Not really - the motive is the same, giant corporation taking secrets for commercial benefit vs giant corporation (which happens to be owned by the Chinese government) taking secrets for commercial benefit. The Chinese government, with its many state-owned operations, is not equivalent to the US government - the Chinese government as much concerned about running businesses as it is about governing.

Note that I'm not condoning either the Chinese or the US behaviour, I'm simply trying to inject some perspective into the current debate which often consists of hysterical 'us and them' finger-pointing, just as used to occur with the Russians who the US now gets along quite well with. It all reminds me of Orwell's "We're at war with Eastasia. We have always been at war with Eastasia."

To provide an alternative and perhaps more relevant example of non-Chinese industrial espionage, the US accused the French government of industrial espionage in the 90s, and vice versa.

Example of alleged recent US espionage: Hilton accused by Starwood. It's extremely common for US firms to hire ex-employees of other firms to achieve a similar thing to what the Chinese are accused of here.

I frequently see middle class Hong Kong investment banking employees taking lunch time naps too. It's very normal, and not really a bad idea for people who work long, tiring hours.

>> The hope is that this will be useful in Asia for handwriting recognition, because Asian scripts use a lot of variation in line thickness

Hmm, I get the feeling that this is 99% what a western company thinks they want in Asia, and 1% possibly actually desirable over here. I'm reasonably familiar with Chinese, Japanese and Korean and they're all happily represented by fonts with no line variation. Hand-painted calligraphy or some of the fancier fonts are about the only place I've seen line variation used.

I've also yet to meet a Chinese person (other than the older generation who very rarely use a computer) who prefers to input their Chinese characters by drawing them. For everyone I've met, from my wife, to her family, my friends, and my colleagues, they all prefer to input it as some form of pinyin (using latin characters), as it's not only faster but also because a lot of them have been doing it for so long they've forgotten how to write many of the characters (at least, without pausing to think about it). They also all use standard pens to write hand-written notes, which have, you guess it, no variation in line thickness.

There might be useful for other scripts I'm not so familiar with though (such as Thai or Arabic - although I bet they write their hand written notes with standard pens, too), although usually the markets the companies producing this stuff are after are those I've described above - China, Korea and Japan.