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Comment: Re:This. (Score 2) 400

by vampire_baozi (#39131859) Attached to: Man Ordered To Apologize To Wife On Facebook

No brofist here.

Marrying the right girl makes it all worth it. I've seen one or two ugly marriages; it isn't pretty, and neither is the train wreck at the end.

But looking at my grandparents (both sides) and my own mother and father, finding the right girl really does make it worth it.

Many people just don't invest the time into finding the right person, or into making it work. Is it possible that the nice girl you met in the library and have known for four years, been together for another three, and started living together after that will turn into a psycho-bitch after years of being married to you? Maybe (at which point I'd wonder what I did to fuck her up *that* much). But I'd expect psycho tendencies to show up long before then, and hopefully before legally binding contracts have come into play. And I'd expect the probability of her sleeping around behind my back to be far less than that of some random chick I met in a bar,nightclub, or on the beach.

Then again, being highly educated and relatively affluent doesn't hurt either.

Comment: Bullshit. Just checked, mentionable on all 3. (Score 1) 103

by vampire_baozi (#36293568) Attached to: China Censors Web To Curb Inner Mongolia Protests

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 :(

Comment: Re:Bad summary: No US troops, only a drill (Score 1) 395

by vampire_baozi (#36220140) Attached to: PLA Develops First Person Shooter With US Troops as Targets

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.


+ - Free $150 Subscriptions for 200,000 NYT Readers->

Submitted by vampire_baozi
vampire_baozi writes "Lincoln (the maker of cars, not the man) has struck a marketing deal with the NYT. While I was happy to get my email, it also raised two questions for me: how much of my information did the NYT give Lincoln to determine I was a heavy user in their target demographic (granted, the NYT knows very little beyond my browsing habits on their site, and the email came from them, so I am hoping no information changed hands), and to what extent will "sponsored" marketing deals become the norm? Can other companies sponsor subscriptions for certain demographic groups, in return for exclusive advertising rights?
On a side note, I found this sort of advertising oddly effective- after I enabled images and realized Abraham had not come from beyond the grave to gift me a subscription, I did actually look at their website while googling related news articles. Would you feel a sense of obligation to at least give them some pageviews, even if you are not immediately in the market to buy a $30k+ car?"

Link to Original Source

Comment: Erroneous Data? (Score 1) 366

by vampire_baozi (#35359786) Attached to: Bing Becomes No.2 Search Engine at 4.37%

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.

Comment: Two Power Strips? Hardly necessary. (Score 1) 497

by vampire_baozi (#35138964) Attached to: Maximum Items You've Powered From a Single Outlet

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.

Comment: Annnd still useless. (Score 1) 68

by vampire_baozi (#35083032) Attached to: China Mandates Parental Controls For Online Games

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.

Comment: Freedom to live, freedom to live free? (Score 1) 640

by vampire_baozi (#34984666) Attached to: Terrorists Bomb Moscow Airport

We've often posed the question on /., what happens when someone hits a security checkpoint? Do we add security checkpoints for security checkpoints? All we're doing is lumping people up. Given population densities, there will ALWAYS be places where people congregate. Do we go to a system of armed guards in every public place, Israeli-style? Admit that once someone has a working bomb, it's almost impossible to stop them from getting it to somewhere with lots of people and setting it off, and then invade privacy on a massive scale to prevent anyone from possibly making a bomb?

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.

Comment: No, really? Clueless author. (Score 2) 535

by vampire_baozi (#34690612) Attached to: Chinese Written Language To Dominate Internet

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.

Comment: Re:That meeting can have more than one benefit. (Score 1) 102

by vampire_baozi (#34619936) Attached to: Can Zuckerberg Leap the Great Firewall of China?


Comment: Re:Too late . . . (Score 1) 102

by vampire_baozi (#34619896) Attached to: Can Zuckerberg Leap the Great Firewall of China?


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.

Passwords are implemented as a result of insecurity.