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Black Panther has a 6.8 on Douban, described as the Chinese IMDB, compared to 97% on RottenTomatoes and a 7.8 on IMDB.

“A torture for the eyes”: Chinese moviegoers think Black Panther is just too black

Some moviegoers disliked Black Panther because they felt Marvel was trying too hard to be politically correct (link in Chinese). While many reviewers on Douban stopped short of leaving overtly racist comments about the film, many discussed their discomfort of being surrounded by so much blackness.

“Maybe the Chinese are still not used to a film full of black people,” wrote one reviewer on Douban (link in Chinese). The commenter said he had to pinch himself more than 10 times to stay awake during the movie because “Black Panther is black, all the major characters are black, a lot of scenes are black, the car-chasing scene is black—the blackness has really made me drowsy.”

Another reviewer who came into the theater late made a similar observation: “When I entered the theater, a bunch of black people was fighting in the night… I’ve never been in a theater so dark that I couldn’t find my seat.”

Someone else said the experience was worse in 3D (link in Chinese): “The film is filled with black actors and actresses. Also, because the film’s colors are a bit dark, it’s nearly a torture for the eyes to watch the film’s 3D version in the theater.”

The movie made $63 million on its opening weekend in China, which should put it around #30, a couple spots behind Iron Man 3, which had awkward content shoehorned into its Chinese version.

I should not avail myself of my right under the laws of the State of Washington to legally consume Cannibus Sativa and code either.

I won't tell you what it is until it goes into public beta.

I've learned the hard way that it's a really bad idea to preannounce my products.

This won't be Free Software. Neither will it be Open Source. It's gonna be dammit-give-me-your-money-you-cheap-bastards-Ware.

However, there is some possibility that I give it away free so as to solicit organic links to my website.

And Facebook shares. And tweets.

That facebook and twitter have become far more important to online businesses than google just appalls me.

If I do charge for it it won't have a very high price. Less than ten dollars and more than ninety-eight cents.

My Antminer L3+ LiteCoin mining rig is chugging away as I write this. It seems to actually be working. I joint the coinfoundry.org mining pool. Coin Foundry reports the right hash rate. I've received two payouts.

However I have become quite skeptical of the claims of all the mining profit calculators:

Coin Foundry asserts that its payout policy is competitive with the pay from other pools. The Block Reward for solving a block is LTC 25. Most of the other miners in my pool have a hashrate of 1 GH/sec; the top miner has 13 GH/sec.

My humble L3+ has only 504 MH/s. That leads me to speculate that all the mining profit calculators overestimate by orders of magnitude.

However Coin Foundry points out that one cannot really determine how profitable one's rig is until one has been with Coin Foundry for at least two months. I'm willing to accept the possibility that Coin Foundry is truthful, so I will stay with them until two months have elapsed.

If by some miracle my L3+ turns out to be lucrative I'll buy more of them.

I have only three circuit breakers for wall outlets. The noise of three rigs would drive me bananas so if I should buy lots of them I'll colocate them in a data center.

Opus Interactive quoted me $299 for 12U and 15 Amps in their Portland data center. 12U should be enough for six Antminers and six Bitmain APW++ power supplies. If the mining profit calculates turn out to be truthful, to colocate six rigs would be economical.

Somehow, somewhere I got the idea that my L3+ LiteCoin rig would profit ten grand a year. The calculators now tell me it's three grand. I have no clue what led me to believe it was ten grand.

The payouts I've received from Coin Foundry so far lead me to believe that my revenue for one year for one L3+ is going to be closer to three hundred than three thousand.

He Became A Celebrity For Putting Science Before God. Now Lawrence Krauss Faces Allegations Of Sexual Misconduct.

BuzzFeed News has learned that the incident with Hensley is one of many wide-ranging allegations of Krauss’s inappropriate behavior over the last decade — including groping women, ogling and making sexist jokes to undergrads, and telling an employee at Arizona State University, where he is a tenured professor, that he was going to buy her birth control so she didn’t inconvenience him with maternity leave. In response to complaints, two institutions — Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, and the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario — have quietly restricted him from their campuses. Our reporting is based on official university documents, emails, and interviews with more than 50 people.

Many of his accusers have requested anonymity, fearing professional or legal retaliation from Krauss, or online abuse from men in the movement who have smeared women for speaking out about other skeptics. A few allegations about Krauss made their way onto skeptic blogs, but were quickly taken down in fear of legal action. So for years, these stories have stayed inside whisper networks in skepticism and physics.

In lengthy emails to BuzzFeed News, Krauss denied all of the accusations against him, calling them “false and misleading defamatory allegations.” When asked why multiple women, over more than a decade, have separately accused him of misconduct, he said the answer was “obvious”: It’s because his provocative ideas have made him famous.

Her "International Woman's Day" emojis have sparked an online backlash

Kim Kardashian's decision to launch a "women's empowerment" add-on to her personal emoji collection for International Women's Day has received a considerable online backlash.

The collection features slogans such as "nasty woman", "my body, my choice" and "full time feminist".

Some on social media celebrated the move as positive promotion of ideals of equality. Others accused the personality of hypocrisy because her other products and emojis are provocative and sexualised.

I fixed a panic.

My coworker fixed a different panic.

We both checked in our code, I did "$ svn update".

I built all the components.

I rolled an installer.

So as to ensure that my release wasn't DOA I tried out one of the cases that - before I fixed it - caused a panic.

And it caused a panic. :(

I expect QA may want to test everything else so I sent out an email to let them know where to find it in subversion, as well as that case that had been fixed but is now broken.

Maybe it's for the best: not having anything to do I was getting bored and planned to leave.

Now I'm not bored anymore.

Alright - I think everyone knows that I have no use for Trump. I really don't like the guy much, for a number of reasons. I've even referred to him, on this forum, as The Court Fool.

Mr. Mychal Massie was a subject of discussion on the radio talk show this morning. "Trump isn't a liberal or a conservative, he's a pragmatist."

Wow. I hadn't thought of Trump in those terms - nor has anyone else here, I suspect. It has been stated here that Trump was not a republican, or a democrat. I just never thought in the direction that Massie has.

We recently enjoyed a belated holiday dinner at the home of friends. The dinner conversation was jocund, ranging from discussions about antique glass and china to theology and politics. At one point reference was made to Donald Trump being a conservative, to which I responded that Trump is not a conservative.

I said that neither does Trump view himself as a conservative. I stated it was my opinion that Trump is a pragmatist. He sees a problem and understands it must be fixed. He then sets about fixing it. He doesn’t see the problem as liberal or conservative; he sees it only as a problem. That is a quality that should be admired and applauded, not condemned. But I get ahead of myself.

Now, isn't that enough to make heads assplode? A pragmatist. BTW - Mr. Massie happens to be a black guy. His picture is at the top of the page, showing the face of a moderately dark brown man. So, this is from an African American who does NOT see Trump as a fascist, or a Nazi, or - well - he doesn't even see Trump as the court fool. I need to keep reading . . .

Viewing problems from a liberal perspective has resulted in the creation of more problems, more entitlement programs, more victims, more government, more political correctness and more attacks on the working class in all economic strata.

Viewing things according to the so-called Republican conservative perspective has brought continued spending, globalism to the detriment of American interests and well-being, denial of what the real problems are and weak, ineffective, milquetoast leadership that amounts to Barney Fife, deputy sheriff – appeasement-oriented and afraid of its own shadow. In brief, it has brought liberal ideology with a pachyderm as a mascot juxtaposed to the ass of the Democrat Party.

Immigration isn’t a Republican problem; it isn’t a liberal problem – it is a problem that threatens the very fabric and infrastructure of America. It demands a pragmatic approach, not an approach that is intended to appease one group or another.

The impending collapse of the economy isn’t a liberal or conservative problem; it is an American problem. That said, until it is viewed as a problem that demands a common-sense approach to resolution, it will never be fixed because the Democrats and Republicans know only one way to fix things, and their impracticality has proven to have no lasting effect. Successful businessmen like Donald Trump find ways to make things work. They do not promise to accommodate.

Trump uniquely understands that China’s manipulation of currency is not a Republican problem or a Democratic problem. It is a problem that threatens our financial stability, and he understands the proper balance needed to fix it. Here again, successful businessmen like Trump who have weathered the changing tides of economic reality understand what is necessary to make business work, and they, unlike both sides of the political aisle, know that if something doesn’t work you don’t continue trying to make it work, hoping that at some point it will.

As a pragmatist, Donald Trump hasn’t made wild pie-in-the-sky promises of a cellphone in every pocket, free college tuition and a $15-an-hour minimum wage for working the drive-through a Carl’s Jr.

I argue that America needs pragmatists because pragmatists see problems and find ways to fix them. They do not see a problem and compound it by creating more problems.

You may not like Donald Trump. I suspect that the reason people do not like him is because: 1) he is antithetical to the “good old boy” method of brokering backroom deals that fatten the coffers of politicians; 2) they are unaccustomed to hearing a candidate speak who is unencumbered by the financial shackles of those who own him vis-a-vis donations; 3) he is someone who is free of idiomatic political ideology; and 4) he is someone who understands that it takes more than hollow promises and political correctness to make America great again.

Listening to Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders talk about fixing America is like listening to two lunatics trying to “out crazy” one another. Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio are owned lock, stock and barrel by the bankers, corporations and big-dollar donors funding their campaigns. Bush can deny it, but common sense tells anyone willing to face facts that people don’t give tens of millions without expecting something in return.

We have had Democrats and Republican ideologues – and what has it brought us? Are we better off today or worst off? Has it happened overnight or has it been a steady decline brought on by both parties?

I submit that a pragmatist might be just what America needs right now. And as I said earlier, a pragmatist sees a problem and understands that the solution to fix same is not about a party, but a willingness and boldness to get it done.

People are quick to confuse and despise confidence as arrogance, but that is common amongst those who have never accomplished anything in their lives and who have always played it safe not willing to risk failure.

I'm thinking that maybe I need to read more Massie . . .

http://www.wnd.com/2016/01/trump-a-pragmatist-not-a-conservative/
Published: 01/18/2016 at 7:23 PM

http://bugreport.apple.com

I should not drink and test.

Coca-Cola plans to launch its first alcoholic drink

Coca-Cola is planning to produce an alcoholic drink for the first time in the company's 125-year history - with an alcopop-style product in Japan. It is keen to cash in on the country's growing taste for Chu-Hi - canned sparkling flavoured drinks given a kick with a local spirit called shochu. The product is typically between 3% and 8% alcohol by volume.

A senior Coke executive in Japan said the move was a "modest experiment for a specific slice of our market". "We haven't experimented in the low alcohol category before, but it's an example of how we continue to explore opportunities outside our core areas," said Jorge Garduno, Coca-Cola's Japan president. It was unlikely the drink would be sold outside of Japan, he suggested.

Some BBC commenterds want to ban alcopops.

Also at NPR and CNBC.