But in reality it's actually causing problems since the same symbol is expected to look in one way for Chinese and slightly different for Japanese.
Well, a large number of people (including myself) believe it's the right thing to do. People like you lost that argument, that's why Unicode is the way it is. I'm simply explaining it, and I'm telling you that the justification isn't Western imperialism or American ignorance or whatever other cultural b.s. people like to attach to it.
By the way, there are plenty of examples where the same symbols have different code points intended for different contexts (Greek letters used for math etc). There are even Latin letters that look slightly different in different language contexts like U+0152 (filtered out by Slashdot), Ø and Ö (they all stem from a combination of O and E, Ö from the convention of writing the E above the O). Agreeing on one of the symbols for all affected languages would be logical and fully intelligible for everyone, but it would look wrong.
Yes, and Unicode CJK support does exactly the same thing that Latin script does for Latin alphabets: characters that look similar enough to be recognizable are shared, and characters that look significantly different and would be unintelligible get different codepoints. Since this is a much harder problem for CJK, they keep adding new codepoints.
Unicode used to have language contexts, as well as other contexts. But markup standards like HTML and XML simply ignored the Unicode facilities. Having two separate standards for marking up regions of texts, possibly conflicting, overlapping, and inconsistently, was a problem. And people weren't using the Unicode facilities. So they were deprecated, then dropped.
It's all a big mess. Not unicode specifically, but human writing in general.
No, most writing systems are pretty simple: they have a few hundred symbols that are arranged usually linear ways. In fact, even CJK isn't all that different and could easily be encoded in a few hundred codepoints (here); it was mostly a policy decision not to do that.
So instead of oil companies, the subsidies will go to "green" companies who will get it whether they actually deliver anything or not. Of course, that isn't even an "instead of", since often those companies are actually one and the same.
Quite apart from the most dubious assumptions that go into such simplistic "100%" calculations, the notion of "jobs created" is nonsense. The 6 million jobs that this is supposed to "create" aren't created, they are diverted from other places. The time and effort they spend digging holes for onshore wind farms is time and effort that is unavailable for building the next space port, or fusion research lab, or highway, or whatever.
People didn't starve to death when the lead was taken out of gasoline,
No, but probably hundreds of thousands of people are dead because the lead was put into gasoline in the first place. And it was put in because government regulators, in response to lobbying, declared it safe for use on public roads.
In the worst case scenario, net neutrality activists will succeed. Why is that the "worst case"? Because it would mean that providers put in the infrastructure to deliver exact volumes at exact speeds. Your "up to 40 Mbps" service for some unspecified by large amount of data will turn into an "exactly 5 Mbps to the nearest office and a 5 Gbytes/month volume cap" at twice the price. But, hey, at least it's both "fair" and you get exactly what you paid for. Are you happy now?
There is nothing out there that combines the speed and expressivity of C++, and when you know performance is going to be a factor at some point, C++ is the only choice.
That's the wrong question to ask. What people in the real world need to ask is: given a team of average programmers and N man years, what choice will produce the best tradeoff between features, correctness, and performance in our application. Usually, if language is the only consideration, C++ is not the best choice. The choice of C++ is usually driven by availability of libraries and tools, backwards compatibility, and what existing teams already know.
No one I know who does high performance code (such as numerics, real time computer vision, that sort of thing) uses anything but C++
That's because you exist in a subculture that happens to use C++ a lot. Other subcultures use Fortran, Matlab, and Python a lot.
Why not say "there's nothing physically wrong with you, maybe you should consider psychotherapy?"
Ah, you have such a simplistic view of medicine: patient comes in, doctor finds what's physically wrong with him, prescribes a pill that has been scientifically proven to fix the problem, patient takes pill and gets better. Sorry, but that's not how medicine works in the real world.
Doing what you suggest would be malpractice: the doctor would be likely to miss a real physical illness, the patient would't get better (whether the illness is physical or psychosomatic), and most likely the patient would just get "real" pills from another doctor.
Ironically, what you suggest as an alternative, psychotherapy, is very expensive, has no accepted rational basis, and in those cases where it seems to work does so likely due to placebo-like effects.
it was very profitable to use money to influence congress 200 years ago and 100 years ago and 50 years ago
Well, yes, in a certain sense. For example, the "Robber Barons" weren't a failure of capitalism, they were the result of massive government spending in response to lobbying. Ditto with the military industrial complex during and after WWII.
But federal spending (and government spending) was a much smaller percentage of the economy; until the 1930's, it was below 5% except during war time. That means there were far fewer areas that you could lobby Congress in and far less money that could be dispensed. So while individual, successful rent seekers could get spectacularly wealthy at the hands of the government 100 years ago, as a whole, there was much less overall total profit in it because there was so much less money to go around, and because the money that was there was much more tightly bound to specific purposes.
And that's my point: government spending is always corrupt and always responds to rent seeking and lobbying. For some reason, progressives hope that magically, that will get fixed if only they pass more laws and increase budgets even further, but that is like throwing gasoline on a fire. The only thing you can do is limit the problem by limiting the overall amount of government spending.
This is the country that gave us Paris Hilton, Kim Kardashian and Real Housewives right? I appreciate not all of America is Hollywood and Manhattan, but you are joking if you don't think the US has the most materialistic people on the planet amongst it population.
You didn't say that the US has the most materialistic people, you said that "Like most Americans you seem to focus only on wealth as a measure of success". Are you familiar with basic English and understand the difference between those two statements?
And if you think that "Paris Hilton, Kim Kardashian and Real Housewives" represent the epitome of materialism, you really can't be very familiar with European society, history, or media.
You seem to be confusing the EU with the continent.
Not at all; the parts of Europe that are outside the EU are generally even more dismal.
You've also assumed that I'm somehow European
Actually, I carefully refrained from assuming that. European bigotry also exists in former colonies (e.g., Australia, New Zealand), plus among many left-wing Americans. So, instead of beating around the bush, where are you actually from?
Poor geographic knowledge is common in your country, probably due to your second rate education system which Europeans definitely don't want.
I'm European by birth and education, and American by choice.
I am an employee (and a stockholder) of a rather large corporation. No one ever asked me if I agree with using corporate funds to support political positions and I don't agree with all of the positions my corporation holds
You get asked constantly: as a shareholder, you can vote; as an employee, you can quit; as a shareholder, you can sell your shares; and as a customer, you can choose not to buy their products.
On top of that if I happen to agree with my corporations political positions their use of corporate funds to support the positions amplifies my speech over someone who doesn't have the benefit of a corporation backing them up.
Incorporating costs $100, and if you're going to engage in any kind of political speech with others, it is reckless not to do that; without incorporating, your entire personal savings are at risk when your friends screw up. The vast majority of corporations are small. And that is what Citizens United was about: a small corporation (non-profit as it happens) that was created specifically to criticize Hillary Clinton. Given Hillary's power and her penchant for vindictiveness, I don't see why any sane person would go up against her otherwise.
You are confusing "corporation" with "huge, wealthy, powerful business entity". Those kinds of businesses tend not to engage in political speech because the reason people give them money is to make money. Political speech is harmful to that end, because no matter what they say, it annoys some politicians, customers, investors, and employees and costs them profits. Nevertheless, if the majority shareholders of some company agree that they wish to push a political viewpoint, it's their right to do so. Often, that kind of political speech, however, is just a marketing ploy. Apple, for example, tends to espouse left-of-center political positions because that reflects the preferences of their customers and gets them positive press.
Yes, it does work: more people get well on it than without treatment, and it causes no physical harm. The way doctors and pharmacists usually use this is that, before they start off with a prescription drug regime that may cause serious side effects and cost a lot of money, they combine a placebo (homeopathy) with lifestyle changes. It's a sensible approach, both because of the placebo effect, and because it stops irrational patients from hurting themselves with drugs they may not need.
And I'm sorry to burst your illusion, but efficacy, safety, and scientific rationale for FDA-approved drugs is usually not that great either, and failure of FDA-approved drugs to live up to their promises costs society far more than homeopathy even if homeopathy were not useful.
No, a "lie for personal gain" does not automatically constitute legal fraud; changing that would be a tremendously bad idea In fact, it is doubtful whether fraud should even be a criminal offense, instead of a civil matter.
Besides, I don't see why you believe that homeopathic practitioners are lying to you: they are telling you what you are getting and why they believe that it works. Where is the lie?
Corporations are people, in the same way that beaches are sand and school classes are children. That is, corporations are just shared property between a bunch of individuals. If those individuals want to use their property to speak out on political matters, what possible reason should there be to deny them that right?
Furthermore, if you really think that Citizens United should be reversed, why should corporations like MSNBC, NYT, be permitted to speak on political matters either? How, in fact, do you draw a distinction between MSNBC and Citizens United?
You might want to look up "carried interest" and how Congress tried close that loop-hole and how that effort was killed even though people supported it.
Who killed it? Space aliens? Brain slugs? Stop such weaselwords. Congress "didn't try to close that loophole and it got killed", Congress voted not to close that loophole.
Why did the choose not to close it? Because what you said is wrong: the majority of Americans didn't support closing it because the majority of Americans didn't know about, and to many of those who did (like myself), simply didn't care.
Congress passes around 400 bills a year. The people can pay attention to maybe half a dozen. That means that the remaining 394 bills are going to be subject to massive rent seeking and regulatory capture. Campaign finance reform isn't going to fix that, it's only going to make the corruption even less transparent.
If you want to reduce the influence on money in Congress, the only way is to make it less profitable to use such influence, and that is to massively reduce the spending and legislative power that Congress has. You know, how things actually worked throughout most of US history.
Most of the moral panic surrounding campaign finance is based on correlation, not causation. In reality, large donations don't cause politicians to win, but politicians that are likely to win receive large donations. Furthermore, the fact that lobbyists, corporations, unions, and other special interests get to write legislation has little to do with campaign donations, and more with regulatory capture and the complexity of regulation.
And that brings us to these legislative proposals. The intent is to somehow make political speech more fair and egalitarian. The net result will, however, be that political power will be traded in even less transparent ways. In the worst case of fully publicly financed campaigns, you end up with government effectively deciding who can run against them.
I don't think these proposals have a snowball's chance in hell. But if they were to pass, the US would be screwed. So, I'll be donating to, and supporting, candidates who oppose them.
I take issue with the fraud of the liars who try to sell others on their delusions so that they don't feel bad being the only ones who believe dumbly.
Well, you can "take issue" with them all you want, but disliking something or believing it is dishonest is not sufficient justification for outlawing it.
Whether that happens by coercion, by persuasion, or by some other means, is an open question.
Any government policy addressing climate change necessarily involves coercion.
P.S. Corporations are not "people".
Of course corporations "are" people, namely the people who have shared ownership of the corporation. If you screw corporations, you screw the people owning them.
but my point was that the US is the #1 in terms of wealth globally
No, your point was "Like most Americans you seem to focus only on wealth as a measure of success". You stated that without any evidence, and it is false. Yes, Americans are very wealthy, but that doesn't mean they "focus on wealth as a measure of success". In fact, the opposite is the case: Americans are fairly non-materialistic in comparison to the rest of the world, including Europeans. There are many cultural and historical reasons for that, but a very simple one is that if you're very wealthy, you can afford to be non-materialistic.
So directly comparing one country against another is not fair?
"Fair" has nothing to do with it. If you want to figure out what good government is, it simply doesn't make sense to compare the US as a whole to individual EU members. Individual EU members these days have less autonomy than US states, and the reason some EU members are doing comparatively well is because other EU members are getting screwed over.
The kind of European bigotry, ignorance, and chauvinism you display doesn't keep Greece in the EU and doesn't get down Spanish youth unemployment. Europe has severe economic and social problems that no pissing contest with the US will fix.
Latin, greek and cyrillic scripts have their own code points for (historically) common characters.
My point was about usage, not about the history of the alphabets: readers simply aren't served well by seeing characters whose meaning (phonetic or ideographic) they understand but that they don't recognize because they are rendered in a font that uses conventions they don't know.
This makes it easy to embed snippets of greek script in an english text, for example, since a greek font will automatically be used for the greek script (instead of getting randomly mixed fonts risking a suboptimal rendition).
Greek and Latin scripts are mutually unintelligible. That is, most of the letters differ between the alphabets. If you print a Latin text in Greek characters, people can't read it at all. (Also, to put this into perspective, Greek and Latin separated about the time that the Chinese got their writing system.)
Chinese and Japanese mostly share the same character shapes; that's why it makes sense to code only the characters that are substantially different, and that's what Unicode does. Small variants are not coded separately not because evil Westerners are miserly with codepoints for CJK language, but because it's actually not useful.
And this is exactly the same thing that we did for the different variants of the Latin alphabet (which are themselves roughly as old as Japanese writing): we share the common letters and provide variants for those that differ between Latin alphabets.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, a large number of people (including myself) believe it's the right thing to do. People like you lost that argument, that's why Unicode is the way it is. I'm simply explaining it, and I'm telling you that the justification isn't Western imperialism or American ignorance or whatever other cultural b.s. people like to attach to it.
Yes, and Unicode CJK support does exactly the same thing that Latin script does for Latin alphabets: characters that look similar enough to be recognizable are shared, and characters that look significantly different and would be unintelligible get different codepoints. Since this is a much harder problem for CJK, they keep adding new codepoints.
Unicode used to have language contexts, as well as other contexts. But markup standards like HTML and XML simply ignored the Unicode facilities. Having two separate standards for marking up regions of texts, possibly conflicting, overlapping, and inconsistently, was a problem. And people weren't using the Unicode facilities. So they were deprecated, then dropped.
No, most writing systems are pretty simple: they have a few hundred symbols that are arranged usually linear ways. In fact, even CJK isn't all that different and could easily be encoded in a few hundred codepoints (here); it was mostly a policy decision not to do that.
So instead of oil companies, the subsidies will go to "green" companies who will get it whether they actually deliver anything or not. Of course, that isn't even an "instead of", since often those companies are actually one and the same.
Quite apart from the most dubious assumptions that go into such simplistic "100%" calculations, the notion of "jobs created" is nonsense. The 6 million jobs that this is supposed to "create" aren't created, they are diverted from other places. The time and effort they spend digging holes for onshore wind farms is time and effort that is unavailable for building the next space port, or fusion research lab, or highway, or whatever.
No, but probably hundreds of thousands of people are dead because the lead was put into gasoline in the first place. And it was put in because government regulators, in response to lobbying, declared it safe for use on public roads.
I think people also tend to forget that the providers can cancel the contract if they don't like it and offer you a new one.
If they are regulated in a way in which they don't see any profit in it anymore, they just stop servicing an area altogether.
In the worst case scenario, net neutrality activists will succeed. Why is that the "worst case"? Because it would mean that providers put in the infrastructure to deliver exact volumes at exact speeds. Your "up to 40 Mbps" service for some unspecified by large amount of data will turn into an "exactly 5 Mbps to the nearest office and a 5 Gbytes/month volume cap" at twice the price. But, hey, at least it's both "fair" and you get exactly what you paid for. Are you happy now?
Practice some more.
That's the way to do it. It still takes a long time to master in C++, because there are still many ways of screwing up.
That's the wrong question to ask. What people in the real world need to ask is: given a team of average programmers and N man years, what choice will produce the best tradeoff between features, correctness, and performance in our application. Usually, if language is the only consideration, C++ is not the best choice. The choice of C++ is usually driven by availability of libraries and tools, backwards compatibility, and what existing teams already know.
That's because you exist in a subculture that happens to use C++ a lot. Other subcultures use Fortran, Matlab, and Python a lot.
Ah, you have such a simplistic view of medicine: patient comes in, doctor finds what's physically wrong with him, prescribes a pill that has been scientifically proven to fix the problem, patient takes pill and gets better. Sorry, but that's not how medicine works in the real world.
Doing what you suggest would be malpractice: the doctor would be likely to miss a real physical illness, the patient would't get better (whether the illness is physical or psychosomatic), and most likely the patient would just get "real" pills from another doctor.
Ironically, what you suggest as an alternative, psychotherapy, is very expensive, has no accepted rational basis, and in those cases where it seems to work does so likely due to placebo-like effects.
Well, yes, in a certain sense. For example, the "Robber Barons" weren't a failure of capitalism, they were the result of massive government spending in response to lobbying. Ditto with the military industrial complex during and after WWII.
But federal spending (and government spending) was a much smaller percentage of the economy; until the 1930's, it was below 5% except during war time. That means there were far fewer areas that you could lobby Congress in and far less money that could be dispensed. So while individual, successful rent seekers could get spectacularly wealthy at the hands of the government 100 years ago, as a whole, there was much less overall total profit in it because there was so much less money to go around, and because the money that was there was much more tightly bound to specific purposes.
And that's my point: government spending is always corrupt and always responds to rent seeking and lobbying. For some reason, progressives hope that magically, that will get fixed if only they pass more laws and increase budgets even further, but that is like throwing gasoline on a fire. The only thing you can do is limit the problem by limiting the overall amount of government spending.
The ability to write code that compiles and runs correctly the first time, without memory leaks, pointer errors, and other bugs.
How do you get that? That's easy too: write a few hundred thousand lines of complex code and debug and test it.
You didn't say that the US has the most materialistic people, you said that "Like most Americans you seem to focus only on wealth as a measure of success". Are you familiar with basic English and understand the difference between those two statements?
And if you think that "Paris Hilton, Kim Kardashian and Real Housewives" represent the epitome of materialism, you really can't be very familiar with European society, history, or media.
Not at all; the parts of Europe that are outside the EU are generally even more dismal.
Actually, I carefully refrained from assuming that. European bigotry also exists in former colonies (e.g., Australia, New Zealand), plus among many left-wing Americans. So, instead of beating around the bush, where are you actually from?
I'm European by birth and education, and American by choice.
You get asked constantly: as a shareholder, you can vote; as an employee, you can quit; as a shareholder, you can sell your shares; and as a customer, you can choose not to buy their products.
Incorporating costs $100, and if you're going to engage in any kind of political speech with others, it is reckless not to do that; without incorporating, your entire personal savings are at risk when your friends screw up. The vast majority of corporations are small. And that is what Citizens United was about: a small corporation (non-profit as it happens) that was created specifically to criticize Hillary Clinton. Given Hillary's power and her penchant for vindictiveness, I don't see why any sane person would go up against her otherwise.
You are confusing "corporation" with "huge, wealthy, powerful business entity". Those kinds of businesses tend not to engage in political speech because the reason people give them money is to make money. Political speech is harmful to that end, because no matter what they say, it annoys some politicians, customers, investors, and employees and costs them profits. Nevertheless, if the majority shareholders of some company agree that they wish to push a political viewpoint, it's their right to do so. Often, that kind of political speech, however, is just a marketing ploy. Apple, for example, tends to espouse left-of-center political positions because that reflects the preferences of their customers and gets them positive press.
Yes, it does work: more people get well on it than without treatment, and it causes no physical harm. The way doctors and pharmacists usually use this is that, before they start off with a prescription drug regime that may cause serious side effects and cost a lot of money, they combine a placebo (homeopathy) with lifestyle changes. It's a sensible approach, both because of the placebo effect, and because it stops irrational patients from hurting themselves with drugs they may not need.
And I'm sorry to burst your illusion, but efficacy, safety, and scientific rationale for FDA-approved drugs is usually not that great either, and failure of FDA-approved drugs to live up to their promises costs society far more than homeopathy even if homeopathy were not useful.
No, a "lie for personal gain" does not automatically constitute legal fraud; changing that would be a tremendously bad idea In fact, it is doubtful whether fraud should even be a criminal offense, instead of a civil matter.
Besides, I don't see why you believe that homeopathic practitioners are lying to you: they are telling you what you are getting and why they believe that it works. Where is the lie?
Corporations are people, in the same way that beaches are sand and school classes are children. That is, corporations are just shared property between a bunch of individuals. If those individuals want to use their property to speak out on political matters, what possible reason should there be to deny them that right?
Furthermore, if you really think that Citizens United should be reversed, why should corporations like MSNBC, NYT, be permitted to speak on political matters either? How, in fact, do you draw a distinction between MSNBC and Citizens United?
Who killed it? Space aliens? Brain slugs? Stop such weaselwords. Congress "didn't try to close that loophole and it got killed", Congress voted not to close that loophole.
Why did the choose not to close it? Because what you said is wrong: the majority of Americans didn't support closing it because the majority of Americans didn't know about, and to many of those who did (like myself), simply didn't care.
Congress passes around 400 bills a year. The people can pay attention to maybe half a dozen. That means that the remaining 394 bills are going to be subject to massive rent seeking and regulatory capture. Campaign finance reform isn't going to fix that, it's only going to make the corruption even less transparent.
If you want to reduce the influence on money in Congress, the only way is to make it less profitable to use such influence, and that is to massively reduce the spending and legislative power that Congress has. You know, how things actually worked throughout most of US history.
Exactly.
High school really should include some courses on political economics, rent seeking, and regulatory capture so that more people understand this.
Most of the moral panic surrounding campaign finance is based on correlation, not causation. In reality, large donations don't cause politicians to win, but politicians that are likely to win receive large donations. Furthermore, the fact that lobbyists, corporations, unions, and other special interests get to write legislation has little to do with campaign donations, and more with regulatory capture and the complexity of regulation.
And that brings us to these legislative proposals. The intent is to somehow make political speech more fair and egalitarian. The net result will, however, be that political power will be traded in even less transparent ways. In the worst case of fully publicly financed campaigns, you end up with government effectively deciding who can run against them.
I don't think these proposals have a snowball's chance in hell. But if they were to pass, the US would be screwed. So, I'll be donating to, and supporting, candidates who oppose them.
Attempting to negotiate a lower price is what free markets are about.
No, it is EXACTLY the sort of thing that helps break up "big, monopolistic corporations".
It is EXACTLY your attitude that helps create "big, monopolistic corporations".
Well, you can "take issue" with them all you want, but disliking something or believing it is dishonest is not sufficient justification for outlawing it.
Any government policy addressing climate change necessarily involves coercion.
Of course corporations "are" people, namely the people who have shared ownership of the corporation. If you screw corporations, you screw the people owning them.
No, your point was "Like most Americans you seem to focus only on wealth as a measure of success". You stated that without any evidence, and it is false. Yes, Americans are very wealthy, but that doesn't mean they "focus on wealth as a measure of success". In fact, the opposite is the case: Americans are fairly non-materialistic in comparison to the rest of the world, including Europeans. There are many cultural and historical reasons for that, but a very simple one is that if you're very wealthy, you can afford to be non-materialistic.
"Fair" has nothing to do with it. If you want to figure out what good government is, it simply doesn't make sense to compare the US as a whole to individual EU members. Individual EU members these days have less autonomy than US states, and the reason some EU members are doing comparatively well is because other EU members are getting screwed over.
The kind of European bigotry, ignorance, and chauvinism you display doesn't keep Greece in the EU and doesn't get down Spanish youth unemployment. Europe has severe economic and social problems that no pissing contest with the US will fix.
Think of the children! Parents obviously hate their children and that is why the loving Father State needs to step in and correct them! /sarc
My point was about usage, not about the history of the alphabets: readers simply aren't served well by seeing characters whose meaning (phonetic or ideographic) they understand but that they don't recognize because they are rendered in a font that uses conventions they don't know.
Greek and Latin scripts are mutually unintelligible. That is, most of the letters differ between the alphabets. If you print a Latin text in Greek characters, people can't read it at all. (Also, to put this into perspective, Greek and Latin separated about the time that the Chinese got their writing system.)
Chinese and Japanese mostly share the same character shapes; that's why it makes sense to code only the characters that are substantially different, and that's what Unicode does. Small variants are not coded separately not because evil Westerners are miserly with codepoints for CJK language, but because it's actually not useful.
And this is exactly the same thing that we did for the different variants of the Latin alphabet (which are themselves roughly as old as Japanese writing): we share the common letters and provide variants for those that differ between Latin alphabets.