Chinese natives who live in America and discover that they enjoy being able to enjoy our culture and criticize their own government without being thrown in jail have also experienced our soft power, with more spectacular results.
But given the political direction of America, things may soon become counterproductive.
There is much more truth to yours and your parent's comments than you realize.
It's called soft power. Quoth an article from the October 24th issue of The Economist, which emphasizes the relationship between America and China, and happens to be the best of my bathroom reading material:
Culture Wars
On the soft-power side, China is slowly learning...Culture, said [Chinese leader] Mr. Hu, was of growing significance in the "competition of overall national strength." A cursory glance at the streets and shops of China suggests what Mr. Hu may have had in mind: the all=pervasiveness of American brands and cultural products, from Coca-Cola to (pirated) boxed sets of a comedy series, "Friends", from Kentucky Fried Chicken to Starbucks. America's intellectual drawing power is evident in the queues of students waiting for visas at the American embassy: in the 2007-2008 academic year more than 81,000 Chinese were studying in American colleges...
I know we are all quick to jump to the conclusion that 'oh noez teh gubment wants internet ppls infos'
Well, they do, but I see what you're trying to say. However, you also just said, emphasis mine,
They aren't immediately just going after random Joe for saying "I like what those guys do".
Aren't immediately going after them? So you do know, then. The effect is to make the public at large believe that their info may be one day be subpoena'd for posting pro-Wikileaks(or any other kind of "subversive" speech) words online. There's nothing the feds can find on Twitter that they don't already know about those key players.
Also, for the first time in my life, I think I'm kinda respecting Twitter.
In the electronics industry, "pulling a kit" is compiling all of the discrete components that you need to get your job done. It's compiling all of the resistors and ICs and other things you need to build a batch of something, or it's compiling whatever you need to fix something.
The article is ridiculously scant on details. It makes no sense. A million bucks worth of kit, smuggled out in a "small bag?!" That's a lot of "small bags" to be taken in and out over a period of time. Might as well held up the loading dock at gunpoint and ran off with the crates.
On the contrary, the growers and distributors are cheating the consumers. They allow them to believe that it is a harmless product, when that isn't really true.
Nobody believes that marijuana is harmless. Nobody who buys pot is being "cheated." Have you seen all those movies where potheads are portrayed as coughing, brain-dead stoners who couldn't remember what they were just talking about? People who use pot know that the shit isn't good for them, though ingestion and vaporization are more healthy than smoking. People who live on diets of fries, Big-Macs, pizza, and ice cream know that the shit isn't good for them. People who drink beer, wine, or liquor know that the shit isn't good for them.
We don't use marijuana because it's harmless, we use it because we like how it makes us feel. Even drinking water in excess will kill you. What we're upset about is the convenient inconsistency in our laws. Marijuana is a schedule I substance while cocaine is schedule II. Marijuana is a drug for dirty street people while corporate-sanctioned drug abuse via long-term prescription of benzodiazepines and opiates is socially acceptable and even hip - just ask Rush Limbaugh. The public and states often support medical and even recreational use of pot, yet the FedThugScum are still at it breaking down doors with battering rams and assault rifles.
Some people say that the customizable privacy prevents stalking. I don't have a facebook account, but I looked up an ex's Facebook page through a Google search just to see what I would find. I wanted to see if I could get any info on her new boyfriend for the sake of science. I don't have a facebook account, but even public searches of a private profile yield info - they probably allow this to make it easier to search for old friends.
There is much to infer from the information found on a private page as found through Google. The picture, interests, and links to friends' profiles (and their interests) are still visible. Most curiously, though, was the fact that her new man's profile link(with pic) was always the one right next to her picture, and the friends in the other slots were randomized but still people whom she communicated with most frequently.
When I saw that her profile pic changed and the dude was no longer in any of the slots, I knew what had happened. Sure enough, She confirmed that he had left her for another woman shortly afterward.
Speaking of the Middle East,why has nobody yet suggested that this guy may be a disgruntled and/or PTSD-suffering Iraq war vet? I'd be pretty pissed too if I saw everybody around me being turned into hamburger so some corporate fat cats can make more millions.
Of course. We idealistic geeks like to say that the enemy of our enemy is not necessarily our friend.
We live in a world of information warfare. Watch CNN or Foxnews if you require proof. Until we are able to summon the being of Aquaman or Jesus Christ(TM) to dig up the ultimate truths, we should be thankful for the illumination we can get. When events are manipulated to the point when our hero Assange(more importantly, Wikileaks itself) disappears or is otherwise subdued, we can only hope for a successor (the money seems to be on openleaks) and more unfortunate truths being released into our hands. Voyeurism, the desire to know, is a sword that cuts both ways.
Anybody calling for open-source and open-everything-else would hope for that. Everybody else is just a consultant or contractor profiting from their own secrecy.
If he is selling your secrets, what stops him from selling them to someone else when he is getting a little low on funds?
That sentence is redundant. Wikileaks cares only about big players and governments, the same ones that are the dirty rotten voyeurs data-mining the hell out of you -- the little guy -- sucking up your voice and data traffic like James Brown sucked the crack smoke from his glass dick*. The governments are the schoolyard bully who literally cries foul when that one brave kid mans up and finally hits him back. That brave kid is Assange.
So Assange is a douchebag -- so what? Do you damsels in distress want the perfect, innocent, lovable Aquaman to come to your rescue and stand up for truth and justice? Do you guys want Jesus Christ(TM) to come kiss them on their crooked foreheads?
Assange has what many of you don't -- a spine. No, he's not perfect. But he's done more in a few years than most of us will do in our entire lifetimes. Lighten the hell up, grab a bag of popcorn, and enjoy the fireworks.
* For those of you who grew up in a plastic bubble, "glass dick" is slang for crackpipe
Apple has discovered that they don't like selling hardware.
What? Of course they do. But you're also right. Here's what Apple will do -- first, all future Macs, except for the ultra-expensive top-end machines, will be glorified dumb terminals operating entirely in the cloud.
Jobs will finally leverage his synergies to bridge the gap between the mobile and desktop paradigms. Apple's new dumb terminals, resembling slimline iMacs, will be sold at the typical Apple markup on hardware, but will be less expensive than today's full-featured Macs, so Apple and the economy-weary consumer both see it as a win-win situation.
I did read and I understood what you wrote, but perhaps you didn't understand my binocular analogy. Let me rephrase it in the form of a question: What kind of masochistic drive compels people to be so obsessed with all kinds of stuff painfully displayed on a screen less lengthy and girthy than my cock?
It's like trying to use a really, really small penis for sex...oh, wait. There it is. Comfort through familiarity. Case closed.
Okay, so you can open full-size documents and watch mobile porn a half-second more quickly.
I bet it greatly enhances your experience of -- to use another car analogy -- driving at highway speeds while looking through the wrong end of the binoculars.
To use a car analogy, overclocking is like adding a fart-pipe to a stock Honda Civic and then bragging to everybody about your extra 25 horsepower of noisy but totally otherwise unnoticable performance gain.
What the hell happened during the past three hours? Goddamn, brother, what the hell is going on? That's Special Agent Dale Cooper! FOr God's sake, Jeffries, where the hell have you been?
What am I doing here?
Who is this girl in my bed?
What is this shit on my face?
My God, what is that awful smell?!
Her name is Rio and she dances on the sand.
Just like that river twisting through a dusty land.
And when she shines she really shows you all she can
Oh Rio Rio dance across the Rio Grande.
what is fmic's personal ratio of accusations:indictments?
Slashdot == Snitchdot? Who woulda thunk, since most Slashdotters were raising their hands in grade school classrooms and then hiding behind Mommy's leg when the mob grew tired of their bullshit?
But to answer the question posed in TFS, "How would you change it for years to come?", I would have it spray viscous white fluid all over the assembled masses at the stroke of midnight.
Your parent is referring to "palm muting," which gives metal chords that distinctive "crunching" or "chugging" sound. It's done by resting the palm of the picking hand over the strings right where the bridge is(so that the strings resonate some instead of being totally muted dead). It may also be used for soloing, good examples being solos in which the palm pressure is gradually released so that the effect is of the solo fading seamlessly from staccato to legato.
I really don't know why the robot cannot palm-mute, it wouldn't have been that difficult to add a palm-muting mechanism.
Hettfield ain't so tough. If the robot wanted to be like that bed-wetting emo-kid James Hettfield, it could beg for mercy* and then leak oil all over itself after playing Mama Said.
* The most pathetic Metallica concert was in '99 at the Coors(now Cricket) amphitheater near San Diego. Hettfield was forgetting rather obvious lyrics to his songs, and the crowd was chucking plastic beer bottles at him, actually sticking Hettfield in the face as he was singing(er, trying to sing) Wherever I may roam. He then begged the audience to go easy and said that they band had low self-esteem. But, the booing and the bottles kept coming. When the band revealed that they were going to dedicate the latter half of their set to do an acoustic set of many popular songs, the crowd booed relentlessly and was on the verge of rioting. Four Horsemen was desecrated, and Metallica had to pay.
If you have a background in law then you may be able to get an internship.
Also note that the volunteer rules are general guidelines and not all that strict in actuality. The EFF need all the help they can get, so contact Bernie Robinson(brobinson@eff.org) and give him a brief description of your background. They throw great parties after headways are made in cases.
Note that, unfortunately, internships are unpaid and cannot furnish J visas.
Some of the research is rigorous and time-consuming, for example, I had to examine a diagram which mandated the use of a bix nood mated to a gollywog. I believe that gig involved a patent-trolling firm called Moon Cricket, which manufactured ultrasonic insect repellant devices.
However, their patent was overly broad and they were going after manufacturers of certain peripherals.
Slashdot Mirror
Chinese natives who live in America and discover that they enjoy being able to enjoy our culture and criticize their own government without being thrown in jail have also experienced our soft power, with more spectacular results.
But given the political direction of America, things may soon become counterproductive.
It's called soft power. Quoth an article from the October 24th issue of The Economist, which emphasizes the relationship between America and China, and happens to be the best of my bathroom reading material:
Culture Wars
On the soft-power side, China is slowly learning...Culture, said [Chinese leader] Mr. Hu, was of growing significance in the "competition of overall national strength." A cursory glance at the streets and shops of China suggests what Mr. Hu may have had in mind: the all=pervasiveness of American brands and cultural products, from Coca-Cola to (pirated) boxed sets of a comedy series, "Friends", from Kentucky Fried Chicken to Starbucks. America's intellectual drawing power is evident in the queues of students waiting for visas at the American embassy: in the 2007-2008 academic year more than 81,000 Chinese were studying in American colleges...
I know we are all quick to jump to the conclusion that 'oh noez teh gubment wants internet ppls infos'
Well, they do, but I see what you're trying to say. However, you also just said, emphasis mine,
They aren't immediately just going after random Joe for saying "I like what those guys do".
Aren't immediately going after them? So you do know, then. The effect is to make the public at large believe that their info may be one day be subpoena'd for posting pro-Wikileaks(or any other kind of "subversive" speech) words online. There's nothing the feds can find on Twitter that they don't already know about those key players.
Also, for the first time in my life, I think I'm kinda respecting Twitter.
In the electronics industry, "pulling a kit" is compiling all of the discrete components that you need to get your job done. It's compiling all of the resistors and ICs and other things you need to build a batch of something, or it's compiling whatever you need to fix something.
The article is ridiculously scant on details. It makes no sense. A million bucks worth of kit, smuggled out in a "small bag?!" That's a lot of "small bags" to be taken in and out over a period of time. Might as well held up the loading dock at gunpoint and ran off with the crates.
On the contrary, the growers and distributors are cheating the consumers. They allow them to believe that it is a harmless product, when that isn't really true.
Nobody believes that marijuana is harmless. Nobody who buys pot is being "cheated." Have you seen all those movies where potheads are portrayed as coughing, brain-dead stoners who couldn't remember what they were just talking about? People who use pot know that the shit isn't good for them, though ingestion and vaporization are more healthy than smoking. People who live on diets of fries, Big-Macs, pizza, and ice cream know that the shit isn't good for them. People who drink beer, wine, or liquor know that the shit isn't good for them.
We don't use marijuana because it's harmless, we use it because we like how it makes us feel. Even drinking water in excess will kill you. What we're upset about is the convenient inconsistency in our laws. Marijuana is a schedule I substance while cocaine is schedule II. Marijuana is a drug for dirty street people while corporate-sanctioned drug abuse via long-term prescription of benzodiazepines and opiates is socially acceptable and even hip - just ask Rush Limbaugh. The public and states often support medical and even recreational use of pot, yet the FedThugScum are still at it breaking down doors with battering rams and assault rifles.
Some people say that the customizable privacy prevents stalking. I don't have a facebook account, but I looked up an ex's Facebook page through a Google search just to see what I would find. I wanted to see if I could get any info on her new boyfriend for the sake of science. I don't have a facebook account, but even public searches of a private profile yield info - they probably allow this to make it easier to search for old friends.
There is much to infer from the information found on a private page as found through Google. The picture, interests, and links to friends' profiles (and their interests) are still visible. Most curiously, though, was the fact that her new man's profile link(with pic) was always the one right next to her picture, and the friends in the other slots were randomized but still people whom she communicated with most frequently.
When I saw that her profile pic changed and the dude was no longer in any of the slots, I knew what had happened. Sure enough, She confirmed that he had left her for another woman shortly afterward.
Speaking of the Middle East,why has nobody yet suggested that this guy may be a disgruntled and/or PTSD-suffering Iraq war vet? I'd be pretty pissed too if I saw everybody around me being turned into hamburger so some corporate fat cats can make more millions.
That's no excuse. The T-800 series Terminators and Bender both ran a 6502 at their core and performed quite well.
Of course. We idealistic geeks like to say that the enemy of our enemy is not necessarily our friend.
We live in a world of information warfare. Watch CNN or Foxnews if you require proof. Until we are able to summon the being of Aquaman or Jesus Christ(TM) to dig up the ultimate truths, we should be thankful for the illumination we can get. When events are manipulated to the point when our hero Assange(more importantly, Wikileaks itself) disappears or is otherwise subdued, we can only hope for a successor (the money seems to be on openleaks) and more unfortunate truths being released into our hands. Voyeurism, the desire to know, is a sword that cuts both ways.
Anybody calling for open-source and open-everything-else would hope for that. Everybody else is just a consultant or contractor profiting from their own secrecy.
I don't want to be one of those [citation needed] assholes, but could you provide proof?
I'm asking because I thought they were both called sir, but not mister.
If he is selling your secrets, what stops him from selling them to someone else when he is getting a little low on funds?
That sentence is redundant. Wikileaks cares only about big players and governments, the same ones that are the dirty rotten voyeurs data-mining the hell out of you -- the little guy -- sucking up your voice and data traffic like James Brown sucked the crack smoke from his glass dick*. The governments are the schoolyard bully who literally cries foul when that one brave kid mans up and finally hits him back. That brave kid is Assange.
So Assange is a douchebag -- so what? Do you damsels in distress want the perfect, innocent, lovable Aquaman to come to your rescue and stand up for truth and justice? Do you guys want Jesus Christ(TM) to come kiss them on their crooked foreheads?
Assange has what many of you don't -- a spine. No, he's not perfect. But he's done more in a few years than most of us will do in our entire lifetimes. Lighten the hell up, grab a bag of popcorn, and enjoy the fireworks.
* For those of you who grew up in a plastic bubble, "glass dick" is slang for crackpipe
Still bitter about Windows Vista, eh?
I know this, I'm still in debt from buying the SGI Altix cluster I needed just to run Aero.
Apple has discovered that they don't like selling hardware.
What? Of course they do. But you're also right. Here's what Apple will do -- first, all future Macs, except for the ultra-expensive top-end machines, will be glorified dumb terminals operating entirely in the cloud.
Jobs will finally leverage his synergies to bridge the gap between the mobile and desktop paradigms. Apple's new dumb terminals, resembling slimline iMacs, will be sold at the typical Apple markup on hardware, but will be less expensive than today's full-featured Macs, so Apple and the economy-weary consumer both see it as a win-win situation.
Are you game, Steve?
I did read and I understood what you wrote, but perhaps you didn't understand my binocular analogy. Let me rephrase it in the form of a question: What kind of masochistic drive compels people to be so obsessed with all kinds of stuff painfully displayed on a screen less lengthy and girthy than my cock?
It's like trying to use a really, really small penis for sex...oh, wait. There it is. Comfort through familiarity. Case closed.
Okay, so you can open full-size documents and watch mobile porn a half-second more quickly.
I bet it greatly enhances your experience of -- to use another car analogy -- driving at highway speeds while looking through the wrong end of the binoculars.
Meh.
To use a car analogy, overclocking is like adding a fart-pipe to a stock Honda Civic and then bragging to everybody about your extra 25 horsepower of noisy but totally otherwise unnoticable performance gain.
I'm gonna fuckin' vomint, man.
HERUUUUUUUUUUUUUUGGGGHHHHHHHHHH! Ga-Huh-Ka-HAH. NNNUrghGLUGHUGHUGHUGHUGHUGHU. FUck, man. I just PUKED.
What the hell happened during the past three hours? Goddamn, brother, what the hell is going on? That's Special Agent Dale Cooper! FOr God's sake, Jeffries, where the hell have you been? What am I doing here?
Who is this girl in my bed?
What is this shit on my face?
My God, what is that awful smell?!
Her name is Rio and she dances on the sand.
Just like that river twisting through a dusty land.
And when she shines she really shows you all she can
Oh Rio Rio dance across the Rio Grande.
what is fmic's personal ratio of accusations:indictments?
Slashdot == Snitchdot? Who woulda thunk, since most Slashdotters were raising their hands in grade school classrooms and then hiding behind Mommy's leg when the mob grew tired of their bullshit?
by oldspewey
But to answer the question posed in TFS, "How would you change it for years to come?", I would have it spray viscous white fluid all over the assembled masses at the stroke of midnight.
I see what you did there, pervert.
What's that symbolic of?
It's symbolic of a man's balls dropping when the heat of the New Year's Eve sex causes his scrotum to relax and slap against the taint of his partner.
Wouldn't one which rose from the floor to some maximum height, combined with a light show/fireworks etc be a little more interesting?
A telescoping tower would make much more sense in that context.
Going to google this, but - 'wha?'
Your parent is referring to "palm muting," which gives metal chords that distinctive "crunching" or "chugging" sound. It's done by resting the palm of the picking hand over the strings right where the bridge is(so that the strings resonate some instead of being totally muted dead). It may also be used for soloing, good examples being solos in which the palm pressure is gradually released so that the effect is of the solo fading seamlessly from staccato to legato.
/metalhead. GG Allin lives!
I really don't know why the robot cannot palm-mute, it wouldn't have been that difficult to add a palm-muting mechanism.
Hettfield ain't so tough. If the robot wanted to be like that bed-wetting emo-kid James Hettfield, it could beg for mercy* and then leak oil all over itself after playing Mama Said.
* The most pathetic Metallica concert was in '99 at the Coors(now Cricket) amphitheater near San Diego. Hettfield was forgetting rather obvious lyrics to his songs, and the crowd was chucking plastic beer bottles at him, actually sticking Hettfield in the face as he was singing(er, trying to sing) Wherever I may roam. He then begged the audience to go easy and said that they band had low self-esteem. But, the booing and the bottles kept coming. When the band revealed that they were going to dedicate the latter half of their set to do an acoustic set of many popular songs, the crowd booed relentlessly and was on the verge of rioting. Four Horsemen was desecrated, and Metallica had to pay.
If you have a background in law then you may be able to get an internship.
Also note that the volunteer rules are general guidelines and not all that strict in actuality. The EFF need all the help they can get, so contact Bernie Robinson(brobinson@eff.org) and give him a brief description of your background. They throw great parties after headways are made in cases.
Note that, unfortunately, internships are unpaid and cannot furnish J visas.
I've volunteered with the EFF doing exactly that.
Some of the research is rigorous and time-consuming, for example, I had to examine a diagram which mandated the use of a bix nood mated to a gollywog. I believe that gig involved a patent-trolling firm called Moon Cricket, which manufactured ultrasonic insect repellant devices.
However, their patent was overly broad and they were going after manufacturers of certain peripherals.