Those kinds of loads aren't sensitive to time, people are. Moreover, the amount of energy spent to move loads like that would be enormous. You can get a LOT onto a container ship or bulk carrier.
China's highspeed rail is great. Not as great as the Japanese bullet train, the attendants are not nearly as hot and the snack cart only has the usual spicy chicken feet and instant Nescafe. But you can get a ticket for not much more than a bus, it's much faster, there's no traffic, and even the second class seats are comfortable. The first time I saw a Chinese hexie hao pull into the station, I immediately thought, "Ah, it's a shinkansen!" Indeed, the trains in my area are license-built copies of the Kawasaki Heavy Industries E2-1000 Series Shinkansen. I always liked taking the train in China, but the main problem was that the bus was always more frequent and sometimes you get some old stinky train full of redneck farmers if you don't know what to watch for when buying your tickets. With the new highspeed rail, the choice is easy.
Who cares if it loses money? That's not the point. The Chinese are loaded with cash right now. The point is to make China, and the world, a smaller place. There's a city south of here that I like to visit. However, the bus trip was 3 1/2 hours of bumpy highways (they never connect the road to abutments correctly so you always get two lurches going over every bridge)...IF there was no traffic or wrecks on the road. I never got down there as often as I liked, and my reluctance was purely due to the unpleasant journey. Now, it's 90 minutes of comfort. The last time I returned from there, I discovered that there are express trains that only take 65 minutes for the trip. Think about it: this city to the south used to be "far". Now, it is "near". I can go there in the morning and be back in the evening. A shopping trip isn't out of the question. Business is easier to conduct. Commuting to work from smaller cities outside is now an option. How's that for change the world, eh?
The black cloud in all of this is construction quality. The head of China's highspeed rail was fired, and either him or someone else highranking said he would under no circumstances ride the train himself. Oh well, I suppose I'll play the lottery on that one, and hope it isn't my train that derails at 161mph.
Connecting the rest of Asia to China's highspeed network will be pricey, but when it's finished Chinese business and influence will spread. That's the whole idea, isn't it? Invest now, pay off later. I tell you, it's weird living under a government that actually acts in its own national interest, unlike my own government.
Where have you been for the last 20 years? On Mars? Geeks & nerds are respected, even fashionable. How do we know? The typical crowd of fashionable idiots tries to horn in on geekdom these days. You've never seen it? Or just blinded by hatred and spewing out some crap?
Nope! Significant portions of the Chinese economy are SOEs, or state-owned enterprises. Fully owned by the government. There are plenty of true-blue believers in communism and Maoism in the government, I know some of them. I know this "they're capitalist now" meme is all throughout western leftism, presumably to use (once again) the No True Scotsman fallacy to paint China as eeeeeeevil.
Chinese don't use Google, they use Baidu.com and sina.com. Try searching on there. You're right about all the lies, though. Journalists just make shit up all the time. Out of ignorance or arrogance, it's inexcusable either way.
Did you hear about the Jasimine revolution protests in China? About 100 foreign journalists showed up, and about zero Chinese protesters showed up. It's all about "the narrative" about China, which was written in 1989 by CNN. Foreign journalists are ready, willing, and able to aid anti-Chinese movements, it's a sad fact. Doesn't it suck when the commies are right?
I'm going to take a controversial stand here and probably be modded into oblivion but here it goes. This is a good move by China. Why? It increases social stability at the cost of individual rights. How many groups of self-described smart people in America are trying to roll back individual freedoms in the name of "it's better our way"? After all, freedom includes the freedom to make the "wrong" choice, and this this really pisses the smart people off. After all, they're the intelligent ones and know what the correct choices are politically, and anyone who opposes them isn't a noble dissenter but (a) mistaken (b) an idiot (c) probably medically insane.
You have to understand where China is coming from with this. The first and foremost priority of the government is to hold the country together. Everyone thinks of China as a monolithic entity, but this is just plain ignorant. China is a multicultural society, and like all multicultural societies it is fundamentally unstable. Action must be taken when unrest occurs, lest it spread throughout the country and result in the horror of all Chinese: a fragmented, divided China. China experienced the warlord era in the 20th century and never wants to go back. Before that, China lost sovereignty over its own territory (foreign concessions) and that wasn't much fun either. If a few peasants need to be crushed to ensure the bad old days will never return, then so be it. These protesters are making the "wrong" choice. All the smart people agree, and it is stupidity or insanity to oppose the choices they make. In China, the smart people really do control the government without that pesky democracy interference. Wasn't there an article here recently about the high government officials all being scientists and engineers? So, the government WILL do what it thinks is necessary to ensure social stability. And to Chinese, stability is more important than progress.
Why are the people protesting? China has a long tradition of the central government having limited control over the provinces and even less control over cities, counties, and lower branches of government. Corruption is endemic. Beijing promotes reform, but local officials are powerful in their own princedoms. It's kind of like trying to reform the State Department or the CIA from the presidency. However, Beijing CAN enforce its will when it comes to clearly overriding concerns like keeping the country from splintering apart. When a few thousand laobaixing get screwed over, there's really nothing to be done. Moreover, the mandarins cheating the peasants is not a pressing national integrity concern, it's been happening in China for thousands of years. So some people in flyover territory get screwed...again, the smart people agree that this is not a problem at all and in fact is sometimes a good thing. After all, who doesn't enjoy a good redneck-bashing?
Gosh, I'd almost feel sorry for newspapers, if they hadn't ruthlessly used their mainstream media status to advance personal and political agendas, both through their choice of stories to report as well as deliberate omissions ("that's not a story"). Bizarrely, journalists still cling to the "we are heroes and white knights" self-narrative, and still in the year 2011 have not had a heel realization.
Pff, gimme a break. Clicks/hovers? You're talking about a plumber. Designers are artists, their next job depends on what they did last. So what if the great unwashed panned it? Their opinions don't matter. When's the last time someone, anyone, admired an efficient plumbing installation? Designers are not in the same class, they are creatives not workers.
The same concept explains why serious movie fans have such wildly different impressions of movies than the rest of us. We're watching the movie, and they're watching the director move the camera around.
Shed your Western-centric perspective. Your post is so confused I'm not really sure where to begin. Can we make an internet post that doesn't mention Iraq?
Didn't hear about the Jasmine revolutions? The government of Egypt was overthrown. The idea was to let the revolution catch fire and spread everywhere. Around here, there was a busload of cops posted near every major public area for about two months afterward. It is no secret that Google as well as individual high-ranking Google employees supported the issue. Read some diverse news sources sometime.
Re:Kevin Bacon has played many roles in his career
on
X-Men: First Class
·
· Score: 1
You sound like a Teabagger whining about Obama's Nobel Peace Prize. Get a grip, the award means a lot to a lot of people, and they don't hand them out like McNuggets. Both awards mean you've been judged worthy by a very hard-to-please group.
It's hard to disagree - Google is indeed anti-China. Vilifying the Chinese government is either corporate policy, or the individual policy of Google employees. Either way, it's difficult to tell which is which, and Google resources are used either way.
Maybe you heard about the "Jasmine" revolution in China. What a joke. The only people for it...didn't live in China. You wouldn't know that from reading Google sources. The Chinese people are quite good at spotting media lies, having grown up on a steady diet of outrageous leftist propaganda in newspapers since the Revolution. China has made it clear in the last few years that the glory days are over and anyone doing business in China must get in line like everyone else and play according to the rules. Yes, China does have laws, and they function surprisingly well once you know how to use them. Google wants to sit in China, make billions, and lend a helping hand to anyone wanting to overthrow the government. Can there be any surprise that China reacts this way, especially when they're correct?
Have you ever actually LISTENED to the "audio alternative"? I got complaints on my website because people couldn't register an account. I tried the CAPTCHA audio, and oh my God it was horrible. Some scratchy digitized voice saying "ALPHA, BRAVO, TANGO, NOVEMBER" and so on. It was hard for me to understand, and I'm a native speaker. My website has a significant minority of non-native speakers of English, and there's no way they could have deciphered the audio captcha. That Tango Uniform stuff is US military phonetic alphabet...who the heck knows about that outside America? What would a random person know to do when some voice starts saying random words like Charlie and foxtrot? How many ESL speakers have "foxtrot" on their vocabulary lists?
Seriously, look it up. Britain declared war on Germany on behalf of an "ally" (Poland) that she had no intention of helping. Bomber Harris proceeded to intentionally target "enemy" civilians, hiding the fact from the air crews, thus proving that he knew it was a war crime and against international law. America unleashed an unprecedented series of provocations, leading to Japan declaring war. America followed this up by a war of aggression, putting Americans that looked like Japanese into concentration camps. White Americans invented new weapons of mass destruction and used them against nonwhites. The Onion put it best: "Nagasaki bombed 'for the hell of it': second bomb would have just 'sat around anyway'.
What, unfamiliar with this narrative? Have you attended a university history course in the last twenty years? My guess is: not.
It's a victory for environmentalists worldwide. We all knew Fukushima could be successfully exploited to make positive changes elsewhere. You just wait, Fukushima will be the gift that just keeps on giving. In the future, any pro-nuclear arguments will be answered with "But...Fukushima!" Let's all pour a pint of naturally brewed reinheitsgebot beer and celebrate!
Alaska Airlines extends its deepest sympathies and apologies to those affected by the latest plane crash. It is our corporate policy that all fancy electronic gadgets be fully charged at all times. Unfortunately, it appears that our low-wage pilots either disregarded or disobeyed our well-thought-out plan and as a result failed to keep the flight manual's battery charged, sending a fully-loaded passenger flight into the ocean at 600mph. We anticipate a fine by the FAA, but as we bribed the corrupt politician Sarah Palin we don't anticipate any legal problems. Sucks to be you. Sincerely, corporate America.
Gosh, that makes America EXACTLY LIKE EVERY OTHER NATION ON THE PLANET. That's so horrible, isn't it? Wow, constructing a system to preserve what you have. Hint: begin studying history. Oh, and America does not have "more than enough." Tell that to the homeless. 40 years ago, homeless people could go to asylums and receive...asylum from society. ACLU lawsuits closed that down, bigtime. Ever see "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest"? A devastating indictment of giving involuntary sanctuary to society's most vulnerable people.
It doesn't matter if they're 15, 18, 25, 55, or whatever. If you're portraying them as underage, then they're underage, period. You're liable for prosecution. If you don't agree, then you're just asking for a sub-industry of porn where people pretend to be underage, and that will gratify a lot of men. The whole entire purpose of anti-kiddieporn laws is to deny unholy men satisfaction. Unless you're on the side of giving men sexual gratification by seeing underage girls...you're not, right? What would you say if you saw a couple consisting of a creepy 42-year-old white guy and an ignorant 21-year-old Asian girl? And they're kissing in public? If your answer is not "spit on them" or "humiliate them with all means at your disposal," then we can only assume that you're one of them.
You don't have to harm children for it to be a crime. You just have to give sexual gratification to perverts. That's it. If the perverts like it, then it's a crime. Perverts don't get off to Chun Li losing a fight. Perverts DO get off to looking up Chun Li's skirt. Again, if you're on the side of the creepy old guys, you're not on our side.
Society has decreed that raping children is the worst crime a man can commit. Worse than murder. A girl of 17 cannot legally consent to sex, therefore it's rape, just like having date rape with a drunk woman who is legally inebriated and cannot give consent. Your mileage may vary if you live in one of those American redneck states where it's legal to have sex with underage girls (Sarah Palin territory...do you really want to identify with that?) You want to change this? Go ahead and start your own political campaign where your platform is "there's nothing wrong with looking up the skirts of underage girls in video games." Let me know how far you get before feminists find your house and dump a truckload of manure on your front yard.
It's one thing to anonymously say this on Slashdot, and it's quite another to say it in public. Although I wouldn't expect someone who uses the phrase "underage pixels" to understand. Go ahead, put your real name, address, and phone number attached to your comment that "no children are being harmed." I dare you. I double-dare you. Go ahead, pussy, you don't have the guts. You know that women's groups will come down on you like a ton of bricks, and you lack the balls to disagree with the dominant paradigm.
Slashdot Mirror
Those kinds of loads aren't sensitive to time, people are. Moreover, the amount of energy spent to move loads like that would be enormous. You can get a LOT onto a container ship or bulk carrier.
Too late. Congress passed a law a few years ago that shut down the mail-order bride business. Can't have competition for American women.
China's highspeed rail is great. Not as great as the Japanese bullet train, the attendants are not nearly as hot and the snack cart only has the usual spicy chicken feet and instant Nescafe. But you can get a ticket for not much more than a bus, it's much faster, there's no traffic, and even the second class seats are comfortable. The first time I saw a Chinese hexie hao pull into the station, I immediately thought, "Ah, it's a shinkansen!" Indeed, the trains in my area are license-built copies of the Kawasaki Heavy Industries E2-1000 Series Shinkansen. I always liked taking the train in China, but the main problem was that the bus was always more frequent and sometimes you get some old stinky train full of redneck farmers if you don't know what to watch for when buying your tickets. With the new highspeed rail, the choice is easy.
Who cares if it loses money? That's not the point. The Chinese are loaded with cash right now. The point is to make China, and the world, a smaller place. There's a city south of here that I like to visit. However, the bus trip was 3 1/2 hours of bumpy highways (they never connect the road to abutments correctly so you always get two lurches going over every bridge)...IF there was no traffic or wrecks on the road. I never got down there as often as I liked, and my reluctance was purely due to the unpleasant journey. Now, it's 90 minutes of comfort. The last time I returned from there, I discovered that there are express trains that only take 65 minutes for the trip. Think about it: this city to the south used to be "far". Now, it is "near". I can go there in the morning and be back in the evening. A shopping trip isn't out of the question. Business is easier to conduct. Commuting to work from smaller cities outside is now an option. How's that for change the world, eh?
The black cloud in all of this is construction quality. The head of China's highspeed rail was fired, and either him or someone else highranking said he would under no circumstances ride the train himself. Oh well, I suppose I'll play the lottery on that one, and hope it isn't my train that derails at 161mph.
Connecting the rest of Asia to China's highspeed network will be pricey, but when it's finished Chinese business and influence will spread. That's the whole idea, isn't it? Invest now, pay off later. I tell you, it's weird living under a government that actually acts in its own national interest, unlike my own government.
Disgusting pro-capitalist propaganda. In my narrative of the story, the "layabout" is black and has been denied a job by the racist city clerk.
Where have you been for the last 20 years? On Mars? Geeks & nerds are respected, even fashionable. How do we know? The typical crowd of fashionable idiots tries to horn in on geekdom these days. You've never seen it? Or just blinded by hatred and spewing out some crap?
Nope! Significant portions of the Chinese economy are SOEs, or state-owned enterprises. Fully owned by the government. There are plenty of true-blue believers in communism and Maoism in the government, I know some of them. I know this "they're capitalist now" meme is all throughout western leftism, presumably to use (once again) the No True Scotsman fallacy to paint China as eeeeeeevil.
Chinese don't use Google, they use Baidu.com and sina.com. Try searching on there. You're right about all the lies, though. Journalists just make shit up all the time. Out of ignorance or arrogance, it's inexcusable either way.
Did you hear about the Jasimine revolution protests in China? About 100 foreign journalists showed up, and about zero Chinese protesters showed up. It's all about "the narrative" about China, which was written in 1989 by CNN. Foreign journalists are ready, willing, and able to aid anti-Chinese movements, it's a sad fact. Doesn't it suck when the commies are right?
I'm going to take a controversial stand here and probably be modded into oblivion but here it goes. This is a good move by China. Why? It increases social stability at the cost of individual rights. How many groups of self-described smart people in America are trying to roll back individual freedoms in the name of "it's better our way"? After all, freedom includes the freedom to make the "wrong" choice, and this this really pisses the smart people off. After all, they're the intelligent ones and know what the correct choices are politically, and anyone who opposes them isn't a noble dissenter but (a) mistaken (b) an idiot (c) probably medically insane.
You have to understand where China is coming from with this. The first and foremost priority of the government is to hold the country together. Everyone thinks of China as a monolithic entity, but this is just plain ignorant. China is a multicultural society, and like all multicultural societies it is fundamentally unstable. Action must be taken when unrest occurs, lest it spread throughout the country and result in the horror of all Chinese: a fragmented, divided China. China experienced the warlord era in the 20th century and never wants to go back. Before that, China lost sovereignty over its own territory (foreign concessions) and that wasn't much fun either. If a few peasants need to be crushed to ensure the bad old days will never return, then so be it. These protesters are making the "wrong" choice. All the smart people agree, and it is stupidity or insanity to oppose the choices they make. In China, the smart people really do control the government without that pesky democracy interference. Wasn't there an article here recently about the high government officials all being scientists and engineers? So, the government WILL do what it thinks is necessary to ensure social stability. And to Chinese, stability is more important than progress.
Why are the people protesting? China has a long tradition of the central government having limited control over the provinces and even less control over cities, counties, and lower branches of government. Corruption is endemic. Beijing promotes reform, but local officials are powerful in their own princedoms. It's kind of like trying to reform the State Department or the CIA from the presidency. However, Beijing CAN enforce its will when it comes to clearly overriding concerns like keeping the country from splintering apart. When a few thousand laobaixing get screwed over, there's really nothing to be done. Moreover, the mandarins cheating the peasants is not a pressing national integrity concern, it's been happening in China for thousands of years. So some people in flyover territory get screwed...again, the smart people agree that this is not a problem at all and in fact is sometimes a good thing. After all, who doesn't enjoy a good redneck-bashing?
Gosh, I'd almost feel sorry for newspapers, if they hadn't ruthlessly used their mainstream media status to advance personal and political agendas, both through their choice of stories to report as well as deliberate omissions ("that's not a story"). Bizarrely, journalists still cling to the "we are heroes and white knights" self-narrative, and still in the year 2011 have not had a heel realization.
Pff, gimme a break. Clicks/hovers? You're talking about a plumber. Designers are artists, their next job depends on what they did last. So what if the great unwashed panned it? Their opinions don't matter. When's the last time someone, anyone, admired an efficient plumbing installation? Designers are not in the same class, they are creatives not workers.
The same concept explains why serious movie fans have such wildly different impressions of movies than the rest of us. We're watching the movie, and they're watching the director move the camera around.
You: joke. Sound: whoosh.
Shed your Western-centric perspective. Your post is so confused I'm not really sure where to begin. Can we make an internet post that doesn't mention Iraq?
Didn't hear about the Jasmine revolutions? The government of Egypt was overthrown. The idea was to let the revolution catch fire and spread everywhere. Around here, there was a busload of cops posted near every major public area for about two months afterward. It is no secret that Google as well as individual high-ranking Google employees supported the issue. Read some diverse news sources sometime.
You sound like a Teabagger whining about Obama's Nobel Peace Prize. Get a grip, the award means a lot to a lot of people, and they don't hand them out like McNuggets. Both awards mean you've been judged worthy by a very hard-to-please group.
It's hard to disagree - Google is indeed anti-China. Vilifying the Chinese government is either corporate policy, or the individual policy of Google employees. Either way, it's difficult to tell which is which, and Google resources are used either way.
Maybe you heard about the "Jasmine" revolution in China. What a joke. The only people for it...didn't live in China. You wouldn't know that from reading Google sources. The Chinese people are quite good at spotting media lies, having grown up on a steady diet of outrageous leftist propaganda in newspapers since the Revolution. China has made it clear in the last few years that the glory days are over and anyone doing business in China must get in line like everyone else and play according to the rules. Yes, China does have laws, and they function surprisingly well once you know how to use them. Google wants to sit in China, make billions, and lend a helping hand to anyone wanting to overthrow the government. Can there be any surprise that China reacts this way, especially when they're correct?
But the main problem with the Chinese system. Users only can. Speaking in sentence fragments using the mobile phone.
So, if my users are NATO soldiers or air traffic controllers, then it's OK. It's NOT self-explanatory if you're a non-native English speaker.
Have you ever actually LISTENED to the "audio alternative"? I got complaints on my website because people couldn't register an account. I tried the CAPTCHA audio, and oh my God it was horrible. Some scratchy digitized voice saying "ALPHA, BRAVO, TANGO, NOVEMBER" and so on. It was hard for me to understand, and I'm a native speaker. My website has a significant minority of non-native speakers of English, and there's no way they could have deciphered the audio captcha. That Tango Uniform stuff is US military phonetic alphabet...who the heck knows about that outside America? What would a random person know to do when some voice starts saying random words like Charlie and foxtrot? How many ESL speakers have "foxtrot" on their vocabulary lists?
Seriously, look it up. Britain declared war on Germany on behalf of an "ally" (Poland) that she had no intention of helping. Bomber Harris proceeded to intentionally target "enemy" civilians, hiding the fact from the air crews, thus proving that he knew it was a war crime and against international law. America unleashed an unprecedented series of provocations, leading to Japan declaring war. America followed this up by a war of aggression, putting Americans that looked like Japanese into concentration camps. White Americans invented new weapons of mass destruction and used them against nonwhites. The Onion put it best: "Nagasaki bombed 'for the hell of it': second bomb would have just 'sat around anyway'.
What, unfamiliar with this narrative? Have you attended a university history course in the last twenty years? My guess is: not.
It's a victory for environmentalists worldwide. We all knew Fukushima could be successfully exploited to make positive changes elsewhere. You just wait, Fukushima will be the gift that just keeps on giving. In the future, any pro-nuclear arguments will be answered with "But...Fukushima!" Let's all pour a pint of naturally brewed reinheitsgebot beer and celebrate!
Alaska Airlines extends its deepest sympathies and apologies to those affected by the latest plane crash. It is our corporate policy that all fancy electronic gadgets be fully charged at all times. Unfortunately, it appears that our low-wage pilots either disregarded or disobeyed our well-thought-out plan and as a result failed to keep the flight manual's battery charged, sending a fully-loaded passenger flight into the ocean at 600mph. We anticipate a fine by the FAA, but as we bribed the corrupt politician Sarah Palin we don't anticipate any legal problems. Sucks to be you. Sincerely, corporate America.
Gosh, that makes America EXACTLY LIKE EVERY OTHER NATION ON THE PLANET. That's so horrible, isn't it? Wow, constructing a system to preserve what you have. Hint: begin studying history. Oh, and America does not have "more than enough." Tell that to the homeless. 40 years ago, homeless people could go to asylums and receive...asylum from society. ACLU lawsuits closed that down, bigtime. Ever see "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest"? A devastating indictment of giving involuntary sanctuary to society's most vulnerable people.
Opposing the President is racism. Didn't you get the memo?
It doesn't matter if they're 15, 18, 25, 55, or whatever. If you're portraying them as underage, then they're underage, period. You're liable for prosecution. If you don't agree, then you're just asking for a sub-industry of porn where people pretend to be underage, and that will gratify a lot of men. The whole entire purpose of anti-kiddieporn laws is to deny unholy men satisfaction. Unless you're on the side of giving men sexual gratification by seeing underage girls...you're not, right? What would you say if you saw a couple consisting of a creepy 42-year-old white guy and an ignorant 21-year-old Asian girl? And they're kissing in public? If your answer is not "spit on them" or "humiliate them with all means at your disposal," then we can only assume that you're one of them.
You don't have to harm children for it to be a crime. You just have to give sexual gratification to perverts. That's it. If the perverts like it, then it's a crime. Perverts don't get off to Chun Li losing a fight. Perverts DO get off to looking up Chun Li's skirt. Again, if you're on the side of the creepy old guys, you're not on our side.
Society has decreed that raping children is the worst crime a man can commit. Worse than murder. A girl of 17 cannot legally consent to sex, therefore it's rape, just like having date rape with a drunk woman who is legally inebriated and cannot give consent. Your mileage may vary if you live in one of those American redneck states where it's legal to have sex with underage girls (Sarah Palin territory...do you really want to identify with that?) You want to change this? Go ahead and start your own political campaign where your platform is "there's nothing wrong with looking up the skirts of underage girls in video games." Let me know how far you get before feminists find your house and dump a truckload of manure on your front yard.
It's one thing to anonymously say this on Slashdot, and it's quite another to say it in public. Although I wouldn't expect someone who uses the phrase "underage pixels" to understand. Go ahead, put your real name, address, and phone number attached to your comment that "no children are being harmed." I dare you. I double-dare you. Go ahead, pussy, you don't have the guts. You know that women's groups will come down on you like a ton of bricks, and you lack the balls to disagree with the dominant paradigm.