Re: [OT] times and habits

On Sun, May 11, 2014 at 04:25:22PM +0100, smf wrote:
>>just ditch the DST like Chinese did after trying it and realising that 
>>it brings more harm than good.
>>Or ditch it by remaining on a permanent DST like Russia decided not 
>>so long ago
>
>I'm not sure those are particularly good examples. If those 
>governments tell you to do something, you do it even if it makes no 
>sense & you don't dare tell anyone that you think the government made 
>a mistake.

I do not think that it works in that way. In any country, if you upset 
the authorities, you will risk getting into trouble. They will find some 
way to get their revenge. In some countries, this is more likely than in 
others, and there could be some vague "national security" legislation 
that is useable as a tool for this.

I have the impression that in any country, there are regulations or laws 
that are not widely supported. Sometimes the regulations are being 
violated openly; in other cases less openly. It is part of the human 
nature, anywhere.

One example is traffic rules, which you can easily observe as a tourist.  
In most parts of the world (again, not inluding North America) these are 
based on the Vienna convention on road signs and signals: 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vienna_Convention_on_Road_Signs_and_Signals

In this email thread, speed limits were mentioned. The maximum speed 
limit is generally being treated as the minimum limit, also in Russia 
and China. While I do not have first-hand experience from traffic in 
Russia, I have reason to believe that it is very chaotic, lots of 
accidents and fatalities compared to Central and North Europe, for 
example. So, there you have one example of large-scale disobedience of 
laws.

In Shanghai, China I observed that the red lights (yes, it looked like 
they follow the Vienna convention, contrary to what the map in Wikipedia 
says) are generally obeyed by cars, and largely ignored by 2-wheeled 
vehicles (bicycles and scooters) or pedestrians, even if some officials 
are looking.

Similarly, my Chinese colleagues did not know that it is officially 
illegal to sell video games in China. They were thinking that the 
systems and games are not officially being sold due to the game consoles 
being loss-leaders and the game sales being zero due to piracy.  The 
systems (grey imports from Hong Kong) are of course available if you 
know where to look, and nobody seems to care. Some months ago, the ban 
was lifted in some small harbour area of Shanghai. I guess that it was 
only a PR move by the Chinese government to the outside world, with no 
practical consequences.

In my two visits to China, I have been knowingly breaking the laws by 
carrying an accurate GPS-based map of China (an excerpt of 
OpenStreetMap) and by taking photos of the city while recording my GPS 
position. Nobody should care, except if I did that near some military 
facility, or maybe if I took photos of people in uniforms. Recently some 
tourists got into trouble in some European country for photographing and 
GPS; I think it was Greece, near some unmarked military facility.

Another example of wide-scale violation of "rules" would be the 
accidental or intentional reliance on undocumented software or hardware 
behaviour, which caused trouble during the C128 and C65 development.

	Marko

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