It's giving the record industry free assistance in their attempts to increase their control over digital music
I must admit, the idea of watching the RMIA spend billions implementing a system which then immediately crashes and burns is attractive. The problem is that it would end up hurting all the wrong people.
The implementation costs for any system the RMIA ultimately imposes will be passed on to consumers and hardware manufacturers in the form of higher CD prices and burdensome licensing fees (which will also be passed on to the consumer), and consumers will be forced to adopt a technology which, though not technically secure, will nonetheless manage to inconvenience hundreds of millions of music lovers globally. Waiting until after the fact to crack that system would simply be a case of adding stink to the shitpile. Then it becomes not just a case of onerously burdening the consumer, but -- worse -- onerously burdening him with a system which is useless even for the purpose for which it was created. Which means a new system will be developed and implemented, with yet more implementation costs futilely ripped from consumer wallets.
No. Better to break the watermarks now and let the SDMI implode from the political backlash. It's not about helping the RMIA. It's a case of protecting ourselves from stupid, bull-headed money-changers who are concerned about anything but our welfare.
The Logitech site won't let me log in because I have cookies disabled. It tells me I can find more info at the "Security and You" page, but it won't let me read the page unless I first enable cookies.
OK, here's a totally lame explanation from someone who knows diddly about investing, despite owning a small fortune in stocks (ah, the pleasures of inheritance in a country that doesn't have estate taxes!).
IPO = "Initial Public Offering".
When a company decides to go public, it files notices with the proper authorities, and makes it known that on such-and-so a date the public will be able to buy stocks in the company. The initial batch of stocks made available is called the initial public offering.
...you didn't provide me with any facts reputing my statement....it is much cleaner, easier, and more efficient to kill someone with a gun thank a knife.
You seem to have refuted your own statement.
I can see the headlines now:
"Drive-By Knifings Soar as Second Amendment Is Repealed".
"Dateline Littleton, CO -- Seven Dead in Columbine HS Bricking Spree"
"Knifeman Holds Twelve Hostage in New York Bank Heist Gone Bad"
"Distraught Man Holds Police at Bay with AK-47 Assault Club"
Lee Kai Wen
(who is in Taiwan -- though his e-mail account isn't>
There are at least 6 indigenous Chinese-language Linux distributions and several foreign distros that also have been Chineseified (TurboLinux, XTeam).
RedHat with Chinese Language Extensions seems to be the most popular here in Taiwan, though other distros use CLE as well. Personally, I run Mandrake 7 with CLE 0.8. And yes, Chinese language support is excellent throughout the OS (with the exception of documentation, which is still largely available only in English).
Cell phone use in Hong Kong is much greater compared to the United States. Most likely, Hong Kong has one of the greatest percentages of cell phone use in the population.
Estimates for Taiwan indicate nearly 20 million cell phones in circulation. Not bad for a country with a population that has yet to reach 23 million. This seems to be fairly typical for Asia -- Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, Singapore, Beijing, even Bangkok last time I was there -- have taken to cellular technology in a big way.
I would be cautious in over-generalizing this, however. Taiwan may lead North America in the per-capita cell phone category, but in most other ways we trail the US technologically.
I had a couple of moderator points left, and would have modded your post. Unfortunately, I couldn't decide whether to mod it up as funny or down as flamebait, so I just hit reply instead. (Damn - now I'll have to find a different forum to waste my last points in.)
(I agree with you about Katz -- stopped reading him a long time ago -- but I try not to let things like that influence my moderating.)
A small note, in my original post I wasn't trying to equate Godwin's Law with a point of logic
Sorry -- I didn't mean I was referring specifically to your post, just that Godwin's Law is often wielded as if it were some variant on argument by analogy.
Godwin's is just arbitrarily condemning any mention of anything relating to Nazis or the Holocaust.
Perhaps you are referring to Usenet tradition. Godwin's Law does not condemn anything. It is a mere statement of probability, which says that the longer a discussion goes on, the more likely it is that someone will make a comparison involving Hitler or Nazism. Godwin's Law doesn't condemn the comparison, it merely predicts it.
It is Usenet tradition which, through convention, has decided that such comparisons are condemnable. Thus, any attempt to invoke Godwin's Law to end a discussion is a misapplication of the Law. If you wish to end the discussion you should be appealing to Usenet tradition, not Godwin's Law.
Which begs the question of whether Usenet tradition is applicable outside Usenet. I would argue that while Godwin's Law is a universal principle, Usenet tradition is not.
First, it should be noted that the poster who invoked Godwin's Law was merely going for laughs; the resultant fallout has taken him way to seriously (perhaps an appropriately placed smiley face would have been helpful; then again, maybe not.)
Be that as it may, trying to invoke Godwin's Law to end an argument is a misapplication of the principle. Godwin's Law is merely a statement of probability, not an arbiter of disputes. It is the corollary Usenet tradition, not the Law itself, which declares that any invocation of Hitler or Nazis ends the discussion.
Similarly, attempting to equate Godwin's Law with a point of logic is a non sequiter. Again, the Law is merely a statement of probability, not a rule of logic.
Godwin's Law, I would argue, is universal. Wheter Usenet tradition is applicable outside Usenet is open for debate.
When someone makes a comparison to Nazis or Hitler to discredit or silence the opposition, then Godwin's Law should certainly apply.
However, when some Nazi-related idea or symbol is used simply to illustrate a point rather than to attack the opposition, why should it be declared invalid?
Note that Godwin's Law is merely a statement of probability. It is the corallary Usenet tradition, not Godwin's Law itself, which stipulates that the party invoking Hitler forfeits the debate.
To invoke Godwin's Law to end a discussion is a misapplication of the principle. It is the Usenet tradition which must be invoked, which leads to the question of whether Usenet tradition applies outside Usenet. Personally I'd argue that while Godwin's Law is universal in scope, Usenet tradition is not.
Though it has its origins on Usenet, I think you'll find it being applied much more broadly today. I have myself seen it invoked numerous times right here on Slashdot. The principle is valid, regardless of context. Do the laws of logic only apply in ancient Greece, simply because they originated there?
2. Godwin's Law specifies accusing one's opponent of being Hitler or a Nazi. No such accusation was made here.
"the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one".
Note that it doesn't say "the probability of one party being compared to Hitler", simply the probability of a "comparison involving Hitler." Which is what this was.
Please don't link to Airsick Raymond's bastardized Jargon File.
Dicto simpliciter -- or the fallacy of sweeping generalization -- is the logical fallacy of making a general statement and then assuming it must be true of every individual case. For example: "Germans are stupid. Therefore, Einstein was an idiot."
More to the point, whether "Airsick Raymond's" jargon file can be trusted in general isn't relevant. The better question is whether his presentation of Godwin's law is accurate. Near as I can tell, it is.
I won't disagree with your argument. As I acknowledged in my original post, my own portrayal was overly simplistic. My point was not so much to provide a scholarly historical analysis as to point out that technological development is not as inevitable as modern sensibilities assume.
Whether the sine qua non of the scientific revolution was, in fact, a Christian concept of order is only secondarily important. The gist of my argument was simply that many pieces had to fall in place to birth modern science, and that the convergence of those pieces was neither given nor necessarily even probable.
RMS invented free software? Hmm.. RMS invented free software... Ah, yes -- here it is, from the OED, 7th edition, copyright (C) 2086, Oxford University Press:
"Altruism:.... 4. A concept attributed to late twentieth century software engineer Richard M. Stallman in response to the then-current hyper-capitalist notion that everything must be sold. It is now widely held that it was the work of Stallman and his Free Software Foundation which laid the groundwork for the techno-communism which transformed the socio-political landscape of the early twenty-first century and paved the way for the later economic and philosophical reforms which form the basis of so much of modern society."
Vociferous Troll is correct, and RMS isn't unacquainted with demagogy himself.
QT has been released under GPL -- something RMS has been stumping for for years. He could have posted an editorial entitle "Hooray for Troll Trech!"; he could have congratulated the parties that be; he could have politely stated his admiration for the skills of all involved in the the KDE project; he could, in a word, have been a gracious winner. But apparently that's not RMS's style. Instead he launches immediately into the picking of nits of such mind-boggling irrelevance it quite takes one's breath away.
There used to be a word for people who were always looking for fights to pick. Bully. RMS seems unwilling to surrender a pulpit from which he loves to hear himself speak.
I'm neither a KDE nor a Gnome partisan; merely an observer who is glad the tired old tirades against KDE for what amount to issues irrelevant to the technology involved can now finally be given a rest (that is, if RMS will let them).
There is no diffenrence between retroactively attacking King Leopold for his business practices in the Congo and retroactively attacking Hitler for his rehabilitation of the German economy.
Per the strictures of Godwin's Law you have just forfeited the argument.
it does follow that He could do so - we just don't know.
Agreed -- we're arguing in a vacuum here (pun intended). It's basically an argument from silence -- both the silence of the cosmos (vis-a-vis signs of intelligent life) and the silence of the Scriptures regarding extraterrestrial creation.
There are certain biblical passages which imply uniqueness in the relationship between God and man, which might be taken to imply humanity's singularity in the universe, but nothing that absolutely forbids the contrary possibility.
In case you're interested in the possibility, the best Christian treatment of the question of extraterrestrial life is CS Lewis' Perelandra trilogy, a science fiction work which asks what extraterrestrial life might look like -- that is, not physically, but morally and spiritually. Interesting stories in their own right, I think they make good reading even for those who aren't interested in the religious implications.
One assumption that rarely gets examined in this debate -- even the Scientific American article missed it -- is the inevitability of technology.
Will an intelligent species inevitably develop technology? Was it inevitable even for us? A look at our own history tends to throw some doubt on the assumption.
Why did human technology develop when it did? Greek philosophers had measured the circumference of a round earth, deduced the existence of atoms, and figured out that it was us who circled the sun. In many ways, they were more scientifically advanced than the European culture which finally birthed modern science. Two thousand years before Columbus and Galileo, Greece had all the pieces. Why didn't it put them together?
Chinese culture also birthed many "modern" technological advances -- from gunpowder to paper and the printing press -- and spawned several "proto-scientific" revolutions, yet they also never quite put the pieces together.
For nearly a thousand years, while Europe wallowed in the Dark Ages, Arab philosopher/scientists were the sole guardians of Greek philosophy. They had all the pieces Europe had lost, yet they, too, failed to birth a scientific revolution.
How and why did Europe finally pull itself out of its malaise? And what was the key which allowed it to do what other cultures with similar or greater potential had failed to do? It certainly had little to do with the 16th century's scientific knowledge -- which lagged behind both Arab and ancient Greek philosophers'.
It has been argued that the key which finally unlocked modern science was not a scientific discovery, but a religious belief. What early modern European culture possessed that others had lacked was a belief that the universe was fundamentally a place of order. After all, a search for the laws of order presupposes a belief that order exists. And it was Christianity which provided this missing link. The God of the Bible was a God of order who would necessarily create a universe in His own ordered image. It but remained for humans to deduce what that order was. It was this notion of the universe as a fundamentally and necessarily ordered place which had escaped both Greek and Arab philosophers, and which finally provided the spark which ignited the smouldering tinder.
I mention this not because I find the argument compelling, but simply because it illustrates my point: that science and technology are far from being inevitable offsprings of intelligence. Sixteenth century European philosopher/scientists were neither more intelligent nor more scientifically advanced than their ancient Greek forebears; in some ways they had in fact taken several steps backward. Science might easily have sprung from a 5th century BC Athenian womb, but it didn't. In fact, it might easily never have have sprung forth at all.
We may indeed be only one amongst hundreds or thousands of intelligent species inhabiting the cosmos. It may only be our technology which is unique.
if your God is omnipotent, why... are [we] the only ones he made?... a truly omnipotent God would have created beings in his image lots of places.
Why? It's true by definition that an omnipotent God is capable of creating life elsewhere. Does it necessarily follow that He must do so? Perhaps He simply chose not to.
Wow - this guy really hit a nerve with the moderators.
I've had moderator access six times in the last four weeks. I wish I had it now so I could mod this one up. Whoever moderated this as flamebait and troll doesn't know flameage from clear thinking. The comments were insightful and succinctly stated. I can only conclude the moderator has some ideological axe to grind against religious expression.
The Bible gives a history of our planet, how do you know he didn't give others the same "shared" eternal soul?
The best treatment of this question I am aware of is CS Lewis' Perelandra trilogy, which asks from a Christian perspective what it would mean if God had created other life, and what that life might look like.
Such life would, of course, be invested with the image of God, as homo sapiens are. In that case there are two possibilities. Either these extraterrestrials never fell from God's grace as we did, and thus were not in need of salvation, or they did fall. In which case God would have provided a means of salvation for them as well.
There is nothing inherent in Christian teaching which forbids the existence of extraterrestrials.
You can't even remember anything from the first few years after you were born.
"Eternal" means only that they will never cease to exist, not that they have always existed. According to the Bible, God is the only entity without beginning or end.
There are more human beings alive at this moment than in all of previous human history. Which makes a total of about 12 billion eternal souls.
As to the crowding issue -- didn't you know the heaven is zoned for duplexes?
Lee Kai Wen -- Taiwan, ROC
Slashdot Mirror
Lee Kai Wen -- Taiwan, ROC
I must admit, the idea of watching the RMIA spend billions implementing a system which then immediately crashes and burns is attractive. The problem is that it would end up hurting all the wrong people.
The implementation costs for any system the RMIA ultimately imposes will be passed on to consumers and hardware manufacturers in the form of higher CD prices and burdensome licensing fees (which will also be passed on to the consumer), and consumers will be forced to adopt a technology which, though not technically secure, will nonetheless manage to inconvenience hundreds of millions of music lovers globally. Waiting until after the fact to crack that system would simply be a case of adding stink to the shitpile. Then it becomes not just a case of onerously burdening the consumer, but -- worse -- onerously burdening him with a system which is useless even for the purpose for which it was created. Which means a new system will be developed and implemented, with yet more implementation costs futilely ripped from consumer wallets.
No. Better to break the watermarks now and let the SDMI implode from the political backlash. It's not about helping the RMIA. It's a case of protecting ourselves from stupid, bull-headed money-changers who are concerned about anything but our welfare.
Lee Kai Wen -- Taiwan, ROC
The Logitech site won't let me log in because I have cookies disabled. It tells me I can find more info at the "Security and You" page, but it won't let me read the page unless I first enable cookies.
Nice.
Lee Kai Wen - Taiwan, ROC
OK, here's a totally lame explanation from someone who knows diddly about investing, despite owning a small fortune in stocks (ah, the pleasures of inheritance in a country that doesn't have estate taxes!).
IPO = "Initial Public Offering".
When a company decides to go public, it files notices with the proper authorities, and makes it known that on such-and-so a date the public will be able to buy stocks in the company. The initial batch of stocks made available is called the initial public offering.
Lee Kai Wen
You seem to have refuted your own statement.
I can see the headlines now:
"Drive-By Knifings Soar as Second Amendment Is Repealed".
"Dateline Littleton, CO -- Seven Dead in Columbine HS Bricking Spree"
"Knifeman Holds Twelve Hostage in New York Bank Heist Gone Bad"
"Distraught Man Holds Police at Bay with AK-47 Assault Club"
Lee Kai Wen (who is in Taiwan -- though his e-mail account isn't>
RedHat with Chinese Language Extensions seems to be the most popular here in Taiwan, though other distros use CLE as well. Personally, I run Mandrake 7 with CLE 0.8. And yes, Chinese language support is excellent throughout the OS (with the exception of documentation, which is still largely available only in English).
Lee Kai Wen -- Taiwan, ROC
Estimates for Taiwan indicate nearly 20 million cell phones in circulation. Not bad for a country with a population that has yet to reach 23 million. This seems to be fairly typical for Asia -- Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, Singapore, Beijing, even Bangkok last time I was there -- have taken to cellular technology in a big way.
I would be cautious in over-generalizing this, however. Taiwan may lead North America in the per-capita cell phone category, but in most other ways we trail the US technologically.
Lee Kai Wen -- Taiwan, ROC
(I agree with you about Katz -- stopped reading him a long time ago -- but I try not to let things like that influence my moderating.)
Lee Kai Wen -- Taiwan, ROC
Sorry -- I didn't mean I was referring specifically to your post, just that Godwin's Law is often wielded as if it were some variant on argument by analogy.
Lee Kai Wen -- Taiwan, ROC
Perhaps you are referring to Usenet tradition. Godwin's Law does not condemn anything. It is a mere statement of probability, which says that the longer a discussion goes on, the more likely it is that someone will make a comparison involving Hitler or Nazism. Godwin's Law doesn't condemn the comparison, it merely predicts it.
It is Usenet tradition which, through convention, has decided that such comparisons are condemnable. Thus, any attempt to invoke Godwin's Law to end a discussion is a misapplication of the Law. If you wish to end the discussion you should be appealing to Usenet tradition, not Godwin's Law.
Which begs the question of whether Usenet tradition is applicable outside Usenet. I would argue that while Godwin's Law is a universal principle, Usenet tradition is not.
Lee Kai Wen -- Taiwan, ROC
Be that as it may, trying to invoke Godwin's Law to end an argument is a misapplication of the principle. Godwin's Law is merely a statement of probability, not an arbiter of disputes. It is the corollary Usenet tradition, not the Law itself, which declares that any invocation of Hitler or Nazis ends the discussion.
Similarly, attempting to equate Godwin's Law with a point of logic is a non sequiter. Again, the Law is merely a statement of probability, not a rule of logic.
Godwin's Law, I would argue, is universal. Wheter Usenet tradition is applicable outside Usenet is open for debate.
Lee Kai Wen
Note that Godwin's Law is merely a statement of probability. It is the corallary Usenet tradition, not Godwin's Law itself, which stipulates that the party invoking Hitler forfeits the debate.
To invoke Godwin's Law to end a discussion is a misapplication of the principle. It is the Usenet tradition which must be invoked, which leads to the question of whether Usenet tradition applies outside Usenet. Personally I'd argue that while Godwin's Law is universal in scope, Usenet tradition is not.
Lee Kai Wen -- Taiwan, ROC
Though it has its origins on Usenet, I think you'll find it being applied much more broadly today. I have myself seen it invoked numerous times right here on Slashdot. The principle is valid, regardless of context. Do the laws of logic only apply in ancient Greece, simply because they originated there?
2. Godwin's Law specifies accusing one's opponent of being Hitler or a Nazi. No such accusation was made here.
"the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one".
Note that it doesn't say "the probability of one party being compared to Hitler", simply the probability of a "comparison involving Hitler." Which is what this was.
Please don't link to Airsick Raymond's bastardized Jargon File.
Dicto simpliciter -- or the fallacy of sweeping generalization -- is the logical fallacy of making a general statement and then assuming it must be true of every individual case. For example: "Germans are stupid. Therefore, Einstein was an idiot."
More to the point, whether "Airsick Raymond's" jargon file can be trusted in general isn't relevant. The better question is whether his presentation of Godwin's law is accurate. Near as I can tell, it is.
Thanks for your reply.
Lee Kai Wen -- Taiwan, ROC
I won't disagree with your argument. As I acknowledged in my original post, my own portrayal was overly simplistic. My point was not so much to provide a scholarly historical analysis as to point out that technological development is not as inevitable as modern sensibilities assume.
Whether the sine qua non of the scientific revolution was, in fact, a Christian concept of order is only secondarily important. The gist of my argument was simply that many pieces had to fall in place to birth modern science, and that the convergence of those pieces was neither given nor necessarily even probable.
Thanks again for the repsonse.
Lee Kai Wen -- Taiwan, ROC
Lee Kai Wen -- Taiwan, ROC
QT has been released under GPL -- something RMS has been stumping for for years. He could have posted an editorial entitle "Hooray for Troll Trech!"; he could have congratulated the parties that be; he could have politely stated his admiration for the skills of all involved in the the KDE project; he could, in a word, have been a gracious winner. But apparently that's not RMS's style. Instead he launches immediately into the picking of nits of such mind-boggling irrelevance it quite takes one's breath away.
There used to be a word for people who were always looking for fights to pick. Bully. RMS seems unwilling to surrender a pulpit from which he loves to hear himself speak.
I'm neither a KDE nor a Gnome partisan; merely an observer who is glad the tired old tirades against KDE for what amount to issues irrelevant to the technology involved can now finally be given a rest (that is, if RMS will let them).
There is no diffenrence between retroactively attacking King Leopold for his business practices in the Congo and retroactively attacking Hitler for his rehabilitation of the German economy.
Per the strictures of Godwin's Law you have just forfeited the argument.
Lee Kai Wen -- Taiwan, ROC
Agreed -- we're arguing in a vacuum here (pun intended). It's basically an argument from silence -- both the silence of the cosmos (vis-a-vis signs of intelligent life) and the silence of the Scriptures regarding extraterrestrial creation.
There are certain biblical passages which imply uniqueness in the relationship between God and man, which might be taken to imply humanity's singularity in the universe, but nothing that absolutely forbids the contrary possibility.
In case you're interested in the possibility, the best Christian treatment of the question of extraterrestrial life is CS Lewis' Perelandra trilogy, a science fiction work which asks what extraterrestrial life might look like -- that is, not physically, but morally and spiritually. Interesting stories in their own right, I think they make good reading even for those who aren't interested in the religious implications.
Lee Kai Wen -- Taiwan, ROC
Will an intelligent species inevitably develop technology? Was it inevitable even for us? A look at our own history tends to throw some doubt on the assumption.
Why did human technology develop when it did? Greek philosophers had measured the circumference of a round earth, deduced the existence of atoms, and figured out that it was us who circled the sun. In many ways, they were more scientifically advanced than the European culture which finally birthed modern science. Two thousand years before Columbus and Galileo, Greece had all the pieces. Why didn't it put them together?
Chinese culture also birthed many "modern" technological advances -- from gunpowder to paper and the printing press -- and spawned several "proto-scientific" revolutions, yet they also never quite put the pieces together.
For nearly a thousand years, while Europe wallowed in the Dark Ages, Arab philosopher/scientists were the sole guardians of Greek philosophy. They had all the pieces Europe had lost, yet they, too, failed to birth a scientific revolution.
How and why did Europe finally pull itself out of its malaise? And what was the key which allowed it to do what other cultures with similar or greater potential had failed to do? It certainly had little to do with the 16th century's scientific knowledge -- which lagged behind both Arab and ancient Greek philosophers'.
It has been argued that the key which finally unlocked modern science was not a scientific discovery, but a religious belief. What early modern European culture possessed that others had lacked was a belief that the universe was fundamentally a place of order. After all, a search for the laws of order presupposes a belief that order exists. And it was Christianity which provided this missing link. The God of the Bible was a God of order who would necessarily create a universe in His own ordered image. It but remained for humans to deduce what that order was. It was this notion of the universe as a fundamentally and necessarily ordered place which had escaped both Greek and Arab philosophers, and which finally provided the spark which ignited the smouldering tinder.
I mention this not because I find the argument compelling, but simply because it illustrates my point: that science and technology are far from being inevitable offsprings of intelligence. Sixteenth century European philosopher/scientists were neither more intelligent nor more scientifically advanced than their ancient Greek forebears; in some ways they had in fact taken several steps backward. Science might easily have sprung from a 5th century BC Athenian womb, but it didn't. In fact, it might easily never have have sprung forth at all.
We may indeed be only one amongst hundreds or thousands of intelligent species inhabiting the cosmos. It may only be our technology which is unique.
Lee Kai Wen -- Taiwan, ROC
Why? It's true by definition that an omnipotent God is capable of creating life elsewhere. Does it necessarily follow that He must do so? Perhaps He simply chose not to.
Lee Kai Wen -- Taiwan, ROC
Unless, of course, it's true.
Lee Kai Wen -- Taiwan, ROC
Wow - this guy really hit a nerve with the moderators.
I've had moderator access six times in the last four weeks. I wish I had it now so I could mod this one up. Whoever moderated this as flamebait and troll doesn't know flameage from clear thinking. The comments were insightful and succinctly stated. I can only conclude the moderator has some ideological axe to grind against religious expression.
Lee Kai Wen -- Taiwan, ROC
The best treatment of this question I am aware of is CS Lewis' Perelandra trilogy, which asks from a Christian perspective what it would mean if God had created other life, and what that life might look like.
Such life would, of course, be invested with the image of God, as homo sapiens are. In that case there are two possibilities. Either these extraterrestrials never fell from God's grace as we did, and thus were not in need of salvation, or they did fall. In which case God would have provided a means of salvation for them as well.
There is nothing inherent in Christian teaching which forbids the existence of extraterrestrials.
Lee Kai Wen -- Tawain, ROC
"Eternal" means only that they will never cease to exist, not that they have always existed. According to the Bible, God is the only entity without beginning or end.
Lee Kai Wen -- Taiwan, ROC
There are more human beings alive at this moment than in all of previous human history. Which makes a total of about 12 billion eternal souls. As to the crowding issue -- didn't you know the heaven is zoned for duplexes? Lee Kai Wen -- Taiwan, ROC
Well, leave Taiwanese out of the list, which is largely an oral language. I've never seen Taiwanese written.
Lee Kai Wen -- Taiwan, ROC