They're in Japanese, and all they're really saying is a summary of the article.

For most purposes other than things like defense and foreign policy, Hong Kong might as well be a separate country. Hongkongers speak different, look different, and most importantly think differently from their cousins up north. Kinda like Texas, but in a positive way.

YouTube captions have been searchable since shortly after they were introduced.

For the benefit of the poster, who doesn't seem the type to know what a servo track is:

A servo track is how the hard drive knows where the heads are over the disk. Older hardware could just read the angle of the arm, but with vast increases in density it became necessary to put position data on the platters themselves where more precision is possible.

Why is this modded 5 insightful? I can't believe how Slashdotters' comprehension skills seem to be lacking.

The point of the FA is not that Kingston doesn't make their own parts (that applies to every vendor), but that their authorized distributor delivered an irregular batch of cards that seemingly couldn't even handle being programmed with a ~50 MB firmware. These irregular cards just so happened to use the same controller chip as an obvious fake, which raised the question of how a seemingly reputable brand managed to unexpectedly supply such low-quality parts.

That's how the Great Firewall tells you that something is "inappropriate." search.cn.yahoo.com is located in China, and the GFW is applied to all Internet traffic passing in/out of China, not just consumer machines, so it's not Yahoo that's blocking that particular term but the government.

This will work with any Mainland Chinese site, for example: http://www.mps.gov.cn/Falun%20Gong

This isn't necessarily true. Operators can use ciphers of their choice for functions that occur within the SIM card (such as authentication and key derivation), but data sent over the air can only be encrypted with Kasumi or (since UMTS Rel-7) Snow 3G. http://www.3gpp.org/ftp/Specs/html-info/33102.htm

Not to mention that UMTS phones will prefer the UMTS signal even if a GSM signal is available. Also, it will stop working once GSM goes away and is fully replaced by UMTS (which does authenticate the network), if that does ever happen.

In the words of US diplomat Dan Fried: nationalism is like cheap alcohol - first it makes you drunk, then it makes you blind, then it kills you.

Mobile networks are actually pretty robust, and the standards and protocols are indeed open (GSM/UMTS, OMA).

Nevertheless, mobile phones are usually sold as locked black boxes because:
1. Government regulations require that equipment must not be able to use frequencies other than those they are licensed to;
2. The same regulations require that transmit power be limited to a safe level; and
3. Mobile carriers want to be able to enact anti-competitive measures (SIM locking) and/or screw consumers (disabling software features).