"The government has been cracking down on this supposedly spiritual movement."
I'm not sure why you threw in the "supposedly spiritual" comment - sounds alot like FUD. I don't agree with the Falun Gong's philosophy by any means, but theirs no room to or point in denying that they're a quasi-religious, spiritual movement.
"I don't why they would want to do this. This is hardly a good public relations move. Smells like a childish prank by some teenagers."
There is no such thing as bad publicity and in China, there is NO publicity. Most Chinese have no idea what the Falun Gong movement is, apart from what the government tells them, which usually are along the lines of "Falun Gong members eat their children." Seriously. Would you have been calling the civil rights activists childish when they tried to ride all white buses? Give me a break.
I personally LIKE it when a movie set in our time period and our world uses branding on its set. Which one is more believable "Mom, I'm going down to the drugstore to buy a Super-Duper-Cola" or "Mom, I'm going down to the drugstore to buy a Coke"? Using fake brands in movies breaks my suspension of disbelief and annoys me. Same goes for video games.
I was under the impression that planes like the new Airbus and the new Boeing would be strictly non-gate airplanes, where it sits out on the tarmac and is accessed by a step truck. Runway lengths at any semi-major airport shouldn't be an issue at all, and as long as the planes can land and taxi to emtpy tarmac, they should be fine. Admittedly, servicing might be a problem with hanger sizes being wrong, etc. but in general, as long as the runways aren't too close together, there shouldn't be too many problems.
You're full of crap talking about the WTO. How is that a stride towards anything? Most analysts predict that China's entrance to the WTO is going to decimate the country economically. Especially hard hit are going to be the elderly on a fixed income, and China's extremely shaky banking industry. Also, I'd like some examples on how China's progressing democratically when any sort of dissent (read: Falungong, Christianity, any other religion that doesn't worship the current government) is prevented from meeting and expressing their beliefs.
"The people in this country *stongly* support their government and it's track record of growth, stability and success"
The idiocy of this statement is almost overwhelming. Have you ever picked up a history book? How about the cultural revolution? The Great Leap Forward? The civil war between the communists and nationalists? Tiananmen Square? If this is stability and a track record of growth, I'd love to have some of whatever you're smoking. We could go back further too to the thousands of years of warlords and dynasties but your perspective is obviously a little limited.
we do the essay/multiple choice part on paper, then we have lab tests that solve this problem. But seriously, there shouldn't be that much difference between writing something on paper and writing it on a computer. You shouldn't be surprised when something doesn't compile, because you should check your syntax. Also, if your algorithm has a major flaw, you should have thought of it or seen it BEFORE you started writing code - that's just good practice.
Hahahaha. The "average" user that uses Windows XP is a home user, and most home users turn off their machines every night. Windows XP and Windows 2000 are not the same - Windows 2000 doesn't come close to XP's reliability and uptime. I haven't rebooted my XP system in over 3 months, which is ever since I installed XP. I'm a huge linux fan, but XP does most things right, and I have extremely few complaints, much less than I do with Linux.
"We all know that China's news institutions (government controlled) will soon be ignored. The Chinese government won't always be able to restrict their users from reading information from the BBC, CNN, and other institutions."
Why do we all know this? If someone came up to you and told you that everything you had ever learned and been taught all your life was a lie (or at least a very highly distorted version of the truth) and that your primary sources of information were largely innacurate, would you believe them? Would you be willing to turn your whole outlook on life upside down? While you might if you were particularly independent, the average Chinese citizen won't. From living in China, I'd say that close to 90% of the young intellectuals, who have known about the Tiananmen Square incident and other debacles still trust the government news. They figure that the western news sources are just as biased, and while they are a definite curiosity, western news is just as unreliable as communist news. They have been taught all their lives that a free press is unreliable and prone to error, and they believe it.
Also, why can't they control the internet? They own all the infrastructure, the ISPs, the cable, everything. You're not very informed to think they just can't turn off whatever they want. They block all of geocities and angelfire, and often block cnn and other news sites when some issue that is sensitive to the government is happening. Don't underestimate what a determined dictatorship can accomplish, especially when they hold all of the cards.
The really funny thing is that most Chinese ISPs and websites self censor their content, out of fear that they'll be totally shut down. The flow of information in China is not out of control, and it won't be for a long time.
Maybe I should have clarified a little more. Amazon's suggestions never work for me, because I like old school, early nineties grunge and they figure that music sort of falls into "heavy" and "not heavy" categories. So I'm constantly reccomended stuff by Metallica, System of a Down, Primus, etc which are all heavy bands, but which don't fit the particular vein of heavy music I like. Google also made the jump to returning Godsmack, which is a newer hardcore band with a lot of grunge fundamentals (which I like) and Tool, and artsier, more emo-influenced heavy band, but still with grunge influences and ties. I don't think Godsmack would ever refer to themselves as grunge, but the connection exists, and google figured it out. Extremely impressive - after all, this is a highly subjective subject area, but one that still has some overall generalizations to it.
I spent a couple hours playing with google labs last night and one of the most impressiev things (to me) was how I put in 3 bands:
Nirvana Alice in Chains Pearl Jam
and received one of the most accurate lists of other grunge and hard rock/heavy bands back that I've seen. To be able to build such a list on something as subjective as music is very impressive, and shows you just how good the quality of google's algorithms are.
It sounds to me like a lot of people on here are missing the point. The point isn't that Microsoft has sucky and bug prone software, the point is that Microsoft has pulled the wool over everyone's eyes again. Everyone on here immediately began laughing with glee and indignantly crying for the government to force MS to "recall" their software. Everyone is missing the point that MS will do anything to keep its advantage, which it believes lies in closed source code. Therefore, MS uses the national security copout, and wins again, all the while laughing at the nerds on slashdot who completely and utterly miss the point.
Maybe I should clarify - the 90% estimate was a seat of the pants estimate I made based on the number of students in my class (150 in 3 classes) and the number of people who said they believed in the moon landing (1).
I grew up in China as well, and while you might be correct that nowadays, college age kids might be more inclined to believe the moon landing, anyone over 30 will have a terrible time believing it. They were alive in the 1960's, and they remember what their life was like then. China was absolute crap in regards to technology at the time, and it would be like telling someone in the US now that another country has had fusion power since 1970.
The reason is that during the 1960's, China couldn't fathom fabricating a reliable car, let alone a spacecraft. The state of technology in China then (and even now, although to less of an extent) was horrible and it is quite embarassing to China that they MIGHT be able to make a lunar landing roughly 20-30 YEARS after the U.S. did.
I taught a higher level English class in a Chinese university a year or two ago for a summer, and I was amazed that not only is this still the official party line, but approximately 90% of the public believes it, although you're correct that almost no scientist in the PRC would believe it.
Having lived in Asia for 15+ years, I can say that this is the way that almost all new movies makes if over there.
Somebody sneaks into a screaning with a camcorder and films the movie. It's always fun to see whether the guy will use a tripod (most don't for fear of getting caught), who's going to stand up during the movie, whether the dude will be eating popcorn (always a little hard to hear the dialogue), and what the audience finds funny.
These bootlegs are almost always sold as VCDs instead of DVDs and they are so low quality that if you have a prayer of seeing the movie at the theater, you don't touch them. Sometimes you get the ultimate surprise of watching "It's a Bug's Life" instead of "Jurrasic Park III", but it's all part of the experience.
P.S. to the MPAA - if you actually sold movies in China that were legal, this sort of thing would never fly with the public.
Not surprising, seeing as how one of these things is just under Job's personal salary of 82 million US dollars. Oops, sorry, 41 million in salary, 41 million in bonuses.
Probably the best way to hear if a band is using auto-pitch correction is to listen for the sound that Cher uses on her voice in that "Do you believe in love" song.
Linkin Park uses an auto-pitch corrector a lot too, as well as Willa Ford in her song "I wanna be bad".
I'll never understand why they just don't do it right, or get someone who can sing. It's like riding a bike - once you learn how to pick it out, you'll never evaluate a singer the same way again.
The real problem isn't the willful distribution of information. The problem is when some terrorist group targets Chuck and his SysAdmin pals before launching some kind of attack. Who thinks the CIA could operate at 100% when some of its key technology staff are toast - every little advantage helps.
See, the really interesting thing about your viewpoint is that you want what you consider "the 'public' norm" to be accepted and the other viewpoint to be rejected. You preach tolerance, but you're intolerant of their personal beliefs, which they hold just as much as you hold yours.
I agree with you, the murdering of abortion performing doctors is ridiculous, but so would most conservatives.
I'd also be willing to bet you only read sources of news that are admittedly run almost entirely by liberals (i.e. USA Today, Time, Newsweek, pretty much any major news outlet in the US) and you probably never read something like National Review. That's fine with me, but it seems like this is a classic case of the pot calling the kettle black.
"fun experiment, ask your average religious right how much the yen is at.. or the euro.. and see if they know"
Hahahaha. Don't you mean "your average American"? Oh wait, don't you mean "your average person?" I've traveled to over 25 different countries in my life and I've never met a normal person who knows what the current exchange rate is for some other country that they do not have direct dealings with.
Your statement implying that only religious right people are ignorant of the world is retarded.
You're a moron. Everyone in China knows what happened on June the 4th, they just know better than to discuss it with a foreigner who doesn't have a clue.
The Chinese firewall sucks. You can get at anything you want with very little technical know-how, and many do, which is why they are constantly shutting down internet cafes.
I can't remember the last time I was blocked from a site I wanted in China.
Lots of my classes ask for submissions written on a particular platform (linux, windows, heck even irix sometimes). My goal has always been to write my assignments in a different platform. It's helped me learn a lot about cross platform coding and lets me experience different operating systems.
Wow - that's a big screen.
on
New iMac Announced
·
· Score: 2, Redundant
"Apple also announced other new products like a 14' display on some iBooks"
A whole fourteen feet of screen for an extra 200 bucks? Wow - and the battery even lasts an hour longer!
Transmeta may end up being a business failure, but they will have achieved what they set out to do: delivering low power consuming chips to consumers. The chips just might just might not end up being supplied by Transmeta.
All in all, we the consumers win. It's doubtful Intel or AMD would have ever considered low power chips had it not been for Transmeta.
Slashdot Mirror
"The government has been cracking down on this supposedly spiritual movement."
I'm not sure why you threw in the "supposedly spiritual" comment - sounds alot like FUD. I don't agree with the Falun Gong's philosophy by any means, but theirs no room to or point in denying that they're a quasi-religious, spiritual movement.
"I don't why they would want to do this. This is hardly a good public relations move. Smells like a childish prank by some teenagers."
There is no such thing as bad publicity and in China, there is NO publicity. Most Chinese have no idea what the Falun Gong movement is, apart from what the government tells them, which usually are along the lines of "Falun Gong members eat their children." Seriously. Would you have been calling the civil rights activists childish when they tried to ride all white buses? Give me a break.
I personally LIKE it when a movie set in our time period and our world uses branding on its set. Which one is more believable "Mom, I'm going down to the drugstore to buy a Super-Duper-Cola" or "Mom, I'm going down to the drugstore to buy a Coke"? Using fake brands in movies breaks my suspension of disbelief and annoys me. Same goes for video games.
I was under the impression that planes like the new Airbus and the new Boeing would be strictly non-gate airplanes, where it sits out on the tarmac and is accessed by a step truck. Runway lengths at any semi-major airport shouldn't be an issue at all, and as long as the planes can land and taxi to emtpy tarmac, they should be fine. Admittedly, servicing might be a problem with hanger sizes being wrong, etc. but in general, as long as the runways aren't too close together, there shouldn't be too many problems.
You're full of crap talking about the WTO. How is that a stride towards anything? Most analysts predict that China's entrance to the WTO is going to decimate the country economically. Especially hard hit are going to be the elderly on a fixed income, and China's extremely shaky banking industry. Also, I'd like some examples on how China's progressing democratically when any sort of dissent (read: Falungong, Christianity, any other religion that doesn't worship the current government) is prevented from meeting and expressing their beliefs.
"The people in this country *stongly* support their government and it's track record of growth, stability and success"
The idiocy of this statement is almost overwhelming. Have you ever picked up a history book? How about the cultural revolution? The Great Leap Forward? The civil war between the communists and nationalists? Tiananmen Square? If this is stability and a track record of growth, I'd love to have some of whatever you're smoking. We could go back further too to the thousands of years of warlords and dynasties but your perspective is obviously a little limited.
It's not how big it is, it's how you use it.
Google is still way more useful in my opinion.
we do the essay/multiple choice part on paper, then we have lab tests that solve this problem. But seriously, there shouldn't be that much difference between writing something on paper and writing it on a computer. You shouldn't be surprised when something doesn't compile, because you should check your syntax. Also, if your algorithm has a major flaw, you should have thought of it or seen it BEFORE you started writing code - that's just good practice.
Hahahaha. The "average" user that uses Windows XP is a home user, and most home users turn off their machines every night. Windows XP and Windows 2000 are not the same - Windows 2000 doesn't come close to XP's reliability and uptime. I haven't rebooted my XP system in over 3 months, which is ever since I installed XP. I'm a huge linux fan, but XP does most things right, and I have extremely few complaints, much less than I do with Linux.
"We all know that China's news institutions (government controlled) will soon be ignored. The Chinese government won't always be able to restrict their users from reading information from the BBC, CNN, and other institutions."
Why do we all know this? If someone came up to you and told you that everything you had ever learned and been taught all your life was a lie (or at least a very highly distorted version of the truth) and that your primary sources of information were largely innacurate, would you believe them? Would you be willing to turn your whole outlook on life upside down? While you might if you were particularly independent, the average Chinese citizen won't. From living in China, I'd say that close to 90% of the young intellectuals, who have known about the Tiananmen Square incident and other debacles still trust the government news. They figure that the western news sources are just as biased, and while they are a definite curiosity, western news is just as unreliable as communist news. They have been taught all their lives that a free press is unreliable and prone to error, and they believe it.
Also, why can't they control the internet? They own all the infrastructure, the ISPs, the cable, everything. You're not very informed to think they just can't turn off whatever they want. They block all of geocities and angelfire, and often block cnn and other news sites when some issue that is sensitive to the government is happening. Don't underestimate what a determined dictatorship can accomplish, especially when they hold all of the cards.
The really funny thing is that most Chinese ISPs and websites self censor their content, out of fear that they'll be totally shut down. The flow of information in China is not out of control, and it won't be for a long time.
Maybe I should have clarified a little more. Amazon's suggestions never work for me, because I like old school, early nineties grunge and they figure that music sort of falls into "heavy" and "not heavy" categories. So I'm constantly reccomended stuff by Metallica, System of a Down, Primus, etc which are all heavy bands, but which don't fit the particular vein of heavy music I like. Google also made the jump to returning Godsmack, which is a newer hardcore band with a lot of grunge fundamentals (which I like) and Tool, and artsier, more emo-influenced heavy band, but still with grunge influences and ties. I don't think Godsmack would ever refer to themselves as grunge, but the connection exists, and google figured it out. Extremely impressive - after all, this is a highly subjective subject area, but one that still has some overall generalizations to it.
I spent a couple hours playing with google labs last night and one of the most impressiev things (to me) was how I put in 3 bands:
Nirvana
Alice in Chains
Pearl Jam
and received one of the most accurate lists of other grunge and hard rock/heavy bands back that I've seen. To be able to build such a list on something as subjective as music is very impressive, and shows you just how good the quality of google's algorithms are.
It sounds to me like a lot of people on here are missing the point. The point isn't that Microsoft has sucky and bug prone software, the point is that Microsoft has pulled the wool over everyone's eyes again. Everyone on here immediately began laughing with glee and indignantly crying for the government to force MS to "recall" their software. Everyone is missing the point that MS will do anything to keep its advantage, which it believes lies in closed source code. Therefore, MS uses the national security copout, and wins again, all the while laughing at the nerds on slashdot who completely and utterly miss the point.
Maybe I should clarify - the 90% estimate was a seat of the pants estimate I made based on the number of students in my class (150 in 3 classes) and the number of people who said they believed in the moon landing (1).
I grew up in China as well, and while you might be correct that nowadays, college age kids might be more inclined to believe the moon landing, anyone over 30 will have a terrible time believing it. They were alive in the 1960's, and they remember what their life was like then. China was absolute crap in regards to technology at the time, and it would be like telling someone in the US now that another country has had fusion power since 1970.
The reason is that during the 1960's, China couldn't fathom fabricating a reliable car, let alone a spacecraft. The state of technology in China then (and even now, although to less of an extent) was horrible and it is quite embarassing to China that they MIGHT be able to make a lunar landing roughly 20-30 YEARS after the U.S. did.
I taught a higher level English class in a Chinese university a year or two ago for a summer, and I was amazed that not only is this still the official party line, but approximately 90% of the public believes it, although you're correct that almost no scientist in the PRC would believe it.
Having lived in Asia for 15+ years, I can say that this is the way that almost all new movies makes if over there.
Somebody sneaks into a screaning with a camcorder and films the movie. It's always fun to see whether the guy will use a tripod (most don't for fear of getting caught), who's going to stand up during the movie, whether the dude will be eating popcorn (always a little hard to hear the dialogue), and what the audience finds funny.
These bootlegs are almost always sold as VCDs instead of DVDs and they are so low quality that if you have a prayer of seeing the movie at the theater, you don't touch them. Sometimes you get the ultimate surprise of watching "It's a Bug's Life" instead of "Jurrasic Park III", but it's all part of the experience.
P.S. to the MPAA - if you actually sold movies in China that were legal, this sort of thing would never fly with the public.
Not surprising, seeing as how one of these things is just under Job's personal salary of 82 million US dollars. Oops, sorry, 41 million in salary, 41 million in bonuses.
The presentation defaults to a picture every 25 miles. You have to increase resolution to every mile in order to see the nitty gritty.
Probably the best way to hear if a band is using auto-pitch correction is to listen for the sound that Cher uses on her voice in that "Do you believe in love" song.
Linkin Park uses an auto-pitch corrector a lot too, as well as Willa Ford in her song "I wanna be bad".
I'll never understand why they just don't do it right, or get someone who can sing. It's like riding a bike - once you learn how to pick it out, you'll never evaluate a singer the same way again.
The real problem isn't the willful distribution of information. The problem is when some terrorist group targets Chuck and his SysAdmin pals before launching some kind of attack. Who thinks the CIA could operate at 100% when some of its key technology staff are toast - every little advantage helps.
See, the really interesting thing about your viewpoint is that you want what you consider "the 'public' norm" to be accepted and the other viewpoint to be rejected. You preach tolerance, but you're intolerant of their personal beliefs, which they hold just as much as you hold yours.
I agree with you, the murdering of abortion performing doctors is ridiculous, but so would most conservatives.
I'd also be willing to bet you only read sources of news that are admittedly run almost entirely by liberals (i.e. USA Today, Time, Newsweek, pretty much any major news outlet in the US) and you probably never read something like National Review. That's fine with me, but it seems like this is a classic case of the pot calling the kettle black.
"fun experiment, ask your average religious right how much the yen is at .. or the euro .. and see if they know"
Hahahaha. Don't you mean "your average American"? Oh wait, don't you mean "your average person?" I've traveled to over 25 different countries in my life and I've never met a normal person who knows what the current exchange rate is for some other country that they do not have direct dealings with.
Your statement implying that only religious right people are ignorant of the world is retarded.
You're a moron. Everyone in China knows what happened on June the 4th, they just know better than to discuss it with a foreigner who doesn't have a clue.
The Chinese firewall sucks. You can get at anything you want with very little technical know-how, and many do, which is why they are constantly shutting down internet cafes.
I can't remember the last time I was blocked from a site I wanted in China.
Lots of my classes ask for submissions written on a particular platform (linux, windows, heck even irix sometimes). My goal has always been to write my assignments in a different platform. It's helped me learn a lot about cross platform coding and lets me experience different operating systems.
Transmeta may end up being a business failure, but they will have achieved what they set out to do: delivering low power consuming chips to consumers. The chips just might just might not end up being supplied by Transmeta.
All in all, we the consumers win. It's doubtful Intel or AMD would have ever considered low power chips had it not been for Transmeta.