Basically, it was a decent idea to provide health care for everyone. Who can be against that, eh? But one party wanted to use this as an instrument to increase government control over the citizens. If they wanted, they could have made a healthcare bill that wasn't nearly so frightening. But what would be the use of that? What's the point in making the common folk (named "sheeple", "mouthbreathers", and other much worse epithets) happy? These people need to be ruled, and since they won't agree to it, we have to sneak it in by the back door.
For those three of you who haven't seen it yet, http://hanzismatter.com/ is the canonical site for idiotic people getting themselves permanently tattooed with a language that they don't understand.
Because the writing system is ridiculous. The other day one of my fellow graduate students, someone who has been studying Chinese for ten years or more, said to me "My research is really hampered by the fact that I still just can't read Chinese. It takes me hours to get through two or three pages, and I can't skim to save my life." This would be an astonishing admission for a tenth-year student of, say, French literature, yet it is a comment I hear all the time among my peers
Because the language doesn't have the common sense to use an alphabet. Chinese people I know who have studied English for a few years can usually write with a handwriting style that is almost indistinguishable from that of the average American. Very few Americans, on the other hand, ever learn to produce a natural calligraphic hand in Chinese that resembles anything but that of an awkward Chinese third-grader.
Because the writing system just ain't very phonetic. One could say that Chinese is phonetic in the way that sex is aerobic: technically so, but in practical use not the most salient thing about it. Furthermore, this phonetic aspect of the language doesn't really become very useful until you've learned a few hundred characters, and even when you've learned two thousand, the feeble phoneticity of Chinese will never provide you with the constant memory prod that the phonetic quality of English does.
Because you can't cheat by using cognates. I remember when I had been studying Chinese very hard for about three years, I had an interesting experience. One day I happened to find a Spanish-language newspaper sitting on a seat next to me. I picked it up out of curiosity. "Hmm," I thought to myself. "I've never studied Spanish in my life. I wonder how much of this I can understand." At random I picked a short article about an airplane crash and started to read. I found I could basically glean, with some guesswork, most of the information from the article. The crash took place near Los Angeles. 186 people were killed. There were no survivors. The plane crashed just one minute after take-off. There was nothing on the flight recorder to indicate a critical situation, and the tower was unaware of any emergency. The plane had just been serviced three days before and no mechanical problems had been found. And so on. After finishing the article I had a sudden discouraging realization: Having never studied a day of Spanish, I could read a Spanish newspaper more easily than I could a Chinese newspaper after more than three years of studying Chinese.
Because even looking up a word in the dictionary is complicated. One of the most unreasonably difficult things about learning Chinese is that merely learning how to look up a word in the dictionary is about the equivalent of an entire semester of secretarial school. When I was in Taiwan, I heard that they sometimes held dictionary look-up contests in the junior high schools. Imagine a language where simply looking a word up in the dictionary is considered a skill like debate or volleyball! Another problem with looking up words in the dictionary has to do with the nature of written Chinese. In most languages it's pretty obvious where the word boundaries lie -- there are spaces between the words. If you don't know the word in question, it's usually fairly clear what you should look up. (What actually constitutes a word is a very subtle issue, of course, but for my purposes here, what I'm saying is basically correct.) In Chinese there are spaces between characters, but it takes quite a lot of knowledge of the language and often some genuine sleuth work to tell where word boundaries lie; thus it's often trial and error to look up a word. It would be as if English were written thus:
FEAR LESS LY OUT SPOKE N BUT SOME WHAT HUMOR LESS NEW ENG LAND BORN LEAD ACT OR GEORGE MICHAEL SON EX PRESS ED OUT RAGE TO DAY AT TH
Whenever you start a Chinese program, and you get garbage instead of Chinese characters, use Microsoft AppLocale to fix the problem. Works like a charm.
They didn't do a really bad job, they did it on purpose. The break-in was a deliberate insult. It gave Google the devil's choice of bowing to China and acknowledging them as master, or getting out of China and leaving the Chinese market to Baidu and other domestic companies. Quite clever, really. It's what I've come to expect of the Chinese.
China imposes huge exit costs on business. It's easy to get in, but you stand to lose a ton to get out. I think a lot of people make the mistake of thinking China is just another country like France or Burkina Faso. It's not. Foreign ownership of anything is restricted, and even if you're properly registered you will always be audited more carefully than any comparable Chinese company. These guys are going to go in to China, set up these huge research plants, and then be driven out Google-style. I mean, come on, China broke into google.com and left their fingerprints everywhere and "China rules!" spraypainted all over the windows. What kind of contempt do you have to have to even do something like that? To Chinese, foreigners are like women workers during WWII: temporarily useful.
Oh, and I hope that they enjoy doing their research behind the Great Firewall of China (Golden Shield). I hear someone saying VPN? VPNs were blocked from Xinjiang for several months following the riots, so the technical capability to block VPNs is there, to be activated if it is in China's interest to do so.
Like I said, it's really hard to find any sympathy for Artists here. Who would care if Wall Street bankers were getting totally screwed? Nobody, because they're a bunch of self-righteous jerks who hold the rest of us in contempt.
In the summary the text is shown as elrincondejesus.com with no hyperlink! WTF? Does Slashdot or its parent company have a policy against linking to sites containing infringing material? (right there on the front page is a link to "American Playboy")
I've got MSN, too. It's free, though. And as a bonus, it is a single-purpose communication program that supports video chat, file transfers, etc. - not cluttered up with silly games so it becomes a liability at work!
What does insomnia have to do with being nocturnal? Night owls still sleep, they just sleep in the daytime! Insomniacs can't sleep at all, the poor buggers. It figures, it was written by a journalist. They aren't the sharpest pencils in the box, you know.
She shouldn't be deciding at all. How the hell is she qualified to discuss such matters? These things need to be left in the hands of experts. The common people have all sorts of crazy ideas when it comes to health care, and it would be a lot better for everyone if the right choices were made for them.
Hm. I know some immigrants from Somalia, China, and Mexico who would heartily disagree with that. It appears you're talking about being the most successful, instead of pulling yourself out of poverty and into the middle class. But hey, back to our regularly-scheduled bout of anti-American negativism.
There's nothing that pisses me off more than a Windows app that opens (Internet Explorer) instead of (system default browser). The developer always comes back with a blank look "Who would ever not use IE? It's the web browser!"
Slashdot Mirror
Basically, it was a decent idea to provide health care for everyone. Who can be against that, eh? But one party wanted to use this as an instrument to increase government control over the citizens. If they wanted, they could have made a healthcare bill that wasn't nearly so frightening. But what would be the use of that? What's the point in making the common folk (named "sheeple", "mouthbreathers", and other much worse epithets) happy? These people need to be ruled, and since they won't agree to it, we have to sneak it in by the back door.
For those three of you who haven't seen it yet, http://hanzismatter.com/ is the canonical site for idiotic people getting themselves permanently tattooed with a language that they don't understand.
What do you mean? Chinese does too have an alphabet! By Good Characters, Inc., only $2.99.
Quoted at length from Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard. If you like this, go read the whole thing.
FEAR LESS LY OUT SPOKE N BUT SOME WHAT HUMOR LESS NEW ENG LAND BORN LEAD ACT OR GEORGE MICHAEL SON EX PRESS ED OUT RAGE TO DAY AT TH
Whenever you start a Chinese program, and you get garbage instead of Chinese characters, use Microsoft AppLocale to fix the problem. Works like a charm.
Oh sure, then you can have the joy of being a second-class citizen, working for a Chinese boss. God forbid if you're a woman, or even worse, black.
What, you expect them to come up with new ideas or something?
They didn't do a really bad job, they did it on purpose. The break-in was a deliberate insult. It gave Google the devil's choice of bowing to China and acknowledging them as master, or getting out of China and leaving the Chinese market to Baidu and other domestic companies. Quite clever, really. It's what I've come to expect of the Chinese.
China imposes huge exit costs on business. It's easy to get in, but you stand to lose a ton to get out. I think a lot of people make the mistake of thinking China is just another country like France or Burkina Faso. It's not. Foreign ownership of anything is restricted, and even if you're properly registered you will always be audited more carefully than any comparable Chinese company. These guys are going to go in to China, set up these huge research plants, and then be driven out Google-style. I mean, come on, China broke into google.com and left their fingerprints everywhere and "China rules!" spraypainted all over the windows. What kind of contempt do you have to have to even do something like that? To Chinese, foreigners are like women workers during WWII: temporarily useful.
Oh, and I hope that they enjoy doing their research behind the Great Firewall of China (Golden Shield). I hear someone saying VPN? VPNs were blocked from Xinjiang for several months following the riots, so the technical capability to block VPNs is there, to be activated if it is in China's interest to do so.
GM has plenty of money, thats what that "Bailout" thing that Obama gave them was.
Like I said, it's really hard to find any sympathy for Artists here. Who would care if Wall Street bankers were getting totally screwed? Nobody, because they're a bunch of self-righteous jerks who hold the rest of us in contempt.
In the summary the text is shown as elrincondejesus.com with no hyperlink! WTF? Does Slashdot or its parent company have a policy against linking to sites containing infringing material? (right there on the front page is a link to "American Playboy")
Well, now that you explain it that way, genocide based on religion is perfectly OK!
It's pretty hard to have sympathy with Artists who despise the common people and spend their careers intentionally making art that excludes them.
Yeah, and eating silver will turn your skin blue. Not like Avatar blue, but pretty close.
I've got MSN, too. It's free, though. And as a bonus, it is a single-purpose communication program that supports video chat, file transfers, etc. - not cluttered up with silly games so it becomes a liability at work!
What does insomnia have to do with being nocturnal? Night owls still sleep, they just sleep in the daytime! Insomniacs can't sleep at all, the poor buggers. It figures, it was written by a journalist. They aren't the sharpest pencils in the box, you know.
She shouldn't be deciding at all. How the hell is she qualified to discuss such matters? These things need to be left in the hands of experts. The common people have all sorts of crazy ideas when it comes to health care, and it would be a lot better for everyone if the right choices were made for them.
The word is the same, it's just a variant spelling. You'd figure the people who invented the language would know that. Cultural imperialism? Huh?
Hooray for another beta product from Google! I wonder how many years this one will be in production before they call it v1.0.
Wow! It's like they just described Madden '95 on PC!
The More You Know: most of the people persecuted by Senator McCarthy were, in fact, Communists who had infiltrated the U.S. government.
Hm. I know some immigrants from Somalia, China, and Mexico who would heartily disagree with that. It appears you're talking about being the most successful, instead of pulling yourself out of poverty and into the middle class. But hey, back to our regularly-scheduled bout of anti-American negativism.
There's nothing that pisses me off more than a Windows app that opens (Internet Explorer) instead of (system default browser). The developer always comes back with a blank look "Who would ever not use IE? It's the web browser!"
"almost exactly"
"American English"
"baggy tights"
"journalistic ethics"
"creation science"