Not being able to write code doesn't mean you're stupid. But if you really can't write a range checking code within a day, even if you have no programming background, it's pretty bad xd

If you give them a simple guildline of what they can choose from and a walkthrough though, I don't think the forum is of much needed unless there is hardware problem. In which case, they should just contact tech support...

I think an overly complex tax system ruin even more people's life... Wasting time of even the more educated people... to read through.. er... tax/tax-return filing documentations and actually file them...

Well, there're lots more issues/trade relations between Canada and USA than just oil. We have all those lumbering businesses and many more. And most of our exports goes to USA. They're in some way holding our throat. If they act against us in other DMCA-unrelated issues, that can affect a huge number of people. Canada has a very small population, our current economy relies on USA a lot more than what many people might think.

Talking about oil, you do notice we ship our oil to US to process, and then get the final product back from them at a much higher cost eh. We have the oil, but ironically, we're the real "oil importer", and they're the actual "oil exporter".

If a catching-up-country says they're going to do it, they're much more likely going to do it than the leading-country, which spent all their resources to support their army everywhere in the world.

Good one. XD

That said, they always make these stuff a big deal, as if general Chinese population really care about news from foreign source.

See, it's not like Chinese really can't push through the firewall if they really want. tens of thousands of Chinese quickly break through the firewall to view a Japanese porn star's blog (twitter? I forgot) after the news about her blog got spread through the word of mouth, adding tens of thousands of "follower" to her blog in just a few days.

But how many push through for news? The fact is clear about what matters.

I find it pretty stable already at beta9. I've been using it as core browser since beta3, and beta9 is totally more than stable enough to substitute your old firefox 3 I know they've been fixing lots of bugs in all these betas. But seriously, I'm not having any problems, and I don't see much visible bug fixes that affect my daily browsing since like beta 7. So I guess it's pretty much the same for these later releases.

If there is a reason to, that is. For most people, it really doesn't matter.

As a Chinese from HK also, I can only say there is no evidence to show if it was first used as a racist term or not. And since Chinese does not really have a serious racist against foreign people, I don't think it's a racists term. UNLESS it's a term created around 1900AD, when the western countries "rent" all those lands in China. Note that there were occationally Arabic and white people working in high position of Chinese government several hundred to a thousand years ago, or even further before, and lots of foreign merchants living in the captial of China thousand years ago. We have had always welcome foreigners. So racists is really an non-issue in China unless you're talking about family matters.

Anyway. Gui () means ghost literally. But in Chinese language, it's very commonly used for its derived meanings. For example, when we describe someone's face colour is very white (even if the person is Chinese), we may describe their colour as "ghostly/white as ghost". Another common and interesting use of it is one that you often use only on people you're friendly with, and if they have some (negative) characteristics. Say, a person often forget stuff, you may call him "jian mang gui" (), with jian=easy, mang=forget, gui=... gui.

My take anyway, the most reasonable interpretation of "gui lo" is that white people are... white like ghosts, which is just a Chinese adjective. Chinese often describe things with comparison.

Another possible meaning could be to separate "human" (Chinese/East Asian) with other people. For this meaning, I need to stress that Chinese is a very subjective language. The ways that terms are used are often very subjective and has a "comparison". For example, Cantonese, when they say "Chinese", they are thinking about Cantonese, not about Mandarine. While a Beijing Chinese will likely think of their local dialect of Mandarine when talking about "Chinese". Now, when you talk about "human" (which is the same word as "people""person" in Chinese), we think of Chinese, or people who look similar. So, who are the others? If not human, then it's ghost. Chinese often use comparisons like that for fun, and over time, it forms terms that are commonly used in unoffical situations. So this is the second possibility that I can explain.

Again, unless it's a term formed when the westerners "rent" Chinese land, and place armies within our land (1900AD, that's not too long ago), I do not think it has its root of racist. Most likely a description or comparison of colour. AND, if the term is formed around 1900, then you can't reject the term even if it's racists because there is all reason for this racist term to form, that is, if it's the formation time.

Last note is that this term is not itself used as a racist term, but simply a casual term that points to white people, in Cantonese.

It's not easy to "learn the difference" between them neither sometimes. Real Chinese often have many forms of writing each word. For westerners, they may simply split Chinese into Traditional Chinese, simplified Chinese, Kanji, etc. But for Chinese, in everyday uses, we don't neccessary always write the "offical words", and are sometimes even indecisive with the "offical word" of certain words.

For example, Hong Kong uses traditional Chinese. But some of its "offical pick" is the same as Taiwan's offical pick, and some are the same as Japan's offical pick, and some are of their own pick. So if you go to a real Chinese place, you may see words that you haven't see before even if you know all common written forms in HK, TW, mainland, and Japan etc. Korea also have their Chinese table. Singapore and malaysia also have their simplified form that's not all the same with mainland. As Chinese, we usually just can recognize them all and write what we're used to personally. But back to the topic, it's not always easy to say which word is "kanji" because Chinese has multiple forms, though those multiple forms are usually simpler enough for everybody to identify.

You missed one very important thing. Both Japan and Korea wrote in Classic Chinese since more than a thousand years ago. In the processes, they imported a large number of Chinese terms and phases into their language, and are used frequently. They often pronounce those terms in the Chinese dialect/offical-classic-pronounciation at the time which they learn it. When merging into their language, they sometimes dropped or change some sounds like any other Chinese dialects.

During the last dynasty of China, (200 years ago or so), Japan got into heavy contact to the then modern western countries, and translated a lot of western new terms into *Chinese*. Not only they uses them, those Japanese-Chinese terms were later imported back into China and Korea later and is in everyday Chinese and Japanese use of languages.

Also, Japan also kept a lot of Chinese used in Tang dynasty of China. Those terms were not changed while Chinese changes over the years. Some of those terms also got re-imported into modern spoken Chinese through animation and comics.

Not to say Korean and Japanese are Chinese. But if you say they are unrelated, that is simply totally wrong. They are not only related, they are heavily related.

I agree. As a programmer, I spend more time thinking than typing. You usually can't think as fast as you type. Most likely, you'll do both together, thinking, typing, reading/check APIs etc., all together. Typing faster, you'll really end up sitting there thinking without typing at the same time, that's all.

In such case, you can group each few cashiers into one line, and have multiiple lines across. Then it can still have a bit of "even out" effect. While pushing the cart over is fast enough.

JS benchmarks is surely good. Though I always hoped that firefox can put more force on UI's responsiveness and flash responsiveness. When a facebook flash game runs on chrome with acceptable speed, and IE with OK speed, and firefox is almost not even loading the game right (too slow), there is a problem.

I haven't look into details about what bugs they fixed. But for me, firefox's betas are generally pretty stable after Beta3 (for any releases).

Same for this one. I've been trying this since beta 1, and switched it as my main browser by beta 3. It got more stable after that, and I remember I didn't see much real difference since beta 5 when I do browsing everydday. So pretty obviously, those are bugs that are not "serious" for a normal user to the point that they can really notice clearly.