For someone in Iran where the project has been suggested as a way of avoiding state censorship it probably isn't worth the risk.
Just to be completely clear in case some readers didn't quite get your point, "the risk" may well include indefinite imprisonment or summary execution.
This is why, when using Wikipedia as a source, you should link to the Wikipedia article at a certain point in time.
Actually, if you're using it for a source in something academic, you shouldn't list it at all. But you can trace the sources Wikipedia uses, check them individually for veracity, and use them as sources instead.
I've found that Wikipedia is actually a very reliable source. This surprised me, because I never expected the "everyone can write whatever they want" model would actually produce the quality that Wikipedia has.
To be completely accurate, it's really the "everyone can write whatever they want until some smart/expert folks realize they're writing bullshit and then the page gets locked" model. Remember what happened when Stephen Colbert tried to use wikipedia to show the elephant population was increasing? That sort of lockout happens fairly often and IMHO is an important reason wikipedia's accuracy doesn't go all to shit.
In hindsight, I think I should have known better. After all, the entire web is built on the "everyone can write whatever they want principle", and, when you get down to it, so are books, newspapers, and pamphlets.
Yeah, but you can't write whatever you want on my personal web site, unless I make it into a public wiki. And you certainly can't write whatever you want on my workplace's website. Only I get to do that. You can make a competing one, but that's actually very different from what wikipedia does: you don't need to make a competing wikipedia, you can just edit the one that exists and what you write will get the server space, promotion and audience of the rest of wikipedia. It's a very different model.
"For decades, Stanford has been working on a different kind of Wikipedia"
Didn't you hear? 15 years now constitutes three decades. It's the 21st century, business moves at the speed of information, information moves at the speed of thought, and time-scales have been adjusted accordingly.
It's not a matter of "trust," it's a matter of respect. Maybe someone who just lost a friend to the Taliban might not really be in the mood for seeing a game where they can re-enact killing their friend.
Guess what? No one, aside from a few historic scholars, reads or writes Runes anymore. Is it the end of the world? Nope. Has Norway fallen into the sea? No. Has Norway undergone a total disruption of their cultural identity? No.
True, but the Vikings were far more badass than modern Norweigians, or really anybody in Europe for that matter. Coincidence?
Runes fell into disuse, because the alphabet is superior. It's just that simple. Kanji script and other writing forms will likely follow suit, as a re-useable alphabet is not only easier to learn and teach, a person who has never heard a word can use phonics to sound out the word.
Actually, the runes were also an alphabet, that got replaced by another alphabet. Both were phonetic. Historically it had more to do with Christianization (which at the time was based on spreading the Latin vulgate translation of the Bible) than with one system's superiority over another.
In the end, the superior format usually wins.
But once in a while, there's a repeat of VHS vs. Betamax.
Oh, that's rich. A suggestion from a Westerner on how Asians can improve their culture.
Actually, that's the whole problem right there. The only reason to keep the spectacularly inefficient Chinese writing system is to consider it part of the culture.
Are you sure it's so inefficient? The Chinese writing system has allowed people who speak mutually unintelligible dialects and even different languages to communicate in written form for thousands of years. In Europe, you have always had to learn many different to read documents from many different places, but in East Asia for most of history one could learn one writing system and read documents from throughout the region. Before the divergence of Hanzi and Kanji literate Japanese and literate Chinese could write letters to one another, and before the development of Hangul literate Koreans could do the same. Down to the present day a Cantonese speaker who does not speak Mandarin cannot have a spoken conversation with a Mandarin speaker who doesn't speak Cantonese, but they can write letters or type emails and communicate, and this applies equally to the many dialects like Wu and Min which are spoken by hundreds of millions of non-Mandarin-speaking Chinese. If they moved to alphabetic, phonetic writing systems they would lose this ability. It may be the spread of Mandarin as a standard within China will make this ability obsolete, but up to this point it has been inaccurate to say it was an inefficient writing system that was only kept for historical reasons; in fact alphabetic and character-based writing systems were efficient in different aspects and inefficient in different aspects.
Sure the fact that it looks pretty and/or elaborate compared to other writing systems means it is easier to categorize as part of your culture, but how about leaving it to the few who are interested in studying culture and adopting a more efficient system that is easier to learn thus can increase the literacy level?
You mean like what the PRC did when it left traditional characters to the few interested in studying culture and promulgated simplified characters to the masses, causing literacy to shoot up?
And I am not exactly another "Westerner" who doesn't know what culture is saying this.
I don't know, Greece is pretty western compared to China. Western ideas of Democracy, birthplace of Western Philosophy, source of much of the Western literary canon.
Koreans are an example of people who used the chinese writing system. Well, over 500 years ago they decided they had enough and invented Hangeul, which is a really interesting writing system. In fact, the Korean writing system is alphabetic, with the letters arranged in syllable squares. The result is that they still look nice, perhaps even similar to Chinese for the untrained eye, yet they have all the benefits of the alphabetic scripts, plus my Korean friends swear that the syllable arrangement allows them to read even faster than if they were arranged in a line.
I agree that Hangul is a very interesting writing system, and produces elegant writing, but it was also a system developed by Koreans to replace a foreign system that had been developed to write a foreign language. In fact the differences between Korean and Chinese were given as the main reason for developing Hangul by the Korean monarch who ordered its development. Chinese characters were also, in a way, symbolic of the cultural imperialism of the Chinese empire which treated Korea as a vassal state.
Wow, I went off course somewhere but the point is that considering an improvement of your writing system as a violation of your culture is really a handicap.
Very few people consider a mere improvement of the Chinese writing system to be a violation. Most of the Chinese-speaking world now uses simplified characters, which were developed in the
The Amish community say they reject technology as it degrades their culture, but that is not true. They have simply "frozen" the evolution of technology at one point. The cart-building and barn-raising techniques they use are (in historical terms) fairly sophisticated and efficient examples of engineering. They could improve on that engineering by incorporating newer technologies.
Where did you learn about Amish culture? Amish resist technology because it weakens the work ethic, and they see hard labor as a key to salvation. What particular form this takes depends a lot on local rulings of the local elders and church leaders. In Maine there are Amish who use electricity, but they have to generate it themselves from generators they build themselves, rather than buy it from the grid. How would this degrade their culture any less than the technology they do not allow? Where I live, in Wisconsin, I know Amish who use various modern appliances, but only selectively to avoid allowing them to take over their lives. The point is not preservation, it is to avoid slipping into laziness and complacency. If they were so concerned about freezing time within their communities, they would take more care of their language, for example. The old Amish men I know are very impressed that I speak "real German" as I learned it in the public education system, while their kids and grandkids only speak Amish German, but they haven't taken any particular care to preserve the German their fathers spoke because their goal is simplicity, not cultural ossification.
Giving an Amish family a solar-powered flourescent lamp would not be imposing our culture on them, it would be providing them with a tool to improve their lives.
True, but telling them they had to use the lamp or they wouldn't be taken seriously would be a bit of an imposition, no?
Show a Chinese person something in traditional Chinese, and they can't read it. Believe me, I've tried.
You are generalizing based on what, one or two experiences? In how many regions? I have found that people in China will typically point out that something is in traditional characters and comment that they either can or cannot read them, but maybe about half the time can read it just fine. But I wouldn't generalize that to all of China and say anywhere you go 50% of the people can read traditional. Maybe it varies between the educated and uneducated, the old and young, or one region and another. Even among people who can't, however, there are so many passages or sentences that are nearly identical because so many characters are unchanged between traditional and simplified that much of the time people can manage anyway.
With Latin entry and ideograph display, we get the best of two worlds -- efficient production for the writer, efficient display for the device. Is this asymmetry more efficient overall?
Yes.
Actually, you're probably right that only time will tell, but I have a hunch as someone who regularly enters Chinese text using phonetic input that your hypothesis is entirely correct.
In China, they have a word for it: 'tibiwangzi,' which means 'take pen, forget paper.'
I don't know who did this translation, but it actually means 'take pen, forget characters.' If you want to verify it, Google the characters for tibiwangzi, mingzi de zi, and you will find a ton of hits for that phrase. Search tibiwangzhi (where zhi means paper) and you won't find any hits. I would put the characters in here but/. doesn't allow them.
I can't buy a Linux PC from Apple, period. Helps if you read every word in the sentence.
- any Apple machine is a personal computer, what's your point? Do you want to buy with Windows tax or not? Also you can buy GNU/Linux machines from various vendors, here is Dell with Red Hat, and when I go to select models on Dell site I can choose to buy them with no OS and the price is decreased normally by at least 70USD.
I don't know where you're finding this place where the price goes down if you choose no OS, but on the link you provided, the only options are Windows OSes. That's right, even on the "Dell with Red Hat" page you just linked as evidence you can still only buy with Windows. Claims that Ubuntu PCs are cheaper have also been debunked by a bit of investigation. This is because when you buy Ubuntu you're still paying for a Windows non-license, which Microsoft forces OEMs to pay.
And Dell is is one of the largest, I didn't bother with other large suppliers, but there are plenty who'll sell you just Linux machines and you can buy empty boxes, or should I Google it for you?
That's not the point. My point is that Microsoft still has the market power, without government intervention, to force manufacturers to pay it even for selling a competitor's product. This is the opposite of competition. With government intervention (i.e. if the Justice Department had finished the job of pursuing the antitrust case it had already basically won) there would be open competition in the market for desktop OSes, instead of the anemic semi-competition that there is now.
You've got to be fucking kidding me. You just Godwined an argument about whether monopolies are caused by government
- no I didn't. The truth is simple: IBM enjoyed many privileges from many governments, it wouldn't be where it is, one of the largest companies in the world without that...
Which has very little to do with the Nazis, but you brought them up anyway to make IBM look bad. This is basically the definition of Godwining. Look it up.
Send a bunch of encrypted e-mails containing questionable content and see if anyone comes knocking at your door. And be sure to not send any questionable content unencrypted, or to give any other reasons for them to show up.
But how will I know they're not just knocking at my door out of a desire to make my acquaintance?
Slashdot Mirror
How about a link to something that actually contains some information
The editors tried to find some, but they were all hidden in the Haystack.
For someone in Iran where the project has been suggested as a way of avoiding state censorship it probably isn't worth the risk.
Just to be completely clear in case some readers didn't quite get your point, "the risk" may well include indefinite imprisonment or summary execution.
And it's always really stupid to start adjusting time-scales just because it takes more than 15 years to get your website done...
Yeah, but what other excuse have they got?
This is why, when using Wikipedia as a source, you should link to the Wikipedia article at a certain point in time.
Actually, if you're using it for a source in something academic, you shouldn't list it at all. But you can trace the sources Wikipedia uses, check them individually for veracity, and use them as sources instead.
I've found that Wikipedia is actually a very reliable source. This surprised me, because I never expected the "everyone can write whatever they want" model would actually produce the quality that Wikipedia has.
To be completely accurate, it's really the "everyone can write whatever they want until some smart/expert folks realize they're writing bullshit and then the page gets locked" model. Remember what happened when Stephen Colbert tried to use wikipedia to show the elephant population was increasing? That sort of lockout happens fairly often and IMHO is an important reason wikipedia's accuracy doesn't go all to shit.
In hindsight, I think I should have known better. After all, the entire web is built on the "everyone can write whatever they want principle", and, when you get down to it, so are books, newspapers, and pamphlets.
Yeah, but you can't write whatever you want on my personal web site, unless I make it into a public wiki. And you certainly can't write whatever you want on my workplace's website. Only I get to do that. You can make a competing one, but that's actually very different from what wikipedia does: you don't need to make a competing wikipedia, you can just edit the one that exists and what you write will get the server space, promotion and audience of the rest of wikipedia. It's a very different model.
"Vetted by experts" in the social sciences means nothing. Anyone heard of the Sokal affair?
Fortunately, philosophy is not one of the social sciences, but one of the humanities. Oh, wait...
I wish them luck, but it is certainly not the first time it's been tried.
Actually, given that it originated in 1995, it probably is.
"For decades, Stanford has been working on a different kind of Wikipedia"
Didn't you hear? 15 years now constitutes three decades. It's the 21st century, business moves at the speed of information, information moves at the speed of thought, and time-scales have been adjusted accordingly.
It's not a matter of "trust," it's a matter of respect. Maybe someone who just lost a friend to the Taliban might not really be in the mood for seeing a game where they can re-enact killing their friend.
Someone modded this as "Troll". Really?!?
Maybe because it is? Really.
Guess what? No one, aside from a few historic scholars, reads or writes Runes anymore. Is it the end of the world? Nope. Has Norway fallen into the sea? No. Has Norway undergone a total disruption of their cultural identity? No.
True, but the Vikings were far more badass than modern Norweigians, or really anybody in Europe for that matter. Coincidence?
Runes fell into disuse, because the alphabet is superior. It's just that simple. Kanji script and other writing forms will likely follow suit, as a re-useable alphabet is not only easier to learn and teach, a person who has never heard a word can use phonics to sound out the word.
Actually, the runes were also an alphabet, that got replaced by another alphabet. Both were phonetic. Historically it had more to do with Christianization (which at the time was based on spreading the Latin vulgate translation of the Bible) than with one system's superiority over another.
In the end, the superior format usually wins.
But once in a while, there's a repeat of VHS vs. Betamax.
Oh, that's rich. A suggestion from a Westerner on how Asians can improve their culture.
Actually, that's the whole problem right there. The only reason to keep the spectacularly inefficient Chinese writing system is to consider it part of the culture.
Are you sure it's so inefficient? The Chinese writing system has allowed people who speak mutually unintelligible dialects and even different languages to communicate in written form for thousands of years. In Europe, you have always had to learn many different to read documents from many different places, but in East Asia for most of history one could learn one writing system and read documents from throughout the region. Before the divergence of Hanzi and Kanji literate Japanese and literate Chinese could write letters to one another, and before the development of Hangul literate Koreans could do the same. Down to the present day a Cantonese speaker who does not speak Mandarin cannot have a spoken conversation with a Mandarin speaker who doesn't speak Cantonese, but they can write letters or type emails and communicate, and this applies equally to the many dialects like Wu and Min which are spoken by hundreds of millions of non-Mandarin-speaking Chinese. If they moved to alphabetic, phonetic writing systems they would lose this ability. It may be the spread of Mandarin as a standard within China will make this ability obsolete, but up to this point it has been inaccurate to say it was an inefficient writing system that was only kept for historical reasons; in fact alphabetic and character-based writing systems were efficient in different aspects and inefficient in different aspects.
Sure the fact that it looks pretty and/or elaborate compared to other writing systems means it is easier to categorize as part of your culture, but how about leaving it to the few who are interested in studying culture and adopting a more efficient system that is easier to learn thus can increase the literacy level?
You mean like what the PRC did when it left traditional characters to the few interested in studying culture and promulgated simplified characters to the masses, causing literacy to shoot up?
And I am not exactly another "Westerner" who doesn't know what culture is saying this.
I don't know, Greece is pretty western compared to China. Western ideas of Democracy, birthplace of Western Philosophy, source of much of the Western literary canon.
Koreans are an example of people who used the chinese writing system. Well, over 500 years ago they decided they had enough and invented Hangeul, which is a really interesting writing system. In fact, the Korean writing system is alphabetic, with the letters arranged in syllable squares. The result is that they still look nice, perhaps even similar to Chinese for the untrained eye, yet they have all the benefits of the alphabetic scripts, plus my Korean friends swear that the syllable arrangement allows them to read even faster than if they were arranged in a line.
I agree that Hangul is a very interesting writing system, and produces elegant writing, but it was also a system developed by Koreans to replace a foreign system that had been developed to write a foreign language. In fact the differences between Korean and Chinese were given as the main reason for developing Hangul by the Korean monarch who ordered its development. Chinese characters were also, in a way, symbolic of the cultural imperialism of the Chinese empire which treated Korea as a vassal state.
Wow, I went off course somewhere but the point is that considering an improvement of your writing system as a violation of your culture is really a handicap.
Very few people consider a mere improvement of the Chinese writing system to be a violation. Most of the Chinese-speaking world now uses simplified characters, which were developed in the
The Amish community say they reject technology as it degrades their culture, but that is not true. They have simply "frozen" the evolution of technology at one point. The cart-building and barn-raising techniques they use are (in historical terms) fairly sophisticated and efficient examples of engineering. They could improve on that engineering by incorporating newer technologies.
Where did you learn about Amish culture? Amish resist technology because it weakens the work ethic, and they see hard labor as a key to salvation. What particular form this takes depends a lot on local rulings of the local elders and church leaders. In Maine there are Amish who use electricity, but they have to generate it themselves from generators they build themselves, rather than buy it from the grid. How would this degrade their culture any less than the technology they do not allow? Where I live, in Wisconsin, I know Amish who use various modern appliances, but only selectively to avoid allowing them to take over their lives. The point is not preservation, it is to avoid slipping into laziness and complacency. If they were so concerned about freezing time within their communities, they would take more care of their language, for example. The old Amish men I know are very impressed that I speak "real German" as I learned it in the public education system, while their kids and grandkids only speak Amish German, but they haven't taken any particular care to preserve the German their fathers spoke because their goal is simplicity, not cultural ossification.
Giving an Amish family a solar-powered flourescent lamp would not be imposing our culture on them, it would be providing them with a tool to improve their lives.
True, but telling them they had to use the lamp or they wouldn't be taken seriously would be a bit of an imposition, no?
Show a Chinese person something in traditional Chinese, and they can't read it. Believe me, I've tried.
You are generalizing based on what, one or two experiences? In how many regions? I have found that people in China will typically point out that something is in traditional characters and comment that they either can or cannot read them, but maybe about half the time can read it just fine. But I wouldn't generalize that to all of China and say anywhere you go 50% of the people can read traditional. Maybe it varies between the educated and uneducated, the old and young, or one region and another. Even among people who can't, however, there are so many passages or sentences that are nearly identical because so many characters are unchanged between traditional and simplified that much of the time people can manage anyway.
Why 'general' but 'gear'? Or 'chair' but 'chlorine'? 'Put' but 'putty'? How the hell "Eugene Delacroix" is pronounced? Etc.
You have to blame the French for that last one.
And if you read Beowulf, not the cluster, the c1000 year old English poem...
Sorry to go a bit off-topic, but I love being part of a community where this distinction is necessary.
With Latin entry and ideograph display, we get the best of two worlds -- efficient production for the writer, efficient display for the device. Is this asymmetry more efficient overall?
Yes.
Actually, you're probably right that only time will tell, but I have a hunch as someone who regularly enters Chinese text using phonetic input that your hypothesis is entirely correct.
In China, they have a word for it: 'tibiwangzi,' which means 'take pen, forget paper.'
I don't know who did this translation, but it actually means 'take pen, forget characters.' If you want to verify it, Google the characters for tibiwangzi, mingzi de zi, and you will find a ton of hits for that phrase. Search tibiwangzhi (where zhi means paper) and you won't find any hits. I would put the characters in here but /. doesn't allow them.
...and neither the animals nor the people are a danger to anyone.
I take you don't know much about bears. Bears that become accustomed to people are very dangerous.
As demonstrated repeatedly on the Threatdown.
you invent thinking machines; we're probably going to do that in this century.
Hmmmm...haven't we heard this before? In a previous century, perhaps?
I can't buy a Linux PC from Apple, period. Helps if you read every word in the sentence.
- any Apple machine is a personal computer, what's your point? Do you want to buy with Windows tax or not? Also you can buy GNU/Linux machines from various vendors, here is Dell with Red Hat, and when I go to select models on Dell site I can choose to buy them with no OS and the price is decreased normally by at least 70USD.
I don't know where you're finding this place where the price goes down if you choose no OS, but on the link you provided, the only options are Windows OSes. That's right, even on the "Dell with Red Hat" page you just linked as evidence you can still only buy with Windows. Claims that Ubuntu PCs are cheaper have also been debunked by a bit of investigation. This is because when you buy Ubuntu you're still paying for a Windows non-license, which Microsoft forces OEMs to pay.
And Dell is is one of the largest, I didn't bother with other large suppliers, but there are plenty who'll sell you just Linux machines and you can buy empty boxes, or should I Google it for you?
That's not the point. My point is that Microsoft still has the market power, without government intervention, to force manufacturers to pay it even for selling a competitor's product. This is the opposite of competition. With government intervention (i.e. if the Justice Department had finished the job of pursuing the antitrust case it had already basically won) there would be open competition in the market for desktop OSes, instead of the anemic semi-competition that there is now.
You've got to be fucking kidding me. You just Godwined an argument about whether monopolies are caused by government
- no I didn't. The truth is simple: IBM enjoyed many privileges from many governments, it wouldn't be where it is, one of the largest companies in the world without that...
Which has very little to do with the Nazis, but you brought them up anyway to make IBM look bad. This is basically the definition of Godwining. Look it up.
Please try to avoid such bigotry in the future.
It's not bigotry, it's +5 Funny.
Was it amusing?
You'll just never know, will you?
You stole my chance at First Post!
Isn't this what the App Store is for?
You read the article?!
No, I used my quantum computation abilities to tell me what must be in it.
Send a bunch of encrypted e-mails containing questionable content and see if anyone comes knocking at your door. And be sure to not send any questionable content unencrypted, or to give any other reasons for them to show up.
But how will I know they're not just knocking at my door out of a desire to make my acquaintance?