Not even close, I love my uncle, he's a brilliantly smart guy and a top personality, plus he's family. Just having a bit of fun here with some well meant hyperbole.
Well, as I said a paragraph earlier, I am a C/C++ programmer, hence the dinner table debates about recursion. Python is good for tools and for initialization routines though, you can waste days writing some complex logic that's only going to be run once in a compiled language, or you can solve it with a mess of nested list constructions and lambda expressions in half an hour. Much of the time what is generated is actually quite readable still, which is the glory of python. C may be my day job, but the things that I manage not to write in C are where I justify my salary.
PS: MPI4piIt strikes me that in general you should quit using python long before you turn to MPI, but it's there if you need it.
My 53 year old uncle is a senior professor (or whatever they call a full professor in North America) in geotechnical engineering. I've heard him lament how kids these days don't know how to do programming, since there are so many pre-made tools that ALMOST do what you need. Amazing to hear a white haired old chap complaining about my generation and its poor computer literacy, usually that is the one exception that they give us credit for. Apparently his PhD students all come running to him to do basic programming for them. Programming of course is on his IBM monstrosity that cost $100K and who's only practical difference from a high-end Xeon is that it runs a visually identical version of AIX and runs an input-compatible version of his Fortran 70 compiler and graphics package as he used in "the good old days"... turns out that old people are just like that.
As a professional 3d game engine programmer with multiple published titles, it is a little bit embarrassing when he is going on about the Delauny triangulation algorithm he hacked up back in '95 or whenever and I suddenly realise it's better than what I used a few weeks ago with the benefit of the Internet, at that point I just agree and pretend that I use a similar algorithm all the time. Main point of contention is when he interrupts my anecdotes about writing in c with some disparaging remarks about recursion and how I should use an array as a stack in a for loop to make program flow clear or some archaic bollocks, God help me if he ever sees what I do with python.
Problem is, you force an scientist or engineer to use FORTRAN or MATLAB and you will get code written with hate. He may make good calculation or publish useful papers in his field, but he'll end up a cranky old bastard complaining about how PGPLOT does not look like it did on the faculty mainframe in '87, that is about as un-hacker as they come. Matlab is obviously designed by someone who hates computers and FORTRAN was designed BEFORE the compiler was invented, meaning it was never meant to be used as what we would call a programming language. Engineers/Scientists love this stuff just to be rude to us, because every successfully executed program written in this spaghetti is a huge fuck-you to 40 years of software research.
It seems like one here. Seems this is a company that makes crappy software and sells it by sending pretty girls to clients office, get naked and entertain them. Supposedly they make web stuff but their site is awfully designed and implemented compared to a run-of-the-mill porn site. All seems extremely dubious to me, maybe a poorly disguised escort service, kind of an insult to real naturalists I think. I like naked hot girls, I like breasts and labia and all the other lovely things on a naked woman, but this just strikes me as a giant, cynical con and I do not like it in the slightest. Maybe some day, there will be a proper naturalist software company, but that is not today.
I find it helps when you have an international team to have printed copies. My Chinese is not natively fluent, but I frequently attend meetings where that is the language spoken and to have an outline in front of me helps to catch up to where the discussion now is so I can resume participating in the conversation, also to look up words I don't know discreetly afterwards is very useful.
Well, I was the first person to mention the word "supercritical" and by supercritical I mean just that, large enough to sustain a nuclear chain reaction, something that nuclear fuel must be capable of, otherwise where is all of that heat coming from?
Anyway, supercriticality in a molten pool is not exactly going to give close to the same yields as a precisely engineered weapons grade Pu-238 sphere being compressed by TNT charges, we are not talking quite about "Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." but in my understanding, it tends to lead to very bad things happening due to the amount of heat and neutrons generated in an uncontrolled environment and due to the difficulty of stopping this reaction at this point.
I have no idea why everyone is jumping down my throat for the use of the world "supercritical", like this is some doomsday scenario that I concocted out of my own little head. The reason everyone doesn't want a meltdown is because there is no guarantee where the flow will go, in Chernobyl the fuel became subcritical after leaving the reactor, but in theory, it can leak into any configuration and continue to react in where it settles. Otherwise everyone would just forget about the whole water injection thing and let the blob cool naturally once the least stable isotopes have decayed away.
It was more just a smarmy shot referencing the strategic lack of oil by the Axis powers, not really meant to be a serious social commentary, but I am glad you were trolled by it anyway. The thrust of what I am saying was about America's unwillingness to get involved in defending rights during WWII until they absolutely were given no other option. This is not to rank the appeasers that controlled Congress at the time amongst the Tojos of this world, although some of the prominent ones did share certain common ground with him and his German pals regarding race and labour.
Though good work with finishing it in the end, sadly you've slacked off for the last 66 years and now god has to do your work in delivering destruction and radiation to Japan.
I believe the term is "partial meltdown", where the fuel rods get hot and unstable, but do not go goey like cheese under the grill. From the little I remember from university metallurgy is that essentially these rods are alloys, primarily U-238 but with other stuff entering the mix when the uranium undergoes fission, alloys are known change phase under heat and certain metals bubble out or condense depending on their chemical properties.
Total meltdown is where the rods turn into liquid and drip down into a super-critical pool at the bottom of the reactor. If that happened, you'd know about it, "Fortunate Island" would become more like "Wide Island" than Three Mile Island if you get my reference.
I'm sitting now in an area that was occupied by Japanese in WWII, all up, they killed about 30,000,000 Chinese civilians. Close to that number of Soviet Citizens were killed during their war with Germany and you are talking about 200,000 as if it was a big number. That's the same as what? Like the body count of a month of Japanese occupation in Nanjing? Unless you want to come out and start denying the holocaust also, you can take your revisionist history and shove it.
You were right about one thing, Americans were just sitting around minding their own business before the Japanese bombed Hawaii, while others were fighting and dying in Europe and Asia, because neither the Germans nor the Japanese had oil. Of course Americans are capable of the same self-serving non-interventionist policies we all know and contempt in the Swiss or imperialism that would make Caesar blush; but when given no other possible option, they will occasionally fight for the good and truth.
Bombs built during the cold war era had the design goal to have the highest yield possible. Turns out surrounding a source of neutrons a fusion reaction with a thick tamper of uranium-238 is a really cheap way to make a large explosion, it also happens to spread a lot of fallout around. If they wanted to make fallout they would have used cobalt instead, if they wanted maximum efficiency in fissionable materials they would have used lead (like in the Tsar Bomba), but I think they used uranium-238 mainly because they wanted a huge boom and didn't want to use a whole lot of expensive plutonium on it.
Not that I fully agree with the professor in the original story. But the fact you bring up designing and understanding Fibonacci heaps kind of illustrates his point. Comparing with the binary heap; the Fibonacci heap is quicker to insert and merge, since you leave the tree rearranging until you gather up the loose trees on a remove, however even though amortized cost of removing a link is O(log(n)), just like a binheap, in reality, the code to do that requires a lot of instructions and to access a lot of memory making it take much longer on a real computer. Then you have to worry about the memory, in binheap, an element needs no pointers since its position in memory can be inferred from its position in the stack, in fibheap, every element needs 4 pointers parent, child and to siblings, this burns 32 bytes on a 64 bit system. In any structure of a scale that justifies thinking in asymptotic terms this is a lot of memory. Also, what is the programmer doing writing and debugging a heap structure when STL provides one? The only time these things really need reimplementing is if you are writing a distributed or embedded version and fibheap does not suit either. Ultimately, if the programmer pops up at work one day and wants to write a fib heap, this will solve nobody's problems but will cause many more.
The Fib heap is a clear example of a cute system with interesting little mathematical properties that finds very little use because of its complexity, memory consumption and poor suitability for real time systems. I am glad I learned this stuff and I think it helps me in its way, but there are many people, like this dude who don't agree. What I know is, when I am hiring a 3d graphics programmer, I test linear algebra and barely touch coding questions, maths is far more important in some fields than others.
I can consistently beat my girlfriend in RPS, maybe 70% of the time. The trick it to focus on what she thinks I am thinking and be one step ahead. The reason I win is that my girlfriend has a research masters degree in a humanities subject and the game requires both logic and empathy; the humanities focus precludes logic and postgraduate education precludes empathy. It is like beating Steven Hawking in an arm wrestling match.
No, most of the guys at my video games company are married and the rest have long term girlfriends. That means that we aren't getting any but know very well what we are missing out on. Since game development is considered a good career where I am, the wives and girlfriends of our team tend to be quite comely, but to a woman they all work 9-6 office jobs. Holding a beautiful, slender, naked women against your body every single night but only getting to enjoy her on Saturday and once on Sunday morning because at other times she is too tired will drive you far more insane and desperate than virginity ever could.
You know, when they announced GConf, I thought like you, because I had bad experiences with the registry and back then I was an arrogant 20 year old programmer who didn't like any framework for anything, especially not tasks like configuration. However, I have warmed to it as Gnome 2.0 slowly became an OK system. Configuration should not be something that needs to be re-designed and re-implemented in every application. Things like policies, handling multiple instances of the one program, external configuration tools, etc. should work on a layer below the app. When I am writing an application, I want to be able to say, "OK, I have these options, make sure they are stored somewhere and tell me when the user wants to change them" and it works really well. It's no harder to use than libconfig or libxml2 but it has the addition that it notifies the application when a variable changes. It is a shitload easier than writing a custom parser by hand or with bison.
some form of Chinese, but I lack the skill to tell the dialects apart.
It's hard, especially since regional accents tend to affect the sound more than the actual dialect, a Cantonese person speaking Mandarin still sounds very Cantonese. But since you seem to be interested.
Mandarin is now the most commonly heard but twenty years ago it was never spoken outside of mainland China. You tend to hear it spoken by newer immigrants and students, often young girls chatting noisily on the train. Unlike other dialects, it has an uneven rhythm, usually syllables are said in pairs, due to the disyllabic words, giving it a more familiar sound to English speakers. Its consonants tend to be dominated by fricative and affricate types, giving it kind of rough sound to it. It is tonal, but the tones are not as obvious to a non speaker as in other dialects. People from north China often accentuate the terminal "r", if you hear many words ending with "r" you know it is Mandarin and also where the speaker is from.
Cantonese is what you hear older, more settled immigrants speaking. Many English speaking countries have been open to HK immigration for far longer. What you hear spoken around Chinatown and in well established Chinese restaurants is likely to be Cantonese (or maybe Hokkien). It has a steady rhythm, syllables come out quickly at an even pace as the way an Italian speaker would speak, it is also very tonal giving it a tune to every sentence, almost as it is sung. Syllables also often end very sharply, rather than trailing off or rolling into an r how they do in Mandarin. To me, I tend to hear more nasal and plosive consonants.
The third is Hokkien, it is also spoken by older immigrants but is less common than Cantonese in most areas. I speak precisely zero, so I identify it by being unable to comprehend a word.
The standard evangelical fundamentalist position however is just that sodomy is against Gods will
Is what I said there correct or not? Are you seriously claiming that evangelical fundamentalists do not consider sodomy to be against God's will? My impression was that they very much did. The bible does not so much say "this is a sin", Leviticus 18:22 calls homosexuality an "abomination" or "detestable" depending on the translation, Romans 1 refers to it as a "perversion" (i.e. saying it is unnatural, rather than saying it is prescribed). You can of course debate the bible's true meaning all you want, but in stating a position about what I will call "mainstream fundamentalists" I think I have done so accurately.
Personally, I consider the whole issue is a matter between homosexual Christians and their pastors and certainly not a matter that slashdot is interested in. However, I intended to contrast mainstream evangelical (Calvinist) and Westboro Baptist (Hyper-Calvinist) and I think I have done that fairly.
If you live in an area without many oriental people and your only experience to older east Asian women is Gong Li and Maggie Cheung, then of course you are going to think they age slowly since they are 45 and 46 respectively and are both seriously hot. But then again, if you base your impression of Italian women on Monica Bellucci (10 days younger than Maggie Cheung) you will think that they are sexy until old age too, but that is really not the case.
Come to China, Japan or Korea sometime. You'll see a lot of 25 year old girls DRESSED like they are 13, but it is pretty obvious that they are not. Also plenty of saggy old mama's just like in your country.
Also, Mainland China wins Asia for discouraging pedophilia. While the Japanese dress their young girls in cute, perfectly fitted sailor suits, short skirt, long socks and black buckled shoes, China sticks them into sacklike tracksuits, white sneakers and cuts their hair as short as the boys. A mainland Chinese schoolgirl in uniform looks amorphous and androgynous. Look at a group of Chinese schoolgirls walking home and try to get aroused, you seriously can't do it, even if the girls are in their final year and are naturally beautiful you just can't do it.
The bible saying homosexuality is a sin does not mean that God hates homosexuals. It says quite clearly in there that God loves everyone, including "fags" and even those crazy Westboro idiots, even if the rest of us don't. Fred Phelps has got his theology muddled up with his personal hatred of homosexuality, he sees a few passages in there where it says to avoid homosexual activity and in his own hypercalvinist way of thinking, that means that the people who commit these homosexual acts are forever damned to hell after taking others with them. The standard evangelical fundamentalist position however is just that sodomy is against Gods will and condoning it is rebellion from God. To an atheist these two positions sound similar, but in actual fact they are quite different. Mainstream evangelical gets upset with gay marriage, recognition of homosexual civil union, etc because it puts man's laws and Gods laws into contradiction, thus it represents rebellion from God. Phelpsian belief is that the homosexual him or herself is an abomination, not born as God's child but as something to pass through this world to hell, subhuman at best, demonic at worst. In most theologian's minds, this is not supported pretty much anywhere in scripture.
Thus, "God Hates Fags" is simply a biblical untruth. "God Loves Fags" does not represent Christian modernism, liberalism or any re-interpretation of scripture to follow one's own belief, in fact, it kind of sits with the whole "repent of your faggotry, God wants to save you!" line that fundimentalists have been pushing for decades.
My sister walked down the aisle to this music in December. Most people in the church didn't know it was from a computer game, the few I told were shocked. As a games programmer, I am proud that our artform is less of an artistic laughing stock today than it once was.
I lived in the Northern Rivers area for about 7 years. Honestly, idiots up there, especially in Nimbin, Bellingen, Byron Bay or other such towns will believe anything if said with enough conviction, apart from pot causing lung cancer. Substance abuse and mental illness are facts of life there, in Coffs Harbour, the largest town in the region, the Jordan Center, the largest mental health center in the region is a household name. Idiotic beliefs go with the territory, even amongst the mentally healthy, people want to be alternative and against the grain, even when the grain is supported with concrete evidence. The point of my disparaging rant is that if this pathogen of a woman can go infect this region all she wants, but that whole region is pretty much a quarantine zone for idiots beforehand, given the low population it's probably a suitable place for her to be confined.
It's interesting interview in that it is conducted by Iwata san, interviewing the other guys and asking them all the questions, but it seems pretty clear that Iwata was pretty much the brains of the operation, gave the game its epic scale and knows much more than the other guys about what they did and why it was good. In my experience working in Asia, programmers will humor designers to quite surreal levels.
Australia's net censorship system is not going to happen. It was proposed, it was debated and in the end it went flat and Australia STILL has no filtering and less site takedowns than the US.
This pub thing is run by certain pubs themselves in order to keep violent patrons out of, it will probably be reviewed by the government if there are undue privacy issues, but this is not a government program, it is on private property, it is not wide spread and it is not mandatory that you drink in the places with this system.
What's your major issue with Australia anyway? The R rated games ban thing? If that's the biggest civil liberties issue in a country, it makes it pretty good by world standards.
Slashdot Mirror
Not even close, I love my uncle, he's a brilliantly smart guy and a top personality, plus he's family. Just having a bit of fun here with some well meant hyperbole.
Well, as I said a paragraph earlier, I am a C/C++ programmer, hence the dinner table debates about recursion. Python is good for tools and for initialization routines though, you can waste days writing some complex logic that's only going to be run once in a compiled language, or you can solve it with a mess of nested list constructions and lambda expressions in half an hour. Much of the time what is generated is actually quite readable still, which is the glory of python. C may be my day job, but the things that I manage not to write in C are where I justify my salary.
PS: MPI4piIt strikes me that in general you should quit using python long before you turn to MPI, but it's there if you need it.
My 53 year old uncle is a senior professor (or whatever they call a full professor in North America) in geotechnical engineering. I've heard him lament how kids these days don't know how to do programming, since there are so many pre-made tools that ALMOST do what you need. Amazing to hear a white haired old chap complaining about my generation and its poor computer literacy, usually that is the one exception that they give us credit for. Apparently his PhD students all come running to him to do basic programming for them. Programming of course is on his IBM monstrosity that cost $100K and who's only practical difference from a high-end Xeon is that it runs a visually identical version of AIX and runs an input-compatible version of his Fortran 70 compiler and graphics package as he used in "the good old days"... turns out that old people are just like that.
As a professional 3d game engine programmer with multiple published titles, it is a little bit embarrassing when he is going on about the Delauny triangulation algorithm he hacked up back in '95 or whenever and I suddenly realise it's better than what I used a few weeks ago with the benefit of the Internet, at that point I just agree and pretend that I use a similar algorithm all the time. Main point of contention is when he interrupts my anecdotes about writing in c with some disparaging remarks about recursion and how I should use an array as a stack in a for loop to make program flow clear or some archaic bollocks, God help me if he ever sees what I do with python.
Problem is, you force an scientist or engineer to use FORTRAN or MATLAB and you will get code written with hate. He may make good calculation or publish useful papers in his field, but he'll end up a cranky old bastard complaining about how PGPLOT does not look like it did on the faculty mainframe in '87, that is about as un-hacker as they come. Matlab is obviously designed by someone who hates computers and FORTRAN was designed BEFORE the compiler was invented, meaning it was never meant to be used as what we would call a programming language. Engineers/Scientists love this stuff just to be rude to us, because every successfully executed program written in this spaghetti is a huge fuck-you to 40 years of software research.
It seems like one here. Seems this is a company that makes crappy software and sells it by sending pretty girls to clients office, get naked and entertain them. Supposedly they make web stuff but their site is awfully designed and implemented compared to a run-of-the-mill porn site. All seems extremely dubious to me, maybe a poorly disguised escort service, kind of an insult to real naturalists I think. I like naked hot girls, I like breasts and labia and all the other lovely things on a naked woman, but this just strikes me as a giant, cynical con and I do not like it in the slightest. Maybe some day, there will be a proper naturalist software company, but that is not today.
I find it helps when you have an international team to have printed copies. My Chinese is not natively fluent, but I frequently attend meetings where that is the language spoken and to have an outline in front of me helps to catch up to where the discussion now is so I can resume participating in the conversation, also to look up words I don't know discreetly afterwards is very useful.
The goose cries once more,
Its sound falls with autumn leaves,
Towards the bored earth.
Well, I was the first person to mention the word "supercritical" and by supercritical I mean just that, large enough to sustain a nuclear chain reaction, something that nuclear fuel must be capable of, otherwise where is all of that heat coming from?
Anyway, supercriticality in a molten pool is not exactly going to give close to the same yields as a precisely engineered weapons grade Pu-238 sphere being compressed by TNT charges, we are not talking quite about "Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." but in my understanding, it tends to lead to very bad things happening due to the amount of heat and neutrons generated in an uncontrolled environment and due to the difficulty of stopping this reaction at this point.
I have no idea why everyone is jumping down my throat for the use of the world "supercritical", like this is some doomsday scenario that I concocted out of my own little head. The reason everyone doesn't want a meltdown is because there is no guarantee where the flow will go, in Chernobyl the fuel became subcritical after leaving the reactor, but in theory, it can leak into any configuration and continue to react in where it settles. Otherwise everyone would just forget about the whole water injection thing and let the blob cool naturally once the least stable isotopes have decayed away.
It was more just a smarmy shot referencing the strategic lack of oil by the Axis powers, not really meant to be a serious social commentary, but I am glad you were trolled by it anyway. The thrust of what I am saying was about America's unwillingness to get involved in defending rights during WWII until they absolutely were given no other option. This is not to rank the appeasers that controlled Congress at the time amongst the Tojos of this world, although some of the prominent ones did share certain common ground with him and his German pals regarding race and labour.
Though good work with finishing it in the end, sadly you've slacked off for the last 66 years and now god has to do your work in delivering destruction and radiation to Japan.
I believe the term is "partial meltdown", where the fuel rods get hot and unstable, but do not go goey like cheese under the grill. From the little I remember from university metallurgy is that essentially these rods are alloys, primarily U-238 but with other stuff entering the mix when the uranium undergoes fission, alloys are known change phase under heat and certain metals bubble out or condense depending on their chemical properties.
Total meltdown is where the rods turn into liquid and drip down into a super-critical pool at the bottom of the reactor. If that happened, you'd know about it, "Fortunate Island" would become more like "Wide Island" than Three Mile Island if you get my reference .
I'm sitting now in an area that was occupied by Japanese in WWII, all up, they killed about 30,000,000 Chinese civilians. Close to that number of Soviet Citizens were killed during their war with Germany and you are talking about 200,000 as if it was a big number. That's the same as what? Like the body count of a month of Japanese occupation in Nanjing? Unless you want to come out and start denying the holocaust also, you can take your revisionist history and shove it.
You were right about one thing, Americans were just sitting around minding their own business before the Japanese bombed Hawaii, while others were fighting and dying in Europe and Asia, because neither the Germans nor the Japanese had oil. Of course Americans are capable of the same self-serving non-interventionist policies we all know and contempt in the Swiss or imperialism that would make Caesar blush; but when given no other possible option, they will occasionally fight for the good and truth.
Bombs built during the cold war era had the design goal to have the highest yield possible. Turns out surrounding a source of neutrons a fusion reaction with a thick tamper of uranium-238 is a really cheap way to make a large explosion, it also happens to spread a lot of fallout around. If they wanted to make fallout they would have used cobalt instead, if they wanted maximum efficiency in fissionable materials they would have used lead (like in the Tsar Bomba), but I think they used uranium-238 mainly because they wanted a huge boom and didn't want to use a whole lot of expensive plutonium on it.
Not that I fully agree with the professor in the original story. But the fact you bring up designing and understanding Fibonacci heaps kind of illustrates his point. Comparing with the binary heap; the Fibonacci heap is quicker to insert and merge, since you leave the tree rearranging until you gather up the loose trees on a remove, however even though amortized cost of removing a link is O(log(n)), just like a binheap, in reality, the code to do that requires a lot of instructions and to access a lot of memory making it take much longer on a real computer. Then you have to worry about the memory, in binheap, an element needs no pointers since its position in memory can be inferred from its position in the stack, in fibheap, every element needs 4 pointers parent, child and to siblings, this burns 32 bytes on a 64 bit system. In any structure of a scale that justifies thinking in asymptotic terms this is a lot of memory. Also, what is the programmer doing writing and debugging a heap structure when STL provides one? The only time these things really need reimplementing is if you are writing a distributed or embedded version and fibheap does not suit either. Ultimately, if the programmer pops up at work one day and wants to write a fib heap, this will solve nobody's problems but will cause many more.
The Fib heap is a clear example of a cute system with interesting little mathematical properties that finds very little use because of its complexity, memory consumption and poor suitability for real time systems. I am glad I learned this stuff and I think it helps me in its way, but there are many people, like this dude who don't agree. What I know is, when I am hiring a 3d graphics programmer, I test linear algebra and barely touch coding questions, maths is far more important in some fields than others.
I can consistently beat my girlfriend in RPS, maybe 70% of the time. The trick it to focus on what she thinks I am thinking and be one step ahead. The reason I win is that my girlfriend has a research masters degree in a humanities subject and the game requires both logic and empathy; the humanities focus precludes logic and postgraduate education precludes empathy. It is like beating Steven Hawking in an arm wrestling match.
No, most of the guys at my video games company are married and the rest have long term girlfriends. That means that we aren't getting any but know very well what we are missing out on. Since game development is considered a good career where I am, the wives and girlfriends of our team tend to be quite comely, but to a woman they all work 9-6 office jobs. Holding a beautiful, slender, naked women against your body every single night but only getting to enjoy her on Saturday and once on Sunday morning because at other times she is too tired will drive you far more insane and desperate than virginity ever could.
You know, when they announced GConf, I thought like you, because I had bad experiences with the registry and back then I was an arrogant 20 year old programmer who didn't like any framework for anything, especially not tasks like configuration. However, I have warmed to it as Gnome 2.0 slowly became an OK system. Configuration should not be something that needs to be re-designed and re-implemented in every application. Things like policies, handling multiple instances of the one program, external configuration tools, etc. should work on a layer below the app. When I am writing an application, I want to be able to say, "OK, I have these options, make sure they are stored somewhere and tell me when the user wants to change them" and it works really well. It's no harder to use than libconfig or libxml2 but it has the addition that it notifies the application when a variable changes. It is a shitload easier than writing a custom parser by hand or with bison.
It's hard, especially since regional accents tend to affect the sound more than the actual dialect, a Cantonese person speaking Mandarin still sounds very Cantonese. But since you seem to be interested.
Mandarin is now the most commonly heard but twenty years ago it was never spoken outside of mainland China. You tend to hear it spoken by newer immigrants and students, often young girls chatting noisily on the train. Unlike other dialects, it has an uneven rhythm, usually syllables are said in pairs, due to the disyllabic words, giving it a more familiar sound to English speakers. Its consonants tend to be dominated by fricative and affricate types, giving it kind of rough sound to it. It is tonal, but the tones are not as obvious to a non speaker as in other dialects. People from north China often accentuate the terminal "r", if you hear many words ending with "r" you know it is Mandarin and also where the speaker is from.
Cantonese is what you hear older, more settled immigrants speaking. Many English speaking countries have been open to HK immigration for far longer. What you hear spoken around Chinatown and in well established Chinese restaurants is likely to be Cantonese (or maybe Hokkien). It has a steady rhythm, syllables come out quickly at an even pace as the way an Italian speaker would speak, it is also very tonal giving it a tune to every sentence, almost as it is sung. Syllables also often end very sharply, rather than trailing off or rolling into an r how they do in Mandarin. To me, I tend to hear more nasal and plosive consonants.
The third is Hokkien, it is also spoken by older immigrants but is less common than Cantonese in most areas. I speak precisely zero, so I identify it by being unable to comprehend a word.
Is what I said there correct or not? Are you seriously claiming that evangelical fundamentalists do not consider sodomy to be against God's will? My impression was that they very much did. The bible does not so much say "this is a sin", Leviticus 18:22 calls homosexuality an "abomination" or "detestable" depending on the translation, Romans 1 refers to it as a "perversion" (i.e. saying it is unnatural, rather than saying it is prescribed). You can of course debate the bible's true meaning all you want, but in stating a position about what I will call "mainstream fundamentalists" I think I have done so accurately.
Personally, I consider the whole issue is a matter between homosexual Christians and their pastors and certainly not a matter that slashdot is interested in. However, I intended to contrast mainstream evangelical (Calvinist) and Westboro Baptist (Hyper-Calvinist) and I think I have done that fairly.
If you live in an area without many oriental people and your only experience to older east Asian women is Gong Li and Maggie Cheung, then of course you are going to think they age slowly since they are 45 and 46 respectively and are both seriously hot. But then again, if you base your impression of Italian women on Monica Bellucci (10 days younger than Maggie Cheung) you will think that they are sexy until old age too, but that is really not the case.
Come to China, Japan or Korea sometime. You'll see a lot of 25 year old girls DRESSED like they are 13, but it is pretty obvious that they are not. Also plenty of saggy old mama's just like in your country.
Also, Mainland China wins Asia for discouraging pedophilia. While the Japanese dress their young girls in cute, perfectly fitted sailor suits, short skirt, long socks and black buckled shoes, China sticks them into sacklike tracksuits, white sneakers and cuts their hair as short as the boys. A mainland Chinese schoolgirl in uniform looks amorphous and androgynous. Look at a group of Chinese schoolgirls walking home and try to get aroused, you seriously can't do it, even if the girls are in their final year and are naturally beautiful you just can't do it.
The bible saying homosexuality is a sin does not mean that God hates homosexuals. It says quite clearly in there that God loves everyone, including "fags" and even those crazy Westboro idiots, even if the rest of us don't. Fred Phelps has got his theology muddled up with his personal hatred of homosexuality, he sees a few passages in there where it says to avoid homosexual activity and in his own hypercalvinist way of thinking, that means that the people who commit these homosexual acts are forever damned to hell after taking others with them. The standard evangelical fundamentalist position however is just that sodomy is against Gods will and condoning it is rebellion from God. To an atheist these two positions sound similar, but in actual fact they are quite different. Mainstream evangelical gets upset with gay marriage, recognition of homosexual civil union, etc because it puts man's laws and Gods laws into contradiction, thus it represents rebellion from God. Phelpsian belief is that the homosexual him or herself is an abomination, not born as God's child but as something to pass through this world to hell, subhuman at best, demonic at worst. In most theologian's minds, this is not supported pretty much anywhere in scripture.
Thus, "God Hates Fags" is simply a biblical untruth. "God Loves Fags" does not represent Christian modernism, liberalism or any re-interpretation of scripture to follow one's own belief, in fact, it kind of sits with the whole "repent of your faggotry, God wants to save you!" line that fundimentalists have been pushing for decades.
I'm in China. My 60GB PS3 that ran perfectly for four years started doing the flashing red light. Stupid sun.
My sister walked down the aisle to this music in December. Most people in the church didn't know it was from a computer game, the few I told were shocked. As a games programmer, I am proud that our artform is less of an artistic laughing stock today than it once was.
I lived in the Northern Rivers area for about 7 years. Honestly, idiots up there, especially in Nimbin, Bellingen, Byron Bay or other such towns will believe anything if said with enough conviction, apart from pot causing lung cancer. Substance abuse and mental illness are facts of life there, in Coffs Harbour, the largest town in the region, the Jordan Center, the largest mental health center in the region is a household name. Idiotic beliefs go with the territory, even amongst the mentally healthy, people want to be alternative and against the grain, even when the grain is supported with concrete evidence. The point of my disparaging rant is that if this pathogen of a woman can go infect this region all she wants, but that whole region is pretty much a quarantine zone for idiots beforehand, given the low population it's probably a suitable place for her to be confined.
It's interesting interview in that it is conducted by Iwata san, interviewing the other guys and asking them all the questions, but it seems pretty clear that Iwata was pretty much the brains of the operation, gave the game its epic scale and knows much more than the other guys about what they did and why it was good. In my experience working in Asia, programmers will humor designers to quite surreal levels.
Australia's net censorship system is not going to happen. It was proposed, it was debated and in the end it went flat and Australia STILL has no filtering and less site takedowns than the US.
This pub thing is run by certain pubs themselves in order to keep violent patrons out of, it will probably be reviewed by the government if there are undue privacy issues, but this is not a government program, it is on private property, it is not wide spread and it is not mandatory that you drink in the places with this system.
What's your major issue with Australia anyway? The R rated games ban thing? If that's the biggest civil liberties issue in a country, it makes it pretty good by world standards.
Gnome got ignored by the academy for its role in Antitrust too, so I guess its even handed.