I actually find it quite funny. There're lots of these human to animal (include monkey) translation images or simply modified images around. And we just look at it for fun. The image itself is probably not very respectful, but I don't see it as a racial thing. People in all race have been played by this before. Recent example is, I guess George Bush? lol Anyway. All these human right group, female right group, or racial critics etc. always like to make a big deal out of something that no other people take it seriously. The problem is often not in the events or images they critize. It's in their imagination.

Logically, I don't think "the people" of Spain and Finland really believe 1mbps internet connection is a "right". All these kinda "right"s are purely just ways to bribe the voters.

Actually, they're allowed to express political opinions. If you BS about it, nobody cares, and actually I do see a lot of opinions around. So just express is not a problem.

It only becomes a problem when the communists think you're "creating problem", or in their terms, "affect the harmony of society".

Personally, I don't neccessary like the western way of strong expressions that tends to really "affect the harmony of society" (as bad in Hong Kong sometimes). But unfortunately, they don't have a efficient way of letting opinions flow into the "brain" of the central government, and the central government is still having big problem controlling local governments (which is actually the biggest problem that avoid the central government to do anything "better").

Basically, most people always "express" their opinion not about central government, but local government (because federal government actions usually doesn't affect their life in a bad way, instead, often in a pretty good way these days, my opinion, at least). But those local provincial governments have their own court system and police who sometimes just go capture those people who try to go to Beijing to complain about local governments. Sometimes, they even cross the province boundary to stop those people.

Certainly a hard problem to solve. But it's really what most Chinese care most about. Federal freedom... I think it's much less of a concern, if you get right down to what exactly are the problems that people are having. At least, for now.

I guess that depends on the area you live in and what class you're in.

Normally, if you move back to China from say USA or Canada, you're probably some business people or finance people or ... in general middle class or above. Companies that hire these level of people generally treat their workers in a relatively reasonable way. And they often have a good chance to earn a lot in mainland also.

So long as you don't try to anger the government, life in major cities are not so bad (except the housing price is... horrible in the top major cities...). I mean, seriously, normal people don't counter the government much anyway in their life. As long as the governments don't really hurt your benefits, you can easily give it a go.

Now, situation may not be so good for those below middle class... which is where most the problem is... I believe. And that's another story.

Actually, information blocking is rather unsuccessful today because of the widespread use of internet and cheap cell phone plans with internet access (which is darn expensive in Canada). People have been using "same sound words" in Chinese and many other literature/language related methods to bypass automatic filtering or terms catching. Basically, because of the huge numbers of Chinese words that sounds the same or mean the same with or without combinations, it becomes impossible to catch until the authorities know those terms and interpret those terms in person. By then, new terms would have come out already... Not to mension Chinese is all over the world and communication between those inside mainland and outside of it allow information to flow in and out efficiently. And then people often uses some programs to bypass the great firewall and read those sensored stuff anyway. At least i know friends who do that and ahve no problem getting information everywhere.

Civil servants in this whole world have all been fighting for budget for thousand of years and try to waste/use-up whatever is left over before the next budget time, which continue today everywhere. lol

I am one who don't hate gay and oppose to same-sex marriage. And I put the simplist reason is... why it ever existed in the first place. And it's because of the celebration/symbol of the birth of new life. Human wouldn't have male or female if not because of reproduction. And marriage wouldn't exist without that. Same sex can't reproduce naturally, which already break the basic of marrage. I'm fine if you say it's same-sex union or whatever term you want to say. It is something "new" and it's your private life. But it simply doesn't have the ground of "marriage", hence shouldn't be related to "marriage". Different is different. In Chinese history, there're gays all along and some emperors or high officals don't even try to hide it (well, so as the normal gays, but they're not recorded in history clearly, so I wouldn't use those as example). Unlike in the west, Chinese people talk about it for fun but they don't really care about it. Now, if you try to change what "marriage" is, that's totally differnt thing. You need to seperate "private event" and "offical cerimonies" clearly. They may be related, but they are totally different things and have different importance. Offical cerimonies has its place in stablization of society (and its structure). While private things, nobody care except your family and friends. They are not the same thing.

Well, I use keyboard at least 8 hours a day. But still there are still a lot of occasions when I write instead of type. Say, if you want to leave a note to your family when you're going out while you know they expect you to be here when they get back. You're going to write them a note, not type it up and print it out. Say, writing a... birthday card or whatever, you're going to write, not type. Or, if you're dropping down some notes in a meeting or class, you're most likely also going to write. Anyway, I'm just saying there're still many "off work/normal task" situations that you'll use writing. In any case you write, except for filling out forms, I find cursive writing pretty... obvious. Even if you haven't learn cursive writing before, when you're writing fast, you just write one word with as few strokes as possible: you'll very naturally join them together, making it cursive or very similar to "standard" cursive.

That's why firefox 3 also has porn mode. lol

Though I personally have already setup all those "keywords" and don't really need to use the "awesomebar", I find it response pretty quickly. And I have a several years old computer. Either you're using a even older computer or you have too much history/bookmark? That said, they should have explicitly let you set options about what you want the "awesomebar" to search for. Here, may this link give you a hand. http://www.kennycarlile.net/2008/06/17/disable-firefox-3-awesomebar/

Actually, I'd say it's a mis-spread message than misunderstood. And it's not unbelievable. I'm not sure about what news western news/newspaper wrote on this. But on Taiwan and Mainland newspaper, at the time they just announced about the plan, the mainland government had already repeatively said that you do not have to install it. They also say even if manufacturer installed it, you can easily uninstall it. They're just thinking about forcing the manufacturers to *provide* it. They offically said that many times a while ago already when they just announced about the plan. So they probably do meant it. I personally think it's not a very meaningful plan. But I think they're pretty believable in this event.

I agree it's horrible working condition, and governments know that.

But I guess we need to take into account about how many people are there in China. When the communist government took on their path to privatize nation owned companies and restructure government and army (into smaller and more efficient units), lots of people were already jobless. Now there are a lot of new generation people graduating from university, the job market is getting much much worse for everybody.

Yes, those are problems that make poor people angry of the government. But the entire job market is a bigger problem ahead of them. At this moment, I don't think they can afford taking lots of actions to those factories because it'll just worsen the job markets (for sure). You can only see this changes when more places in mainland China is being developed, hence creating a bigger economy and more jobs around. When China reaches such phases, then the society will become relatively stable and the economy can take those "negative effects" of targeting those bad businesses.

Regardless of whether the communist government want to deal with that or not (the central government certainly want to), they have to bend to the reality. The real cost of living in mainland China has been rising a lot, and many manufacturing industries had already taken their move to Vietnam etc. Mainland China need to let many of those "evil" factories to stay so that they can "stablize" a lot of jobless crowd.

Their next job is to distribute wealth. I'm sure they can do that, but I doubt those poor factory workers can benefit from that until at least 15 years later, I'd think.

As the communist government always say, any small problem multiply by 1.3 billion people is... a lot of problem. If the dark side can help stablizing some of those problems, you just have to let it be, unfortunately.

I think right now, when people are not allowed to use it on non apple machine, they can concentrate working on making sure their OS works smoothly on those limited set of selected hardwares.

But if people are allowed to bring OSX on non apple machine, they'll have to put extra resources to make sure their support on other hardwares are decent. Otherwise, the name of their OS may be damaged.

It can certainly help apple in a long run I think. But it'll likely take them some time to be able to establish a network/framework to try to keep different hardwares work fine together on OSX

It's a bit hard to not allow them to bundle IE at all. Html/css/javascript interpreter and renderer is needed or useful in many applications. If a desktop environment doesn't provide one by default, then it's just creating problems for developers. Developers can choose alternatives when developing programs of course, but if you don't want to ship with an extra browser/library, then a standard browser that you know exists on a platform save your day.

You can make policy to force MS to hide IE and force pre-bundling of other browsers. But you certainly can't force them to exclude it completely.

GNOME have their own. KDE have their own. May be they force MS to hide the IE interface from users by default, but the library is certainly left to stay.

Your quote skipped the first part of the paragraph, which affects the interpetation of the meaning.

The words before your quote is:
Not to value/employ men with superior ability keeps people from rivalry; not to prize articles which are difficult to procure keeps people from becoming thieves; not to show people what is likely to excite their desires keeps their minds from disorder.

The real meaning of Lao Zi's quote (the quote in the above post) actually centred to two things: 1) Fulfill their physical need/keep them strong. 2) Decrease people's desire.

Lao Zi himself is a history scholar who is very wise, knowledgable, and good in ethic that Kong Zi (the "founder" of Confucius) describe him as "dragon" (an animal that reaches the "god" level).

The writing does say "keeps them innocent of knowledge" etc. literally. But reading Chinese writing, you can never take it word by word. You need to get the "atmosphere" or "real meaning" of the writing.

Various times in history, Chinese did try to implement his ideas into ruling system. Those times results into the strongest time of China. And it's not really about not letting people know, but about "controlling desire" (that's part of Chinese culture) and "let nature fix things naturally by not imposing unneccessary laws and controls".

What mainland government doing is not really associated to what Tao Teh Ching says. They fails to clean up desires amoung government officals (probably not including the very top ones). Then they can't possibily clean up the desire amoung the people, except the scholars who care (not talking about those university people, but scholars, if you know what I mean).