Well! Finally someone has solved the "where will the neverending flow of new money come from" aspect of socialism that has bedeviled so many attempts to implement it.
That's the whole idea of a counterfeit. Replace quality (expensive) parts with cheap crap, put the famous name on the box and sell them at full price. You get the money, the original company gets all the customer complaints and bad reputation. The closest they get are "shanzhai" factories that meld parts from different customers together into their "own" product. I suppose it wouldn't be called classical counterfeiting.
I've had my original sweat-of-the-brow work counterfeited and copied, and it fucking sucks. I think the entire copyright debate should be had by people who have been victimized, but hey I'm weird and that's just me.
PS just today I was hanging out with the farming peasants, the mud is still on my shoes. Plenty of them left in China. You might even say that they make up the vast majority of China's population.
OK, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that Western reporters in Beijing are total dumbasses. They constantly write stories colored by their own blinders they're not even aware that they're wearing. The story doesn't even mention that WoW/Netease problems getting a license in China has been going on for a while now and is nothing new. It's not really even a story, just a space filler - bureaucratic turf wars between communist ministries are news now? Anyhow, I just wanted to mention whenever you see that line at the top of the story, immediately mentally activate your BS detectors. If you want China news, there is no shortage of primary sources in English. Even my own small city district has its own website, with a translated English page. Here is a much better story from Shanghai Daily, which lays out the issue in a much clearer fashion:
``The GAPP said downloading online games is also an "online publication". GAPP is responsible for reviewing and approving "publications", and the ministry has the right to regulate the "online game" market.''
Compelling story, eh? This is typical of what comes out of Western media in Beijing.
It baffles me that someone's tiny mind simply can not wrap itself around the idea that different humans might have different ways of looking at the world, and that everyone who disagrees with the correct view is a shill. And why is it that vigilante justice is roundly condemned whenever it is mentioned, and yet here it's modded up to 5?
It's this sort of blinkered, ignorant thinking that got us the whole "Twitter can save Iran!" thing. How did the whole "turning your web page green in sympathy" thing work out? Who prevailed in the end, people with computers or people with firearms? Modern-day equivalent, my ass.
Was that really your first thought on reading the headline? Sad how tainted people's minds are these days. Reminds me of the preacher who sees Satan's hand in everything or the policeman who is convinced that all teenagers are criminals. When your perspective is that skewed...jeez I don't know what to say.
Assuming I want to use some spare CPU cycles for some purpose or other, where should I apply to make sure it's OK? So far, we have protein folding and alien hunting as acceptable: what are some other uses of spare CPU that are acceptable and unacceptable?
With your selective quoting, and careful omissions, you have distorted and misrepresented what they have actually said.
Hell yeah! The man deserves a job with the New York Times or other mainstream media. Come on, don't even pretend that the pros don't use this tactic when they have an agenda to push.
Please define one moment in human history when the example you cite was not the case. The study of history is a powerful anecdote to those who think their lives are novel and unique, and who heavily criticize our own society for not living up to some sort of Kantian ideal.
Come on. Environmentalism is all about stopping development of any kind. Has nothing to do with wind, solar, etc. You know those people can always come up with an excuse of some kind to stop the EEEEEEVIL developers.
Also, how is someone who believes in his views and tells them to the world a "shill"? You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
I'd being willing to bet if Woodward and Bernstein were to try to break Watergate today, Nixon would call up the Washington Posts management/editors and it would be killed before it saw the light of day because the management of most papers today are pro establishment and pro corporate interests instead of a beacon of truth and freedom.
A bright, shining lie. Watergate has assumed mythical proportions and needs a good debunking, which it will of course never get. Watergate was a disgruntled political appointee abusing his position to get petty revenge. Nothing more.
Hey, I've got one better for you. I was walking down the corridors of a Chinese hospital, and my friend said, "you know what's wrong with this place? You know 'that hospital smell'? This hospital doesn't have it." He was right. There was nobody mopping the floors with disinfectant, nobody washing the walls, nobody doing anything other than basic janitorial work. It really brought home just how screwed you are if you end up in a place like that.
Then there was my friend who got asked, "do you want the real medicine? You're sure, because it's 3x the price and there's no going back after we open it." He said, "yeah, I'll pay, don't give me the counterfeit like you give to everyone else.
Nah, it's a flawed comparison from a self-selecting sample. You never see the kids that drop out or are too stupid to do anything but become the local witch-burner. By definition, you only see the talented ones.
Assuming other cultures are stupid is quite natural - just look at how developed urban populations despise rural people. The disgust is quite open and appears in the popular media daily.
Myspace is still vaguely relevant to my life because small bands always have a myspace page. Other than that, I never travel to myspace links. And since the local dump of a live house closed down last year, I haven't even done that.
Does Myspace have any actual relevance to anyone here? Or has it just become yet another fossilizing internet community like friendster or orkut?
Would be nice to actually have advancements in our culture so that the rest of the world doesnt mock us quite as often as they do!
That is a poor rationale for spending huge amounts of money. PS I don't know what fantasy world you live in, but avoiding mockery by foreigners is not exactly a priority of the American people. Substitute "French" or any other nationality and find how stupid that sounds.
Scams have always been around, and they have nothing to do with 'stupidity'. This is a conceit of our modern age, where we are desperately anxious to call other people stupid so as to relieve our anxiety that we might not be smart by comparison. Rather, it has to do with scammers who have made a study of human nature (the profession is ancient and goes back to the dawn of time). Calling people who fall for scams 'stupid' is not correct, calling them 'greedy and trying to screw the conman' is much more correct. Consider how many people in the current 'intelligent' audience would fall for the following:
You take an ordinary pack of 52 playing cards, spread them face up on the table, and offer to bet your victim that you can beat him at a game of draw poker, nothing wild, in which you both draw your cards from a face-up deck, taking any cards you wish. The game will be played according to standard rules except that you and he can help yourselves to any cards in the face-up deck both in putting together your initial hand and on the draw. You claim that your opponent will be unable to beat or even tie you even though each of you sees what the other man holds and even though you will allow him to go last.
The procedure, you explain, will be as follows: You will draw five cards from the face-up deck for your hand. Your opponent will then draw any five cards he wishes from the remainder of the deck to form his hand. You will then discard any cards you wish and draw cards from the remainder of the deck to complete your hand. Your opponent may then discard nay or all of his cards. He may take any cards remaining in the face-up deck to fill his hand. If he beats you, he wins the bet. Even if he only succeeds in tying your hand, he still wins. In order for you to win the bet, you must end up with a better hand than his.
Since your opponent gets to go last both on the deal and the draw, it would seem a sure thing for him to at least tie. After all, the best you can end up with is a royal flush, and he can tie that by taking another royal flush in a different suit. (Remember suits have no rank in poker.)
Actually, you have a mortal lock on this one if you employ the following strategy: In selecting your initial hand, take the four tens plus any other card. Your opponent will either give himself a higher four of a kind jacks, queens, kings, or aces or he will take a straight flush. (Note that the highest straight flush he can make is a five through nine of one suit. Your four tens preclude his building a royal flush or a straight flush higher than a nine.) Either way, he has you beat for the moment.
You now discard three of the tens and your odd card. Use that one ten to build the highest straight flush you can. For example, if he holds four aces, you give yourself a king-high straight flush. If your opponent holds a straight flush, you build a royal flush around the ten you hold. Now its his turn to draw, but there is no way he can make a straight flush as high as yours because you have killed the other three tens among the discards. Of course, your strategy will work just as well if, for some unaccountable reason, your opponent initially draws some other hand than the ones suggested above.
Letting your opponent go last, which seems to guarantee a tie for him, actually robs him of any chance of winning the bet. Take out a deck of cards and experiment for a couple of minutes and youll see that all your adversary can do is come in second best.
In my younger, more adventurous days, I often used this scam on a mark I had badly beaten at poker, if he still had any money left. As soon as he started bemoaning his bad luck, I would say, What do you mean luck? Youre the worst poker player Ive ever seen in my life. Its a wonder your mother lets you out of the house without a note pinned to your chest. You couldnt beat me at poker if I let you run through the deck and pick out your own hand. I would then pause as if suddenly getting an inspiration, and say, As a matter of fact, I bet you reall
Repeat these two sentences until you can draw a conclusion from them:
'International customers do pay a higher price for their books than US customers due to higher operating costs outside of the US' I fail to understand the reasoning for this in places where Amazon already has a huge operation (eg UK)
Hint: huge operation = higher operating costs. There's a FAIL here all right...oh wait, I see you even say "I fail" too! Well OK then.
How long before Twitter becomes a has-been like Everquest, Myspace, Tron Guy, and that rabbit that balances pancakes on its head? Anyone got an estimate on the timeline? Don't these things usually take 18 months to complete?
Oh yeah, right, twitter is a game-changer that can overthrow governments. Good job they did in Iran, wot?
This has all the marks of a hoax. Even if it's not, still, consider the current media climate in which journalists don't check sources but simply reprint crap that other newspapers cover. Try it yourself...fax in a "press release" to the newspaper and then watch it appear in print the next day, unverified. I used to do that when I worked at a government office, and I was just shocked that nobody ever called my phone number to check. How many hoaxes has the press reported this year, so far?
Yup, using speech as a social status marker is what aristocrats use to make sure that everyone around knows what they are. Yearning for aristocratic status causes people to behave as douchebags of the highest order, the poor souls.
On the other hand, from a story perspective, Doom was absolutely rubbish. You start in a room, no idea whats going on and you are surrounded by demons. You have to read the manual and supporting media to get a grip on it all something modern games would get heavily slated for doing.
OK, he lost me there. The entire idea of DOOM was that it was an incredibly technically advanced shoot-em-up. Being able to run around in the levels and shoot realistic-acting guns was great. All that you really had to know was to shoot the demons - the player has no other way to interact with the world other than shooting. Who needs a plot? That always baffled me about the old Japanese Nintendo games...they always had these incredibly convoluted unncessary plots that I read the first few lines of and then forgot it and went on to saving the kingdom or whatever. And I was a manual-reading completist.
When, exactly, did computer game snobs decide it was cool to call DOOM 'rubbish'? What happened to computer game snobs being polygon and FPS guys? What makes this guy look down his nose at something that he doesn't understand and apparently has no desire to understand?
It's always been a word for writers, not used in conversation. Wait, you're just now finding out you're a douchebag?
Hint: it's not the words are douchebaggy, it's the people who use the words.
Re:But what about Element 115?
on
Element 114 Verified
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· Score: 2, Informative
The only active X-Com forums on the internet nowadays. Game runs great in DOSbox and Xcomutil fixes the problems with the game. Still a great mix of strategy plus action/strategy game.
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Well! Finally someone has solved the "where will the neverending flow of new money come from" aspect of socialism that has bedeviled so many attempts to implement it.
So can I make it my full-time job to enforce federal laws in my spare time and make money at it too? I know which law I want to enforce...
I've had my original sweat-of-the-brow work counterfeited and copied, and it fucking sucks. I think the entire copyright debate should be had by people who have been victimized, but hey I'm weird and that's just me.
PS just today I was hanging out with the farming peasants, the mud is still on my shoes. Plenty of them left in China. You might even say that they make up the vast majority of China's population.
The BBC, for one, is renowned for its objectivity and lack of bias.
OK, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that Western reporters in Beijing are total dumbasses. They constantly write stories colored by their own blinders they're not even aware that they're wearing. The story doesn't even mention that WoW/Netease problems getting a license in China has been going on for a while now and is nothing new. It's not really even a story, just a space filler - bureaucratic turf wars between communist ministries are news now? Anyhow, I just wanted to mention whenever you see that line at the top of the story, immediately mentally activate your BS detectors. If you want China news, there is no shortage of primary sources in English. Even my own small city district has its own website, with a translated English page. Here is a much better story from Shanghai Daily, which lays out the issue in a much clearer fashion:
Compelling story, eh? This is typical of what comes out of Western media in Beijing.
It baffles me that someone's tiny mind simply can not wrap itself around the idea that different humans might have different ways of looking at the world, and that everyone who disagrees with the correct view is a shill. And why is it that vigilante justice is roundly condemned whenever it is mentioned, and yet here it's modded up to 5?
It's this sort of blinkered, ignorant thinking that got us the whole "Twitter can save Iran!" thing. How did the whole "turning your web page green in sympathy" thing work out? Who prevailed in the end, people with computers or people with firearms? Modern-day equivalent, my ass.
Assuming I want to use some spare CPU cycles for some purpose or other, where should I apply to make sure it's OK? So far, we have protein folding and alien hunting as acceptable: what are some other uses of spare CPU that are acceptable and unacceptable?
Hell yeah! The man deserves a job with the New York Times or other mainstream media. Come on, don't even pretend that the pros don't use this tactic when they have an agenda to push.
Please define one moment in human history when the example you cite was not the case. The study of history is a powerful anecdote to those who think their lives are novel and unique, and who heavily criticize our own society for not living up to some sort of Kantian ideal.
A substantial portion of those 90% voted for Bush. Fuck them.
Also, how is someone who believes in his views and tells them to the world a "shill"? You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
A bright, shining lie. Watergate has assumed mythical proportions and needs a good debunking, which it will of course never get. Watergate was a disgruntled political appointee abusing his position to get petty revenge. Nothing more.
Then there was my friend who got asked, "do you want the real medicine? You're sure, because it's 3x the price and there's no going back after we open it." He said, "yeah, I'll pay, don't give me the counterfeit like you give to everyone else.
Assuming other cultures are stupid is quite natural - just look at how developed urban populations despise rural people. The disgust is quite open and appears in the popular media daily.
Does Myspace have any actual relevance to anyone here? Or has it just become yet another fossilizing internet community like friendster or orkut?
That is a poor rationale for spending huge amounts of money. PS I don't know what fantasy world you live in, but avoiding mockery by foreigners is not exactly a priority of the American people. Substitute "French" or any other nationality and find how stupid that sounds.
You take an ordinary pack of 52 playing cards, spread them face up on the table, and offer to bet your victim that you can beat him at a game of draw poker, nothing wild, in which you both draw your cards from a face-up deck, taking any cards you wish. The game will be played according to standard rules except that you and he can help yourselves to any cards in the face-up deck both in putting together your initial hand and on the draw. You claim that your opponent will be unable to beat or even tie you even though each of you sees what the other man holds and even though you will allow him to go last.
The procedure, you explain, will be as follows: You will draw five cards from the face-up deck for your hand. Your opponent will then draw any five cards he wishes from the remainder of the deck to form his hand. You will then discard any cards you wish and draw cards from the remainder of the deck to complete your hand. Your opponent may then discard nay or all of his cards. He may take any cards remaining in the face-up deck to fill his hand. If he beats you, he wins the bet. Even if he only succeeds in tying your hand, he still wins. In order for you to win the bet, you must end up with a better hand than his.
Since your opponent gets to go last both on the deal and the draw, it would seem a sure thing for him to at least tie. After all, the best you can end up with is a royal flush, and he can tie that by taking another royal flush in a different suit. (Remember suits have no rank in poker.)
Actually, you have a mortal lock on this one if you employ the following strategy: In selecting your initial hand, take the four tens plus any other card. Your opponent will either give himself a higher four of a kind jacks, queens, kings, or aces or he will take a straight flush. (Note that the highest straight flush he can make is a five through nine of one suit. Your four tens preclude his building a royal flush or a straight flush higher than a nine.) Either way, he has you beat for the moment.
You now discard three of the tens and your odd card. Use that one ten to build the highest straight flush you can. For example, if he holds four aces, you give yourself a king-high straight flush. If your opponent holds a straight flush, you build a royal flush around the ten you hold. Now its his turn to draw, but there is no way he can make a straight flush as high as yours because you have killed the other three tens among the discards. Of course, your strategy will work just as well if, for some unaccountable reason, your opponent initially draws some other hand than the ones suggested above.
Letting your opponent go last, which seems to guarantee a tie for him, actually robs him of any chance of winning the bet. Take out a deck of cards and experiment for a couple of minutes and youll see that all your adversary can do is come in second best.
In my younger, more adventurous days, I often used this scam on a mark I had badly beaten at poker, if he still had any money left. As soon as he started bemoaning his bad luck, I would say, What do you mean luck? Youre the worst poker player Ive ever seen in my life. Its a wonder your mother lets you out of the house without a note pinned to your chest. You couldnt beat me at poker if I let you run through the deck and pick out your own hand. I would then pause as if suddenly getting an inspiration, and say, As a matter of fact, I bet you reall
'International customers do pay a higher price for their books than US customers due to higher operating costs outside of the US'
I fail to understand the reasoning for this in places where Amazon already has a huge operation (eg UK)
Hint: huge operation = higher operating costs. There's a FAIL here all right...oh wait, I see you even say "I fail" too! Well OK then.
Oh yeah, right, twitter is a game-changer that can overthrow governments. Good job they did in Iran, wot?
This has all the marks of a hoax. Even if it's not, still, consider the current media climate in which journalists don't check sources but simply reprint crap that other newspapers cover. Try it yourself...fax in a "press release" to the newspaper and then watch it appear in print the next day, unverified. I used to do that when I worked at a government office, and I was just shocked that nobody ever called my phone number to check. How many hoaxes has the press reported this year, so far?
Yup, using speech as a social status marker is what aristocrats use to make sure that everyone around knows what they are. Yearning for aristocratic status causes people to behave as douchebags of the highest order, the poor souls.
OK, he lost me there. The entire idea of DOOM was that it was an incredibly technically advanced shoot-em-up. Being able to run around in the levels and shoot realistic-acting guns was great. All that you really had to know was to shoot the demons - the player has no other way to interact with the world other than shooting. Who needs a plot? That always baffled me about the old Japanese Nintendo games...they always had these incredibly convoluted unncessary plots that I read the first few lines of and then forgot it and went on to saving the kingdom or whatever. And I was a manual-reading completist.
When, exactly, did computer game snobs decide it was cool to call DOOM 'rubbish'? What happened to computer game snobs being polygon and FPS guys? What makes this guy look down his nose at something that he doesn't understand and apparently has no desire to understand?
Hint: it's not the words are douchebaggy, it's the people who use the words.
The only active X-Com forums on the internet nowadays. Game runs great in DOSbox and Xcomutil fixes the problems with the game. Still a great mix of strategy plus action/strategy game.