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Comment by alan_cx | Hacker News Reader

I find it surprising that it would seem that the only country on the face of this planet hacking foreign countries and business are Chinese. I'm so pleased that no one in the US, UK, Israel, Russia, South Africa, Pakistan, India, Japan, Canada, etc would clearly never dream of such things. On top of that, I cant even begin to imagine why countries other than the US would seek intelligence to help them in defence.

Good job that no one is using computer or the internet to launch attacks on research and production facilities in foreign countries.....stuxnet.......oh.

This might be new to some, but it it turns out countries spy and thieve off each other. But all we seem to see is lots of articles about the evil red commie Chinese, who we all happily do business with, including allowing to own our debt, hack the US. Strange that.

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For the record, the Chinese don't actually own that large a portion of the US national debt, which is almost entirely held by American organizations. Propping up our currency, now, that's a looming problem - but one that will hurt China a lot more than it'll hurt us when it hits the fan.

Sources please ?

The Fed is the #1 individual holder of US debt (for sovereigns or banks). Social Security holds $2.7 trillion. China has about $1.1 trillion, just in front of Japan.

China's holdings are actually not a big deal. If pressed to do so, the Fed could print a trillion dollars tomorrow and buy it all back (with some obvious consequences, but non-the-less).

"The breakout of foreign-held debt shows that China was the largest holder, at $1.161 trillion (as of October 2012, most recent data). Japan came in second, at $1.134 trillion."

http://useconomy.about.com/od/monetarypolicy/f/Who-Owns-US-N...

There's a massive number of sources, but here you go:

http://finance.townhall.com/columnists/politicalcalculations...

china is basically doing exactly what the US did to come to economic power and people are shocked, shocked! to see it.

people really, truly, honesty believe the last 200 years of US and European ascent didn't happen, as if the world sprang forth fully formed in 1997. the vast majority of people haven't spent 5 minutes really thinking about how this stuff works.

a lot of this double-standard is inextricably tied to racism also.

Who did the US steal the transistor, cell phone, modern operating system, microprocessor, router and Internet from?

Did the US steal all the oil in Titusville (which instigated a massive economic boom) from Britain? How about all the chemistry work and exploration work that the US did to make oil useful and plentiful? Standard Oil had one of the most advanced R&D labs on the planet. I guess all the advanced technology out of Xerox PARC and Bell Labs was stolen from... Madagascar?

Who did Tesla steal his inventions from while he was in America? How about George Westinghouse? Edison invented a few things that you might have heard of.

We could be here all night.

The US is known to have used ECHELON for industrial espionage. This was for aerospace.

While avoiding hyperbole of the parent comment let's not imagine that any country is immune from industrial espionage and industrial corruption. (The UK which has relatively little political corruption has some astounding examples of industrial corruption.)

Astounding example #1:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Yamamah_arms_deal

I wasn't aware that ECHELON existed in 1850 or 1920 or 1947.

The parent claimed the US primarily stole technology to fuel its way to economic power. The facts do not support that.

I believe most of that industrial espionage was done to counter the effect of European companies paying bribes.

There were a lot of important things invented before cell phones and operating systems, like starting from the wheel and the fire, you know? What we call USA today grew on immigration, isn't this speak for itself? But why am I talking generics when some of my engineering teachers (the young ones) left for USA even in my university study years! The qualified people, the ones that takes a lot of time and resource to train - taken! Could be here all night? Really?

P.S.: BTW, the knowledge on which transistor relies did NOT occurred in USA, and networks similar to USA's ARPANET were developed in other countries in the same period, so the fact that Internet has an USA origin is purely incidental ...something that may be true for a lot of other things.

your argument assumes the US sprang fully-formed in 1900.

what you are doing is comparing the height of the US as it was hitting its stride (cellphones, cpus, internet) with the very beginnings of an industrial revolution in china. the US also had a beginning industrial revolution, and it stole much of that technology from the UK/Europe.

read that again: you are comparing the HEIGHT of a country (20th century US) to the BEGINNINGS of another. what you should be doing is comparing the BEGINNINGS of the US to the BEGINNINGS of china 2.0

then of course there's:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chinese_inventions

but nobody really gives a shit about this stuff anymore because it's so old. what have you done for me lately, right?

yes, the US achieved prominence through all those inventions, but not before there were sweatshops, theft of English intellectual property, mass exportation of cheaply made goods, etc.

and maybe now china is ascending again, and in the next 50 years, you will see the equivalent of transistor, cell phone, CPUs, etc.

but then again that's probably just WAY too far-fetched for you to believe.

George Westinghouse bought the rights to a steam turbine design off a UK engineer. Technically it wasn't "theft", but the idea wasn't his, was it? Also, one of the first working steam turbines was built in Sweden. We stand on shoulders of giants. Developing transistor required a lot of groundwork. Not all was done in the US. An important part of success of Edison's light bulb was Sprengel pump designed in... London. Hace you ever heard the name Werner von Braun? I am not negating any of those achievements, but arguing it was all purely done by US is ridiculous All the facts are from Wikipedia

Ha, what I heard is that the Chinese are the only ones who get caught.

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