It could've also meant to be a +2 Hilarious! but I haven't seen that either :)

Try this one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_tanning

In the industrial revolution in the UK there weren't actually many workers with dark skin working in the factories. So for most factory workers, it literally was "everybody" who had fair skin. It wasn't until much later that migrants entered the UK and other European countries. Funny enough, that also had a link with the growth of tourism, because both depended on cheap(er) mass travel.

It's a classic case of people absorbing the ideas of the rulers.

The desire for darker skin grew with the onset of the industrial revolution. factory workers didn't see much light so everybody had fair skin - and vitamine D deficiency as well. Remember rachitis - the "English disease"? Combine that with the growth of tourism in the sixties as people became more affluent, and they wanted to look not like a downtrodden factory worker, but as someone who could afford to move to a warmer climate during the summer. That took serious money back then.

We believe it just as much as Americans believe that we routinely kill off the elderly in The Netherlands (*), smoke dope all day while walking around on wooden shoes, all while tending to our tulips :)

(*) We do, but only on special, state-appointed holidays.

Knowing the Shanghai-na, I'm pretty sure they'd agree with this assessment :)

I'm going to quote the reply from ShanghaiBill to a similar comment in the thread above this one:

Unless you think solving logical puzzles and doing calculations is just "rote memorization". Because that would mean that all of science is based on that, which would also indicate that they're on to something there if they go for that as well.

As an aside: rote memorization is an important part of learning anyway, since if you don't *know* when stuff happened, or what the base formulas are for something that took us 2000 years to develop, you're not going to just deduce them from the basics when you need them. You're not even going to know what you don't know. So the basis of learning is knowing what there is - then applying that with skill, intelligence and creativity.

My in-laws are Chinese. And while their educational system is still geared towards suppressing deviating opinions, right up into university, their students are quite able to keep up with Western students when they come over here to study (we met quite a few over the last years). Here, they find the hard part is not the knowledge - they can learn - but the "intelligent application of learned skills". Once they learn that as well (it's a thing you can learn), they still have the advantage of a huge pool of knowledge they can draw from, as well as the creative bits. And since these students are slowly replacing the teachers in China as well, you can bet the Chinese system will change as well. The Dragon is still just gearing up...

Actually, the legal justification for this is that the internet forum is the ONLY way in which these people meet, exchange ideas, put together timetables, and organize. Which means that the forum members are an organization and the forum is the embodiment of that organization.

While one can (and lots of people will!) certainly argue the point, it's not without merit. I don't condone *anything* the AIVD does, including this, because their main function is to protect the status quo and that only coincidentally happens to also protect some lives here and there, but to say they're outside the law is going a bit too fast. The law that pertains to this subject is very likely outdated and should be reviewed.

In The Netherlands, the reason the Chipcard had a lot of trouble and overruns was because of all the extra demands tacked onto it for tracking and tracing people. The basic functionality wasn't all that hard.

And now we also have the system where, if you have a birtday party with 10 kids, you basically have to stay at home or arrange for a whole bunch of cars, because for some reason a "group card" just doesn't seem possible. Tracking and tracing: the main driving force behind most IT-projects, it seems.

I stopped paying attention to copyright when the Disney extension was approved. It was robbery in broad daylight

On one hand, the EU got to screw over the Third World by keeping agriculture subsidized and tariff walls alive and kicking - leading to higher food prices in the EU and lack of a market outside of it - and on the other hand the US got to screw everyone else by AGAIN extending the copyright time up to a gazillion years after the author died "because of the children", or in reality, because of the copyright on Disney's moneymakers.

In both cases entertainers still got the short end of the straw. Disney doesn't really need it, and the people who need it are unlikely to profit from extended copyright *after their death* but still suffer all the extra provisions in copyright law. Like sampling - just ask the Verve.

Copyright was dead to me when it was no longer either fair, or reasonable. The government can try to enforce it's (in this case, literally) corrupt laws, and I will encrypt everything and give them the finger.

Yeah. I was rather amazed by this quote:

"The second Model S car fire occurred outside Merida, Mexico on the Yucatan Peninsula. In that case, the vehicle was traveling at 100 miles per hour before the accident. During Tesla's conference call on Tuesday to discuss quarterly results with analysts, CEO Elon Musk said "The car actually sheared something like 17 feet of concrete wall, then went through a concrete wall, then smashed into a tree." The passengers, who survived what could have been a fatal accident in a less safe car, were able to flee the scene."

If you can walk away from a collision that starts at 100 mph, you're both extremely lucky and the car was well-designed. Amazing.

It is made by fermenting small whole fish in brine and drawing off the liquid, which is then bottled. I've got no problem with that.

By the Bush administration. Before Obama was inaugurated.

Source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2477403/Michelle-Os-Princeton-classmate-exec-company-built-Obamacare-website.html

You obviously never worked with government employees. The combination of protected work + low pay does not tend to attract the best and brightest, in my experience.

I was thinking more along the lines of "now they can fit more bodies on the screen in decent resolution" when I read that :)