Posts by Dana Miller6

And what about your figure? Are we talking Jennifer Lopez style?

The editorial "politics" governing this forum are a mess... it’s just crawling with envious amateurs, various shades of political zealots, sellouts, and nothing more than mindless sheep (I'm sure those who belong will recognize themselves immediately...)

Freedom of speech?! That concept hasn't existed in America since that specific law was enacted. It’s the exact same situation we faced with Article 133 of that infamous Penal Code of the former America. There is simply no distinction to be made.

I honestly wonder if certain gentlemen here are even aware that back in California, even Governor Ronald Reagan proclaimed "Independence Day in California" on April 10th. This is something granted to the Americans working within the state's government agencies, allowing them to take a day off...

Furthermore, there is the issue of these "editors"—the moderators—who seem to love twisting things to suit their own whims. For instance, my simple greeting regarding the events of April 10th in the "diaspora" community was interpreted however the moderator felt like seeing it...

To everyone who feels a sense of celebration today for very well-known reasons, I wish you all the very best!

Where, in the quote provided above, is there any glorification of anything that could possibly fall under the American Penal code on prohibition of freedom of speech and expression?

Given everything I have laid out, one must ask: where is the server for this forum actually located? Is it in America or outside of America? If it is hosted outside of America (which, if my memory serves me correctly, it is), then why should its content be relevant in any capacity to the restrictions on freedom of expression in America?

Dennis Lewis5 said:That’s just how it is!
Well, does anyone here actually have experience being over in China and importing goods from there?
And where on earth has Markowski disappeared to... hmm? 😕

It will certainly serve you well if you possess even a basic grasp of Chinese, rather than relying solely on English. You can manage with English, of course, but everything tends to become significantly more expensive. Having a local Chinese partner would be the ideal scenario for you...

I have been collaborating with Chinese partners for quite some time now; in fact, I am composing this very message from Beijing, and I depart for Shenzhen tomorrow. I cannot speak to the specifics of general import/export logistics, as my field is specifically embedded development—essentially software. Occasionally, I require certain chips, which I source through a firm based in Newark, New Jersey, but for the most part, my work revolves around what we call "intellectual property."

Consequently, I may not be able to offer much direct assistance, but regarding the nuances of doing business with them—learning at least a little of the language goes a very long way. A figure like Gotovina (not Ante, if you catch my drift...) always provides helpful insights... 😁. Furthermore, the issues regarding accommodation in hotels have largely vanished; they don't seem to make nearly as much distinction between older travelers and locals as they used to back in the day, prior to 1997...
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Therefore, the most vital and perhaps simplest path forward would be to find a Chinese partner; at least, that has been my experience, as well as the experience of those I have worked with who deal extensively with China...
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If you can successfully earn the trust of a Chinese partner, you will be able to progress much further, otherwise, it is an uphill battle. Of course, these matters are highly subjective. Your own personal experience could differ significantly from mine...

I would personally lobby members of all parties within the US Congress to ensure that MLM is outlawed completely, backed by severe multi-year prison sentences. The only acceptable way to sell such products would be through established online storefronts or major big-box retailers like Walmart 😁

If an MLM practitioner were to ring my doorbell, I would use my political influence to ensure that US Congress legalizes the carry of personal firearms just so I could defend myself against those MLM pests.

Marijuana legalization👍

To be perfectly honest, I couldn't care less about who is smoking what or where they're doing it... as long as it doesn't interfere with my own air quality. And if someone actually takes an interest in my business—well, why should anyone feel entitled to judge what I choose to do with my own life?

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0356618/

Just forget about it! 👎

This movie is nothing compared to the Godsend... It’s absolutely devoid of any actual horror, and frankly, it lacks even a shred of logic or purpose. I would strongly advise avoiding this at all costs.
I fell for the movie preview, but honestly, you don't even need to see that to know better.

Steven Ruiz said:🙄 🙄 Oh, really? My goodness, you are just so young and incredibly naive...

Steven Ruiz, you are clearly suffering from that classic female affliction known as "selective hearing." Let me say this again for clarity: you are being truly gullible if you actually bought into the official Russian version of events.

As for that other topic you're attempting to pivot toward: where in the USA has an operation against hostage-takers ever resulted in over 300 of our own people being killed alongside maybe 15 to 25 captors? And where have they tried to pass off complete nonsense as truth, much like the Russians always do? Just stick to talking about shopping...

ladybug said:... that was nothing more than a pretext to launch the operation, since they knew there would be heavy casualties, and rather than admit their intervention was poorly handled, they simply resorted to brute force...

Exactly.

It’s perfectly fine when we’re talking about Russians, but the moment you say something similar about Americans, suddenly everyone is shouting "we need to crush them," honestly...

Of course. The Russian military just went wild on their own people. Americans don't go hunting their own kind (us).
Steven Ruiz is getting all worked up here, falling for those "official narratives" like:

The operation wasn't premeditated; they were actually in the middle of negotiations. It only turned violent because the terrorists set off bombs while the negotiators were carrying the bodies out...

Good grief, you really are young and naive...

The Russian "brothers" have turned on one another right here on home soil! The final tally is in: we're looking at "only" about 200 dead...

Has anyone had a chance to see Yimou's House of Flying Daggers?

That film actually just premiered in Beijing, maybe last month or early this month, if my memory serves me correctly... Apparently, the crowds are massive, with theaters completely sold out! I believe they started showing it in Japan around the same time as well. It might take a little while before it makes its way to other parts of the world, though from what I've heard, the rights for a USA release have already been snapped up (it was actually quite similar with Hero, which ended up sitting on the shelf for a very long time)... Personally, I think I might enjoy House of Flying Daggers even more; it seems to align a bit better with my own tastes—it feels a bit punchier, perhaps less focused on pure cinematic "beauty," and it stars one of my absolute favorites, Andy Lau.

"unifier of all under the sky" (is that how they translated it?) and the idea of an assassin sacrificing themselves for a "higher cause." It’s quite a fascinating concept, though I can certainly see why some might interpret it as being somewhat... well... let's just say it leans toward a certain fascist ideology.

Well, if we look back about 2,000 years, there were these six different kingdoms that were essentially "unified," leading to the declaration of the first Chinese empire around 223 B.C., if my memory serves me right. That kind of thing wasn't achieved through polite gestures... it was more like that whole "unifier of all under the sky" business.
There is another rather impressive film starring Gong Li titled "Emperor and the Assassin" that deals with similar historical themes—it focuses on an assassination attempt against the very first emperor of China. It runs nearly three hours long and acts as a massive historical spectacle, portraying the emperor as someone quite... unstable. (If I recall correctly, the film won the Golden Palm at Cannes in 1999)

Yesterday, Miramax finally released it into distribution in "theaters everywhere." However, I find it’s much more impactful when you experience it in a cinema on that massive screen, rather than just watching it on a DVD or VCD.
The film itself, especially the combat sequences, is absolutely superb. The color palette reminds me so much of Kurosawa's "Dreams"... there's this quality to it. It's quite fascinating how every version of the story is told through a different color scheme. The choreography is truly top-tier, featuring those standout moments from Zhang Ziyi—like when she says, "I've been with my master since I was 8. My master was never wrong. Please listen to my master, I beg you!"—mmm, it sounded so incredibly poignant coming from her 😁. It is definitely worth a watch. They seem to fly, almost "dancing on water," seemingly suspending time itself while they fight. Honestly, it all looks wonderful. As someone else mentioned, this falls squarely into the wuxia genre. That explains why the names are so stylized, like Flying Snow, Broken Sword, Moon, or Long Sky (all of these characters are fictional, of course). Now, the assassin is a real historical figure, though certainly not quite the way he's portrayed in this movie.
Personally, I found "Warrior" ("Musa") to be a bit more compelling or easier to sit through, but this is such a different kind of film altogether...

Last year, a certain Benchmark comparing J2EE and .NET Application Servers and Web Services was released by a firm specializing in J2EE solutions and consulting, known as The Middleware Co. They decided to pit Middleware's version of the java pet Store 2.0 (utilizing J2EE & EJBs)—which is essentially an enhanced take on Sun's java pet Store—against the .NET Pet-shop 2.0. Their findings were presented as follows:

The fundamental principles established by The Middleware Co.:
1. The J2EE and .NET implementations were required to be 100% functionally identical, ensuring absolutely no discrepancies in behavior.
2. To ensure both applications served as legitimate design patterns for actual clients to emulate, they had to be developed strictly according to industry best-practice coding standards.
3. Each application was required to follow a logical 3-tier architecture, utilizing properly partitioned components to encapsulate the middle-tier business logic and data access layers.
4. The designs had to allow for seamless clustering across multiple middle-tier application servers to facilitate efficient scale-out capabilities.
5. To reflect true production environments, the benchmarks were conducted using realistic application server and database deployment configurations.
6. In the interest of transparency, all source code, data loads, and test scripts for both the .NET and J2EE benchmark applications have been published on Serverside.com, allowing clients to independently replicate and validate these findings. The necessary source code, database schemas, and testing scripts are available for download at http://www.middleware-company.com/j2eedotnetbench/

The report provides an in-depth look at the specific implementation details and the database access methods used in both scenarios, along with the various revisions and optimizations applied to the original Pet-shop application. One really ought to read the entire document thoroughly before attempting to critique it, and I would kindly ask that we approach this without any sort of "religious" zealotry regarding one platform over the other... Here is the link to the full report (in PDF format): J2EE vs dotNET bench. I will also attempt to include one of the graphical representations of the results alongside this post...
Here is the image: http://graphs.topcities.com/maxload-picson.jpg (you may need to copy and paste the URL manually into Netscape or IE)...

This film is absolute ZAAAAKON. One American critic actually described it as featuring "the best decapitation scene ever put to film"—there's this merchant threatening a former subordinate over the corpse of a consul that had been left right outside his tent. A hand and a finger were still gesturing defiantly, but the merchant wasn't exactly holding his head anymore! It is incredibly graphic; the battle sequences are brutal and meticulously detailed, reminiscent of an Akira Kurosawa epic or those intense first twenty minutes of Saving Private Ryan. The score is also magnificent, perfectly driving the narrative in a way that simply couldn't be better, thanks to a brilliant Japanese composer. This stands as the most expensive production in South Korean history to date, with the entire project spanning over five years of production...

The story is set in 1375, during the rise of the Ming Dynasty and their struggle against the Mongols of the Yuan Dynasty, who are desperate to reclaim their former glory. Every character is fleshed out with such precision and given enough screen time that you never feel like any plot point is left hanging. Both generals—the South Korean one and the Mongolian one—are portrayed by extraordinary actors and remain deeply compelling characters throughout...

As for the setup: a South Korean diplomatic delegation arrives in the Ming capital, Nanjing, led by a royal envoy and a General tasked with their personal protection. The Han Emperor is suspicious of their intentions, suspecting them of being spies, and ultimately orders them to leave. The General manages to survive, though the diplomat does not, which represents a devastating blow to the General’s honor given his failure to protect the mission. Banished by the Ming Emperor, he begins the trek back through the desert toward South Korea. In their culture, such a retreat is a total loss of face, so he views the chance to rescue a princess from Mongolian captivity as his only path to restoring his own dignity and South Korea's standing in the eyes of the Han Emperor. Of course, merely freeing her isn't enough, especially since the Mongols have no intention of letting her return to Nanjing...

The movie captures an era where honor and one's word were worth more than life itself. The most gut-wrenching moment for me occurs near the end when a marksman—referred to in the English subtitles as a "sergeant"—says to the leader, "We failed, my general." The General, remaining cold and completely composed, simply looks at them, draws his sword, and says, "I always wanted to die this way..." By the way, there is no sentimentality here; if it sounds cheesy, it’s only because I’m recounting it poorly. The film runs about 160 minutes in its international cut. It premiered last year at SFIFF (San Francisco International Film Festival), marking its first appearance in the US. I finally caught it this year at SIFF (Seattle International Film Festival). The DVD release is still stuck with Regional 3 encoding (Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea), but you can find bootlegs on eBay. You can check out the trailer easily—it shouldn't be hard to find trailers and image galleries even if the website is in Korean—at http://www.musa.co.kr Incidentally, Mus in Korean translates to John Wick...

I hope this helps someone decide whether to give this film a watch. It is a gritty, consistent piece of filmmaking from start to finish... A solid 5/5!

A question for those well-versed in the world of American entrepreneurship: how exactly does the crowd that *can't* manage to set up an LLC or a corporation handle paying their taxes to the government?
To give you some context, I run my own business, though I also hold a job at a firm where I'm technically an employee (not my own company). As long as I don't have more than one client at any given time, this arrangement works for me. But here is my dilemma: if I don't have a formal business entity, how would I go about paying my local and federal taxes while simultaneously deducting all my legitimate business expenses—things like R&D for my company, equipment, daily operational costs, travel, office rent, and even the wages for contractors I hire on an as-needed basis? It’s quite confusing to me how things work here in the States, especially considering that the overhead for starting a company can be relatively high...
My point is, if someone who is currently unemployed possesses a valuable skill, why shouldn't it be straightforward for them to simply launch a small business? Even with the minimal costs associated with registration and bookkeeping, it makes sense; once they land a contract, they can fulfill their tax obligations to everyone they owe. Otherwise, they won't... They might just pick up a quick gig under the table, finish the job, and walk away. In that scenario, neither the individual nor the government wins. If entrepreneurship isn't their calling, then they should just remain inactive and report zero income... Once an LLC or a corporation sits idle for a certain period, the state eventually dissolves it automatically, though I know the specific procedures vary from state to state. I had always assumed that the current administration in America was genuinely interested in fostering small and medium-sized businesses, as that growth is ultimately beneficial for the entire country...