[LINK] A Story About Christmas or The new Spreading Meme, "The Apparent Lack of Christmas".

[Kim Holburn]

I was reading an article related to some of the things in your blog:
http://apple.slashdot.org/story/11/12/26/1431248/i-device-manufacturing-unprofitable-to-china

Which talks about how the manufacturing component of Apple devices is small compared with the profit to Apple.  An interesting discussion in itself.

In the comments are a number of interesting side discussions including this link:

http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/09/china_trade_policy_and_the_fallacy_of_idea-land.html

There was an interesting example of the way China deals with facebook:
> Facebook is a classic example of China's non-tariff trade barriers at work.  The Social Network is illegal in China, and its website is blocked as part of China's social repression system.  Yet, Beijing actively supports the growth of its Chinese competitor Renren, which just had a successful IPO on the NYSE.  While Facebook's idea has no access to the Chinese market, American capital pours into a firm that stole it!

But the kicker for me was this snippet near the end:
> Google tried to play China's game but was burned.  Beijing directed it to censor offensive search results like "Chinese democracy."  Though originally compliant, the California firm was continually disadvantaged by induced disruptions to its Chinese network, a blatant public preference for its Chinese competitor, and hassles over its internet "license."  In order to avoid the trap Beijing laid for Yahoo -- demanding dissidents' emails and info -- Google disabled services such as gmail.  Its YouTube service was completely blocked.  China eventually requested that Google also censor "objectionable" Chinese material from its U.S.-based site.  In 2009 Google discovered that Chinese agents had hacked their systems -- along with more than 200 other U.S. firms -- and swiped their cherished source code.  So much for the advantage of ideas.

I don't remember hearing before that "Chinese agents had ... swiped Google's cherished source code".  Did I miss something?



On 2011/Dec/27, at 2:28 PM, Tom Koltai wrote:

....

> The following suggests a possible barrier to long term financial
> recovery, not understood  by the average person aghast at this countries
> apparent cavalier attitude to illegal migrants.
> 
> Continues... http://kovtr.com/wordpress/?p=1071

Sorry but 66% of the Vietnamese immigrants in the 70s and 80s were not Christian, Chinese immigrants - ditto.  

If you mean by illegal immigrants, people who overstay their visas, then most of them are Christian and from England or the US.  

If you are referring to asylum seekers then there is a simple solution - Australia could repudiate the UN Refugee convention - then asylum seekers would actually be illegal - right now they are not illegal.  

If you mean normal legal immigrants - by far the largest numbers of immigrants - that's our cavalier attitude to migrants.  

-- 
Kim Holburn
IT Network & Security Consultant
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