Wouldn't this statute,

i e, section 337 of the Tariff Act of 1930, also be relevant in the the Motorola Mobile suite against Apple for patent infringement and the importation of infringing kit from abroad (http://assets.sbnation.com/assets/895480/New_MMI_v_Apple_Complaint.pdf) ? Is the USITC actively pursuing this vital matter as well ? You say not ? Wonder why ?...

Henri

«However, given the paranoia that exists around Chinese firms,

especially in the US, it remains to be seen how enthusiastic customers will be about China Mobile having hold of their data.» To which paranoia, of course, Phil is ever ready, as his every posting on China on the Reg has demonstrated, to contribute. As others commentators have noted, all data storage companies, no matter their location - and in the US, public libraries which are required, if so ordered, to inform the FBI of which books loaners have borrowed, but enjoined from informer the loaner that this information has been passed on - are going to make one's files available to the government if requested/required to do so. Anyone who thinks otherwise is blissfully unaware of the notion of «sovereign powers» exercised by a state. Encryption is, as pointed out above, one alternative, others DvDs, external harddisks, or tape, depending upon how much data one needs to store. There are also, not to be forgotten, courses in mnemonics....

Henri

A question, Phil -

if it wasn't time «to sweep the cobwebs out of that old nuclear bunker at the bottom of the garden» when we knew that the US had targetted China with 3rd generation ICBMs, why is it now time to do so when we learn (are told) that China is responding by targetting the US with the same type of device ? Has the Chinese government shown a greater dispostion to bomb other countries than the United States ? It is hardly China that represents the greatest threat to mankind's survival....

Henri

«The flaw there is that one might well argue

that modern human civilisation has largely eliminated natural selection and survival of the fittest: a dullard or other genetically sub-par type, in some circumstances anyway, would seem just as likely (if not more) to propagate his or her genes as someone with useful abilities is.» «[M]ight well argue», indeed, Lewis, if one were unfamiliar with research on the matter, for example, that on natural and sexual selection in a Finnish population between 1760 and 1849 described here (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/04/120430152037.htm) or here (http://www.pnas.org/content/109/21/8044). One can't help wondering if the ability to understand the science concerning human evolution or, for that matter, global warming, is one of the «useful abilities» to which you refer (without specification) above....

Henri

«Always striving to be the biggest and best on Earth,

China is also set to complete the world’s largest radio telescope in 2016.» Is that your inferiority complex showing, Phil ? Would you have written about the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico in these terms ?...

Henri

The really frightening thing is that

the government of this particular country - the United States America - which, along with its vassals here in Europe, continues to play a major role in determining policies which affect H sapiens sapiens' chances (slim at best) of making it through the present century....

Henri

Tried this myself on 64-bit Ubuntu 12.04, with the following results :

Firefox Nightly 17.0a1 (2012-08-19) :6059

Chrome 21.0.1171.0 dev : 9661

Test conditions far from identical, as on Chrome I ran Octane with one (1) tab open, while on Nightly i had 221 (sic !) tabs open. Hardly fair, but I don't want to lose those tabbed pages....

Henri

«... China's claim to Taiwan had been renounced in 1985» ?!!

Rather confused about East Asian history, are you not «Shocked Jock» ? Perhaps you meant to refer to the Treaty of Shimonoseki of 1895, in which China (then governed by the Qing Dynasty), was forced to cede Taiwan «in perpetuity» to the Japanese state. Easy come, easy go - what a country can gain by winning one war it can forfeit by losing the next or the one after that, the situation in which the Japanese government found itself in in 1945, when it was forced by the terms of the Cairo Declaration, incorporated into the Potsdam Declaration, itself incorporated into the instrument of surrender, to return to China all the territories it had seized from that country 50 years earlier (a fact which is also relevant when considering who has the better title to the Diaoyu Tai/Senkaku Shotō). The present Chinese government - the government of the PRC - has never relinquished its claim to Taiwan and the islands, but as Phil states here «... both are happy to maintain the status quo and not bring up the thorny issue of Taiwan’s political reintegration with the mainland». As to the sending of Guomindang supporters and their families to internal exile in Tibet, I can only congratulate you on your imagination - you wouldn't be related by any chance to Ian Fleming, now would you ?...

Henri

Those who support Pussy Riot

but condemn Wikileaks and Mr Assange fail to grasp what freedom of speech/information is all about. Contrary to what you may have read - implicitly - in our European and North American corporate media, it is not about supporting speech/actions that are anti-Putin, while condemning those who investigate those who shed light on the secret activities of actors in such political and economic capiitals as Washington, New York, and London. But as Upton Beall Sinclair used to say, «It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it !»...

Henri

Be interesting to see

what this has for repercussions on broadband speeds in China, which presently, as detailed in previous Reg articles, lie at the low end of the scale....

Henri

Tux, just because....

The fun thing is the Chinese translation of Noah's Ark (诺亚方舟)

is, as the photos accompanying the China Daily article (thanks for the link, Phil !) make clear, painted in large glyphs on the surface of the spheroid. But the Chinese term for Ark (方舟) literally means «square/rectangular boat». Wonder what Eukleides would have said about this attempt to square the circle....

Henri

Say what one will, no one can accuse Morpheus

of sleeping on the job ! Looked more like a nightmare to me....

Henri

Kudos to the Glaswegian physicists,

to Nature for allowing us ordinary mortals to read the paper, and not least, to Richard for giving us a heads-up !...

Henri

Interesting news, Richard,

but your source is rather short on specifics - while it claims « a safe, cost-effective battery with high energy density», it provides no figures at all. I realise that Walter Murdoch was not related to Keith Rupert, but could there be a common aversion to quantification lurking there ?...

Henri

Intelligence over the channel,

continent cut off....

Henri

As any fule who has lived and worked in China kno,

dialectical differences in the pronunciation of the so-called «common language» (普通话) are many and not infrequently mutually unintelligible. One can't help wondering if, given the prevalence of smart phones and what seems to be a desire for voice recognision and natural language processing technology in that country, these latter are going to do as much, if not more to standardise the Chinese spoken language than radio and television have done these last six decades....

Henri

The exploitation of students in China's vocational education system,

well described in the pdf file to which Phil provides a link, reminds me, for some odd reason, of the way so-called «internships» and «job-training programmes» are currently used to extract unpaid labour from students and others in North America and Europe. Here relations between capital and labour have moved decisively in favour of the former during the last three decades ; I hope that will not prove to be the case in the coming three decades in China....

Henri

I fear, Ian, that in concentrating on Mr Ferdowsi,

you neglected the really vital story, which can be found here : http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/international/earth-hails-successful-mars-invasion-2012080637126?utm_campaign=08082012. Earth bacteria colonising Mars is one thing, but imagine if that «peace, philosophy, and so forth» infected the rover and managed in some fashion to make its way to this planet....

Henri

What strikes me as interesting about this prize

is that in choosing the first awardees, Yuri Borisovich Milner was willing to go out on a limb and give prizes to researchers whose theories have not (yet ?) been validated (to the degree that any theory can be said to be validated). Sort of like awarding a prize to Peter Ware Higgs, Robert Brout, François Englert & Co for the Higgs mechanism/boson back in, say, 1970. It will be interesting to see whether awardees themselves, who will choose future rounds of prize winners, will dare to be so bold....

Henri

This is merely George Gideon Oliver Osborne's way

of reducing the UK's budget deficit - and if you fail to grasp how the new £500m field allowance will aid in that worthy task, you are probably an over-age chav who should be ASBOed immediately....

Henri

After having waded through the material

released by the Samsung team to journalists (http://assets.sbnation.com/assets/1257891/Samsung_unredacted_trial_brief.pdf), I can understand why Apple is up in arms - they obviously haven't got a leg to stand on in this case - but how Lucy Haeran Koh can keep this evidence from the jurors and then assert that this is a fair trial is quite beyond me. Here we have proof positive that not merely the patent system, but also the (in)justice system in the USA is in dire need of reform - but that doesn't come as a surprise to anyone, now does it ?...

Henri

«Unfortunately for Motorola, the phone still appears to be broadly-rectangular [sic !],

a shape which we all now know certain corporate residents of Cupertino invented long before Euclid started fooling with geometry.»

Shouldn't that read ««Unfortunately for Motorola, the phone still appears to be broadly rectangular, a shape which we all now know certain corporate residents of Cupertino invented long before Euclid - and Lucy Haeran Koh - started fooling with geometry» ? After all, credit where credit is due....

Henri

Ms Chan hit the nail on the head :

«Debby Chan, a project officer at SACOM who exposed alleged malpractice at Apple ODM Foxconn, argued that bribery is only part of the problem with audits and that the root problem is the absence of genuine trade unions in China», but given the attitude of a large number of members of the US Congress towards trade unions (at least US trade unions), it is more than a tad ironic to hear these complaints about factory working conditions and wages being aired in a US Congressional hearing....

Henri

«Usually, initiatives to crack down on pornography, malware

and fraudulent web sites are nothing more than a cover for something far more important to Party bosses – shutting down online political dissent.» You do have evidence for that statement, do you not, Phil - given your long and initmate association with «Party bosses» ? Or are you suggesting that when the police shut down this network (which, unless more serious issues were uncovered (pardon the pun !) than pornography, I suggest is an egregious waste of police resources, which even in China are not unlimited), it was all a mistake, and they actually intended to so something else (and twice as nefarous - after all, they're Chinese) entirely ? The article would have been greatly improved by editing out that last superciliously ignorant little paragraph....

Henri

«It further paints Keller as a government patsy ....»

That about nails it, innit ?...

Henri

Aren't critics being a tad too negative here ?

Rather than an «unprecedented insult» to women, shouldn't «0xB16B00B5» instead be regarded as an unprecendented encouragement to plastic surgeons ? After all, they get paid to put the implants in and then, when it is discovered how dodgy they are, they get paid to take them out again. A real win-win !...

Henri

Nice article, Richard - as usual -

but perhaps you could explain to me why the usual Reg stalwarts - none named, none forgotten - have refrained from commenting on the report by the BEST team and ertwhile skeptic Richard Muller to the effect that 1) global warming is real and 2) that it is largely anthropogenic. In addition to Professor Muller's own OpEd in the «NY Times», to which you kindly provide a link, a fairly lengthy article on the matter can be found in yesterday's «Guardian» : http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/jul/29/climate-change-sceptics-change-mind?CMP=EMCNEWEML1355....

Henri

Thanks for the update, Richard -

nice to see a Reg article which just reports the fact, ma'am, without including the author's (not Mr Chirgwin's) ideological ballast !...

Henri

You posed the question, Phil :

«So who do we believe? A federal court and a shamed defence contractor hit with a $75m fine, or the Chinese government?» Any reason to prefer the account of one of the two parties to this dispute to that of the other - aside from your evident antipathy for China ? Or do you mean that «federal court[s] and [...] shamed defence contractor[s]» would never lie - so long as they are located in the US ? Rather than asking a rhetorical question, you might want to try doing some journalism for a change and investigating the matter sufficiently so that you can provide a credible answer to a serious query....

Henri

Considering the nature of the crimes committed by Mr Blair

and the offenses committed by this Mr Hussain and the respective consequences for each of them, I can't help wanting to simplify Martin Luther King's famous dictum to the effect that «... the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice» to the somewhat more accurate «the arc of the moral universe is bent»....

Henri

Have to agree, Phil - those Chinese are baaad !

After all, China has around 30 % of known rare earth reserves (as pointed out by Tim above, neither W nor Mo are among the so-called «rare earths», i e, the lanthanides plus Sc and Y) and produces about 97 % of those available on the market. This would seem to mean that countries with 70 % of known reserves produce approximately 3 % of the rare earths available on the market. The obvious conclusion to draw from all this is that it is those dastardly Chinese who are holding the market to ransom and that the other countries sitting on all those reserves and which don't choose to produce for the market have nothing at all to do with any lack of these materials there. Right, Phil ?...

Henri

Phil, to put Huawei's Q2 results in perspective,

wouldn't it have been wise to compare with Ericsson's, which showed a 1 % increase in net sales (-17 % in networks) YoY, but a sharp (63 %) decline in net income (http://www.ericsson.com/res/investors/docs/q-reports/2012/6month12-en.pdf) ? Under these circumstances, Huawei doesn't seem to be doing so bad....

Henri

Velkopopovický - in both pale and dark versions ?

Those were Russians of culture, as any Švejk fan kno. Don't blame them for emptying the tins first ; I'd certainly have done the same....

Be waiting for them down at U Kalicha at six in the evening after the War*...

Henri

*Pity now that we seem to be going back to wars that really take a long time to come to an end, like the Thirty Years War or the Hundred Years War, rather than relatively limited conflicts like WW I, in which Švejk and his comrades played so honourable a role....