I'd rather see a character translation method. I should be able to type CNN in my native language and, once put into a URL bar, it will translate it to cnn.com and move forward.
That makes no sense. Other languages aren't just substitution ciphers. A string in non-Latin language X will be ambiguously correspondent to multiple Latin sites in some cases.
There are plenty of URLs in different languages, but as far as I know they're all the latin characters (abcdef, etc).
You are wrong. Non-Latin URLs have been available for many years. The only difference today is that the final part of the domain name can finally be non-latin too. Everything else (except for "http") could have been - and often was - non-Latin for a long time.
friendster? its still alive and well in malaysia, philippines, indonesia. a malaysian company in fact recently purchased friendster
It turns out that I live almost next door to that company's HQ (MOL) but I'd never heard of it until looking up the Friendster purchase after reading your post. Based on Vincent Tan's other tech projects I think it's safe to say Friendster will be dead within 2 years.
Malaysians use Facebook. They may use Friendster more than other people use Friendster, but they use Facebook more than they use Friendster.
So the other half is more or less excluded because domain names have those limitations, so just to be able to use the Internet they first have to learn a foreign script (a phonetic script - Chinese for example is not phonetic, so that in itself is a huge challenge for a Chinese to learn).
Actually, the way that most Chinese people type on the computer is using a Latin keyboard to type pinyin phonetics. So they've already learned it whether or not they are using the internet. This is not going to change with the new TLD. The only difference is how it looks on the screen after they type it (and the fact that they don't have to click the icon to switch between Chinese and English input mode).
When is the last time you visited say a Swedish or French or Hungarian web site? It is not that they use a different script or so. However I have the feeling that you still can not read what is written there - so that is "fragmented" already for you.
An English speaker would have to be retarded to not be able to make basic sense of a Swedish or French web site. Hungarian, okay, that's harder.
Plus you yourself gave an example of one area with vibrant script that is quite distinct from Latin ones.
To be fair, the Arabic script is losing ground. They've lost Indonesian (a major coup), Malaysian, and Turkish to the Latin script, and probably others that I'm not aware of.
so here's my suggestion to firefox developers: put some easy to see visual clue on the address bar to tell exactly in which language or character set the URL is written in.
Firefox already shows the punycode rather than the Unicode expression of the domain name, so it's already obvious - you'll see xn-whatever instead of the real domain name.
The only difference today is that there are also TLDs in non-latin alphabets. For a long time you could have [chinese-characters].com and so on. So what you're talking about happened way back when.
Anyway, just click a link if for some reason you can't type it (though I can type Chinese and Arabic characters on my US-104 keyboard, not sure why you can't).
There is an awful amount of overhead to running a university. Libraries, computers, recreational facilties, general campus upkeep, security, phone system, counseling, health service, it doesn't end.
Your calculation omitted the lost productivity due to the higher fatality rate at the faster speed. Not to mention the less tangible costs of those fatalities.
Having attained degrees from both the University of Michigan and Yale, and having spent extensive time at other universities on the list, I can easily say that for students University of Michigan is top-notch. More accessible faculty, vastly better facilities than almost all the others, more vibrant campus community, and on and on.
I haven't been to the US for quite a while, but a couple years ago, I went to an ATT store and the guy wanted $50 for a SIM card. When I balked, he sold it to me for $25. The rates were the same as I see on ATT's site now for "Go phone", though on the site there's no mention of using your own phone. Presumably if you go into a shop you can still buy a bare SIM. Otherwise, the cheapest phone listed on the site is a $10 refurb Nokia, so you could take that and pull out the SIM card.
Travelled through some poky parts of Indonesia and where there was wi-fi it was free
But after 3 months in Australia and 3 months in NZ only had free hotel wifi a total of three times.
Australian and NZ ISPs normally set low monthly usage caps and charge by the gigabyte after that. So hotels with free wifi may well be spending a lot of money on it if their guests are downloading torrents all night.
In most of southeast Asia it's rare to pay for traffic - you just pay your monthly fee and that's the end of it. So the Indonesian hotels don't care what you do.
Also, Aus+NZ and other developed countries are infested with Revenue Maximisation Consultants who will pitch the hotels pay-internet systems as ways to increase their bottom line. They never mention how many guests it keeps from ever coming back.
Of course, if I go out of the country I wouldn't as roaming would kill me.
When out of the country shop around at the airport for pre-paid SIMs with good data bundles. If you're lucky, you can do it while waiting for your bags.
In many countries, even rich ones, I've been able to get online for a few bucks a day that way.
Carry a second phone and suddenly you don't have to worry about crap hotel wifi nearly so much anymore.
Even worse than that, you pay $15/day for WiFi at the Hilton in NYC and then it doesn't work worth a damn.
My general experience is that the more expensive the wifi, the shittier it is. Free wifi at a $30/night mom-and-pop motel usually beats the pants off of any high-end hotel's elaborate and costly setup.
Because sex, necessarily, requires a second person. I believe it is impossible to show respect to yourself, or to your partner, outside of a monogamous relationship. The piano has no such limitation, there is no disrespect.
I never said that was the only proper way to use it, only that it was evidence that man and woman are intended for each other. Forgive me for being unclear. If we didn't have sexual reproduction, we wouldn't have two genders. So what's the practical purpose of homosexuality?
I think I have to give up. Your rationales are at odds with each other, with themselves, with the context of this discussion, and with common sense. These two paragraphs open up such a can of weird it's making my head hurt. What's the practical purpose of homosexuality? Well, what's the practical purpose of playing the piano or watching a film? Plenty of people get more out of their homosexual relations than they do out of Chopin. And anything that doesn't have an inherent sense of respect is fair game for any treatment? Who intended man and women for each other? What's the connection between respect and the technical requirements of the human reproductive process? Please don't answer, these are all rhetorical questions.
They may not actively bar membership on the basis of being a theist, but you can bet your ass that if someone preached on God while a member they would get kicked the hell out. The same with the BSA: it is simply inconsistent with their views to have a member or leader actively espousing something different.
You don't have to preach gayness from the mountainsides to get kicked out of BSA, you just have to be gay and live your life peacefully. That's about who you are, not what you do (unless you construe one's everyday private home life to be "what you do", like eating food while being black or breathing while being female or having a relationship while being gay).
I also seriously doubt anyone would get kicked out of a secularist organization for preaching about God, unless it was run by 12-year-olds.
So you would take away tax-exempt status from groups who funnel that money towards the good of others, just because you don't agree with them? Even for a moral relativist, that seems way out there.
I would take tax-exempt status from a group that dosed their philanthropy with hate, yes. There are enough other groups that manage to do good for the sake of doing good alone, they deserve the tax advantages more.
Anyway, we're getting nowhere, I have work to do, the last word is yours if you choose to take it.
Short answer: yes. But you don't really care why, so I'll save my breath.
I desperately care why, at least insofar as I am motivated to continue this conversation. It's what you've been avoiding for the past several exchanges. The suspense is killing me.
So infanticide and sexual cannibalism is ok? They are quite common in nature. Also, in many animals the males disappear after mating, leaving the female to raise the children on their own. I assume you are against child support from deadbeat dads?
What animals do is a terrible guide for our actions.
Ok, if you're with me that far, then help me understand your penis argument again. It is immoral to put a penis anywhere else but a vagina because somehow that's the only natural way to do it (even though it's not). But other natural things may or may not be moral. Huh?
The American Humanist Association is tax-exempt as well. They sell morality as well. The only difference I see is which one we think is right.
I don't know what American Humanist Association is, but if they exclude people based on who they are, or espose the viewpoint that people living normal lives are "immoral" because of how they happened to be born, then I'm having none of it. That goes for NOW, NAACP, whatever.
Says the process of sexual reproduction. You know, the penis and vagina being intended (evolved) complements of each other.
You say the penis and vagina are evolved solely to work with each other, and therefore no other interaction involving them is "moral", and yet you find nothing unnatural about playing the piano?
Homosexuality occurs frequently in nature, but I can assure you piano playing does not.
Thus why I am so confused that you would force your moral code into places where my moral code should take precedence. I don't want my morality to dictate our laws, why do you want your morality to dictate the operating procedures of my church and private organizations?
Because your church gets tax breaks from my government and your private organizations are operating in my public schools.
If your church paid taxes and your boy scouts kept their propaganda out of the schools, then I would care a whole lot less. I am not interested in subsidizing hate groups or welcoming them into what should be a safe place for my childrens' education.
To me this is just a post hoc rationalization. Our minds and bodies are made for playing piano and for watching films, but not for loving relationships with people of the same sex? Says who? How can you possibly make this argument with a straight face?
As for sexuality, I see truly monogamous relationships as the only way to truly respect a spouse and one's own sexuality. I also see sexuality as intended for the complementary sexes. They're intended for each other, whether you believe it was designed or if it evolved that way. To do otherwise is to disrespect one's own body.
Our senses and motor abilities are "intended" to allow us to survive in a hostile environment, feeding ourselves and fending off predators. Do you see it as "disrespectful" when someone plays a beautful piano aria, enjoys a film, kicks around a football, or just lies down in the grass on a warm spring day without a care in the world?
Neither the Engadget article nor the Slashdot summary seemed to include a link to the actual page on Apple's site. Seems like that would be more instructive reading than someone else's summary of it.
Slashdot Mirror
That makes no sense. Other languages aren't just substitution ciphers. A string in non-Latin language X will be ambiguously correspondent to multiple Latin sites in some cases.
You are wrong. Non-Latin URLs have been available for many years. The only difference today is that the final part of the domain name can finally be non-latin too. Everything else (except for "http") could have been - and often was - non-Latin for a long time.
Configuration detail. They can just as easily be pointed at 172.17.58.219.
It turns out that I live almost next door to that company's HQ (MOL) but I'd never heard of it until looking up the Friendster purchase after reading your post. Based on Vincent Tan's other tech projects I think it's safe to say Friendster will be dead within 2 years.
Malaysians use Facebook. They may use Friendster more than other people use Friendster, but they use Facebook more than they use Friendster.
Actually, the way that most Chinese people type on the computer is using a Latin keyboard to type pinyin phonetics. So they've already learned it whether or not they are using the internet. This is not going to change with the new TLD. The only difference is how it looks on the screen after they type it (and the fact that they don't have to click the icon to switch between Chinese and English input mode).
An English speaker would have to be retarded to not be able to make basic sense of a Swedish or French web site. Hungarian, okay, that's harder.
Or rational. If it's not a clearly marked "sponsored link" then Google isn't getting paid.
To be fair, the Arabic script is losing ground. They've lost Indonesian (a major coup), Malaysian, and Turkish to the Latin script, and probably others that I'm not aware of.
This is exactly wrong.
The internal representation is microsoft.com.[newtld].
When you are storing mixed runs of LTR and RTL characters, the storage order doesn't change; it's in reading order.
Domain resolution would be impossible if the internal representation depended on the display order.
Firefox already shows the punycode rather than the Unicode expression of the domain name, so it's already obvious - you'll see xn-whatever instead of the real domain name.
Insightful?
This has been possible for years.
The only difference today is that there are also TLDs in non-latin alphabets. For a long time you could have [chinese-characters].com and so on. So what you're talking about happened way back when.
Anyway, just click a link if for some reason you can't type it (though I can type Chinese and Arabic characters on my US-104 keyboard, not sure why you can't).
There is an awful amount of overhead to running a university. Libraries, computers, recreational facilties, general campus upkeep, security, phone system, counseling, health service, it doesn't end.
Your calculation omitted the lost productivity due to the higher fatality rate at the faster speed. Not to mention the less tangible costs of those fatalities.
Having attained degrees from both the University of Michigan and Yale, and having spent extensive time at other universities on the list, I can easily say that for students University of Michigan is top-notch. More accessible faculty, vastly better facilities than almost all the others, more vibrant campus community, and on and on.
Why does anyone bother to watch it on Veronica? Just for the subtitles?
$140? Holy crap. I pay about $90 for digital satellite TV, high speed DSL, home phone line, and cell phone with unlimited data plan. No PVR though.
My British neighbour has a UK-based VPN service that he uses, among other things, to watch BBC online.
In the US there's T-Mobile and ATT.
I haven't been to the US for quite a while, but a couple years ago, I went to an ATT store and the guy wanted $50 for a SIM card. When I balked, he sold it to me for $25. The rates were the same as I see on ATT's site now for "Go phone", though on the site there's no mention of using your own phone. Presumably if you go into a shop you can still buy a bare SIM. Otherwise, the cheapest phone listed on the site is a $10 refurb Nokia, so you could take that and pull out the SIM card.
Data seems to be $35 for 200MB or $60 for 5GB.
Australian and NZ ISPs normally set low monthly usage caps and charge by the gigabyte after that. So hotels with free wifi may well be spending a lot of money on it if their guests are downloading torrents all night.
In most of southeast Asia it's rare to pay for traffic - you just pay your monthly fee and that's the end of it. So the Indonesian hotels don't care what you do.
Also, Aus+NZ and other developed countries are infested with Revenue Maximisation Consultants who will pitch the hotels pay-internet systems as ways to increase their bottom line. They never mention how many guests it keeps from ever coming back.
When out of the country shop around at the airport for pre-paid SIMs with good data bundles. If you're lucky, you can do it while waiting for your bags.
In many countries, even rich ones, I've been able to get online for a few bucks a day that way.
Carry a second phone and suddenly you don't have to worry about crap hotel wifi nearly so much anymore.
My general experience is that the more expensive the wifi, the shittier it is. Free wifi at a $30/night mom-and-pop motel usually beats the pants off of any high-end hotel's elaborate and costly setup.
I think I have to give up. Your rationales are at odds with each other, with themselves, with the context of this discussion, and with common sense. These two paragraphs open up such a can of weird it's making my head hurt. What's the practical purpose of homosexuality? Well, what's the practical purpose of playing the piano or watching a film? Plenty of people get more out of their homosexual relations than they do out of Chopin. And anything that doesn't have an inherent sense of respect is fair game for any treatment? Who intended man and women for each other? What's the connection between respect and the technical requirements of the human reproductive process? Please don't answer, these are all rhetorical questions.
You don't have to preach gayness from the mountainsides to get kicked out of BSA, you just have to be gay and live your life peacefully. That's about who you are, not what you do (unless you construe one's everyday private home life to be "what you do", like eating food while being black or breathing while being female or having a relationship while being gay).
I also seriously doubt anyone would get kicked out of a secularist organization for preaching about God, unless it was run by 12-year-olds.
I would take tax-exempt status from a group that dosed their philanthropy with hate, yes. There are enough other groups that manage to do good for the sake of doing good alone, they deserve the tax advantages more.
Anyway, we're getting nowhere, I have work to do, the last word is yours if you choose to take it.
I desperately care why, at least insofar as I am motivated to continue this conversation. It's what you've been avoiding for the past several exchanges. The suspense is killing me.
Ok, if you're with me that far, then help me understand your penis argument again. It is immoral to put a penis anywhere else but a vagina because somehow that's the only natural way to do it (even though it's not). But other natural things may or may not be moral. Huh?
I don't know what American Humanist Association is, but if they exclude people based on who they are, or espose the viewpoint that people living normal lives are "immoral" because of how they happened to be born, then I'm having none of it. That goes for NOW, NAACP, whatever.
You say the penis and vagina are evolved solely to work with each other, and therefore no other interaction involving them is "moral", and yet you find nothing unnatural about playing the piano?
Homosexuality occurs frequently in nature, but I can assure you piano playing does not.
Because your church gets tax breaks from my government and your private organizations are operating in my public schools.
If your church paid taxes and your boy scouts kept their propaganda out of the schools, then I would care a whole lot less. I am not interested in subsidizing hate groups or welcoming them into what should be a safe place for my childrens' education.
To me this is just a post hoc rationalization. Our minds and bodies are made for playing piano and for watching films, but not for loving relationships with people of the same sex? Says who? How can you possibly make this argument with a straight face?
Our senses and motor abilities are "intended" to allow us to survive in a hostile environment, feeding ourselves and fending off predators. Do you see it as "disrespectful" when someone plays a beautful piano aria, enjoys a film, kicks around a football, or just lies down in the grass on a warm spring day without a care in the world?
Neither the Engadget article nor the Slashdot summary seemed to include a link to the actual page on Apple's site. Seems like that would be more instructive reading than someone else's summary of it.
So here it is.