Perhaps this explains their compulsion to enter such perfectly sensible fields as driftnet fishing, making medicines from body parts of nearly extinct species, creative toxic waste disposal, and, above all, the wholesale, organized theft of intellectual property. It's not just software, either -

Indonesia has bootleg publishers who crank out counterfeit bestsellers, and even Hong Kong's Saturday morning TV clown wears a purloined Ronald McDonald outfit.

This has a lot to do with the collective Chinese approach to technology. The Chinese were born to hack. A billion of them jammed together have created the world's most efficient system for honing and assimilating new tech (they actually view

Americans as being somewhat backward and slow to accept new ideas - the Chinese are considered, as Bill Newton put it,

"not so much early adopters as rapid adopters"). As soon as someone comes up with a new idea, all the neighbors know about it, and through an exponential process that you don't have to be a math major to understand, a billion people know about it a week later. They start tinkering with it, applying it to slightly different problems, trying to eke out hair-thin improvements, and the improvements propagate across the country until everyone's doing things the same way - which also happens to be the simplest and most efficient way. The infrastructure of day-to-day life in China consists of a few simple, cheap, robust technologies that don't belong to anyone: the wok, the bicycle, various structures made from bamboo and lashed together with strips of rattan, and now the 286 box. A

piece of Chinese technology, whether it's a cooking knife or a roofing tile, has the awesomely simple functionality of a piece ofhand-coded machine language.

Introducing non-copy-protected software into this kind of an environment may be the single most boneheaded thing that