"Fac,ade" is definitely not an English word, as it can not be expressed with the English alphabet.
Michael Everson, who has his own set of honors, writes in http://www.evertype.com/alphabets/english.pdf:
Despite unfounded but widespread belief to the contrary (based doubtless on the prevalence of ASCII), diacritics (usually French ones) are often found in naturalized English words.
Fac,ade is used in running text with none of the usual indications of foreign, like italics. (Whereas "C,es le vie" is always italized when I've seen it, and never takes normal English changes, like fac,ades.)
In any case, ASCII can't represent proper English single and double quotes and em-dashs. Why should take a standard driven by space restrictions and that lacks the ability to transcribe accurately written English punctuation as an authority on the letters used in English? Facade was good enough for computer use of the era.
Lastly, co"ordinate was commonly used less then a hundred years ago. But co"ordinate comes from coordinatus, which is Latin, which doesn't use the diaresis, and doesn't spell it co"ordinate in any case. So obviously there are words in English that aren't foreign, but use letters outside ASCII.
Just because you can look in a dictionary does not mean that you understand its use.
This peer reviewed article -- http://www.ascusc.org/jcmc/vol9/issue1/palfreyman. html -- uses transliteration frequently, but always intra-Arabic, not between two languages.
He references Beesley for his definition-- http://www.xrce.xerox.com/competencies/content-ana lysis/arabic/info/romanization.html -- in an article called Romanization, Transcription and Transliteration:
The purpose of a Transliteration (sometimes called a "strict transliteration" or "orthographical transliteration") is to write a language in its customary orthography, using the exact same orthographical conventions, but using carefully substituted orthographical symbols.
who quotes a book called Transcription and Transliteration: an annotated bibliography on conversion of scripts:
Following the established usage of ISO, the term "Transliteration" is employed for "representing the characters (letters or signs) of one alphabet by those of another, in principle letter by letter", whereas "Transcription" is used for "the operation of representing the elements of a language, either sounds or signs, however they may be written originally, in any other written system of letters or sound signs."
None of these sources use it to refer to words brought between languages.
for a word to be brought from the source language to the target language, it must be transliterated.
Most of the world's languages aren't written outside a missionary or linguist orthography. How would a word brought from one spoken language to another be transliterated if it was never written in either language?
"A loan word" is not even proper use of English in this regard, as I have stated before, though the use of "loaned word" is common even among linguists because "transliteration" is a mouthful.
If it's used by the common people and linguists alike and recongized by dictionaries, then that use has become a proper use of the English language.
I'll just point to the degrees on my wall
I guess you got that degree without siting sources or ever taking a logic class that would have told you that argument by authority isn't valid.
Transliteration \Trans*lit`er*a"tion\, n.
The act or product of transliterating, or of expressing words
of a language by means of the characters of another alphabet.
[1913 Webster]
By definition, if Bishop Wulfia invented a word out of thin air, and it has never before or since been used in a language since Gothic, the word has been transliterated (from Gothic script to Latin script) when printed in new editions. But it's not a loan word, because it's only used in Gothic.
On the flip side, "fac,ade" is spelled exactly as it is in French, even though c, is but a questionable member of the English alphabet. So it's not been transliterated, as it's still expressed in letters of its own alphabet, but it is a loan word. (As far as I can tell, the text box won't let me put a real cedilla here.)
Sure, in a Stalin-esque type way. Perhaps if he had accepted the people as they were and tried to help them grow more modern, it would have stuck, but instead he outlawed their way of life and tried to force them into a new one. I hardly see that as something to be approved of.
The US republic originally did not allow election of senetors or of the president. It was still a democracy.
Benjamin Franklin disagreed. He was adamant that what they had created was a republic, not a democracy. Considering the only people who could vote were landowning men and most of the people in the federal government, including the president, were appointed (the electors actually had power, unlike now), it's questionable whether the American government actually was a democracy to start out.
I hang around with linguists, and I can't remember a single time that transliteration was used that way. Transliteration is writing a word in another language's script or orthography. When it gets adopted into a language, it's no longer transliterated.
The people of Iran don't exactly have it so great. Ever since the revolution and the ayatollahs, its been rough riding for those not in line with the government.
Ever since? The Shah of Iran had a secret police trained in torture by the best in the world. Anyone who disagreed with him convienantly disappeared. Iranian freedom, in some ways, has gone up since the revolution.
Theocracies are not healthy governments. Iranian students have protested several times on large scales, and government thugs have repressed them continuously.
A "Remember the Alamo/Maine" incident for the Iranian revolution was when the Shah was returned to power by the CIA, students protested at the University of Tehran. So the Shah has them machine gunned down. The new administration has never been quite so heavy handed.
"given this fine effort, application maintainers and contributors who think they would have something to offer, and know several languages... consider adding a major language to your app first."
Still, would you object if they chose Dutch or Hungarian or Greek or Hebrew? Farsi has a more speakers then those. And the native speakers of Chinese and Arabic and Hindi and Spanish and French should be able to take care of those languages much better then someone who learned the language in school.
There was a western-backed government in place before, and a student revolution overthrew it and instituted the current government.
Yes, there was a western-backed government in place. But it's not like they overthrew a Western democracy to put in place a conservative theocracy; the Shah was a cruel dictator with a secret police to rival just about any in the world.
Its hard for westerners to understand, but Muslim societies don't think like us. [...] Their constitution originally specified no official religion, but after great pressure from the populace, the official religion was changed to Islam.
This differs from Western societies how? It's perhaps a little regressive, but many western countries have Christianity or some subset thereof as the offical religion, and the US constantly has constitutional amendments circling Congress to make Christianity the official religion.
Iran isn't a dictatorship. Its a theocracy. There is a difference.
Yes, oligarchies (like Iran's theocracy) have some limits to the arbitrary abuse of power, and protection against the way that many dictators seem to lose touch with reality. They can be just as despotic when the members of the oligarchy act in unison; as clerics of the same faith, there are many subjects where they do act in unison.
There was a people's revolution,
There's a lot of argument that the clerics co-opted a general revolution for their narrow ends. Certainly revolutions don't neccessarily represent the will of the people; the Romanian revolution, for one, seems to have been largely orchistrated by people in high places, despite being a people's revolution.
Iran is democratic. It is, after all, the Islamic Republic of Iran.
"Democratic" and "Republic" and "of the people" in the names of nations is a running joke; the more of them you have in your countries name, the less free it is. Note the People's Republic of China and how about the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (aka North Korea).
To run for president you have to be a cleric and all candidates have to be approved by the religious authority, but the American republic has similar limitations.
Nonsense. The American legal restrictions aren't censorship-based; Eugene Debs ran repeatedly for president while he was in jail for being a socalist. (Wilson's administration was not the high point of freedom of speech in America. But he could still run.) You can run without being a Republican or Democrat, and American history reveals that the apparent duopoly can split and break under pressure.
Do a little research before you label a country a "dictatorship".
It's not a dictatorship, but it is largely a oligarchy, a theocracy. The clerics hold great and enforce opinion not supported by the majority of the Iranians. The President is largely ineffectual to furfill the promises that he made to get elected.
The Ethnologue is the best single source for reliable information about where languages are spoken, by how many people, etc.
The Ethnologue is written by splitters, though; for example, where most people count one language, Farsi, the Ethnologue has two, Western and Eastern Farsi. They count at least a dozen dialects of Arabic as seperate languages, four different dialects of Romanian as seperate languages and at least eight different dialects of Italian as seperate languages. Linguistically correct or not (some are unarguably correct from a linguistic standpoint, some are very iffy), they tend to give smaller numbers for any one language then other sources, especially as written language tends to be shared; all dialects of Arabic, no matter how little two speakers can understand each other, read and write the same language.
Honestly, it's not something I would let bother me. If someone in the Netherlands rips me off, it's going to have to get pretty worldwide before I hear about it. In which case, I would have to bring suit in the Netherlands, and I'm not sure I would be willing to spend the time and money to bring suit in the court in my home town. If it gets too broad, I might sign my copyright over to the FSF and let them deal with it, but that'd have to be pretty big.
Of course, I do most of my programming under the BSD, because only a real idiot would try and rip off the tiny toys I work on wholescale, and if they want to borrow a procedure or two, how does it hurt me? I would use the GPL if I were working on something that someone might actually want to pirate, but I still can't imagine it being worth an international law suit to try and protect it.
a tool that will make tech savvy to many non-democratic states...
The educated elite of Iran mostly know English and if not, they definitely know Arabic. So Windows is easy (and it's trivial to import a copy and pirate as much as you want; no copy protection is going to stop a government for long.) But Linux in Farsi is going to help the teen who spent all day picking cotton, and is now spend his hard earned money on a Internet cafe.
The elite of any nation is education, and almost certainly know French or English. It's the middle classes and lower classes (in libraries and Internet cafes) that benefit most from translation.
Ports to languages like Farsi are interesting, but maintainers of applications really need to focus on Arabic
This isn't commerical software. We didn't throw a bunch of money at a translating group for them to translate the software. A bunch of Farsi speakers showed up to translate the software; so far, there haven't been as many Arabic speakers showing up to translate. We don't control that.
Let localized distributions help you out on the smaller languages (*cough*klingon*cough*).
First place, it's trivial to toss an fa.po file into your application if someone else is translating it. Once you support displaying Arabic (like KDE and Gnome do), displaying Farsi comes for free.
Secondly, comparing a language with 24 million native speakers (with many of the other 41 million Iranians speaking it fluently) to a language spoken by no one as their primary language is offensive. There are millions of people out there who want to use KDE or Gnome in Farsi (many of whom probably couldn't use an English or Arabic UI), and it is important to support them.
package maintainers can easily get caught up in a sort of fad around certain translations
I don't know where you got this impression. Package maintiners have little to do with translations. It doesn't matter how they feel, it's what the translators choose to work on, and package maintainers includes what they get without respect to language.
Though the moderates or "reformists" would like one to believe that you can have democracy within a theocracy, it is not possible.
Is the government of Britian democratic? If so, then you can have democracy inside a monarchy. Governments aren't pure, and there's a lot of steps between a government where the people elect one figurehead and the clerics run everything, to where the people run everything and the clerics are figureheads.
Arguing that the CD is the same as the magazine is akin to saying since my subscription entitles me to all issues of the magazine for a certain period, I am owed the CD because it is no different than the magazine and contains the issues that covers my subscription - something I think NGS would disagree with and point out the Cd is a different beast.
NGS can sell the magazine on microfilm within case law, or they can sell the large print edition, but that doesn't mean you get those unless you pay for them either.
And I guess it's the right of Standard Oil to not deliver fuel to your shop if you try and compete with their barrel making buisness or any other part of their monopoly. Microsoft, a convicted monopoly, does not have a right to lock people into the code. And free software is not a fair comparison, because nobody in free software forces people to use their implementation. If *BSD or Microsoft or SCO want to read and write EXT2/3 or emulate Linux, they can do so.
It is, of course, true that Bollywood makes a lot of what Westerners would think of as junk. But then, so does Hollywood.
The difference is that Bollywood is in the place Hollywood was before television; you make a lot of movies cheaply, because that's what people want to see. Hollywood makes a few movies, but spends tens of millions to over a hundred million dollars on each of them. They have the money and time to put into each movie, and they have to, because Americans don't go to the movies nearly as often as they used to.
That doesn't mean there aren't great Bollywood movies and lousy Hollywood movies. It just means that Bollywood makes a lot of movies like the old B movies that Hollywood cranked out, and stuff like Peter Jackson's LotR and the Terminators are going to come out of Hollywood, because Bollywood doesn't have the budget to blow on film.
All in all, I think Tolkien has been the recipient of more charity and good-will from his readers than any writer since Moses.
Any book that has that many popular readers is obviously doing something right. If people read the books and loved them, why should they nitpick them like that? I could sit here and rip Silas Marner apart, but there's still many people that treasure it, and that's what matters. (I assume there's someone that treasures it, or they've been torturing English students for nothing.)
Then, one of the fools got greedy and decided to print up a forged ticket for a practically impossible series of bets, which paid off in the millions.
Actually, they told the computer to pick the winning horse, before they knew which horse would win. When the 80 to 1 long-shot won, then they knew they were in deep trouble.
What do *companies* want, to pay a fee to QT and own their own code, or give it away with the GPL and Gnome?
Most of the Gnome libraries are LGPL. In any case, QT is similar to GTK, and KDE is similar to Gnome.
Ever wonder why most game companies program in directX and NOT openGL? OpenGL is C, directX is not.
And all the OpenGL programmers immediately jumped to DirectX when it was first released. Oh wait, when it was first released they thought it was junk. It took many releases for it to mature. Perhaps there's something more then just C versus not C, perhaps there's actual differences between the two.
These people claim the BSD license isn't free
Bullshit. I've never heard that from anyone who wasn't completely troll. It's not a position that Stallman agrees with.
If you give something away, you give it away for good.
Perhaps you should work on the whole sharing thing. See, I can give you something, and when you're done with it, you can give it back.
When decisions are NOT based on technical merit, rather on politics, then you are no longer a geek.
Geeks can't be political? In any case, human affairs are political, not techical, and a license is a document to other humans, not computers. Everyone makes political decisions every day, and people who don't tend to have serious troubles living in the real world.
Someone with billions who gives it all away just teaches people that handouts are readily available and personal achievement is meaningless.
Right, because they can't look at the ex-coke addict, who got into Yale with an SAT score (1209) that will barely get you into most state universities, and is now President of the US, and realize that personal achivement is meaningless.
With GTK, you save a week's salary but:[...] Now do we want a registry in Gnome or not? Do we want to push everything to Mono or not? Which window manager do we want to use this time?
No one's pushing anyone to Mono; it's being developed as an option. Whether or not Gnome has a registery or a window manager is clearly irrelevant to GTK, just like KDE's (which has switched window managers before too) choices are irrelevant to QT.
You have only a tiny fraction of potential customers
Why, because you don't like GTK? It runs on Windows and Unixes, and MacOS X users who won't run X are hardly the vast majority of most people's potential customers.
And its good it wasn't a universal region code--the film opened to excellent and stable box office, something that would've never, ever happened if this ridiculous idea was embraced.
From the IMDB: The Life of Brian (1979):
Released theatrically in Italy in the early 1990s, with no mention that it was made in 1979. The success was such that And Now for Something Completely Different (1971) was also released theatrically.
I assume they had VHS tapes of the movie by then . . .
The song's gifts originally were hidden references to the teachings of the Catholic faith. The two turtle doves signified the Old and New Testaments, the eight maids a-milking are the Beatitudes and the 10 lords a-leaping the 10 Commandments.
As far as I know, Protestants never forgot the Old and New Testaments, the Beatitudes or the 10 Commandments. All could be taught by Catholics openly without ever admitting they were Catholic. So why the song?
Slashdot Mirror
Michael Everson, who has his own set of honors, writes in http://www.evertype.com/alphabets/english.pdf:
Fac,ade is used in running text with none of the usual indications of foreign, like italics. (Whereas "C,es le vie" is always italized when I've seen it, and never takes normal English changes, like fac,ades.)
In any case, ASCII can't represent proper English single and double quotes and em-dashs. Why should take a standard driven by space restrictions and that lacks the ability to transcribe accurately written English punctuation as an authority on the letters used in English? Facade was good enough for computer use of the era.
Lastly, co"ordinate was commonly used less then a hundred years ago. But co"ordinate comes from coordinatus, which is Latin, which doesn't use the diaresis, and doesn't spell it co"ordinate in any case. So obviously there are words in English that aren't foreign, but use letters outside ASCII.
Just because you can look in a dictionary does not mean that you understand its use.
This peer reviewed article -- http://www.ascusc.org/jcmc/vol9/issue1/palfreyman
He references Beesley for his definition-- http://www.xrce.xerox.com/competencies/content-an
who quotes a book called Transcription and Transliteration: an annotated bibliography on conversion of scripts:
None of these sources use it to refer to words brought between languages.
for a word to be brought from the source language to the target language, it must be transliterated.
Most of the world's languages aren't written outside a missionary or linguist orthography. How would a word brought from one spoken language to another be transliterated if it was never written in either language?
"A loan word" is not even proper use of English in this regard, as I have stated before, though the use of "loaned word" is common even among linguists because "transliteration" is a mouthful.
If it's used by the common people and linguists alike and recongized by dictionaries, then that use has become a proper use of the English language.
I'll just point to the degrees on my wall
I guess you got that degree without siting sources or ever taking a logic class that would have told you that argument by authority isn't valid.
Transliteration \Trans*lit`er*a"tion\, n.
The act or product of transliterating, or of expressing words
of a language by means of the characters of another alphabet.
[1913 Webster]
By definition, if Bishop Wulfia invented a word out of thin air, and it has never before or since been used in a language since Gothic, the word has been transliterated (from Gothic script to Latin script) when printed in new editions. But it's not a loan word, because it's only used in Gothic.
On the flip side, "fac,ade" is spelled exactly as it is in French, even though c, is but a questionable member of the English alphabet. So it's not been transliterated, as it's still expressed in letters of its own alphabet, but it is a loan word. (As far as I can tell, the text box won't let me put a real cedilla here.)
I do know that the Shah helped modernize Iran.
Sure, in a Stalin-esque type way. Perhaps if he had accepted the people as they were and tried to help them grow more modern, it would have stuck, but instead he outlawed their way of life and tried to force them into a new one. I hardly see that as something to be approved of.
The US republic originally did not allow election of senetors or of the president. It was still a democracy.
Benjamin Franklin disagreed. He was adamant that what they had created was a republic, not a democracy. Considering the only people who could vote were landowning men and most of the people in the federal government, including the president, were appointed (the electors actually had power, unlike now), it's questionable whether the American government actually was a democracy to start out.
transliteration is the linguists' term.
I hang around with linguists, and I can't remember a single time that transliteration was used that way. Transliteration is writing a word in another language's script or orthography. When it gets adopted into a language, it's no longer transliterated.
The people of Iran don't exactly have it so great. Ever since the revolution and the ayatollahs, its been rough riding for those not in line with the government.
Ever since? The Shah of Iran had a secret police trained in torture by the best in the world. Anyone who disagreed with him convienantly disappeared. Iranian freedom, in some ways, has gone up since the revolution.
Theocracies are not healthy governments. Iranian students have protested several times on large scales, and government thugs have repressed them continuously.
A "Remember the Alamo/Maine" incident for the Iranian revolution was when the Shah was returned to power by the CIA, students protested at the University of Tehran. So the Shah has them machine gunned down. The new administration has never been quite so heavy handed.
"given this fine effort, application maintainers and contributors who think they would have something to offer, and know several languages... consider adding a major language to your app first."
Still, would you object if they chose Dutch or Hungarian or Greek or Hebrew? Farsi has a more speakers then those. And the native speakers of Chinese and Arabic and Hindi and Spanish and French should be able to take care of those languages much better then someone who learned the language in school.
There was a western-backed government in place before, and a student revolution overthrew it and instituted the current government.
Yes, there was a western-backed government in place. But it's not like they overthrew a Western democracy to put in place a conservative theocracy; the Shah was a cruel dictator with a secret police to rival just about any in the world.
Its hard for westerners to understand, but Muslim societies don't think like us. [...] Their constitution originally specified no official religion, but after great pressure from the populace, the official religion was changed to Islam.
This differs from Western societies how? It's perhaps a little regressive, but many western countries have Christianity or some subset thereof as the offical religion, and the US constantly has constitutional amendments circling Congress to make Christianity the official religion.
Iran isn't a dictatorship. Its a theocracy. There is a difference.
Yes, oligarchies (like Iran's theocracy) have some limits to the arbitrary abuse of power, and protection against the way that many dictators seem to lose touch with reality. They can be just as despotic when the members of the oligarchy act in unison; as clerics of the same faith, there are many subjects where they do act in unison.
There was a people's revolution,
There's a lot of argument that the clerics co-opted a general revolution for their narrow ends. Certainly revolutions don't neccessarily represent the will of the people; the Romanian revolution, for one, seems to have been largely orchistrated by people in high places, despite being a people's revolution.
Iran is democratic. It is, after all, the Islamic Republic of Iran.
"Democratic" and "Republic" and "of the people" in the names of nations is a running joke; the more of them you have in your countries name, the less free it is. Note the People's Republic of China and how about the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (aka North Korea).
To run for president you have to be a cleric and all candidates have to be approved by the religious authority, but the American republic has similar limitations.
Nonsense. The American legal restrictions aren't censorship-based; Eugene Debs ran repeatedly for president while he was in jail for being a socalist. (Wilson's administration was not the high point of freedom of speech in America. But he could still run.) You can run without being a Republican or Democrat, and American history reveals that the apparent duopoly can split and break under pressure.
Do a little research before you label a country a "dictatorship".
It's not a dictatorship, but it is largely a oligarchy, a theocracy. The clerics hold great and enforce opinion not supported by the majority of the Iranians. The President is largely ineffectual to furfill the promises that he made to get elected.
The Ethnologue is the best single source for reliable information about where languages are spoken, by how many people, etc.
The Ethnologue is written by splitters, though; for example, where most people count one language, Farsi, the Ethnologue has two, Western and Eastern Farsi. They count at least a dozen dialects of Arabic as seperate languages, four different dialects of Romanian as seperate languages and at least eight different dialects of Italian as seperate languages. Linguistically correct or not (some are unarguably correct from a linguistic standpoint, some are very iffy), they tend to give smaller numbers for any one language then other sources, especially as written language tends to be shared; all dialects of Arabic, no matter how little two speakers can understand each other, read and write the same language.
actively support Irani users
It's Iranian.
Honestly, it's not something I would let bother me. If someone in the Netherlands rips me off, it's going to have to get pretty worldwide before I hear about it. In which case, I would have to bring suit in the Netherlands, and I'm not sure I would be willing to spend the time and money to bring suit in the court in my home town. If it gets too broad, I might sign my copyright over to the FSF and let them deal with it, but that'd have to be pretty big.
Of course, I do most of my programming under the BSD, because only a real idiot would try and rip off the tiny toys I work on wholescale, and if they want to borrow a procedure or two, how does it hurt me? I would use the GPL if I were working on something that someone might actually want to pirate, but I still can't imagine it being worth an international law suit to try and protect it.
a tool that will make tech savvy to many non-democratic states...
The educated elite of Iran mostly know English and if not, they definitely know Arabic. So Windows is easy (and it's trivial to import a copy and pirate as much as you want; no copy protection is going to stop a government for long.) But Linux in Farsi is going to help the teen who spent all day picking cotton, and is now spend his hard earned money on a Internet cafe.
The elite of any nation is education, and almost certainly know French or English. It's the middle classes and lower classes (in libraries and Internet cafes) that benefit most from translation.
Ports to languages like Farsi are interesting, but maintainers of applications really need to focus on Arabic
This isn't commerical software. We didn't throw a bunch of money at a translating group for them to translate the software. A bunch of Farsi speakers showed up to translate the software; so far, there haven't been as many Arabic speakers showing up to translate. We don't control that.
Let localized distributions help you out on the smaller languages (*cough*klingon*cough*).
First place, it's trivial to toss an fa.po file into your application if someone else is translating it. Once you support displaying Arabic (like KDE and Gnome do), displaying Farsi comes for free.
Secondly, comparing a language with 24 million native speakers (with many of the other 41 million Iranians speaking it fluently) to a language spoken by no one as their primary language is offensive. There are millions of people out there who want to use KDE or Gnome in Farsi (many of whom probably couldn't use an English or Arabic UI), and it is important to support them.
package maintainers can easily get caught up in a sort of fad around certain translations
I don't know where you got this impression. Package maintiners have little to do with translations. It doesn't matter how they feel, it's what the translators choose to work on, and package maintainers includes what they get without respect to language.
Though the moderates or "reformists" would like one to believe that you can have democracy within a theocracy, it is not possible.
Is the government of Britian democratic? If so, then you can have democracy inside a monarchy. Governments aren't pure, and there's a lot of steps between a government where the people elect one figurehead and the clerics run everything, to where the people run everything and the clerics are figureheads.
Arguing that the CD is the same as the magazine is akin to saying since my subscription entitles me to all issues of the magazine for a certain period, I am owed the CD because it is no different than the magazine and contains the issues that covers my subscription - something I think NGS would disagree with and point out the Cd is a different beast.
NGS can sell the magazine on microfilm within case law, or they can sell the large print edition, but that doesn't mean you get those unless you pay for them either.
Quite possibly, and that's their right.
And I guess it's the right of Standard Oil to not deliver fuel to your shop if you try and compete with their barrel making buisness or any other part of their monopoly. Microsoft, a convicted monopoly, does not have a right to lock people into the code. And free software is not a fair comparison, because nobody in free software forces people to use their implementation. If *BSD or Microsoft or SCO want to read and write EXT2/3 or emulate Linux, they can do so.
It is, of course, true that Bollywood makes a lot of what Westerners would think of as junk. But then, so does Hollywood.
The difference is that Bollywood is in the place Hollywood was before television; you make a lot of movies cheaply, because that's what people want to see. Hollywood makes a few movies, but spends tens of millions to over a hundred million dollars on each of them. They have the money and time to put into each movie, and they have to, because Americans don't go to the movies nearly as often as they used to.
That doesn't mean there aren't great Bollywood movies and lousy Hollywood movies. It just means that Bollywood makes a lot of movies like the old B movies that Hollywood cranked out, and stuff like Peter Jackson's LotR and the Terminators are going to come out of Hollywood, because Bollywood doesn't have the budget to blow on film.
All in all, I think Tolkien has been the recipient of more charity and good-will from his readers than any writer since Moses.
Any book that has that many popular readers is obviously doing something right. If people read the books and loved them, why should they nitpick them like that? I could sit here and rip Silas Marner apart, but there's still many people that treasure it, and that's what matters. (I assume there's someone that treasures it, or they've been torturing English students for nothing.)
Then, one of the fools got greedy and decided to print up a forged ticket for a practically impossible series of bets, which paid off in the millions.
Actually, they told the computer to pick the winning horse, before they knew which horse would win. When the 80 to 1 long-shot won, then they knew they were in deep trouble.
What do *companies* want, to pay a fee to QT and own their own code, or give it away with the GPL and Gnome?
Most of the Gnome libraries are LGPL. In any case, QT is similar to GTK, and KDE is similar to Gnome.
Ever wonder why most game companies program in directX and NOT openGL? OpenGL is C, directX is not.
And all the OpenGL programmers immediately jumped to DirectX when it was first released. Oh wait, when it was first released they thought it was junk. It took many releases for it to mature. Perhaps there's something more then just C versus not C, perhaps there's actual differences between the two.
These people claim the BSD license isn't free
Bullshit. I've never heard that from anyone who wasn't completely troll. It's not a position that Stallman agrees with.
If you give something away, you give it away for good.
Perhaps you should work on the whole sharing thing. See, I can give you something, and when you're done with it, you can give it back.
When decisions are NOT based on technical merit, rather on politics, then you are no longer a geek.
Geeks can't be political? In any case, human affairs are political, not techical, and a license is a document to other humans, not computers. Everyone makes political decisions every day, and people who don't tend to have serious troubles living in the real world.
Someone with billions who gives it all away just teaches people that handouts are readily available and personal achievement is meaningless.
Right, because they can't look at the ex-coke addict, who got into Yale with an SAT score (1209) that will barely get you into most state universities, and is now President of the US, and realize that personal achivement is meaningless.
With GTK, you save a week's salary but:[...]
Now do we want a registry in Gnome or not? Do we want to push everything to Mono or not? Which window manager do we want to use this time?
No one's pushing anyone to Mono; it's being developed as an option. Whether or not Gnome has a registery or a window manager is clearly irrelevant to GTK, just like KDE's (which has switched window managers before too) choices are irrelevant to QT.
You have only a tiny fraction of potential customers
Why, because you don't like GTK? It runs on Windows and Unixes, and MacOS X users who won't run X are hardly the vast majority of most people's potential customers.
From the IMDB: The Life of Brian (1979):
I assume they had VHS tapes of the movie by then . . .
The song's gifts originally were hidden references to the teachings of the Catholic faith. The two turtle doves signified the Old and New Testaments, the eight maids a-milking are the Beatitudes and the 10 lords a-leaping the 10 Commandments.
As far as I know, Protestants never forgot the Old and New Testaments, the Beatitudes or the 10 Commandments. All could be taught by Catholics openly without ever admitting they were Catholic. So why the song?