I wonder who will construct the crazy mobius loop of running Linux in Chrome's native mode? It'll be google-colored turtles all the way down.

Dumb. Pirates can't play multiplayer, as a rule. You call that no effect? Maybe game developers need to *interleave* the single and multiplayer parts of the game, so proceeding in the single player means performing some tasks in multiplayer to "unlock" progress. Since multiplayer is less vulnerable to piracy (depending on architecture, of course), it might provide a DRM-without-DRM effect.

What taint? Sorry. Confused.

Haier is a former State-owned corporation, with very tight links to the top levels of government. It would be very unwise for another manufacturer to copy Haier's products and logos, within China. Some well-connected Chinese brands will enjoy western-style IP protection, within Chinese borders. Of course, the Chinese government will expect protection for its brands overseas, as well.

Quality Fade is a concept that Westerners need to understand thoroughly.

Right in Beijing you've the got (in)famous Silk Market, which is packed full of every fake leather good you can possibly imagine. You can buy Hermes for a few hundred bucks, or Chanel fakes, or whatever you want. Some of the fakes are of high quality; most are crap.

Will the Silk Market disappear?

The problem gets distinctly worse when Chinabolt sells Superbolt look-alikes, but decides that the product is just too expensive to make. They cut the quality, but leave the packaging intact.

Never underestimate how pervasive fake stuff is in Chinese culture. I suspect that part of the reason for this crackdown is that Chinese people themselves can't figure out what is real and what is fake. For example: "Deslon Germany" cookware. Looks like pretty good quality, claims to be a German product. The Chinese people who bought it think it's German, and paid high prices for it. Except -- there is no Deslon Germany. And why are their Chinese characters stamped into the metal?

It's probably a knock-off of a real german design; the quality seemed high to me. But -- deliberately deceptive to the domestic Chinese customer.

The quickest way to find a list of decent books in the SF category is to filter Amazon's results by hardcover format only. There you'll find works that publishers believe are worthy of the hardcover format.

Couldn't agree with you more. I find it almost impossible to buy e-books by going through the Kindle storefront. The lists of books in some categories are dominated by cheap, self-published works with hundreds of glowing reviews. Amazon cheerfully publishes these, of course. Most of them definitely wouldn't make it through a traditional publishing process; the quality isn't there, and they're badly edited.

I find it much more useful to work through the print bookstore instead. What I find there has been through the "middlemen", and as a result is usually of substantially higher quality. Since Amazon lists the various editions of a book, I can flip over to the Kindle version and purchase that, if I want to.

I understand the economics of the situation, and that an author can often earn more money by selling direct. What I'm getting at is that for me, as a reader, I wish Amazon had the ability to simply filter out any content that hasn't been through a publisher. I don't want to see it. I've bought at least ten of them based on the reviews, and haven't read a good one yet.

Of course I'm not saying that good self published works don't exist; they do. Most of them aren't good, though, and they are crowding out works of vastly superior quality. There are parallels to cheap imported goods.

For me, the Kindle store will be useful the day it allows me to filter based on publisher. If you hit the Kindle bookstore as of this writing and select the SF/High Tech category, positions 1 through 9 of the first ten books listed by popularity are self-published. Number 10 is Snow Crash. Sort by average customer review, and all ten top books are self-published.

I guess I could keep hitting "next page" over and over again, trying to wade through piles of chaff.

In short, a publisher's imprint has commercial value, and value to consumers as a mark of quality. I hope they can adapt and not be discarded in the name of middleman elimination.

Yeah -- let's eke out every last bit of strategic oil in US territory! And let's cram it into a bunch of stupid SUVs!! Because That's How America Uses Oil!!!

And let's do this all in the next decade or two, guaranteeing the current generation of oil billionaires a semi-permanent place in history, as the last such. They can get started on their even more gated communities, and wall their future families in thoroughly.

I guess my general point is that unless the US (and similar countries) take the high road on neutrality issues, they're going to find it difficult to make political progress vis-a-vis the internet, because of the slippery slopes involved.

Yeah, you can get around the GFC, but doing so splits into two cases: Wanting to get information that you shouldn't be able to get, and wanting to get information that is only useful when transferred in a timely and usable manner. Gmail performance in China just sucks. OK, thinks me, I'll punch an SSH tunnel through to the imap server and pull it that way. Result? Works perfectly, but very slow. I can't say for sure, but I think that the GFC's approach to tunnel "issue" is simply to dramatically slow down certain kinds of traffic (like SSH), and especially traffic it does not recognize (or does, and wants to impair). There's little doubt in my mind that repeated use of SSH from a given endpoint will gather special attention, once enough red flags arise.

In the mean time, "just make it suck" allows "acceptable" traffic through, sort of. China's censors aren't stupid. The information and political ecosphere is massive; within a country the size of China it can only be approached on a probabilistic basis. Changing the "convenience factor" for information turns the dials on the probability model and generates certain political effects, when observed at scale.

It was news to me ('cause I'm foolishly optimistic) that any site that uses Facebook-backed content delivery, or twitter, or youtube, is simply not visible in China.

If packet-level neutrality is properly implemented globally, my SSH tunnel runs fast. Packet-level neutrality generalizes a solution to the issues of political and private impairment of the net. "Don't mess with the packets", and you have a internet freedom. Of course, that's I-want-a-pony, 'cause there are bad actors out there. It seems we'll be stuck with filtering, at a minimum.

This is refreshed evidence of the ability of the internet to influence politics and history, of course. Discussions of net neutrality aren't often rooted in socio-political terms; actions like these demonstrate the need for neutrality. If there's a very concrete, very specific definition of what the internet is and what the internet isn't, the rest of the internet can take actions against entities and networks that "aren't the internet".

The political dimension of the net neutrality comes into play here. When laws and policy in the US are cemented in place that allow private and government entities to arbitrarily discriminate against traffic, it becomes very difficult for the internet as a whole to maintain any kind of defense. China, Russia, and numerous other countries around the world want anything BUT a neutral internet. It's hard for the US, for example, to argue for neutrality in other countries along political dimensions, while caving to corporate, anti-competitive interests internally.

Crappy thought formation here -- sorry for that. The essence is that unless the US takes the high road on neutrality, it will become less and less ubiquitous in the future, as more and more countries follow the downward spiral of fragmentation.

I am visiting China right now, and I can tell you that internet access here is just plain WEIRD. Imagine an internet in the US with a thousand provider firewalls and packet paywalls everywhere, twisting in the winds of contracts between provider and highest bidder. The Great Firewall of China? How would you like to be dealing with the Shitty Firewall of Comcast-St.Louis, instead? And then the wall after that?

Don't think that he needs to be charged. The equivalent of an arrest warrant needs to have been issued, and published appropriately. At that point due process is available, and should be utilized by the arrestee.

All hail Mr. Zero-Sum, Energy Constant Universal the Third. Never do anything! Consequences!!

Isn't it the case that due process is only available for people who submit themselves to it? Due process has _always_ been available to this guy, if he wanted it. All he had to do was turn himself in. He's been on the run from the law, and that's a different situation. I don't see why this is complicated at all, as long as there's been an active indictment against him, or whatever is necessary to effect a legal arrest.

All I know is that they could prick some holes in those big electric pipes, let the 'lectricity out and create a ton of steam bubbles. This will turn the entire coast of Japan into a giant steam bath, achieving all goals simultaneously: Eliminate winter, increase tourism from Scandinavian countries, pirate ships coming out of cool misty effects, and the Japanese can relax for a change.