User:Thomas Meng/sandbox

Ni Yulan

Ni's human rights activism began in 2001, when her neighborhood in Beijing was slated for mandatory demolition in preparation for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. She helped her neighbors to either save their homes from demolition or to demand equitable compensation. In April 2002, Ni was arrested by Chinese police while filming the forced demolition of her neighbor's home. She was subsequently tortured in custody and maimed as a result.

In September 2002, Ni was sentenced to 1 year in prison in China for "obstructing official business". In 2018, she was sentenced to 2 years in prison, and in 2011, she was sentenced to 2 years and 8 months in prison for "causing a disturbance" and "fraud". Human rights groups have said these sentences are a retaliation by the Chinese government against Ni's human rights activism.

Academic publications on Falun Gong's teachings

• According to Professor of Social Work, Maria Cheung, at University of Manitoba:

Falun Gong (also known as Falun Dafa) is a body-mind-spiritual practice which started in China in 1992 and was widely practiced in the 1990s. It is a self-cultivation practice, which upholds the principles of “truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance.” The practice comprises five sets of meditative exercises. The teachings of Falun Gong emphasize cultivation of the mind, without adherence to religious formalities. The tenets of Falun Gong trace back to those traditional Chinese cultural beliefs grounded in Buddhist and Taoist philosophies. From the beginning of its introduction to the Chinese populace, Falun Gong was popularized in China as a form of qigong—the cultivation and exercise of the body’s vital energy.

• ("Eric Voegelin’s Asian Political Thought," Lee Trepanier Ed. (Lexington Books 2020) [1]

At the heart of Falun Gong’s moral philosophy are the tenets Zhen, Shan, Ren (truth, compassion, and forbearance), which represent the fundamental nature of the universe—the ultimate manifestation of the Buddha Law, or the Dao. This force represents the divine ground of being: it is the source of order in the universe, animating and giving rise to all things. The cosmos itself, and all that is contained in it, are thought to embody this quality of Zhen Shan Ren. Whereas Voegelin’s gnostic believes that the order of being is corrupt and must be overthrown, Falun Gong holds that it is inherently just and benevolent. Not only that, but the purpose of human life, and the means of salvation, lies in assimilating oneself to this divine nature and relinquishing the self. In Falun Gong’s core text Zhuan Falun, Li writes “This characteristic, Zhen Shan Ren, is the criterion for measuring good and bad in the universe… No matter how the human moral standard changes, this characteristic of the universe remains unchanged, and it is the sole criterion that distinguishes good people from bad people.” In other words, Falun Gong maintains there is an immutable and unchanging truth that exists independent of human experience, society, and culture. The CCP rejects the notion of a moral law standing above mankind. Instead, truth can only be grasped through social practice. As Mao Zedong wrote in 1963, “Where do correct ideas come from? Do they drop from the skies? No. Are they innate in the mind? No. They come from social practice and from it alone. They come from three kinds of social practice: the struggle for production, the class struggle, and scientific experiment.” In this respect, Falun Gong’s teachings are at best irrelevant, if not downright subversive, insofar as they suggest that the party is subject to judgement by a higher authority.

• State and Society in Twenty-first Century China: Crisis, Contention, and Legitimation. (Routledge, 2005) [2]

"The challenge posed by popular religious beliefs and practices like those of Falun Gong cuts right to the heart of the Chinese state’s own logic of legitimation….[Falun Gong’s teachings] stand in the profoundest possible opposition to the present political order. They assail the ethical truths on which the entire political construct is meant to rest. However peacefully they practice their meditation exercises and however much they may regard “politics” as being beneath them, those swept up in the Falun Gong phenomenon never had a chance of remaining “apolitical” in China. With its slogan, “Zhen, Shan, Ren” (真, 善, 忍) – “Truth, Goodness, and Forbearance” – Falun Gong makes almost a perfect counter-hegemony. Truth! – but not the state’s narrow empiricist truths. Goodness! –but not the state’s dubious versions of benevolence. Forbearance! – but not the state’s vulgarly assertive “wealth and power” concept of what it means to attain transcendent glory. Precisely because Falun Gong does represent such an absolute challenge – a challenge to the very foundations of the state’s authority and legitimacy – government officials insist on complete extermination of the threat."

• Penny, Benjamin. The Religion of Falun Gong. The University of Chicago Press. p.124 [3]

In addition, in Falun Gong cultivation adherence to the code of truth, compassion, and forbearance is not just regarded as the right and responsible course of action for practitioners;it is an essential part of the cultivation process. Lapsing from it will render any other efforts in cultivation worthless.

• Ownby, David. Falun Gong and the Future of China. Oxford University Press. p. 93. [4]

Falun Gong is profoundly moral. The very structure of the universe, according to Li Hongzhi, is made up of the moral qualities that cultivators are enjoined to practice in their own lives: truth, compassion, and forbearance. The goal of cultivation, and hence of life itself, is spiritual elevation, achieved through eliminating negative karma—the built-up sins of past and present lives—and accumulating virtue.

Selenium framework future contributions

Expansion work ongoing for the section below:

Selenium WebDriver

Selenium WebDriver is the successor to Selenium RC. Selenium WebDriver accepts commands (sent in Selenese, or via a Client API) and sends them to a browser. This is implemented through a browser-specific browser driver, which sends commands to a browser and retrieves results. Most browser drivers actually launch and access a browser application (such as Firefox, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, Safari, or Microsoft Edge); there is also an HtmlUnit browser driver, which simulates a browser using the headless browser HtmlUnit.

Unlike in Selenium 1, where the Selenium server was necessary to run tests, Selenium WebDriver does not need a special server to execute tests. Instead, the WebDriver directly starts a browser instance and controls it. However, Selenium Grid can be used with WebDriver to execute tests on remote systems (see below). Where possible, WebDriver uses native operating system level functionality rather than browser-based JavaScript commands to drive the browser. This bypasses problems with subtle differences between native and JavaScript commands, including security restrictions.

In practice, this means that the Selenium 2.0 API has significantly fewer calls than does the Selenium 1.0 API. Where Selenium 1.0 attempted to provide a rich interface for many different browser operations, Selenium 2.0 aims to provide a basic set of building blocks from which developers can create their own domain-specific language (DSL). One such DSL already exists: the Watir project in the Ruby language has a rich history of good design. Watir-webdriver implements the Watir API as a wrapper for Selenium WebDriver in Ruby. Watir-webdriver is created entirely automatically, based on the WebDriver specification and the HTML specification.

As of early 2012, Simon Stewart (inventor of WebDriver), who was then with Google, and David Burns of Mozilla were negotiating with the W3C to make WebDriver an Internet standard. In July 2012, the working draft was released and the recommendation followed in June 2018. Selenium WebDriver (Selenium 2.0) is fully implemented and supported in JavaScript (Node.js), Python, Ruby, Java, and C#. As of 2021, Selenium 4 is a release candidate.

Examples

Python

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By
from selenium.webdriver.common.keys import Keys
from selenium.webdriver.support.ui import WebDriverWait
from selenium.webdriver.support.expected_conditions import presence_of_element_located

#This example requires Selenium WebDriver 3.13 or newer
with webdriver.Firefox() as driver:
    wait = WebDriverWait(driver, 10)
    driver.get("https://google.com/ncr")
    driver.find_element(By.NAME, "q").send_keys("cheese" + Keys.RETURN)
    first_result = wait.until(presence_of_element_located((By.CSS_SELECTOR, "h3")))
    print(first_result.get_attribute("textContent"))}}

Pytest (Software framekwork) resources

https://www.pythoninsight.com/2018/01/assertion-rewriting-in-pytest-part-1/