>> It's really helpful to paste some Chinese into the editor and be able to hover the mouse over words to get instant dictionary lookup.
There's an open source project doing exactly this for the simplified character set at:
http://www.adsotrans.com
Neatest feature is the collaborative backend database, which is also open source and downloadable. The Beijing-based server is a bit slow for trans-Pacific, but there is a language learning news portal using it which loads much faster. I use it as my homepage:
I get the feeling that if Lucas actually DID refilm Ran frame-for-frame his criticism would consist of nothing but attacks on how boring the damn thing was, especially the early scenes which were (really) far too political. No-one needs that many shots of people moping around in the grass nor do they really want to see minutes of old men creeping out of burning fortresses when a couple of action shots would have done just as well.
You get the film you get, and this one is a serial space adventure. Live with the conventions of the genre or don't go. And you can call the criticism hackneyed and cliched, but that doesn't even approach a sophmoric level of film analysis.
>> Lucas can do good guy/bad guy fine- Darth Vader wears BLACK and breathes OMINOUSLY and STRANGLES his underlings without hesitation, thus he is EVIL and must be stopped. Luke is INNOCENT and GOOD, and Leah is PURE and GOOD too (they both wear WHITE), let's hope they WIN!
If you understood the parent post, I think you'd understand why this is a misinterpretation of the film.
Did you catch the cloud or water imagery in the second film. What about the use of colours to casually foreshadow Anakin's maternal attachment ("blue for the boy, red for his mother"). Or the use of masks, duplicates, moon imagery???
There is tons of stuff there that most people don't bother to look for because they don't like the film or think reading anything into it is a waste of time. But that doesn't mean it isn't there. Case in point, consider the thematic split between ego and id on Naboo. Hardly accidental that Jar Jar (the id) is the one who proposes the droid army. Anger triumphs reason.
And if Lucas uses conventional imagery, it isn't as stiltedly as you suggest. Consider cloud city. A perfectly "white" (heavenly) city which turns into a blood-red hell sequence as sunset falls suggests the capacity for evil which lies within the individuals of that film as well. Or look at the final transformation of C3PO at the end of Attack of the Clones. His physical transformation into a battledroid is nothing more than a symbolic manifestation of the changes all of the other "good" characters undergo (abandoning pacifism for violence).
Until Microsoft's solves its significant issues with software security and reliability, it is unreasonable to put obstacles in the way of consumers who need to reinstall their software.
There are two reasons. The first is the issue of reasonableness. Issuing a paper license (in a box jammed-full of brochureware) is an unreasonable way to provide critical information required for product operation. A related problem is Microsoft's reluctance to even provide installation media in many cases. If someone needs to buy replacement media because of problems with Microsoft's software distribution model, they will probably use the key that comes with it regardless of source.
The second issue is a reasonable expectation that the software you purchase will continue to provide the service you paid for it. To the extent that older version of Windows are becoming unusable due to bad design decisions made by Microsoft, I think its perfectly legitimate for users to upgrade by using pirated software. There is a point at which continuing to upgrade becomes unreasonable, but reinstalling a patched version of XP bundled with SP2 instead of installing an older copy and updating online should not be a problem.
Locke's first treatise begins with a discussion of Adam's right to name animals. He argued that this was a divine right to man which implied limitations on the crown.
I've read both, and my reading is that Locke was largely concerned with physical property. If not, for instance, we are led deductively to the conclusion that language is property.
I also study political science, and have never attended a class which has given only one answer to this kind of question, or invoked an authority without questioning their basis for judgement and process of reasoning.
>> You are incorrect and probably stupid if you think that every French-speaker in the entire world speaks exactly the same language.
The person whose English you've taken the time to criticise is a French Canadian. He is probably also a bit more authoritative than you on worldwide differences in French, even if he does say courielle instead of email.;)
You were probably accessing the site through the network of a foreign company. Internet access for foreign companies is more expensive but much less censored. I've noticed huge differences in the accessibility of sites dependong on what network I'm on.
I've been unable to pull up the English version for the past two weeks whereever I've tried. It either redirects to the Chinese version or just fails.
The quote comes from an interview, not a prepared speech. That it is already *that* qualified suggests that Gore was being very careful to avoid overstating his contribution, and restrict them to the public policy domain.
Like or dislike the man for whatever reasons you want. But arguing that he claimed to invent the Internet is silly.
Your concerns on the environmental front are valid, but Lenovo is an assembler and marketer. Pollution takes place higher up the value chain.
Two things to remember: Lenovo is a Chinese firm and largely avoids paying the Windows tax. The extreme competition in computer assembly (the company *is* undercut by small businesses) suggests it lacks the ability to truly abuse workers in the sense of paying them below market wages.
FWIW, I work in China and would have bought a Lenovo for my last laptop, but needed an international warranty and so went with Fugitsu.
You don't understand. The issue is not voter preference but statistical anomalies in measuring them.
Exit polling is targeted, large-n and technology-neutral. When its accuracy starts to correlate with binary variables like Paper_Record_Exists or Election_Results_Auditable there is reason to be suspicious.
So don't hold back.... If you've got a non-vacuous explanation by all means share it. The statisticians in the crowd would love to hear.
>> The authors imply a causal relationship that isn't purely supported by their data.
Correlation is not causation but rational evidence of it. Your argument is not: the assertion of widespread and consistent Democratic fraud ONLY in select counties in multiple pre-2002 elections, at least one of which was incredibly transparent (Florida, 2000).
If you are truly in a position to judge good from bad social science, you should be competent enough to run an OLS regression. They have given you the data AND their model. Your test is simple: what percentage reduction of democratic votes in counties with electronic ballots THIS time is required in past elections to reduce the confidence level of their model to 95% or less.
If you have SPSS installed, it should take 20 minutes. And if you understand statistics you'll understand that this measure of robustness will return the smallest amount of fraud which can reasonably be claimed to have skewed their results.
I prefer Occam's razor, but if you want to go with the Democratic fraud story, flesh it out a bit. What level of fraud are you asserting actually happened in previous elections and why would it happen in ONLY those counties?
Had you read the article or studied multivariate statistical analysis you would know that no-one is worried about when the "gains correlate well with the counties in which Bush previously did the most poorly". They are worried about when voting methods become statistically significant variables in predicting changes in voter outcomes over time.
This is excellent social science. So how about downloading the datasets and runing your opinions through SPSS before you toss them out?
Jan Wong is a well-known columnist for the Globe and Mail. But anyone familiar with mandarin would spot her as a Westerner at once. These are the giveaways:
(1) Neither "Jan" nor "Wong" are standard English spellings of Chinese characters. They come from early Western attempts to represent Chinese phonetics using the alphabet. Mainlanders would use standard pinyin, which is probably "Zhan" and "Wang".
(2) Note that the family name is written LAST rather than FIRST. Few Chinese will do this unless they're trying to break into Western markets ("Jet Li", "Fay Wang", "Jackie Chan", etc).
I know the comment was meant in jest, but it still comes across as somewhat racist.
In China pirated CDs run between $0.50 and $0.60 USD, Non-pirated ones cost about five times that on average. Adjusting for the income differential this would be the equivalent of someone in the US being able to purchase CDs for about $5.00.
Funny that there is no shortage of new and interesting mainland-produced music. So keep up the fight! Just because it is possible to theoretically argue that IPR is necessary to give people incentives to produce doesn't make the argument at all valid. Demand empirical proof!!!
Since the larger corporations which benefit overwhelmingly from strengthened IPR have the data to do things like regression analyses on this question, the lack of any statistically-defensible empirical studies backing their claims strongly suggests that the relationship they claim is weak or non-existant.
I know the difference between fixed and flexible exchange rates. My reply was to the claim that the exchange rate "is set delibrately low by the Chinese government to encourage foreign investment"
You can argue that central steps to prevent inflation domestically are putting deflationary pressure on China's trading partners, but not much else. Americans seem predisposed to taking the fixed exchange rate as de facto manipulation. Which is pretty ignorant. No-one would ever make the same claim about the United States under Bretton Woods, or Great Britain in the nineteenth century.
The value of the Yuan has been held constant at about 8.3 since 1996. It is hard to square this fact with the popular image of China manipulating its exchange rate.
About the worst you can say is that policy makers in China have been buying up inflowing dollar assets to ward off inflation. Inflation would theoretically reduce American demand for Chinese products and push the trade balance towards equilibrium. It would also make life unlivable for many Chinese in major urban centers whose income is less than $100 USD/month and not likely to rise....
The government is not enforcing WAPI compliance. The concession came several weeks ago thanks to both domestic and foreign pressure. Their multimedia and cellular formats are no more proprietary than foreign offerings, and usually have lower licensing fees.
What amazes me is how cynical people here are. Project Gutenberg owes everything to Michael Hart, and so you think that admirers of the original would be supportive of the new venture.
Slashdot Mirror
>> It's really helpful to paste some Chinese into the editor and be able to hover the mouse over words to get instant dictionary lookup.
There's an open source project doing exactly this for the simplified character set at:
http://www.adsotrans.com
Neatest feature is the collaborative backend database, which is also open source and downloadable. The Beijing-based server is a bit slow for trans-Pacific, but there is a language learning news portal using it which loads much faster. I use it as my homepage:
http://www.newsinchinese.com
I get the feeling that if Lucas actually DID refilm Ran frame-for-frame his criticism would consist of nothing but attacks on how boring the damn thing was, especially the early scenes which were (really) far too political. No-one needs that many shots of people moping around in the grass nor do they really want to see minutes of old men creeping out of burning fortresses when a couple of action shots would have done just as well.
You get the film you get, and this one is a serial space adventure. Live with the conventions of the genre or don't go. And you can call the criticism hackneyed and cliched, but that doesn't even approach a sophmoric level of film analysis.
>> Lucas can do good guy/bad guy fine- Darth Vader wears BLACK and breathes OMINOUSLY and STRANGLES his underlings without hesitation, thus he is EVIL and must be stopped. Luke is INNOCENT and GOOD, and Leah is PURE and GOOD too (they both wear WHITE), let's hope they WIN!
If you understood the parent post, I think you'd understand why this is a misinterpretation of the film.
A very subtle set of films, actually.
Did you catch the cloud or water imagery in the second film. What about the use of colours to casually foreshadow Anakin's maternal attachment ("blue for the boy, red for his mother"). Or the use of masks, duplicates, moon imagery???
There is tons of stuff there that most people don't bother to look for because they don't like the film or think reading anything into it is a waste of time. But that doesn't mean it isn't there. Case in point, consider the thematic split between ego and id on Naboo. Hardly accidental that Jar Jar (the id) is the one who proposes the droid army. Anger triumphs reason.
And if Lucas uses conventional imagery, it isn't as stiltedly as you suggest. Consider cloud city. A perfectly "white" (heavenly) city which turns into a blood-red hell sequence as sunset falls suggests the capacity for evil which lies within the individuals of that film as well. Or look at the final transformation of C3PO at the end of Attack of the Clones. His physical transformation into a battledroid is nothing more than a symbolic manifestation of the changes all of the other "good" characters undergo (abandoning pacifism for violence).
No wonder they all lose.
Until Microsoft's solves its significant issues with software security and reliability, it is unreasonable to put obstacles in the way of consumers who need to reinstall their software.
There are two reasons. The first is the issue of reasonableness. Issuing a paper license (in a box jammed-full of brochureware) is an unreasonable way to provide critical information required for product operation. A related problem is Microsoft's reluctance to even provide installation media in many cases. If someone needs to buy replacement media because of problems with Microsoft's software distribution model, they will probably use the key that comes with it regardless of source.
The second issue is a reasonable expectation that the software you purchase will continue to provide the service you paid for it. To the extent that older version of Windows are becoming unusable due to bad design decisions made by Microsoft, I think its perfectly legitimate for users to upgrade by using pirated software. There is a point at which continuing to upgrade becomes unreasonable, but reinstalling a patched version of XP bundled with SP2 instead of installing an older copy and updating online should not be a problem.
Locke's first treatise begins with a discussion of Adam's right to name animals. He argued that this was a divine right to man which implied limitations on the crown.
I've read both, and my reading is that Locke was largely concerned with physical property. If not, for instance, we are led deductively to the conclusion that language is property.
I also study political science, and have never attended a class which has given only one answer to this kind of question, or invoked an authority without questioning their basis for judgement and process of reasoning.
>> You are incorrect and probably stupid if you think that every French-speaker in the entire world speaks exactly the same language.
;)
The person whose English you've taken the time to criticise is a French Canadian. He is probably also a bit more authoritative than you on worldwide differences in French, even if he does say courielle instead of email.
Live and let live. Peace.
True cold burns. I hold with those who favor fire.
You post is a chronology of might making right, which is hardly an argument against civil war settling the issue again.
Perhaps all of Asia can have a giant Counterstrike Tournament to settle the issue.
You were probably accessing the site through the network of a foreign company. Internet access for foreign companies is more expensive but much less censored. I've noticed huge differences in the accessibility of sites dependong on what network I'm on.
I've been unable to pull up the English version for the past two weeks whereever I've tried. It either redirects to the Chinese version or just fails.
The quote comes from an interview, not a prepared speech. That it is already *that* qualified suggests that Gore was being very careful to avoid overstating his contribution, and restrict them to the public policy domain.
Like or dislike the man for whatever reasons you want. But arguing that he claimed to invent the Internet is silly.
Your concerns on the environmental front are valid, but Lenovo is an assembler and marketer. Pollution takes place higher up the value chain.
Two things to remember: Lenovo is a Chinese firm and largely avoids paying the Windows tax. The extreme competition in computer assembly (the company *is* undercut by small businesses) suggests it lacks the ability to truly abuse workers in the sense of paying them below market wages.
FWIW, I work in China and would have bought a Lenovo for my last laptop, but needed an international warranty and so went with Fugitsu.
You don't understand. The issue is not voter preference but statistical anomalies in measuring them.
Exit polling is targeted, large-n and technology-neutral. When its accuracy starts to correlate with binary variables like Paper_Record_Exists or Election_Results_Auditable there is reason to be suspicious.
So don't hold back.... If you've got a non-vacuous explanation by all means share it. The statisticians in the crowd would love to hear.
Cross state variances in the accuracy of exit polling appear to have largely correlated with the kinds of voting technology used.
Why should we expect variances in voter response to exit polls based on the technology voters used to vote. Sorry, I don't buy it.
>> The authors imply a causal relationship that isn't purely supported by their data.
Correlation is not causation but rational evidence of it. Your argument is not: the assertion of widespread and consistent Democratic fraud ONLY in select counties in multiple pre-2002 elections, at least one of which was incredibly transparent (Florida, 2000).
If you are truly in a position to judge good from bad social science, you should be competent enough to run an OLS regression. They have given you the data AND their model. Your test is simple: what percentage reduction of democratic votes in counties with electronic ballots THIS time is required in past elections to reduce the confidence level of their model to 95% or less.
If you have SPSS installed, it should take 20 minutes. And if you understand statistics you'll understand that this measure of robustness will return the smallest amount of fraud which can reasonably be claimed to have skewed their results.
I prefer Occam's razor, but if you want to go with the Democratic fraud story, flesh it out a bit. What level of fraud are you asserting actually happened in previous elections and why would it happen in ONLY those counties?
You're right, it is just your opinion.
Had you read the article or studied multivariate statistical analysis you would know that no-one is worried about when the "gains correlate well with the counties in which Bush previously did the most poorly". They are worried about when voting methods become statistically significant variables in predicting changes in voter outcomes over time.
This is excellent social science. So how about downloading the datasets and runing your opinions through SPSS before you toss them out?
Jan Wong is a well-known columnist for the Globe and Mail. But anyone familiar with mandarin would spot her as a Westerner at once. These are the giveaways:
(1) Neither "Jan" nor "Wong" are standard English spellings of Chinese characters. They come from early Western attempts to represent Chinese phonetics using the alphabet. Mainlanders would use standard pinyin, which is probably "Zhan" and "Wang".
(2) Note that the family name is written LAST rather than FIRST. Few Chinese will do this unless they're trying to break into Western markets ("Jet Li", "Fay Wang", "Jackie Chan", etc).
I know the comment was meant in jest, but it still comes across as somewhat racist.
That works, but why not just put the sticker you write on above the protective layer. Why is this even a question?
In China pirated CDs run between $0.50 and $0.60 USD, Non-pirated ones cost about five times that on average. Adjusting for the income differential this would be the equivalent of someone in the US being able to purchase CDs for about $5.00.
Funny that there is no shortage of new and interesting mainland-produced music. So keep up the fight! Just because it is possible to theoretically argue that IPR is necessary to give people incentives to produce doesn't make the argument at all valid. Demand empirical proof!!!
Since the larger corporations which benefit overwhelmingly from strengthened IPR have the data to do things like regression analyses on this question, the lack of any statistically-defensible empirical studies backing their claims strongly suggests that the relationship they claim is weak or non-existant.
Looks like they pulled a fast one.
I know the difference between fixed and flexible exchange rates. My reply was to the claim that the exchange rate "is set delibrately low by the Chinese government to encourage foreign investment"
You can argue that central steps to prevent inflation domestically are putting deflationary pressure on China's trading partners, but not much else. Americans seem predisposed to taking the fixed exchange rate as de facto manipulation. Which is pretty ignorant. No-one would ever make the same claim about the United States under Bretton Woods, or Great Britain in the nineteenth century.
The value of the Yuan has been held constant at about 8.3 since 1996. It is hard to square this fact with the popular image of China manipulating its exchange rate.
About the worst you can say is that policy makers in China have been buying up inflowing dollar assets to ward off inflation. Inflation would theoretically reduce American demand for Chinese products and push the trade balance towards equilibrium. It would also make life unlivable for many Chinese in major urban centers whose income is less than $100 USD/month and not likely to rise....
less doesn't transparently support alternate character-encodings such as GB for simplified Chinese text.
:)
At least... it doesn't on my machine. So I use more
The government is not enforcing WAPI compliance. The concession came several weeks ago thanks to both domestic and foreign pressure. Their multimedia and cellular formats are no more proprietary than foreign offerings, and usually have lower licensing fees.
"Take the Roman Empire for example, they started outlawing all kinds of technolgy "
An example here would be helpful.
Thanks for the clear review.
What amazes me is how cynical people here are. Project Gutenberg owes everything to Michael Hart, and so you think that admirers of the original would be supportive of the new venture.
Thanks Michael.