Not because the clocks are automatic, but because I don't have to. Living in a country without DST is kind of nice.
Of course, it gets dark here at 6 in the evening anyway. And has since September. Ah, well.
I just made a post saying "Inner Mongolia. Is Inner Mongolia being censored?" in Chinese on Renren. Nope, no problems, instant send. Asked a friend to ask their friends, grapevine says no protests in any major cities in Neimenggu.
This sounds like bullshit to me. Not even China censors so well that not a single mention of the protests is found ANYWHERE. Tianya would have like 20 threads a minute,like during the Uighur riots (okay, minor exaggeration). Sounds more like a made-up non-story.
The real story is that something like this gets picked up by the media and Slashdot. And that it is so believable
But I've probably scanned and sent a few thousand PDFs.
The game is Guangrong Shiming, which is better translated as "Glorious Destiny".
I can see their point about American soldiers, since the footage from 0:25-0;29 in the Youtube video looks alot like American soldiers in desert fatigues (made famous by Iraq/Afghanistan). If it's a training mission, it's pretty realistic, since you can see blood flying out from the headshot.
Damn, I really wanna play. Good thing I'm going back to China for two years next month.
Just as messy.
By their own numbers, Baidu has 70% of the Chinese search market. Naver is similar for Korea, and Yandex has 50% of Russia. Given that all three of these nations are wired out the wazoo and have large populations of internet users, I have a hard time believing that their market shares add up to less than 10% of the global search market.
I have plenty of power strips with 8 or 10 sockets laying around. I'd never hook them up to each other, but if I'm setting up some friends for a LAN, we can easily get 8-10 devices (mostly laptops and routers) plugged into a single strip. 8-10 (or more) devices isn't that heavy of a load, for many electronics. We don't have crappy wiring, and we don't buy crappy power strips.
That doesn't mean I'm going to plug the fridge or a heater into one, though.
The summary notes, they can just get fake adult IDs. As a foreigner, I just had them generate a new ID for me every time I went in (I used a semi-permanent one when I became I gold member). Kids would do the same thing if they had a few extra yuan; if you weren't willing to pay, the cafe I usually went to refused school age kids
Others did not; it was normal to see high school kids pulling all nighters there using fake IDs, supplied by the PC cafe. At home? Just use the same software (or website) as the PC cafe to generate your own ID number. Just enter your birthday, sex, and place of birth, and there ya go.
It's just one more step in the arms race. Guess what, it's like Bittorrent. The masses are still winning.
We've often posed the question on
I don't like either system. But how many Russians, and how many Americans, would be willing to accept these systems? It seems like an overwhelming majority.
Accepting that there will always be a few nutjobs wanting to kill lots of people for various reasons, whose hearts and minds cannot be won (except early on, with excellent secular education programs), do we just accept that terrorist attacks are a cost of an open, free society? How does one explain it to the victims and their families? "I am sorry for your loss, but it is outweighed by the potential loss of the freedoms of the masses that is the alternative“
It's gruesome arithmetic. The freedom of a few people to live, versus the freedom of the rest of us to live free.
It is highly unlikely Chinese will displace English as a lingua franca, in the near future. There will be more Chinese pages or more Chinese internet users, perhaps, but that will not make the dominant language of the "internet" Chinese. For the rest of the world, English will remain the dominant language. Chinese users wanting to speak to most non-Chinese will need to resort to English or another third language.
As for "preserving the purity" of the language, that's just bullshit. TV shows and such are subtitled in Chinese for two very simple reasons: first, many Chinese
don't speak Mandarin Chinese, the official language! Most Chinese dialects are mutually unintelligible. Only the written language is common to the whole of China, and allows communication between users/people who don't speak the same (oral) language.
Second, it also promotes integration into mainstream society by ethnic minorities. Some call it cultural genocide, but in America we (the American government) promote ESL and only offer most classes in English, just as Germany promotes German language education. Hardly preserving the purity of the language; it is more directed and cultivating a sense of national character, by everyone having a common language, and also making sure everyone can understand what's being said. Dialects (and people who can't understand English) are far too common not to demand translations and subtitles.
So what is the author saying? Inferring that whichever language group has the most users, dominates the internet? I'm sorry, but Chinese users aren't anywhere near a 50% majority, much less any sort of "overwhelming" majority. English has a huge number of users; many of the users who speak Spanish, German, Japanese, Russian, and even Chinese are also part of the English hegemony. And the participation of these groups in the English internet is what makes it dominant, not its number of users.
As much as Baidu might like to expand, they're a Chinese language search engine. They don't have a "Baidu English". They're like Yandex or Naver: they do the domestic market, and they do it very well. I'm curious as to what Baidu wants that Xiaonei/Renren and Kaixin aren't giving them.
And I know hundreds who don't. Highly Western-oriented users will use Facebook. I have about ~400 Chinese friends on Renren/Xiaonei who are all students studying in the US, at my university (or close by). The ones who speak English, look for foreign boyfriends/girlfriends, and plan to stay in America use Facebook.
Those are the “scores" (maybe 50 or so). The other 350? They're in the US, but even if they have a FB account, they use Chinese sites almost exclusively. They, and the millions of Chinese not technically savvy enough (or without the interest) to go around or under the firewall are the market Zuckerberg wants to target.
They don't need Facebook for this. As the summary noted, Kaixin and Renren (Xiaonei) are well entrenched. I and many friends have been served warning and had status updates/links/journals deleted by the censors, with a nice PM to let us know to to repost it.
Chinese "copycats" of facebook are in full compliance. Facebook would need to comply just as well, if not more, to try to unseat them. If it is less cooperative than the Chinese companies, they will be of little value to the censors.
It applies in China as well- though only among a subset of the population, though still a much larger subset than would have been reached otherwise. For example. my friends on Chinese college campuses have been talking quite a bit about Charter 08 and Liu Xiaobo- almost purely as a result of censorship attempts.
With your bare hands?!?
