us.
That being said, I do agree that in Chinese culture there is little in the way of respect for intellectual property. Imitation is expected for all things popular and good, making most creative products a commodity (like your dessert example). This is really both good and bad. It creates an industry that is constantly out-doing each other to the benefit of the consumer, but it also discourages long-term and large-scale R&D - why invest millions when your ideas will be stolen as soon as your product moves out the door?
Sometimes I get the feeling that OpenOffice advocates clearly don't use OpenOffice. Here's a hint: it sucks. It's slow, unresponsive, the UI leaves much to be desired, and the compatibility with MS Office is partial at best. There's a lot of solid OSS out there that rivals their commercial competitors, but OO is not one of them.
Hitler was a person. Mussolini was a person. This is not to say that Jack Valenti is on par with Hitler, because he is not, but where do you want to draw the line between "go ahead and celebrate" and "mourn his death"?
I do agree with your point, though naturally people focus on the bad more than the good. As the old joke goes... "I've been building bridges all my life, but nobody calls me Bob the Bridge Builder... but you fuck one goat..."
I think most people in the first world know how much the US has done *in the past* for the world, and the role it played in the founding and continued maintenance of the UN during its weakest hour. However, the US's attitude towards the UN is, in a word, hostile these days. That's what most first-world anti-US people feel. The UN was established in the spirit of cooperation and deciding world-affecting issues multilaterally. The US's track record over the past 7 years has been anything but. It's important to note the anti-Americanism in developed countries was not nearly as strong in the mid-late 90s as it is now.
As for third-world countries, yes, I agree that the US is often used as a scapegoat for just about any problem they have. One still has to realize though, that the US is responsible for a lot of what they get blamed for. The creation of the Taliban was a result of US interference in the region during the Cold War (which may or may not have been justified), the current situation in Iraq, most of Latin America... etc. Sure, the USA isn't responsible for Omar's house burning down in a freak accident, but they may in fact be responsible for the regime he lives under.
The Soviet Union posed a very real threat at the time, but at the same time the old Soviet threat was trotted about as justification to do just about anything. The coup against Allende was in a very large part instigated by multi-national companies with interests in Chile, who feared nationalization of their properties. It's hard to say which was the *real* reason the US acted, but the thing that should be understood is that through the last 50 years, America, acting in its own interests (justifiably or otherwise), has destroyed million of lives around the world. It's all fine and good to chalk this up to protecting oneself, but one should not act at all surprised when the world hates America as a result.
"Stopping Soviet expansion" was an all-too-common line back then to justify just about anything, you should be smarter than to buy into that McCarthy-ist BS. Not to mention that many of the US's anti-communist actions during the Cold War were disastrous and paved the way for the way the USA is hated now. Justified at the time or not, the US created this atmosphere of resentful (and in some places, outright hate).
Case in point: The CIA overthrew Salvador Allende, funded and participated in a coup d'etat against a democratically elected (if socialist) leader in Chile. In his place? The US installed a hardline anti-communist, who in the end turned out to be one of the worst, cruelest dictators history has known.
It should be clear to history by now that most "anti-Soviet" actions during the Cold War had ulterior motives (for Allende it was his nationalizing of American interests in Chile, mostly), and in any case created the world that the US now suffers in (selling weapons to Afghanistan back in the day, anyone?)
On the large scale, yeah, it doesn't matter if people buy XP or Vista right? The same number of dollars still float into Microsoft.
But look at it this way: Vista will have been a total flop if this occurs, and the books at Redmond will be looking VERY VERY red for this project. Considering Windows is one of MS's supposed guaranteed cash cows, this is going to be absolute hell on investor confidence, and stock is going to tumble. *That* then becomes the real financial loss for MS.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, but these binary-choice interfaces are very rarely "yes/no". More often than not they represent two most popular choices out of a much larger menu, except that this doesn't work nearly as well as it sounds when you've got menus were all items are equally used.
Personally I have never seen a "yes/no" presented to me on a cell phone like that.
Besides, if you have a touch screen, there's really no need for other buttons - that yes/no question you need answered can just be two big buttons on the screen.
Heck, Windows has no way of mounting images as virtual drives without the installation of extra software. And AFAIK it can't burn disk images without extra software also! Both of these features I've used heavily in OSX.
They STILL don't get it, do they?
Look at that HTC Touch pic. See those two buttons on the bottom? This is proof conclusive, to me anyway, that these guys just don't get it. You have a touch screen for God's sake, why in the world are you still dealing with the "binary choice" UI of old phones? That is absolutely one thing I despise the most about current cell phone UI - they have all adopted the two-button interface. For every menu you are in, there are only ever two choices (unless you want to risk bringing up yet another menu). Sure, this is a limitation due to hardware, so why are we keeping it now that we have the freedom to allow the user to interact in ANY way with the device?
Like you, I am also a college student living on campus, except in Canada, though WiFi is also ubiquitous here. It is clear we have vastly different experiences. I believe the iPhone targets people like me:
A - I don't have my laptop with me when I go out with friends. Why would I lug that thing around, especially if I'm out drinking? Recipe for disaster.
B - Free public computers only exist on campus. Honestly, is campus really that exciting that you spend the vast majority of your off hours there?
1 - Plans change. This sounds like one of the initial arguments against cell phones. "I always plan ahead, so there's no need for a barrage of phone calls on the go!". Well, invariably someone screws up, or something unforeseen happens (bar closes, buddy gets run over, movie theater's closed, etc etc). Since getting my phone I've had an infinitely easier time socializing with my friends than before, and I suspect this will up the ante for that even further.
2 - 411 is $1 a call. Around here, it means dialing it, waiting. Waiting. Waiting. Describing what you're trying to find. Waiting. Waiting. Getting your answer (texted to your phone, nice), and then turning around and calling THAT number to find the actual information you need... Oh, and you might have to hold there too. With the internet at your fingertips, it's "free" (save data costs... but considering how much I plan to use the service, it's more than worth it compared to 411).
3 - Yes, because my friends are my bitches who should look up movie schedules on-call. Not that I wouldn't if I were in a real pinch, but this allows me to find the information I need independently. It also allows me to skim a page for the info I need, instead of forcing my dear friend here to recite it to me.
4 - I suppose this is where we differ. When I "hang out with friends", we hit pubs, bars, movies, restaurants, pool joints, concerts, and any other number of events and weird places. We like to explore a lot, and we bus ourselves to nearby strange cities to take in their sights and sounds. An iPhone-like device would be extremely helpful for us.
Allow me to point out a very recent example. I just returned from Toronto (Canada), where my girlfriend and I went to see the grand re-opening of the Royal Ontario Museum (highly recommended visit for anyone in the area, seriously). After taking a look at the brand spankin' new museum, we decided to take in a movie, but wanted to check the movie schedule, as well as if we'd miss the last bus out of the city. Well, unfortunately that meant:
A - Trudging down the street to the movie theatre. It's only a few blocks, but still 10 minutes wasted if I had access to their site at my fingertips.
B - Trudging to the nearest subway terminal, which has a kiosk where you can look up inter-city bus schedules.
Not rocket science by any measure, but you can start to see how an iPhone would have been useful here. A half hour information trek could've been reduced to 30 seconds. Heck, while perusing the museum we wondered about certain things, and if I had Wikipedia at my fingertips...
How is the iPhone required for use while walking? Personally I don't imagine the iPhone being used much while walking (except while listening or chatting) at all. The big selling point is both email and Google Maps. There have been *so* many occasions when I've gathered with friends, and wondered "where's the nearest burger joint?" or "when's the movie showing tonight so we know when to leave the bar?". Things of that sort - none of us know the cinema's hotline (there is one) by heart, so Google and GMaps is crucial for us.
None of that requires use while walking. But it does require use while a laptop or other source of internet is not easily accessible!
I don't think the iPhone is about bringing anything completely revolutionary and unseen onto the table. Rather, it fills a very real ache in the market that nobody has so far been able to fill: true internet on mobiles. I've used browsers on cell phones, they are a pain in the ass. I've also used a Blackberry, and while they're a bit better off, the internet is still far from useful on them.
Looking back, the iPod didn't bring in anything horribly new either. MP3 players have already existed for some time since then, but Apple rolled in a slick user interface, and an end-to-end music management service (iTunes). Apple has always built their products on being end-to-end integrated, with software working in tandem with hardware, as opposed to being two disparate parts of the same process. The success of the iPod wasn't that Apple had some absolutely revolutionary technology, it was that they took technology and brought it down to the average man.
The iPhone is in for some tougher competition - the mobile market is a lot more mature than the music player market was at the launch of the iPod. But having used a lot of cell phones (both internet enabled and otherwise), I can say for sure that the market has a LOT of room for a phone (even one without the iPod!) that has as slick a UI as the iPhone seems to have. Goodbye convoluted two-button interfaces! Goodbye crappy browsers! Goodbye the infamous Motorola UI lag!
"Imagine you are taking your Civic from Maine to Califorina and it's winter."
Correction: Imagine you are taking your Civic from Houston to Orlando and it's winter, and you're wearing astronaut diapers...
"Fluff"? I would say that the physical device interaction is the coolest part of the whole deal.
Oops sorry, I'm not following the Slashdot groupthink. *clears throat* Rah! Rah! Microsoft evil! Microsoft steal idea! Microsoft does no innovation! Rah!~
Woah woah woah, wait. A computer when making a decision is also often not constrained to a single choice, and in the case of optimization-based algorithms, the computer will use a complex weighting or logic system to choose between available choices.
Does my machine have free will?
I'm afraid when studying such vague subjects that people observe natural phenomena (impressive as they may be) and start to anthropomorphize what they see. A fly may be making an educated choice, but is that really our definition of free will, or dare I say, consciousness?
As a former Apple employee, I can tell you without a doubt that they don't distribute this type of information in memos. The grunts like us are not privy to release dates for anything except pretty much our own assigned products. The only people who are at any point aware of big-picture information like this are the suits, and I doubt any of them would leak (especially considering you can count them on two hands).
Like the iPhone, Apple employees rely on the same sources regular joes do to find out about new releases. Nobody besides the iPhone team even knew what an iPhone looked like before it was shown at MacWorld.
Agreed, though "below average" for developers is at least somewhat livable. From what I've seen (I've known many people who've worked QA), the pay is minimum wage. I know guys flipping burgers at McDonalds making more money than a tester at EA. Unless you are a senior QA tester (such a term is hardly heard of), do not expect to support yourself with a QA job.
I've known some people who have "broken in" to development after spending a lot of (grueling, low-pay, poor security) time in QA. Which is to say... it is possible to get into dev through QA.
That said, I've known many a game developer, and the general consensus is that, while it is possible, the possibility is also remote enough that it's a pretty crappy idea. A lot of game development, from the code side anyway (I'm assuming since this is Slashdot that this is the case), require extensive understanding of computer science fundamentals, so unless you are some genius self-trained uber-coder, it's probably best if you go to school and learn the nuts and bolts necessary in this industry.
The fundamental problem I see with people who are anti-arms in this argument is that you're assuming that we're advocating that we give guns to EVERYONE willy-nilly. Giving every person a gun is just stupid, nobody is really advocating that. What I think people *are* advocating is that we arm people who are willing to get trained in safety, engagement, and everything else that makes them a better shooter and more capable under these circumstances.
Yeah, average Joe will probably shoot a friendly than the gunman simply by accident. Trained average Joe probably will not.
You don't need the keyboard attachment... I have a USB keyboard (an Apple USB Keyboard no less...) hooked up to my 360 and it works great when I'm trying to IM someone.
If it was true that Blizzard using my outbound bandwidth is saving me money, then sure, it's an effective compromise (except that many ISPs are now blocking upload BT traffic in an attempt to kill Torrent, but that's another point entirely). I for one am not convinced that this is the case.
We've all heard the BS before. Episodic gaming! You get games at regular intervals, keeping you hooked and interested, and you the customers supply us with a steadier revenue stream so we don't have to suck $50 out of you at once! Sounds good until you realize that the $50 game has now turned into 5x $20 episodes. Oops!
Support online distribution! By eliminating the eeeeevil publishing middlemen, we can turn a healthier profit and pass the savings on to you the consumers! Oops, nope, online games still cost as much as their brick-n-mortar shelf counterparts. Considering I'm paying the exact same price, I'd rather get a box, manual, and support local businessmen (and high school clerks with part time jobs) while I'm at it.
The game industry has promised us a lot of things, promised us cost savings, but in the end none of that has ever materialized. Even if Blizzard came out and tried to justify BTing their patches, it won't prevent the inevitable price hike.
"The Taiwan government isn't an American-styled democracy."
It is, more than you might imagine. Sun Yat-Sen, the founding father of modern Chinese democracy, studied in the US and modeled much of his system of government after it. Case in point: Taiwanese government is divided into 4 branches, 3 of which are direct clones from the American model: legislative, executive, and judiciary. The only major change there is the addition of a 4th "oversight" branch of government. Much of the constitution is also inspired largely by the American constitution.
"And no, calling people from Taiwan Chinese is not insulting."
You're right, it's not. Us Taiwanese do not object to being called Chinese - because ethnically that is what we are. But of course, that isn't what you said in your post. You said: "When I was living in Taiwan, which isn't China but it's close enough". There's a fundamental difference here. To compare the relatively free Taiwanese society, of educated individuals and an extremely well developed social welfare system, with representative government and free elections... to a country like China, where oppression and fear still reign supreme, education is still limited to the elite, and no significant representation exists in government... that is the true insult. We have fought long and hard for these freedoms, and we still live in the shadow of Chinese communist annihilation every day. The least you can do is not lump the two countries into the same damned category.
"Taiwan government considers its territory Zhongguo"
The Taiwanese government has not made claims to China in a very long time. Way to be stuck in the 60s.
"and by extension, the people who live under it are Zhongguoren, which pretty much translates into Chinese"
I really don't think you understand Chinese-Taiwanese geopolitics very well, despite apparently having lived there. The Taiwanese identify themselves as Chinese by ethnicity, but the Taiwanese government does not assert right of rule over the people of China. As far as the Taiwanese government is concerned, Taiwan is its own separate country with self-rule, and China is its own thing. The Taiwanese claim over all of China has not been exercised since a LONG time ago.
I greatly object to the fact that you equated the *countries* of Taiwan and China, not the ethnicities or cultural groups. It is no lie that ethnically the Taiwanese and southern Chinese are one and the same. But to pretend like the two places share the same lifestyle, freedoms, and government is just ignorant.
Also of interest (and something slightly more on-topic) is that Taiwan does have recognized and actively enforced copyright and intellectual property laws. Most IP theft occurs in a strictly illegal context and is not representative of a government that does not recognize copyrights. What we do not recognize is the patent or exclusivity of a particular product type. To take your example of a popular dessert being introduced, and spawning imitators within weeks, culturally and legally we do not recognize a pastry creation as being deserving of exclusive rights. On the other hand, stealing PCB designs and prints to a turbine is a strict no-no.
"When I was living in Taiwan, which isn't China but it's close enough"
As an ethnic Taiwanese... no... no it's not. Do not confuse a totalitarian dictatorship with no semblance of human rights with an American-styled democracy. Please. It insults all of us.
That being said, I do agree that in Chinese culture there is little in the way of respect for intellectual property. Imitation is expected for all things popular and good, making most creative products a commodity (like your dessert example). This is really both good and bad. It creates an industry that is constantly out-doing each other to the benefit of the consumer, but it also discourages long-term and large-scale R&D - why invest millions when your ideas will be stolen as soon as your product moves out the door?
Sometimes I get the feeling that OpenOffice advocates clearly don't use OpenOffice. Here's a hint: it sucks. It's slow, unresponsive, the UI leaves much to be desired, and the compatibility with MS Office is partial at best. There's a lot of solid OSS out there that rivals their commercial competitors, but OO is not one of them.
Hitler was a person. Mussolini was a person. This is not to say that Jack Valenti is on par with Hitler, because he is not, but where do you want to draw the line between "go ahead and celebrate" and "mourn his death"?
I do agree with your point, though naturally people focus on the bad more than the good. As the old joke goes... "I've been building bridges all my life, but nobody calls me Bob the Bridge Builder... but you fuck one goat..."
I think most people in the first world know how much the US has done *in the past* for the world, and the role it played in the founding and continued maintenance of the UN during its weakest hour. However, the US's attitude towards the UN is, in a word, hostile these days. That's what most first-world anti-US people feel. The UN was established in the spirit of cooperation and deciding world-affecting issues multilaterally. The US's track record over the past 7 years has been anything but. It's important to note the anti-Americanism in developed countries was not nearly as strong in the mid-late 90s as it is now.
As for third-world countries, yes, I agree that the US is often used as a scapegoat for just about any problem they have. One still has to realize though, that the US is responsible for a lot of what they get blamed for. The creation of the Taliban was a result of US interference in the region during the Cold War (which may or may not have been justified), the current situation in Iraq, most of Latin America... etc. Sure, the USA isn't responsible for Omar's house burning down in a freak accident, but they may in fact be responsible for the regime he lives under.
The Soviet Union posed a very real threat at the time, but at the same time the old Soviet threat was trotted about as justification to do just about anything. The coup against Allende was in a very large part instigated by multi-national companies with interests in Chile, who feared nationalization of their properties. It's hard to say which was the *real* reason the US acted, but the thing that should be understood is that through the last 50 years, America, acting in its own interests (justifiably or otherwise), has destroyed million of lives around the world. It's all fine and good to chalk this up to protecting oneself, but one should not act at all surprised when the world hates America as a result.
"Stopping Soviet expansion" was an all-too-common line back then to justify just about anything, you should be smarter than to buy into that McCarthy-ist BS. Not to mention that many of the US's anti-communist actions during the Cold War were disastrous and paved the way for the way the USA is hated now. Justified at the time or not, the US created this atmosphere of resentful (and in some places, outright hate).
Case in point: The CIA overthrew Salvador Allende, funded and participated in a coup d'etat against a democratically elected (if socialist) leader in Chile. In his place? The US installed a hardline anti-communist, who in the end turned out to be one of the worst, cruelest dictators history has known.
It should be clear to history by now that most "anti-Soviet" actions during the Cold War had ulterior motives (for Allende it was his nationalizing of American interests in Chile, mostly), and in any case created the world that the US now suffers in (selling weapons to Afghanistan back in the day, anyone?)
Are you suggesting that we tie the internet's tubes?
On the large scale, yeah, it doesn't matter if people buy XP or Vista right? The same number of dollars still float into Microsoft.
But look at it this way: Vista will have been a total flop if this occurs, and the books at Redmond will be looking VERY VERY red for this project. Considering Windows is one of MS's supposed guaranteed cash cows, this is going to be absolute hell on investor confidence, and stock is going to tumble. *That* then becomes the real financial loss for MS.
MS has a massive dev cost to recoup for Vista. If nobody buys Vista then that's a failure to make back the money they spent.