the story I always heard was it was trivial for the software distributors to make one tiny change to one character and it was legally a new typeface (it wasn't bit for bit identical).
Actually, there's a big difference between a typeface - the set of curves that define the shape of a character - and a computer font - the code that draws those curves. The latter has full protection of law. You can't take the font and change a few bits in it and legally redistribute it, and those companies that did got sued big time. You can, however, print out the font at large sizes and scan it back into the computer, or anything else that copies the curves but not the program/font.
Re:The word is treason (Well, not really...)
on
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No matter how many times those of us that knew what we were talking abou tsaid that there was nothing to worry about,
And many other people, also seemingly authoritive, said there was stuff to worry about.
people still paniced, and still stocked up. Not a vastly large number of people mind you, but a good majority
A good majority would be a vastly large number of people. And honestly, people may have stocked up, but I don't remember any runs on the supermarket or bank. Sure, some people may have bought a few extra batteries, flashlights and cans of creamed corn (which are never bad to have a few extra of), but all in all, most people were calm and rational about it.
Imagin what the public reaction would be to an "End of the world via nuke" senario.
And? Frankly, if someone plans on playing a game of brinkmanship, I'd like the chance to get away from ground zero, and go back to Nowhere, Oklahoma until the issue calms down. I think that's an eminently rational approach.
after Sept 11, when it was revealed that there was the potential for the government to know about this all before hand [...]? The press and the public screamed bloddy murder that people weren't warned
I don't remember anyone complaining that the press wasn't notified. I do remember complaints that the left hand of the government didn't know what the right hand was doing, and that if they had assembled what they had, they would have known what was going on.
If you're a Nazi, they come and throw you in prison.
If you are stupid enough to wave a Nazi flag around. On the other hand, I can't remember the last time a synagouge got attacked in the US, whereas there are a number of cases of Jews being attacked in Germany. If you search for Jews on the Amnesty International, I get them being attacked in Germany and being considered two sympathetic to keep on a jury in the US.
Re:The word is treason (Well, not really...)
on
Want Freedom?
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· Score: 2
Creating widespread pandimonium is not bennificial to anyone except your enemies.
Really? Then why has the Bush administration been trying so hard? ("There may be terrorist activities on July 4th"... well, duh, but there may be any day, and unless you have fairly concrete details, it doesn't do much good, does it?)
In any case, the government should not be hiding stuff like the Cuban Missile crisis. Widespread pandimonium beats a public that has no idea what the government is doing. It's a democratic government; the people must know what's going on so they can make their opinion known, and made good choices about who keeps their jobs and who doesn't.
So they have all kinds of laws to make sure that Nazis never again get anything resembling power in Germany. [...] Frankly, I think this is commendable in this specific case.
And I would disagree. You drive something underground, you make it cool and anti-establishment - which I understand has happened to Naziism in Germany. But in America, Nazis are idiots; it's not cool to be a Nazi, you just make yourself the target of derision and hatred. Of course, there are huge differences, but the difference is thought-provoking.
Here's a country that bends over backwards, any way it can, to avoid making the same mistake twice.
How many countries wouldn't? The US government puts a lot of money and support into combating racism in the US.
IMO, once you cross that path, you'll never go back. Naziism will never be a serious power in Germany, or anywhere else, again. But the question is, how much nasty stuff will be done in the name of Naziism by punks and jerks trying to be cool and anti-establishment?
Re:The word is treason
on
Want Freedom?
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· Score: 2
If a reporter discovers classified information
Then the enemy probably could have discoved the same information. Probably easier, since the enemy presumbly has spies in the military where as the press is made up of civilians.
It is a matter of treason, as if they'd discovered documents and sold them directly to a foreign power.
It's not treason. Treason "shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies [...] on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, [...]" (U.S. Constitution, article 3, section 3). Do you really expect reporters to run everything by the government before they publish it, to see whether it's classified? You may as well shut down the free press. If it's classified, the press shouldn't be able to find out about it. It's your fault for not concealing the information; if they could find it, so potentially could the enemy.
You make a brash claim, one that I have yet to see any actual scientist claiming to be an evolutionist want to make in public.
Dawkins claims to explain the evolution of the eye in several of his books.
a unique structure like the optic nreve [..] or the brain (that has no visual cortex for processing any signals it might send)
Nerves run everywhere in the body, and all lead to the brain. The brain is fairly adaptable - if one nerve starts giving different information, it can handle that through non-evolutionary (intra-creature) adaptation. Yes, as the eyes develop over geological time, the optic nerve is going to get larger, as is the part of brain it hooks up to, but that's exactly what evolution claims.
the possibility of cross-species disease propagation is very real and very scary.
Why? We've been living with and eating these creatures for millenia. (We've probably been having sex with them for the same time, sick as the concept may be.) Many farmers have probably got pigs blood in open wounds - they tend not to be squeamish when killing animals. If there's a disease that pigs carry that humans haven't already developed at least partial immunity to, then it is extraordinarily hard to catch.
They are not to have unprotected sex and should not have children.
Um, why? Why do we think that those will be the primary means of transmission? If a new disease does come out of the woodwork, it seems that any mode of transmission may be used.
That is your opinion, and you are in the minority.
I made a claim: that if an entertaining group is not affected by the opinion of its audience, then they will tend to perform stuff that they like, which is frequently not what the majority likes. Of course it's an opinion, but it's not a judgement call; it could easily be tested. Whether or not others disagree is irrelevant to the truthfulness of the claim.
One example of this may be French cinema; I'm told at one point in time, it was almost completely funded by the French government, and French audiences went to see American movies because few wanted to see the French movies.
the ability to watch something just because it is fun?
It's very hard to make something fun; it's much easier to make it "deep", and "insightful". What do you think that most show makers, freed of commercial obligations, would go for?
One of the great advantages of having no ads is that there is no concept of ratings. [...] you can concentrate on the providing quality content,
You can provide content which will please the programmers. You will, however, have little indication of what pleases the public and honestly little reason to care. Stuff like that tends to carry fairly esoteric material, aimed to a narrow subset of the public (not nessecarily your subset!), instead of widely popular content.
I don't believe that people should be required or even expected to communicate in a non native language if they don't want to
If you can't communicate in a non-native language, then expect people who aren't fluent in your native language not to understand you.
would it kill people to learn a little bit of A/ISL?
I've never had to deal with someone who only speaks sign. Given that, why should I take what's going to amount to a semester class for even the most basics of the language? I could spend that time learning other stuff; even language-wise, I'm better off improving my German or learning some Spanish or Russian.
Sign Language is not a disability.
Being deaf and unable to learn to speak a spoken language is.
Nor Spanish, nor Hebrew, Pashto or anything else.
Nor is Achinese, Acoli, Adangme, Afrikaans, Aljama, Albanian, Aluet, Amharic, Apache, Arabic, Armenian, Araucanian, Arapaho, Arawak, Assamese, Avaric, Avestan, Awadhi, Aymara, or Azerbaijani. Once you've learned those, come back and we can start on the B's.
There are 5,000 languages in the world, and over a hundred with several million speakers. Even the most dedicated speaker will find it very hard to be fluent in even ten of them. Artificial aids to communicate with those who don't share your language are always useful.
English is not the official language here in America.
It happens to be what the inhabitants of the US speak. There are many ways that it can made be easier for someone who doesn't speak native English, but it is the lingua franca of the land, and unless you're Mohammed, and expect the mountain to come to you, you're going to need to learn the language for day to day life in America. (Why is that American tourists are blasted for going to foreign countries and not knowing any of the language, but people can move to America and we should accomadate them not knowing any English?)
They may not have realized that gettext is GPLed (Not LGPLed.)
I believe the latest release is LGPLed. In any case, there are LGPLed copies of gettext about - libc has a copy (so nothing for Linux that uses gettext need be GPLed) and KDE has a copy that was taked from libc.
(For those reading at zero, the AC is me; I just forgot to log in first.)
For someone flaming evolutionists for making unsupported statements, that's a pretty big claim. What had to be created all at once? How do we know that? A long time example was the eye, but that's pretty much been shattered.
If we did not have the Flying Squirrel as a living example, the evolution of bat flight might be harder to imagine, for example.
And if this doesn't illustrate the shallowness of evolutionist argument, I don't know what does.
Wha? Read what was written. Flying squirrels were given as an example of similiarity, not evolution. An example of an intermdiate step.
See Stoneage Mutant Mammal Turtles for more on this topic...)
Which asks questions like:
How did a reptile with one vagina, that reproduces by expelling hard-shelled eggs, become a marsupial?
There are snakes that give live birth, so the concept of a group of reptiles developing live birth isn't at all implausible. Bifurcated/multiple vaginas is also a common mutation, even in humans.
Evolution is, in fact, losing credibility as people begin to look at it critically.
Young-earth creationism lost all credibility over a century ago. Whatever happens to evolution, young-earth creationism has been established to be wrong. If evolution is also wrong, then we need a good alternate theory - which may be the eternal existance of life in an eternal universe, for example. The fact that none of the anti-evolution people picked that as a theory makes me suspicious of their motives.
ever raising religion as an argument. (Which is not to imply that it's not a vaild one...)
Why is it a valid argument? It presumes the answer, and you either take it on faith or not. There's no argument part to it.
The best site I've found on this topic is Science Against Evolution
Which has a section "Christianity versus Evolution". That's not science; it's about as believable as the cigarette companies claiming smoking doesn't cause cancer.
the one about the insurmountable difficulties of reptilian-to-mammal evolution. If you believe that one happened, I've got a bridge to sell you...)
And yet you believe that some being could just wish this world into existence in one piece? In any way the world was created, extraordinary things happened.
The Science Against Evolution site is written and managed by "Do-while Jones" a nom de plume for David Pogge, who in 1990 was given the considerable honor of being made a Fellow at the US Naval Weapons Center at China Lake. He is one of the world's most accomplished programmers
What does a programmer know about biology? Would you let him diagnose your illness? History is ripe with smart people speaking nonsense outside their field of knowledge.
Is this registration some special process that makes one copyright somehow stronger than another?
Yes. Before you can bring a case to court, you must register your copyright with the Library of Congress, which costs about $35. I believe you could do the whole website in one bite, and it only matters if you're going to sue someone.
I don't have serious objections to Windows of the Mac.
I still find an 800MHz processor more than fast enough for commercial software development.
I don't have an obsession with buying every new $400 video card that comes along.
Maybe it's the faux "power users" that need a condescending term for them?
"Power users" certainly isn't the right term. Frankly, a lot of the people who would look down on you for running a Mac run old x86s, old Sparcs or even Vaxen. Most of the people with the $400 video card run Windows.
It goes to the intent of the framers. Do you think that the framers intended for retrospective copyright laws to be unconstitutional, then immediately went and voted in the first congress for a retrospective copyright law?
But when the framers wrote a retrospective copyright law, it was because maps (in particular) were being held as trade secrets because of a lack of copyright protection. There's a big difference between giving people who currently holding their works as trade secrets a reason to release them and giving works already released by authors who won't be releasing any more an additional stay under copyright.
it's real professional to kill backwards-compatibility on a sub-major version release.
3.2 is a major release. The C++ ABI had not stabilized yet, and this is the last change before making it permenantly stable.
That way all your users can upgrade without thinking about it and suddenly have to reinstall their whole system
All the major distributers (FreeBSD, Debian, RedHat, Mandrake, SuSe) and anybody else who bothered following the list knew about this. GCC is like libc; changing it can break everything, so most people just let the distribution handle it. Those who ride the cutting edge, and don't keep their eyes out for something like this, get what they deserve.
Oh, you mean there isn't an OSS solution for the US Postal Service?
If there isn't, then there most definetely should be. It is a "highly targeted, industry specific solutions that can't be solved without an in-depth knowledge and design of that industry" - the only reason for the Post Office not to have the source code and right to modify it, is so some proprietary company can use threats against the mail service to extort money out of us.
the OSes themselves use only ascii (from what I understand).
The OS's support arbitrary strings of 8-bit characters, which means they support UTF-8. There is no point in a modern Unix kernel where you would want to use UTF-8, and it won't let you, short of arbitrary hardware or standards limitations (weird foreign filesystems and what not.)
The W3C (amongst others) is responsible for having created a baroque web of overly complex standards, resulting in ambiguous specifications, bugs in the various implementations, and a stagnant culture where developers spend their time conforming to W3C specs rather than developing new features and doing what _they_ think is important.
Wait a second; the whole reason the HTML standard is as complex and baroque as it is, is _because_ of developers developing new features and doing what they think is important. There has to be some standard for what HTML should look like, so that IE and Mozilla and Lynx and Word and FineReader and Dreamweaver and Emacs and every other program that has to deal with HTML can communicate with each other. W3C is it, and it's good enough that no one should need to ignore it.
Slashdot Mirror
Would that be because some joker like Bill Gates made it possible to patent algorithms?
No. Fonts have full protection of copyright law like any other program.
the story I always heard was it was trivial for the software distributors to make one tiny change to one character and it was legally a new typeface (it wasn't bit for bit identical).
Actually, there's a big difference between a typeface - the set of curves that define the shape of a character - and a computer font - the code that draws those curves. The latter has full protection of law. You can't take the font and change a few bits in it and legally redistribute it, and those companies that did got sued big time. You can, however, print out the font at large sizes and scan it back into the computer, or anything else that copies the curves but not the program/font.
No matter how many times those of us that knew what we were talking abou tsaid that there was nothing to worry about,
And many other people, also seemingly authoritive, said there was stuff to worry about.
people still paniced, and still stocked up. Not a vastly large number of people mind you, but a good majority
A good majority would be a vastly large number of people. And honestly, people may have stocked up, but I don't remember any runs on the supermarket or bank. Sure, some people may have bought a few extra batteries, flashlights and cans of creamed corn (which are never bad to have a few extra of), but all in all, most people were calm and rational about it.
Imagin what the public reaction would be to an "End of the world via nuke" senario.
And? Frankly, if someone plans on playing a game of brinkmanship, I'd like the chance to get away from ground zero, and go back to Nowhere, Oklahoma until the issue calms down. I think that's an eminently rational approach.
after Sept 11, when it was revealed that there was the potential for the government to know about this all before hand [...]? The press and the public screamed bloddy murder that people weren't warned
I don't remember anyone complaining that the press wasn't notified. I do remember complaints that the left hand of the government didn't know what the right hand was doing, and that if they had assembled what they had, they would have known what was going on.
If you're a Nazi, they come and throw you in prison.
If you are stupid enough to wave a Nazi flag around. On the other hand, I can't remember the last time a synagouge got attacked in the US, whereas there are a number of cases of Jews being attacked in Germany. If you search for Jews on the Amnesty International, I get them being attacked in Germany and being considered two sympathetic to keep on a jury in the US.
Creating widespread pandimonium is not bennificial to anyone except your enemies.
Really? Then why has the Bush administration been trying so hard? ("There may be terrorist activities on July 4th"... well, duh, but there may be any day, and unless you have fairly concrete details, it doesn't do much good, does it?)
In any case, the government should not be hiding stuff like the Cuban Missile crisis. Widespread pandimonium beats a public that has no idea what the government is doing. It's a democratic government; the people must know what's going on so they can make their opinion known, and made good choices about who keeps their jobs and who doesn't.
So they have all kinds of laws to make sure that Nazis never again get anything resembling power in Germany. [...] Frankly, I think this is commendable in this specific case.
And I would disagree. You drive something underground, you make it cool and anti-establishment - which I understand has happened to Naziism in Germany. But in America, Nazis are idiots; it's not cool to be a Nazi, you just make yourself the target of derision and hatred. Of course, there are huge differences, but the difference is thought-provoking.
Here's a country that bends over backwards, any way it can, to avoid making the same mistake twice.
How many countries wouldn't? The US government puts a lot of money and support into combating racism in the US.
IMO, once you cross that path, you'll never go back. Naziism will never be a serious power in Germany, or anywhere else, again. But the question is, how much nasty stuff will be done in the name of Naziism by punks and jerks trying to be cool and anti-establishment?
If a reporter discovers classified information
Then the enemy probably could have discoved the same information. Probably easier, since the enemy presumbly has spies in the military where as the press is made up of civilians.
It is a matter of treason, as if they'd discovered documents and sold them directly to a foreign power.
It's not treason. Treason "shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies [...] on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, [...]" (U.S. Constitution, article 3, section 3). Do you really expect reporters to run everything by the government before they publish it, to see whether it's classified? You may as well shut down the free press. If it's classified, the press shouldn't be able to find out about it. It's your fault for not concealing the information; if they could find it, so potentially could the enemy.
... do try to maintain a little historical perspective. International finance pre-dates computers by hundreds of years.
Sure. So does typesetting and a lot of other things that no one in their right mind is going to try and do without computers nowadays.
You make a brash claim, one that I have yet to see any actual scientist claiming to be an evolutionist want to make in public.
Dawkins claims to explain the evolution of the eye in several of his books.
a unique structure like the optic nreve [..] or the brain (that has no visual cortex for processing any signals it might send)
Nerves run everywhere in the body, and all lead to the brain. The brain is fairly adaptable - if one nerve starts giving different information, it can handle that through non-evolutionary (intra-creature) adaptation. Yes, as the eyes develop over geological time, the optic nerve is going to get larger, as is the part of brain it hooks up to, but that's exactly what evolution claims.
the possibility of cross-species disease propagation is very real and very scary.
Why? We've been living with and eating these creatures for millenia. (We've probably been having sex with them for the same time, sick as the concept may be.) Many farmers have probably got pigs blood in open wounds - they tend not to be squeamish when killing animals. If there's a disease that pigs carry that humans haven't already developed at least partial immunity to, then it is extraordinarily hard to catch.
They are not to have unprotected sex and should not have children.
Um, why? Why do we think that those will be the primary means of transmission? If a new disease does come out of the woodwork, it seems that any mode of transmission may be used.
That is your opinion, and you are in the minority.
I made a claim: that if an entertaining group is not affected by the opinion of its audience, then they will tend to perform stuff that they like, which is frequently not what the majority likes. Of course it's an opinion, but it's not a judgement call; it could easily be tested. Whether or not others disagree is irrelevant to the truthfulness of the claim.
One example of this may be French cinema; I'm told at one point in time, it was almost completely funded by the French government, and French audiences went to see American movies because few wanted to see the French movies.
the ability to watch something just because it is fun?
It's very hard to make something fun; it's much easier to make it "deep", and "insightful". What do you think that most show makers, freed of commercial obligations, would go for?
One of the great advantages of having no ads is that there is no concept of ratings. [...] you can concentrate on the providing quality content,
You can provide content which will please the programmers. You will, however, have little indication of what pleases the public and honestly little reason to care. Stuff like that tends to carry fairly esoteric material, aimed to a narrow subset of the public (not nessecarily your subset!), instead of widely popular content.
I don't believe that people should be required or even expected to communicate in a non native language if they don't want to
If you can't communicate in a non-native language, then expect people who aren't fluent in your native language not to understand you.
would it kill people to learn a little bit of A/ISL?
I've never had to deal with someone who only speaks sign. Given that, why should I take what's going to amount to a semester class for even the most basics of the language? I could spend that time learning other stuff; even language-wise, I'm better off improving my German or learning some Spanish or Russian.
Sign Language is not a disability.
Being deaf and unable to learn to speak a spoken language is.
Nor Spanish, nor Hebrew, Pashto or anything else.
Nor is Achinese, Acoli, Adangme, Afrikaans, Aljama, Albanian, Aluet, Amharic, Apache, Arabic, Armenian, Araucanian, Arapaho, Arawak, Assamese, Avaric, Avestan, Awadhi, Aymara, or Azerbaijani. Once you've learned those, come back and we can start on the B's.
There are 5,000 languages in the world, and over a hundred with several million speakers. Even the most dedicated speaker will find it very hard to be fluent in even ten of them. Artificial aids to communicate with those who don't share your language are always useful.
English is not the official language here in America.
It happens to be what the inhabitants of the US speak. There are many ways that it can made be easier for someone who doesn't speak native English, but it is the lingua franca of the land, and unless you're Mohammed, and expect the mountain to come to you, you're going to need to learn the language for day to day life in America. (Why is that American tourists are blasted for going to foreign countries and not knowing any of the language, but people can move to America and we should accomadate them not knowing any English?)
They may not have realized that gettext is GPLed (Not LGPLed.)
I believe the latest release is LGPLed. In any case, there are LGPLed copies of gettext about - libc has a copy (so nothing for Linux that uses gettext need be GPLed) and KDE has a copy that was taked from libc.
(For those reading at zero, the AC is me; I just forgot to log in first.)
Some things simply had to be created all at once
For someone flaming evolutionists for making unsupported statements, that's a pretty big claim. What had to be created all at once? How do we know that? A long time example was the eye, but that's pretty much been shattered.
If we did not have the Flying Squirrel as a living example, the evolution of bat flight might be harder to imagine, for example.
And if this doesn't illustrate the shallowness of evolutionist argument, I don't know what does.
Wha? Read what was written. Flying squirrels were given as an example of similiarity, not evolution. An example of an intermdiate step.
See Stoneage Mutant Mammal Turtles for more on this topic...)
Which asks questions like:
How did a reptile with one vagina, that reproduces by expelling hard-shelled eggs, become a marsupial?
There are snakes that give live birth, so the concept of a group of reptiles developing live birth isn't at all implausible. Bifurcated/multiple vaginas is also a common mutation, even in humans.
Evolution is, in fact, losing credibility as people begin to look at it critically.
Young-earth creationism lost all credibility over a century ago. Whatever happens to evolution, young-earth creationism has been established to be wrong. If evolution is also wrong, then we need a good alternate theory - which may be the eternal existance of life in an eternal universe, for example. The fact that none of the anti-evolution people picked that as a theory makes me suspicious of their motives.
ever raising religion as an argument. (Which is not to imply that it's not a vaild one...)
Why is it a valid argument? It presumes the answer, and you either take it on faith or not. There's no argument part to it.
The best site I've found on this topic is Science Against Evolution
Which has a section "Christianity versus Evolution". That's not science; it's about as believable as the cigarette companies claiming smoking doesn't cause cancer.
the one about the insurmountable difficulties of reptilian-to-mammal evolution. If you believe that one happened, I've got a bridge to sell you...)
And yet you believe that some being could just wish this world into existence in one piece? In any way the world was created, extraordinary things happened.
The Science Against Evolution site is written and managed by "Do-while Jones" a nom de plume for David Pogge, who in 1990 was given the considerable honor of being made a Fellow at the US Naval Weapons Center at China Lake. He is one of the world's most accomplished programmers
What does a programmer know about biology? Would you let him diagnose your illness? History is ripe with smart people speaking nonsense outside their field of knowledge.
Is this registration some special process that makes one copyright somehow stronger than another?
Yes. Before you can bring a case to court, you must register your copyright with the Library of Congress, which costs about $35. I believe you could do the whole website in one bite, and it only matters if you're going to sue someone.
I use a GUI.
I don't have serious objections to Windows of the Mac.
I still find an 800MHz processor more than fast enough for commercial software development.
I don't have an obsession with buying every new $400 video card that comes along.
Maybe it's the faux "power users" that need a condescending term for them?
"Power users" certainly isn't the right term. Frankly, a lot of the people who would look down on you for running a Mac run old x86s, old Sparcs or even Vaxen. Most of the people with the $400 video card run Windows.
It goes to the intent of the framers. Do you think that the framers intended for retrospective copyright laws to be unconstitutional, then immediately went and voted in the first congress for a retrospective copyright law?
But when the framers wrote a retrospective copyright law, it was because maps (in particular) were being held as trade secrets because of a lack of copyright protection. There's a big difference between giving people who currently holding their works as trade secrets a reason to release them and giving works already released by authors who won't be releasing any more an additional stay under copyright.
it's real professional to kill backwards-compatibility on a sub-major version release.
3.2 is a major release. The C++ ABI had not stabilized yet, and this is the last change before making it permenantly stable.
That way all your users can upgrade without thinking about it and suddenly have to reinstall their whole system
All the major distributers (FreeBSD, Debian, RedHat, Mandrake, SuSe) and anybody else who bothered following the list knew about this. GCC is like libc; changing it can break everything, so most people just let the distribution handle it. Those who ride the cutting edge, and don't keep their eyes out for something like this, get what they deserve.
Oh, you mean there isn't an OSS solution for the US Postal Service?
If there isn't, then there most definetely should be. It is a "highly targeted, industry specific solutions that can't be solved without an in-depth knowledge and design of that industry" - the only reason for the Post Office not to have the source code and right to modify it, is so some proprietary company can use threats against the mail service to extort money out of us.
If you are a kernel hacker (I'm not....), and you want to use chinese characters as variable names, why should you not be able to do that?
Because the common language of kernel hackers is English.
the OSes themselves use only ascii (from what I understand).
The OS's support arbitrary strings of 8-bit characters, which means they support UTF-8. There is no point in a modern Unix kernel where you would want to use UTF-8, and it won't let you, short of arbitrary hardware or standards limitations (weird foreign filesystems and what not.)
The W3C (amongst others) is responsible for having created a baroque web of overly complex standards, resulting in ambiguous specifications, bugs in the various implementations, and a stagnant culture where developers spend their time conforming to W3C specs rather than developing new features and doing what _they_ think is important.
Wait a second; the whole reason the HTML standard is as complex and baroque as it is, is _because_ of developers developing new features and doing what they think is important. There has to be some standard for what HTML should look like, so that IE and Mozilla and Lynx and Word and FineReader and Dreamweaver and Emacs and every other program that has to deal with HTML can communicate with each other. W3C is it, and it's good enough that no one should need to ignore it.