Why do they let you have a computer? The notion that the Chinese themselves are the only ones who can produce compelling evidence for OR AGAINST their own claims is absurd. First, the Tibetans themselves witnessed what happened, and their voices get equal weight. Second, the Chinese destroy their own credibility by trying to silence anyone who disagrees with their position (you acknowledge this much). But where do you get the idea that only professional historians, and Chinese ones at that, can consider the evidence and form opinions? And FYI: yes I can read classical Chinese, and I still think that the Chinese position is a load of crap. Moreover, I think *THEY* know it's a load of crap too, which is why they refuse to allow public discussion on the matter.
But if you think the Free Tibet movement is secretly sponsored by foreign governments who want to use Tibet to stage an invasion of China then you've got bigger problems than your theory of knowledge./flame off
China was nearly conquered by Tibet during the Tang dynasty. The Tibetan army stopped miles from the Tang capital, signed a perpetual treaty of friendship with the Chinese, and departed. Today, that treaty is used by the Chinese government as evidence that Tibet was always a part of China. Ugh.
To say that Mongolia, or Manchuria, or Tibet, or West Turkistan are part of modern China because they were part of the Manchu empire is loony - CHINA wasn't part of China then! It was all part of Qing - China belonged to the Manchus, not the other way around! Geez! We're seeing classic disconnection here; a foreign power makes you their bitch for several hundred years, and after you manage to kick them out, instead of saying, "Oh, that was unpleasant, let's try to not do that to anyone else," you turn around and invade your neighbors. Nice.
Imagine, if you will, that Turkey tapped on the US's collective shoulder in Iraq and said, "Oh, thanks, we were looking for that." Imperial claims to territory don't mean jack. And if anyone says anything about 5000 years of Chinese history, my hed asplode - people have been living in what's now Switzerland for what, 10,000 years, but no one but a complete prat would talk about 10,000 years of Swiss history.
Be more careful about your criticism. There was no such place as China in 2000BC. Even Shang, which was established around 1760BC, wasn't China - it was Shang, and the territory that it ruled in no way matches the modern borders of China. The entire Zhou, Spring and Autumn, and Warring States periods, almost 800 years, were marked by disunity and bare allegience with a very weak central government.
There wasn't really anything like what we now call China until the Qin, and even then regional allegiences took precedence over any loyalty towards the center until well into the Han. And then the Han collapsed, and China fell apart again for over 300 more years. This happened again for a short time after the Tang, then again when the Sung fell. It wasn't until the Mongols fell that China stopped crumbling after each dynasty collapsed.
Modern China uses several national myths to promote unity. The first is the myth of a national language with several dialects, when in fact the so-called dialects have no more in common than Spanish and Romanian - they're languages, not dialects. Second is the "5000 years of Chinese history" that we keep hearing about, when in fact there has been no such thing.
As for the prosperity argument, it doesn't hold water. Although the Chinese themselves argue about the issue, I believe that the greatest period of cultural and economic prosperity was not the Han or Tang but during the Sung, which was marked by disunity, an invasion from the northern tribes, and general weakness in government.
So be careful about calling people retards, retard.
Aargh, thanks for reminding me of that "campaign." Are they responsible for those Oblique Tangent ads too?
The problem is that it's impossible to prove a negative - they claim that at some point in the Precambrian era I opted in with one of their infinity+1 partners, and even though I know that I never opt in for anything except extra cheese, I have no way of proving that they're lying. Bastards.
Good point. The old steel companies have been complaining for decades that they can't compete, that they need tarriffs and gub'ment subsidies, and here comes this upstart company that is basically running circles around them. What the old steel mills really meant was that they couldn't compete doing business the way they'd always had, and they were too big, old, and slow to think their way out. So we, the taxpayers, rewarded them for being stupid and inflexible, when we thought they were competing efficiently but still losing thanks to the big bad foreigners. Stupid them, but even stupid(er) us.
E.G. they weren't. Until that point, most roads in this country were unpaved disasters, generally two-land roads. Imagine driving from Boston to Washington DC on all local streets and country roads. It wasn't until the advent of federal taxation and the grants that went along with it that enough resources could be mustered to build large highways (starting with New York State in the 20's thanks to the work of everyone's favorite megalomaniac, Robert Moses).
And don't kid yourselves - parasite states like Delaware (my own) which have low/no income tax, or no sales tax, find ways of compensating for the lack of money. Delaware, for instance, poaches its section of I-95 mercilessly, charging outrageous tolls which cause miles-long backups on the interstate while doing virtually nothing to actually improve the quality of that road - all of the toll money goes to local road construction. Or, another Delaware invention, they attract huge corporations to the state so they can earn incorporation fees, thus earning several thousand dollars for themselves while depriving the original homes of those companies of millions of corporate tax dollars. If you're paying Paul, you've got to screw Peter somewhere.
Ultimately, the group that has all of the rights not otherwise delegated to the Feds or the states is "the people" - whoever that is. Modern law more and more is deciding that "the people" is a fiction, that it doesn't exist - every right under the sun can be claimed by state or local governments as long as they're not stepping on the Fed's toes, and vice versa. Who steps up for the rights of "the people" when they're threatened? Nuts, unfortunately - and in every case (2nd Amendment anyone?) the government seems to decide that the rights in question can't be claimed by any individual per se, but only by "the people" - and good luck finding them.
Seems that almost every cell phone related auction is fake. Wait until Nokia announces their next big model, and then do a search on eBay for it - you'll see dozens of auction listings for a phone that hasn't even been released yet, using only the manufacturer's graphics. And don't even get me started with the "Instructions for How to Build a Spot Welder! CHEAP!!?!!~" whenever I search for welding equipment.
$69 for a codec? Exsqueeze me? thekompany charges $20 for a Zaurus player that does the same thing (on a more expensive piece of hardware, but still...)
Who says that the Earth way is the only way to set up a functional metabolism? It's a big universe out there - if we go looking for life, where life = "like us," we may be missing the forest for the small slimy amorphous biomasses.
You mean unlike, say, the hundreds of thousands of Indians who have moved to the United States to become American citizens, raise American children, and die on American soil? We think nothing of people forsaking their homelands to move to the United States. We created this system, and we don't have the right to complain when people apply our own rules to us.
Then they started building factories, and told us that we could get rich by making things, even though lots of people got hurt or killed, the air and water got fouled, and the pay wasn't really that good after all. Then we got together and fought for better conditions, and the people that had only been consuming what we made got strong enough to build factories of their own, and the factories picked up and left.
Then they told us, "Don't worry about the factories leaving! The future is in services and intellectual property creation!" So they trained two generations of us to use computers and write memos and move paper around (at our great expense) so we could work in their service industries.
But the service industries didn't have any factories or other major infrastructural investments, so when the consumers of our software code and financial products got well-educated enough to do those things themselves, the service industries had an even easier time of it and ran for the hills.
Now they're not telling us where we're supposed to work, and not telling us how we're supposed to put our expensive educations to use, only that it'll get better some day. But what's left? No farms, no factories, empty office buildings, and even the production of the very food we eat and the houses we live in is restricted to illegal immigrants because no one is willing to pay living wages. There are some jobs that can't be moved easily - construction, machining, auto repair, but how are we supposed to support an entire economy with this?
There were many great things about Psion palmtops - their clamshell formfactors with actual usable keyboards, their lightweight power requirements (several days on a charge), and yes, their OS. The netBook/Series 7 really never did much for me - it was basically laptop sized, still ran EPOC/Symbian OS so it could (more or less) only run simple PDA style apps, and was, like this machine, expensive. I don't see why new Psion this is an improvement. I loved my Revo+, but it always seemed like Psion didn't know what they wanted their product to be or who their audience was. They killed their own products through simple lack of development.
Assuming that the original poster means blind and not deaf people, I saw something similar on a cable news show several years ago. A man used clicks to echolocate his way around, and was even able to ride a bicycle. Pretty impressive, if it really works.
No kidding. Where, exactly, is the *invention* here? All I see is a very very vague description of what the invention would be, if the so-called inventor had the will or ability to actually code it themselves. We are not supposed to be able to patent ideas, we have to take those ideas and make them into something before we have an invention. I think we need to go back to the patent office requiring a functional product before any patent can be granted.
Are they talking about the uncertainty principle? If we observe the asteroid just so, do we actually affect its speed and/or location? All we have to do is measure its speed, oh, 10,000 times from the left and we're saved! Horrah!
Every company I've worked for had a bunch of poorly written custom apps from 1989 that had been hacked up periodically to make sure that they (sort of, but not really) still work on more recent versions of windows, and they're usually related to some ancient oracle server that no one knows how to change anymore. This stuff will never run on anything other than Windows - and it barely runs on Windows at that. Then there are all of the Access db's that people use (Filemaker doesn't cut it if you need to redo all of the forms to make it work).
There are easier ways ...
on
Aquarium Modcase
·
· Score: 4, Funny
to electrocute yourself. Leave the fish out of it!
You're not by any chance referring to the same country where the laws are intentionally set up to discriminate against non-Malays in education, government service, etc., and where conversion away from Islam is an offence punishable by imprisonment, are you?
Pop quiz: Under which two presidents has the United States had its largest budget deficits? Answer: Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush Bonus Question: What party did both of these presidents belong to?
Seriously, its not that I love the Democrats, but to associate them with wholesale economic wreckage and the Replublicans with prosperity is not just unfair, its a complete lie. Lowering taxes while paying for massive defense expenditures isn't what I'd call sound economic policy. Carter and Clinton may not have spent less, but at least they had the sense to realise that you can't spend MORE while lowering taxes at the same time.
Slashdot Mirror
Why do they let you have a computer? The notion that the Chinese themselves are the only ones who can produce compelling evidence for OR AGAINST their own claims is absurd. First, the Tibetans themselves witnessed what happened, and their voices get equal weight. Second, the Chinese destroy their own credibility by trying to silence anyone who disagrees with their position (you acknowledge this much). But where do you get the idea that only professional historians, and Chinese ones at that, can consider the evidence and form opinions? And FYI: yes I can read classical Chinese, and I still think that the Chinese position is a load of crap. Moreover, I think *THEY* know it's a load of crap too, which is why they refuse to allow public discussion on the matter.
But if you think the Free Tibet movement is secretly sponsored by foreign governments who want to use Tibet to stage an invasion of China then you've got bigger problems than your theory of knowledge./flame off
China was nearly conquered by Tibet during the Tang dynasty. The Tibetan army stopped miles from the Tang capital, signed a perpetual treaty of friendship with the Chinese, and departed. Today, that treaty is used by the Chinese government as evidence that Tibet was always a part of China. Ugh.
To say that Mongolia, or Manchuria, or Tibet, or West Turkistan are part of modern China because they were part of the Manchu empire is loony - CHINA wasn't part of China then! It was all part of Qing - China belonged to the Manchus, not the other way around! Geez! We're seeing classic disconnection here; a foreign power makes you their bitch for several hundred years, and after you manage to kick them out, instead of saying, "Oh, that was unpleasant, let's try to not do that to anyone else," you turn around and invade your neighbors. Nice.
Imagine, if you will, that Turkey tapped on the US's collective shoulder in Iraq and said, "Oh, thanks, we were looking for that." Imperial claims to territory don't mean jack. And if anyone says anything about 5000 years of Chinese history, my hed asplode - people have been living in what's now Switzerland for what, 10,000 years, but no one but a complete prat would talk about 10,000 years of Swiss history.
Be more careful about your criticism. There was no such place as China in 2000BC. Even Shang, which was established around 1760BC, wasn't China - it was Shang, and the territory that it ruled in no way matches the modern borders of China. The entire Zhou, Spring and Autumn, and Warring States periods, almost 800 years, were marked by disunity and bare allegience with a very weak central government.
There wasn't really anything like what we now call China until the Qin, and even then regional allegiences took precedence over any loyalty towards the center until well into the Han. And then the Han collapsed, and China fell apart again for over 300 more years. This happened again for a short time after the Tang, then again when the Sung fell. It wasn't until the Mongols fell that China stopped crumbling after each dynasty collapsed.
Modern China uses several national myths to promote unity. The first is the myth of a national language with several dialects, when in fact the so-called dialects have no more in common than Spanish and Romanian - they're languages, not dialects. Second is the "5000 years of Chinese history" that we keep hearing about, when in fact there has been no such thing.
As for the prosperity argument, it doesn't hold water. Although the Chinese themselves argue about the issue, I believe that the greatest period of cultural and economic prosperity was not the Han or Tang but during the Sung, which was marked by disunity, an invasion from the northern tribes, and general weakness in government.
So be careful about calling people retards, retard.
Aargh, thanks for reminding me of that "campaign." Are they responsible for those Oblique Tangent ads too?
The problem is that it's impossible to prove a negative - they claim that at some point in the Precambrian era I opted in with one of their infinity+1 partners, and even though I know that I never opt in for anything except extra cheese, I have no way of proving that they're lying.
Bastards.
Good point. The old steel companies have been complaining for decades that they can't compete, that they need tarriffs and gub'ment subsidies, and here comes this upstart company that is basically running circles around them. What the old steel mills really meant was that they couldn't compete doing business the way they'd always had, and they were too big, old, and slow to think their way out. So we, the taxpayers, rewarded them for being stupid and inflexible, when we thought they were competing efficiently but still losing thanks to the big bad foreigners. Stupid them, but even stupid(er) us.
>The same way roads were funded up until 1913
E.G. they weren't. Until that point, most roads in this country were unpaved disasters, generally two-land roads. Imagine driving from Boston to Washington DC on all local streets and country roads. It wasn't until the advent of federal taxation and the grants that went along with it that enough resources could be mustered to build large highways (starting with New York State in the 20's thanks to the work of everyone's favorite megalomaniac, Robert Moses).
And don't kid yourselves - parasite states like Delaware (my own) which have low/no income tax, or no sales tax, find ways of compensating for the lack of money. Delaware, for instance, poaches its section of I-95 mercilessly, charging outrageous tolls which cause miles-long backups on the interstate while doing virtually nothing to actually improve the quality of that road - all of the toll money goes to local road construction. Or, another Delaware invention, they attract huge corporations to the state so they can earn incorporation fees, thus earning several thousand dollars for themselves while depriving the original homes of those companies of millions of corporate tax dollars. If you're paying Paul, you've got to screw Peter somewhere.
Ultimately, the group that has all of the rights not otherwise delegated to the Feds or the states is "the people" - whoever that is. Modern law more and more is deciding that "the people" is a fiction, that it doesn't exist - every right under the sun can be claimed by state or local governments as long as they're not stepping on the Fed's toes, and vice versa. Who steps up for the rights of "the people" when they're threatened? Nuts, unfortunately - and in every case (2nd Amendment anyone?) the government seems to decide that the rights in question can't be claimed by any individual per se, but only by "the people" - and good luck finding them.
Please tell me that you're not using Slashdot as a model of standard English usage and grammar.
Seems that almost every cell phone related auction is fake. Wait until Nokia announces their next big model, and then do a search on eBay for it - you'll see dozens of auction listings for a phone that hasn't even been released yet, using only the manufacturer's graphics. And don't even get me started with the "Instructions for How to Build a Spot Welder! CHEAP!!?!!~" whenever I search for welding equipment.
$69 for a codec? Exsqueeze me? thekompany charges $20 for a Zaurus player that does the same thing (on a more expensive piece of hardware, but still...)
Who says that the Earth way is the only way to set up a functional metabolism? It's a big universe out there - if we go looking for life, where life = "like us," we may be missing the forest for the small slimy amorphous biomasses.
I used to date a headhunter, and she was a very nice girl. I don't know why everyone says such nasty things about them.
So, anyone interested in a permanent move?
You mean unlike, say, the hundreds of thousands of Indians who have moved to the United States to become American citizens, raise American children, and die on American soil? We think nothing of people forsaking their homelands to move to the United States. We created this system, and we don't have the right to complain when people apply our own rules to us.
First we were farmers.
Then they started building factories, and told us that we could get rich by making things, even though lots of people got hurt or killed, the air and water got fouled, and the pay wasn't really that good after all. Then we got together and fought for better conditions, and the people that had only been consuming what we made got strong enough to build factories of their own, and the factories picked up and left.
Then they told us, "Don't worry about the factories leaving! The future is in services and intellectual property creation!" So they trained two generations of us to use computers and write memos and move paper around (at our great expense) so we could work in their service industries.
But the service industries didn't have any factories or other major infrastructural investments, so when the consumers of our software code and financial products got well-educated enough to do those things themselves, the service industries had an even easier time of it and ran for the hills.
Now they're not telling us where we're supposed to work, and not telling us how we're supposed to put our expensive educations to use, only that it'll get better some day. But what's left? No farms, no factories, empty office buildings, and even the production of the very food we eat and the houses we live in is restricted to illegal immigrants because no one is willing to pay living wages. There are some jobs that can't be moved easily - construction, machining, auto repair, but how are we supposed to support an entire economy with this?
Yeah, it's a good thing that Jesus turned the water into iced tea.
There were many great things about Psion palmtops - their clamshell formfactors with actual usable keyboards, their lightweight power requirements (several days on a charge), and yes, their OS. The netBook/Series 7 really never did much for me - it was basically laptop sized, still ran EPOC/Symbian OS so it could (more or less) only run simple PDA style apps, and was, like this machine, expensive. I don't see why new Psion this is an improvement. I loved my Revo+, but it always seemed like Psion didn't know what they wanted their product to be or who their audience was. They killed their own products through simple lack of development.
Assuming that the original poster means blind and not deaf people, I saw something similar on a cable news show several years ago. A man used clicks to echolocate his way around, and was even able to ride a bicycle. Pretty impressive, if it really works.
No kidding. Where, exactly, is the *invention* here? All I see is a very very vague description of what the invention would be, if the so-called inventor had the will or ability to actually code it themselves. We are not supposed to be able to patent ideas, we have to take those ideas and make them into something before we have an invention. I think we need to go back to the patent office requiring a functional product before any patent can be granted.
Are they talking about the uncertainty principle? If we observe the asteroid just so, do we actually affect its speed and/or location? All we have to do is measure its speed, oh, 10,000 times from the left and we're saved! Horrah!
Every company I've worked for had a bunch of poorly written custom apps from 1989 that had been hacked up periodically to make sure that they (sort of, but not really) still work on more recent versions of windows, and they're usually related to some ancient oracle server that no one knows how to change anymore. This stuff will never run on anything other than Windows - and it barely runs on Windows at that.
Then there are all of the Access db's that people use (Filemaker doesn't cut it if you need to redo all of the forms to make it work).
to electrocute yourself. Leave the fish out of it!
You're not by any chance referring to the same country where the laws are intentionally set up to discriminate against non-Malays in education, government service, etc., and where conversion away from Islam is an offence punishable by imprisonment, are you?
Dude, calm down. I think they mean Sandisk's Secure Digital technology. Open blister pack, remove chill pill, swallow.
Pop quiz:
Under which two presidents has the United States had its largest budget deficits?
Answer: Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush
Bonus Question: What party did both of these presidents belong to?
Seriously, its not that I love the Democrats, but to associate them with wholesale economic wreckage and the Replublicans with prosperity is not just unfair, its a complete lie. Lowering taxes while paying for massive defense expenditures isn't what I'd call sound economic policy. Carter and Clinton may not have spent less, but at least they had the sense to realise that you can't spend MORE while lowering taxes at the same time.
What the...no! No! I was only adjusting the carburetors! Nooooo!!!!!