I live in Asia, and before the diversity visa lottery was made into

Since no one ever bothers to read the source, the original statement actually says TV dramas should not have plots that are pure fantasy, such as time traveling drama; made-up mythologies; or encourage superstitions, such as believing in fate or reincarnations. There's nothing in the statement about censorship or banning.

Chinese TV have always been quite dry for me, since a lot of it are historical drama that talk about revolutionary heroes, but my Chinese friends love them, maybe growing up in China helps.

It's your ears, or your pronunciation of C that makes them think you're saying she. Chinese people have no trouble pronouncing "C", since the (Mandarin) Chinese word for "west" is pronounced "C". If you have trouble teaching the C sound, just ask them to say west. On the other hand, there's no Mandarin sound that directly corresponds to "she".

Since I speak both Mandarin and English, and I work with a lot of language learners and speakers, I discovered most Westerners have trouble differentiating Chinese people pronouncing C vs. She, while Chinese people themselves have no trouble. There are other examples of this in other languages too, it's as if the listeners' ears aren't trained to distinguish those sounds. It's just one of those strange things.

That's a lot like the Siemens PLC we have. The software on the PLC, the firmware on the PLC, and the PC software must all match. And different versions of PC software can't be installed simultaneously on the same computer. So we have a whole series of computers with different versions installed to support the different PLC's.

And they charge crazy prices on "PLC memory downloading unit" to my company until I realized they're just regular CF cards.

I don't know about others, but reading e-books on LCD screens is much faster for me since there's no pause in having to flip the page, just touch/press and go. I'm much slower when reading on the Kindle since the page refresh takes so long and I literally have to wait for the next page to come up. I really like the Kindle's e-paper display but the page refresh, the color inversion, and waiting drove me nuts.

I don't quite understand why the Kindle needs to invert to black and back when flipping pages but the web page can scroll and update without inverting. It would have been really nice if there was an option to flip pages without the color inversion.

Anyway, my favorite reading device right now is the iPod touch since it's easy to hold in one hand and "flip" with my thumb. I can read really fast and I've already read hundreds of books with it. It's not so good for technical reference though, probably an iPad...

Serial may be dead on the PC. But besides routers and switches, there are thousands of other industrial devices that still use the serial port. At my work place, we have weigh scale indicators that use the serial port, and we even have motor controllers that still use ISA bus cards. We looked into replacing those motor controllers, and the replacements use the *parallel port*, another dead port.

I have a ThinkPad with the Ultrabay serial/parallel port adapter. No one's gonna care to pry it from my hands, but I'm keeping it anyway.

It's not that bad, since the URL bar and the search bar takes up almost the entire width of the toolbar area, it's usually so hard to see what the stupid persona image is anyway.

At work we have PC's much older than that, running manufacturing equipment. If any of them break down, I have a whole room full of old PC's that I could simply search for parts. Eventually we'll run out of parts (the equipment need ISA bus to operate), but at this rate, we're good for another 25 years or so.

I used to have 20,000+ in my spam folder every day for years. Recently it dropped to the low 400's.

But because there's much less spam, I actually check the spam folder quite often to see if there are false positives, and I almost always find a few. Makes me wonder how much mail I missed all this time?

I don't know about other people, but around where I work, the joke is that whichever computer has Nod32 installed, it also has tons of viruses installed. Nod32 never seems to work in real life, eventhough it consistently scores high in reviews and have lots of recommendations.

(We use avira.)