I'm not sure how the events in Tibet can exactly reflect all that badly on the Chinese, from what I see on the news a whole bunch of Tibetans have been engaged in racially motivated attacks on Chinese Tibetans and the authorities have quite rightly done what they have to protect all Tibetans from this sort of violence.
All I hear on the news are various western talking heads banging on about Buddism being a religion of perfect peace and how evil China is whilst totally ignoring the facts that Tibet has always been a part of China in the same way Scotland is a part of the UK and the Tibetans are well known for their propensity to engage in warfare and violent conflict ( along with petty theft and slavery ) which they revere as a key part of their heritage and that I have to say doesn't sound all that peaceful to me.
I'd say the Tibetans have a much better PR machine than the Chinese, at least in the West, thanks to the sheer number of useless, ignorant media stars willing to kow tow to the Dali Lama and swallow any line of bullshit he feeds them.
Seems to me the best solution for the Chinese would be to make sure there markets remain stable and willing to buy Chinese manufactured goods. If this involves a military assault on Washington and annexing New York, San Fransico and LA to ensure US co-operation then so be it thats just good business.
Microsoft-to-Realtek: Here's the API Realtek: Thanks man, lets get this driver done Microsoft-to-Realtek: The API changed, here's a new one Realtek: Damn, back to the drawing board Microsoft-to-Realtek: We've just improved the API, it's different now Realtek: Double damn, this is getting irritating but nevertheless lets solider on Microsoft-to-Realtek: Here's another API Realtek: Fuck this
Re:Excession and Look to Windward?
on
Matter
·
· Score: 1
Complete lack of an ending ! The ending is brilliantly understated but brilliant nonetheless.
I agree the plot doesn't really twist or turn all that much but there is so much that is going on which is only hinted at that which you have to pretty much work out for yourself as you go along that it is totally engrossing. In addition to that the whole geography of the world takes a little time to come to terms with properly but is a fascinating idea and the characters are, Bascule especially, probably amongst the most amusing and witty Banks has created.
I think you might be a little biased ( but then so might I ! ), a lot of his non Sci-Fi is fantastic and I think on balance personally prefer it to the Sci Fi.
The first of his books I ever read was the Wasp Factory and that is quite a short read but is simultaneously hilariously funny and gratuitously sick. My personal favourites though are The Crow Road and Whit both of which I absolutely love and would rank above all of his Sci Fi stuff except Feersum Enjinn.
Re:Excession and Look to Windward?
on
Matter
·
· Score: 1
I'm afraid I have to totally disagree with that I think Feersum Injun is by far and away his best Sci-Fi book but I can understand that the phonetic writing of Bascule might put people off. My advice is to persevere because the book is just amazing.
Au Contraire, it's that stuff that they would be most interested in.
If someone is genuinely behaving in a terroristic manner, e.g. buying large amounts of explosive, huge money belts etc then I've no problem with the state security forces spying on them, following them around and keeping as close an eye on them as possible. The problem is you have to find these terrorists before you can place them under observation and finding them in the first place is the problem.
One way of finding terrorists might be to feed in as much information about indviduals as you can gather and let a fancy computer system sift through it and look for for any pointers that a particular person might be a terrorist. Everyday the computer would print a list of likely terrorists and all you'd have to do is assign some observation to each person for a week or so to find out if they really are a terrorist.
All the time the agent is sat outside your house he'll no doubt be going through your file, all that CCTV footage from bars and nightspots, your subscriptions to "Big Gay Men Weekly", the details of your divorce and subsequent sex change operation. He and his buddy will probably have a good laugh over some of the stuff you get up and maybe they will even be able to zero in on some of the new behaviour they have observed you enage in that will place you under further precautionary surveillance.
Imagine if a car goes to a restaurant and having waited ages for it's meal is disappointed when the starter and main course arrive and are foul tasting and inadequate for a car of his appetite...
I think another major war in Europe is the last thing the USSR wanted, I think preventing such a war was a key driving force in their policy. Don't forget they made a far greater contribution to winning WWII than the US did and experienced a vastly higher degree of suffering and hardship and they were very keen to avoid a repeat showing. The US on the other hand remained relatively isolated and seemed to base it's foreign policy on some bizarre paranoid domestic policies.
Not quite, a better analogy might be that it's like going to restaurant and recieving a mediocre and unsatisfying starter and main course and when it comes to pudding being told that the pudding isn't ready yet and if they were to serve it to you immediately you might get ill and die. Nevertheless even hearing this advice you then break into the kitchen and gobble down the partially cooked pudding rather than taking the perfectly sensible option of going to the lovely homely Penguin tavern next door where they're serving wholesome, nutritious and filling meals for nothing, and with free beer.
There are families in my town known to be mostly composed of members who commit crime (sad but true).
There are similar families living in every town and are probably responsible for a large percentage of the nuisance crimes, general thuggery and burglary. Basically it's a self perpetuating problem, the parents think it's fine to sit around on benefits, demand your "rights" and turn a blind eye as your kids get involved in alcoholism, drugs, petty burglary and vandalism and then in turn when the kids themselves become parents ( around 14 years of age ) they pass these same values on to the next generation.
A solution I favour is to first of all cut off all benefits to any household whose members have more than 2 arrests or convictions between them and force them out to work in something like what used to be referred to as the workhouse. They would also have to all wear distinctive marks advertising the fact they were low life scum and incorporating the same sort of things you see on lorries saying "Hows my driving, call..." so the decent citizens could report them for any sort of anti social behaviour at all. For example if they're on the way to the workhouse and you bid them good day in the street and they didn't reply courteously you would ring the number and they would then have some sort of punishment, say a birching or restriction of rations or something.
This has got nothing to do with class domination, whatever that is, and everything to do with generations of people being too fat and lazy to earn their own living honestly.
Re:Left out Multi-Level Marketing
on
The Dirty Jobs of IT
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
I once worked for a company which used to carry out "free security survey" where we'd go round to peoples houses and attempt to scare them into buying an overpriced alarm system from one of our sales men who were without exception sleazy dishonest assholes.
Their method of paying everyone was to pay large amounts to one person and expect them to take the money from their own bank accounts to pay the other staff as some kind of tax dodge presumably. They paid me like that and I left that very evening and spent the next two weeks laughing at their pathetic phone calls threatening me with their 'top' lawyers and the police etc.
I would say that the month you're born in has very little influence on your personality compared to the far far greater influences of your parents, your environment and 1001 other things. I know half a dozen people whose birthday is within 1 or 2 days of my own, in the same year and our personalities are very pretty diverse.
Also simply because there was once an economic recession when pluto is a particular position is an entirely meaningless and useless piece of information in the absence of any actual influence of pluto on economic recessions. Anyone relying on such information to handle their share dealing would be a moron and deserve everything they get in the way of bankruptcy etc.
I think it most certainly isn't successful even on "personality types". All it does it give some random generic traits which all humans exhibit to some extent so when you read about your sign you think things like
"Oh, it says Aries is optomistic. Hey ! I'm often optomistic, but then look it says there can be periods when Aries can be pessimistic too and yes, sometimes I am ! This is amazing."
I figured the average reader could do basic math and would know that by doubling the 5% you could roughly get a women vs. men comparison. Perhaps I assumed too much.
Wow, are there really exactly the same number of men and women in the world then, amazing !
Maybe not. On the other hand "I'm going to kill one passenger every minute until you open this door" would probably work. Also, "I'm going to set off my bomb if you don't open this door in 30 seconds" is pretty much guaranteed to work.
I'm not sure it would, it wouldn't if I were the pilot anyway. I can't see what benefit you'd get letting a suicdial maniac into the cockpit so he can kill people on the ground as well as those he's already killing on the plane. On a more fundamental level if there is a murderous maniac killing people outside the last thing I'm going to do is let him in to kill me too.
The best thing to do is hope he doesn't really have a bomb and fly to the nearest military base where the SAS or whoever can have a reception party waiting for him. The more passangers he's killed the more painful he is likely to find it when he lands.
Not quite, if you imagine the theory as a car then the scientists suspected it might have been a Porsche Cayenne 4x4 and once they had built their simulation ( imagine that as a carwash ) it turned out that it was indeed a Porsche Cayenne 4x4. However the amazing thing was that even though they hadn't considered the driver specifically in their simulation it did indeed turn out the simulated driver was a enormous wanker thus proving beyond doubt the truth of their simulation.
Thats what would happen if every individual made their purchases independantly but what would happen if you kept the money from each individual purchase in a safe place and didn't buy any shares until there was enough cash to buy your 51% all at once ?
This seems like the most sensible way of funding them to me, I'm not an expert on these matters at all but it seems to me that by loaning SCO the money as and when they request it they have ensured that when SCO loses ( first of all to Novell ) in court and has to pay massive damages the only money Novell will be able to claim is that 1st 5 Million because SCO would not then request any more loan money.
Exactly, the most annoying people are in the world are the ones who are constantly touching the brakes on the motorway because they are unable to judge the speed of the traffic in front of them properly because you have to leave a massive gap behind them which people then jump into and also begin to randomly break when the guy in front of them gets back up to his tricks again.
We have the same in the UK, it's only in the last week or so that I've been able to leave for work and get home whilst it's still light, even if only for 10 mins or so.
Later on this month we'll change to British Summer Time and I can't wait because whilst initially it will still be dark in the mornings I'll have a good hour or two of sun in the evenings.
Just because musicians have been lucky enough to enjoy the benefits of technology over the last hundred years or so which lets them sell pieces of plastic or metal in order to share their music with people doesn't mean they should enjoy any sort of right to continue to do that when the technology changes again.
Now it has changed and we don't need to buy pieces of plastic or metal to enjoy sharing the musicians work with them and it's down to the musicians to work out a viable way they can make a living from the new situation.
The fact is people enjoy making music and there will never be a situation in which there is no music to be heard or no musicians to go and see play, creating and enjoying music is a more or less fundamental piece of human behaviour and there is no such thing as a shortage of music so if the current musicians can't make money from the situation then I'm quite happy for them to die off and make room for those who can.
Surely by the far the best plan is to not allocate specific seats at all and make sure everyone fills the plane from the the back. It doesn't matter if people are late then, they can just join the end of the queue.
Almost everytime I fly there is someone in my allocated seat anyway and we have to spend time sorting that out, unpacking stuff from the lockers etc.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure how the events in Tibet can exactly reflect all that badly on the Chinese, from what I see on the news a whole bunch of Tibetans have been engaged in racially motivated attacks on Chinese Tibetans and the authorities have quite rightly done what they have to protect all Tibetans from this sort of violence.
All I hear on the news are various western talking heads banging on about Buddism being a religion of perfect peace and how evil China is whilst totally ignoring the facts that Tibet has always been a part of China in the same way Scotland is a part of the UK and the Tibetans are well known for their propensity to engage in warfare and violent conflict ( along with petty theft and slavery ) which they revere as a key part of their heritage and that I have to say doesn't sound all that peaceful to me.
I'd say the Tibetans have a much better PR machine than the Chinese, at least in the West, thanks to the sheer number of useless, ignorant media stars willing to kow tow to the Dali Lama and swallow any line of bullshit he feeds them.
Seems to me the best solution for the Chinese would be to make sure there markets remain stable and willing to buy Chinese manufactured goods. If this involves a military assault on Washington and annexing New York, San Fransico and LA to ensure US co-operation then so be it thats just good business.
I hear with Vista it was more like this
Microsoft-to-Realtek: Here's the API
Realtek: Thanks man, lets get this driver done
Microsoft-to-Realtek: The API changed, here's a new one
Realtek: Damn, back to the drawing board
Microsoft-to-Realtek: We've just improved the API, it's different now
Realtek: Double damn, this is getting irritating but nevertheless lets solider on
Microsoft-to-Realtek: Here's another API
Realtek: Fuck this
Complete lack of an ending ! The ending is brilliantly understated but brilliant nonetheless.
I agree the plot doesn't really twist or turn all that much but there is so much that is going on which is only hinted at that which you have to pretty much work out for yourself as you go along that it is totally engrossing. In addition to that the whole geography of the world takes a little time to come to terms with properly but is a fascinating idea and the characters are, Bascule especially, probably amongst the most amusing and witty Banks has created.
I'd really suggest you give it another go !
I think you might be a little biased ( but then so might I ! ), a lot of his non Sci-Fi is fantastic and I think on balance personally prefer it to the Sci Fi.
The first of his books I ever read was the Wasp Factory and that is quite a short read but is simultaneously hilariously funny and gratuitously sick. My personal favourites though are The Crow Road and Whit both of which I absolutely love and would rank above all of his Sci Fi stuff except Feersum Enjinn.
I'm afraid I have to totally disagree with that I think Feersum Injun is by far and away his best Sci-Fi book but I can understand that the phonetic writing of Bascule might put people off. My advice is to persevere because the book is just amazing.
Au Contraire, it's that stuff that they would be most interested in.
If someone is genuinely behaving in a terroristic manner, e.g. buying large amounts of explosive, huge money belts etc then I've no problem with the state security forces spying on them, following them around and keeping as close an eye on them as possible. The problem is you have to find these terrorists before you can place them under observation and finding them in the first place is the problem.
One way of finding terrorists might be to feed in as much information about indviduals as you can gather and let a fancy computer system sift through it and look for for any pointers that a particular person might be a terrorist. Everyday the computer would print a list of likely terrorists and all you'd have to do is assign some observation to each person for a week or so to find out if they really are a terrorist.
All the time the agent is sat outside your house he'll no doubt be going through your file, all that CCTV footage from bars and nightspots, your subscriptions to "Big Gay Men Weekly", the details of your divorce and subsequent sex change operation. He and his buddy will probably have a good laugh over some of the stuff you get up and maybe they will even be able to zero in on some of the new behaviour they have observed you enage in that will place you under further precautionary surveillance.
No problem.
...
Imagine if a car goes to a restaurant and having waited ages for it's meal is disappointed when the starter and main course arrive and are foul tasting and inadequate for a car of his appetite
I think another major war in Europe is the last thing the USSR wanted, I think preventing such a war was a key driving force in their policy. Don't forget they made a far greater contribution to winning WWII than the US did and experienced a vastly higher degree of suffering and hardship and they were very keen to avoid a repeat showing. The US on the other hand remained relatively isolated and seemed to base it's foreign policy on some bizarre paranoid domestic policies.
Not quite, a better analogy might be that it's like going to restaurant and recieving a mediocre and unsatisfying starter and main course and when it comes to pudding being told that the pudding isn't ready yet and if they were to serve it to you immediately you might get ill and die. Nevertheless even hearing this advice you then break into the kitchen and gobble down the partially cooked pudding rather than taking the perfectly sensible option of going to the lovely homely Penguin tavern next door where they're serving wholesome, nutritious and filling meals for nothing, and with free beer.
There are similar families living in every town and are probably responsible for a large percentage of the nuisance crimes, general thuggery and burglary. Basically it's a self perpetuating problem, the parents think it's fine to sit around on benefits, demand your "rights" and turn a blind eye as your kids get involved in alcoholism, drugs, petty burglary and vandalism and then in turn when the kids themselves become parents ( around 14 years of age ) they pass these same values on to the next generation.
A solution I favour is to first of all cut off all benefits to any household whose members have more than 2 arrests or convictions between them and force them out to work in something like what used to be referred to as the workhouse. They would also have to all wear distinctive marks advertising the fact they were low life scum and incorporating the same sort of things you see on lorries saying "Hows my driving, call
This has got nothing to do with class domination, whatever that is, and everything to do with generations of people being too fat and lazy to earn their own living honestly.
I once worked for a company which used to carry out "free security survey" where we'd go round to peoples houses and attempt to scare them into buying an overpriced alarm system from one of our sales men who were without exception sleazy dishonest assholes.
Their method of paying everyone was to pay large amounts to one person and expect them to take the money from their own bank accounts to pay the other staff as some kind of tax dodge presumably. They paid me like that and I left that very evening and spent the next two weeks laughing at their pathetic phone calls threatening me with their 'top' lawyers and the police etc.
I would say that the month you're born in has very little influence on your personality compared to the far far greater influences of your parents, your environment and 1001 other things. I know half a dozen people whose birthday is within 1 or 2 days of my own, in the same year and our personalities are very pretty diverse.
Also simply because there was once an economic recession when pluto is a particular position is an entirely meaningless and useless piece of information in the absence of any actual influence of pluto on economic recessions. Anyone relying on such information to handle their share dealing would be a moron and deserve everything they get in the way of bankruptcy etc.
I think it most certainly isn't successful even on "personality types". All it does it give some random generic traits which all humans exhibit to some extent so when you read about your sign you think things like
"Oh, it says Aries is optomistic. Hey ! I'm often optomistic, but then look it says there can be periods when Aries can be pessimistic too and yes, sometimes I am ! This is amazing."
Wow, are there really exactly the same number of men and women in the world then, amazing !
I'm not sure it would, it wouldn't if I were the pilot anyway. I can't see what benefit you'd get letting a suicdial maniac into the cockpit so he can kill people on the ground as well as those he's already killing on the plane. On a more fundamental level if there is a murderous maniac killing people outside the last thing I'm going to do is let him in to kill me too.
The best thing to do is hope he doesn't really have a bomb and fly to the nearest military base where the SAS or whoever can have a reception party waiting for him. The more passangers he's killed the more painful he is likely to find it when he lands.
Not quite, if you imagine the theory as a car then the scientists suspected it might have been a Porsche Cayenne 4x4 and once they had built their simulation ( imagine that as a carwash ) it turned out that it was indeed a Porsche Cayenne 4x4. However the amazing thing was that even though they hadn't considered the driver specifically in their simulation it did indeed turn out the simulated driver was a enormous wanker thus proving beyond doubt the truth of their simulation.
Thats what would happen if every individual made their purchases independantly but what would happen if you kept the money from each individual purchase in a safe place and didn't buy any shares until there was enough cash to buy your 51% all at once ?
This seems like the most sensible way of funding them to me, I'm not an expert on these matters at all but it seems to me that by loaning SCO the money as and when they request it they have ensured that when SCO loses ( first of all to Novell ) in court and has to pay massive damages the only money Novell will be able to claim is that 1st 5 Million because SCO would not then request any more loan money.
They are also entered in the competition separately from the guy in the garage and are in the top 15 - 20 places by the look of it.
Exactly, the most annoying people are in the world are the ones who are constantly touching the brakes on the motorway because they are unable to judge the speed of the traffic in front of them properly because you have to leave a massive gap behind them which people then jump into and also begin to randomly break when the guy in front of them gets back up to his tricks again.
We have the same in the UK, it's only in the last week or so that I've been able to leave for work and get home whilst it's still light, even if only for 10 mins or so.
Later on this month we'll change to British Summer Time and I can't wait because whilst initially it will still be dark in the mornings I'll have a good hour or two of sun in the evenings.
Just because musicians have been lucky enough to enjoy the benefits of technology over the last hundred years or so which lets them sell pieces of plastic or metal in order to share their music with people doesn't mean they should enjoy any sort of right to continue to do that when the technology changes again.
Now it has changed and we don't need to buy pieces of plastic or metal to enjoy sharing the musicians work with them and it's down to the musicians to work out a viable way they can make a living from the new situation.
The fact is people enjoy making music and there will never be a situation in which there is no music to be heard or no musicians to go and see play, creating and enjoying music is a more or less fundamental piece of human behaviour and there is no such thing as a shortage of music so if the current musicians can't make money from the situation then I'm quite happy for them to die off and make room for those who can.
Yes you'd probably be OK with a knife but what I'm talking about is a KNIFE.
Surely by the far the best plan is to not allocate specific seats at all and make sure everyone fills the plane from the the back. It doesn't matter if people are late then, they can just join the end of the queue.
Almost everytime I fly there is someone in my allocated seat anyway and we have to spend time sorting that out, unpacking stuff from the lockers etc.