Is that big enough to put a portal on?

The formatting of the RSS feed is all screwed up now, as well. At least it is for me in Opera. Everything else seems to work, though.

This is because they are two different languages. Chinese, as a writing system, is understandable to speakers of many Chinese languages, for example Mandarin, or Cantonese, when these spoken languages are mutually unintelligible. It is hard to provide an analogy using western languages, but you could think of it like this: written Chinese is like the Roman Script; it is a way of writing languages, but pronunciation is totally different between different languages. This isn't a great analogy though, because with an alphabet different languages spell words differently, while Chinese 'spell' the words the same.

When I worked in China, I just used Tor. Quick, easy, and worked perfectly. Even works for torrents, since all your client needs to do is connect to the tracker over http, and then you don't need a proxy after that point.

What most people don't realize is what life is like for factory workers in China. I have worked in China, and I can tell you that 12 hours shifts is not uncommon. You could make 15 hour shifts and people there would still line up to get a job, because the alternative is starvation. It's easy to criticize from a distance, but there is more to this than just a single company. The whole society and economy leads to this situation. Furthermore, what we aren't hearing here in the west is that after the first suicide, Foxconn employed a large number of psychiatric workers to come and talk to employees. The simple fact is, most of these suicides will be because most people in China are worth more dead than they are alive.
The first employee committed suicide after he was demoted for losing an iphone. Note, not fired, just demoted. After he took the dive, Foxconn payed a large sum, including IIRC a monthly fee, to the family of the worker. This money was considerably more than the worker would make. Shortly after, more suicides happened, and Foxconn payed more money to those families. This is how it is; the employees make more money for their families by dying than by staying and working, and this situation is not unique to this company. One of the women who committed suicide did so because of a personal relationship (I'm not sure of the exact nature, I didn't catch that part on the news here), and Foxconn still payed money to the family. AFAIK, Foxconn has recently made a new policy, wherein if an employee commits suicide without asking one of the companies employees for help, no compensation will be payed to the family.

It is a terrible situation, but blame cannot be heaped solely at the feet of this one company. This is just reality for factory workers in China. It is similar to child labor. All will agree that it is a terrible thing, but how much blame really lies at the companies who employ children? Sure, it's easy to blame them, but if they didn't employ those children, another company would. Why? Because without employment, many children are unable to feed themselves, and far too often their whole families as well. In this respect, China is no different from, say, India. Many parts of China, mostly the large cities, are becoming quite modern, but most of the country is still in the stone ages.

You have a lot of opinions, and they are just that: opinion. I would like to see some numbers to support your claim that "if copyright violation was legal, a Steam-like system would spring up in 2-3 months". As I see it, we have 3 groups involved in copyright violation. Assuming we are talking about a movie, these would be: 1) Die hard fans who insist on going to the movie theater and owning an official copy of the DVD once it comes out. 2) Normal people. Some will see the movie, some won't have time, some will buy the DVD, some won't have the money. 3) Die hard pirates. These will never pay for the movie, out of principle. Of these, group 1 will never pirate the movie, so we can ignore them. Group 3 will never pay for the movie, so there are no lost sales, so we can ignore them too. Out of the largest group, group 2, a significant proportion may pirate movie. But why? They may not have money, or consider the price of the movie or DVD excessive. This sub-group, then, are not the target market, so there are no lost sales. Some may have no time, and thus we can also exclude this sub-group, because they would never have time, regardless of the legality of copyright violation, and thus no lost sales. So what is the situation we find ourselves in? The target market of movies and DVDs - those with the funds and the time to spend - will likely purchase the entertainment. Those outside of the target group - those who cannot afford it - may pirate the work so that they can also enjoy it, but even if piracy was impossible, they would simply not purchase the work, no lost sales, no harm done. What can the movie (and by extension, the entire entertainment industry) do about this? In my humble, non-professional, armchair-critical opinion, they should stop worrying about those who are not their customers (people outside the target market, just as the fashion industry is doing) and/or change their business model to make them their customers once again. Raising prices will do nothing, it will only make the second group larger than before. Legally persecuting pirates will not help, as it still will not make those unable/unwilling to purchase their material change their minds nor their situation. What they can do, however, is provide services that directly compete with piracy. If Prada wanted to combat copies of their items, they could lower their prices so that purchasing an official copy becomes worth the price to a larger group of people. Similarly, if the entertainment industry wants people to stop pirating their works, provide a viable alternative, or stop complaining. You talk about Steam-like systems. Then lets look at Steam itself. It is incredibly successful, and offers many low-cost games, specials and weekend demos to entice more customers to pay. Not only that, but it provides a common, easy to use, system for purchasing, and downloading new games. It is a viable alternative to piracy. Yes, piracy still happens, and it always will. Even if you entice all of group 2 to become your paying customers, there will always be group 3 who refuse to pay, not matter how little you charge. Similarly, there will always be people who will only buy knock-off fashion items, and will never buy and authentic piece. There will always be people who obtain all their music from recording songs from the radio, or copying CDs from their friends. There will always be people who wait until movies come out of TV, or borrow their friend's DVDs and copy them. These people will never go away, and it's pointless to try and make them. Instead, the entertainment industry, like the fashion industry, should innovate, and make a valuable, viable, alternative to entice as many people from group 2 to pay for their products.

You're right, the entire fashion industry is on the verge of bankruptcy because of the copy-culture stealing their intellectual property!

Honestly, the ignorance of this statement leaves me speechless. Ignoring all the other reasons, the biggest reason why this is a bogus argument is because neither Soviet Russia nor North Korea were socialist or even communist. They are/were dictatorships, pure and simple. So, before you go painting those countries with the same socialism brush, perhaps you should check what shade of political paint they are actually using under all the propaganda.

Why do people continue to think that universal health care will somehow bankrupt the nation? Look at all the other countries that have universal health care, and then try and claim that such a scheme before trying to claim that the US is somehow different.

You are correct, except that Pinyin is a terrible system to learn with. I recommend all learners of Mandarin start with Zhuyin instead. It creates a conceptual difference between your language and Chinese, and leads to better pronunciation, faster.