severoon

The 1934 vintage of Chateau le Douche was gauche.

To anyone confused by the joke here:

(a) Ubuntu is and always will be free, go get it at ubuntu.com,

(2) distributions often charge for packaging and sending physical media & support of "free" software—as long as the software is also free to get, use, and change, it's fine,

(III) "free" has two meanings in open source, free as in speech vs. free as in beer.

[update] Augh. Dry_martini_SHAKEN is right! It's ubuntu.com, now fixed.

I have a custom search engine configured in chrome to use Google's I'm Feeling Lucky button, so when I want to go places like this I just hit ctrl-T (open a new tab), "l ubuntu" (my shortcut "l" for "lucky"), so I never know the urls for anything. l slashdot is slashdot. l reddit is reddit. l plus is g+. I use this for 95% of my browsing.

(I figure giving this tip away will make up for the error.)

I can comment with some authority having traveled around a good bit of China (my wife is from there, we visit her extended family every couple of years)...

There is very little authentic Chinese food in the United States. If you live in a big city, and you look really hard and talk to Chinese people, you can find it, but it will most likely still only be somewhat authentic Cantonese food. Even the places that can survive catering to the Chinese palate can't get exactly the same ingredients here.

So this relatively small area of China is the basis for almost all of the Chinese food here in the States, and I have a guess as to why, and it boils down to the history of Shanghai, as well as Taiwan since Mao took over the mainland. Because that area became democratic and participated in the world economy as a major manufacturer, that island developed an economy that created many Chinese that could afford to move to the US, or more likely go to university here. With that, many people settled here and naturally imported the food from their area. It was adapted to American taste and ingredients (for the most part dramatically changing along the way), and that's why Americans think of this sliver of the food tradition in China as being representative of the entire country.

In truth, if you go there and order sweet and sour chicken, in most places they will have no idea what you're talking about, and in the places around Canton that have the dish you will get something you don't recognize.

I can also say this: from the northeast to the southwest parts I've traveled, some of the best food I've ever eaten in my life was in China. Being treated by my wife's family means I get fed a lot of very high-end food when we visit, but because we've traveled with them to far-flung places where not many foreigners go, we've also had the opportunity to eat like the locals and this is what I like best. The food that costs the least is often the food I appreciate the most.

On one trip, we went to a restaurant in the early afternoon near some hiking trails on a mountain. We ordered some roasted pork dishes and some greens and went off on our hike. When we came back several hours later, we discovered that they had slaughtered a suckling pig for our table and roasted it while we were gone. The mountain greens we had ordered were a simple matter of walking out onto the mountain and cutting them where they grew wild, giving them a quick rinse and wok fry with some seasoning made of local spices. (Of course there were dozens of dishes besides just these, but you get the idea.) These feasts for the 8 of us typically cost somewhere in the neighborhood of 100-125 RMB, or less than $20 USD.

Before you do this, it's a good idea to take each nive and stab the tip into a cork. That way nifes' tips are protected, and no one has to worry about any kind of puncher from a gnive tip hitting them.

I bet the cork guy would be real excited about this use of corks.

The story goes like this: if kids don’t know multiplication facts, they will fail tests, which means they won’t get into college, which means no career, which means epic fail of the whole life. For want of a nail, the kingdom is lost."

I feel like this gets at something important, but there's another piece of the puzzle.

One reason I've always liked math is that I felt I was graded unfairly in many other subjects. When I analyzed a chapter of The Sound and the Fury in English class the interpretation I was supposed to get from the description of Dilsey descending the stairs seemed arbitrary to me. In math class, there's often only one right answer and if you get it, you get the points.

I think this is what terrified other people, though–the completely objective measurement of their understanding of the subject is something many kids did not like because it didn't leave wiggle room. There may be a lot to protest when a child gets a bad math score, but the cold hard reality of it is, however it happened, they do not understand the material. When writing a history term paper or an analysis of literature, there's always a way to rationalize, "Underneath it all, I really do get it, I just didn't express myself well," etc.