I have a bike of the type you described. I just got off it about 10 minutes ago, actually.
The e-bike is great. I love mine. However, it's not a solution to all problems. Here are the problems that I see with e-bikes in China:
Bike thieves are everywhere, and it's better to steal e-bikes instead of a normal bicycle.
The bike lanes are crowded, and people simply don't watch where they're going. They swerve all over the place, and cars speed around blind corners.
Of course you need a license - I had to get one for mine. I don't know where you got that idea.
They're vulnerable to the usual problems of bicycles - cold weather, rainy weather, hot weather, basically any kind of weather other than "warm and sunny" makes it a pain to ride an e-bike. All winter, I wrapped myself up in clothes and scarves until only my eyes were visible.
The pedals ABSOLUTELY DO NOT WORK to help if you have a shortage of power. The bike is about 40 pounds heavier with the battery in it, plus the weight of the frame, which is heavier than a normal bike. It takes less energy just to get off and push the bike.
I love my e-bike, but to say that it's a panacea is just deceptive.
Actually, yes. Terrorists aren't the smartest people in the world. Look at how many of them get caught, compared to the number of successful terrorist attacks.
Seti was the seed-corn for the whole concept of doing scientific computing as a distributed calculation.
Nope. You're thinking of distributed.net, which did cryptography research. SETI came after, and gave people a pretty screensaver (ooh!), and everyone thinks that the SETI client was number 1 because it's the first one that they heard of.
Which China do you live in? My friends all agree that the Chinese government is crap, but it's the government they have and that's that. "Mao was 70% right" and all that, except for the millions of peasants he murdered.
It's an interesting projection on your part to call patriotism "frightening". Not biased, are we?
Nah. I'm a citizen of the USA who is an expat in a bonafide fascist state, and it's nothing like back home. You people are fricking morons. If I stood outside with a sign against the government, I'd be in jail in an hour. If I led a demonstration down the street, we'd have the riot police on us. If I published a newspaper article critical of the government, I'd be in jail. All of these things occur regularly without incident in the USA.
So - basically, you want Solaris to be Linux. Sorry, d00d, not gonna happen. Sounds like you started with linux, and now anything that's not linux sux.
Actually, the introduced some mistakes of their own. No kidding.
It all turned out well, though. I talked to a government official who actually speaks English, and he sympathized with my plight. He invited me for dinner on Friday! (being invited to dinner with a Communist government official is a huge deal in China)
Uh...licensing costs? They just steal it. It's standard operating procedure. Seriously.
Just this weekend, I was at the local expo at my city here in China (I'm an expat). I open up their little guide magazine that comes with the gift bag and city map. Inside, I find content ripped off directly from my own website (I run the local English-language city guide). It's stuff that I wrote, and the freaking government copied it. Of course, there was no use complaining - what am I going to do, sue?
Actually it was given to me by my mother as a birthday present. She didn't have a lot of money at the time, and it was a really nice surprise. The dang thing lasted for 10 years before I finally lost it in a move.
I was bitching at the utter vapidity of people who believe that they're making a "lifestyle choice" when they buy a damn music player. It's just marketing, and people actually buy into it and repeat the ad copy with a straight face.
Also, do you know WHY America gets criticzed for even (relatively, compared to the Darfur genocide) slips in human rights records?
Because AI is a biased organization that lives and breathes anti-Americanism?
Check out their annual report - it begins with a letter from Amnesty's secretary general, Irene Khan. The letter opens with the events of August 19, 2003, when the United Nations envoy to Iraq, Sergio Vieira de Mello, was killed in an attack on United Nations headquarters in Baghdad. Khan wonders why the "legitimacy and credibility of the UN could have eroded to such a fatal degree," noting that the UN was marginalized by America's march to war. That is supposed to explain the bombing of UN headquarters in Iraq? This peculiar bit of reasoning defies logic. Later on in the letter, Khan condemns "unequivocally" the actions of terrorist groups. But this hardly makes up for her earlier implication that America's rocky relationship with the UN somehow led to the August 19 attacks.
Khan worries that Washington is trampling on human rights in its search for security, and muses about lost opportunities to correct social injustice and inequality as increased funding goes to the Pentagon's budget rather than to poverty-alleviation programs. While condemning "armed groups and individuals," she doesn't delve into much detail about the enormous harm wrought on the lives and rights of untold millions living under the intolerant tenets of religious extremism.
The United States is named five times in her opening letter, and indirectly alluded to on several other occasions. No other country merits such sustained criticism. Certainly not the government of Sudan, which is guilty of ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity in what is the worst humanitarian crisis in the world today. As many as a million Sudanese in the Darfur region have been driven from their homes and tens of thousands have been slaughtered by militias loyal to the government. Khan does not mention the government of North Korea, which keeps a population of 25 million living in abject poverty and isolation, with more than 6 million Koreans depending on international handouts to avoid starvation while the regime spends scarce resources to build nuclear weapons. Khan mentions only in passing the human rights problems in the Congo, where more than 3 million people have died in a war nobody pays much attention to. Egypt merits a brief mention, but Khan does not bother criticizing Saudi Arabia, Syria, Libya, or any of the other Arab countries where jails are filled with political prisoners who often linger behind bars even after their sentences are completed. The millions of Burmese living under the heel of military dictatorship also fail to garner a mention in Khan's letter, as do the populations of increasingly repressive Central Asia regimes. And, of course, Khan declined to write about the travesty of the UN Human Rights Commission, which has lost all credibility by counting among its members some of the world's worst human rights violators.
Yes, the details of each country's abuses appear inside the report. But the overarching views and priorities of Amnesty International take shape in Khan's introductory letter and in the press release. After all, those are the sections of the report that most readers are likely to see.
And Amnesty's bias isn't just reflected in who it condemns; it's also revealed in where it directs praise. Amid the desolate landscape allegedly created by Washington, Amnesty takes solace in the emergence of what it calls a "global justice movement"--comprising the millions who, according to Amnesty, "took to the streets around the world in solidarity with the Iraqi people." That's an amazingly simplistic characterization of anti-war marches--it's not clear how a movement that urges the abandonment of Iraq stands in "solidarity with the Iraqi people"--and one that makes Amnesty sound more like a left-wing activist group than the rational, analytical organization it claims to be. Human rights are indeed under attack, and victims of abuse need staunch--and serious--defenders more than ever. Amnesty International could be at the forefront of this work, if it weren't so busy carrying out a narrow political agenda.
Urbanites...lifestyle? Jeez, did you actually believe the marketing gimmicks? Amazing how shallow people can be.
It's a fricking MP3 player, not a lifestyle. I had a personal music device 20 years ago, it was called a Sony Walkman, and it wasn't "designed for urbanites", whatever the fuck that means.
Hahaha...AI is a neutral organization? Please tell me you're not that naive. They spend most of their time denouncing the USA and have little time left to denounce the Darfur genocide, for instance.
Developing economies like India and China has official versions of audio-visual content priced very high.
I've been living in China for 2 years now, and I have yet to see an authentic DVD on sale ANYWHERE. I ask Chinese people where to buy legit DVDs, and they don't know what I'm talking about.
Remember watching a film in theaters costs anywhere from 50 cents to 1.5 dollars in these countries.
Nope. Movie ticket costs $7.50, with half price Tuesdays and $3.12 before 6pm.
I've been doing manufacturing in China for a few years now, and I can confirm that this sort of thing is exactly what the Chinese would do.
The strange part is that Lenovo doesn't even need to do that - the Chinese are stealing American technology left and right, and they're doing just fine without bugged PCs.
Uh...using a proxy can hardly be considered "hacking".
I have an unencrypted squid proxy on a box in the States, and that works just fine. Only, I don't call it "hacking" and I only use it as necessary. If I use the proxy to browse sites inside China, it greatly slows my connection.
Banks are absolutely horrible. They are mean skinflints and will never give anything to anybody, for any reason. Give source code out, for free? Come on, they won't even loan money to black people.
Slashdot Mirror
--Hussein Massawi, Hezbollah leader
So, how do you "talk to" or "open dialogue" with that, exactly?
"The greatest weapon of the fascist
Is the tolerance of the pacifist"
-- "Give It Revolution," Suicidal Tendencies
Racist much? San Antonio is a minority-majority city.
Nope, you have to take a license test and you get a license. Maybe you're driving illegally?
Yeah, the sucky E-bikes are more bicycle-like. Lighter battery = much shorter battery life.
The e-bike is great. I love mine. However, it's not a solution to all problems. Here are the problems that I see with e-bikes in China:
- Bike thieves are everywhere, and it's better to steal e-bikes instead of a normal bicycle.
- The bike lanes are crowded, and people simply don't watch where they're going. They swerve all over the place, and cars speed around blind corners.
- Of course you need a license - I had to get one for mine. I don't know where you got that idea.
- They're vulnerable to the usual problems of bicycles - cold weather, rainy weather, hot weather, basically any kind of weather other than "warm and sunny" makes it a pain to ride an e-bike. All winter, I wrapped myself up in clothes and scarves until only my eyes were visible.
- The pedals ABSOLUTELY DO NOT WORK to help if you have a shortage of power. The bike is about 40 pounds heavier with the battery in it, plus the weight of the frame, which is heavier than a normal bike. It takes less energy just to get off and push the bike.
I love my e-bike, but to say that it's a panacea is just deceptive.Actually, yes. Terrorists aren't the smartest people in the world. Look at how many of them get caught, compared to the number of successful terrorist attacks.
Animal Farm and 1984 were reactions to Stalinism. George Orwell became a rightwing nutbag after becoming disillusioned by Communism.
Uh, hate to be the one to break this to you - but George Orwell was what we would today call a neocon wingnut. Seriously.
So, it's sort of like New York City, then?
You need an emo lawn. It cuts itself.
Old adage? That's a new one. The old one is "cheap, fast, good, pick any two".
Nope. You're thinking of distributed.net, which did cryptography research. SETI came after, and gave people a pretty screensaver (ooh!), and everyone thinks that the SETI client was number 1 because it's the first one that they heard of.
It's an interesting projection on your part to call patriotism "frightening". Not biased, are we?
Nah. I'm a citizen of the USA who is an expat in a bonafide fascist state, and it's nothing like back home. You people are fricking morons. If I stood outside with a sign against the government, I'd be in jail in an hour. If I led a demonstration down the street, we'd have the riot police on us. If I published a newspaper article critical of the government, I'd be in jail. All of these things occur regularly without incident in the USA.
So - basically, you want Solaris to be Linux. Sorry, d00d, not gonna happen. Sounds like you started with linux, and now anything that's not linux sux.
It all turned out well, though. I talked to a government official who actually speaks English, and he sympathized with my plight. He invited me for dinner on Friday! (being invited to dinner with a Communist government official is a huge deal in China)
Just this weekend, I was at the local expo at my city here in China (I'm an expat). I open up their little guide magazine that comes with the gift bag and city map. Inside, I find content ripped off directly from my own website (I run the local English-language city guide). It's stuff that I wrote, and the freaking government copied it. Of course, there was no use complaining - what am I going to do, sue?
I was bitching at the utter vapidity of people who believe that they're making a "lifestyle choice" when they buy a damn music player. It's just marketing, and people actually buy into it and repeat the ad copy with a straight face.
Because AI is a biased organization that lives and breathes anti-Americanism?
Check out their annual report - it begins with a letter from Amnesty's secretary general, Irene Khan. The letter opens with the events of August 19, 2003, when the United Nations envoy to Iraq, Sergio Vieira de Mello, was killed in an attack on United Nations headquarters in Baghdad. Khan wonders why the "legitimacy and credibility of the UN could have eroded to such a fatal degree," noting that the UN was marginalized by America's march to war. That is supposed to explain the bombing of UN headquarters in Iraq? This peculiar bit of reasoning defies logic. Later on in the letter, Khan condemns "unequivocally" the actions of terrorist groups. But this hardly makes up for her earlier implication that America's rocky relationship with the UN somehow led to the August 19 attacks.
Khan worries that Washington is trampling on human rights in its search for security, and muses about lost opportunities to correct social injustice and inequality as increased funding goes to the Pentagon's budget rather than to poverty-alleviation programs. While condemning "armed groups and individuals," she doesn't delve into much detail about the enormous harm wrought on the lives and rights of untold millions living under the intolerant tenets of religious extremism.
The United States is named five times in her opening letter, and indirectly alluded to on several other occasions. No other country merits such sustained criticism. Certainly not the government of Sudan, which is guilty of ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity in what is the worst humanitarian crisis in the world today. As many as a million Sudanese in the Darfur region have been driven from their homes and tens of thousands have been slaughtered by militias loyal to the government. Khan does not mention the government of North Korea, which keeps a population of 25 million living in abject poverty and isolation, with more than 6 million Koreans depending on international handouts to avoid starvation while the regime spends scarce resources to build nuclear weapons. Khan mentions only in passing the human rights problems in the Congo, where more than 3 million people have died in a war nobody pays much attention to. Egypt merits a brief mention, but Khan does not bother criticizing Saudi Arabia, Syria, Libya, or any of the other Arab countries where jails are filled with political prisoners who often linger behind bars even after their sentences are completed. The millions of Burmese living under the heel of military dictatorship also fail to garner a mention in Khan's letter, as do the populations of increasingly repressive Central Asia regimes. And, of course, Khan declined to write about the travesty of the UN Human Rights Commission, which has lost all credibility by counting among its members some of the world's worst human rights violators.
Yes, the details of each country's abuses appear inside the report. But the overarching views and priorities of Amnesty International take shape in Khan's introductory letter and in the press release. After all, those are the sections of the report that most readers are likely to see.
And Amnesty's bias isn't just reflected in who it condemns; it's also revealed in where it directs praise. Amid the desolate landscape allegedly created by Washington, Amnesty takes solace in the emergence of what it calls a "global justice movement"--comprising the millions who, according to Amnesty, "took to the streets around the world in solidarity with the Iraqi people." That's an amazingly simplistic characterization of anti-war marches--it's not clear how a movement that urges the abandonment of Iraq stands in "solidarity with the Iraqi people"--and one that makes Amnesty sound more like a left-wing activist group than the rational, analytical organization it claims to be. Human rights are indeed under attack, and victims of abuse need staunch--and serious--defenders more than ever. Amnesty International could be at the forefront of this work, if it weren't so busy carrying out a narrow political agenda.
It's a fricking MP3 player, not a lifestyle. I had a personal music device 20 years ago, it was called a Sony Walkman, and it wasn't "designed for urbanites", whatever the fuck that means.
Hahaha...AI is a neutral organization? Please tell me you're not that naive. They spend most of their time denouncing the USA and have little time left to denounce the Darfur genocide, for instance.
I've been living in China for 2 years now, and I have yet to see an authentic DVD on sale ANYWHERE. I ask Chinese people where to buy legit DVDs, and they don't know what I'm talking about.
Remember watching a film in theaters costs anywhere from 50 cents to 1.5 dollars in these countries.
Nope. Movie ticket costs $7.50, with half price Tuesdays and $3.12 before 6pm.
The strange part is that Lenovo doesn't even need to do that - the Chinese are stealing American technology left and right, and they're doing just fine without bugged PCs.
I have an unencrypted squid proxy on a box in the States, and that works just fine. Only, I don't call it "hacking" and I only use it as necessary. If I use the proxy to browse sites inside China, it greatly slows my connection.
Currently, the playback feature of Google Video isn't available in your country.
Banks are absolutely horrible. They are mean skinflints and will never give anything to anybody, for any reason. Give source code out, for free? Come on, they won't even loan money to black people.