When you look at all the claims of this and that poll showing majority don't care or support it, you have to think about how they are conducted. Unless in a sufficiently anonymous setting they are very careful about what they say, particularly to foreigners, partly due to saving face and partly due to the potential of having your secret method to access banned websites plastered all over creation. Censorship is so prevalent that the most popular IM client over there actively prohibits you from saying certain key words and posting links it deems dangerous. People still get the point across by using a wide variety of puns or pictures. They put up with it because for most it's not enough to risk life and limb over, YET.

Unhindered access to the intertubes is a natural right now?

For god sake some of you make it sounds like the OP's never gonna be seen alive again. He's just going to China, not the goddamn Death Star. I guess you can say there's always the risk of being detained, but you risk being detained just coming back to the US! Any halfway savvy Chinese net user knows how to browse blocked sites. The laws are intentionally vague and nebulous. Enforcement against you is unlikely unless you really try to start something.

People don't like living under tyrants, but they like being invaded by a foreign power even less.

Damn right, I know I feel cheapened when buying a $.99 app online. As a human being I deserve to be treated with respect, and should only deal with other human beings, not mere soulless machines! I demand Apple cease hawking cheap-ass apps in their abominable online store and convert it all to major retail locations across the country.

Well they had a prior history... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibm#Business_relations_with_Nazi_Germany Based on their prediction system the likelihood of IBM collaborating with Nazis again is not negligible.

If you commit an act found objectionable by some, do they have the right to act against you? Perhaps not legal right, but morally can you allow yourself to abide silently while something you think is wrong goes on? When should your moral respect for others' privacy outweigh your own principles? How easy is it to convince yourself that "it's just the internets, I don't and can't know the whole story, so I'll just treat potential evil as passing diversion?" I think privacy should be viewed in a contractual sense. In some cases you expect another party to actively protect your privacy, such as between you and your doctor. Strangers who come upon publicly available but unknown information about you do not have that obligation, though perhaps the medium they choose to broadcast it to the world has.

It's just a way to lure Joe Average into a false sense of security. It really shouldn't be any more difficult for someone with a minimal amount of effort to obtain a legit SSL cert from say VeriSign who then uses it for evil. However it's the best scam we have so... My suggestion is to put geographic or political limitations on a trust root's clients. It shouldn't make sense for say an Australian bank site to have a cert from CCNIC. Domain name register and the cert's issuer should match in terms of geographic sphere of influence.

His quote is from V for Vendetta, a greatly relevant movie to our time.

Let's assume for a moment that human-induced global warming is hogwash. What then is the aim of this vast global conspiracy? Are they in cahoots with the powerful, money-grabbing solar energy industry? Is it a scheme to push new age, carbon-reducing snake oil products? Do they just hate people and want to reduce our standard of living out of spite?

More and more people are starting to think about freedom, especially political, now that they're getting rich. However I believe the last thing the world needs is a consumerist society 1 billion strong.

This guy's got the right idea. What's said is totally different from what's done in China. It's like that with a lot of world governments to be sure, but still the prevalence makes a difference. MMOs because they're more resistant to piracy are the big slice of China's domestic game industry. Most of them have ads that put the infamous Civony to shame.

More MMOs should adopt the pay-per-hour system popular elsewhere in the world, so that they'll know where the fuck their revenue comes from, the casuals or the 40-hour-a-week hardcore gamers. Subscription is basically asking casual players to subsidize the hardcore guys, like a fucking insurance plan. As a result the casuals have to be given the same level of attention as those who have invested much more into a product, and neither group is happy and view the other with loathing. Does this make sense? You have one group of customers who love your product and have the potential to spend a lot, vs. another group that occasionally brings you business and could just as well go buy another product, yet you charge them exactly the same and treat them the same?