Chinese Reactions to American Guns

With the Second Amendment the US has some of the least strict gun laws in the world. These sales and ownership of guns confuses many outside of the country. ChinaSmack is a blog based on China, and they recently had an interesting article on Chinese reactions to Wal-mart selling guns in the store.
guns for sale walmart 02 560x406 Chinese Reactions to American Guns From Tiexue, Sina, & Mop:

This is how America’s Wal-Mart sell guns

Today, while visiting Wal-Mart, I took a photo while at the gun sales counter. The guns were sold in a rotating glass display case just like this with price tags attached. If interested, you just ask the salesperson to take it out for you to examine. Being able to buy a gun while buying groceries at Wal-Mart, convenient. guns for sale walmart 01 Chinese Reactions to American Guns In this glass display case are different types of ammunition. guns for sale walmart 03 Chinese Reactions to American Guns guns for sale walmart 04 560x420 Chinese Reactions to American Guns guns for sale walmart 05 Chinese Reactions to American Guns Comments from Tiexue: txgk:
I’d like to ask the lou zhu a question. It may be very naive but please be so kind as to give me an answer. Since guns are sold like this in America, is their government not afraid of social problems? Right now in Shanghai, the supermarkets selling cooking knives have also locked them inside glass display cases like this.
bandit800:
Because the hostility between their people is not as deep as it is with us, which is to say they are harmonious in the true meaning and not river crab. Hehe.
北美孤狼:
China bans guns and aside from political reasons, it may be because the government has considered that there are too many neurotic people in China, people who will bark/howl for no reason. If these kind of people had guns, imagine how bad it would be. (I’m referring to the issue, not people, so I hope certain people will keep that in mind before responding).
破奴:
I think the American Constitution has a part that says the citizens have the right to overthrow an authoritarian government…it is what I have heard, not sure if it is true or not. But in China, that is not possible, and the key is that the character of the people [on average] is not there yet. If firearms were available for sale in China, then we’d probably have to wear bullet-proof vests in order to go out.
飞行音:
Our country’s people have treachery/trouble-making in their bones. You can see it now, in all of China, no one respects anyone else. Learned men scorn each other and military men are lowly to each other, this place cursing that place. If everyone in China had guns, then the country would be torn apart. Even though everyone speaks Chinese, everyone has a different heart. Are we lacking lessons from history?!!
鹰舞苍穹:
Only with citizens who have high restraint and a society with relatively few injustices would [a country] dare be like this.
cbasky:
Imagine for a moment, if we were to sell guns in this manner, I think those domestic tigers, birds, bears, these animals basically could no longer survive.
bluehaze:
I think I saw a short-barrel M700, did I see wrong?? America is really not bad. The weapons that are sold without restrictions appear to be those used for hunting, but even openly selling firearms like this truly makes people sigh.
俺老头是老兵:
If this were China, the number of crime-related deaths would increase ten times. Therefore, America’s gun deaths is still very little. In the future [if guns were allowed in China], those who are involved in forced demolitions and chengguan would not be so niubi anymore. Pressure us and they’ll just shoot you a few times.
五好青年:
Damn, foreign countries are too incredible, even allowing guns to be sold. If China were to also allow them to be sold, things would be a mess. [The population of] black society [organized crime] would at least increase 2 times. And with China’s current education level, it is possible that school shootings would happen often.
kelefly:
America is a country that was built up from the first shot of the Battle of Lexington. And the biggest reason they were victorious at the time was because the ordinary people had guns.
冯欣伯林根:
When everyone has guns, no one is afraid of a few people having guns. If it is fear of overthrowing the government, there is no need. If the current government in power truly doesn’t follow the people’s will, in four years at most, they will have to step down and at worst there are still impeachment procedures. There is no need to use knives and guns [no need for violence], truly not worth it. If one wants to express one’s political views, one can organize one’s own political party. Although America in reality is only a two-party system, there still exist other political parties, and what more, the constitution protects the participation of every political party, with the most powerful non-mainstream parties like the Green Party normally getting around 10% of the vote. If one day, this party were to replace the Democratic Party or the Republican Party, the constitution would also protect it. And when there is social disorder, there is the SWAT. With so many people having guns in America, I don’t think a little handgun or a small hunting rifle can cause any social impact.
中国人都期待航母:
The reason why America allows the ordinary people to possess guns is to prevent dictatorship…when that happens, the people can revolt… Over time, Americans have developed the habit of not using guns even if they have them. Or maybe they are bound by ideas of individual heroism, believing that men should use fists to fight it out, and not relying on guns. But in our country, the once proper so quick to resort to taking up knives, if there were guns, definitely within 10 years, the population of Chinese people would probably be reduced by half…haha. PS: America as a country has the highest penetration of firearms in the world, with one gun per capita, but the number of Americans that die under the barrel of a gun are only a trivial 30,000…
幽狙:
America’s president is chosen by the American citizens, so this type of government is not afraid of the common people harming society and rebelling, because don’t need to resort to guns [violence] and only need to demonstrate and protest to make the president step down~~
kemescape:
Americans lives are comfortable, so why have a good life and not live it? Usually chaotic/disorderly societies are all in impoverished countries; You have guns, others have guns, mutually checking each other. If you carry a gun illegally, the police have the right to kill you. Americans’ tradition highly values life…
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Corporate Uses of BitTorrent

The copyright giants (RIAA, MPAA, etc) love to paint Bittorrent and other P2P applications as a giant evil on the Internet. Used widely for piracy and file sharing, they would like nothing more to eliminate it from the face of the planet.

 

Unfortunately for them, BitTorrent lately has been making more and more in-roads into legitimate businesses. First it was brought in to share legal CD images of things like the Linux and BSD operating systems. Then companies and individuals that wanted to share free videos found it ideal for sharing the data without having to overload their servers. When World of Warcraft was released, Blizzard used it as a patching engine for the game to allow people to update and get back in the game faster, and without having to buy more bandwidth and patch servers.

 

Now it seems Twitter and Facebook have both found the benefits of BitTorrent as well.

 

facebookflogo Corporate Uses of BitTorrentSay what you like about BitTorrent and the culture of piratical drugged-up junkies that it fuels, but the fact is: big businesses keep finding excellent, legitimate uses for torrents. Today, Facebook came out and admitted that BitTorrent powers the transfer of new code between each and every one of its servers.

 

You wouldn't have thought it troublesome -- source code is fairly lightweight after all -- but when you consider that Facebook has tens of thousands of servers... well, you can begin to imagine the logistical nightmare of rolling out code changes on a regular basis. With BitTorrent, it takes a matter of minutes to update every single Facebook Web server with new software -- awesome!

 

As TorrentFreak points out, Facebook isn't the only large company that uses BitTorrent -- so does Twitter! BitTorrent isn't relegated to internal uses, though: Blizzard uses it to distribute huge patches to its 12 million World of Warcraft subscribers!

 

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Jobs on iPhone 4 antenna: “avoid holding it in this way”

Steve Jobs has made a horrible PR blunder with the new iPhone 4. People have reported dropped calls and horrible signal when holding it with their left hand. His response? "All phones have sensitive areas," Jobs wrote. "Just avoid holding it in this way." Ars Technica has more below. Follow the link to their article.
"All phones have sensitive areas," Jobs wrote. "Just avoid holding it in this way." TUAW reader Craig Brockman was able to get a more detailed response, which Engadget reports is Apple's official statement on the issue: "Gripping any phone will result in some attenuation of its antenna performance, with certain places being worse than others depending on the placement of the antennas. This is a fact of life for every wireless phone," Jobs wrote. "If you ever experience this on your iPhone 4, avoid gripping it in the lower left corner in a way that covers both sides of the black strip in the metal band, or simply use one of many available cases." So, it appears that our worry that Apple's iPhone 4 bumpers would be a recommended fix was founded after all. What Jobs and Apple are saying about all phones being affected by this issue is true to some degree. Your hand can attenuate the signal to any radio antenna—try playing with the antenna of a portable AM/FM radio, for instance. Spencer Webb, an antenna engineer with Antennasys Inc, explained in a blog post that the placement of antennas in mobile devices is predicated partly on FCC and carrier testing requirements, so Apple's design isn't entirely out of the ordinary. Issues of signal degradation similar to that of the iPhone 4 have also been reported with the iPhone 3G and 3GS, as well as Google's Nexus 1. One inconsistency is that numerous examples of using the iPhone 4, including Jobs' own WWDC demo, have shown users gripping the iPhone 4 in the exact manner that triggers the issue. Macintouch reader Saam G said that Apple Support confirmed the issue, blaming "a missing protective coating on some of the parts," so there may be more to this issue than what Jobs is admitting. Read the comments on this post  Jobs on iPhone 4 antenna: “avoid holding it in this way”
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