Yeah, but crippled by a crappy GUI designed for a 3" screen and hands that can't touch type or use a pencil.

Doing this with tariffs might be more difficult than US, EU and UN administrators might think. The Chinese management system (government + industry) has a documented history of faked economic reports. This is due in part to the general practice of promoting/demoting managers based on the production figures from their own areas of control, with little or no independent auditing of the data. The fishing example was documented by outside researchers about 15 years ago, but as the (rather well done "neutral" phrasing of the) wikipedia article hints, the catch figures still show numbers that are discounted as "probably mostly fictional" by the FAO and various other international organizations and researchers.

It can be rather difficult for outsiders to collect verifiable data on economically or politically important subjects within China. The same problem will arise with the proposed tariffs. They will presumably be based on available data on emissions, which will mostly come from within China, and will be produced by people whose jobs and pay levels rely on their organizations producing the "right" data. There will be little or no truly independent auditing of the data; auditors will also be similarly rewarded or punished based on the acceptability of their reports to the higher-ups. As with the fishing industry, the pollution-emission data could show decreasing levels while the actual numbers are increasing, and this could continue for decades.

Collecting data on the pollution from outside will be attempted, of course, but China is a big chunk of territory, and there are practical limits to the accuracy of data data collection from outside that territory. Most of the monitoring will have to be done from orbit, and while that's improving, there are still many ways that interested parties can confuse the issue. Just read the ongoing political debates over climate change/warming to get a feel for how easy it is for interested parties to confuse and mislead our political and industrial leaders.

They seem to be saying that, in addition to displaying the content on your screen, your browser also writes a copy into its cache, and that's two copies.

I wonder what they'd say of, say, a RAID1 file system, which makes two copies of the cached page, on two different disks. Would that mean two violations of the copyright? And if, after sending it from the screen to your eyes, the information in your brain is a third violation?

And there's also the copy from short-term to long-term memory that occurs in your brain when you read an article and actually remember it the next day. Soon they'll be quizzing readers about last-weeks news, and every correct answer means they can charge for the extra copy in your long-term memory.

Lest you think this is a joke, remember that companies did try to claim that computer backups are legally "copies" that must be paid for to be legal.

Actually, I'm surprised they didn't handle it this way from the start. That way the "private citizen" wouldn't even know that another department had "seized" their documents.

But maybe I've just been working on the Internet too long. I tend to be surprised when someone wants to deal with hard copy.

All Your Doors are Open to US.

We're eagerly awaiting your detailed instructions on how we might do this.

Hey, you got all your facts wrong.

First, we still do have the US Constitution. It's kept at the National Archives. To quote from their web site: "The National Archives Building is located between Seventh and Ninth Streets, NW, with entrances on Pennsylvania and Constitution Avenues. Please Note: The Rotunda entrance, which includes the Exhibit Hall, is on Constitution Avenue." You can go there and see it in its display case.

Second, it's not a piece of paper; it was written on parchment.

Next time, try to get your facts right. ;-)

(How much of it is in effect any more isn't clear. We do pretty much know that all those parts that limit what the government can do are, uh, "inoperative" at the moment. Yeah, that's the word. But it's still useful for social-control purposes, so we keep it around.)

Heh. That doesn't even mean you're safe. I recall a project back in the late 1980s, when I was part of a team hired by a big company (who shall remain unnamed so you'll suspect it was your company ;-). We'd had a few discussions with "top management" who'd hired us, about their problems with the DP department. Their computer folks effectively owned the data, and all access was mediated by the DP department. There was a lot of information that was there, but management couldn't get at it, because the DP folks feigned an inability to provide it.

One evening, a bunch of us decided to stay around after hours. We went to work on their big (IBM of course) mainframe, and in the morning, we demoed to management that we could read any file on their machine. Our demo included a few reports we'd printed out that got wide-eyed reactions. We'd given them access to all of their own data, and they were very happy with us. We stuck around and provided them with a lot more reports ("over the dead bodies" of some of the DP department ;-).

Some time later, we discussed in private the question of what we should tell the IBM folks about what we'd done. Our decision was essentially "Nah; they'll just block our current clients' access to their own data and give control back to the DP priesthood. And we have other customers who'll pay us to similarly break into their own data."

The fact that your own employees can't access their own data doesn't necessarily mean it's safe from outsiders.

(We never did discuss with them the implication that other outsiders might as easily access their data, if they happened to know the things we did. In the late 1980s, managers at corporate computer installations generally had no concept of a "network" other than as a way to connect remote terminals to the mainframe. There's no way we could have got them to understand the wider implications of the security holes we knew about and exploited for their benefit. It's not obvious that most of today's "management" class has such understanding, either. The current story pretty much demos the extent that understanding. ;-)

Indeed, and this is also an excellent example of where we can use the canonical /. automotive simile: There is a long tradition of government agencies (and some corporations) requiring that all purchased vehicles come with complete shop manuals. This is a direct parallel to requiring the source code for software. In both cases, such a requirement makes it possible for the purchasing organization to set up their own repair shop to fix the products when something fails. It also allows the purchaser to make their own mods to handle their special needs.

Many US states (and a good number of other countries) require that shop manuals be available for all vehicles sold in their jurisdiction, not just to the government. This is done to guarantee that independent auto shops can exist, and the vendor can't have a monopoly on repairs and spare parts. The same argument applies to software. With open source, you can hire local independent software contractors to debug (and/or extend) purchased software. Without this, both government agencies and private purchasers are at the mercy of the vendor when problems or special needs arise.

Of course, we can expect to hear from the usual corporate shills (paid or ideologically motivated ;-), pushing their usual misleading claims. But note that nobody much ever claims that open-source software is bug-free. The argument is that, when bugs are discovered, people not working for the vendor can study the code and fix the code. And they can also publicize bugs and fixes, unlike what happens all too often when dealing with secret, proprietary software. This also applies to both software and vehicles.

Nah; they don't have any fossil DNA from humans or other critters known to be decent.

But we can look forward to Americans who are furry and have an extra layer of fat. And this can be exported to any other part of the world where there's a market for such people.

It's not just common; it's the standard approach that's pretty much hard-wired into the entire GUI approach. And the designers are openly proud of the fact that they did it this way. And if you managed to memorize the location of something important in the menu tree, chances are that one of those "upgrades" that you clicked on has moved it to someplace else by now. If you don't like this, you can use the CLI approach, except that most "consumer" computer systems have done a good job of hiding that from their users. We're all too stupid to understand something without pretty pictures, y'know. ;-)

I guess so; Revere, Glosta and P-town are all rather different from the town I live in - and from each other. But then, so are the towns to the west and south of this town, which are among the wealthiest in the state.

(Hmm ... It occurs to me that you might have been making a joke. Well, the funniest jokes are often the ones that have a strong reality component. ;-)

I didn't find it hard at all in my household (in a western suburb of Boston). I easily found items manufactured in places like Malaysia, the Philippines, Vietnam, and even Japan. Oh, and a couple of items from Scandinavia, too. Not much made in the US, though.

Actually, my wife makes a lot of her own clothes, partly as a hobby, but mostly out of disappointment about the crap sold in local clothing stores. She has been complaining about the slow loss of the local fabric stores. Buying online doesn't work well, because you can't feel the material before ordering it. And most of her favorite fabrics do come from outside the US, though I don't think many are from China. But the "manufacturing" is done very locally, upstairs. ;-)