I live in China, too, and while I applaud any measures (including capital punishment) that put the brakes on spammers, I'm sorely inconvenienced by China's insistence on blocking access to domains that provide free Web space... I can't get to anything inside the Geocities or Angelfire domains, for instance.
On the other hand, here in Chengdu, capital of Sichuan province, I have a 56Mbps VDSL connection that costs me less than $50 for six months of unlimited use! Wheeeeeee!
If you'd like to see some pictures of China along with my smartass commentary, check out http://www.manfre-land.com/motis
You can also disable the screensaver for every future instance of Mplayer by modifying the conf file, located in either usr/local/etc/mplayer/mplayer.conf or/root/.mplayer/gui.conf. You can find out which conf file mplayer is using by running it from the command line and watching mplayer's initialization messages.
I just hope against hope that none of the 75 pieces of artwork mentioned in the article are a depiction of that oozing multipenised beast that appeared in one of Orson Scott Card's novels.
Is it just me, or do a lot of his books feature adolescents and young teens being sexually assaulted by monsters?
Huh. They completely ignored the giant stone coinage of the Yap Islanders. What could be more innovative? The money is too large and heavy to move, so instead of carrying it around and exchanging it, the people of Yap simply point to their money when they want to purchase something, saying "That one's mine. Now it's yours."
No inflation, ever, 'cause the total supply of money is completely static. No loose change lost in the sofa. No underworld money laundering. No expensive infrastructure to maintain.
One drawback, of course: the first Yap to figure out how to purchase a bulldozer from the mainland using giant stone coins will end up lord and master of the whole society.
The thing doesn't need to mine for raw materials. Recent news stories on breakthroughs in thermal depolymerization (http://www.changingworldtech.com/techfr.htm) mention that the process is scalable down to a fully-functional unit that can fit on the back of a pickup truck... easily small enough to fit in your basement. You put garbage in, and get oil (which is what plastics are made of) along with various minerals and other raw materials out. Voila! You get rid of your garbage, heat your home, and feed your desktop manufacturing device. No need to buy refills like you do with an inkjet printer.
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I live in China, too, and while I applaud any measures (including capital punishment) that put the brakes on spammers, I'm sorely inconvenienced by China's insistence on blocking access to domains that provide free Web space... I can't get to anything inside the Geocities or Angelfire domains, for instance.
On the other hand, here in Chengdu, capital of Sichuan province, I have a 56Mbps VDSL connection that costs me less than $50 for six months of unlimited use! Wheeeeeee!
If you'd like to see some pictures of China along with my smartass commentary, check out http://www.manfre-land.com/motis
You can also disable the screensaver for every future instance of Mplayer by modifying the conf file, located in either usr/local/etc/mplayer/mplayer.conf or /root/.mplayer/gui.conf. You can find out which conf file mplayer is using by running it from the command line and watching mplayer's initialization messages.
I just hope against hope that none of the 75 pieces of artwork mentioned in the article are a depiction of that oozing multipenised beast that appeared in one of Orson Scott Card's novels. Is it just me, or do a lot of his books feature adolescents and young teens being sexually assaulted by monsters?
Huh. They completely ignored the giant stone coinage of the Yap Islanders. What could be more innovative? The money is too large and heavy to move, so instead of carrying it around and exchanging it, the people of Yap simply point to their money when they want to purchase something, saying "That one's mine. Now it's yours." No inflation, ever, 'cause the total supply of money is completely static. No loose change lost in the sofa. No underworld money laundering. No expensive infrastructure to maintain. One drawback, of course: the first Yap to figure out how to purchase a bulldozer from the mainland using giant stone coins will end up lord and master of the whole society.
The thing doesn't need to mine for raw materials. Recent news stories on breakthroughs in thermal depolymerization (http://www.changingworldtech.com/techfr.htm) mention that the process is scalable down to a fully-functional unit that can fit on the back of a pickup truck... easily small enough to fit in your basement. You put garbage in, and get oil (which is what plastics are made of) along with various minerals and other raw materials out. Voila! You get rid of your garbage, heat your home, and feed your desktop manufacturing device. No need to buy refills like you do with an inkjet printer.