...and about Korea, Vietnam, and other places "liberated" by the communist army, there is only one version of history, defined by the sad reality you can verify yourself: as of 2009, the North Korea, a communist-"liberated" society, is about the poorest and most backwards place on Earth, a living tragi-farce, and Vietnam and other "liberated" communist countries are not that much better off, whereas South Korea, where the communist cancer hasn't spread from long enough to inflict much damage, is now a rich and modern society, a wonderful place to live, and with uncensored, high-speed Internet connectivity that U.S. and E.U. countries can only dream of. As for the details: perhaps you should check out the War Memorial in Seoul sometime or meet the survivors who escaped from North Korea (many of them live in Seoul). Surely, innocent people have tragically died on both sides, and surely, each side may have used its share of dirty tricks, but there's no question which side was fighting for the right cause: the answer lies in front of you, crisp and clear.

See, the issue lies not in knowing that certain events have taken place, but in being able to reflect on them, question them, interpret and speak freely about them. Chinese government, through its aggressive propaganda, created the situation where everything is linked this way or another to national pride. Even from your response it is sort of evident that you are being defensive, as if the reflection on the past events were to insult or otherwise discredit the entire Chinese nation. And this is precisely the issue. Many intelligent Chinese I had met seem completely unable to separate discussion of history and infamous past events from the matter of national pride. One person I tried to speak to about Tibet denied it fiercely to the point she almost cried. This sort of reaction is hardly normal. Questioning the actions of the Chinese government and bringing up the infamous events in history is treated by some as a personal attack at a deep emotional level. Surely, many Americans are also like that; the difference is that those Americans choose to be like that despite the fact they live in a free society, whereas for people who were born in China this may not be a matter of choice. If you think anyone here is trying to blame or discredit the Chinese, you are deeply confused; everyone here is rather sympathetic with your fellow citizens. The question is whether the Chinese raised in the communist propaganda can handle the criticism of their own government without taking it at the personal level and getting all emotional and defensive.

What exactly is your point? I believe in what you wrote, but I don't see how that has anything to do with what I wrote, or with the topic of this thread in general. I think you're trying to be sarcastic; unfortunately, I'm not getting the point. The fact that the U.S. government has its share of attacks on free speech certainly doesn't mean that we're not allowed to criticize the Tiananmen massacre.

...so then I'm curious, is anyone aware of any policy at their school/workplace that would specifically forbid putting content that isn't politically neutral on your personal website (even with a disclaimer). I've run a couple of Google searches, and haven't come across anything specific. If there is a policy, what does it say? If it forbids posting political opinions, for example, does it prevent you from posting factual information that doesn't constitute an opinion?

...but that won't prevent Chinese students living abroad from getting the point. I personally know a number of very smart Chinese Ph.D. students who honestly believe that everything the Chinese government does is right and has always been right because they have been told so back home, and political correctness in U.S. prevents people from going anywhere near such subjects at school or in the workplace.

I wonder how feasible it would be for the Internet crowd to "make" June 4 the unofficial day of the free speech, by means of posting some small banner or a short comment on thousands of websites on that day, to the extent that it would get media coverage, and then repeating it every year on the anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre. I guess one could do that one one's personal blog, I don't know about a personal page at a university or other such places since it would probably violate some regulations. Surely, someone who's a lawyer could advise... obviously, Chinese citizens wouldn't notice, but the rest of the world might, including those who came from China to study and may be oblivious of the fact that the rest of the world considers Chinese government's policies and actions morally questionable.

I wasn't advocating being a marketroid; I was pointing out that people naturally become marketroids, and instead of talking about ethics, we need to design the system to be marketroid-tolerant (where by "-tolerant", i mean as in Byzantine fault-tolerant). The monkey model you pointed to is consistent with what I said. As we grow to the top of the tree, we become manipulative, and more likely to look down on others whether it is justifiable or not. So the system inevitably manipulates us to become more of a marketroid ourselves, whether we like it or not. Is there some way marketroids can be manipulated? Surely, by telling them they are being immoral is not going to help. They view themselves as victims of the evil system, trying to follow the implicit principles of becoming successful. We humans have an amazing ability to justify our own mistakes and our flaws, and portray them as beautiful, noble, righteous, or find ways to push the blame onto others.

You're right, except it's not what science "is", but what science "should be", and in practice your postulate is infeasible. Science is very much like selling carrot at a vegetable market, you are rewarded for being aggressive, not for being honest. There have been various social systems based on the assumption that people are inherently good and honest, and for all I know, they all failed miserably. The most successful theories are based on assumption that people are selfish, manipulative bastards. We need a system, in which being a selfish, manipulative bastard can benefit the others. For example, what if paper submissions, proposals, and paper reviews were never anonymous, but instead publicly available for scrutiny? I don't know if that would help, but intuition tells me that extreme transparency could go a long way making us all more fair and honest.

Moreover, you rarely become a professor at a major university or some other distinguished position only on the basis of being talented; it is much more important that you are skilled at writing and inter-personal politics, manipulative both in terms of being able to sell your research and in terms of luring grad students, junior researchers and funding agencies to work for you or to pay you. Unfortunately, the same manipulative skills you need to acquire to become successful make you potentially more capable of cheating. I don't mean to insult anyone here by implying that it will actually make you more likely to cheat; only that it's easier for you to cheat because you are skilled at manipulating others (this being said, arguably the line between skilled manipulation and outright cheating is not as crisp and well-defined as one might hope). Indeed, sometimes cheating happens unwillingly; I have witnessed it on multiple occasions, when a famous professor would write a pile of an outright bullshit in a paper; not intentionally, but because his bullshitting skills and confidence were orders of magnitude above his raw technical competence.

I'm not sure those who build data centers are making their decisions solely based on the cost of operation. Economy says that in many applications, data centers are basically redundant since their only purpose is to relay data back and forth; often it would be much cheaper to implement a peer-to-peer solution that for the most part keeps the data out. Still, data center owners are eager to pay the cost just to lay their dirty hands on the wealth of information they can dig into. I'm not sure changing cost of operation could change these greedy policies. We will see more and more data centers being built no matter what. I see a future with millions of data centers, standing there like giant honey pots designed to lure, trap, and enslave the naive and trusting, and suck their innocent blood through targeted advertising, exploiting our every weakness and dirty secret.

He didn't, I misinterpreted his comment.

In that case you're right. It wasn't clear if you're just stating the fact or approving of it. Lots of people here seem happy that MS got spanked.

You don't become a patent troll by simply acquiring lots of obvious patents. You become a troll by using those patents to harass others. Lots of companies big and small file patents for DEFENSIVE reasons. Once you have a patent, it's much harder to sue you for infringement; after all, the patent office already agreed that you're doing something innovative. So as long as the patent office awards patents for obvious stuff, filing for such patents for defensive reasons is not only fair, but essentially required. You don't want to risk investing lots of money to develop and market a new product only to find out later that you've been sued by some stupid patent-squatter. Instead of blaming the big players, who only exercise their common sense right to protect their investment, the community should exert pressure on the patent office to start uniformly rejecting ALL such applications.

You mean, the law should protect only the poor, miserable, and troubled, and punish the rich, mighty, and successful, so that everyone and everything becomes uniformly mediocre and apathetic. I'm amazed at how the pure open source ideals sometimes end up twisted in people's minds, so that they become indistinguishable from the dull communist propaganda. Surely, this is completely missing the point of the open source movement?

Suppose you are a politician and the uneducated hard-core conservatives want the competition out; ideally, nobody would ever immigrate. There are two options: you can kick out people whom you can control (those who follow the law), or kick out people whom you can't control (those who enter illegally). The latter option is very difficult to implement: after all, if you can't control or even identify someone, you can't kick them out. So in order to demonstrate that you listen to your voters and do something to protect them from the evil "aliens", you generate all sorts of restrictions on people who follow the law.