if you find a written character that you don't know, there's only one way of looking it up; go find somebody Chinese and ask them how to pronounce it.
Actually, that still wouldn't help. Since Mandarin uses a (mostly) non-phonetic writing system, knowing how to pronounce a character won't help you find it in a dictionary.
In fact, most Chinese dictionaries are organized according to the radicals which make up the character. True, with its 200-odd radicals, memorizing the order of radicals is somewhat more time consuming than, say, the English alphabet, but it's a far cry from having to memorize the entire six to eight thousand character vocabulary of the average adult Mandarin speaker.
Not to unduly state harsh stereotypes, but most of the scenes of rural China I have seen (like on travel documentaries, the Discovery Channel, etc.) depict areas and a culture barely emerged from the Middle Ages: these people barely have electricity and running water.
Conversely, I could point to residents of the Appalachian region of the United States to demonstrate the cultural backwardness of modern America.
You're confusing culture with technological advancement.
It is true that large portions of rural China are technologically backward by modern American/European standards. But modern Chinese are the inheritors of one of the oldest and most culturally advanced societies in the world. While America prides itself on its two-hundred years of existence, Chinese culture boasts five thousand years of unbroken history, boasting some of the greatest philosophers, political rulers and technological advances history has seen (paper and the printing press being but two examples).
And I'm not sure I would knock the Middle Ages. Aside from modern technology (a gift of the Middle Ages, if my history hasn't failed me) Western culture has seen little advance since then. And there are those who would argue that the idea that technology represents advance at all is merely a symptom of the modern parochial technological mindset.
China has a government that is repressive of truth and business.
Translation: they don't support truth, justice and the American way like every right-thinking country should.
Aside from potential investors, I can't see any reason why a non-Chinese would visit a Mandarin site in the first place, let alone feel compelled to learn the language to do so.
Hmm, let's see. Personal growth? Expanding one's horizons? A desire to free oneself from the parochialism which seems to dominate so much of modern American thinking (and of which your own statement is such a superb example)?
Once you figure out how to speak and read the language, typing is a breeze. And the nice thing is that there are dozens of different ways to type
Hmm... I'll have to disagree somewhat here. I live in Taiwan, though, so my mileage may vary.
I'm typing this from Chinese Windows 98, and while the menu systems and online help are in Chinese, I see English all over the place. Microsoft Word still announces itself in English as "Microsoft Word". The file structure on my hard drive is 98% English. And Chinese Windows fully supports English. I doubt the converse is true.
Most tellingly, CWin98 does not natively provide a facile method for typing Chinese. It still relies on the QWERTY keyboard. If I wish to type in Chinese, I have to rely on third-party software. And even the best of that is tedious and laborious. It is nowhere near as easy as typing in English. The only exception is the various handwriting recognition technologies that exist; but of course those aren't typing at all.
You are correct that I could type in PinYin, but that's of little use. While pinyin is commonly used to render Chinese phonetically using Roman characters, I don't know any native Chinese speaker who actually "reads" pinyin -- that is, who could read a book, a magazine, or even a short article rendered in pinyin without exerting some measure of concentrated effort. And few people I know could do even that.
The analogous situation would be to ask how many Americans can read English rendered using the international phonetic alphabet.
Of course, here in Taiwan, as you mentioned, the schools use bopomofo (what you refer to as the "Mandarin phonetic symbols") to teach kids to read until such time as they've acquired a sufficient written vocabulary to get by (just to read a daily newspaper takes a vocabulary of between 2000 and 2500 characters). But by the time most Taiwanese reach adulthood, they've largely forgotten bopomofo. And even in children's books, bopomofo is always printed only alongside the Chinese character; it is never used on its own, so children are never taught to use bopomofo as a written language in its own right. I suspect the same is true of pinyin in mainland China.
if a Chinese person wants to talk to an Indian, they are most likely to share only English in common
I'd like to add my first-hand experience as testimony to this. While I live in Taiwan, I do a fair amount of travelling in my work. Beijing and Hong Kong are two common ports of call.
Hong Kong, in particular, is a world-city, and it is very easy to encounter persons from many different countries. Universally, they communicate in English.
I once found myself standing in line at the Taiwanese embassy in Hong Kong behind a French gentleman, another from Africa, and a Hong Kong resident (whose native language was Cantonese). One by one, each of these gentlemen conducted their business in English. Even the Hong Kong resident had to communicate with the Mandarin-speaking embassy personnel in English.
That is pretty much the same as with what happened with Latin. It was the "common tongue" long after native Latin speaking society fell.
Well, in fact, there was no such thing as "Latin-speaking society", unless you're referring to the Roman Empire. However, the parallels are there. Just as Latin, the language of business, politics and learning, was never the native language for the majority of the Empire's residents, so also with English today.
If the English speaking countries "fell", you'd probably still see English as a "common tongue" in a large number of places
In one sense, English seems to be doing what Latin did before it -- devolving into a family of related, though mutually unintelligible -- languages. Take a native-English speaker from Australia, one from Nigeria, and one from, say, India, throw them together in a room, and see how well they communicate.
I work as a bilingual Mandarin/English instructor in Taiwan, which has what will soon be the largest economy in Asia.
The reason English is spoken in india is because it was ruled from 1858 - 1947 by the British Crown.
True, but irrelevant. This is the reason English is spoken anywhere in the world, outside of England itself. The result is the same: English is the language of commerce throughout India (and the world) -- largely due to the economic influence of the US, itself a former British possession.
And as for that very cheeky reference to How many of those Mandrin people do you think are still living in huts, with no electricity or running water?
I agree -- the reference was somewhat "cheeky".
The fact remains, however, that Mandarin speakers have always outnumbered English speakers -- or speakers of any other language. This is not some new development the author of the article somehow "discovered".
That fact notwithstanding, English is still universally taught throughout Asia and the world. The demand for native English speakers is so great, not only here in Taiwan but throughout Asia, English cram schools are in a perpetual hiring mode. My institutes are experiencing severe shortages, and my teachers are universally overworked.
Conversely, I see very few English speakers demanding to learn Chinese, despite the fact that China possesses the world's second-leading GDP.
The author of the article seems to be of the opinion that the Internet exists in some sort of vacuum, insulated from the rest of the world.
Just as in the "real world", however, sheer numerical superiority doesn't necessarily translate into linguistic dominance. There are other factors at play.
At one time, English dominated on the Internet because America dominated the Internet, technologically and numerically. Even once Mandarin speakers surpass English speakers numerically, America will still hold the technological edge. And as the Internet becomes increasingly commercialized, America's economic dominance will also come increasingly into play, and English will remain the dominant language.
The sales department of a former employer of mine was empowered to execute legally binding contracts with customers -- without pre-consulting engineering. Which meant if they promised the customer our product could spit-shine their dogs, software engineering was then legally obligated to make sure our product could polish pooches.
And a coder's quarterly reviews turned heavily on the number of lines of code he produced. In fact, shortly before I left, the powers-on-high actually established a quota (I believe it was 500 lines per day).
It should task no one's synapses to imagine the quality of the resulting code.
I'm going to take the time and write my legislators about repealing the provisions of the DMCA which enact the absurd restrictions on reverse engineering encryption systems
It'd be pretty hard for them to repeal the provisions of something that isn't even law . To date, DMCA has only been passed in two states, and gone into effect in only one -- in a heavily modified version to boot. DMCA has been rejected by more states than it has been accepted by.
I don't claim to be an expert in US law, but I'm a bit mystified as to how lawyers could be be getting so much mileage out of something which, to date, isn't a law anywhere outside the Commonwealth of Virginia.
Ordering online is another possibility, but living outside the US, I wouldn't even want to think about the shipping and exchamge rates.
Almost half of my software purchases are from overseas -- usually the US -- using a standard-issue VISA card. I've begun ordering more online, as well, though vendors tend to charge MSRP, so I try to avoid them.
I've never been asked to pay an exchange rate, and shipping almost always runs less than US$5.
The only downside is delivery times tend to run at least a week.
This makes damn near everyone who agrees with hardcore EULA's look like a blathering idiot.
In Taiwan, we at least understand the intellectual property rights argument, even if we tend to ignore it.
For mainland Chinese, trying to explain why a product someone just coughed up 6 months' pay for isn't really his will just get you a look of incredulity. Then what the hell did he just pay for? It's akin to telling an American he just dropped $20k on a new car, but that the car still belongs to GM, and BTW here's a list of the things you can and can't do with it.
Eric is a free man living in a country that has the 1st and 2 Amendments to the Bill of Rights
I don't live in the US, but even I know the first two amendments are not amendments to the Bill of Rights -- which has never been amended.
If you knew how Americans were viewed by a good part of the civilized world, you might change your tune a bit. Gun-toting, shoot-first-ask-questions-later, card-carrying members of the posse comitatus. A country where every disagreement is punctuated with bullets, and where incidents like Columbine and drive-by shootings seem the rule rather than the exception, legitimizing the strict gun-control laws in our respective lands. A land where capital punishment (of all things!) is still practiced, and this by a people which considers itself the zenith of civilized life!
Sorry -- from this corner of the universe, your 2nd Amendment appears to be more scourge than savior.
I find myself jet-hopping to Beijing probably a couple of times a month for business.
The issue, like all such issues, boils down to money.
The problem Windows faces in China -- as well as here in Taiwan, tough to a lesser extent -- is price. Microsoft insists pricing Windows out of the reach of all but the wealthiest individuals. Street prices of a Windows upgrade in Beijing are roughly equivalent to half a year's wage for the average laborer. If Microsoft can't figure out why software piracy on the mainland exceeds 80% (a conservative estimate) it might start with its own pricing policies.
This doesn't put a legit copy of Windows out of the reach of just the individual; imagine what it does to a business's technology budget.
Couple this with the Chinese attitude toward fine print; "contemptuous" might be too fine a word for it. The kind of "licensing" championed by western "shrinkwrap" is utterly foreign to the Chinese mentality. As far as a Chinese consumer is concerned, if he buys a copy of Windows, it's his. No shrinkwrap license is going to convince him he can't install the thing wherever, whenever, and how ever often he wants.
This attitude extends to businesses, as well. Buy one copy of Windows, install it a thousand times. What Microsoft calls a 99.9% piracy rate, a businessman calls common sense.
This explains why the largest OEM in Beijing recently reported shipping 2,000 copies of Windows last year. During the same period, it shipped 200,000 copies of Linux. If Microsoft isn't worried, it should be.
Here in Taiwan -- though the price comparatively speaking isn't nearly outrageous, given the torrid economy -- piracy is just as rampant. A few months ago I went hunting for a new PC with a *legit* copy of Windows -- not because I wanted it, but just as an excercise.
I checked out over a dozen system vendors, and not ONE sold machines with legitimate copies of Windows; even here in Taiwan, the margin between piracy and legitimacy is enough to make or break a company. And even in westernized Taiwan, our attitude toward the legal system is more closely aligned to that of the mainland than the West.
Lee Kai Wen - Chiayi, Taiwan, ROC
Re:Extreme complexities of evolutionary theory + y
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As for the "turtles all the way down", this is no less a problem for modern science. We can certainly trace the universe back to the initial moments of the big bang, but we have no way of pushing the horizons back further. OK, sure, at some time in the distant past all matter was concentrated in a spot the size of my little finger nail. How'd it get there, and where did it come from before that? After all, even the big bang did not create matter/energy, it merely re-arranged it.
The traditional theistic definitions avoid the turtles problem simply by defining God as that being which has always existed. "Always", of course, precludes the question of "who created God," since God was not created.
Of course, the natural reply is that the idea of an eternally existent being is nonsense, and that attempts to define God as such are merely a cop-out intended to avoid the problem.
And the reply to that is that it is only nonsense to intellects which insist on thinking in terms of linear time.
And the answer to that is... well, never mind. You get the idea.
It's not as easy as all that to declare a winner in the "who's 'simpler' is simpler" debate.
Actually, my intent was not to get into the specifics of a debate about whether belief in God or belief in Big Bang+Evolution is simpler. I merely proferred it as an example in our discussion of Occam's Razor, pointing out that it's easy to say, "A is simpler than B", but much more difficult to prove.
One person finds a Creator God the easier explanation; another finds evolution less problematic. One person believes in an objective, physical reality, while another finds the theory that the physical world is but a projection of our disembodied minds to be less messy. We have our work cut out for us to come up with an agreeable set of objective criteria by which we can determine who's "simpler" is, in fact, simpler.
Peace,
Lee Kai Wen
Re:If you're in the shower, Occam's a fraud
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For example, let's say that along with observing that nobody answers the door, you also observe that the lights are on, the television is on, the car is in the driveway, and the door is unlocked.
Or, conversely, the lights are off, the TV is off, and the car is not in the driveway. I conclude no one is home.
Later, however, I discover the lights are off because my friend is taking a nap. The TV is off for the same reason. And the car is in the garage, not the driveway. Occam's Razor still turns out to be wrong. Occam's Razor simply says, "Pluralitas non est ponenda sine neccesitate" -- "plurality should not be posited without necessity." Or, in modern terms, "simplicity is to be preferred." It doesn't say, "After collecting the appropriate amount of information, simplicity is to be preferred."
Lee Kai Wen
Re:If you're in the shower, Occam's a fraud
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Just proves that Atheism is a religion as well, though one that has not killed as many people through history as any religion involving Gods.
Almost forgot: religion doesn't kill people. People kill people. If we didn't have religion as an excuse for mass murder, we'd simply find another scapegoat. That's the nature of humanity, I'm afraid.
Lee Kai Wen
Re:If you're in the shower, Occam's a fraud
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My points were as follows:
You state the following: "Which is the simpler explanation: That God would exist, but not prove His existence, or that He doesn't exist?" The implicit assumption is that a God who exists has to prove His existence (or, at least, a God who proves His existence is a simpler explanation than a God who doesn't). This is the assumption I challenged.
You replied by adding the caveat: "He has to prove His existence or I won't believe in Him." This shifts the discussion from "Why doesn't God exist?" to "Here's why I choose not to believe in God." I.e., it shifts the argument from a general philosophical argument against God's existence to a mere statement of personal beliefs, which is an entirely different ballgame.
Interestingly, Occam, a Franciscan monk, himself rejected natural theology, stating that the idea of God is not established by evident experience or evident reasoning.
If one were really a stickler for Occam's Razor, one could posit, a la Bishop George Berkeley, that material substance itself is an unnecessary hypothesis. The simpler explanation is that we only need minds and their ideas to explain everything. Or, one might argue that a Creator God is the simpler explanation -- that it's easier to believe God created the universe than to believe in the extreme complexities of evolutionary theory.
Your first problem is that you haven't proven you initial assumption: that a God who proves His existence (i.e., to your personal satisfaction) is a simpler explanation than a God who chooses not to.
Lee Kai Wen
If you're in the shower, Occam's a fraud
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Because He chooses not to. Or because his proofs don't match your criteria. Or because He's got more important things to do than jumping through your hoops. Where is it written that God has to prove His existence? More to the point, where is it written that He has to prove it to your satisfaction? Sounds rather conceited to me.
If I come knocking at your door and no one answers, does that prove you're not home? "If he's home," I postulate, "he would prove it by answering the door." No one is answering. Since "no one's home" is the simpler answer, Occam's Razor forces me to conclude the house is unoccupied.
Of course, if you're in the shower, then Occam turns out to be a fraud.
It's also interesting how your biography of Lori Fena conveniently leaves out the fact that she is a former executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Well, no. The facts you present may be (though apparently they're as selective as they are factual), but the opinions are just opinions.
Case in point. You wrote:
Robert Abrams, former attorney general of New York... which threatened to file suit against Doubleclick.
All well and good. I don't doubt it. But then you somehow leap from "former AG of a state that threatened to sue DoubleClick" to:
His role will be to lobby his buddies in various government agencies to prevent privacy lawsuits.
Your logic appears to have exercised some aerial acrobatics that would do Barnum and Bailey proud. How you go from "threatened to sue" to "lobby on behalf of" you don't make clear. It was this sort of thing Reality Master 101 was requesting evidence for.
It's pretty obvious you were digging hard for dirt, or, where you couldn't find it to have it trucked in.
Oh, and BTW, from what I can tell, none of these individuals was "hired" by DoubleClick. According to the press releases I've seen, they are pro bono consultants. DoubleClick pays expenses, but they will receive no salaries for their work.
I had the same reaction when I read michael's piece, and almost laughed out loud when I read, "you can make up your own mind", because michael had so obviously already done it for me.
I can't say I'm angry about it -- after all, michael is entitled to his opinion as well. But the backgrounding he did was so blatantly skewed it could only be considered objective in a Microsoftian universe.
In short, I found it difficult to take michael's post seriously.
The brouhaha with DoubleClick is that they had announced plans to take this "anonymous" on-line information -- browsing and purchasing habits, the porn sites you've visited, your tastes in music, your political leanings, your choice of operating systems, the kinds of unmentionables your wife likes -- and link it together with a database of off-line NON-anonymous data they had recently acquired. In short, to take that anonymous data and make it personally identifiable.
But please define "anonymous". I'm not sure I see how storing personal info under a randomly-generated number rather than an alphanumeric designator (in olden days known as a "name") constitutes anonymity.
Imagine applying online for a credit card. Before I've even had a chance to type my name, let alone my SSN, my application is rejected. Why? Because the "anonymous" number hiding in a cookie on my machine is (accurately or not - and who's policing THAT?) associated with a bad online credit report. That "anonymous" profile, you see, is already associated with me , even if it's not (yet) associated with my name .
Or imagine my wife hops online to download the latest entertainment news. Suddenly up pops a very explicit banner ad, specially chosen just for me (aka "00AH045-S2234XI0YTJ-2-T8-974339-001") just because the warez site I stopped by yesterday popped up seventeen Sluts-O-Plenty banners and now everybody thinks I like my browsing raw.
Now imagine a future in which law enforcement agencies acquire search warrants to retrieve cookies off your computer, and courts begin issuing injunctions requiring companies such as DoubleClick to cough up all that anonymous information which isn't associated with you.
You can't kill a language by trying to keep it "pure", nor can you legislate linguistic purity.
A language is what its users make of it. If French speakers want to adopt English words like "television" or "internet", there's not much the Academie Francaise can do about it, save sit and sputter in their ivory towers.
I think you overestimate the influence of the Academie if you think it can either prevent the adoption of foreign words or kill off an entire language by doing so.
As an aside, I'm not aware of any laws mandating linguistic "purity". Are they going to start throwing people in jail for uttering Americanisms?
I can just see it: a whole French underground whose goal is the bastardization of French, whose purpose is the overthrow of the "puristes", and whose methods are subversive acts of linguistic terrorism such as spray-painting English words on metro stops at the Palais Chaillot, holding secret meetings devoted to the reading of English verse, and hitting politicos in the face with (American-made) cream pies, all the while shouting "Vive l'Anglais! Vive le rouge, blanc et blu!"
Even if France did enact such legislation, it would hardly be binding on the whole francophone world, of which France is only a small part.
In addition, most books on computer science are written in english.
Here (Taiwan) all computer science books are available in Chinese translation - from the O'Reilly books to Microsoft Press to pick-your-publisher. It's quite difficult to find an English-language version of any text. I wonder why this isn't true in Norway.
Of course, this doesn't mean you don't find a lot of English in the books, such as when when dealing with source code (which is all pseudo-English).
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, that still wouldn't help. Since Mandarin uses a (mostly) non-phonetic writing system, knowing how to pronounce a character won't help you find it in a dictionary.
In fact, most Chinese dictionaries are organized according to the radicals which make up the character. True, with its 200-odd radicals, memorizing the order of radicals is somewhat more time consuming than, say, the English alphabet, but it's a far cry from having to memorize the entire six to eight thousand character vocabulary of the average adult Mandarin speaker.
Lee Kai Wen -- Taiwan, ROC
Conversely, I could point to residents of the Appalachian region of the United States to demonstrate the cultural backwardness of modern America.
You're confusing culture with technological advancement.
It is true that large portions of rural China are technologically backward by modern American/European standards. But modern Chinese are the inheritors of one of the oldest and most culturally advanced societies in the world. While America prides itself on its two-hundred years of existence, Chinese culture boasts five thousand years of unbroken history, boasting some of the greatest philosophers, political rulers and technological advances history has seen (paper and the printing press being but two examples).
And I'm not sure I would knock the Middle Ages. Aside from modern technology (a gift of the Middle Ages, if my history hasn't failed me) Western culture has seen little advance since then. And there are those who would argue that the idea that technology represents advance at all is merely a symptom of the modern parochial technological mindset.
Lee Kai Wen -- Taiwan, ROC
Translation: they don't support truth, justice and the American way like every right-thinking country should.
Aside from potential investors, I can't see any reason why a non-Chinese would visit a Mandarin site in the first place, let alone feel compelled to learn the language to do so.
Hmm, let's see. Personal growth? Expanding one's horizons? A desire to free oneself from the parochialism which seems to dominate so much of modern American thinking (and of which your own statement is such a superb example)?
Lee Kai Wen -- Taiwan, ROC
Hmm ... I'll have to disagree somewhat here. I live in Taiwan, though, so my mileage may vary.
I'm typing this from Chinese Windows 98, and while the menu systems and online help are in Chinese, I see English all over the place. Microsoft Word still announces itself in English as "Microsoft Word". The file structure on my hard drive is 98% English. And Chinese Windows fully supports English. I doubt the converse is true.
Most tellingly, CWin98 does not natively provide a facile method for typing Chinese. It still relies on the QWERTY keyboard. If I wish to type in Chinese, I have to rely on third-party software. And even the best of that is tedious and laborious. It is nowhere near as easy as typing in English. The only exception is the various handwriting recognition technologies that exist; but of course those aren't typing at all.
You are correct that I could type in PinYin, but that's of little use. While pinyin is commonly used to render Chinese phonetically using Roman characters, I don't know any native Chinese speaker who actually "reads" pinyin -- that is, who could read a book, a magazine, or even a short article rendered in pinyin without exerting some measure of concentrated effort. And few people I know could do even that.
The analogous situation would be to ask how many Americans can read English rendered using the international phonetic alphabet.
Of course, here in Taiwan, as you mentioned, the schools use bopomofo (what you refer to as the "Mandarin phonetic symbols") to teach kids to read until such time as they've acquired a sufficient written vocabulary to get by (just to read a daily newspaper takes a vocabulary of between 2000 and 2500 characters). But by the time most Taiwanese reach adulthood, they've largely forgotten bopomofo. And even in children's books, bopomofo is always printed only alongside the Chinese character; it is never used on its own, so children are never taught to use bopomofo as a written language in its own right. I suspect the same is true of pinyin in mainland China.
Lee Kai Wen - Taiwan, ROC
I'd like to add my first-hand experience as testimony to this. While I live in Taiwan, I do a fair amount of travelling in my work. Beijing and Hong Kong are two common ports of call.
Hong Kong, in particular, is a world-city, and it is very easy to encounter persons from many different countries. Universally, they communicate in English.
I once found myself standing in line at the Taiwanese embassy in Hong Kong behind a French gentleman, another from Africa, and a Hong Kong resident (whose native language was Cantonese). One by one, each of these gentlemen conducted their business in English. Even the Hong Kong resident had to communicate with the Mandarin-speaking embassy personnel in English.
That is pretty much the same as with what happened with Latin. It was the "common tongue" long after native Latin speaking society fell.
Well, in fact, there was no such thing as "Latin-speaking society", unless you're referring to the Roman Empire. However, the parallels are there. Just as Latin, the language of business, politics and learning, was never the native language for the majority of the Empire's residents, so also with English today.
If the English speaking countries "fell", you'd probably still see English as a "common tongue" in a large number of places
In one sense, English seems to be doing what Latin did before it -- devolving into a family of related, though mutually unintelligible -- languages. Take a native-English speaker from Australia, one from Nigeria, and one from, say, India, throw them together in a room, and see how well they communicate.
Lee Kai Wen - Taiwan, ROC
The reason English is spoken in india is because it was ruled from 1858 - 1947 by the British Crown.
True, but irrelevant. This is the reason English is spoken anywhere in the world, outside of England itself. The result is the same: English is the language of commerce throughout India (and the world) -- largely due to the economic influence of the US, itself a former British possession.
And as for that very cheeky reference to How many of those Mandrin people do you think are still living in huts, with no electricity or running water?
I agree -- the reference was somewhat "cheeky".
The fact remains, however, that Mandarin speakers have always outnumbered English speakers -- or speakers of any other language. This is not some new development the author of the article somehow "discovered".
That fact notwithstanding, English is still universally taught throughout Asia and the world. The demand for native English speakers is so great, not only here in Taiwan but throughout Asia, English cram schools are in a perpetual hiring mode. My institutes are experiencing severe shortages, and my teachers are universally overworked.
Conversely, I see very few English speakers demanding to learn Chinese, despite the fact that China possesses the world's second-leading GDP.
The author of the article seems to be of the opinion that the Internet exists in some sort of vacuum, insulated from the rest of the world.
Just as in the "real world", however, sheer numerical superiority doesn't necessarily translate into linguistic dominance. There are other factors at play.
At one time, English dominated on the Internet because America dominated the Internet, technologically and numerically. Even once Mandarin speakers surpass English speakers numerically, America will still hold the technological edge. And as the Internet becomes increasingly commercialized, America's economic dominance will also come increasingly into play, and English will remain the dominant language.
Lee Kai Wen - Taiwan, ROC
And a coder's quarterly reviews turned heavily on the number of lines of code he produced. In fact, shortly before I left, the powers-on-high actually established a quota (I believe it was 500 lines per day).
It should task no one's synapses to imagine the quality of the resulting code.
Lee Kai Wen
Mea culpa. You're right, of course. My mistake.
Lee Kai Wen
It'd be pretty hard for them to repeal the provisions of something that isn't even law . To date, DMCA has only been passed in two states, and gone into effect in only one -- in a heavily modified version to boot. DMCA has been rejected by more states than it has been accepted by.
I don't claim to be an expert in US law, but I'm a bit mystified as to how lawyers could be be getting so much mileage out of something which, to date, isn't a law anywhere outside the Commonwealth of Virginia.
Lee Kai Wen
Almost half of my software purchases are from overseas -- usually the US -- using a standard-issue VISA card. I've begun ordering more online, as well, though vendors tend to charge MSRP, so I try to avoid them.
I've never been asked to pay an exchange rate, and shipping almost always runs less than US$5. The only downside is delivery times tend to run at least a week.
Lee Kai Wen -- Taiwan, ROC
In Taiwan, we at least understand the intellectual property rights argument, even if we tend to ignore it.
For mainland Chinese, trying to explain why a product someone just coughed up 6 months' pay for isn't really his will just get you a look of incredulity. Then what the hell did he just pay for? It's akin to telling an American he just dropped $20k on a new car, but that the car still belongs to GM, and BTW here's a list of the things you can and can't do with it.
Lee Kai Wen
I don't live in the US, but even I know the first two amendments are not amendments to the Bill of Rights -- which has never been amended.
If you knew how Americans were viewed by a good part of the civilized world, you might change your tune a bit. Gun-toting, shoot-first-ask-questions-later, card-carrying members of the posse comitatus. A country where every disagreement is punctuated with bullets, and where incidents like Columbine and drive-by shootings seem the rule rather than the exception, legitimizing the strict gun-control laws in our respective lands. A land where capital punishment (of all things!) is still practiced, and this by a people which considers itself the zenith of civilized life!
Sorry -- from this corner of the universe, your 2nd Amendment appears to be more scourge than savior.
Lee Kai Wen -- Chiayi, Taiwan, ROC
The issue, like all such issues, boils down to money.
The problem Windows faces in China -- as well as here in Taiwan, tough to a lesser extent -- is price. Microsoft insists pricing Windows out of the reach of all but the wealthiest individuals. Street prices of a Windows upgrade in Beijing are roughly equivalent to half a year's wage for the average laborer. If Microsoft can't figure out why software piracy on the mainland exceeds 80% (a conservative estimate) it might start with its own pricing policies.
This doesn't put a legit copy of Windows out of the reach of just the individual; imagine what it does to a business's technology budget.
Couple this with the Chinese attitude toward fine print; "contemptuous" might be too fine a word for it. The kind of "licensing" championed by western "shrinkwrap" is utterly foreign to the Chinese mentality. As far as a Chinese consumer is concerned, if he buys a copy of Windows, it's his. No shrinkwrap license is going to convince him he can't install the thing wherever, whenever, and how ever often he wants.
This attitude extends to businesses, as well. Buy one copy of Windows, install it a thousand times. What Microsoft calls a 99.9% piracy rate, a businessman calls common sense.
This explains why the largest OEM in Beijing recently reported shipping 2,000 copies of Windows last year. During the same period, it shipped 200,000 copies of Linux. If Microsoft isn't worried, it should be.
Here in Taiwan -- though the price comparatively speaking isn't nearly outrageous, given the torrid economy -- piracy is just as rampant. A few months ago I went hunting for a new PC with a *legit* copy of Windows -- not because I wanted it, but just as an excercise.
I checked out over a dozen system vendors, and not ONE sold machines with legitimate copies of Windows; even here in Taiwan, the margin between piracy and legitimacy is enough to make or break a company. And even in westernized Taiwan, our attitude toward the legal system is more closely aligned to that of the mainland than the West.
Lee Kai Wen - Chiayi, Taiwan, ROC
The traditional theistic definitions avoid the turtles problem simply by defining God as that being which has always existed. "Always", of course, precludes the question of "who created God," since God was not created.
Of course, the natural reply is that the idea of an eternally existent being is nonsense, and that attempts to define God as such are merely a cop-out intended to avoid the problem.
And the reply to that is that it is only nonsense to intellects which insist on thinking in terms of linear time.
And the answer to that is... well, never mind. You get the idea.
It's not as easy as all that to declare a winner in the "who's 'simpler' is simpler" debate.
Lee Kai Wen
Actually, my intent was not to get into the specifics of a debate about whether belief in God or belief in Big Bang+Evolution is simpler. I merely proferred it as an example in our discussion of Occam's Razor, pointing out that it's easy to say, "A is simpler than B", but much more difficult to prove.
One person finds a Creator God the easier explanation; another finds evolution less problematic. One person believes in an objective, physical reality, while another finds the theory that the physical world is but a projection of our disembodied minds to be less messy. We have our work cut out for us to come up with an agreeable set of objective criteria by which we can determine who's "simpler" is, in fact, simpler.
Peace,
Lee Kai Wen
Or, conversely, the lights are off, the TV is off, and the car is not in the driveway. I conclude no one is home.
Later, however, I discover the lights are off because my friend is taking a nap. The TV is off for the same reason. And the car is in the garage, not the driveway. Occam's Razor still turns out to be wrong. Occam's Razor simply says, "Pluralitas non est ponenda sine neccesitate" -- "plurality should not be posited without necessity." Or, in modern terms, "simplicity is to be preferred." It doesn't say, "After collecting the appropriate amount of information, simplicity is to be preferred."
Lee Kai Wen
Almost forgot: religion doesn't kill people. People kill people. If we didn't have religion as an excuse for mass murder, we'd simply find another scapegoat. That's the nature of humanity, I'm afraid.
Lee Kai Wen
You state the following: "Which is the simpler explanation: That God would exist, but not prove His existence, or that He doesn't exist?" The implicit assumption is that a God who exists has to prove His existence (or, at least, a God who proves His existence is a simpler explanation than a God who doesn't). This is the assumption I challenged.
You replied by adding the caveat: "He has to prove His existence or I won't believe in Him." This shifts the discussion from "Why doesn't God exist?" to "Here's why I choose not to believe in God." I.e., it shifts the argument from a general philosophical argument against God's existence to a mere statement of personal beliefs, which is an entirely different ballgame.
Interestingly, Occam, a Franciscan monk, himself rejected natural theology, stating that the idea of God is not established by evident experience or evident reasoning.
If one were really a stickler for Occam's Razor, one could posit, a la Bishop George Berkeley, that material substance itself is an unnecessary hypothesis. The simpler explanation is that we only need minds and their ideas to explain everything. Or, one might argue that a Creator God is the simpler explanation -- that it's easier to believe God created the universe than to believe in the extreme complexities of evolutionary theory.
Your first problem is that you haven't proven you initial assumption: that a God who proves His existence (i.e., to your personal satisfaction) is a simpler explanation than a God who chooses not to.
Lee Kai Wen
If I come knocking at your door and no one answers, does that prove you're not home? "If he's home," I postulate, "he would prove it by answering the door." No one is answering. Since "no one's home" is the simpler answer, Occam's Razor forces me to conclude the house is unoccupied.
Of course, if you're in the shower, then Occam turns out to be a fraud.
Lee Kai Wen
It's also interesting how your biography of Lori Fena conveniently leaves out the fact that she is a former executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Now why would you fail to mention that?
Lee Kai Wen
Well, no. The facts you present may be (though apparently they're as selective as they are factual), but the opinions are just opinions.
Case in point. You wrote:
Robert Abrams, former attorney general of New York ... which threatened to file suit against Doubleclick.
All well and good. I don't doubt it. But then you somehow leap from "former AG of a state that threatened to sue DoubleClick" to:
His role will be to lobby his buddies in various government agencies to prevent privacy lawsuits.
Your logic appears to have exercised some aerial acrobatics that would do Barnum and Bailey proud. How you go from "threatened to sue" to "lobby on behalf of" you don't make clear. It was this sort of thing Reality Master 101 was requesting evidence for.
It's pretty obvious you were digging hard for dirt, or, where you couldn't find it to have it trucked in.
Oh, and BTW, from what I can tell, none of these individuals was "hired" by DoubleClick. According to the press releases I've seen, they are pro bono consultants. DoubleClick pays expenses, but they will receive no salaries for their work.
Lee Kai Wen
I had the same reaction when I read michael's piece, and almost laughed out loud when I read, "you can make up your own mind", because michael had so obviously already done it for me.
I can't say I'm angry about it -- after all, michael is entitled to his opinion as well. But the backgrounding he did was so blatantly skewed it could only be considered objective in a Microsoftian universe.
In short, I found it difficult to take michael's post seriously.
Lee Kai Wen
But please define "anonymous". I'm not sure I see how storing personal info under a randomly-generated number rather than an alphanumeric designator (in olden days known as a "name") constitutes anonymity.
Imagine applying online for a credit card. Before I've even had a chance to type my name, let alone my SSN, my application is rejected. Why? Because the "anonymous" number hiding in a cookie on my machine is (accurately or not - and who's policing THAT?) associated with a bad online credit report. That "anonymous" profile, you see, is already associated with me , even if it's not (yet) associated with my name .
Or imagine my wife hops online to download the latest entertainment news. Suddenly up pops a very explicit banner ad, specially chosen just for me (aka "00AH045-S2234XI0YTJ-2-T8-974339-001") just because the warez site I stopped by yesterday popped up seventeen Sluts-O-Plenty banners and now everybody thinks I like my browsing raw.
Now imagine a future in which law enforcement agencies acquire search warrants to retrieve cookies off your computer, and courts begin issuing injunctions requiring companies such as DoubleClick to cough up all that anonymous information which isn't associated with you.
"Anonymous"? Welcome to 1984.
Lee Kai Wen
A language is what its users make of it. If French speakers want to adopt English words like "television" or "internet", there's not much the Academie Francaise can do about it, save sit and sputter in their ivory towers.
I think you overestimate the influence of the Academie if you think it can either prevent the adoption of foreign words or kill off an entire language by doing so.
As an aside, I'm not aware of any laws mandating linguistic "purity". Are they going to start throwing people in jail for uttering Americanisms?
I can just see it: a whole French underground whose goal is the bastardization of French, whose purpose is the overthrow of the "puristes", and whose methods are subversive acts of linguistic terrorism such as spray-painting English words on metro stops at the Palais Chaillot, holding secret meetings devoted to the reading of English verse, and hitting politicos in the face with (American-made) cream pies, all the while shouting "Vive l'Anglais! Vive le rouge, blanc et blu!"
Even if France did enact such legislation, it would hardly be binding on the whole francophone world, of which France is only a small part.
Lee Kai Wen>
Here (Taiwan) all computer science books are available in Chinese translation - from the O'Reilly books to Microsoft Press to pick-your-publisher. It's quite difficult to find an English-language version of any text. I wonder why this isn't true in Norway.
Of course, this doesn't mean you don't find a lot of English in the books, such as when when dealing with source code (which is all pseudo-English).
Lee Kai Wen