If they treat him the same as HSBC, he'll be OK. Slap a minor fine on him (5 weeks-worth of profit) and the government take their cut of the proceedings.

Now, the government wouldn't treat individuals charged with wrongdoing differently to multi-million/billion dollar businesses, would they?

See also Havana Club rum and their trademark dispute with Bacardi, who claimed it in the US (with a little anti-Cuban US government help, of course).

It's not that, though. It's that the game allows players to (gasp) imagine attacking China.

Perhaps the Chinese government are actually astute and realise that their ability to control the Chinese people is fragile and anything, even a fictional representation of insurrection could tip them over the edge into thinking 'hey, why not actually do this!?' ... or perhaps they're simply paranoid. Either way, it doesn't bode well for them, if this is what they consider a threat. If it's the former it will happen sooner or later. And if it's the latter, paranoia, they'll create a self-fulfilling prophecy by doing things like this (and, of course, much worse).

Flexible democracy is the best systems for a stable society, not a brittle authoritarian regime.

...and if they're feeling particularly angry ... resolutions!

The archive link:

Doctor Who 50th Anniversary Google Doodle.

The oil spill did not happen in the United States. It happened in International Waters under the supervision of a British petroleum company.

A British company?

[J]ust how British is BP? Obviously it’s listed in London. And it’s got a British CEO. But BP employs 23,000 people in the US, compared to 10,000 UK workers. Around 40 per cent of BP’s shares are held in the UK. But around the same proportion is held in the US. And a glance at BP’s 2009 report (p29)shows that 26 per cent of BP’s crude oil production comes from the US (665,000 barrels a day out of 2,535,000 globally). A similar proportion of BP’s natural gas comes from the US. And 18 per cent of its oil is sold in the US too. And BP’s entire US operation is largely an inheritance from the 1998 merger with Amoco under Lord Browne.

So we have a company with a large number of American workers, a large number of American owners, which sells American oil and gas to American customers, which is being attacked by an American president for polluting the American coastline.

[source]

because they broke almost all of their pre-election promises.

Here's a nice little summary of all those broken promises, pledges and outright deceit.

Blockbuster saw the new model and unnecessary risk (comfortable encumbent's almost-inevitable, flawed thinking: preserve what we have).
Netflix saw the new model as necessary opportunity (startup's raison detre; nothing to lose, everythign to gain).

Blockbuster would have had to destroy themselves to save themselves. Very few are capable of doing this. Netflix wasn't ebing held back by having anything to preserve.

It amazes me that people still don't understand that social networks don't exist to provide services to users.... they exist to turn users into products that can be sold.

People don't realise this because it isn't true. What you describe is a relationship in which only the social network provider gains, but this isn't what people experience: people do get utility out of the functions the networking sites provide.

You can certainly argue that the relationship is skewed, or that the price users are paying for the networking is greater than they realise (I think it is) - but, this is not a one-sided relationship. The users get networking services AND the providers of that service turns their users into products.

It's a symbiotic relationship. It may also be an unhealthy symbiotic relationship, but it's not parasitic.

The Guardian has a great companion article detailing several ways the government has used the term "threat to national security" to cover up nothing more than embarrassing facts about the way it conducts itself.

One example:

National security was said to be under threat in 1972, journalists were bugged and blackmailed by police, and threatened with prosecution under the Official Secrets Act, when the director of public prosecutions ordered Scotland Yard to identify the source of a leaked document.

The reason? The document, from the Ministry of Transport, disclosed that ministers were quietly considering the closure of 4,600 miles of railway lines - almost half the nation's network. And if the culprit would leak that secret, the ministry and the DPP reasoned, what else would he or she expose?

Unfortunately no therapy transacted over the internet or the telephone system can, these days, be said to abide by the confidentiality agreement the therapist is supposed to abide by.

From the City of London Wikipedia page:

Author and journalist Nicholas Shaxson argues that, in return for raising loans and finance for the British government, the City "has extracted privileges and freedoms from rules and laws to which the rest of Britain must submit" that have left the corporation "different from any other local authority". He argues that the assistance provided to the institutions based in its jurisdiction, many of which help their rich clients with offshore tax arrangements, mean that the corporation is "a tax haven in its own right". Writing in The Guardian, George Monbiot argued that the corporation's power "helps to explain why regulation of the banks is scarcely better than it was before the crash, why there are no effective curbs on executive pay and bonuses and why successive governments fail to act against the UK's dependent tax havens" and suggested that its privileges could not withstand proper "public scrutiny".

In the past, the Labour Party has pledged to abolish the corporation. Former British Prime Minister Clement Attlee wrote, "Over and over again we have seen that there is in this country another power than that which has its seat at Westminster. The City of London, a convenient term for a collection of financial interests, is able to assert itself against the Government of the country. Those who control money can pursue a policy at home and abroad contrary to that which has been decided by the people." When he became Prime Minister he nationalised the Bank of England.

In December 2012, following criticism that it was insufficiently transparent about its finances, the City of London Corporation revealed that its "City’s Cash" account – an endowment fund built up over the past 800 years that it says is used "for the benefit of London as a whole" – holds more than £1.3bn. The fund collects money made from the corporation’s property and investment earnings.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_London_Corporation

The City of London is pretty dodgy, if you ask me. This sort of thing doesn't surprise.

>Just out of curiosity, exactly what "offense" did he commit [...] ?

Looking sexy while being raped. This article is nothing but a tech version of 'blame-the-victim'.

Did they have to suffer any imposed financial pressure? I'm fairly sure Apple (and most large corprations) are happy to collude with oppressive regimes (wherever they exist in the world) when there's a profit to be made.

I thought that one of the points to VLC was that it got shit to work.

That's always been my impression of it, when after exhausting all other players to try to get something to work, I used VLC and it just did.

It's one of VLC's USPs (unique selling points) and I thought was why it was (among other things) held in high esteem and has such a good reputation.