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.

> 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'.

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."