You do know that Linux and OpenBSD always used this method, right? FreeBSD was relying too much on hardware random number generation. Now they are finally catching up. If anything, it should make people wary of FreeBSD security.
Here in China, it is not really possible to even find a normal "legit" version of Windows. All versions found at any normal store will be pirated. A typical price for pirated Windows, sold in a professional looking box, will be about 18 yuan (~3 USD). There is even a common software program used to deliver updates to pirated XP machines. This software also comes with anti-malware tools, and is called "360." This program is the only way that China is able to keep going with Windows, circumventing copyright protection while still receiving regular updated from this service!
A few months ago I was talking to a sales clerk at a computer market. I saw stickers for Ubuntu on the laptops there, yet the operating system was obviously Windows. I pointed at the sticker with a smirk, and asked him about it, already knowing the answer. He sheepishly tried to tell me how they put on Windows because that's the standard in China. Obviously they were getting discounts from the manufacturers for dumping the Windows tax, and then turning around and installing pirated Windows on these computers. By the way, these were big brand names like Dell, HP, Samsung, Lenovo, Asus, etc. Out of curiosity, I asked him if many people in China use Linux, and he said it is used mostly for servers (he mentioned Red Flag Linux specifically).
If it is a straightforward photo that reproduces a 2D image such as a manuscript page that is in the public domain, then that photo is also in the public domain. I have uploaded others' photos on numerous occasions to Wikimedia Commons, which also recognizes such photos as public domain, and it has always been accepted as valid. Unfortunately many people, even museums, believe that anything and everything is under copyright, and they are uninformed about copyright as it applies to public domain works.
Laptops? While I'd love to see a nice, low cost CPU/GPU combo that can hang with my (rather meager) Athlon X2 6000+ and GT 240, I'm still running pretty low end gear. If this is targeted at enthusiasts they're just going to replace it with a card...
Basically it's a CPU + GPU bundle that only takes up the size of the CPU. It's not meant for the hardcore gamers, just pragmatists who are looking for value and simplicity. Like every company, AMD has a product lineup -- different products are marketed in different ways (although AMD is not always as clear about the matter as it could be). For the price, these chips are usually pretty good values.
Freetards like yourself are why most people stay as far away as possible from the GPL. "How dare you use this GPL code in complete compliance with the license since you violated [insert ad hoc unwritten rule]!!"
His post did not even mention the GPL -- only you did, you foul troll. The GP seems only to be referring rather to commercial companies (Oracle) essentially repackaging Red Hat's distribution and marketing it as something completely different. There is no legal issue being raised here, only an ethical one about respecting the work of others.
However, it could be debated that what Oracle is doing does go against the GPL in some way, since the GPL requires that the source code be conveyed in the preferred form for working with. Since Red Hat is distributing essentially combined patches that obfuscate the actual changes being made, they are probably at least going against the spirit of the GPL (and maybe even violating the license), by distributing the code in a form that discourages others from understanding these changes and working with them. Quoth the GPLv2:
The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it.
If you are fulfilling the basic requirements for edits (good information that is well-sourced, and written in an encyclopedic manner), then your edits are unlikely to be reverted. However, often newbies are unfamiliar with the basic editing process, and think that because it's a wiki, that it should be a free-for-all. It's not quite so simple, and just as Encyclopedia Brittanica has standards, Wikipedia also has standards. The key to learning the system and becoming very proficient in it, is to start small, working on obscure articles and watching bigger articles, and gradually expanding your reach. After some time, you will be able to edit major articles with a fair amount of confidence that nothing will be reverted.
If you want fewer bugs, then Ubuntu LTS is really the way to go. Those LTS releases are expected to be relatively stable for 5 years. When you are on the quick release cycles, anything can happen. This is the same principle between stable / testing / unstable with Debian. When you are on the bleeding edge, things break. When you are using the stable version, you should be able to expect that very few things will ever break. I wish more Ubuntu users paid attention to this principle, especially during the early period of Unity, when everyone was complaining about it being so buggy. Then when the LTS release came out (12.04): "Hey, Unity is actually pretty decent and stable now!" Of course it will be stable.... that's the stable version.
School is more or less standard for kids in China up through middle school. However, some kids are kicked out of school, or choose not to attend for some reason (or their parents pull them out for some reason). It is not unheard of for 14-year olds to be working full-time. For example, there is this 10-year old auto mechanic who does this work "as a hobby" since he was kicked out of school for bringing down the test scores:
China is basically a different beast altogether. This country does not follow the same rules as a first world country, and some things may seem completely alien to us. They are also very hostile to what they view as "western meddling," and with good reason (past history, and frankly western countries do have that tendency). As someone who has lived there in the past, my only advice is that other countries should have strict standards for labor practices if they are doing trade with China, and to realize that China is a very different animal (things may be legal in China that are illegal in the U.S., and vice-versa). In my view, China is really the "Wild West of Asia," in which there is very little rule of law, and things mostly still get done through networking and favors.
Yes, I actually love Unity in 12.04. Before 12.04. it was unusable on my netbook, so I switched to Gnome 3, and I really enjoyed the new changes there too. I'm a long-time Linux user (~15 years), much of that time using Slackware and Debian, so I'm not exactly some kid who is only used to the "Windows way." Part of the reason I like these new interfaces is because they are VERY different from the old Windows 95 copycat desktop environments. They put more emphasis on ensuring that the programs you use are always close by. Unity has some awesome keyboard shortcuts too. Of course, that takes a little training and time to get used to, though. I consider Unity now to be much more advanced than Gnome 2 ever was, though.
By the way, when I showed the 12.04 Unity interface to a few other Gnome 2 users still running Ubuntu (simple PC end users), they were blown away when they saw Super+S and the other cool shortcuts, and wanted me to upgrade them immediately. Slashdot is still the place for holdouts to gripe about Unity, though, because previously (in older versions of Ubuntu) it was still under heavy development. Slashdot is always like that, giving way to strong opinions (KDE users in this thread apparently -- still like a broken record).
Why do you think that this new cloud system has anything to do with you, or that they would try to appeal to you? Chinese networks and Chinese websites rarely have English equivalents, or attempt to provide them. It seems a bit self-centered and presumptuous to think that this "cloud" is an overblown trap aimed squarely at you. We don't even know if its services will be open to the Chinese public, much less foreigners.
So before it was a "pro-social gene" and now religiosity is based on group solidarity, the ability to believe contradictory statements, and being simply stupid? I take it these are just your own narrow prejudices and conclusions, then?
Recluses and individual monks were responsible for many of the greatest masterpieces of literature and poetry in India and the Far East. And one look at Buddhist abhidharma such as that of the Sarvastivada school in India, is evidence enough that there were huge groups of monastics who were not only religious, but extremely systematic thinkers who used formal logic extensively. The extensive use of the tetralemma in Buddhist logic and debate is further proof that these people had clear understandings of logic far before western Europe.
How does that explain the people who were traditionally the most religious people of a society, the contemplative recluses and hermits? I think also if you look into the sramana traditions of India such as Jainism and Buddhism, there is a great deal of radical individualism involved in their practice. The same goes for the Daoist hermits and the Indian Yogis who lived in the mountains in order to practice meditation.
The Chinese Communist Party initially took pride in its efforts to end the exploitation of Chinese women, and women formed a big part of the revolutionary movement. Now the CCP takes pride in its past and present efforts in this area. I can understand why they do not allow pornography in China, because in a country with such an economy, it is only the poor women who are exploited and forced into lifestyles of prostitution and pornography. They just get by with the money they earn, and are then tossed out when they get too old. In the U.S., porn is all about bimbos and wannabe models who want to have sex and make porn. However, in China it is underprivileged young girls who have no hope for the future, and are taking this lifestyle because it is their only way to keep from living on the street.
Besides these contextual points, the Chinese people have often looked to the government not only for economic justice, but also as a safeguard for social and moral justice. Especially with the current Premier, Wen Jiabao, there is a lot of emphasis on positively improving the culture of China, and for the Chinese that includes the education and moral improvement of the entire society.
Indeed, Edsger Dijkstra said this back in 1975: "It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration." He also said, "I think of the company advertising 'Thought Processors' or the college pretending that learning BASIC suffices or at least helps, whereas the teaching of BASIC should be rated as a criminal offence: it mutilates the mind beyond recovery."
I'm surprised that anyone still wants to teach BASIC when far superior "easy" languages such as Python and Ruby exist, or Squeak, which is a great approach. This is not even mentioning Scheme, which is probably the best way to start, and has been around for a long time now. There is all sorts of nice introductory material from the PLT Scheme people, with custom dialects of Scheme that have extensions specifically for easy graphics and other fun stuff that students would like.
China also has a large government, and it is able to move very quickly to embrace new technology and fund development. The reason for this is that it isn't the size of the system, but the way the system works. China moves unilaterally, so it can just go ahead and do whatever the government wants. The U.S. has a safer approach, but it requires deliberation, but when two parties are locked in place, and they have mutually conflicting goals, of course it's terribly inefficient. Nobody can agree on anything, so nothing gets done. It's a horrible system, and the agility of other countries like China, in developing high speed rail, for example, makes the U.S. look like a third world country. What do we expect when both parties are screeching the same slogans they were 30 years ago? The rest of the world is passing us by, because we were too dumb to look around and comprehend the actual situation. In my state, the newly-elected governor sent back federal money which would have developed high speed rail between the two largest cities in the state. He did this as a political stunt to make his point about small government, and yet this money was just sent to other states that actually were going to continue with their programs. What a joke.
I watched the whole sad story unfold. It was clear that Sega's Dreamcast had an innovative design, compact form factor, and all sorts of great games. The graphics were also far better than anything on the previous systems (PSX, N64), and the Sonic demos alone were to die for. I just felt the whole time that Sega deserved the comeback and their new system was really impressive. Unfortunately the timing was bad, because Sony had been working on its PS2, and it was set to be released just as the Dreamcast should have been coming into its own. Unlike the Dreamcast, the PS2 had a large and clunky design, controllers that were the exact same as the last system's, and memory cards that looked exactly the same as well. In terms of its games and developers, they were essentially holdovers from the PSX days. They really offered nothing great in the way of innovation. What they did offer was higher system specs. Rather than the GD-ROM of the Dreamcast, the PS2 had a DVD player, so much more storage for textures and media. Of course, the big thing was better performance for 3D graphics, and Sony wowed everyone with all sorts of contrived demos that no real PS2 game looked even half as good as (It's rendering the FF8 ballroom dance CGI in realtime! Yeah right...). Sony then released this ugly black cube for a hefty $300, which was $100 more than the Dreamcast had been released for at launch.
The result of all these factors? Of course the PS2 destroyed it. The system performance and developer loyalty were what mattered. The Dreamcast had all the makings of a great system, and it seemed like Sega did everything right in its design, but the timing just killed it. With the death of the Dreamcast and the emergence of new and expensive next-generation consoles, the magic seemed like it was gone, so I left gaming behind. I have fond memories of the old PSX days, though, when quality Japanese RPG's were being released left and right, and each action game wasn't a grizzled spacing marine walking down drab hallways.
So we finally know the truth: Jesus was an asexually-reproduced reptile man of some kind, with genetically-imbued magical powers derived from his innate chromosomal oddity.
Doesn't this just prove that not only did Jesus exist as the Only Way (tm), but that he was immaculately conceived as well, from some type of half-woman-half-reptile asexually-reproducing demigod?
Anyone who cares about free access to the Internet has some method around the Great Firewall. VPN services are even advertised quite freely in China for foreigners over there (maybe because the officials can't read them). Anyways, despite what many westerners would expect, the Chinese themselves often support the government's general ability to block access to websites. Much like in America, these things are framed as actions taken for the good of the nation, and just like the Americans, the majority will accept that. I had a discussion about this when I was in China, and I was the only one who disagreed with the firewall. Nobody really seemed to miss anything, and they asked me which sites are blocked. I rattled off a few like YouTube and Blogger, but they hadn't heard of them. For video sites, they use Youku and Tudou. For blogs and the like, QQ's services are popular. Perhaps the only exception to any of this is that some younger people like to get around the firewall so they can use Facebook as well (FB is blocked in China), but the Chinese have their own social networking site that is more popular there (RenRen). China is a whole different animal.
Mod parent up! Just checked out the nightly build, and it is indeed very fast and smooth. It's really slick, just the way Firefox seemed back when it was the "fast" browser forked from the Mozilla suite. My old P4 3GHz IBM desktop seems fast again.:-D
On the plus side, this means that some businesses may not be so trapped with Windows due to their reliance on Exchange. This has always been a big sticking point for the use of Linux and other open source platforms in businesses. To have any option of using Exchange on a Linux desktop opens up some interesting possibilities.
FYI: "Socialism for Business" is called Corporatism, which is synonymous with Fascism. Socialism is ideally concerned with the good of workers and ordinary people, and to use this term for the exact opposite of that is quite misleading. In fact, if the U.S. had a bit more real Socialism, as Northern Europe has, our average standard of living might be closer to theirs'. Instead, ordinary Americans continue to be economically raped by the financial sector, among many other rich and powerful corporate interests.
Yes, this! The real European alchemists knew that it was to be understood as spiritual transformation, not a crude physical science. In their books, some of the real ones even stated this quite bluntly that it was a spiritual science. Even at the time, there were naive people who didn't understand it and also assumed it to be a physical chemical process. The symbols such as lead and mercury were just that, symbols, and they have meaning as well. For example, mercury is the aspect of thought, which scatters when people try to control it.
Newton was still a Christian, but we could say that his real spiritual aspirations were in the form of the "spiritual science" of alchemy. Isn't it fitting that his spiritual practices would also be patterned on science?
The real archaic and naive ones are the modern people who just write off his alchemical pursuits without even understanding the subject on the most superficial level.
Slashdot Mirror
You do know that Linux and OpenBSD always used this method, right? FreeBSD was relying too much on hardware random number generation. Now they are finally catching up. If anything, it should make people wary of FreeBSD security.
Here in China, it is not really possible to even find a normal "legit" version of Windows. All versions found at any normal store will be pirated. A typical price for pirated Windows, sold in a professional looking box, will be about 18 yuan (~3 USD). There is even a common software program used to deliver updates to pirated XP machines. This software also comes with anti-malware tools, and is called "360." This program is the only way that China is able to keep going with Windows, circumventing copyright protection while still receiving regular updated from this service!
A few months ago I was talking to a sales clerk at a computer market. I saw stickers for Ubuntu on the laptops there, yet the operating system was obviously Windows. I pointed at the sticker with a smirk, and asked him about it, already knowing the answer. He sheepishly tried to tell me how they put on Windows because that's the standard in China. Obviously they were getting discounts from the manufacturers for dumping the Windows tax, and then turning around and installing pirated Windows on these computers. By the way, these were big brand names like Dell, HP, Samsung, Lenovo, Asus, etc. Out of curiosity, I asked him if many people in China use Linux, and he said it is used mostly for servers (he mentioned Red Flag Linux specifically).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_Art_Library_v._Corel_Corp.
If it is a straightforward photo that reproduces a 2D image such as a manuscript page that is in the public domain, then that photo is also in the public domain. I have uploaded others' photos on numerous occasions to Wikimedia Commons, which also recognizes such photos as public domain, and it has always been accepted as valid. Unfortunately many people, even museums, believe that anything and everything is under copyright, and they are uninformed about copyright as it applies to public domain works.
Laptops? While I'd love to see a nice, low cost CPU/GPU combo that can hang with my (rather meager) Athlon X2 6000+ and GT 240, I'm still running pretty low end gear. If this is targeted at enthusiasts they're just going to replace it with a card...
Basically it's a CPU + GPU bundle that only takes up the size of the CPU. It's not meant for the hardcore gamers, just pragmatists who are looking for value and simplicity. Like every company, AMD has a product lineup -- different products are marketed in different ways (although AMD is not always as clear about the matter as it could be). For the price, these chips are usually pretty good values.
Freetards like yourself are why most people stay as far away as possible from the GPL. "How dare you use this GPL code in complete compliance with the license since you violated [insert ad hoc unwritten rule]!!"
His post did not even mention the GPL -- only you did, you foul troll. The GP seems only to be referring rather to commercial companies (Oracle) essentially repackaging Red Hat's distribution and marketing it as something completely different. There is no legal issue being raised here, only an ethical one about respecting the work of others.
However, it could be debated that what Oracle is doing does go against the GPL in some way, since the GPL requires that the source code be conveyed in the preferred form for working with. Since Red Hat is distributing essentially combined patches that obfuscate the actual changes being made, they are probably at least going against the spirit of the GPL (and maybe even violating the license), by distributing the code in a form that discourages others from understanding these changes and working with them. Quoth the GPLv2:
The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it.
If you are fulfilling the basic requirements for edits (good information that is well-sourced, and written in an encyclopedic manner), then your edits are unlikely to be reverted. However, often newbies are unfamiliar with the basic editing process, and think that because it's a wiki, that it should be a free-for-all. It's not quite so simple, and just as Encyclopedia Brittanica has standards, Wikipedia also has standards. The key to learning the system and becoming very proficient in it, is to start small, working on obscure articles and watching bigger articles, and gradually expanding your reach. After some time, you will be able to edit major articles with a fair amount of confidence that nothing will be reverted.
If you want fewer bugs, then Ubuntu LTS is really the way to go. Those LTS releases are expected to be relatively stable for 5 years. When you are on the quick release cycles, anything can happen. This is the same principle between stable / testing / unstable with Debian. When you are on the bleeding edge, things break. When you are using the stable version, you should be able to expect that very few things will ever break. I wish more Ubuntu users paid attention to this principle, especially during the early period of Unity, when everyone was complaining about it being so buggy. Then when the LTS release came out (12.04): "Hey, Unity is actually pretty decent and stable now!" Of course it will be stable.... that's the stable version.
School is more or less standard for kids in China up through middle school. However, some kids are kicked out of school, or choose not to attend for some reason (or their parents pull them out for some reason). It is not unheard of for 14-year olds to be working full-time. For example, there is this 10-year old auto mechanic who does this work "as a hobby" since he was kicked out of school for bringing down the test scores:
http://www.chinasmack.com/2010/pictures/10-year-old-boy-skilled-auto-mechanic.html
China is basically a different beast altogether. This country does not follow the same rules as a first world country, and some things may seem completely alien to us. They are also very hostile to what they view as "western meddling," and with good reason (past history, and frankly western countries do have that tendency). As someone who has lived there in the past, my only advice is that other countries should have strict standards for labor practices if they are doing trade with China, and to realize that China is a very different animal (things may be legal in China that are illegal in the U.S., and vice-versa). In my view, China is really the "Wild West of Asia," in which there is very little rule of law, and things mostly still get done through networking and favors.
Yes, I actually love Unity in 12.04. Before 12.04. it was unusable on my netbook, so I switched to Gnome 3, and I really enjoyed the new changes there too. I'm a long-time Linux user (~15 years), much of that time using Slackware and Debian, so I'm not exactly some kid who is only used to the "Windows way." Part of the reason I like these new interfaces is because they are VERY different from the old Windows 95 copycat desktop environments. They put more emphasis on ensuring that the programs you use are always close by. Unity has some awesome keyboard shortcuts too. Of course, that takes a little training and time to get used to, though. I consider Unity now to be much more advanced than Gnome 2 ever was, though.
By the way, when I showed the 12.04 Unity interface to a few other Gnome 2 users still running Ubuntu (simple PC end users), they were blown away when they saw Super+S and the other cool shortcuts, and wanted me to upgrade them immediately. Slashdot is still the place for holdouts to gripe about Unity, though, because previously (in older versions of Ubuntu) it was still under heavy development. Slashdot is always like that, giving way to strong opinions (KDE users in this thread apparently -- still like a broken record).
Why do you think that this new cloud system has anything to do with you, or that they would try to appeal to you? Chinese networks and Chinese websites rarely have English equivalents, or attempt to provide them. It seems a bit self-centered and presumptuous to think that this "cloud" is an overblown trap aimed squarely at you. We don't even know if its services will be open to the Chinese public, much less foreigners.
So before it was a "pro-social gene" and now religiosity is based on group solidarity, the ability to believe contradictory statements, and being simply stupid? I take it these are just your own narrow prejudices and conclusions, then?
Recluses and individual monks were responsible for many of the greatest masterpieces of literature and poetry in India and the Far East. And one look at Buddhist abhidharma such as that of the Sarvastivada school in India, is evidence enough that there were huge groups of monastics who were not only religious, but extremely systematic thinkers who used formal logic extensively. The extensive use of the tetralemma in Buddhist logic and debate is further proof that these people had clear understandings of logic far before western Europe.
How does that explain the people who were traditionally the most religious people of a society, the contemplative recluses and hermits? I think also if you look into the sramana traditions of India such as Jainism and Buddhism, there is a great deal of radical individualism involved in their practice. The same goes for the Daoist hermits and the Indian Yogis who lived in the mountains in order to practice meditation.
Trick question? China does not have general elections of high level officials.
The Chinese Communist Party initially took pride in its efforts to end the exploitation of Chinese women, and women formed a big part of the revolutionary movement. Now the CCP takes pride in its past and present efforts in this area. I can understand why they do not allow pornography in China, because in a country with such an economy, it is only the poor women who are exploited and forced into lifestyles of prostitution and pornography. They just get by with the money they earn, and are then tossed out when they get too old. In the U.S., porn is all about bimbos and wannabe models who want to have sex and make porn. However, in China it is underprivileged young girls who have no hope for the future, and are taking this lifestyle because it is their only way to keep from living on the street.
Besides these contextual points, the Chinese people have often looked to the government not only for economic justice, but also as a safeguard for social and moral justice. Especially with the current Premier, Wen Jiabao, there is a lot of emphasis on positively improving the culture of China, and for the Chinese that includes the education and moral improvement of the entire society.
Indeed, Edsger Dijkstra said this back in 1975: "It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration." He also said, "I think of the company advertising 'Thought Processors' or the college pretending that learning BASIC suffices or at least helps, whereas the teaching of BASIC should be rated as a criminal offence: it mutilates the mind beyond recovery."
I'm surprised that anyone still wants to teach BASIC when far superior "easy" languages such as Python and Ruby exist, or Squeak, which is a great approach. This is not even mentioning Scheme, which is probably the best way to start, and has been around for a long time now. There is all sorts of nice introductory material from the PLT Scheme people, with custom dialects of Scheme that have extensions specifically for easy graphics and other fun stuff that students would like.
China also has a large government, and it is able to move very quickly to embrace new technology and fund development. The reason for this is that it isn't the size of the system, but the way the system works. China moves unilaterally, so it can just go ahead and do whatever the government wants. The U.S. has a safer approach, but it requires deliberation, but when two parties are locked in place, and they have mutually conflicting goals, of course it's terribly inefficient. Nobody can agree on anything, so nothing gets done. It's a horrible system, and the agility of other countries like China, in developing high speed rail, for example, makes the U.S. look like a third world country. What do we expect when both parties are screeching the same slogans they were 30 years ago? The rest of the world is passing us by, because we were too dumb to look around and comprehend the actual situation. In my state, the newly-elected governor sent back federal money which would have developed high speed rail between the two largest cities in the state. He did this as a political stunt to make his point about small government, and yet this money was just sent to other states that actually were going to continue with their programs. What a joke.
I watched the whole sad story unfold. It was clear that Sega's Dreamcast had an innovative design, compact form factor, and all sorts of great games. The graphics were also far better than anything on the previous systems (PSX, N64), and the Sonic demos alone were to die for. I just felt the whole time that Sega deserved the comeback and their new system was really impressive. Unfortunately the timing was bad, because Sony had been working on its PS2, and it was set to be released just as the Dreamcast should have been coming into its own. Unlike the Dreamcast, the PS2 had a large and clunky design, controllers that were the exact same as the last system's, and memory cards that looked exactly the same as well. In terms of its games and developers, they were essentially holdovers from the PSX days. They really offered nothing great in the way of innovation. What they did offer was higher system specs. Rather than the GD-ROM of the Dreamcast, the PS2 had a DVD player, so much more storage for textures and media. Of course, the big thing was better performance for 3D graphics, and Sony wowed everyone with all sorts of contrived demos that no real PS2 game looked even half as good as (It's rendering the FF8 ballroom dance CGI in realtime! Yeah right...). Sony then released this ugly black cube for a hefty $300, which was $100 more than the Dreamcast had been released for at launch.
The result of all these factors? Of course the PS2 destroyed it. The system performance and developer loyalty were what mattered. The Dreamcast had all the makings of a great system, and it seemed like Sega did everything right in its design, but the timing just killed it. With the death of the Dreamcast and the emergence of new and expensive next-generation consoles, the magic seemed like it was gone, so I left gaming behind. I have fond memories of the old PSX days, though, when quality Japanese RPG's were being released left and right, and each action game wasn't a grizzled spacing marine walking down drab hallways.
So we finally know the truth: Jesus was an asexually-reproduced reptile man of some kind, with genetically-imbued magical powers derived from his innate chromosomal oddity.
Doesn't this just prove that not only did Jesus exist as the Only Way (tm), but that he was immaculately conceived as well, from some type of half-woman-half-reptile asexually-reproducing demigod?
Anyone who cares about free access to the Internet has some method around the Great Firewall. VPN services are even advertised quite freely in China for foreigners over there (maybe because the officials can't read them). Anyways, despite what many westerners would expect, the Chinese themselves often support the government's general ability to block access to websites. Much like in America, these things are framed as actions taken for the good of the nation, and just like the Americans, the majority will accept that. I had a discussion about this when I was in China, and I was the only one who disagreed with the firewall. Nobody really seemed to miss anything, and they asked me which sites are blocked. I rattled off a few like YouTube and Blogger, but they hadn't heard of them. For video sites, they use Youku and Tudou. For blogs and the like, QQ's services are popular. Perhaps the only exception to any of this is that some younger people like to get around the firewall so they can use Facebook as well (FB is blocked in China), but the Chinese have their own social networking site that is more popular there (RenRen). China is a whole different animal.
Mod parent up! Just checked out the nightly build, and it is indeed very fast and smooth. It's really slick, just the way Firefox seemed back when it was the "fast" browser forked from the Mozilla suite. My old P4 3GHz IBM desktop seems fast again. :-D
For the Linux and BSD users who have wget installed and want to have a little fun...
/tmp; while $(true); do wget northcountrygazette.org; rm index.html 2>/dev/null; done
cd
On the plus side, this means that some businesses may not be so trapped with Windows due to their reliance on Exchange. This has always been a big sticking point for the use of Linux and other open source platforms in businesses. To have any option of using Exchange on a Linux desktop opens up some interesting possibilities.
FYI: "Socialism for Business" is called Corporatism, which is synonymous with Fascism. Socialism is ideally concerned with the good of workers and ordinary people, and to use this term for the exact opposite of that is quite misleading. In fact, if the U.S. had a bit more real Socialism, as Northern Europe has, our average standard of living might be closer to theirs'. Instead, ordinary Americans continue to be economically raped by the financial sector, among many other rich and powerful corporate interests.
Yes, this! The real European alchemists knew that it was to be understood as spiritual transformation, not a crude physical science. In their books, some of the real ones even stated this quite bluntly that it was a spiritual science. Even at the time, there were naive people who didn't understand it and also assumed it to be a physical chemical process. The symbols such as lead and mercury were just that, symbols, and they have meaning as well. For example, mercury is the aspect of thought, which scatters when people try to control it.
Newton was still a Christian, but we could say that his real spiritual aspirations were in the form of the "spiritual science" of alchemy. Isn't it fitting that his spiritual practices would also be patterned on science?
The real archaic and naive ones are the modern people who just write off his alchemical pursuits without even understanding the subject on the most superficial level.