I really can't explain this properly because I can't show you the symbols,
I know the symbols; I can read Japanese.
I'm sick of seeing the Chinese variant of the first kanji in "chokusetsu" whenever I type an email in Japanese
Why would you be seeing the Chinese variant if you're writing an E-mail in Japanese, presumably using a Japanese font? Note that even Google Translate manages to show you the correct local variants:
Are you saying the Japs and the Chinks should unify their writing systems? Because that's as disrespectful as the demonyms I have just used.
I don't see how suggesting that the Chinese and Japanese do what we in the West have done for thousands of years, namely rationalize, unify, and adapt our writing systems is "disrespectful". Writing in the West is several thousand years older than in China; we discarded ideographs in favor of our alphabet before the Chinese even had writing. I have lived in Western cities that had literate cultures a thousand years before the Japanese even had any writing.
Your analogy between ethnic slurs and cultural disrespect doesn't work. Ethnicity is an arbitrary accident of birth and has no bearing on anyone's abilities, morals, or other characteristics. Disrespecting someone's ethnicity is therefore not rational. Culture, on the other hand, is a collection of values, norms, behaviors, and achievements. And you are absolutely right: while I find Chinese and Japanese culture interesting and like some aspects of each, overall, I consider those cultures failures and examples of how human societies and affairs should not be organized. And I think I have history on my side. So, in that sense, I "disrespect" those cultures as cultures.
Europe achieves what progressives want: low inequality through redistribution, taxation, and other policies. That means that if you're below average, you get compensated better than you ought to be, and if you're above average, you get compensated worse than you ought to be based on your ability and productivity. It shouldn't be surprising that this is not an attractive proposition to people with skills and talents, so many leave if they can.
Any intelligent civilization populous and large enough to cause a detectable extinction event would leave lots of fossils. None of the fossils in the fossil record that we have found could plausibly have been intelligent even if they didn't leave any artifacts.
In addition, there is little indication that humans will actually cause a significant extinction event. Sure, in the space of 1000 years, we cleared off the same number of species that might normally go extinct in 100000 years, but that's a blip that wouldn't even be noticed in the fossil record. We'd have to keep going for a long time before that because a geologically noticeable extinction event, let alone a mass extinction. And it looks like we're slowing down killing off things.
Yes, I agree that that's what the GP was writing for. But it isn't Unicode's fault that the original text lacked the language tags or font information for his needs; Unicode didn't prevent the original authors from putting that in, either using Unicode's own language tag characters or (preferred) XML/HTML and/or metadata. However, most people really don't want the behavior he wants, which is why people don't usually do this.
Give some evidence, better than the one in the paper (note: several studies have shown that this is a massive extinction event and we're probably the ones doing it).
The Holocene extinction is a well known phenomenon; you can read about it here:
The paper doesn't present any new evidence; it's a biased interpretation of existing, known data.
Ehrlich is simply wrong when he says "[the study] shows without any significant doubt that we are now entering the sixth great mass extinction event"; that would require 75% or more of all species to disappear; the paper only looks at a small subset of species, those most affected by humans. The paper also incorrectly extrapolates from the past into the future, but 19th and 20th century trends simply aren't relevant to the 21st century or beyond. Growth is entirely different in the 21st century, and the high extinction rates in past centuries were due to particularly susceptible species and pristine ecosystems being affected. Think of it this way: if we were actively trying to kill species, we are now reaching the point where we have killed off all the ones that are easy to kill, and if we wanted to continue, it would be a lot harder and we would have to slow down.
Finally, the paper presents no evidence that an anthropogenic extinction or mass extinction event would be harmful to humans. Gibbons, bison, manatee, oryxes, tapirs, and all those other endangered species are wonderful to have around, and I think everybody should donate and volunteer trying to provide habitat for them. But misrepresenting their significance doesn't help: Bartel's Rat going extinct is no more a threat to human survival than the Mona Lisa going up in flames would be.
All I see is bull shit!
The paper is bullshit, and if you knew anything about the subject, you would recognize it as such.
Personally, I'm not particularly bothered by this. but it leads to the technical problem that each text must be supplied with a language tag to select a correct font.
That's roughly like saying that you need to render the words "automaton", "Tsirpas", and "Varoufakis" in Greek characters, and "Putin" and "Gorbachev" using Cyrillic characters, in Latin text: it serves little purpose and it would make the text unreadable for many readers.
Most of the time, you should to show Japanese glyph variants to Japanese readers because that's what they know how to read and how to enter with their keyboard.
It reaches a random Chinese web page, encoded in UTF-8. The page's author never bothered adding a language tag. Now the web browser must guess whether to render the page in a Chinese font or a Japanese one. And a "guess" is really all that it can do.
The reader decides which font he wants to use based on what he is comfortable reading, and you have no business overriding that. In case a character variant is significant, the Unicode consortium will probably have allocated a separate codepoint for it, and the writer has the option of choosing that.
There are a number of glyphs that share a common historic root in these languages, and the Unicode folks decided to consecrate this historical relationship by recycling the character codes between the languages.
This is not substantially different for what happened with Latin and Greek characters, both pre-Unicode and in Unicode.
Yet, the glyphs are substantially different when rendered.
Most of those glyph variants are similar enough that people have no trouble figuring them out. Those are the ideographs that were unified. For the rest, Unicode chose non-unified ideographs. Since CJK writing systems are big, unwieldy, and complex, they didn't get it all right on the first try, which is why they are adding new characters in new releases of Unicode.
Furthermore, why does it even make sense to show a Japanese reader a Chinese glyph variant? Who are you designing your application for? I mean, if all you care about is appearance, you might as well embed images. But let's say a Japanese reader reads a text on Chinese philosophy. He wants to be able to enter and search for Chinese loan words and Chinese names; what good would it do him if the Chinese loan words and names are encoded in ways that he can't enter or search for?
Unicode isn't that great after all
These problems are intrinsic to the languages; they are not problems with Unicode. The real solution is political and cultural: if using strings across languages is a frequent use case, that use case can only be addressed by harmonizing the writing systems themselves and adapting real-world usage; it's not something that the encoding can solve. And, of course, that unification is already happening, just like it happened in the West when we mostly unified our variants of the Latin writing system across Europe.
In short, unicode is about as universal as USB, including the built-in crappiness.
And like USB, it's a lot better than what we had before. There are a few things wrong with Unicode, but nothing major. And where Unicode has problems, they are usually just problems that specific writing system users did to themselves and don't hurt anybody else (e.g., Chinese and Japanese screwed up a bit, but that really doesn't matter to the rest of the world).
There are many more problems with unicode, including security problems, wilfully introduced interoperability problems, problems with having too many different encodings to do the same thing, and so on, and so forth.
Those are problems with how you use Unicode, not with Unicode itself. Unicode addresses them through normalization; there are standard normalized forms you can use, plus a standard database of Unicode character properties for coming up with your own normalizations. That's really the best any system can do. The rest of the mess is just the inherent messiness of human writing systems.
Counterpoint: If we had a clear marker for encoding used, you could switch encodings and thereby switch rules on the fly, and use shorter encodings for the non-latin1-languages you use the most. Of course, you couldn't mix characters from fifty scripts at will, even mix and match accents among them. But again, the ability to do that is awesome expressive power that comes at a continuous cost but no practical gain.
I don't see how that would be any better: general purpose string libraries would have to support all major encodings, plus switching on the fly anyway. The only difference would be whether you indicate the encoding for every character or for parts of strings. If you chose markers to switch between encodings, libraries would simply convert strings into sequences of (encoding, character) pairs anyway and then transform those into integers because string algorithms and theoretical computer science have always assumed that strings are members of \Sigma^*, where \Sigma is a set of characters.
At Google’s product forums users of Chrome have expressed concern about the lack of any API access to disable the audio recording capability,
The problem isn't so much that Chromium is doing that, it is that most packages run largely unprotected.
What Linux lacks is something similar to what the Android / iOS permission systems attempt to do (but aren't very good at either). All the low level infrastructure is there, but there is support missing at the package and desktop level.
Which may or may not have had much to do with regulation... Correlation != causation etc.
I didn't make an argument, I stated a widely held belief backed up by research and data: airline deregulation caused decreases in ticket prices. I invite you to review the economic literature.
If you come across any peer reviewed articles in a reputable journal making a coherent argument backed by data that the decrease in ticket prices only accidentally coincided with deregulation and had other causes, please by all means share it.
If you're rich and famous, London is a great place, with per square foot prices about four times what they are in SF. You get to hobnob with all the wealthy and influential people, and get really close to people with tons of money to throw around. Of course, you have to like the lousy weather in London. And you have to not give a shit that your wonderful, privileged London lifestyle is subsidized by hardworking Brits who will never get to enjoy it. I'm sure Jimmy Wales meets all those criteria.
Then there is flying over other people's properties without their permission.
Except, of course, if you're a big corporation and the FAA gives you license to fly wherever you want. And that's going to happen with FAA regulation of drones.
I always thought that Moscow was in Russia ***runs off to check an atlas*** Yep, it's still there.
Yes, and Russia is a country that spans two continents, Europe and Asia. Moscow happens to be in Europe. It's not a difficult concept to grasp.
Apologies for using facts against you like this.
I'm not arguing that the Guardian numbers are wrong (they seem pretty plausible to me), I'm pointing out that you don't even understand the data if you believe that those numbers represent facts. My point is about your ignorance, not the numbers.
The numbers themselves are irrelevant: whether a bunch of inbred Icelanders or guilt-ridden Germans have low rates of police violence has no bearing on what US policies should be or what is just, right, or moral. There are certainly things that can and should be improved about policing in the US, but you simply are too ignorant to weigh in on that.
I'm not sure who you think I am, but I'm not aware that I'm doing anything with/for/against the "will of the people".
I have no idea what you "do", if you do anything at all. But you said clearly what you think:
I personally think it's wrong to kill people over mere property and I don't believe that the average person is a good judge of when to use "deadly force".
The implication of what you are saying is that you consider your personal moral judgments to be superior and more informed to that of the "average person", and that you want your moral judgments to be the basis of law even if they disagree with the will of the majority or run up against individual liberties. And that is typical for European attitudes towards government.
With just a brief checking of facts, it appears that you are flat out wrong about "much of Europe abolished the death penalty as part of European integration".
Most of those are post-WWII, aren't they? When did you think European integration started?
You seem to have a strange, paranoid view of Europeans, so I'd guess that you've never travelled very much.
No, I have a realistic view of Europeans because I grew up in Europe, spent a large part of my life there, and don't delude myself about its dismal history and culture.
I'd recommend going to other countries as travel really does broaden the mind and gives you a better perspective.
Ah, more typical European chauvinism: "Americans are untraveled and stupid". Well, if I'm untraveled and stupid, it's Europe that made me that way. In any case, basking in the sun on a Florida beach or getting drunk in a Phuket bar doesn't make you historically or politically educated; for that you have to read and understand, and in the case of Europeans, you have to overcome decades of indoctrination and cultural chauvinism.
Yes, Moscow is in Europe. Where did you think it was?
UK... German
I have no doubt they are low in the UK and Germany. But that's not all of Europe, and the reasons they are low are not reasons that I'd like to see apply in the US.
The real threat to privacy is from government use of facial recognition technology. Worrying about whether the Banana Republic or Google tries to recognize your mug from a camera is such a useless distraction from the real threats that one really has to wonder whether these "privacy advocates" aren't really just in league with the NSA.
I personally think it's wrong to kill people over mere property and I don't believe that the average person is a good judge of when to use "deadly force".
So, in different words, you and people like you are substituting your judgment for the will of the people. Yes, that's exactly what's wrong with Europe.
Higher rates of killing is definitely wrong no matter what excuses are presented, but then there's such a huge cultural difference between the U.S. and Europe that we think that capital punishment is barbaric.
When much of Europe abolished the death penalty as part of European integration, it wasn't by popular will, it was by imposition from above, so that's not a "cultural difference", it's difference in opinion by Europe's ruling classes. And even today, many European countries are still split about the death penalty, despite decades of indoctrination.
In reality, Europeans don't "think" much at all; they parrot what their government and their intellectual classes tell them, usually with a good deal of European chauvinism and anti-Americanism thrown in. And what you call "European culture" is really the preferences of the educated upper middle class that you happen to be part of.
Are those preferences good? Not really. The worship of law and order is what has driven European nations to totalitarianism over and over again. Thanks, but I'd rather live in a "barbaric" and "uncivilized" country.
I think you're confused about my terminology of 'check point'. It is nothing to do with giving somebody a ticket.
No, I simply made two separate points: (1) there are plenty of checkpoints in Europe, for the same reasons they exist in the US: immigration, terrorism, smuggling, drugs, fugitives, and drunk driving.
And (2) in addition to that, in the US people get stopped when they get a ticket.
No, it will simply mean that political speech in Europe reverts to what it has always been: something approved by the state and engaged in mostly by statist academics, politicians, and media personalities.
Newspapers may go back to publishing just selected "letters from their readers" on their web sites, and blogs may disappear entirely. Well, except for the US and a few other places, where the new European fascists can't enforce their laws.
Perhaps. But the NSA still needs to drag him into court over his speech (likely to fail) or declare him a terrorist (rare and highly visible) if they want to do anything to him,
Slashdot Mirror
I know the symbols; I can read Japanese.
Why would you be seeing the Chinese variant if you're writing an E-mail in Japanese, presumably using a Japanese font? Note that even Google Translate manages to show you the correct local variants:
https://translate.google.com/#...
I don't see how suggesting that the Chinese and Japanese do what we in the West have done for thousands of years, namely rationalize, unify, and adapt our writing systems is "disrespectful". Writing in the West is several thousand years older than in China; we discarded ideographs in favor of our alphabet before the Chinese even had writing. I have lived in Western cities that had literate cultures a thousand years before the Japanese even had any writing.
Your analogy between ethnic slurs and cultural disrespect doesn't work. Ethnicity is an arbitrary accident of birth and has no bearing on anyone's abilities, morals, or other characteristics. Disrespecting someone's ethnicity is therefore not rational. Culture, on the other hand, is a collection of values, norms, behaviors, and achievements. And you are absolutely right: while I find Chinese and Japanese culture interesting and like some aspects of each, overall, I consider those cultures failures and examples of how human societies and affairs should not be organized. And I think I have history on my side. So, in that sense, I "disrespect" those cultures as cultures.
Europe achieves what progressives want: low inequality through redistribution, taxation, and other policies. That means that if you're below average, you get compensated better than you ought to be, and if you're above average, you get compensated worse than you ought to be based on your ability and productivity. It shouldn't be surprising that this is not an attractive proposition to people with skills and talents, so many leave if they can.
Any intelligent civilization populous and large enough to cause a detectable extinction event would leave lots of fossils. None of the fossils in the fossil record that we have found could plausibly have been intelligent even if they didn't leave any artifacts.
In addition, there is little indication that humans will actually cause a significant extinction event. Sure, in the space of 1000 years, we cleared off the same number of species that might normally go extinct in 100000 years, but that's a blip that wouldn't even be noticed in the fossil record. We'd have to keep going for a long time before that because a geologically noticeable extinction event, let alone a mass extinction. And it looks like we're slowing down killing off things.
Yes, I agree that that's what the GP was writing for. But it isn't Unicode's fault that the original text lacked the language tags or font information for his needs; Unicode didn't prevent the original authors from putting that in, either using Unicode's own language tag characters or (preferred) XML/HTML and/or metadata. However, most people really don't want the behavior he wants, which is why people don't usually do this.
The Holocene extinction is a well known phenomenon; you can read about it here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The paper doesn't present any new evidence; it's a biased interpretation of existing, known data.
Ehrlich is simply wrong when he says "[the study] shows without any significant doubt that we are now entering the sixth great mass extinction event"; that would require 75% or more of all species to disappear; the paper only looks at a small subset of species, those most affected by humans. The paper also incorrectly extrapolates from the past into the future, but 19th and 20th century trends simply aren't relevant to the 21st century or beyond. Growth is entirely different in the 21st century, and the high extinction rates in past centuries were due to particularly susceptible species and pristine ecosystems being affected. Think of it this way: if we were actively trying to kill species, we are now reaching the point where we have killed off all the ones that are easy to kill, and if we wanted to continue, it would be a lot harder and we would have to slow down.
Finally, the paper presents no evidence that an anthropogenic extinction or mass extinction event would be harmful to humans. Gibbons, bison, manatee, oryxes, tapirs, and all those other endangered species are wonderful to have around, and I think everybody should donate and volunteer trying to provide habitat for them. But misrepresenting their significance doesn't help: Bartel's Rat going extinct is no more a threat to human survival than the Mona Lisa going up in flames would be.
The paper is bullshit, and if you knew anything about the subject, you would recognize it as such.
That's roughly like saying that you need to render the words "automaton", "Tsirpas", and "Varoufakis" in Greek characters, and "Putin" and "Gorbachev" using Cyrillic characters, in Latin text: it serves little purpose and it would make the text unreadable for many readers.
Most of the time, you should to show Japanese glyph variants to Japanese readers because that's what they know how to read and how to enter with their keyboard.
The reader decides which font he wants to use based on what he is comfortable reading, and you have no business overriding that. In case a character variant is significant, the Unicode consortium will probably have allocated a separate codepoint for it, and the writer has the option of choosing that.
This is not substantially different for what happened with Latin and Greek characters, both pre-Unicode and in Unicode.
Most of those glyph variants are similar enough that people have no trouble figuring them out. Those are the ideographs that were unified. For the rest, Unicode chose non-unified ideographs. Since CJK writing systems are big, unwieldy, and complex, they didn't get it all right on the first try, which is why they are adding new characters in new releases of Unicode.
Furthermore, why does it even make sense to show a Japanese reader a Chinese glyph variant? Who are you designing your application for? I mean, if all you care about is appearance, you might as well embed images. But let's say a Japanese reader reads a text on Chinese philosophy. He wants to be able to enter and search for Chinese loan words and Chinese names; what good would it do him if the Chinese loan words and names are encoded in ways that he can't enter or search for?
These problems are intrinsic to the languages; they are not problems with Unicode. The real solution is political and cultural: if using strings across languages is a frequent use case, that use case can only be addressed by harmonizing the writing systems themselves and adapting real-world usage; it's not something that the encoding can solve. And, of course, that unification is already happening, just like it happened in the West when we mostly unified our variants of the Latin writing system across Europe.
And like USB, it's a lot better than what we had before. There are a few things wrong with Unicode, but nothing major. And where Unicode has problems, they are usually just problems that specific writing system users did to themselves and don't hurt anybody else (e.g., Chinese and Japanese screwed up a bit, but that really doesn't matter to the rest of the world).
Those are problems with how you use Unicode, not with Unicode itself. Unicode addresses them through normalization; there are standard normalized forms you can use, plus a standard database of Unicode character properties for coming up with your own normalizations. That's really the best any system can do. The rest of the mess is just the inherent messiness of human writing systems.
I don't see how that would be any better: general purpose string libraries would have to support all major encodings, plus switching on the fly anyway. The only difference would be whether you indicate the encoding for every character or for parts of strings. If you chose markers to switch between encodings, libraries would simply convert strings into sequences of (encoding, character) pairs anyway and then transform those into integers because string algorithms and theoretical computer science have always assumed that strings are members of \Sigma^*, where \Sigma is a set of characters.
I don't see a disconnect:
(1) Airfares down 50 percent from 30 years ago
(2) Average domestic airfare has risen 10.7% over the past five years, after adjusting for inflation.
Note that "from 30 years ago" is relevant to deregulation; the accompanying graph shows a steady decrease in ticket prices over most of that time.
Ticket prices and fees have risen strongly again only under Obama (see the graph in (1)), for whatever reason (but clearly not deregulation).
http://www.boston.com/communit...
The problem isn't so much that Chromium is doing that, it is that most packages run largely unprotected.
What Linux lacks is something similar to what the Android / iOS permission systems attempt to do (but aren't very good at either). All the low level infrastructure is there, but there is support missing at the package and desktop level.
I didn't make an argument, I stated a widely held belief backed up by research and data: airline deregulation caused decreases in ticket prices. I invite you to review the economic literature.
If you come across any peer reviewed articles in a reputable journal making a coherent argument backed by data that the decrease in ticket prices only accidentally coincided with deregulation and had other causes, please by all means share it.
If you're rich and famous, London is a great place, with per square foot prices about four times what they are in SF. You get to hobnob with all the wealthy and influential people, and get really close to people with tons of money to throw around. Of course, you have to like the lousy weather in London. And you have to not give a shit that your wonderful, privileged London lifestyle is subsidized by hardworking Brits who will never get to enjoy it. I'm sure Jimmy Wales meets all those criteria.
Yes, and flights were much more expensive too.
Except, of course, if you're a big corporation and the FAA gives you license to fly wherever you want. And that's going to happen with FAA regulation of drones.
Yes, and Russia is a country that spans two continents, Europe and Asia. Moscow happens to be in Europe. It's not a difficult concept to grasp.
I'm not arguing that the Guardian numbers are wrong (they seem pretty plausible to me), I'm pointing out that you don't even understand the data if you believe that those numbers represent facts. My point is about your ignorance, not the numbers.
The numbers themselves are irrelevant: whether a bunch of inbred Icelanders or guilt-ridden Germans have low rates of police violence has no bearing on what US policies should be or what is just, right, or moral. There are certainly things that can and should be improved about policing in the US, but you simply are too ignorant to weigh in on that.
I have no idea what you "do", if you do anything at all. But you said clearly what you think:
The implication of what you are saying is that you consider your personal moral judgments to be superior and more informed to that of the "average person", and that you want your moral judgments to be the basis of law even if they disagree with the will of the majority or run up against individual liberties. And that is typical for European attitudes towards government.
Most of those are post-WWII, aren't they? When did you think European integration started?
No, I have a realistic view of Europeans because I grew up in Europe, spent a large part of my life there, and don't delude myself about its dismal history and culture.
Ah, more typical European chauvinism: "Americans are untraveled and stupid". Well, if I'm untraveled and stupid, it's Europe that made me that way. In any case, basking in the sun on a Florida beach or getting drunk in a Phuket bar doesn't make you historically or politically educated; for that you have to read and understand, and in the case of Europeans, you have to overcome decades of indoctrination and cultural chauvinism.
Yes, Moscow is in Europe. Where did you think it was?
I have no doubt they are low in the UK and Germany. But that's not all of Europe, and the reasons they are low are not reasons that I'd like to see apply in the US.
They are more like deeply steeped in 1984-like Newspeak when they talk of "voluntary, enforceable" codes.
The real threat to privacy is from government use of facial recognition technology. Worrying about whether the Banana Republic or Google tries to recognize your mug from a camera is such a useless distraction from the real threats that one really has to wonder whether these "privacy advocates" aren't really just in league with the NSA.
So, in different words, you and people like you are substituting your judgment for the will of the people. Yes, that's exactly what's wrong with Europe.
When much of Europe abolished the death penalty as part of European integration, it wasn't by popular will, it was by imposition from above, so that's not a "cultural difference", it's difference in opinion by Europe's ruling classes. And even today, many European countries are still split about the death penalty, despite decades of indoctrination.
In reality, Europeans don't "think" much at all; they parrot what their government and their intellectual classes tell them, usually with a good deal of European chauvinism and anti-Americanism thrown in. And what you call "European culture" is really the preferences of the educated upper middle class that you happen to be part of.
Are those preferences good? Not really. The worship of law and order is what has driven European nations to totalitarianism over and over again. Thanks, but I'd rather live in a "barbaric" and "uncivilized" country.
No, I simply made two separate points: (1) there are plenty of checkpoints in Europe, for the same reasons they exist in the US: immigration, terrorism, smuggling, drugs, fugitives, and drunk driving.
And (2) in addition to that, in the US people get stopped when they get a ticket.
I think you are deluding yourself if you think that's not true; Europe runs from Lisbon to Moscow, after all.
I defy you to show any substantive statistics on police shootings or police violence in Europe at all.
No, it will simply mean that political speech in Europe reverts to what it has always been: something approved by the state and engaged in mostly by statist academics, politicians, and media personalities.
Newspapers may go back to publishing just selected "letters from their readers" on their web sites, and blogs may disappear entirely. Well, except for the US and a few other places, where the new European fascists can't enforce their laws.
Perhaps. But the NSA still needs to drag him into court over his speech (likely to fail) or declare him a terrorist (rare and highly visible) if they want to do anything to him,