For me, this study confirmed what I came to believe instinctively, since I moved to live in Vietnam. In Vietnam, social relations are far more important than anything else when doing business, including simple things as buying grocery.
I often encounter other foreigners who complain about how Vietnamese try to cheat them, tell them ridiculous prices, etc. Me, I had exactly the opposite experience. One of the reasons was that I took the time to read about their culture before I came here. And one aspect of their culture is that social relations are far more important than anything else. It doesn't matter who you are, how much you are willing to spend, etc. Once I was buying a pack of cigarettes from a street vendor, when I noticed a coin just under my motorbike. It may have fallen out of my pocket, or not... I didn't care, I gave it to the vendor. She was protesting, but I smiled, patted her on the shoulder, and drove away. Two weeks later, I bought another pack from the same vendor. She kept the coin and gave it to me, trying to explain something enthusiastically. I speak a little Vietnamese, but couldn't understand her.
I know this is common sense, and we all know that if we befriend a shopkeeper or an official, he or she will treat us better - but it is far more prevalent in Vietnam than in our cultures. So I usually start any interaction by talking, telling them my name, age, marital status (those will be the first question you encounter) and making them laugh. They are a fun loving people, make them laugh, and you won't have to pay more than the locals.
Expacts complaining about them usually approach vendors expecting to be cheated. Vietnamese have a very keen sense of your attitude, enhanced by the language barrier (they have to rely more on their instinct when you don't speak their language). They are very good at reading people. Approach them with an open heart, and they will like you. If they like you, you pay local prices. Simple as that. Pretending to like them, fake smiles don't really work. When I share my views with these complaining expacts, they usually say I'm just naive, and I'm being cheated without even knowing it. Funny, considering I've been here for over two years, have lots of Vietnamese friends, and know the local prices of almost everything. Plus I understand enough Vietnamese to know how much they asked their countrymen to pay for a given item.
Point is that here, it is far more important to establish some sort of relationship before conducting any business. That includes very personal questions, like your age, marital status, etc. Of course, age is also important because they don't have a generic "you" in their language. You can't say "you" in Vietnamese. If someone's younger than you, you is "em", same age will be "anh" for men and "chi" for women, "ong" and "co" respectively for men and women who could be your mother. There are a dozen more commonly used personal pronouns for you, depending on position in the family, your age, your gender, and your social status. So I'd say that the findings in this study can be important to understand not only our own cultures, but other cultures too. It also shows an aspect of general human nature that in many western cultures became more buried under formalities.
And facebook gets your cellphone number. Good thing that fb is a reputable company ran by people of high integrity who would never abuse that information.
How? It's a serious question. I had my phone number listed already, never saw any drawbacks. Of course, it can be abused, mostly by users, but that's when "don't be stupid" kicks in - don't befriend random people you know nothing about, adjust your privacy settings, etc. So how is Facebook going to abuse this information?
Apple doesn't give a rat's ass about what a small percentage of hackers do after they've paid Apple for the hardware. Why would they? Does anyone even have a plausible possibility?
Most of what you say is correct, especially when it comes to desktop offering. That last bit, however, is nonsense or just fanboyism. See this for example.
China is in territorial dispute with every SE-Asian country that has a shoreline. They claim sovereignty over every island down to the Philippines. For example, they have claims over Paracel islands which in theory, belong to Vietnam. Recently they started to harass fishing boats, hold them at ransom, very similar to what Somalian pirates do. Vietnam has historical documents to prove their claim - irony is, that actually some of the documents the Chinese produced to prove their point turned out to be validate the Vietnamese claims (they mention these islands as "foreign lands" in their records). Also, they threatened foreign companies (oil exploration) that had contracts with Vietnamese oil companies to back out. Finally - this started this year - they began to organize "tours" to these islands, showing the beauty of these "most remote Chinese lands." In reality, there's nothing to see there actually. Except Vietnamese fishermen who lived there for generations. Well, not anymore, actually, but you get the point... just trying to illustrate how territorial the Chinese are... and how arrogant.
That's very interesting - it seems to me that Assange is the right person for the kind of job he does. He's like a vulcan in that chatlog, refuses to get into any emotional exchange. In fact that's not really a flamewar, because Assange avoids completely a who said what/did what kind of back and forth bickering. Instead, his only concern is the leak itself: how many people and who exactly heard the information. Domscheit-Berg comes off as a typical forum prick, likening Assange to a slave trader, king, emperor...
I don't think you have tried flash on Froyo - I don't care what random author says on the internet, most sites I have ran into work well with flash enabled on my Nexus One. That includes flashgames247, a site I just visited to try out how flash works. Played a game where you had to shoot arrows by dragging backwards and clicking with the mouse. Worked flawlessly with fingers. Then before I bought this phone, I was looking at reviews on youtube. Found a video comparing the Iphone 4 with the Nexus One. By the time the Iphone finished loading the page of one specific site*, the Nexus one has already finished and the flash video was already playing! The slowest site I managed to find was sonystyle, animation is as slow as a slideshow, but so far, the majority of flash heavy sites I visited work very well.
*www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjhF1xZQRQk - browser test is between the 6th and 7th minute
I'm really hoping that someone's going to admonish me with a "woosh!" indicating that you were just being satiric or ironic or something and not serious, because if you really believe...
Let me get this straight.
Reading your post made me a little bit sad.:-/
A lot of people post stuff far more farcical than yours, and they are being dead serious about their crap. Especially when it comes to politics. I read your post and was asking myself the same question - is he serious? Without visual cues or hearing your tone, there was a good chance you were, even if you thought that this is glaringly obvious. Happened to me a number of times, I thought no one would miss that for a joke, then most people did. Actually, it happens to me all the time in face to face conversations.
The reason he didn't feel his dog eating his toe is not just that he was drunk, but because diabetes causes peripheral neuropathy. When you have severe untreated diabetes, you often can't feel pain in your extremities, and untreated sores become gangrenous. So his being drunk was the least of his problems, his bigger problem was that his toe was decomposing and he couldn't feel it.
Yeah, but he could SMELL and see it - that might have been a clue that something's not right...
I'd say procrastinating on visiting the doctor in case something might be discovered is understandable to some extent. But doing so when your own brother died of complications of a disease that you also start to have symptoms of... that's stupid.
Yeah you're right about the diabetes part, my mistake. As to the dog eating chewing off his toe - I dunno... I'm still a bit skeptical about that, but I admit it might be possible.
No, not really. How much do you have to drink to pass out so badly that you don't feel your dog eating your toe?? I mean there could be several more plausible explanations than the one he came up with after waking up from his drunken stupor. At that kind of alcohol abuse, you can bet that the man has no idea what happened before he passed out. Besides, the man is a retard - he was urged to check for diabetes, but resisted "fearing the diagnosis" while his brother died of diabetes complications earlier! And he had this sliver in his toe and tried to remove it with a knife cutting away skin. Then when it got worse and started to both swell and SMELL, his solution was to use loose sandals instead of going to the doctor. Major fail. Oh, and his wife is a certified nurse.
... and I'd like to know where you got it, because I would also like a DVD player that does what I want.
Modern cheap Chinese DVD players have a skip button specifically designed to do that. My brand is Oppo, not to confused with a US company selling electronics under the same name. Plays everything, even the crappy 15c pirate DVDs that 99% of DVD stores sell around here (major brands like Sony or Pioneer quite often choke on those).
1: OS X tends to have lower latency than Windows out of the box (you can disable services in Windows to help things). This, combined with the fact that Macs do not need a CPU and I/O draining antivirus program resident 24/7 means that a Mac Pro can outperform a similarly configured Windows machine.
I agree with most of your points except this. I have an antivirus (Microsoft Security Essentials) on my netbook, barely notice it's presence on my netbook. I also disabled all services (Windows 7 Home Premium), more for psychological (I don't like crap running I don't need) than any measurable gain. We are talking about a single Atom processor here - so do you think this would make a difference on a 12-core monster processor? Yeah, you may gain a few millisecond render time here and there, and well it can add up to a few seconds (maybe even a minute!!!) over a year... but seriously, this is not exactly a huge advantage;)
As for reason #3 I think that's more an argument for why not. #7 I'm not sure, you can buy a G5 Mac Pro now for 200$, that's a fraction of the original price. The loss seems to me pretty much on par with (over 90%) PCs. I also wonder about your latency claim - I don't dispute it, I just don't know what to think... do you have any proof? The only benchmarks I saw comparing the three platforms (PC/Linux PC/Win7 Mac/OsX) was on phoronix, and I don't trust them too much (but the mac box lost on almost all benchmarks).
Sure classical HDD will soon reach 5TB but do we need always more space ?
Yes. My 1.5 Tb drive in my Kaiboer 300 is full (I have all my favourite series on it, including all Doctor Who parts plus tons of other movies). Took me 6 months to fill it up. I've done with handling optical disks, and streaming 1080p movies from the internet is not possible here (I live in Vietnam).
If you think about it, China is a very big market for porn. Considering there is no competition what so ever and the shear size of the population, it must be extremely proffitable for those who can get in there even if for a few weeks, days or even hours. So if an owner of a handfull of porn sites is able to keep from being filtered, perhaps by a sizable under the counter bribe, then they still stand to make a lot of money. Either way it shows that whoever is in charge of looking after the filter is either corrupt or incompitent and thus a very good argument to why the whole idea is very bad in the first place.
Don't forget gender imbalance either. Due to families preferring boys (and widespread abortion when it turns out it's going to be a girl) now China has a 120:100 male to female ratio. So yes, China is a huge market for porn indeed...
Just to make it clear - the reason I called your rant wild speculation is that you repeatedly failed to provide evidence that there is a connection between Greenpeace and the coal industry. In your reply you provide a bunch of numbers proving how bad coal plants are - but I didn't say they were not bad now did I?
So let's see some facts than:
Coal can provide energy at the cost of 1-2$/MMBTu compared with 6-12$ for oil or gas.
The top three countries with most coal plants are China (no.1 since 2006), the US and India. All three countries have abundant coal supplies.
Coal plants are not only cheap to build, but you can build them relatively fast.
1/3 of coal plants in the US date from 1970 or earlier, the rest were built before 1989. Only 12 were built since then.
Now put 1 and 1 together, and there you find a more plausible answer supported by facts instead of the sheer lunacy (now at +5 insightful lol) of your original post. In fact, the last fact I mention alone is enough to debunk your claims, since Greenpeace was founded in 1971 and only achieved the current political clout by the time the US stopped building coal plants.
Congratulations. You found evidence that coal plants are bad. Now please point out the part of my post that says otherwise (and you have the audacity to preach about logic!).
Saying that we have a lot of coal plants because of Greenpeace, now that's crazy. So China built thousands of coal plants in the past decade because of Greenpeace, right? Not because they have vast amounts of coal supplies, not because it's relatively cheap to set up (and you can set up a coal plant faster than any other types of plants). Their breakneck pace of growth and skyrocketing energy demands have nothing to do with building cheap coal plants as fast as they can, no, it must be Greenpeace.
I don't have time to find a citation at the moment, but I'll lay out the math for you.
[...]
Now realize that instead [...] Now realize that their power [...]
Realize that the average [...]
Sir, your post is simply WILD SPECULATION, nothing else. Now realize that Greenpace has been traditionally quite strong in France for example (and still is). And look how they destroyed the nuclear industry in France...
Now lets look at Germany, that started investing in green technologies decades ago. They were one of the few countries with a long term vision of becoming world leaders in these technologies as demand for them grows. Today, along with Japan, they are there, and already started to reap the benefits.
The most aggravating part of your post is that you begin your sentences with "Realize that..." You sound like the githzeray in NWN2 (though she started with the annoying "Know that..." The point is, that you sound like a religious nutcase, with hating Greenpeace being at the center of your religion.
The parent asked for proof... now if you consider pulling wild stuff out of your ass as proof, than your signature is quite ironic indeed ("Wikipedia, the concept that persistent opinions represent facts").
GP simply lacks the capacity to look at a situation from different perspectives while believing that his own perspective is morally superiour to everyone else's. A trait shared by religious zealots and fanatics, self-indignant extreme-right politicians, etc... ironically, the kind of people you and I would never describe as moral or ethical;)
It sounds like you consider your own perspective so morally superior to those of "religious zealots" and extreme-right politicians that you can't look at a situation from their persepctive. Interesting.
Considering my perspective superiour and the ability to look at a situation from theirs have nothing to do with each other. They are not mutually exclusive. Take, for instance, humour. Some people get the humorous aspect of this story, others don't. While the former group is capable of looking at the story from a serious point of view (feeling sympathy for the teller in his plight for example), the latter group would always insist that THIS IS NOT FUNNY. Now I wouldn't say that my perspective is superiour (that's your assumption), but I do think that having a sense of humour is a great asset, because the story itself, and some of the comments I read in this thread (including yours;)) are fucking HILARIOUS. Laughter is good for your health:)
Uh... the guy was waving a gun in some teller's face. How is that remotely something that a person should be finding humorous?
I'd like to make another point. I think you're facing a dichotomy between what you think people should find funny vs. what (most) people do find funny.
In my other replies to you, I was trying to explain why I think people do find the story funny.
As to whether or not we should, that's an entirely separate ball of wax. But I for one don't have too much control over what I do find funny. I reckon that's largely part of the human condition.
I think prescribing what people should find funny would lead to a very bleak world. Humour has nothing to do with morality, except perhaps when it's used as a tool to humiliate others. This is not the case here - and the guy you replied to has no way of knowing how the teller reacted or how he coped with the situation after it happened. In fact, a lot of people find humour a good way to work through traumatic experiences. Whenever I am under considerable stress, or something bad happens, sooner or later I'll find a way to look back and smile. I also think you are talking to a wall here. GP simply lacks the capacity to look at a situation from different perspectives while believing that his own perspective is morally superiour to everyone else's. A trait shared by religious zealots and fanatics, self-indignant extreme-right politicians, etc... ironically, the kind of people you and I would never describe as moral or ethical;)
Having a gun pointed your head is something that I'm sure that teller is liable to remember far less than pleasantly for a long, long, time to come. I'm glad that nobody got hurt, of course, but I simply cannot see this as amusing, and I find the fact that so many people apparently do (including marking me as a troll, above), to be in astonishingly poor taste with respect to the feelings of the people who could have potentially been killed.
Apple's browser engine? How many times does this myth have to be corrected? KHTML was a pretty complete rendering engine before Apple adopted it under the name WebKit. It was the only major free software contender to gecko, and Apple was not the first to notice it. NOKIA used it to replace gecko in their handhelds (and they sent a nice thank you letter to the khtml mailing list). Yes, Apple did contribute a lot of code, but they did not write it. And as of now, they are not the only contributors either. So webkit is a bad example for Apple's contributions - they basically forked KHTML (and the first few releases of Safari were pretty much KHTML + a few patches) and they had no choice but to maintain it as free software because KHTML was GPL.
I agree completely. This is a clever albeit transparent trick on the part of Google to let Chinese save face. Make no mistake, China didn't want Google to leave completely, that would've been an international PR disaster (apart from the job loss and other collateral damages). Naturally, Google didn't want to go either, loosing all the business opportunities in China. Most importantly, those services that they don't have to filter anyway, like music, product search, etc. So Google pretended to do something and yield to the Chinese government's demands, and China gladly accepted this opportunity to get out of this impasse (their license to operate in China covers everything, not only search). There's a reason I use pretended - I mean what Google did is very very close to nothing, just check out http://www.google.cn/ - and click anywhere on the screen. This "concession" is a joke, and it was a dangerous gamble on Google's part, since depending on how you look at it, this can be seen as China loosing face (actually bowing to Google's demands) instead the other way around. It also shows the kind of bargaining power Google has. For what exactly did China gain? Well, see for yourself, just goo ahead and visit google.cn and search for something:))
Slashdot Mirror
I often encounter other foreigners who complain about how Vietnamese try to cheat them, tell them ridiculous prices, etc. Me, I had exactly the opposite experience. One of the reasons was that I took the time to read about their culture before I came here. And one aspect of their culture is that social relations are far more important than anything else. It doesn't matter who you are, how much you are willing to spend, etc. Once I was buying a pack of cigarettes from a street vendor, when I noticed a coin just under my motorbike. It may have fallen out of my pocket, or not... I didn't care, I gave it to the vendor. She was protesting, but I smiled, patted her on the shoulder, and drove away. Two weeks later, I bought another pack from the same vendor. She kept the coin and gave it to me, trying to explain something enthusiastically. I speak a little Vietnamese, but couldn't understand her.
I know this is common sense, and we all know that if we befriend a shopkeeper or an official, he or she will treat us better - but it is far more prevalent in Vietnam than in our cultures. So I usually start any interaction by talking, telling them my name, age, marital status (those will be the first question you encounter) and making them laugh. They are a fun loving people, make them laugh, and you won't have to pay more than the locals.
Expacts complaining about them usually approach vendors expecting to be cheated. Vietnamese have a very keen sense of your attitude, enhanced by the language barrier (they have to rely more on their instinct when you don't speak their language). They are very good at reading people. Approach them with an open heart, and they will like you. If they like you, you pay local prices. Simple as that. Pretending to like them, fake smiles don't really work. When I share my views with these complaining expacts, they usually say I'm just naive, and I'm being cheated without even knowing it. Funny, considering I've been here for over two years, have lots of Vietnamese friends, and know the local prices of almost everything. Plus I understand enough Vietnamese to know how much they asked their countrymen to pay for a given item.
Point is that here, it is far more important to establish some sort of relationship before conducting any business. That includes very personal questions, like your age, marital status, etc. Of course, age is also important because they don't have a generic "you" in their language. You can't say "you" in Vietnamese. If someone's younger than you, you is "em", same age will be "anh" for men and "chi" for women, "ong" and "co" respectively for men and women who could be your mother. There are a dozen more commonly used personal pronouns for you, depending on position in the family, your age, your gender, and your social status. So I'd say that the findings in this study can be important to understand not only our own cultures, but other cultures too. It also shows an aspect of general human nature that in many western cultures became more buried under formalities.
And facebook gets your cellphone number. Good thing that fb is a reputable company ran by people of high integrity who would never abuse that information.
How? It's a serious question. I had my phone number listed already, never saw any drawbacks. Of course, it can be abused, mostly by users, but that's when "don't be stupid" kicks in - don't befriend random people you know nothing about, adjust your privacy settings, etc. So how is Facebook going to abuse this information?
Apple doesn't give a rat's ass about what a small percentage of hackers do after they've paid Apple for the hardware. Why would they? Does anyone even have a plausible possibility?
Most of what you say is correct, especially when it comes to desktop offering. That last bit, however, is nonsense or just fanboyism. See this for example.
In fact, we should say thank you to China on this one.
Recent news reports have Japan accusing China of this being over a territorial dispute. The traders are saying that things have resumed but that this is just an excuse for China to harass traders and outbound exports with "preshipment" checks. China denies this has anything to do with the dispute but the timing is more than a bit suspect and why is this only directed at Japan?
China is in territorial dispute with every SE-Asian country that has a shoreline. They claim sovereignty over every island down to the Philippines. For example, they have claims over Paracel islands which in theory, belong to Vietnam. Recently they started to harass fishing boats, hold them at ransom, very similar to what Somalian pirates do. Vietnam has historical documents to prove their claim - irony is, that actually some of the documents the Chinese produced to prove their point turned out to be validate the Vietnamese claims (they mention these islands as "foreign lands" in their records). Also, they threatened foreign companies (oil exploration) that had contracts with Vietnamese oil companies to back out. Finally - this started this year - they began to organize "tours" to these islands, showing the beauty of these "most remote Chinese lands." In reality, there's nothing to see there actually. Except Vietnamese fishermen who lived there for generations. Well, not anymore, actually, but you get the point ... just trying to illustrate how territorial the Chinese are... and how arrogant.
That's very interesting - it seems to me that Assange is the right person for the kind of job he does. He's like a vulcan in that chatlog, refuses to get into any emotional exchange. In fact that's not really a flamewar, because Assange avoids completely a who said what/did what kind of back and forth bickering. Instead, his only concern is the leak itself: how many people and who exactly heard the information. Domscheit-Berg comes off as a typical forum prick, likening Assange to a slave trader, king, emperor...
*www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjhF1xZQRQk - browser test is between the 6th and 7th minute
Let me get this straight.
Reading your post made me a little bit sad. :-/
A lot of people post stuff far more farcical than yours, and they are being dead serious about their crap. Especially when it comes to politics. I read your post and was asking myself the same question - is he serious? Without visual cues or hearing your tone, there was a good chance you were, even if you thought that this is glaringly obvious. Happened to me a number of times, I thought no one would miss that for a joke, then most people did. Actually, it happens to me all the time in face to face conversations.
The reason he didn't feel his dog eating his toe is not just that he was drunk, but because diabetes causes peripheral neuropathy. When you have severe untreated diabetes, you often can't feel pain in your extremities, and untreated sores become gangrenous. So his being drunk was the least of his problems, his bigger problem was that his toe was decomposing and he couldn't feel it.
Yeah, but he could SMELL and see it - that might have been a clue that something's not right...
I'd say procrastinating on visiting the doctor in case something might be discovered is understandable to some extent. But doing so when your own brother died of complications of a disease that you also start to have symptoms of... that's stupid.
Yeah you're right about the diabetes part, my mistake. As to the dog eating chewing off his toe - I dunno... I'm still a bit skeptical about that, but I admit it might be possible.
Hungry dog saves man's life by eating a toe.
Wow.
No, not really. How much do you have to drink to pass out so badly that you don't feel your dog eating your toe?? I mean there could be several more plausible explanations than the one he came up with after waking up from his drunken stupor. At that kind of alcohol abuse, you can bet that the man has no idea what happened before he passed out. Besides, the man is a retard - he was urged to check for diabetes, but resisted "fearing the diagnosis" while his brother died of diabetes complications earlier! And he had this sliver in his toe and tried to remove it with a knife cutting away skin. Then when it got worse and started to both swell and SMELL, his solution was to use loose sandals instead of going to the doctor. Major fail. Oh, and his wife is a certified nurse.
There. Fixed that for ya! ;-)
Cat worshipping Goa'uld lords??
User operation prohibition on DVDs. If your DVD player ignores them, it may be in violation of the DVD format license.
... and I'd like to know where you got it, because I would also like a DVD player that does what I want.
Modern cheap Chinese DVD players have a skip button specifically designed to do that. My brand is Oppo, not to confused with a US company selling electronics under the same name. Plays everything, even the crappy 15c pirate DVDs that 99% of DVD stores sell around here (major brands like Sony or Pioneer quite often choke on those).
1: OS X tends to have lower latency than Windows out of the box (you can disable services in Windows to help things). This, combined with the fact that Macs do not need a CPU and I/O draining antivirus program resident 24/7 means that a Mac Pro can outperform a similarly configured Windows machine.
I agree with most of your points except this. I have an antivirus (Microsoft Security Essentials) on my netbook, barely notice it's presence on my netbook. I also disabled all services (Windows 7 Home Premium), more for psychological (I don't like crap running I don't need) than any measurable gain. We are talking about a single Atom processor here - so do you think this would make a difference on a 12-core monster processor? Yeah, you may gain a few millisecond render time here and there, and well it can add up to a few seconds (maybe even a minute!!!) over a year... but seriously, this is not exactly a huge advantage ;)
As for reason #3 I think that's more an argument for why not. #7 I'm not sure, you can buy a G5 Mac Pro now for 200$, that's a fraction of the original price. The loss seems to me pretty much on par with (over 90%) PCs. I also wonder about your latency claim - I don't dispute it, I just don't know what to think... do you have any proof? The only benchmarks I saw comparing the three platforms (PC/Linux PC/Win7 Mac/OsX) was on phoronix, and I don't trust them too much (but the mac box lost on almost all benchmarks).
Sure classical HDD will soon reach 5TB but do we need always more space ?
Yes. My 1.5 Tb drive in my Kaiboer 300 is full (I have all my favourite series on it, including all Doctor Who parts plus tons of other movies). Took me 6 months to fill it up. I've done with handling optical disks, and streaming 1080p movies from the internet is not possible here (I live in Vietnam).
... like HTC does with Sense, but that would make way too much sense.
There's a joke in there somewhere :)
If you think about it, China is a very big market for porn. Considering there is no competition what so ever and the shear size of the population, it must be extremely proffitable for those who can get in there even if for a few weeks, days or even hours. So if an owner of a handfull of porn sites is able to keep from being filtered, perhaps by a sizable under the counter bribe, then they still stand to make a lot of money. Either way it shows that whoever is in charge of looking after the filter is either corrupt or incompitent and thus a very good argument to why the whole idea is very bad in the first place.
Don't forget gender imbalance either. Due to families preferring boys (and widespread abortion when it turns out it's going to be a girl) now China has a 120:100 male to female ratio. So yes, China is a huge market for porn indeed...
Just to make it clear - the reason I called your rant wild speculation is that you repeatedly failed to provide evidence that there is a connection between Greenpeace and the coal industry. In your reply you provide a bunch of numbers proving how bad coal plants are - but I didn't say they were not bad now did I?
So let's see some facts than:
Now put 1 and 1 together, and there you find a more plausible answer supported by facts instead of the sheer lunacy (now at +5 insightful lol) of your original post. In fact, the last fact I mention alone is enough to debunk your claims, since Greenpeace was founded in 1971 and only achieved the current political clout by the time the US stopped building coal plants.
Congratulations. You found evidence that coal plants are bad. Now please point out the part of my post that says otherwise (and you have the audacity to preach about logic!).
Saying that we have a lot of coal plants because of Greenpeace, now that's crazy. So China built thousands of coal plants in the past decade because of Greenpeace, right? Not because they have vast amounts of coal supplies, not because it's relatively cheap to set up (and you can set up a coal plant faster than any other types of plants). Their breakneck pace of growth and skyrocketing energy demands have nothing to do with building cheap coal plants as fast as they can, no, it must be Greenpeace.
I don't have time to find a citation at the moment, but I'll lay out the math for you.
[...]
Now realize that instead [...] Now realize that their power [...]
Realize that the average [...]
Sir, your post is simply WILD SPECULATION, nothing else. Now realize that Greenpace has been traditionally quite strong in France for example (and still is). And look how they destroyed the nuclear industry in France...
Now lets look at Germany, that started investing in green technologies decades ago. They were one of the few countries with a long term vision of becoming world leaders in these technologies as demand for them grows. Today, along with Japan, they are there, and already started to reap the benefits.
The most aggravating part of your post is that you begin your sentences with "Realize that..." You sound like the githzeray in NWN2 (though she started with the annoying "Know that..." The point is, that you sound like a religious nutcase, with hating Greenpeace being at the center of your religion.
The parent asked for proof... now if you consider pulling wild stuff out of your ass as proof, than your signature is quite ironic indeed ("Wikipedia, the concept that persistent opinions represent facts").
It sounds like you consider your own perspective so morally superior to those of "religious zealots" and extreme-right politicians that you can't look at a situation from their persepctive. Interesting.
Considering my perspective superiour and the ability to look at a situation from theirs have nothing to do with each other. They are not mutually exclusive. Take, for instance, humour. Some people get the humorous aspect of this story, others don't. While the former group is capable of looking at the story from a serious point of view (feeling sympathy for the teller in his plight for example), the latter group would always insist that THIS IS NOT FUNNY. Now I wouldn't say that my perspective is superiour (that's your assumption), but I do think that having a sense of humour is a great asset, because the story itself, and some of the comments I read in this thread (including yours ;)) are fucking HILARIOUS. Laughter is good for your health :)
I'd like to make another point. I think you're facing a dichotomy between what you think people should find funny vs. what (most) people do find funny.
In my other replies to you, I was trying to explain why I think people do find the story funny.
As to whether or not we should, that's an entirely separate ball of wax. But I for one don't have too much control over what I do find funny. I reckon that's largely part of the human condition.
I think prescribing what people should find funny would lead to a very bleak world. Humour has nothing to do with morality, except perhaps when it's used as a tool to humiliate others. This is not the case here - and the guy you replied to has no way of knowing how the teller reacted or how he coped with the situation after it happened. In fact, a lot of people find humour a good way to work through traumatic experiences. Whenever I am under considerable stress, or something bad happens, sooner or later I'll find a way to look back and smile. I also think you are talking to a wall here. GP simply lacks the capacity to look at a situation from different perspectives while believing that his own perspective is morally superiour to everyone else's. A trait shared by religious zealots and fanatics, self-indignant extreme-right politicians, etc... ironically, the kind of people you and I would never describe as moral or ethical ;)
Having a gun pointed your head is something that I'm sure that teller is liable to remember far less than pleasantly for a long, long, time to come. I'm glad that nobody got hurt, of course, but I simply cannot see this as amusing, and I find the fact that so many people apparently do (including marking me as a troll, above), to be in astonishingly poor taste with respect to the feelings of the people who could have potentially been killed.
I find your lack of perspective disturbing.
Apple's browser engine? How many times does this myth have to be corrected? KHTML was a pretty complete rendering engine before Apple adopted it under the name WebKit. It was the only major free software contender to gecko, and Apple was not the first to notice it. NOKIA used it to replace gecko in their handhelds (and they sent a nice thank you letter to the khtml mailing list). Yes, Apple did contribute a lot of code, but they did not write it. And as of now, they are not the only contributors either. So webkit is a bad example for Apple's contributions - they basically forked KHTML (and the first few releases of Safari were pretty much KHTML + a few patches) and they had no choice but to maintain it as free software because KHTML was GPL.
I agree completely. This is a clever albeit transparent trick on the part of Google to let Chinese save face. Make no mistake, China didn't want Google to leave completely, that would've been an international PR disaster (apart from the job loss and other collateral damages). Naturally, Google didn't want to go either, loosing all the business opportunities in China. Most importantly, those services that they don't have to filter anyway, like music, product search, etc. So Google pretended to do something and yield to the Chinese government's demands, and China gladly accepted this opportunity to get out of this impasse (their license to operate in China covers everything, not only search). There's a reason I use pretended - I mean what Google did is very very close to nothing, just check out http://www.google.cn/ - and click anywhere on the screen. This "concession" is a joke, and it was a dangerous gamble on Google's part, since depending on how you look at it, this can be seen as China loosing face (actually bowing to Google's demands) instead the other way around. It also shows the kind of bargaining power Google has. For what exactly did China gain? Well, see for yourself, just goo ahead and visit google.cn and search for something :))