mahranch

Slightly off topic; My favorite clothing brand is made in India; Robert Graham. Allegedly, they were the only place that could make what the founders wanted. He'd been searching for nearly a decade till he found a manufacturer in India that showed/proved what he wanted could be done.

Sure, some of the clothing from RG can be a bit, gaudy, it's the more subdued stuff I'm into. Most importantly, build quality is literally off the charts. I have shirts from RG that I've had for 4 years that still look brand new, even the collar is still crisp and looks new.

Comparing U.S government to the Chinese government here is ridiculous. The Chinese government has absolute and total control of everything within its borders. It could dissolve a company tomorrow if it didn't like it -- or do the reverse and allow it to operate at a loss in order to hurt foreign competitors. The U.S has laws against such practices while China actively engages in those behaviors.

Chinese culture of copy-catting freely doesn't help.

The problem with that, is that it's a vicious circle. Innovation is the foundation for future innovations. It builds on itself. It lays the groundwork and foundation for what comes next. By leapfrogging and cheating its way to the top (or near the top) they are sacrificing that crucial infrastructure for future discoveries and innovations.

China has to copy & steal IPs because it simply doesn't have the culture to compete. They're one of the least innovative countries on Earth, year after year. And the only way to change that is by allowing its citizens to think creatively, outside the box -- to be able to challenge authority. But China doesn't want that; they want conforming little worker bees who follow the party line.

It must exist because we still haven't reconciled quantum mechanics with relativity. That matters if we ever want to understand what happens inside black holes, or the moment of the big bang itself. As of right now, our physics literally breaks, it stops working. If a black hole was a computer program, we'd get a critical systems fault the moment it began running.

His book contains several factual inaccuracies that he either has failed to correct or refuses too (as of last year). It makes me think a lot less of him and his position on string theory. It makes me wonder what else has he misrepresented in his criticisms.

Keep in mind science is not free of "agendas"; people in competing areas love to bash the competition because they're competing for funding, aka their livelyhood.

Wouldn't it be even more true in China, given the big brother system they have in place? The government (and by extension, the banks) knows more about its citizens than say, the U.S government. Hell, they just issued a "social credit score" to every citizen - it's similar to a financial credit score and just goes to show just how many things they're keeping tabs on.

Source: https://newyork.cbslocal.com/2018/04/24/china-assigns-every-...

pulled their search engine out of China, defying their censorship attempts

They didn't pull their search engine out of China because of censorship requests, they pulled their search engine because the government kept trying to hack them and steal their source code, which they eventually did. So Google up and left.

Source: https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303493904575167...

They like to cite censorship and free speech to look better, but they knew exactly what they were getting into before setting foot in China -- the government of China made specific requirements before they could do business in China and Google agreed to those requirements. In fact, Google was criticized heavily for doing so. So don't buy into their history revisionism, they were on board with censorship from day 1. They had to be, or the PRC wouldn't allow them in.

The web was intended to be

I'm sorry, but this is ridiculous. You cannot say what the web was intended to be because you had no hand in inventing it. You do not know the mind of Tim Berners-Lee.

In fact, I argue the opposite - he had a vision of a global hyperlinked information system. While he wanted the protocol itself to be free (a move away from gopher), the information itself had no such protections. And that is precisely what we have today; it doesn't cost anything to use the WWW protocol. His vision has been fulfilled.

Now, the information (the content) itself is another matter. IP laws exist for a reason, people want to be paid for the content they create. They have ownership of that content. Whether it's the latest episode of game of thrones, a video game IP, or a book I wrote, the law protects my intellectual property. If I want to charge for access to that content, I'm more than within my legal right. Whether it's accessed over WWW, a cable box, or purchased from a book store, it makes no difference to my legal protections.

Chinese govt. could have given preferential treatment

How do we know they didn't? They could have just decided "Now that Taobao is up and running, we can get rid of ebay". They've done worse before, so it's not a stretch.

It's interesting that there are no massive web properties in China with the bulk market share (google, facebook, ebay, amazon, twitter, etc) that aren't Chinese owned. Yet, in the entire rest of the world, those same websites are #1. That's not just some coincidence or one-off, that's clearly governmental manipulation and control.

If it was just one or two web properties, I could understand. Like how it is with Yahoo! Japan. But all of them? Sorry, China doesn't want western companies running the show within their country. Articles like this are moot since there was no future with eBay in the #1 spot thanks to the CCP.

You act like the US Government hasn't already banned Chinese companies

The U.S didn't ban ALL Chinese companies operating in the U.S. Try setting up a coffee shop or computer repair shop in China as a non-citizen and see how long you last. That's extremely illegal in China. Their government has to approve every foreign business and they rarely do (unless you're some multinational corporation who have made a whole host of concessions.

Starbucks is doing very well in China

Starbucks is considered extremely high-end/luxury in China. It's not just an overpriced coffee shop like it is here in the U.S. It's considered 'exotic'.

Reddit is the 4th/5th largest website in the U.S according to Alexa (keeps swapping between 4th and 5th). Source: https://www.alexa.com/topsites/countries/US

Any agency, whether it's a nation state/government, business or political party, would be laughably bad at their job to ignore a website that size, one with the perfect format to spew their propaganda. It even has little score counters so you can keep track of what works, and what doesn't! How handy!

Reddit has been a target for manipulation for years now. I've been a moderator of some of their largest subreddits and the evidence was so overwhelming you can't help but become angry, then apathetic when told by the admins that they wouldn't do anything. "As long as they don't break the global rules, they're free to be here" I saw a moderator get told that by an admin ~3 years ago (few months before the Ellen Pao debacle). Spewing propaganda is fine on reddit, so long as you don't manipulate the votes.

I take issue with the fact that BOTH are inorganic manipulation of reddit. Both should be dealt with swiftly, without prejudiced and without mercy.

Yeah, people under 33 seem to have a romanticized view of the internet. They believed there was no ads and it was flush with the kinds of content we enjoy today. Nope. Content existed but it was scarce/thin. Many of the internet users just stayed on AOL/Prodigy/Compuserve and never left to explore the WWW side of things. Those service providers were essentially national level BBSs.

There was no youtube, wikipedia, itunes or reddit. No instagram, twitter or google earth. The internet was basically geocities where most webpages were fan pages or pages/forums about niche interests.

I think people want to believe that because they believe that if ads were to disappear off the internet tomorrow, nothing would change. They don't realize that ads subsidize the content they consume, whether it's a youtube video they're watching or a reddit thread, ads are paying for that content. Nothing is free.

Had we established the first Moon base in 1988 as NASA had on its roadmap in 1970 we would know all about this

You say that offhandedly, as if they decided not to move forward with a Moon base due to bureaucracy or because some upper management people decided to go in a different direction.

A permanent moon base in the 70s and 80s was largely impossible as far as the technology is concerned. Hell, we're approaching 2020 and we still have several major hurdles before we could put a permanent base on a body or planet that is not earth. Everything from radiation to supplies are still problems that need solved. Expecting them to solve them in the late 70s or early 80s is almost laughable.

I know HN and reddit likes to think it was congress who is responsible for the shift in NASAs goals (after all, they control the purse strings so they get to dictate/approve budgets & goals), but they did so precisely because NASA told them it was impossible to establish a permanent moon base at that point in time. On top of the insane cost, what more was there to be gained that justified the immense cost? If they wanted to go to the moon and study rocks, that's what the Apollo program was for. There was only so much we could learn with the technology we had at the time. People forget, the rest of the solar system awaited exploration too, but only so much money to go around.

"But we can use the moon as a base to launch further missions out into the solar system and beyond!" It's a nice pipe dream, but getting the materials there and/or manufacturing facilities to create everything needed is cost prohibitive. Also, the logistics of doing something like that today is insane, let alone 30 years ago.

whole premise is based on one border incursion and some building of roads

They used those as examples, but there are more listed on the second page of the article.

From the article: "In some cases, the military may have been acting on its own. "Due to a lack of control by the commander-in-chief, those farthest from the center have committed provocative acts in some cases" said a Japanese national security official."

Does he not remember how much spam we received before those sorts of upgrades? Email spam in the late 90s and early 2000s was insane. And every grandmother who plugged in their PC at the time got hit by it. "I ordered v1gr4 cheap from this business, why hasn't it shown up 4 months later?!"

Sure, I guess it's harder to run your own email server, but the trade-off was virtually zero spam making its way to my inbox. I think that's a trade worth making, since I vividly remember the dark days of email.

One thing I've noticed about people who are nostalgic for the past, is that they either misremember or forget the negative things while wearing their rose-colored glasses.

I saw someone pining for the good old days of the late 90s internet due to a lack of ads everywhere and I gently reminded them that due to a lack of bandwidth and modems capable of download at speed, a gif file took 5 minutes to download and view, videos were basically non-existent to download as real-player was in its infancy serving up what amounted to flip-book quality clips which still took 15 minutes to download a 15 second clip.

The internet wasn't in some golden age back in the late 90s, it was slow as fuck, quality was shit and there was barely any content. We take so much for granted today...

The internet was built on people writing massive forums posts about completely stripping down Kawasaki motorbike engines

You're skipping the birth of the internet and are talking about the teenage years. I was alive and on the internet in the very early 90s. Academics and Hobbyists created the barebones of the internet, sure, sorta. But the internet didn't explode in popularity until people started making money off it. That's when the 90s internet bubble started to form. Even before the internet, services like Prodigy, Compuserve and AOL were here, quite literally being the internet. There were local BBSs and then there were big, national BBSs like Prodigy and Compuserve. They were little internets onto themselves, and produced content themselves. At the time, they were more popular than the web itself, because the content today simply didn't exist like it did back then. No google, No wikipedia, forums were still in their infancy, etc.

I totally and utterly refute your statement. The world came to the internet for the content that people made for free

Wrong. You most certainly weren't on the internet back then if you're going to stand behind that statement because it's 100% false. It's simply too complex for that statement to hold true. Everything from internet speeds to cheap computers played a much larger part -- the internet sucked back in the mid 90s because it took 3 minutes to load up a simple (non animated) gif file. Videos? Hah! It would take you a week to download a 15 minute clip. Due to these issues, people got fed up or were impatient and it delayed adoption.

Quality online content will not vanish if online advertising fails, because quality online content is posted by people who first and foremost /want to post content/.

That's great in some naive ideological fantasy, but it ignores a little something called human nature, more specifically, greed and/or the need to put food on the table. People will want to make money off their work and people will create content for money. Just because some people will create content for free doesn't mean they constitute a majority, or even a minority.

And it should be a larger concern for bitcoin proponents, too. Imagine if China decided to wage a covert war on bitcoin. I mean, is it really so hard to believe that China wouldn't like bitcoin because it literally (not figuratively) runs antithesis to their own fiscal policies?

And how would they run a covert war against it? An open war or public attack would immediately raise the defenses of everyone involved, from miners to developers, to bitcoin holders. But what if they played nice while all the while poisoning the well or setting the stage to gain trust. They could do this through third party companies (cough bitmain cough) which could cause damage to bitcoin by delaying vital upgrades and sowing the seeds of uncertainty and doubt.

Seems to me as though Bitcoin mining is kind of a backdoor way to move Chinese money offshore

Which is why China is trying desperately to get control. They limit how much money their citizens can move around, whether it's Yuan, stocks or foreign currency, everything is limited and monitored. Bitcoin is no exception. Except, I think it's more nefarious than that. Bitcoin stands for everything China is against. A (mostly) anonymous currency which is decentralized? It's practically the opposite of China's ideology, a country which has strict controls on just about everything within their borders.

If I was the PRC, I'd move to damage, corrupt or if possible, destroy bitcoin. At the very least, I'd dig my claws in somehow, someway so I had some (even if it's just a little) control. But if I was China, how would I do it? I couldn't just create "The Exchange of the People's Republic of China". I'd have to do it through a proxy of some sort. There were some rumors on reddit about Chinese nationalist Jihan and his company Bitmain being such a front. I'm no tinfoil hat kind of guy, but the more I think on it, the less of stretch it seems...

Voyager I and II and Curiosity are powered with radioisotope thermoelectric generators

AKA a nuclear battery... That's how they're referred to by just about everyone.

It's not baseless speculation, it's fact.

Just look at places where that's currently happening, such as Ethiopia or Zambia.

Are you using that as a positive example? You need to do your research kid, China's imperialism in Africa is not turning out to be a good thing for the African countries they're working in. Hell, Kenyan workers were protesting the Chinese http://qz.com/749177/kenyan-rail-workers-are-protesting-agai...

Oh yeah, and Zambia? http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article/36341367/china-denies-...

Sounds like everything is peachy.... /s

No, the narrative is consistently "Japanese imperialism and/or Militarism is evil, there has nothing to do with Japanese people".

Except, Japan hasn't engaged in any form of imperialism in 70+ years. They are a completely pacifist country, not just in law but in actions. The same cannot be said about China who are now building military bases in Africa. They are also incredibly aggressive in the region.

majority of Japanese people did support Japan's invasion in China during WW2. And this fact is never mentioned in any text books

You've fallen victim to propaganda I'm afraid. They most certainly do mention it in textbooks. Not just that, but they talk about Japan's atrocities like Nanking. Stanford University did a study which proved Japan's textbooks are more accurate than China's, South Koreas and Americas, less nationalistic too. See for yourself: http://www.nippon.com/en/in-depth/a00703/

Those are general opinions about the country itself, not personal opinions. The question they ask is; Do you have a positive opinion of China? The Japanese could be taking the question to mean: Do you think China likes you? Or any other variation... It's not necessarily "Do you hate China". In fact, I'd argue that's not the question at all.

As far as she was concerned, the government's description was the end of the story.

This is what people don't get about China. "Ooohh yeah, China will take the U.S down a few pegs, go China!" this is a very popular sentiment on reddit's /r/Worldnews or with any cynical millennial on reddit. They eat up all the blatant propaganda that comes out of either Xinhua or the People's Daily (China's very own English language, government-owned & ran propagand... erm, I mean "news agency"). China literally, not figuratively, brainwashes its citizens. And they do so from a very early age: Japan is evil!. I get a kick when I hear people say how China hates Japan and Japan hates China. I'm sorry, but relatively speaking, it's a one-sided hatred -- just go search youtube for people asking random Japanese people down the street what they think of China. There are dozens and dozens of them, all by different youtubers and done at various times over the last 10 years.

What they don't understand is that if China replaced or supplanted the U.S as the world's sole superpower, things would be a whole hell of a lot different than they are now. China would most definitely exert its influence in a way that the world has yet to see. The U.S is far from perfect but they are, by *orders of magnitude, the lesser evils. They're simply benign by comparison. Under Chinese rule, it would most certainly not be benign and many of our freedoms would erode the more powerful China got. Until one day we wake up to a global "great firewall". Sounds like an exaggeration but as someone who has lived in China, I assure you, it's not.

This particular thing 'feels' sort of slimy

I was just coming here to talk about how inaccurate the title was. It implies (or leads people to believe) that "nuclear batteries" are something new. Or at least, that's what they want readers thinking. They're not even close to new. They're decades old. They're aboard the Voyager probes (which is why they're still working, 30 years later) and they're powering the Curiosity rover on Mars. Hell, there was even a nuclear battery powered automobile made by Ford I believe (the "Nucleon") as proof of concept. This was in the 1950s.

The new thing here, is the fact that they can run the batteries with nuclear waste.

we want to maintain an artisanal search index of 1B documents. Then our cost comes down to $12M/yr.

Yeah, no. It doesn't cost that much to maintain an index of that size. Not even remotely close. My roommate coded a search engine back in 2001-02 as part of a class project/hobby and it easily had an index that large, probably larger till he shut it down. The key lies in not crawling it all in a single day. And your index doesn't populate overnight, it takes months of slow crawling. You can maintain an index of practically unlimited size for chump change (well, compared to the millions OP was throwing around). Do people think Excite, Hotbot, Lycos and Yahoo! in the early years had $12 million per year to spend on their indexing? Hell no. Every single one of them would have went bankrupt in a week. Those companies weren't even worth that much back in the mid to late 90s. Your biggest cost is going to be user loads on your servers (CPU/Ram/Bandwidth), not maintaining an index.

I'd be willing to pay a modest subscription if Google got out of the advertising business

That would be like asking Ford to get out of the automotive business. Something like 94% of Google's revenue comes from their advertising division.

More importantly, I wish people would stop pitching the subscription model when it comes to alternatives to advertising. Study after study, after real world example, after real world example has shown that subscription models just don't work. Period. Sure, you may have one or 2 rare exceptions where a site didn't crash and burn but the overwhelming majority of sites that have tried it have fallen hard. And the ones that saw success only saw very tepid success.

It's a model that just doesn't work.

Does it matter? It happened, you can google it. It's literally a 30 second google search away.

Listen up kid, (I'm calling you kid because you're acting like one; telling me "I don't know what I saw". Who the hell do you think you are?) I'm not some naive nobody who was being swayed by paranoia, the media or anything else. I'm also not going to fall for any 9/11 conspiracy nuttery.

I looked up what I saw and you can see the videos yourself, right now, with a quick google search.

I was working in a network operations center at the time

I simply don't believe you. I don't believe you are over the age of 25 in fact. More importantly, everyone was glued to their TV back then. And yes, there was this thing called "the internet" back then too, where people could validate and check information. They could also get their news from sources outside the U.S. Many of us were doing just that.

That's nice and all, but I vividly remember people dancing in the streets of Iran celebrating the attack. I will never have that image removed from my mind.

While I'm sure there are people who were upset at the attacks, there was a sizeable chunk of people who weren't. They were in fact happy. Enough to form crowds dancing in the streets holding signs and chanting. I'm old enough to remember that stuff pretty vividly (I was 22 years old on 9/11) so historical revisionism isn't going to work on me...