The real reason why a lot of poor (by US standards) and recently-but-no-longer poor Americans eat poorly has a lot to do with class mobility. People learn eating habits early, and as part of family cultures. When families are still in "survivor mode," when the experience of scarcity is still persistant in the values of that family, they are taught, first, that food is an intrinsic pleasure and, secondly, that the waste of food is unethical and risky. Add to that factors like a. stress, b. schedules that encourage fewer, bigger meals instead of more, smaller ones, and c. the lack of information about healthier foods (or of a traditional food-culture, like those in Spain, France, and Japan, that has over centuries learned how to make healthier meals) and you have the formula for obesity
You call that an application of Ockham's Razor? If anything, the gradual increase in laziness (the Law of Entropy, no doubt) makes a whole lot more sense -- especially if you're applying Ockham -- than your aforementioned theory.
if this was purely religious and they didn't have mass get-togethers in public areas then there would be no issue.
This, wo de peng you, is the heart of the problem. China claims (or, claimed) to allow freedom of religion, freedom of speech, etc. But if you can't do it publically, one can hardly consider it freedom. China killed the "four freedoms" ("speaking out freely, airing views fully, holding great debates, writing big-character posters") after people started taking these "freedoms" seriously, during and just before Tian An Men.
Religion is just one form of "freedom of expression", but China will crack down on it, just as much as any other incident of "speaking out freely", if the regime feels that it threatens the power structure in the slightest.
I can, to some degree, perhaps understand your arguments elsewhere in this thread about China having to be more strict, due to its vast population, etc. However, arguing that they shouldn't have basic human rights of free speech, expression, etc., in order to preserve the culture is a very fragile plank. You argue it as if they have plenty right now, which is truly a farce. I think we're a lot closer to the other side of the spectrum. The Chinese don't have anything resembling "reasonable freedom" right now, much less "excessive freedom".
Yeah, you'd be wise to don the asbestos, because that is a flaming generalization.
In Northern Virginia, NOVA is, all things considered, a pretty good setup despite the disparaging remarks about "NOVA High", etc. No, this isn't an alumni endorsement -- although I did take a World War II history class there about a year ago at the local campus.
For what it's worth, however, that history class was an amazing experience, with the professor bringing in guest speakers such as holocaust survivors and the pilot of the original Air Force One.
Furthermore, this professor didn't cut anyone any slack, either. It was a pretty tough course -- which of course, I forgot to audit, so I had to do all the work:>
AFAIK, http pipelining is a function of HTTP 1.1, and I didn't/don't think that a lot of people or places are actually serving up HTTP 1.1 data.... much less is are any of those groups enabling pipelining, because it is implemented incorrectly, to varying degrees, across so many httpd server packages.
I'd be interested if anyone could verify or correct what I've said... but seems that my last bit of research regarding http pipelining said something to that effect.
A few weekends ago, a friend recommended Rich Dad, Poor Dad to me. No, it's not an investment book. Rather, it's an interesting look into the ways that those of different economic levels teach their kids what money is, and how to earn money.
It's pretty good so far. Nothing mind-blowing, but there's certainly some logical thought in there that had never occurred to me.
I mention the book, though, because he freely admits that your typical "employment" lifestyle that most Americans have isn't enough to make you "rich", and is hardly enough to help you retire comfortably. However, he also realises people have to start out somewhere. You can't invest if you have zero. Thus, fiscal responsibility is entirely necessary, especially in the beginning, and something that most of us (yes, you, Slashdot reader) don't have.
I know and/or have known way too many people who make way too much more money than me to be living paycheck-to-paycheck like they do. Granted, I make an okay salary, but I've known tonnes of people who've made six-figures USD and can't control their finances. It's asanine, but it's not an anomaly -- US News and World Report recently that some enormous percentage of Americans had saved less than $50,000 for retirement.
The author of that NYT article was right, to some degree. Americans are fairly rich. We also, however, spend a lot of money on absurd things. The author of Rich Dad, Poor Dad is right, too: Americans don't know where to put their money, spending it on liabilities, not assets, and have a pitifully wrong understanding of it.
I saw this thing when I was in Beijing. Ugly as sin, not to mention you have to hold the phone upside down to talk out of it, so the dialpad is on the other side. What happens if you have to enter an extension or something, after you connect?
I dunno about the functionality of it tho.. I couldn't read any of the hanzi characters on the LCD screen.
Can you write copy for a FAQ? I suppose. Can you copyright a FAQ? I haven't the foggiest.
Bitch and moan all you want, this isn't little grammar issue I'm pointing out. A misused word, in this case, completely changes the meaning of the question.
At least the editors got this one right in the title.
Re:The one thing you can say about China...
on
China Plans Moonbase
·
· Score: 2
Jiang Zemin had said many times that it wasn't going to happen "immediately", that China would have to go through capitalism, a stage it hadn't even reached yet. He told the interviewer it would take China "at least 100 years", maybe more, to achieve "Chinese Communism". That'll be interesting to watch as well:>
No, as usual, you completely missed the point of the post.
I specifically didn't deny that such dissent existed, nor did I say that there weren't a lot of other problems. My point was that it probably will happen, be it good, bad or indifferent.
Also -- totalitarian? Arguably, yes. Dictatorial? No. One of the biggest fallacies in looking at the modern Chinese state.
The one thing you can say about China...
on
China Plans Moonbase
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
...if 1.5 billion people say they say they are gonna do it, they will.
Be it in business, life, current affairs -- whatever the situation. It's almost ingrained into the Chinese worldview. This has been shown time and time again, through the projects that have been completed and/or worked upon, in China. The Great Wall and The Three Rivers Gorge are the first two obvious examples that come to mind; the manmade Kunming Lake elicits the same thoughts, as well.
Now, I'm not saying these tasks are/were not costly, both in terms of dollars and human lives, nor am I saying that many (especially current) Chinese projects are without corruption and/or controversy.
Rather, what I am pointing out is the historical Chinese trend of "progress" against odds. I don't really want to use the term "determination", because there is certainly the very real possibility that people work on these things against their will. Yet in any case, foreigners who've worked there on corporate projects for a while will tell you that, when working with a Chinese corporation, while they may promise you something seemingly outrageous... but short of a few exceptions, they won't promise you something they can't/won't complete.
The aforementioned exceptions are, however, predictably tied to corruption, where unwilling corporate heads -- or even middle management -- can very easily tie up a project with red tape, unless there's a little cash to "oil the wheels". If China's going to build a moon base, this corrupt undercurrent, in my opinion, is the most likely stumbling block. (As an aside this goes for the 2008 Olympics, too. After just getting back from Beijing a few weeks ago, I will be most amazed if they solve, at least to a large degree, the pollution problem, as they have promised.)
In most cases, however, while a project may take 10, 20, or two hundred years, the Chinese have historically tended to accomplish any goal that they've set out to do.
Again, it's all in the mindset... a "slow but steady" one, at that. Westerners tend to think in short, digestible timeframes. "Project ABC has to be completed in X months." The Chinese, on the other hand, look at things across a much, much larger timetable. What's a hundred years, when you've been around for several-thousand, already?
Granted, in a modern world, this opens the door to corruption and inefficiency... but how many of those "really cool projects", on which you've spent countless hours at work, have gotten tossed into the circular file because they were deemed too costly or too time-inefficient by the corporate heads?
So they say they'll have a moon base? I really don't doubt it. It may not happen in my lifetime, or yours... but it will probably happen, nevertheless.
I can't remember what I was looking up when I saw this ad, but it was something benign. Now, I am not shitting you, that's what came up on my screen. It went to this webpage, which I'm surprised is still up.
It made me wonder whether we're becoming a self-appointed nation of commandos, or whether that was someone with simply way too much time and money on his hands.
We all know that fruit flies multiply at an alarming rate. Now consider, in turn, that time flies like an arrow -- if said experiments go awry, it could be discovered that fruit flies like a BANANANANANANANA...
Ok, I'm biased because I know a lot of people who work/used to work on the project. But TWIG has always been a great mailreader, if you're into the web-based mail reader sort of thing. It's a PHP-based client that, in addition to mail, it has newsgroup capability, a scheduler, and a bunch of other keen things.
Historically it's been a "till noon" thing. In fact, there are many rhymes that have traditionally been recited when someone attempted to pull an April Fools prank on a would-be party after 12.00, something akin to:
April Fools has come and gone / You're the Fool and I am none.
That's the one I'd heard as a kid. For others similar, go here
I said this just after the 0.9.9 release -- and I'll reiterate those points, because none of them have been fully fixed... and I don't mean just little niggling things, (although the <TEXTAREA bug is at least bearable now), I mean serious crash issues.
For example, what happens if I try to print two pages in a row that contain moderate numbers of images? Inevitably, the browser crashes long and hard. It was suggested that printing problems might be fixed in 0.9.9, but I had the same issues, all over again. I would hope that high visiblity crashes such as these would be caught and fixed well before 1.0, so that all the "fringe" test cases that might arise from this bug might be weeded out as well. Alas, such doesn't appear to be the case.
Oh well. Perhaps I'll enter another bug, although I find it hard to believe that something like this hasn't been reported yet. Of course, regardless, my bug will just be pushed off to a 1.0+ milestone:/.
Yes. Corpses of previous characters.... corpses, because I presumably ran in a floating eye. Or stumbled blindly into a cockatrice corpse. Or tried to suck down a can of spinach into my already satiated body.
From the site: (If you have old record and logfile entries from a previous NetHack version, you might want to save copies before they get overwritten by the new empty files; old saved games and bones files won't work with 3.4.0.)
Alas! Without my bones files, how will I ever remember to avoid taking on a floating eye in melee? Or grabbing that cockatrice corpse? Or stuffing myself silly with spinach?
Waitress: (cont) or lobster thermador ecrovets with a bournaise sause, served in the purple salm Mr. Bunor with chalots and overshies, garnished with truffle pate, brandy, a fried katz on top and spam.
Mrs. Bun: Have you got anything without spam?
Waitress: Well, there's spam, katz, slashdot and spam. That's not got much spam in it.
Mrs. Bun: I don't want any spam!
Mr. Bun: Why can't she have katz, CowboyNeal, spam and slashdot?
Mrs. Bun: That's got spam in it.
Mr. Bun: It hasn't got as much spam in it as spam, katz, slashdot and spam has it?
Mrs. Bun: (over Vikings starting again) Could you do me katz, CowboyNeal, spam and slashdot without the spam then?
Waitress: Ech!
Mrs. Bun: What do you mean ech! I don't like spam!
Vikings: Lovely spam, wonderful spam....etc
Waitress: Shut up! Shut up! Shut up! Bloody vikings. You can't have katz, CowboyNeal, spam and slashdot without the spam.
Mrs. Bun: I don't like spam!
Mr. Bun: Shh dear, don't cause a fuss. I'll have your spam. I love it. I'm having spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, Cmdr Tacos, spam, spam, spam and spam. (starts Vikings off again)
Vikings: Lovely spam, wonderful spam...etc
Waitress: Shut up! Cmdr Tacos are off.
Mr. Bun: Well, can I have her spam instead of the Cmdr Tacos?
Waitress: You mean spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, and spam?
Vikings: Lovely spam, wonderful spam...etc...spam, spam, spam! (in harmony)
Slashdot Mirror
Funny, all I got was an alert, "This document contains no data."
The real reason why a lot of poor (by US standards) and recently-but-no-longer poor Americans eat poorly has a lot to do with class mobility. People learn eating habits early, and as part of family cultures. When families are still in "survivor mode," when the experience of scarcity is still persistant in the values of that family, they are taught, first, that food is an intrinsic pleasure and, secondly, that the waste of food is unethical and risky. Add to that factors like a. stress, b. schedules that encourage fewer, bigger meals instead of more, smaller ones, and c. the lack of information about healthier foods (or of a traditional food-culture, like those in Spain, France, and Japan, that has over centuries learned how to make healthier meals) and you have the formula for obesity
You call that an application of Ockham's Razor? If anything, the gradual increase in laziness (the Law of Entropy, no doubt) makes a whole lot more sense -- especially if you're applying Ockham -- than your aforementioned theory.
Publicly, duh.
Good catch. Post-lunch drowsiness must have caused that one.
if this was purely religious and they didn't have mass get-togethers in public areas then there would be no issue.
This, wo de peng you, is the heart of the problem. China claims (or, claimed) to allow freedom of religion, freedom of speech, etc. But if you can't do it publically, one can hardly consider it freedom. China killed the "four freedoms" ("speaking out freely, airing views fully, holding great debates, writing big-character posters") after people started taking these "freedoms" seriously, during and just before Tian An Men.
Religion is just one form of "freedom of expression", but China will crack down on it, just as much as any other incident of "speaking out freely", if the regime feels that it threatens the power structure in the slightest.
I can, to some degree, perhaps understand your arguments elsewhere in this thread about China having to be more strict, due to its vast population, etc. However, arguing that they shouldn't have basic human rights of free speech, expression, etc., in order to preserve the culture is a very fragile plank. You argue it as if they have plenty right now, which is truly a farce. I think we're a lot closer to the other side of the spectrum. The Chinese don't have anything resembling "reasonable freedom" right now, much less "excessive freedom".
Yeah, you'd be wise to don the asbestos, because that is a flaming generalization.
:>
In Northern Virginia, NOVA is, all things considered, a pretty good setup despite the disparaging remarks about "NOVA High", etc. No, this isn't an alumni endorsement -- although I did take a World War II history class there about a year ago at the local campus.
For what it's worth, however, that history class was an amazing experience, with the professor bringing in guest speakers such as holocaust survivors and the pilot of the original Air Force One.
Furthermore, this professor didn't cut anyone any slack, either. It was a pretty tough course -- which of course, I forgot to audit, so I had to do all the work
I'm very suprised by this..?
AFAIK, http pipelining is a function of HTTP 1.1, and I didn't/don't think that a lot of people or places are actually serving up HTTP 1.1 data.... much less is are any of those groups enabling pipelining, because it is implemented incorrectly, to varying degrees, across so many httpd server packages.
I'd be interested if anyone could verify or correct what I've said... but seems that my last bit of research regarding http pipelining said something to that effect.
A few weekends ago, a friend recommended Rich Dad, Poor Dad to me. No, it's not an investment book. Rather, it's an interesting look into the ways that those of different economic levels teach their kids what money is, and how to earn money.
It's pretty good so far. Nothing mind-blowing, but there's certainly some logical thought in there that had never occurred to me.
I mention the book, though, because he freely admits that your typical "employment" lifestyle that most Americans have isn't enough to make you "rich", and is hardly enough to help you retire comfortably. However, he also realises people have to start out somewhere. You can't invest if you have zero. Thus, fiscal responsibility is entirely necessary, especially in the beginning, and something that most of us (yes, you, Slashdot reader) don't have.
I know and/or have known way too many people who make way too much more money than me to be living paycheck-to-paycheck like they do. Granted, I make an okay salary, but I've known tonnes of people who've made six-figures USD and can't control their finances. It's asanine, but it's not an anomaly -- US News and World Report recently that some enormous percentage of Americans had saved less than $50,000 for retirement.
The author of that NYT article was right, to some degree. Americans are fairly rich. We also, however, spend a lot of money on absurd things. The author of Rich Dad, Poor Dad is right, too: Americans don't know where to put their money, spending it on liabilities, not assets, and have a pitifully wrong understanding of it.
...this BBC article was posted one day after the thirteenth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.
I saw this thing when I was in Beijing. Ugly as sin, not to mention you have to hold the phone upside down to talk out of it, so the dialpad is on the other side. What happens if you have to enter an extension or something, after you connect?
I dunno about the functionality of it tho.. I couldn't read any of the hanzi characters on the LCD screen.
Jeebus, it's "copyright".
Seriously, a copywriter and a copyrighter have two completely different jobs.
Can you write copy for a FAQ? I suppose. Can you copyright a FAQ? I haven't the foggiest.
Bitch and moan all you want, this isn't little grammar issue I'm pointing out. A misused word, in this case, completely changes the meaning of the question.
At least the editors got this one right in the title.
Jiang Zemin had said many times that it wasn't going to happen "immediately", that China would have to go through capitalism, a stage it hadn't even reached yet. He told the interviewer it would take China "at least 100 years", maybe more, to achieve "Chinese Communism". That'll be interesting to watch as well :>
No, as usual, you completely missed the point of the post.
I specifically didn't deny that such dissent existed, nor did I say that there weren't a lot of other problems. My point was that it probably will happen, be it good, bad or indifferent.
Also -- totalitarian? Arguably, yes. Dictatorial? No. One of the biggest fallacies in looking at the modern Chinese state.
...if 1.5 billion people say they say they are gonna do it, they will.
Be it in business, life, current affairs -- whatever the situation. It's almost ingrained into the Chinese worldview. This has been shown time and time again, through the projects that have been completed and/or worked upon, in China. The Great Wall and The Three Rivers Gorge are the first two obvious examples that come to mind; the manmade Kunming Lake elicits the same thoughts, as well.
Now, I'm not saying these tasks are/were not costly, both in terms of dollars and human lives, nor am I saying that many (especially current) Chinese projects are without corruption and/or controversy.
Rather, what I am pointing out is the historical Chinese trend of "progress" against odds. I don't really want to use the term "determination", because there is certainly the very real possibility that people work on these things against their will. Yet in any case, foreigners who've worked there on corporate projects for a while will tell you that, when working with a Chinese corporation, while they may promise you something seemingly outrageous... but short of a few exceptions, they won't promise you something they can't/won't complete.
The aforementioned exceptions are, however, predictably tied to corruption, where unwilling corporate heads -- or even middle management -- can very easily tie up a project with red tape, unless there's a little cash to "oil the wheels". If China's going to build a moon base, this corrupt undercurrent, in my opinion, is the most likely stumbling block. (As an aside this goes for the 2008 Olympics, too. After just getting back from Beijing a few weeks ago, I will be most amazed if they solve, at least to a large degree, the pollution problem, as they have promised.)
In most cases, however, while a project may take 10, 20, or two hundred years, the Chinese have historically tended to accomplish any goal that they've set out to do.
Again, it's all in the mindset... a "slow but steady" one, at that. Westerners tend to think in short, digestible timeframes. "Project ABC has to be completed in X months." The Chinese, on the other hand, look at things across a much, much larger timetable. What's a hundred years, when you've been around for several-thousand, already?
Granted, in a modern world, this opens the door to corruption and inefficiency... but how many of those "really cool projects", on which you've spent countless hours at work, have gotten tossed into the circular file because they were deemed too costly or too time-inefficient by the corporate heads?
So they say they'll have a moon base? I really don't doubt it. It may not happen in my lifetime, or yours... but it will probably happen, nevertheless.
...until women stopped looking for the "little black dress". Now they'll be shopping for the "little black box".
I can't remember what I was looking up when I saw this ad, but it was something benign. Now, I am not shitting you, that's what came up on my screen. It went to this webpage, which I'm surprised is still up.
It made me wonder whether we're becoming a self-appointed nation of commandos, or whether that was someone with simply way too much time and money on his hands.
Could this be the beginning of the end for our dependence on oil?
I can think of many reasons why it won't.
We all know that fruit flies multiply at an alarming rate. Now consider, in turn, that time flies like an arrow -- if said experiments go awry, it could be discovered that fruit flies like a BANANANANANANANA...
From the website:
The Problem: Spambots Ate My Website
s/Spambots/Slashdot/
Just ask CowboyNeal about some of his fun with dealing with dealers in Hong Kong.
Well, that's what you get for bidding on that "Asian Massage + FREE Wife!!!" listing.
Ok, I'm biased because I know a lot of people who work/used to work on the project. But TWIG has always been a great mailreader, if you're into the web-based mail reader sort of thing. It's a PHP-based client that, in addition to mail, it has newsgroup capability, a scheduler, and a bunch of other keen things.
TWIG links:
twig.screwdriver.net
TWIG on Freshmeat.
Also, be sure to query 'twig' on sourceforge to see a few other projects that involve TWIG.
Historically it's been a "till noon" thing. In fact, there are many rhymes that have traditionally been recited when someone attempted to pull an April Fools prank on a would-be party after 12.00, something akin to:
That's the one I'd heard as a kid. For others similar, go here
I said this just after the 0.9.9 release -- and I'll reiterate those points, because none of them have been fully fixed... and I don't mean just little niggling things, (although the <TEXTAREA bug is at least bearable now), I mean serious crash issues.
:/.
For example, what happens if I try to print two pages in a row that contain moderate numbers of images? Inevitably, the browser crashes long and hard. It was suggested that printing problems might be fixed in 0.9.9, but I had the same issues, all over again. I would hope that high visiblity crashes such as these would be caught and fixed well before 1.0, so that all the "fringe" test cases that might arise from this bug might be weeded out as well. Alas, such doesn't appear to be the case.
Oh well. Perhaps I'll enter another bug, although I find it hard to believe that something like this hasn't been reported yet. Of course, regardless, my bug will just be pushed off to a 1.0+ milestone
Yes. Corpses of previous characters.... corpses, because I presumably ran in a floating eye. Or stumbled blindly into a cockatrice corpse. Or tried to suck down a can of spinach into my already satiated body.
From the site:
(If you have old record and logfile entries from a previous NetHack version, you might want to save copies before they get overwritten by the new empty files; old saved games and bones files won't work with 3.4.0.)
Alas! Without my bones files, how will I ever remember to avoid taking on a floating eye in melee? Or grabbing that cockatrice corpse? Or stuffing myself silly with spinach?
Mr. Bun: Morning.
Waitress: Morning.
Mr. Bun: Well, what you got?
Waitress: Well, there's katz and CowboyNeal; katz, slashdot and CowboyNeal; katz and spam; katz, CowboyNeal and spam; katz, CowboyNeal, slashdot and spam; spam, CowboyNeal, slashdot and spam; spam, katz, spam, spam, CowboyNeal and spam; spam, slashdot, spam, spam, spam, CowboyNeal, spam, tomato and spam; spam, spam, spam, katz and spam; (Vikings start singing in background) spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, Cmdr Tacos, spam, spam, spam and spam.
Vikings: Spam, spam, spam, spam, lovely spam, lovely spam.
Waitress: (cont) or lobster thermador ecrovets with a bournaise sause, served in the purple salm Mr. Bunor with chalots and overshies, garnished with truffle pate, brandy, a fried katz on top and spam.
Mrs. Bun: Have you got anything without spam?
Waitress: Well, there's spam, katz, slashdot and spam. That's not got much spam in it.
Mrs. Bun: I don't want any spam!
Mr. Bun: Why can't she have katz, CowboyNeal, spam and slashdot?
Mrs. Bun: That's got spam in it.
Mr. Bun: It hasn't got as much spam in it as spam, katz, slashdot and spam has it?
Mrs. Bun: (over Vikings starting again) Could you do me katz, CowboyNeal, spam and slashdot without the spam then?
Waitress: Ech!
Mrs. Bun: What do you mean ech! I don't like spam!
Vikings: Lovely spam, wonderful spam....etc
Waitress: Shut up! Shut up! Shut up! Bloody vikings. You can't have katz, CowboyNeal, spam and slashdot without the spam.
Mrs. Bun: I don't like spam!
Mr. Bun: Shh dear, don't cause a fuss. I'll have your spam. I love it. I'm having spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, Cmdr Tacos, spam, spam, spam and spam. (starts Vikings off again)
Vikings: Lovely spam, wonderful spam...etc
Waitress: Shut up! Cmdr Tacos are off.
Mr. Bun: Well, can I have her spam instead of the Cmdr Tacos?
Waitress: You mean spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, and spam?
Vikings: Lovely spam, wonderful spam...etc...spam, spam, spam! (in harmony)