First off, if you are offended by me assuming that you are an American, then I'm sorry. I usually don't look at people's email addresses. And if you are offended by me calling you a racist, then I apologize for that as well. It's just that your comment about all immigrants being potential traitors struck a nerve in me as I (though an American citizen) find that I will not be able safely to pursue a scientific career in NASA because of my ethnic background. As I saw with Wen Ho Lee, if you are Chinese, then the US government will treat you as a traitor. Now, with this crap about a space war, I will almost certainly never be allowed to work on anything interesting related to space, despite the fact that I will soon graduate from the best college in America.
Second of all, to understand why I feel that Taiwanese are traitors and why I'm not xenophobic, racist, paranoid, or communist-sympathizing for feeling this way(several of my relatives were persecuted because they were born to rich families, so you can guess my feelings toward the current Chinese government), go to the following
site.
I will not suggest that the author isn't biased (though you should pay attention to the his biography on the right column). However, it will give you a perspective on Chinese-Taiwanese relations that is not presented in Western media. It certainly had a huge impact on my view of things after I read the essays.
Third of all, as for why I oppose SDI, consider that in an arms race, you can do two things 1) Make your own weapons work better or 2) Make your enemy's weapons work worse. Both courses of actions will escalate tensions.
Where exactly did I try to whitewash the Chinese system? A specific quote please.
I was merely trying to point out the hypocritical way most Americans go about treating China.
I never made a single comment for or against the policies of the Chinese government.
And I was born in this country. Isn't it interesting that while I'm a citizen in the full legal sense, I still can't be trusted because of my last name?
No, debris is not a problem. Simple mathematics will show this. The radius of the earth is 6370km. Assuming that satellites orbit from a radius of 7000 km to 36,000 km (for geosynchronous orbit), the total volume of space would be:
4/3 * pi * (36000 - 7000)^3 = 1.02E14 km^3 or 10 TRILLION cubic kilometers.
There's no way in hell that humans have sent up enough stuff to make any dent in this figure let alone "have a junk layer too thick to navigate".
Saved the world? If that idealistic fool Wilson hadn't butted his way into World War I, then we would have had a far more equitable peace treaty thus preventing the humiliation of Germany and the rise of Hitler. The allies would have been able to send much more aid to combat the Bolshleviks in Russia and thus prevent the rise of communism.
I don't know why they never bother including this in books about Egypt, but a version of the Egyptian language is still spoken today. It's called Coptic and is spoken in areas of Egypt and Ethiopia. It was only with the knowledge of Coptic that the Rosetta stone was deciphered. Champilion figured out the the heiroglyphs represented sounds but he could not have figured out what the sounds meant without have at least some clue of the spoken language they represented.
> They do need to redraw the map each time they got here
What kind of bullshit is this? It's called latitude and longtitude. I know this might be hard for such a deluded mind as yourself, but by measuring angles to the sun and the stars, you can *** gasp *** figure out where you are without pyramids. Or, on a more advanced level, you keep a few satellites in space and set up a GPS system.
But don't take my word for it, just look at the space program. I don't see space shuttles requiring pyramids in order to land.
Having been in China, I find that the power users all use the "wubi" method which inputs characters based on how they are written and not on the pronouciation (for example, s = "tree", b = zi so sb would give you the character for Li). Thus I don't think misspellings would matter that much then.
Also, by the time the Internet truly gains acceptance among a significant portion of the Chinese society and not just among the urban youth, speech recognition will probably be working well enough that it will be the primary method of input.
1. You are insinuating that because I favor the consistent use of spelling and grammar, I'm some sort of right-wing fanatic - a "fascist" as you so eloquently put it. I won't bother to respond to that obvious troll except to say that from your use of the word "fascist", it's pretty obvious that you don't know what it means and that you are using it out of some sort of need to insult me.
2. You say that language is killed by "fascist rules" dictating what "proper language" is. By parallel argument, The fascist rules promulgated by ANSI upholding what proper C is have killed the language.
3. The person who misspelled "crimson" did so out of laziness and possibly ignorance. Why should that be accepted?
True enough. I tried KDE 2 on Mandrake 7.2 and it was both slow and rather unstable. Actually there isn't much reason to use KDE 2 other than Konqueror, Kmail, and Koffice but thankfully, you call them from other window managers.
China was "allied" with the Soviet Union only from the brief period of 1949 - about 1960. After that (and this was before China developed the bomb), there was great animosity between the two governments to the point where several small battles were fought.
From you second assertion, I seriously doubt you do know history. The primary purpose of American nuclear deterrence was to prevent the Soviets from dominating Western Europe. Southeast Asia and Asia in general were much less important as the Soviets concentrated their forces on their eastern borders
But the only reason you know about this algorithm is because of someone else...
Isn't this like the Rambus situation? A group of companies independently come up with a memory technology only to have Rambus come 8 years later and claim that they thought of it first and then proceed to demand that royalties be paid to them
The problem with patents in my view is that currently, they don't distinguish between copying someone else's work and independently coming up with it. The most obvious consquence of this is the prevelance of "obvious" patents like the 1-click patent.
If the dev kit is free, how's Microsoft going to make money off the Xbox? After all, they are heavily subsidizing the hardware.
A guy on the Xbox team (Seamus Blackely) gave a talk at my college two weeks ago and he said quite explicitly that Microsoft will be charging considerable amounts for the dev kit. Select developers (SquareSoft, for example) will receive big discounts.
Also, the Xbox will use a proprietary DVD based format. Even if you developed a game, you still have to find a way to burn a DVD
Two weeks ago, Seamus Blackley (who designed Flight Unlimited and who is in charge of Xbox development) visited my campus. According to him, the Xbox uses a completely different bus than the PC (it's much wider and faster).
He also mentioned that as far as licensing goes, the top developers (ie SquareSoft, EA) get their dev kits at very high discounts while smaller, less known developers have to pay the full price. Microsoft is following the same policy.
As far as "openness" goes, I think what Microsoft (or Seamus at any rate) means is that because the Xbox is so similar to PCs, people developing for it will know what's going on inside rather than having to completely rely on say, Sony's documentation.
English as you know it arose around Shakespeare's time and slightly after Chaucer's. That's why you can read the former and not quite the latter.
Before that, it was basically a dialect of Old German.
English is a Germanic language with many (> 40%) expressions and words borrowed from other languages (mainly Latin-derived ones).
People (non-English speakers presumably) resist English so much mostly because it takes a lot of effort to learn a foreign language and in the learning process, you can't help but think that the grammer/vocabulary/etc. is totally weird and stupid. That was how I felt when I was learning French.
Actually Churchill was an advocate of a restricted 500-word vocabulary English language. Believe it or not, it was called Basic English. It never got off the ground though because the people teaching it kept using words not on the official list (you are supposed to use compound words and such to compensate for the lack of a vocabulary).
But only when it's sold as a game console will Sony make money. I read an article somewhere that said people in Japan were buying to PS2 mainly as a cheap DVD player. It might be the case in the US as well.
Slashdot Mirror
First off, if you are offended by me assuming that you are an American, then I'm sorry. I usually don't look at people's email addresses. And if you are offended by me calling you a racist, then I apologize for that as well. It's just that your comment about all immigrants being potential traitors struck a nerve in me as I (though an American citizen) find that I will not be able safely to pursue a scientific career in NASA because of my ethnic background. As I saw with Wen Ho Lee, if you are Chinese, then the US government will treat you as a traitor. Now, with this crap about a space war, I will almost certainly never be allowed to work on anything interesting related to space, despite the fact that I will soon graduate from the best college in America.
Second of all, to understand why I feel that Taiwanese are traitors and why I'm not xenophobic, racist, paranoid, or communist-sympathizing for feeling this way(several of my relatives were persecuted because they were born to rich families, so you can guess my feelings toward the current Chinese government), go to the following site.
I will not suggest that the author isn't biased (though you should pay attention to the his biography on the right column). However, it will give you a perspective on Chinese-Taiwanese relations that is not presented in Western media. It certainly had a huge impact on my view of things after I read the essays.
Third of all, as for why I oppose SDI, consider that in an arms race, you can do two things 1) Make your own weapons work better or 2) Make your enemy's weapons work worse. Both courses of actions will escalate tensions.
Where exactly did I try to whitewash the Chinese system? A specific quote please. I was merely trying to point out the hypocritical way most Americans go about treating China. I never made a single comment for or against the policies of the Chinese government. And I was born in this country. Isn't it interesting that while I'm a citizen in the full legal sense, I still can't be trusted because of my last name?
No, debris is not a problem. Simple mathematics will show this. The radius of the earth is 6370km. Assuming that satellites orbit from a radius of 7000 km to 36,000 km (for geosynchronous orbit), the total volume of space would be:
4/3 * pi * (36000 - 7000)^3 = 1.02E14 km^3 or 10 TRILLION cubic kilometers.
There's no way in hell that humans have sent up enough stuff to make any dent in this figure let alone "have a junk layer too thick to navigate".
I will tell you something: For the last 4,000 years, Chinese soldiers have never fought more than 100 miles outside of China's current borders.
In the past 200 years, however, American soldiers have fought on every continent except Australia.
Which country is the aggressive one?
Saved the world? If that idealistic fool Wilson hadn't butted his way into World War I, then we would have had a far more equitable peace treaty thus preventing the humiliation of Germany and the rise of Hitler. The allies would have been able to send much more aid to combat the Bolshleviks in Russia and thus prevent the rise of communism.
Why should you care? It's not as if you can read Chinese.
I don't know why they never bother including this in books about Egypt, but a version of the Egyptian language is still spoken today. It's called Coptic and is spoken in areas of Egypt and Ethiopia. It was only with the knowledge of Coptic that the Rosetta stone was deciphered. Champilion figured out the the heiroglyphs represented sounds but he could not have figured out what the sounds meant without have at least some clue of the spoken language they represented.
Actually, if the human race would spend even 5% of its output on the development of space, all of us would be taking vacations Mars by now.
> They do need to redraw the map each time they got here
What kind of bullshit is this? It's called latitude and longtitude. I know this might be hard for such a deluded mind as yourself, but by measuring angles to the sun and the stars, you can *** gasp *** figure out where you are without pyramids. Or, on a more advanced level, you keep a few satellites in space and set up a GPS system.
But don't take my word for it, just look at the space program. I don't see space shuttles requiring pyramids in order to land.
Hey! Let's all post our opinions on stuff we haven't even read! Maybe that's why slashdot is so interesting!
Having been in China, I find that the power users all use the "wubi" method which inputs characters based on how they are written and not on the pronouciation (for example, s = "tree", b = zi so sb would give you the character for Li). Thus I don't think misspellings would matter that much then.
Also, by the time the Internet truly gains acceptance among a significant portion of the Chinese society and not just among the urban youth, speech recognition will probably be working well enough that it will be the primary method of input.
1. You are insinuating that because I favor the consistent use of spelling and grammar, I'm some sort of right-wing fanatic - a "fascist" as you so eloquently put it. I won't bother to respond to that obvious troll except to say that from your use of the word "fascist", it's pretty obvious that you don't know what it means and that you are using it out of some sort of need to insult me.
2. You say that language is killed by "fascist rules" dictating what "proper language" is. By parallel argument, The fascist rules promulgated by ANSI upholding what proper C is have killed the language.
3. The person who misspelled "crimson" did so out of laziness and possibly ignorance. Why should that be accepted?
True enough. I tried KDE 2 on Mandrake 7.2 and it was both slow and rather unstable. Actually there isn't much reason to use KDE 2 other than Konqueror, Kmail, and Koffice but thankfully, you call them from other window managers.
What makes you compulsively rail against people who want to uphold a certain degree of literacy?
China was "allied" with the Soviet Union only from the brief period of 1949 - about 1960. After that (and this was before China developed the bomb), there was great animosity between the two governments to the point where several small battles were fought.
From you second assertion, I seriously doubt you do know history. The primary purpose of American nuclear deterrence was to prevent the Soviets from dominating Western Europe. Southeast Asia and Asia in general were much less important as the Soviets concentrated their forces on their eastern borders
Isn't this like the Rambus situation? A group of companies independently come up with a memory technology only to have Rambus come 8 years later and claim that they thought of it first and then proceed to demand that royalties be paid to them
The problem with patents in my view is that currently, they don't distinguish between copying someone else's work and independently coming up with it. The most obvious consquence of this is the prevelance of "obvious" patents like the 1-click patent.
Actually, I think Kasparov realized that he couldn't win and if didn't draw, Kramnik might very well beat him.
If the dev kit is free, how's Microsoft going to make money off the Xbox? After all, they are heavily subsidizing the hardware.
A guy on the Xbox team (Seamus Blackely) gave a talk at my college two weeks ago and he said quite explicitly that Microsoft will be charging considerable amounts for the dev kit. Select developers (SquareSoft, for example) will receive big discounts.
Also, the Xbox will use a proprietary DVD based format. Even if you developed a game, you still have to find a way to burn a DVD
Two weeks ago, Seamus Blackley (who designed Flight Unlimited and who is in charge of Xbox development) visited my campus. According to him, the Xbox uses a completely different bus than the PC (it's much wider and faster). He also mentioned that as far as licensing goes, the top developers (ie SquareSoft, EA) get their dev kits at very high discounts while smaller, less known developers have to pay the full price. Microsoft is following the same policy. As far as "openness" goes, I think what Microsoft (or Seamus at any rate) means is that because the Xbox is so similar to PCs, people developing for it will know what's going on inside rather than having to completely rely on say, Sony's documentation.
English as you know it arose around Shakespeare's time and slightly after Chaucer's. That's why you can read the former and not quite the latter.
Before that, it was basically a dialect of Old German.
English is a Germanic language with many (> 40%) expressions and words borrowed from other languages (mainly Latin-derived ones).
People (non-English speakers presumably) resist English so much mostly because it takes a lot of effort to learn a foreign language and in the learning process, you can't help but think that the grammer/vocabulary/etc. is totally weird and stupid. That was how I felt when I was learning French.
Latin doesn't give special treatment to any country? Consider this:
You can take entire paragraphs in Italian and convert them to Latin with minor changes.
If you are in the West, you at least know the alphabet.
If you are in Eastern Europe, you at least know half of the alphabet.
If you are somewhere else, then you are f*cked.
Actually Churchill was an advocate of a restricted 500-word vocabulary English language. Believe it or not, it was called Basic English. It never got off the ground though because the people teaching it kept using words not on the official list (you are supposed to use compound words and such to compensate for the lack of a vocabulary).
You better hope not or else several big American cities will be "glowing in the dark nagasaki style" as well.
Esperanto is easy to learn if you know one Anglo-Saxon language and one Romance language. Otherwise, it's just as hard as anything else.
Fortunately, I know English and French so I was able to teach myself Esperanto in a week.
But only when it's sold as a game console will Sony make money. I read an article somewhere that said people in Japan were buying to PS2 mainly as a cheap DVD player. It might be the case in the US as well.