The area occupied by Israel was largely unoccupied before the late 1800s and early 1900s when Jewish settlers started moving into the area.
Completely incorrect. The inconvenient fact that there were all these people already there is why the Zionists had to engage in a campaign of ethnic cleansing in 1948, and why the "right to return" has been an issue.
When Israel was formed it was the largest single group of Jews in the world and its creation was merely a matter of the British setting borders in the area to best represent the political/racial groups.
Let's get the history straight. At the end of WWI, with the destruction of the Ottoman Empire, the League of Nations decision to place Palestine under the administration of Great Britain. The British double-crossed the Arab population living there and made the Balfour Declaration, commiting Britian to the establishment of Jewish homeland in Palestine. (As with current U.S. support, the primary motivation was strategic interests in the area.)
In the early 20th century there were around 50,000 Jewish settlers living in the region, constituting perhaps 10% of the population. The remaining 90% of the population was, oddly enough. not very pleased at having foreign colonial powers
come in and take over. (It should be noted that before WWI, the Jews and Arabs in the region got along reasonably peacefully. It was Zionists outside Palestine who worked for the Balfour Declaration.)
During the 1920s, thanks to British policies about 100,000 Jewish immigrants arrived - a substantial number in a region with a population of about 750,000. The Jewish population more than doubled, rising to over 17%, and tensions began to rise.
In the 1930s, the Nazis began their reign of terror, and many Jews who escaped came to Palestine. By 1939 the Jewish population was over 445,000, out of a total of about 1,500,000 - nearly 30 per cent. By 1947, the total population of Palestine was 1,850,000, including 608,000 Jews.
The large Jewish population in the region at the time of the parition was only the result of decades of concerted effort by the British and by Zionist organizations.
The reason why the State of Israel exists today and why today 1,500,000 Palestinian Arabs are refugees is that, for 30 years, Jewish immigration was imposed on the Palestinian Arabs by British military power until the immigrants were sufficiently numerous and sufficiently well-armed to be able to fend for themselves with tanks and planes of their own. The tragedy in Palestine is not just a local one; it is a tragedy for the world, because it is an injustice that is a menace to the world's peace. -- Arnold J. Toynbee, 1968
It's a very popular myth that there was this vast empty space on the map that the Jewish refugees from WWII could occupy. The truth is that there were plenty of people aready living there, getting screwed over by the British Empire's form of Zionism.
(And indeed, the Jews have been victims in this too, a reasonable desire for a homeland twisted and warped by British and American politics, so that instead of slowly and peacefully building a independant nation, today the "Jewish homeland" is an unsustainable enterprise, existing only because of the support of the United States.)
One group is secular, democratic, multi-racial, and targets military targets.
Israel is Jewish state. Orthodox Judaism is the only legally recognized form of Judaism, and has considerable authority, with control over marriages, burials, and decisions over "who's a Jew". It takes great twisting of the language to regard that as secular.
I don't see anything in the 1st amendment that can keep them from requiring organizers and attendants lists to check against terrorist databases to the list of their criteria.
They're not "terrorist databases". They're "terrorist suspect databases". Until they have enough evidence to press charges, those suspects have full rights to assemble and petition.
...but the only true requirement is what's expressed in the name: "Object Oriented". Meaning a program is based on objects as the fundamental unit of coding
Sure, but one then has to ask, "What is an object"? The concepts of encapsulation and abstraction predate the widespread use of the term "object" to describe a software entity.
But, yeah, so long as the code is clear, I don't care what you call your technique.:-)
What you like is not object orientation, it's modularity - encapsulation and abstraction
Umm, that's what object orientation is.
No, object orientation also implies inheritance. Without that you have what's sometimes called "Abstract Data Types" (though that term is also used by some OO folks to describe abstract base classes), not objects. Don't have Stroustrup handy, but I can cite Yourdon's "Object-Oriented Systems Design" on this. Or see this Wikipedia page. Objects = Abstract Data Types + Inheritance. (Some insist that polymorphism must also be present to give OO.)
You can easily get encapsulation and abstraction (Abstract Data Types) in C. Put your module in a separate.c file, keep your private stuff in the.c file and mark it static and put declarations of anything you want to export in a.h file and use the "external" keyword.
You can get real OOness in C but it takes some heavy lifting, see gtk for an example.
And of course you can write non-OO code, or really bad OO code ("object obfuscated"), in C++.
OOP enables you to easily swap out modules, or replace existing code. As long as you know the inputs and outputs of an object, it can be seemlessly removed for a newer version.
But that's encapsulation and abstraction, which can be achieved in most any language. (C, for example, lets you do this by encapsulating things in the scope of one file.)
IMHO inheritance is an overrated feature of OOP
Exactly. What you like is not object orientation, it's modularity - encapsulation and abstraction.
There are sooo many general programming languages but only one database access languages: SQL? SQL is so old, it hurts
Arabic numbers are old too, but I don't see anyone proposing to change them.
SQL is an English-like representation of relational calculus. Relational calculus has not, and is not going to, change significantly. When the problem is solved well, there's no need to change the solution.
i dont agree, our limit of measurement will always be a limit of our tools, whatever they may be.
And since you always have to measure with tools, there's a limit. Or are you planning on using your ESP to "sense" where the particles are going?
it's not as if one electron spreads itself out around a nucleus in a statistical fashon
According to our best, most successful theories, yes, it is exactly like that. The universe appears "fuzzy" at small scales.
heisenberg proposed a principle to describe our measurements and not the property of what's behind the thing we are trying to measure.
That is the nature of scientific theory. It organizes, models, and predicts measurements. If there's a property of reality that does not cause observable effects, as far as science is concerned it doesn't exist. (Indeed it's hard to say what it would mean for something to have a property that does not have observable effects.)
if you think i'm hopelessly wrong here then please direct me to an experiment which proves that this universe is random at it's heart.
Google for "Bell's Inequality" and "EPR paradox". (Or for more complete introduction read John Gribben's book In Search of Schrodinger's Cat.)
Back in the 30's, Einstein, Podolsky, and
Rosen (EPR) argued that the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics - the
idea that things exist in a superpositioned "wave" state until an observation is made, and then collapse to a fundamentally random "real" value - had to be regarded as incomplete. They argued (somewhat like what you seem to be) that particles had "hidden variables" that kept things deterministic.
Their argument was this: imagine that two particles, A and B, interact with one another, then fly apart and don't interact with anything else until we decide to look at one of them. Each particle has its own momentum and position. We can't know both the momentum and position of either particle precisely (the uncertainty principle), but we can know the total
momentum of the pair, and the original distance between them.
If we measure the momentum of A, we can figure out the momentum of B (since we know the total momentum). We haven't messed with B, so presumably we can measure the position of B, and knowing the original position of A and the momentums we can figure out the position of A. So we know both position and momentum of A and B, in violation of the uncertainty principle!
So either the uncertainty principle is bunk and there are hiddern variables, or (and here's the really weird part) measuring the momentum of A somehow instantaneously - not at lightspeed, but instantaneously - affects B and disturbs its position so that uncertainly is preserved. "No reasonable definition of reality could be expected to permit this," said Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen.
However, the universe is not bound by our notions of reason. Bell's inequality shows a way to actually put this to the test. In the 60's he
figured out a mathematical statement (actually about particle spin rather than position and momentum, but the same reasoning applies) that would be true if EPR were right and there were hidden variables, and false if the particles were in superposition and the instantaneous weird action-at-a-distance thing were the case.
It's been tested. Bell's inequality is violated. While the question is not completely settled, our best evidence to date is that the universe is random, reality is fuzzy, and entangled particles can instantaneously affect one another over distance.
"Consider Heisenberg's uncertainty principle: the more precisely the position is known, the less precisely the momentum can be known"
this only exists because we have limited ability of measuring.
You're reasoning in circles. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle says exactly that "we have limited ability of measuring". It just makes it clear that, after a certain point, this isn't because we're not clever enough, but that the limits are part of the nature of the universe.
Are the MD5CRK folks trolling, smoking crack, or just not explaining themselves very well?
They "aim to disprove one of the fundamental requirements of a secure message digest: No two inputs can be found which produce the same digest - this is also known as a collision."
they won't ship a useful and decent free (as in beer) language because it's not fee (as in liberty), right?
If it's not free-as-in-liberty, then ipso facto it's not a useful and decent language. It is foolish to commit any significant project to development in a language whose future depends on the whim of one company.
I called VISA and said, hey guys, I didn't make this charge. They said, ok, took the charge off the bill and didn't pay the company. So if the company lets my card information get out that's their problem.
And we all pay for that credit card fraud, in the form of higher fees and interest rates.
What, you think your Visa issuer is going to cover the cost of the fraud out of the goodness of their hearts? Nope. They spread it around to all of us.
What is the best way to list languages on a resume that you have minimal skill in.
My resume says "C and C++; also some PHP, Perl, LISP, Bourne and C Shells, Pascal, SQL". I'll probably move PHP to a more primary position soon since I've been working primarily in it since last year.
I don't recommend getting more specific than "these I'm pretty good at, these I've had some exposure too".
"Begs the question" means that what you just said begs us to ask another question.
Except that it doesn't mean that. If you're using that sense of beg, then what are you begging the question for? ("I begged the question for a dollar to buy some bread.")
"Raise the question" just isn't emotional enough. Beg is so much more passionate.
"Beg" does not, and never has, had a meaning in any way similar to "to raise". It does have a meaning of "to evade or sidestep".
Why on Earth would anyone care about what "begging the question" means.
Perhaps one might wish to communicate clearly? I find that knowing the meaning of the words and phrases I use helps enormously with that goal.
These days, "begging the question" means "...and so that leads us to wonder".
In context, most educated readers can understand that that was the writer's intended message, yes. But another message comes through also: the writer is ignorant. (In that respect it is similar to using "I could care less," when in fact you mean "I couldn't care less"; or "I recommend you for doing that good deed" instead of "I commend you for doing that good deed.")
If "I am ignorant" is part of the message you wish to communicate, by all means, continue to use "beg the question" to mean "raise the question." We'll know what you mean.
I suppose what makes a superior display is in the eyes (literally) of the beholder.
You should NEVER have visible flicker on a decent CRT (unless you are comparing your new 2003 LCD to your old 14" running @60Hz)
I find anything below 70 Hz completely unusable, and have to get close to 80 before the problem goes away completely. Of course I've always adjusted my own machines accordingly, but I still occasionally encounter machines where the damn monitor looks like a strobelight to me. (Especially under fluorescent lights.)
As for "sharper pixels" you are technically correct - unfortunately sharper rectangular pixels does not a smooth diagonal line make...
Maybe that's the big difference in our perceptions - a little jagginess doesn't bother me at all. In fact blur drives me nuts and I dislike text antialiasing. (I agree with this "Joel on Software" column.) Instead, I pick fonts that look good on a pixelated display.
What the heck is good about that? Expensive energy no matter where it comes from means economic slowdown, lower standards of living, etc.
Fossil fuels are are very expensive way of producing energy. This expense is not nearly fully represented in the "sticker price". (You don't pay for oil wars, environment devistation, and the depletion of irreplacable resources at the gas pump.)
As the price of oil rises, the cost of a barrel of oil gets closer to the actual total cost. This will drive us towards more economically efficient solutions.
Yes, this will mean energy will be more expensive. In a market economy this will drive us to greater energy efficiency - which can mean more and better jobs and a better standard of living, et cetera. This is supposed to be the "Information Age", dammit - organization, not raw power.
Something my wife wants us to look at for both heating and cooling is "geothermal", that is using the earth for the both hot side (in winter) and cold side (summer) of the heat pump.
Ground source heat pumps seem like a great idea. The only drawback would be installation cost - you have to dig things up pretty good to lay the heat exchanger piping.
when the quality of LCD's (color depth/range, "refresh rates" etc) matches CRTs.
For text-based applications (which is most of what comptuers are used for), LCD give superior quality to CRTs. No flicker and sharper pixels. I'm never going back.
ways for statically checking our code (such as type checking...
Since PHP types are dynamic, it would be hard to do static checking, no?
PHP allows you to check types at runtime, using functions such as is_string(). For your classes, you are of course free to add a "get_type()" method to a base class and derive everything from that. You can choose your own trade-off of safety versus convenience.
Also, "mushin" more closely refers to "acting without thought" than "thinking without words".
That's how it's often translated, yes. That is, IMHO, an overly-literal translation. The person acting in mushin is not acting "thoughlessly" or "mindlessly". What has gone away is that inner voice, the chattering "monkey mind".
I've been studying a Seido Juku, a style of karate-do that incorporates Zen style meditation, for over eighteen years, and have had a little bit of experience of mushin in that time. I think the Suzuki quote ("He thinks like the showers coming down from the sky") is closer to it. But again, "open mouth already as mistake", so I'll shut up now.:-)
Yes. How could one aquire language if thought wasn't there already? Consider the rare feral children adults who have grown up without acquiring language - do you think they're "dark inside"? Or even more fascinating, Helen Keller, who acquired language late enough to have memories that pre-dated that acquisition.
Consult any Zen master for further instruction - that which the Japanese call "mushin" ("no-mind") might be thought of as "thinking without words". (Of course, there is a difference between transcending linguistic thought, and never acquiring it in the first place.)
But in thinking of mushin as thinking without words, you are thinking with words, and thus getting away from the actual phenomenon. Thus Zen Master Seung Sahn's observation "open mouth, already a mistake".
Man is a thinking reed but his great works are when he is not calculating and thinking. "Childlikeness" has to be restored with long years of training in the art of self-forgetfulness. When this is attained, man thinks yet he does not think. He thinks like the showers coming down from the sky; he thinks like the waves rolling on the ocean; he thinks like the stars illuminating the nightly heavens; he thinks like the green foliage shooting forth in the relaxing spring breeze. Indeed, he is the showers, the ocean, the stars, the foliage. -- D.T. Suzuki
Slashdot Mirror
I think Robotron 2048 had the double-joystick controls long before Smash TV came around...
Completely incorrect. The inconvenient fact that there were all these people already there is why the Zionists had to engage in a campaign of ethnic cleansing in 1948, and why the "right to return" has been an issue.
Let's get the history straight. At the end of WWI, with the destruction of the Ottoman Empire, the League of Nations decision to place Palestine under the administration of Great Britain. The British double-crossed the Arab population living there and made the Balfour Declaration, commiting Britian to the establishment of Jewish homeland in Palestine. (As with current U.S. support, the primary motivation was strategic interests in the area.)
In the early 20th century there were around 50,000 Jewish settlers living in the region, constituting perhaps 10% of the population. The remaining 90% of the population was, oddly enough. not very pleased at having foreign colonial powers come in and take over. (It should be noted that before WWI, the Jews and Arabs in the region got along reasonably peacefully. It was Zionists outside Palestine who worked for the Balfour Declaration.)
During the 1920s, thanks to British policies about 100,000 Jewish immigrants arrived - a substantial number in a region with a population of about 750,000. The Jewish population more than doubled, rising to over 17%, and tensions began to rise.
In the 1930s, the Nazis began their reign of terror, and many Jews who escaped came to Palestine. By 1939 the Jewish population was over 445,000, out of a total of about 1,500,000 - nearly 30 per cent. By 1947, the total population of Palestine was 1,850,000, including 608,000 Jews.
The large Jewish population in the region at the time of the parition was only the result of decades of concerted effort by the British and by Zionist organizations.
It's a very popular myth that there was this vast empty space on the map that the Jewish refugees from WWII could occupy. The truth is that there were plenty of people aready living there, getting screwed over by the British Empire's form of Zionism.
(And indeed, the Jews have been victims in this too, a reasonable desire for a homeland twisted and warped by British and American politics, so that instead of slowly and peacefully building a independant nation, today the "Jewish homeland" is an unsustainable enterprise, existing only because of the support of the United States.)
Israel is Jewish state. Orthodox Judaism is the only legally recognized form of Judaism, and has considerable authority, with control over marriages, burials, and decisions over "who's a Jew". It takes great twisting of the language to regard that as secular.
It takes greater twisting to re
They're not "terrorist databases". They're "terrorist suspect databases". Until they have enough evidence to press charges, those suspects have full rights to assemble and petition.
Sure, but one then has to ask, "What is an object"? The concepts of encapsulation and abstraction predate the widespread use of the term "object" to describe a software entity.
But, yeah, so long as the code is clear, I don't care what you call your technique. :-)
No, object orientation also implies inheritance. Without that you have what's sometimes called "Abstract Data Types" (though that term is also used by some OO folks to describe abstract base classes), not objects. Don't have Stroustrup handy, but I can cite Yourdon's "Object-Oriented Systems Design" on this. Or see this Wikipedia page. Objects = Abstract Data Types + Inheritance. (Some insist that polymorphism must also be present to give OO.)
You can easily get encapsulation and abstraction (Abstract Data Types) in C. Put your module in a separate .c file, keep your private stuff in the .c file and mark it static and put declarations of anything you want to export in a .h file and use the "external" keyword.
You can get real OOness in C but it takes some heavy lifting, see gtk for an example.
And of course you can write non-OO code, or really bad OO code ("object obfuscated"), in C++.
But that's encapsulation and abstraction, which can be achieved in most any language. (C, for example, lets you do this by encapsulating things in the scope of one file.)
Exactly. What you like is not object orientation, it's modularity - encapsulation and abstraction.
Arabic numbers are old too, but I don't see anyone proposing to change them.
SQL is an English-like representation of relational calculus. Relational calculus has not, and is not going to, change significantly. When the problem is solved well, there's no need to change the solution.
And since you always have to measure with tools, there's a limit. Or are you planning on using your ESP to "sense" where the particles are going?
According to our best, most successful theories, yes, it is exactly like that. The universe appears "fuzzy" at small scales.
That is the nature of scientific theory. It organizes, models, and predicts measurements. If there's a property of reality that does not cause observable effects, as far as science is concerned it doesn't exist. (Indeed it's hard to say what it would mean for something to have a property that does not have observable effects.)
Google for "Bell's Inequality" and "EPR paradox". (Or for more complete introduction read John Gribben's book In Search of Schrodinger's Cat.)
Back in the 30's, Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen (EPR) argued that the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics - the idea that things exist in a superpositioned "wave" state until an observation is made, and then collapse to a fundamentally random "real" value - had to be regarded as incomplete. They argued (somewhat like what you seem to be) that particles had "hidden variables" that kept things deterministic.
Their argument was this: imagine that two particles, A and B, interact with one another, then fly apart and don't interact with anything else until we decide to look at one of them. Each particle has its own momentum and position. We can't know both the momentum and position of either particle precisely (the uncertainty principle), but we can know the total momentum of the pair, and the original distance between them.
If we measure the momentum of A, we can figure out the momentum of B (since we know the total momentum). We haven't messed with B, so presumably we can measure the position of B, and knowing the original position of A and the momentums we can figure out the position of A. So we know both position and momentum of A and B, in violation of the uncertainty principle!
So either the uncertainty principle is bunk and there are hiddern variables, or (and here's the really weird part) measuring the momentum of A somehow instantaneously - not at lightspeed, but instantaneously - affects B and disturbs its position so that uncertainly is preserved. "No reasonable definition of reality could be expected to permit this," said Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen.
However, the universe is not bound by our notions of reason. Bell's inequality shows a way to actually put this to the test. In the 60's he figured out a mathematical statement (actually about particle spin rather than position and momentum, but the same reasoning applies) that would be true if EPR were right and there were hidden variables, and false if the particles were in superposition and the instantaneous weird action-at-a-distance thing were the case.
It's been tested. Bell's inequality is violated. While the question is not completely settled, our best evidence to date is that the universe is random, reality is fuzzy, and entangled particles can instantaneously affect one another over distance.
You're reasoning in circles. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle says exactly that "we have limited ability of measuring". It just makes it clear that, after a certain point, this isn't because we're not clever enough, but that the limits are part of the nature of the universe.
Are the MD5CRK folks trolling, smoking crack, or just not explaining themselves very well?
They "aim to disprove one of the fundamental requirements of a secure message digest: No two inputs can be found which produce the same digest - this is also known as a collision."
MD5 gives a 128-bit digest. There are more than 2^128 possible messages. Of course there are collisions. What MD5 claims is that the difficulty of coming up with two messages having the same message digest is on the order of 2^64 operations, and that the difficulty of coming up with any message having a given message digest is on the order of 2^128 operations.
No digest algorithm can claim to be free of collisions; they are many-to-one mappings.
If it's not free-as-in-liberty, then ipso facto it's not a useful and decent language. It is foolish to commit any significant project to development in a language whose future depends on the whim of one company.
The best is M-x psychoanalyze-pinhead, where Zippy meets ELIZA:
I am the psychotherapist. Please, describe your problems. Each time you are finished talking, type RET twice.
The PILLSBURY DOUGHBOY is CRYING for an END to BURT REYNOLDS movies!!
Why do you say that?
You can't hurt me!! I have an ASSUMABLE MORTGAGE!!
What makes you believe you have an assumable mortgage?
A GRAM?? A BRAM... A GROOM... A BROOM... Oh, Yeh!! Wash the ROOM!!
Maybe your plans have something to do with this.
You should all JUMP UP AND DOWN for TWO HOURS while I decide on a NEW CAREER!!
What happened when you decide on a new career?
My BIOLOGICAL ALARM CLOCK just went off.. It has noiseless DOZE FUNCTION and full kitchen!!
Is it because of your life that you say it has noiseless doze function and full kitchen?
I have many CHARTS and DIAGRAMS..
Are you sure that you have many charts and diagrams?
.. my NOSE is NUMB!
...Perhaps this has something to do with hangups you have?
Psychoanalysis?? I thought this was a nude rap session!!!
Is it because of your inhibitions that you say you thought this was a nude rap session?
I just put lots of the EGG SALAD in the SILK SOCKS --
I don't understand.
CONGRATULATIONS! Now should I make thinly veiled comments about DIGNITY, self-esteem and finding TRUE FUN in your RIGHT VENTRICLE??
And we all pay for that credit card fraud, in the form of higher fees and interest rates.
What, you think your Visa issuer is going to cover the cost of the fraud out of the goodness of their hearts? Nope. They spread it around to all of us.
My resume says "C and C++; also some PHP, Perl, LISP, Bourne and C Shells, Pascal, SQL". I'll probably move PHP to a more primary position soon since I've been working primarily in it since last year.
I don't recommend getting more specific than "these I'm pretty good at, these I've had some exposure too".
Except that it doesn't mean that. If you're using that sense of beg, then what are you begging the question for? ("I begged the question for a dollar to buy some bread.")
"Beg" does not, and never has, had a meaning in any way similar to "to raise". It does have a meaning of "to evade or sidestep".
Perhaps one might wish to communicate clearly? I find that knowing the meaning of the words and phrases I use helps enormously with that goal.
In context, most educated readers can understand that that was the writer's intended message, yes. But another message comes through also: the writer is ignorant. (In that respect it is similar to using "I could care less," when in fact you mean "I couldn't care less"; or "I recommend you for doing that good deed" instead of "I commend you for doing that good deed.")
If "I am ignorant" is part of the message you wish to communicate, by all means, continue to use "beg the question" to mean "raise the question." We'll know what you mean.
I suppose what makes a superior display is in the eyes (literally) of the beholder.
I find anything below 70 Hz completely unusable, and have to get close to 80 before the problem goes away completely. Of course I've always adjusted my own machines accordingly, but I still occasionally encounter machines where the damn monitor looks like a strobelight to me. (Especially under fluorescent lights.)
Maybe that's the big difference in our perceptions - a little jagginess doesn't bother me at all. In fact blur drives me nuts and I dislike text antialiasing. (I agree with this "Joel on Software" column.) Instead, I pick fonts that look good on a pixelated display.
Fossil fuels are are very expensive way of producing energy. This expense is not nearly fully represented in the "sticker price". (You don't pay for oil wars, environment devistation, and the depletion of irreplacable resources at the gas pump.)
As the price of oil rises, the cost of a barrel of oil gets closer to the actual total cost. This will drive us towards more economically efficient solutions.
Yes, this will mean energy will be more expensive. In a market economy this will drive us to greater energy efficiency - which can mean more and better jobs and a better standard of living, et cetera. This is supposed to be the "Information Age", dammit - organization, not raw power.
Ground source heat pumps seem like a great idea. The only drawback would be installation cost - you have to dig things up pretty good to lay the heat exchanger piping.
For text-based applications (which is most of what comptuers are used for), LCD give superior quality to CRTs. No flicker and sharper pixels. I'm never going back.
Since PHP types are dynamic, it would be hard to do static checking, no?
PHP allows you to check types at runtime, using functions such as is_string(). For your classes, you are of course free to add a "get_type()" method to a base class and derive everything from that. You can choose your own trade-off of safety versus convenience.
That's how it's often translated, yes. That is, IMHO, an overly-literal translation. The person acting in mushin is not acting "thoughlessly" or "mindlessly". What has gone away is that inner voice, the chattering "monkey mind".
I've been studying a Seido Juku, a style of karate-do that incorporates Zen style meditation, for over eighteen years, and have had a little bit of experience of mushin in that time. I think the Suzuki quote ("He thinks like the showers coming down from the sky") is closer to it. But again, "open mouth already as mistake", so I'll shut up now. :-)
Yes. How could one aquire language if thought wasn't there already? Consider the rare feral children adults who have grown up without acquiring language - do you think they're "dark inside"? Or even more fascinating, Helen Keller, who acquired language late enough to have memories that pre-dated that acquisition.
Consult any Zen master for further instruction - that which the Japanese call "mushin" ("no-mind") might be thought of as "thinking without words". (Of course, there is a difference between transcending linguistic thought, and never acquiring it in the first place.)
But in thinking of mushin as thinking without words, you are thinking with words, and thus getting away from the actual phenomenon. Thus Zen Master Seung Sahn's observation "open mouth, already a mistake".
I remember not only the movie, but the video game. Ah, the innocent days of coin-op goodness...
It's showed up in a lot of things, enough that I sort of had the notion that is was an existing technology that had just never proved useful.
I think of subvocal mics as a sci-fi standard - indeed a Google search on the exact phrase "subvocal microphone" returns four pages of hits ("subvocal mic" returns another 3), so it's an idea that's out there.