People are used to commentators being *part of the action*, not just narrating the events. That's why you'll get things like Americans doing commentary for themselves while scoring a touchdown in football, or whatever. It just doesn't seem "real" unless there's someone watching and saying something about it. The NASA guy didn't provide the "required" dose of "reality" to the recording, and that's why everyone freaks out about it. It's not "normal" to see a TV person observe an event and not freak out about it.
His bank accounts are long since empty and properties have been hidden. The guy's a scammer, he scams for a living. Getting sued was part of the business plan from the beginning.
When you have judgments out against you, and you have zero assets, one thing they can do is wait years until you get an inheritance, and then legally take that.
There was no "fine". This is a civil judgement. Were it a fine, it might have some teeth behind it, but the spammer can essentially laugh off a civil monetary award. Remember, he's a criminal, so it's not like obeying the law is something that he does. All this does is prevent him from inheriting anything from his parents.
Nice try. A resident of the UK uses litres, as the metric system is far superior to anything American. This is but one of the many reasons Americans are inferior.
The Viet Cong were destroyed in the 1968 Tet Offensive. After that point, they were irrelevant. TV news cast the Tet Offensive as a defeat, and made it so.
The US withdrew in 1972. Congress cut off all help to South Vietnam to spite Nixon because of Watergate. The South Vietnamese were not in bad shape when the US left.
Well, to the modern type of person who attends protests, saying things is as effective as doing them. This has a long history going back to the 60s radicals. There's this idea of "the narrative" where real-life events are supposed to follow a script. In the past, framing events made them happen in reality (the story of US defeat in Vietnam, for example) but this only works in free countries with biased media. This is why so many people were baffled when Iran didn't fall..."I changed my web page background to green and applied twitter directly to the forehead...why didn't it work?"
This product was not meant to be bought for people to use for themselves. This was meant to be bought as a gift for others! Think about it...the recipient opens the present, it's this LOL keyboard thing, everyone laughs, you get off the hook for buying something, and the thing gets discarded after two days of use because it's hogging a USB slot. TFA is slashdotted but if the price is $12-20 then it's prime gift category, because people will spend that much.
In a speech in Madison, Wis., Obama told his supporters that rallying to his cause was today's equivalent of the "greatest generation" rallying to defeat Hitler and Tojo. Oprah merely calls him, "The One," saying he will help us "evolve to a higher plane."
In his pre-campaign book, "The Audacity of Hope," Barack Obama proclaims, "I find comfort in the fact that the longer I'm in politics the less nourishing popularity becomes, that a striving for rank and fame seems to betray a poverty of ambition, and that I am answerable mainly to the steady gaze of my own conscience." Some might think this odd testimony from a young and inexperienced freshman senator on the cusp of seeking the highest rank, and the most famous position, in the world. It's a bit like a parish priest saying he's happy with his modest lot in life and then declaring he's throwing his hat in the ring to become pope.
But a closer reading reveals a possible explanation. Perhaps he's an adulation junkie. Maybe the diminishing "nourishment" Sen. Obama receives from "popularity" is actually causing him to ratchet up his pursuit of more and more praise just to get the minimal fix he needs. That would account for why a man who thinks striving for popularity is a character flaw has nonetheless decided to give his nomination acceptance speech in a 76,000-seat football stadium.
Or it might tell us why a candidate who hasn't even been nominated yet wants to re-enact some of the most famous scenes from both Reagan and JFK's highlight reels by holding a rally at Germany's Brandenburg Gate, even though he's not a head of state yet. (German authorities, aware of Obama's rock-star status with the German public, diplomatically suggested that it was up to Obama to decide what is in "good taste.") Perhaps Dominic Lawson, writing in the British newspaper The Independent had it right when he recently wrote that Obama is "a man of stunning articulacy, but also stunning self-regard." Last July, Obama explained to reporters that he would eventually overtake Hillary Rodham Clinton in the polls because "to know me is to love me." Some months later, according to The Associated Press' Ron Fournier, he proclaimed, "Every place is Barack Obama country once Barack Obama's been there." Of course, Obama and his surrogates would say he's just being lighthearted, he doesn't really take himself all that seriously. One problem with that interpretation is that there's little evidence that he's interested in dispelling or rebutting the cult of personality he's developed. Obama himself talks of reversing the ocean's tides. The overarching theme to his entire campaign - "We are the ones we've been waiting for," and all that - is that voting for Obama is proof of the cosmic superiority of... Obama voters.
Take his decision to deliver his acceptance speech at Invesco Field at Mile High in Denver. It seems that the venue for the rest of the Democratic convention - the Pepsi Center (occupancy 21,000) - is just too small. Obama says he wants to give the common folk more "access" to the process. Only a man with an Olympian's sense of entitlement to mass worship could describe such a choreographed descent upon a place called "Mile High" as an effort to bond with the common man. A demigod, it seems, is never so tall as when he stoops to bask in the adoration of the little people.
BZZT Wrong! The toothpaste-tube robot only exists because the labor became too expensive. I live in China and I constantly see factories that could automate, but don't. Why? The robot costs more than the labor. The DAY that the robot costs less - that's they day they switch over. But not until then. I leave it to the reader as to why labor costs put so many people out of work in America (hint: I won't say why but it rhymes with "union").
Gosh, I had totally forgotten about this one. Wow, that brings me back. I remember it was awfully pretentious when it came out, "now you can write for the galaxy-famous HHG" but I had assumed it died off with all the other drek from the previous century. I guess government funding has its advantages, eh? It didn't even occur to them to cut crap like this until it was extreme budget tightening time.
Wikipedia is not the right reference to use. *shock* *horror* *how dare someone insinuate that "the wikipedia" is not the fount of all human knowledge!* The best place for research is USENET (search for "Google Groups" instead these days) because that's the only central location where games discussions went on back then. Sure, there were BBS and such, but one-node communications platforms are very limited.
China is getting a great deal on this. Not only do they get investment, but they get the tooling and most importantly first-hand knowhow to build reliable high-performance jet engines. China has had lots of trouble mastering jet engines. They are very tricky to get right, especially for them to last a long time and not be replaced every 1000 hours. Apparently just because your net.agents stole the plans from poorly-secured GE desktops doesn't mean you actually know how to use the knowledge.
The unnamed state-owned company that GE will be giving money to isn't even identified in the article. This is because state-owned company means that it is an arm of the Chinese government. Americans unfamiliar with the Chinese SOE and searching for an American equivalent merely need think of GM: owned by the government and not so much worried with making profit as keeping workers employed and achieving national political objectives. These SOEs are a major part of the Chinese economy (even though "journalists" like to tell us that China has gone all capitalist now) and doing a JV (joint venture) with them is putting on lipstick and stockings and getting into bed with the government. Whatever happens next, you know you're getting fucked. We are all aware, of course, that under Chinese law JVs are required to be owned 51% by the Chinese partner? And that there is a long list of broken companies in the last ten years that went into JVs and ended up lying by the roadside, lipstick smudged and used condoms hanging out of their asses? Look up Danone vs. Wahaha for a well-known example. GE's slogan, "imagination at work", should serve it well as it goes shopping for lingerie and a nice water-based lube for the pleasure of its new Chinese husband.
Is that "the narrative" these days? That the world was better off when the Soviet Union was around? Here's a summary of a book I've been reading, I picked it up at the Half Price Books near a university along with a lot of other books about Marxism (mostly Chinese, but this one was a buck so I threw it in). We all know what happens when far-right fanatics get into power, and we couldn't avoid this knowledge if we wanted to. However, what happens when the extreme left jumps in the saddle is rarely discussed in any detail, perhaps because 90% of university professors in America label themselves as being "liberal or very liberal" in their political opinions, and are generally sympathetic to the iconic figures of communism (Che, Castro, Marx, etc.) if not to communism itself. You could take a course on Nazi Germany at my undergraduate alma mater, actually several of them, but there were no courses on Stalin or the history of applied communism. Perhaps because of this sympathy, and because it failed so catastrophically everywhere it reared its ugly head, the topic is smothered in silence. This book should be mandatory reading for anyone still clinging to romantic fantasies about communism, or for that matter, any middle-class college student who thinks wearing a Che t-shirt makes an intelligent political statement.
Viktor Suvorov (real name Vladimir Bogdanovich Rezun), who grew up under communism, has never kept silent on what it was like to live in a society operating under Marxist-Leninist philosophy. He was a former member of the Soviet GRU who later defected to Britain during the height of the cold war. Suvorov revels in exposing the Soviet leviathan as lumbering, corrupt, unspeakably cruel and yet almost comically inefficient - a year's supply of anti-magnetic paint is used up whitewashing rocks because an admiral wants an improved-looking coastline; thousands of tons of chemical fertilizer are dumped into the Volga River (creating an environmental catastrophe) because the Party didn't make adequate preparations to store it; military exercises are run which leave the country defenseless; soldiers are sentenced to barbarous punishments for the slightest infractions; generals keep private harems and use military resources to construct fabulous dachas; incompetent drunks are promoted to important posts simply to get rid of them. Nothing works, the bureacracy is suffocating, one has to bribe officials to get them to do their jobs and secret police stooges are everywhere, ignoring corruption and crime but mercilessly punishing political unorthodoxy. By the time Suvorov was a young lieutenant, he understood the Soviet habit of substituting the word "hell" with "communism." So you can imagine his feelings when, in the summer of '68, the Soviet army was sent to Czechoslovakia to crush the burgeoning democratic movement there. Expecting to be greeted as liberators, the naive Soviets were pelted with eggs, rocks and rotten tomatoes, cursed roundly and told to stop doing to Eastern Europe what they had done to their own country. That, and seeing how much better off Czechoslovakia was than Russia, was so psychologically devastating to the liberators that the Soviet government sent most of them to the Chinese frontier for the rest of their military service, lest they start asking too many unfortunate questions. The Liberators is a half-tragic, half-comic book, one which shows the amusing and yet painful coming-to-consciousness of a young man who wakes up one day to discover that he is not a liberator but an inmate - and his country a prison. 200 pages. A must read for everyone.
superiority of Western culture? Where, exactly, did I say that? If you're witch-hunting, you'll probably find a witch. The only mention of superiority is in your own mind. I suppose actually living in the East for so many years has a different view. BTW, Mr. Cultural Blinders, the topic in this thread is tests for government employment so I'm not sure that T.A. experience really applies. Anti-Western hate seems appropriate for an academic, however.
I have lived outside our Western culture for a while now, and there is a big difference in the idea of tests and examinations. We have the idea that the test is there to see who is competent to get the job. Simple, right? Nope, it's our own cultural biases that make us think this way. Elsewhere, it's all about getting what comes after the test. Your actual skill is irrelevant, not really a worthy topic of discussion. It's all about the job that you can get, or the university that you can get into, or whatever. The idea that if you don't have the skills then you're not qualified doesn't translate. Eastern cultures have a long history of examinations and take a different view than we do. I know a teacher who, after repeatedly warning against cheating in his class, was fired for daring to catch his students cheating in class. The students lost face, you see, and the teacher (not the students' cheating) was identified as the cause of the problem. True story.
Scientific socialism refers to a method for understanding and predicting social, economic and material phenomena by examining their historical trends through the use of the scientific method in order to derive probable outcomes and probable future developments.
Basically, socialism is scientific. If you disagree with socialism, then you are disagreeing with the equivalent to the theory of evolution. Go ahead and laugh. Millions of real people were classified as clinically insane for disagreeing with scientific socialism. Sent to mental institutions, given electric shock therapy, and so on. For some strange reason, this has never been memorialized in the popular media. A strange omission. Go figure!
Slashdot Mirror
People are used to commentators being *part of the action*, not just narrating the events. That's why you'll get things like Americans doing commentary for themselves while scoring a touchdown in football, or whatever. It just doesn't seem "real" unless there's someone watching and saying something about it. The NASA guy didn't provide the "required" dose of "reality" to the recording, and that's why everyone freaks out about it. It's not "normal" to see a TV person observe an event and not freak out about it.
Anyone who was there remembers the tasteless jokes that spread across the media in the days after the disaster. Let's try a few!
Q: What was the Shuttle's last transmission?
A: "I said I wanted a BUD Light!"
Q: What does NASA stand for?
A: Need Another Seven Astronauts
Q: Did you know why they only drink Sprite at NASA?
A: They couldn't get 7-UP.
Q: Did you hear that they are sending up another teacher on the next shuttle mission?
A: She's going to be a substitute.
Q: Did you know that Christa McAuliffe was blue eyed?
A: One blew left and one blew right.
Q: What were Christa McAuliffe's last words?
A: "What's this button do?"
Q: What were Christa McAuliffe's last words to her husband?
A: "You feed the kids - I'll feed the fish."
Q: What subject did Christa MacAuliffe teach?
A: Social studies . . . but now she's history.
Q: What's the difference between the Patriots and the Challenger?
A: The Patriots made it past Miami.
His bank accounts are long since empty and properties have been hidden. The guy's a scammer, he scams for a living. Getting sued was part of the business plan from the beginning.
When you have judgments out against you, and you have zero assets, one thing they can do is wait years until you get an inheritance, and then legally take that.
There was no "fine". This is a civil judgement. Were it a fine, it might have some teeth behind it, but the spammer can essentially laugh off a civil monetary award. Remember, he's a criminal, so it's not like obeying the law is something that he does. All this does is prevent him from inheriting anything from his parents.
Nice try. A resident of the UK uses litres, as the metric system is far superior to anything American. This is but one of the many reasons Americans are inferior.
The Viet Cong were destroyed in the 1968 Tet Offensive. After that point, they were irrelevant. TV news cast the Tet Offensive as a defeat, and made it so.
The US withdrew in 1972. Congress cut off all help to South Vietnam to spite Nixon because of Watergate. The South Vietnamese were not in bad shape when the US left.
Motivation = $$$
Sorry that wasn't made clear. It is typically assumed.
Sure you can punish them for it. Casinos kick out card counters all the time. Skill is not allowed while gambling.
So, basically, he's the only man in the entire situation with a motivation to lie. Gotcha.
Well, to the modern type of person who attends protests, saying things is as effective as doing them. This has a long history going back to the 60s radicals. There's this idea of "the narrative" where real-life events are supposed to follow a script. In the past, framing events made them happen in reality (the story of US defeat in Vietnam, for example) but this only works in free countries with biased media. This is why so many people were baffled when Iran didn't fall..."I changed my web page background to green and applied twitter directly to the forehead...why didn't it work?"
This product was not meant to be bought for people to use for themselves. This was meant to be bought as a gift for others! Think about it...the recipient opens the present, it's this LOL keyboard thing, everyone laughs, you get off the hook for buying something, and the thing gets discarded after two days of use because it's hogging a USB slot. TFA is slashdotted but if the price is $12-20 then it's prime gift category, because people will spend that much.
In a speech in Madison, Wis., Obama told his supporters that rallying to his cause was today's equivalent of the "greatest generation" rallying to defeat Hitler and Tojo. Oprah merely calls him, "The One," saying he will help us "evolve to a higher plane."
In his pre-campaign book, "The Audacity of Hope," Barack Obama proclaims, "I find comfort in the fact that the longer I'm in politics the less nourishing popularity becomes, that a striving for rank and fame seems to betray a poverty of ambition, and that I am answerable mainly to the steady gaze of my own conscience." Some might think this odd testimony from a young and inexperienced freshman senator on the cusp of seeking the highest rank, and the most famous position, in the world. It's a bit like a parish priest saying he's happy with his modest lot in life and then declaring he's throwing his hat in the ring to become pope.
But a closer reading reveals a possible explanation. Perhaps he's an adulation junkie. Maybe the diminishing "nourishment" Sen. Obama receives from "popularity" is actually causing him to ratchet up his pursuit of more and more praise just to get the minimal fix he needs. That would account for why a man who thinks striving for popularity is a character flaw has nonetheless decided to give his nomination acceptance speech in a 76,000-seat football stadium.
Or it might tell us why a candidate who hasn't even been nominated yet wants to re-enact some of the most famous scenes from both Reagan and JFK's highlight reels by holding a rally at Germany's Brandenburg Gate, even though he's not a head of state yet. (German authorities, aware of Obama's rock-star status with the German public, diplomatically suggested that it was up to Obama to decide what is in "good taste.") Perhaps Dominic Lawson, writing in the British newspaper The Independent had it right when he recently wrote that Obama is "a man of stunning articulacy, but also stunning self-regard." Last July, Obama explained to reporters that he would eventually overtake Hillary Rodham Clinton in the polls because "to know me is to love me." Some months later, according to The Associated Press' Ron Fournier, he proclaimed, "Every place is Barack Obama country once Barack Obama's been there." Of course, Obama and his surrogates would say he's just being lighthearted, he doesn't really take himself all that seriously. One problem with that interpretation is that there's little evidence that he's interested in dispelling or rebutting the cult of personality he's developed. Obama himself talks of reversing the ocean's tides. The overarching theme to his entire campaign - "We are the ones we've been waiting for," and all that - is that voting for Obama is proof of the cosmic superiority of ... Obama voters.
Take his decision to deliver his acceptance speech at Invesco Field at Mile High in Denver. It seems that the venue for the rest of the Democratic convention - the Pepsi Center (occupancy 21,000) - is just too small. Obama says he wants to give the common folk more "access" to the process. Only a man with an Olympian's sense of entitlement to mass worship could describe such a choreographed descent upon a place called "Mile High" as an effort to bond with the common man. A demigod, it seems, is never so tall as when he stoops to bask in the adoration of the little people.
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/item_6isjHhFs3jYtG9eaH1qtOO;jsessionid=6EAF54E5F76F09B94F03096D9522F398
BZZT Wrong! The toothpaste-tube robot only exists because the labor became too expensive. I live in China and I constantly see factories that could automate, but don't. Why? The robot costs more than the labor. The DAY that the robot costs less - that's they day they switch over. But not until then. I leave it to the reader as to why labor costs put so many people out of work in America (hint: I won't say why but it rhymes with "union").
Well good on you for getting the fuck out, Mr. Japanese Handle. More whiny Americans should follow your example!
Gosh, I had totally forgotten about this one. Wow, that brings me back. I remember it was awfully pretentious when it came out, "now you can write for the galaxy-famous HHG" but I had assumed it died off with all the other drek from the previous century. I guess government funding has its advantages, eh? It didn't even occur to them to cut crap like this until it was extreme budget tightening time.
In the land where soap operas receive more respect than science comedies, perhaps. That's a pretty fucked-up place, in my opinion.
Achievement unlocked: ability to be even more pretentious whilst in line at Starbucks
Wikipedia is not the right reference to use. *shock* *horror* *how dare someone insinuate that "the wikipedia" is not the fount of all human knowledge!* The best place for research is USENET (search for "Google Groups" instead these days) because that's the only central location where games discussions went on back then. Sure, there were BBS and such, but one-node communications platforms are very limited.
China is getting a great deal on this. Not only do they get investment, but they get the tooling and most importantly first-hand knowhow to build reliable high-performance jet engines. China has had lots of trouble mastering jet engines. They are very tricky to get right, especially for them to last a long time and not be replaced every 1000 hours. Apparently just because your net.agents stole the plans from poorly-secured GE desktops doesn't mean you actually know how to use the knowledge.
The unnamed state-owned company that GE will be giving money to isn't even identified in the article. This is because state-owned company means that it is an arm of the Chinese government. Americans unfamiliar with the Chinese SOE and searching for an American equivalent merely need think of GM: owned by the government and not so much worried with making profit as keeping workers employed and achieving national political objectives. These SOEs are a major part of the Chinese economy (even though "journalists" like to tell us that China has gone all capitalist now) and doing a JV (joint venture) with them is putting on lipstick and stockings and getting into bed with the government. Whatever happens next, you know you're getting fucked. We are all aware, of course, that under Chinese law JVs are required to be owned 51% by the Chinese partner? And that there is a long list of broken companies in the last ten years that went into JVs and ended up lying by the roadside, lipstick smudged and used condoms hanging out of their asses? Look up Danone vs. Wahaha for a well-known example. GE's slogan, "imagination at work", should serve it well as it goes shopping for lingerie and a nice water-based lube for the pleasure of its new Chinese husband.
Viktor Suvorov (real name Vladimir Bogdanovich Rezun), who grew up under communism, has never kept silent on what it was like to live in a society operating under Marxist-Leninist philosophy. He was a former member of the Soviet GRU who later defected to Britain during the height of the cold war. Suvorov revels in exposing the Soviet leviathan as lumbering, corrupt, unspeakably cruel and yet almost comically inefficient - a year's supply of anti-magnetic paint is used up whitewashing rocks because an admiral wants an improved-looking coastline; thousands of tons of chemical fertilizer are dumped into the Volga River (creating an environmental catastrophe) because the Party didn't make adequate preparations to store it; military exercises are run which leave the country defenseless; soldiers are sentenced to barbarous punishments for the slightest infractions; generals keep private harems and use military resources to construct fabulous dachas; incompetent drunks are promoted to important posts simply to get rid of them. Nothing works, the bureacracy is suffocating, one has to bribe officials to get them to do their jobs and secret police stooges are everywhere, ignoring corruption and crime but mercilessly punishing political unorthodoxy. By the time Suvorov was a young lieutenant, he understood the Soviet habit of substituting the word "hell" with "communism." So you can imagine his feelings when, in the summer of '68, the Soviet army was sent to Czechoslovakia to crush the burgeoning democratic movement there. Expecting to be greeted as liberators, the naive Soviets were pelted with eggs, rocks and rotten tomatoes, cursed roundly and told to stop doing to Eastern Europe what they had done to their own country. That, and seeing how much better off Czechoslovakia was than Russia, was so psychologically devastating to the liberators that the Soviet government sent most of them to the Chinese frontier for the rest of their military service, lest they start asking too many unfortunate questions. The Liberators is a half-tragic, half-comic book, one which shows the amusing and yet painful coming-to-consciousness of a young man who wakes up one day to discover that he is not a liberator but an inmate - and his country a prison. 200 pages. A must read for everyone.
superiority of Western culture? Where, exactly, did I say that? If you're witch-hunting, you'll probably find a witch. The only mention of superiority is in your own mind. I suppose actually living in the East for so many years has a different view. BTW, Mr. Cultural Blinders, the topic in this thread is tests for government employment so I'm not sure that T.A. experience really applies. Anti-Western hate seems appropriate for an academic, however.
I have lived outside our Western culture for a while now, and there is a big difference in the idea of tests and examinations. We have the idea that the test is there to see who is competent to get the job. Simple, right? Nope, it's our own cultural biases that make us think this way. Elsewhere, it's all about getting what comes after the test. Your actual skill is irrelevant, not really a worthy topic of discussion. It's all about the job that you can get, or the university that you can get into, or whatever. The idea that if you don't have the skills then you're not qualified doesn't translate. Eastern cultures have a long history of examinations and take a different view than we do. I know a teacher who, after repeatedly warning against cheating in his class, was fired for daring to catch his students cheating in class. The students lost face, you see, and the teacher (not the students' cheating) was identified as the cause of the problem. True story.
What, that old spelling flame again? A better flame would be being a Eurocentric jerk and lecturing us all on the superiority of PAL vs. NTSC.
Uh...guy? Hungary was not in the West. It was rather firmly in the East. It tried to join our side, but was was thankfully put down by the forces of scientific socialism and prevented from making a huge mistake.
Oh, and dude? I live in China. It's not a police state. Please stop saying that. Kthx!
Scientific socialism refers to a method for understanding and predicting social, economic and material phenomena by examining their historical trends through the use of the scientific method in order to derive probable outcomes and probable future developments.
Basically, socialism is scientific. If you disagree with socialism, then you are disagreeing with the equivalent to the theory of evolution. Go ahead and laugh. Millions of real people were classified as clinically insane for disagreeing with scientific socialism. Sent to mental institutions, given electric shock therapy, and so on. For some strange reason, this has never been memorialized in the popular media. A strange omission. Go figure!