papersmith

My grandpa was sent to labour camp merely for being a professor and having relations in Taiwan, he wasn't even very vocal about politics. My grandma avoided it by being on an expedition at the time. From their account, it didn't seem like that people were merely tricked into criticizing the state.

During the civil war, the communists has substantial support from the academics and intellectuals (think Spanish Civil War). This combined with successful economic policies during the early 50s made Mao overly confident of his support base.

At the time the Nationalists in Taiwan was still recognized as the legitimate government of China on the world stage, so Mao wanted some vocal support. To his surprise he opened the can and worms came out, which caused huge embarrassment, and he blamed it on rightist infiltration.

As a reaction he locked up "naysayers" and implemented radical ideological-based economic policies that ended up in disaster, so he stepped down for a few years. During the time his rival Liu Shaoqi became the chairman, who played with the idea of market economy and was warming up to the west.

This infuriated Mao as it implied his failure as a visionary, so he out-maneuvered Liu and launched the cultural revolution to manufacture support for his vision on a large scale. It helped him to maintain power til his death, but at the cost of running the country into the ground.

Some people who are used to squatting toilet would squat on seated toilets. Sitting down feels too weird for them.

With less body contact, it's probably more hygienic as well.

Hmm...

http://us.st12.yimg.com/us.st.yimg.com/I/bugbear_2037_155503...

Like they said in the article "A few Russians had emigrated to the United States and Israel.", though the number is probably much smaller in comparison.

I think it's saying that Russia being more urbanized, the Russians' lives were much better off to begin with, so there wasn't as much momentum for change. If you compare per capita GDP, Russia is still about three times as much as China, the margin was even bigger back then.

The reform happened mostly in the countryside, while in cities the workers under the protective umbrella of state-owned enterprises were much more resistant to change. It just happened that Russia had a larger portion city workers than China.

What's perfectly whole seems flawed,

but you can use it forever.

What's perfectly full seems empty,

but you can't use it up.

True straightness looks crooked.

Great skill looks clumsy.

Real eloquence seems to stammer.

To be comfortable in the cold, keep moving;

to be comfortable in the heat, keep still;

to be comfortable in the world, stay calm and clear.

-- Tao Te Ching

Just curious, do most people here use the email client as the primary interface for the group sites?

I personally use the web interface for busy listings just to keep things separate from my actual email, and email client for only very low-volume listings. Am I missing out on something?

I think they tried very hard to make the place look organic, but you if look carefully everything just seems contrived. I think it's sort of the uncanny valley of interior decoration, which I see quite often these days.

It probably serves more as a function to impress clients than to actually inspire creativity.

If I were them I would've let the employees decorate their own spaces. Could've saved a bunch of money that way. I would've also chose a house with garden over Manhattan, but then again I don't run a consulting company.

"All you have to do to trigger a deep yawn is to fake it six or seven times."

Does this work for anyone else? Maybe I'm doing it wrong.

Six Apart.

It's sad that something as fundamental as cleaning up after ourselves is made into a partisan issue.

This seems to reflect the advice often given by hackers to roll your own framework as a learning experience.

I consider it more of a guilty pleasure.

Does anyone know how PostgreSQL's built-in full-text index compare with Sphinx and Lucene?

I don't see how it's promoted as fact. He presented it as "Popper’s principle". I see it more as a general rule of thumb.

Have to in this case is confined to context of the principle itself, it indicates that you have to do such and such in order to follow the principle.

I am not very familiar with MacRuby, anyone know if it plays well with Rails and its libraries?

It's really cool that 0.5 uses LLVM. Does anyone know how this it stacks up against the other Ruby implementations?

My dad, who is 54, got taller since he started swimming every other day in the past two years.

I think that happened in the 90s. :)

It's not that black and white. It was Deng's regime that crushed the Tiananmen Square protesters. There were other nominal heads-of-state at that time, but Deng had de facto power.

His reputation is generally favourable today because of the economic wonders he orchestrated in the 90s.

Depending on how you define a good politician, Zhao Ziyang, the party general secretary in 1989, was sympathetic towards the pro-democracy movement. But overall he didn't change as many lives as Deng did. He lost power after Tiananmen Square protests.

One liberal political who was pro-democracy at that time yet still remained in power is Wen Jiabao, the current Premier (second in power maybe). He is probably the most popular politician in power today. If there is going to be top-down democratisation, it would probably start around him. He is in a lineage of politicians who rose to power through meritocracy rather than loyalty, succeeding Zhu Rongji.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wen_Jiabao

After the faction-change and Sino-Soviet split, the US actually sold weapons to PRC. It lasted until 1989 where the Tiananmen Square protest ended it all with a PR disaster.

Ironically PRC has more Black Hawk helicopters than Taiwan: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UH-60_Black_Hawk#Military_opera...

Also not sure if anyone noticed some of the choppers during the parade were Eurocopter Dauphins. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurocopter_Dauphin

I think the major passive safety features of this decade are better crumple zones and side-impact airbags. IIRC Euro NCAP made their crash tests much tougher recently to adapt to the improved safety across the board.

Am I the only one who had a good chuckle at the zodiac grid?

I'm curious as to how a second-hand private yacht ($1,200 mil) can be worth more than the build cost of the largest cruise ship in the world ($700 mil). Don't watercrafts depreciate like crazy?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RMS_Queen_Mary_2

Has anyone who also used SproutCore have any thoughts on how they stack up? SproutCore also stabilized into 1.0 recently it seems.

And I was wondering how the other 50% will manage to survive.

Looks pretty cool, though they should probably make the controller look less like a gun.

Just a personal gripe, flash plugin runs subpar in Linux, which I developed flex in for a few months.

"New diesel engines like in the Ford Fiesta are considered to have almost zero carbon emissions"

Carbon as in CO2?

Audi A3 will have a 2.0 TDI model for 2010. The Mark VI (2010) Golf will have come with the same engine, which will launch in NA a month from now.

I don't know about carpenter rates, but it's cheaper to get a custom-tailored suit than to buy a factory-made name brand.

I wouldn't say the protest was without fruit. Much of the economic progress of the 90s owe to the government trying to please an impoverished population. Empty stomach sits at the root of much political changes in history, ideologies ride the hunger waves.