Many markup languages existed in 1971: troff predecessors runoff, roff, rf; SGML predecessor GML
Oh cool, let's take our limited volunteer labor and force them to learn some off the wall markup language that they will never use anywhere else.
just about any computer [...] would have been capable of running a simple viewer for such languages
Oh cool, let's take our audience and get rid of anyone not willing to run a viewer they only need for our books. Provided, of course, there is a viewer for their system, be it any one of the dozens before Windows, Mac and Unix forced just everyone else out of the playing field.
Or, of course, we could provide plain text files. So we do all this extra work to create marked up files, and take the extra load on our server or distribution media, so people can view the plain text file.
The biggest cost in markup is the height of hoops you're asking volunteers to jump through.
That's absurd. Of course, there are disadvantages to XML:
Everyone can write plain text; there are very few people who know enough to write XML long-hand. XML is in discussion in Distributed Proofreaders, and we got several answers amounting to "Whatever. You have totally confused me. So long as I don't have to touch it, I don't care.".
Not everyone has the programs to transform XML into something usable. The DTD's haven't been created, and even where they have been, the programs to convert the XML to plain text and other formats just aren't available in easy to install packages on every platform.
XML takes work. It is a lot easier to take the raw output of proofers and turn it into text then it is turn it into XML.
We are trying to change to XML, but we can't do it until we have something that all our proofers - including the computer-illiterate ones - can handle with confidence.
Not to mention the problem of characters that aren't in ASCII.
Which is a moot point. When we have characters that aren't in ASCII we can use Latin-1 or UTF-8. Even if we go to XML, there's no guarentee that any of these characters will be used. The HTML books in PG sometimes don't have the Greek untransliterated or -- turned back into real emdashes, much less proper Unicode quotes. Our one Sanskrit text is in ASCII transliteration, not because of any PG rules, but because that's what the creators felt comfortable working with.
Suppose that XML is [...] a horrible joke being perpetuated by hordes of clueless professionals who love buzzwards. Suppose no one uses XML in 10 years.
Then there are good reasons people quit using XML, probably having to do with it being oververbose and too painful to work with. In that case, racking our proofers over the coals for some minor advantage would not be a good thing.
...they were still throwing away the formatting of the text to force it into crude 80 column ASCII. Are they still doing that? At the time they started the project I don't think there wasn't much excuse for not using some kind of markup and nowadays there's absolutely no excuse.
To start with: what type of markup do you think we should have used? The 1971 start of PG predates TeX, XML or Troff. Even 1990, in some ways a more accurate start date, predates HTML and XML. Do you honestly think that forcing all our volunteers to learn some odd markup that few could turn into something readable would have been an advantage?
Even now, most of our books come out in the same 80 column plain text (we post many books in ISO-8859-1, though.) This is because, despite your claims to the contrary, it's entirely suitable for many books.
When authors write it's not just the letters that counts. Some of that writing effort goes into formatting and you can't just discard it.
We don't discard italics. Looking at the pile of books around me, "Presten som ikke kunde brukes" uses bold instead of italics; any text transform that noted bold (say using underscores) would preserve everything. "The Food of the Gods" has a couple line diagrams that could be reproduced in ASCII art (and technically aren't formatting.) "The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes" has a map of London (that didn't come with the stories originally.) "Earthclan" has one picture of an alien ship. "El la Biblio" has nothing that would be lost by transformation into plain text. True, this is a biased selection, but if you look at what's been uploaded to Project Gutenberg, most of it that's just in plain text is exactly these types of work that don't degrade in putting them into plain text. Math books are in TeX and heavily graphical books are in HTML, if either of them are in PG at all.
I mean, "Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk" - an thoroughly discredited[1,2,3] bit of anti-Catholic propoganda - is included on the "gold" list.
We're a library; our job is not to pretty up the past, it's to record. We noted on our copy that it was propoganda, and left it at that. If you are interested in the history of anti-Catholism in the US, that is an important work to read.
Why not just include ""The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion"[4] as well?
Because we haven't found a clearable copy yet? That work had indirectly affected everyone on the planet; it's an important historical document, and so it should be preserved, if only so people can know what racist lieing screeds sound like so they can recognize it when the next politician or disgruntled psycho starts reciting them.
a photograph of a public-domain painting can be copyrighted, even though it may be visually indistinguishable from another one that has been released to public domain.
Nope. Some company sued Corel over including pictures it had made of famous paintings in their image collections. The court ruled that making a copy of an existing work doesn't give a new copyright, no matter how hard it is. In the US, at least, creative effort is required for a new copyright.
But has PG begun to preserve "musical works []; pictorial, graphic, and sculptural works; motion pictures and other audiovisual works; sound recordings; and architectural works"?
Yes, to some of those. We have some transcribed musical texts, (and one top forty song), and some of us have started working on early movies; so far PG only has a few short, low-res Government clips.
I thought PG etexts were plain ASCII text.
Common misconception. PG usually keeps an ASCII edition where feasable, but that doesn't exclude them making other editions or ignoring that when it isn't reasonable. (In any case, we could just do like the movie companies used to when they would print out every frame for copyright, and run every frame of a movie through a graphic to ascii filter.)
Those are "literary works" under 17 USC 101.
I don't think you have a concept of just how many literary works were printed before 1922. Take a look at the Canadiana or Making of America sites one day to see a great wealth of eligible books that aren't in PG yet. My old library at OSU probably had 10,000 eliglible books we hadn't done yet.
This is a finite set as well.
The number of atoms in the universe is also a finite set.
I'd like to think that we'll reverse the last copyright extension in some way or at least hold back the next one.
Wishful thinking has its purposes, but does PG have a plan B?
You like worrying, don't you? What will happen, will happen, and maybe once we get a lot closer, we'll have to worry about it, but so long as we have a large supply of texts, there's no need to worry about it. What's the worst that happens, Project Gutenberg stops getting larger nearly as fast?
most of the newer, and more accurate, translations are still copyrighted. That's why you usually only see the KJV available for download.
Any translation newer than 1922 is copyrighted (in the US). But there's a number of translations available; PG has the Douay-Rheims translation, and the World English Bible (a modern translation) for its English editions. (The World English Bible is still under copyright, but we have the right to use it.) (We could also do the American Standard Edition, but I've never seen a clearable copy.)
Modern translators have gone back to the original Hebrew and Greek, whereas the KJV was translated from the Vulgate.
In the original dedication, King James mentions translating it from the original Sacred languages, so I believe you're wrong here. However, their Greek edition was probably closely related to Erasmus's, which started European scholars studying the Greek as opposed to the Vulgate edition, but was not a terribly accurate edition in itself.
For being a fairly large database of reading material, is it only capable of archiving things so old that they have expired copyrights [...] you can hardly expect it to become a cultural phenomenon,
At least some of us read some of that older material. Shakespeare and Poe and Twain didn't suddenly become pointless after you left school.
Personally I've found myself reading a number of pulp mysterys - The Orange-Yellow Diamond by J.S. Fletcher (some sterotypes, but not racist), Joe Muller: Detective by Grace Isabel Colbron and Augusta Groner, and of course the early Agatha Christies. Despite being "a million years" old, they're still quite good novels.
What happens when Project Gutenberg has finally digitally republished all known literary works in the English language that were first published on or before 1922?
For one thing, we don't just do literary works. We haven't even scratched the surface on mathematical and scientific works. As for magazines, we're just starting on Punch and a few other well-known ones. We also haven't started on the books that weren't renewed, and I'd like to think that we'll reverse the last copyright extension in some way or at least hold back the next one.
I'm not sure what you are referring to. Take any doctrine and somone will be willing to oppress all dissent.
Try Judges, when the Jews were sent into Israel and told to kill everyone. Doesn't seem like much freedom of choice there; you worship Baal, you die, without even an option to convert.
True, but the article pointed out that IE:mac and Outlook Express:mac support Zulu.
Give a few bucks and I can get any Unix system you want completely working on Zulu. That's because supporting Zulu is easy; all even full support requires is a translation team and maybe a keyboard layout. However, Hebrew requires its own fonts, and bidirection code and spelling code that ignores optional vowels.
If you look at KDE, Xhosa and Venda, two languages of South Africa, are well supported, but Hindi, one of the world's six largest languages, isn't supported. It has little to do with politics; it's all about how easy they are to support.
An operating system is just a bit of code which manages resources. [...] the Darwin kernel is an operating system; [...] Mac OS X, despite its name, is not an operating system;
Words are defined by usage. An operating system is obviously more then a bit of code which manages resources, because the front page of the Debian website says "Debian is a free operating system (OS) for your computer", and because page 1 of "Getting Started Microsoft Windows 98" says "Welcome to the Microsoft Windows 98 operating system", Sun lists Solaris under Operating Systems and because, as you pointed out, Mac OS X has "operating system" embedded into its name. So basically everyone in the computing buisness uses operating system to include all the stuff that gets boxed in with a kernel, and I'd hazard to say that the consumer (including the IT consumer) expects that.
Next hardest is Cyrilic languages like Greek or Russian.
Greek is not a Cyrillic language - they use the Greek alphabet. I assume here you'd also place the other languages that can be handled with a single byte code page.
Next hardest is languages like Japanese where you need to have double byte characters or Unicode.
You don't exactly have the ability not to handle Unicode anymore, if only because there's daggers and quotes and dashes in Unicode needed for proper English writing. In a lot of ways, proper Chinese support is easier then proper English support, as characters are one width (unless you toss Roman characters in, which are usually half the normal width) and line wrapping that ignores words; no justification or word wrapping to worry about.
The hardest is Arabic and Hebrew because of BiDi.
I think Bidi processing is easier then the character shaping necessary for Hindi and other Indic languages.
It is also possible that the universe periodically bangs/crunches, or is "created" out of a black hole in a different universe.
Sure, but there's no need for those quotation marks - our universe would definetly be being created, if not ex nihlo. For the most part, to those insects crawling on this planet's face, there's no distinction; there's nothing we can discover about the previous universes, and nothing we can send on to the next.
I'm sure it will be a better place when murder, theft, fraud, coercion, the contract, freedom of choice and so on become obsolete.
Which of those weren't a crime under Roman law? And since when was "freedom of choice" Christian-based morality - I seem to remember a lot of people, including the entire population of Palestine, were executed for believing in the wrong thing in the Bible.
Could it be possible, there never was a creation from a creator or a big bang which started this whole process?
When objects move apart, you can hear a shift in sound. Studies have lead us to the conclusion that the same is true of light - that the light from an object moving away from us will appear red-shifted. Since we know the wavelengths released by the various elements, we can see that the stars and galaxies around us are moving away from us. Unless we're something special, the universe is flying apart. That means that at one point in time, things were much closer; given what we know of gravity, the logical conclusion is that there was a huge explosion that threw everything in the universe apart. The steady-state theory was held by Einstein, and many others, but it's not been found to match the evidence.
they are not Christians because they don't fit the definition of Christian
When the Portuguese first came to Japan, they left behind a small group of Christians, even after that became illegal. After several centuries of being cut off from the Christiam mainstream, they picked up a number of weird ideas - I seem to remember one about Mary giving birth to Jesus after a fish was slipped in her ear. Whatever their odditiess, they worshipped the same Jesus Christ you do. What better way to characterize them then by the name of the central figure in their religion?
As for your crack about definitions, these from online dictionaries seem relevant: Christian \Chris"tian\, a. 1. Pertaining to Christ or his religion; as, Christian people. [1913 Webster]
Christian \Chris"tian\, n. [L. christianus, Gr. ?; cf. AS. cristen. See {Christ}.] [1913 Webster] 1. One who believes, or professes or is assumed to believe, in Jesus Christ, and the truth as taught by Him; especially, one whose inward and outward life is conformed to the doctrines of Christ. [1913 Webster]
(Of course, that one leaves what the doctrines of Christ are open to discussion.)
2. One born in a Christian country or of Christian parents,and who has not definitely becomes an adherent of an opposing system. [1913 Webster]
(This, too, applies to most Jehova's Witnesses.)
From The Devil's Dictionary (1881-1906) [devil]:
CHRISTIAN, n. One who believes that the New Testament is a divinely inspired book admirably suited to the spiritual needs of his neighbor. One who follows the teachings of Christ in so far as they are not inconsistent with a life of sin.
Most (if not all) prayer-in-school cases I've heard had voluntary student participation that was "voluntary" in the same way the boss selling candy bars for his kid is "voluntary."
One of the fun cases I read about involved prayer at a graduation ceremony. Since it was voluntary, the student council got to vote on whether or not to have a prayer. They voted against it. Since it was "voluntary", they were sent back to vote again so they could get it "right". (Sorry about the lack of details; it's from memory.)
Remember, the Ten Commandments is a very early and almost universally understood code of laws.
Thou shalt have no other gods before me [Jehova]. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image. Thou shalt not take the name of the LORD they God in vain. Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy.
Those aren't almost universally understood; they are religious commandments, specific to one sect of humanity, and by most accounts designed to set that sect apart from the rest of humanity.
Nobody would object if Hammurabi's Code was in the courtroom.
Why is no one putting Hammurabi's Code in the classroom? Is it, perhaps, because it's not at the root of anyone's religion and so no one has a vested interest in pushing it into classrooms? Note that Judge Roy Moore has openly stated that the religious nature of the ten commandments is why he put them in his courtroom.
saying the pledge is voluntary,
In theory - in practice I never knew that until I started reading about civil liberties. My sister was very suprised, because it wasn't voluntary in her classes.
after the first grade, I don't ever remember reciting it in class.
It depends on your school district. The high school I went to in Oklahoma never said it, but every school in Clark County (aka Vegas), Nevada said from kindergarten to high school graduation.
Taikonaut was the term coined by an American (IIRC) observer of the Chinese program. The Chinese use "Yuhangyuan" which is closer to a proper translation of astronaut.
Then the term is taikonaut, since we're speaking English and not Chinese. More likely, the term will be astronaut, but of taikonaut and yuhangyuan, the one that has a chance to formally enter the English language is taikonaut.
First off, Congress isn't making a law, nor has it made a law, concerning saying the words "Under God" in the pledge
Actually, there was a legislative act that added the words "under God" to the pledge, so yes, Congress did make a law.
"respecting an establishment of religion" refers to the actual buildings that religions meet in.
Whatever. That's a very bizzare interpretation; does that mean that Congress can make a nature religion that doesn't use buildings the national religion?
A little humility at acknowledging a supreme being is probably something that most people could use.
A little humility at realizing that our actions have consequences, and that there's no afterlife or Big Brother to make our mistakes better is probably something that most people could use.
it appears to me that people who don't believe in a "relational", absolute God are, in fact, increasingly receiving preferential treatment over those that do.
Dayton, Tennessee has 21 bibles in their school library and no copies of the Origin of Species. An Alabama court has a two-ton granite monument with the ten commandments on it in the foyer. When Madilyn Murray O'Hair disappeared, the police didn't care. When a Santeria church wanted to open in Hidelia, Florida, the city council passed a law against their religious practices.
I've never heard of the reverse, of any school library with a plethora of humanist texts in their library or two-ton monuments on state land to any non-Abraham descended religion, any loud mouthed Christian preachers silently getting killed or any cities banning Christianity. I hardly see how those who believe in God aren't getting preferencial treatment.
Those who would prefer no mention of God at all [...] seem to be succeeding in forcing their "religion" into all sorts of venues.
That's hardly a religion; that's a belief about the appropriate behavior of society and government, held by many Christians.
Like all non-Christian cults, the Jehovah's Witness organization distorts the essential doctrines of Christianity.
So, in other words, they aren't "true" Christians, because "true" Christians say so.
I was once banned from a Jehovah's Witness chat room after I not only answered their objections to the Trinity and deity of Christ, but challenged them in return. Subsequently, my name was passed around to all other Jehovah's Witness rooms where I was banned from them as well.
Because you know the Truth and are working for a translation of the bible that you know to be accurate to original texts. Did you never consider that heading into a chat room for individuals of a certain belief and attacking that belief is rude behavior, and is likely to get you banned from any chat room?
Details of capitalization aren't particularly a propos,
But they are; "a god" and even possibly "the god", but "God" is a proper name and hence always capitalized.
"God" suggests no religion in particular at all.
To the best of my knowledge, no other religions besides those that consider themselves descended from Abraham (i.e. Judiasm, Islam and Christianity) uses the word God like that. No pagan, no Buddhist, no Confucist, and certainly no atheist would use the word like that.
it was wrong in Emerson on a plain reading of the words of the Constitution.
It's amazing how many people make plain readings of the Bill of Rights and then disagree widely. "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion" has always impressed me by its very murkiness.
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Many markup languages existed in 1971: troff predecessors runoff, roff, rf; SGML predecessor GML
Oh cool, let's take our limited volunteer labor and force them to learn some off the wall markup language that they will never use anywhere else.
just about any computer [...] would have been capable of running a simple viewer for such languages
Oh cool, let's take our audience and get rid of anyone not willing to run a viewer they only need for our books. Provided, of course, there is a viewer for their system, be it any one of the dozens before Windows, Mac and Unix forced just everyone else out of the playing field.
Or, of course, we could provide plain text files. So we do all this extra work to create marked up files, and take the extra load on our server or distribution media, so people can view the plain text file.
The biggest cost in markup is the height of hoops you're asking volunteers to jump through.
Using XML would give only advantages.
That's absurd. Of course, there are disadvantages to XML:
Everyone can write plain text; there are very few people who know enough to write XML long-hand. XML is in discussion in Distributed Proofreaders, and we got several answers amounting to "Whatever. You have totally confused me. So long as I don't have to touch it, I don't care.".
Not everyone has the programs to transform XML into something usable. The DTD's haven't been created, and even where they have been, the programs to convert the XML to plain text and other formats just aren't available in easy to install packages on every platform.
XML takes work. It is a lot easier to take the raw output of proofers and turn it into text then it is turn it into XML.
We are trying to change to XML, but we can't do it until we have something that all our proofers - including the computer-illiterate ones - can handle with confidence.
Not to mention the problem of characters that aren't in ASCII.
Which is a moot point. When we have characters that aren't in ASCII we can use Latin-1 or UTF-8. Even if we go to XML, there's no guarentee that any of these characters will be used. The HTML books in PG sometimes don't have the Greek untransliterated or -- turned back into real emdashes, much less proper Unicode quotes. Our one Sanskrit text is in ASCII transliteration, not because of any PG rules, but because that's what the creators felt comfortable working with.
Suppose that XML is [...] a horrible joke being perpetuated by hordes of clueless professionals who love buzzwards. Suppose no one uses XML in 10 years.
Then there are good reasons people quit using XML, probably having to do with it being oververbose and too painful to work with. In that case, racking our proofers over the coals for some minor advantage would not be a good thing.
...they were still throwing away the formatting of the text to force it into crude 80 column ASCII. Are they still doing that? At the time they started the project I don't think there wasn't much excuse for not using some kind of markup and nowadays there's absolutely no excuse.
To start with: what type of markup do you think we should have used? The 1971 start of PG predates TeX, XML or Troff. Even 1990, in some ways a more accurate start date, predates HTML and XML. Do you honestly think that forcing all our volunteers to learn some odd markup that few could turn into something readable would have been an advantage?
Even now, most of our books come out in the same 80 column plain text (we post many books in ISO-8859-1, though.) This is because, despite your claims to the contrary, it's entirely suitable for many books.
When authors write it's not just the letters that counts. Some of that writing effort goes into formatting and you can't just discard it.
We don't discard italics. Looking at the pile of books around me, "Presten som ikke kunde brukes" uses bold instead of italics; any text transform that noted bold (say using underscores) would preserve everything. "The Food of the Gods" has a couple line diagrams that could be reproduced in ASCII art (and technically aren't formatting.) "The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes" has a map of London (that didn't come with the stories originally.) "Earthclan" has one picture of an alien ship. "El la Biblio" has nothing that would be lost by transformation into plain text. True, this is a biased selection, but if you look at what's been uploaded to Project Gutenberg, most of it that's just in plain text is exactly these types of work that don't degrade in putting them into plain text. Math books are in TeX and heavily graphical books are in HTML, if either of them are in PG at all.
I mean, "Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk" - an thoroughly discredited[1,2,3] bit of anti-Catholic propoganda - is included on the "gold" list.
We're a library; our job is not to pretty up the past, it's to record. We noted on our copy that it was propoganda, and left it at that. If you are interested in the history of anti-Catholism in the US, that is an important work to read.
Why not just include ""The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion"[4] as well?
Because we haven't found a clearable copy yet? That work had indirectly affected everyone on the planet; it's an important historical document, and so it should be preserved, if only so people can know what racist lieing screeds sound like so they can recognize it when the next politician or disgruntled psycho starts reciting them.
a photograph of a public-domain painting can be copyrighted, even though it may be visually indistinguishable from another one that has been released to public domain.
Nope. Some company sued Corel over including pictures it had made of famous paintings in their image collections. The court ruled that making a copy of an existing work doesn't give a new copyright, no matter how hard it is. In the US, at least, creative effort is required for a new copyright.
But has PG begun to preserve "musical works []; pictorial, graphic, and sculptural works; motion pictures and other audiovisual works; sound recordings; and architectural works"?
Yes, to some of those. We have some transcribed musical texts, (and one top forty song), and some of us have started working on early movies; so far PG only has a few short, low-res Government clips.
I thought PG etexts were plain ASCII text.
Common misconception. PG usually keeps an ASCII edition where feasable, but that doesn't exclude them making other editions or ignoring that when it isn't reasonable. (In any case, we could just do like the movie companies used to when they would print out every frame for copyright, and run every frame of a movie through a graphic to ascii filter.)
Those are "literary works" under 17 USC 101.
I don't think you have a concept of just how many literary works were printed before 1922. Take a look at the Canadiana or Making of America sites one day to see a great wealth of eligible books that aren't in PG yet. My old library at OSU probably had 10,000 eliglible books we hadn't done yet.
This is a finite set as well.
The number of atoms in the universe is also a finite set.
I'd like to think that we'll reverse the last copyright extension in some way or at least hold back the next one.
Wishful thinking has its purposes, but does PG have a plan B?
You like worrying, don't you? What will happen, will happen, and maybe once we get a lot closer, we'll have to worry about it, but so long as we have a large supply of texts, there's no need to worry about it. What's the worst that happens, Project Gutenberg stops getting larger nearly as fast?
most of the newer, and more accurate, translations are still copyrighted. That's why you usually only see the KJV available for download.
Any translation newer than 1922 is copyrighted (in the US). But there's a number of translations available; PG has the Douay-Rheims translation, and the World English Bible (a modern translation) for its English editions. (The World English Bible is still under copyright, but we have the right to use it.) (We could also do the American Standard Edition, but I've never seen a clearable copy.)
Modern translators have gone back to the original Hebrew and Greek, whereas the KJV was translated from the Vulgate.
In the original dedication, King James mentions translating it from the original Sacred languages, so I believe you're wrong here. However, their Greek edition was probably closely related to Erasmus's, which started European scholars studying the Greek as opposed to the Vulgate edition, but was not a terribly accurate edition in itself.
For being a fairly large database of reading material, is it only capable of archiving things so old that they have expired copyrights [...] you can hardly expect it to become a cultural phenomenon,
At least some of us read some of that older material. Shakespeare and Poe and Twain didn't suddenly become pointless after you left school.
Personally I've found myself reading a number of pulp mysterys - The Orange-Yellow Diamond by J.S. Fletcher (some sterotypes, but not racist), Joe Muller: Detective by Grace Isabel Colbron and Augusta Groner, and of course the early Agatha Christies. Despite being "a million years" old, they're still quite good novels.
What happens when Project Gutenberg has finally digitally republished all known literary works in the English language that were first published on or before 1922?
For one thing, we don't just do literary works. We haven't even scratched the surface on mathematical and scientific works. As for magazines, we're just starting on Punch and a few other well-known ones. We also haven't started on the books that weren't renewed, and I'd like to think that we'll reverse the last copyright extension in some way or at least hold back the next one.
I'm not sure what you are referring to. Take any doctrine and somone will be willing to oppress all dissent.
Try Judges, when the Jews were sent into Israel and told to kill everyone. Doesn't seem like much freedom of choice there; you worship Baal, you die, without even an option to convert.
True, but the article pointed out that IE:mac and Outlook Express:mac support Zulu.
Give a few bucks and I can get any Unix system you want completely working on Zulu. That's because supporting Zulu is easy; all even full support requires is a translation team and maybe a keyboard layout. However, Hebrew requires its own fonts, and bidirection code and spelling code that ignores optional vowels.
If you look at KDE, Xhosa and Venda, two languages of South Africa, are well supported, but Hindi, one of the world's six largest languages, isn't supported. It has little to do with politics; it's all about how easy they are to support.
An operating system is just a bit of code which manages resources. [...] the Darwin kernel is an operating system; [...] Mac OS X, despite its name, is not an operating system;
Words are defined by usage. An operating system is obviously more then a bit of code which manages resources, because the front page of the Debian website says "Debian is a free operating system (OS) for your computer", and because page 1 of "Getting Started Microsoft Windows 98" says "Welcome to the Microsoft Windows 98 operating system", Sun lists Solaris under Operating Systems and because, as you pointed out, Mac OS X has "operating system" embedded into its name. So basically everyone in the computing buisness uses operating system to include all the stuff that gets boxed in with a kernel, and I'd hazard to say that the consumer (including the IT consumer) expects that.
Next hardest is Cyrilic languages like Greek or Russian.
Greek is not a Cyrillic language - they use the Greek alphabet. I assume here you'd also place the other languages that can be handled with a single byte code page.
Next hardest is languages like Japanese where you need to have double byte characters or Unicode.
You don't exactly have the ability not to handle Unicode anymore, if only because there's daggers and quotes and dashes in Unicode needed for proper English writing. In a lot of ways, proper Chinese support is easier then proper English support, as characters are one width (unless you toss Roman characters in, which are usually half the normal width) and line wrapping that ignores words; no justification or word wrapping to worry about.
The hardest is Arabic and Hebrew because of BiDi.
I think Bidi processing is easier then the character shaping necessary for Hindi and other Indic languages.
It is also possible that the universe periodically bangs/crunches, or is "created" out of a black hole in a different universe.
Sure, but there's no need for those quotation marks - our universe would definetly be being created, if not ex nihlo. For the most part, to those insects crawling on this planet's face, there's no distinction; there's nothing we can discover about the previous universes, and nothing we can send on to the next.
I'm sure it will be a better place when murder, theft, fraud, coercion, the contract, freedom of choice and so on become obsolete.
Which of those weren't a crime under Roman law? And since when was "freedom of choice" Christian-based morality - I seem to remember a lot of people, including the entire population of Palestine, were executed for believing in the wrong thing in the Bible.
Could it be possible, there never was a creation from a creator or a big bang which started this whole process?
When objects move apart, you can hear a shift in sound. Studies have lead us to the conclusion that the same is true of light - that the light from an object moving away from us will appear red-shifted. Since we know the wavelengths released by the various elements, we can see that the stars and galaxies around us are moving away from us. Unless we're something special, the universe is flying apart. That means that at one point in time, things were much closer; given what we know of gravity, the logical conclusion is that there was a huge explosion that threw everything in the universe apart. The steady-state theory was held by Einstein, and many others, but it's not been found to match the evidence.
they are not Christians because they don't fit the definition of Christian
When the Portuguese first came to Japan, they left behind a small group of Christians, even after that became illegal. After several centuries of being cut off from the Christiam mainstream, they picked up a number of weird ideas - I seem to remember one about Mary giving birth to Jesus after a fish was slipped in her ear. Whatever their odditiess, they worshipped the same Jesus Christ you do. What better way to characterize them then by the name of the central figure in their religion?
As for your crack about definitions, these from online dictionaries seem relevant:
Christian \Chris"tian\, a.
1. Pertaining to Christ or his religion; as, Christian people. [1913 Webster]
Christian \Chris"tian\, n. [L. christianus, Gr. ?; cf. AS. cristen. See {Christ}.] [1913 Webster]
1. One who believes, or professes or is assumed to believe, in Jesus Christ, and the truth as taught by Him; especially, one whose inward and outward life is conformed to the doctrines of Christ. [1913 Webster]
(Of course, that one leaves what the doctrines of Christ are open to discussion.)
2. One born in a Christian country or of Christian parents,and who has not definitely becomes an adherent of an opposing system.
[1913 Webster]
(This, too, applies to most Jehova's Witnesses.)
From The Devil's Dictionary (1881-1906) [devil]:
CHRISTIAN, n. One who believes that the New Testament is a divinely inspired book admirably suited to the spiritual needs of his neighbor. One who follows the teachings of Christ in so far as they are not inconsistent with a life of sin.
(I love Ambrose Bierce.)
Most (if not all) prayer-in-school cases I've heard had voluntary student participation that was "voluntary" in the same way the boss selling candy bars for his kid is "voluntary."
One of the fun cases I read about involved prayer at a graduation ceremony. Since it was voluntary, the student council got to vote on whether or not to have a prayer. They voted against it. Since it was "voluntary", they were sent back to vote again so they could get it "right". (Sorry about the lack of details; it's from memory.)
Remember, the Ten Commandments is a very early and almost universally understood code of laws.
Thou shalt have no other gods before me [Jehova]. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image. Thou shalt not take the name of the LORD they God in vain. Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy.
Those aren't almost universally understood; they are religious commandments, specific to one sect of humanity, and by most accounts designed to set that sect apart from the rest of humanity.
Nobody would object if Hammurabi's Code was in the courtroom.
Why is no one putting Hammurabi's Code in the classroom? Is it, perhaps, because it's not at the root of anyone's religion and so no one has a vested interest in pushing it into classrooms? Note that Judge Roy Moore has openly stated that the religious nature of the ten commandments is why he put them in his courtroom.
saying the pledge is voluntary,
In theory - in practice I never knew that until I started reading about civil liberties. My sister was very suprised, because it wasn't voluntary in her classes.
after the first grade, I don't ever remember reciting it in class.
It depends on your school district. The high school I went to in Oklahoma never said it, but every school in Clark County (aka Vegas), Nevada said from kindergarten to high school graduation.
Taikonaut was the term coined by an American (IIRC) observer of the Chinese program. The Chinese use "Yuhangyuan" which is closer to a proper translation of astronaut.
Then the term is taikonaut, since we're speaking English and not Chinese. More likely, the term will be astronaut, but of taikonaut and yuhangyuan, the one that has a chance to formally enter the English language is taikonaut.
First off, Congress isn't making a law, nor has it made a law, concerning saying the words "Under God" in the pledge
Actually, there was a legislative act that added the words "under God" to the pledge, so yes, Congress did make a law.
"respecting an establishment of religion" refers to the actual buildings that religions meet in.
Whatever. That's a very bizzare interpretation; does that mean that Congress can make a nature religion that doesn't use buildings the national religion?
A little humility at acknowledging a supreme being is probably something that most people could use.
A little humility at realizing that our actions have consequences, and that there's no afterlife or Big Brother to make our mistakes better is probably something that most people could use.
it appears to me that people who don't believe in a "relational", absolute God are, in fact, increasingly receiving preferential treatment over those that do.
Dayton, Tennessee has 21 bibles in their school library and no copies of the Origin of Species. An Alabama court has a two-ton granite monument with the ten commandments on it in the foyer. When Madilyn Murray O'Hair disappeared, the police didn't care. When a Santeria church wanted to open in Hidelia, Florida, the city council passed a law against their religious practices.
I've never heard of the reverse, of any school library with a plethora of humanist texts in their library or two-ton monuments on state land to any non-Abraham descended religion, any loud mouthed Christian preachers silently getting killed or any cities banning Christianity. I hardly see how those who believe in God aren't getting preferencial treatment.
Those who would prefer no mention of God at all [...] seem to be succeeding in forcing their "religion" into all sorts of venues.
That's hardly a religion; that's a belief about the appropriate behavior of society and government, held by many Christians.
Like all non-Christian cults, the Jehovah's Witness organization distorts the essential doctrines of Christianity.
So, in other words, they aren't "true" Christians, because "true" Christians say so.
I was once banned from a Jehovah's Witness chat room after I not only answered their objections to the Trinity and deity of Christ, but challenged them in return. Subsequently, my name was passed around to all other Jehovah's Witness rooms where I was banned from them as well.
Because you know the Truth and are working for a translation of the bible that you know to be accurate to original texts. Did you never consider that heading into a chat room for individuals of a certain belief and attacking that belief is rude behavior, and is likely to get you banned from any chat room?
Details of capitalization aren't particularly a propos,
But they are; "a god" and even possibly "the god", but "God" is a proper name and hence always capitalized.
"God" suggests no religion in particular at all.
To the best of my knowledge, no other religions besides those that consider themselves descended from Abraham (i.e. Judiasm, Islam and Christianity) uses the word God like that. No pagan, no Buddhist, no Confucist, and certainly no atheist would use the word like that.
it was wrong in Emerson on a plain reading of the words of the Constitution.
It's amazing how many people make plain readings of the Bill of Rights and then disagree widely. "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion" has always impressed me by its very murkiness.