I didn't know that Mozart put on 'The Magic Flute' as a one-man show
That still doesn't approach the size or complexity of modern film.
Even back before copyright, it cost money to create art
I don't remember one pre-copyright art work that required anywhere near the expenditure of modern film. Items that were arguably works of art that took huge amounts of effort - cathedrals and pyramids - were built on the backs of slaves and peasants.
It's the 21st century - power does not come from above. We can't depend on rich folks to pay for all our entertainment; the only way to get funding is to get the people who want to watch it to pay for it. We don't live in a world where everyone can come to the Globe theater to watch Shakespear; we live in a world where works of art are made for the world, and distribution is an important part of that.
This is just crap. Ever hear of Bach, Mozart, or Beethoven? They're these old dead guys who used to write some tunes.
But they didn't produce Apollo 13. Apollo 13 took hundreds of people to make, who each spent months working on it. Projects like that can't be made by one person, or even a small group, and they can't be made cheaply; camera, film, computers all cost money.
There are projects that are out of the reach of one person or a small group of people working in their spare time. Copyrights are used to fund them. It would be surprising if somebody who worked hard for his money would be willing to pay for the billions of dollars spent to make movies; it's a very different proposal from paying for one Beethoven, Bach, or Mozart.
You can't have a reliable roundtrip conversion, when you don't even have a reliable freaking one way conversion!
How can you have a reliable conversion if the origin is ill-defined?
And there is no longer any translation table at all.
All Unicode did was move it into the OBSOLETE directory. They certainly didn't search the web and destroy every copy they could find.
The impetus for asians to use unicode has all but evaporated,
Which is why all operating systems sold in China must support GB18030, a format of Unicode.
the only people using unicode for asian data interchange is westerners.
Sure, the email may be in ISO-2022-JP; but the emailer that sent it probably stored it in Unicode and displayed it using a Unicode text display engine. This is true for Outlook Express, Mozilla, and anything written for KDE or Gnome 2.
For many language encodings the conversion to unicode is a one-way ticket, there is no roundtrip possible
Really? Name a few. The Unicode consortium and ISO 10646 went through a lot of trouble to round trip everything through Unicode. They recently added ARABIC TAIL FRAGMENT to roundtrip some ancient IBM Arabic character sets through Unicode. There are hundreds of characters in Unicode whose only point is roundtrip other character sets through Unicode.
There is no longer any official translation table for japanese encodings to unicode.
Those were never official. Two different systems didn't always agree on the definition of various characters in those encodings, making it hard to make an accurate universal translation table. Also, Unicode doesn't consider the defintion of various Japanese standards its business.
One particular time, a translator looked at the japanese and translated the words as "fingering the ulimate nothingness that underlies everything". This was from part of some C programming instructions. Took me nearly eight hours to figure out that the phrase was "pointer to void"
Okay, now hand the same phrase to Joe Translator, who doesn't speak C. I seriously doubt that you'll get anything better. The problem was not that you were using an automatic translator; it was that you were using a translator, human or otherwise, that didn't know the jargon of the field you were translating.
If congress could ever intelligently craft legislation and keep crippling amendments away from it, there will be a better chance of something like this not being thrown out on "protected speech" rulings.
Um, how? The complaint wasn't that it was sloppy, or crippled by special interests. The complaint was that filtering software is illegal under the first amendment. No matter how you craft it, that's going to be a crippling problem.
I also believe that it is wrong for the government to actively undermine the efforts of parents to raise their children in a moral manner
Of course, some parents would consider the Bible to be at least as bad as pornography in this case. And part of the problem is that with filtering software is that some of the makers agree with you, and filter stuff like NOW or gay and lesbian stuff, which you may find fine, but I find rather offensive.
the librarians, hampered by legal constraints, stand by silently with their arms folded.
What legal constraints? My local public library had me sign a paper saying I wouldn't do that before they'd let me access the Internet, giving them grounds to remove anyone doing that. Heck, they could be arrested for lewd acts in public, if they have their hands in their pants.
(because presumably, men want a woman who looks like a porn star)?
In my experiance with porn, there is no one shape for the porn star. They come in all shapes and sizes. So don't blame porn for hangups about shape and size.
How many men learn to look only at a woman's outward appearance when looking for a girlfriend; worse, how many see women as nothing more than a means to a sexual end, and have no intentions of ever being a husband to one?
Many people who do that haven't seen porn; it just comes naturally to them. I don't think it's fundamentally much different from the places in the world where men can have many wives and women are to be seen but not heard, and in most of those places, pornography is banned.
Any competent computer science grad student should be able to write a servicable compiler. Thousands of people are capable of doing this, and the only remarkable aspect of GCC is that it was released under the GPL
Then why do the BSD people still use it? It seems instead of being dependent on the GNU project for the compiler, they would have written their own. Or maybe a good optimizing, multi-architecture compiler is a non-trivial thing to write, eh?
We require all the sciences to use the metric system.
The metric system - all the average person needs to use - is describable on one small page at normal size print. No language comes close, especially not English. In any case, if you want to be a scientist, you have to take 10 years of college; there should be no unnessecary requirements on what you have to learn to use a computer.
most information is in English,
Most people use the Internet more for communication than information. It's like comparing the amount of water in two lakes when you're looking to water your roses. It doesn't matter how much information there is, so long as there's enough. I would guess there's enough information out there in Spanish or German or Chinese or most other major languages.
people learn that they need to know english well enough to ask a question, read a manual, read a book on programming, etc.
Right. Most people don't go around reading manuals (that didn't come with their computer) or books on programming (at all).
Again, we aren't talking about hackers here. People seriously into any field are going to pick up the language common in that field, and computers are no exception. You're asking the masses to learn a language to use computers, which is entirely different.
You don't sound like someone who's tried to learn languages here. I've taken years of classes to learn German, and can still only stutter through. Reading a half-page of technical information in German took me a hour, at which point I gave up trying to read it. I can't imagine ordering everyone in the world to learn a language to use a computer.
The ae and oe to which you refer are indeed ASCII...
If you use Linux, try man ascii. That will show you all the characters in ascii. See Roman Czyborra's character set page for more detail than you could ever want. As a point, ae and oe are not in ASCII; oe isn't even in Latin-1.
Mathematics has it's own language which I doubt Unicode can rival.
Huh? What's that supposed to mean?
As far as culture, you can keep your native language... Just keep one language standard on the internet!
You can keep your language, as long as we don't see it, then? Use our language where we can see it. That's not arrogant? What if you were asked to learn Mandarian Chinese (the language of more people than any other) before you could use the Internet?
One of the amazing things about the Internet are when grandparents can communicate with grandchildren; forcing old dogs to learn new tricks and young kids to pick up a second language before they've fully learned their first isn't going to make the Internet more accessable to everyone.
So... you can't respect other people's personal decisions on spirituality? Granted, the 900-numbers are gimmicky. But why should Astrology books be discredited as non-sense?
So you feel it's all right to knock 900-numbers, but astrology books are something that everyone should respect, eh?
You can't just call something faith, and say that no one should say anything about it. Astrology makes certain checkable statements, which tend to found wrong. Most branchs of Christianity and Judaism make few checkable statements; belief in them is a matter of faith.
(1) Which glyphs are the same are entirely font dependent.
(2) Greek letter A lowercased should look like ; Latin letter A lowercase should look like a. There are 23 o-like characters, some symbols, some alphabetic characters, 1 ideograph; each of them has their own properies, and many of them may or may not look the same depending on the font.
I'm shocked at how hard it is to install applications, partly because of how the use shared libraries, and all the hassles associated with having the wrong version of the libraries, having them in the wrong place, etc.
What distribution are you using? I use Debian, wherein apt just downloads whatever versions of the various libraries I need along with the program. Whenever this comes up, RPM people claim their various systems use apt or some other system to solve the problem just as elegantly.
What are you doing on Linux that you weren't doing on Unix? As far as I can tell, the same problems should pop up with add-on packages and Unix.
Oh dear, my idealism is shattered, now that I know that Slashdot readers listen to "pop"ular music as opposed to only Pagannine, Vivaldi, and Mozart.
This really surprises you? I would have guessed that the Slashdot audience listened to classical music slightly more than their age group, and country music slightly less, but I wouldn't expect a real strong correlation anyway.
Personally, what little classical music I listen to is usually fast and furious, although I also enjoy a good classical orchastra backing up a good rock band.
Well of course the Republic of China was formed in 1912, so that fits in with your timescale:-).
Oops. Asian history isn't really my forte . ..
So perhaps your divergence is that the communist revolution failed.
I'd think it be more important that whatever problems let it get started disappear.
The development of something akin to unicode would have been fundamental, not an afterthought.
One of my personal annoyances, and something I don't entirely understand, is that China, Taiwan and Japan all had multibyte character since at least 1980, but none of them really tried to be multilingal; the impetus behind Unicode was largely American. (To be fair, America had multibit character sets since the 50's, but expanding the number of bits to include the everyone didn't really occur to us until the mid-80s.) Looking at history, a multibyte character set would have been used, but I don't think something like Unicode would have appeared until the world just plain shrunk enough and people got tired of dealing with dozens of different character sets everywhere.
There is a reason why all airline pilots are required to speak the same language. It happens to be English, but that's not what's important.
Yes, but airline pilots are highly trained professionals who may kill people if there's a communication problem. The Internet should be accessable to everyone, not just those who know English.
Conventions could be adopted to convert their display into other character sets, but the ASCII version should be the official one.
That's what they're doing - I believe a leading bq-- will signal that it's supposed to be Unicode. How is bq--asdiv8nern.com much better than 129.22.21.99, though?
HOWEVER, what I'd like best of all would be to replace the dumb keyboard (hit a key, get the character printed on the key cap) with smart input methods at the OS level (maybe keyboard driver level if you don't have a GUI).
Will the X input manager framework not support this? I've looked at it repeatedly, but I read none of the CJK languages XIM is primarily designed for and primarily documented in.
I know it's only X, but I've given up any hope of Linux and X agreeing on the keyboard.
nothing like a good bash of the perceived 'English Language Oligarchy' that rules the planet.
You're saying the _American_ Standard For Information Interchange should be the _universal_ standard for URLs, and so far, more or less, it has been. Of any non-invented language in the world, English has the most people who say "why don't they all speak my language". How many American journals publish in a non-English language? How many Japanese journals publish in a non-Japanese language? And what language is that usually? It's not an overt thing; no oligarchy exists per se. But there are distinct biases towards English, and it's very frustrating when those biases are gratitious.
URLs must be standardized on a universally recognizable (and unconfused) character-set.
Why must the character set be universally recognizable? Yes, I'm not likely to type in www..com. So what? If they want my business, they probably need to register an ASCII domain name. If they don't want my buisness, they can go on being www..com.
Every literate person on the planet can read them.
Um, no? At best, _many_ people literate in languages using non-Latin scripts can recognize them. That's a far cry from reading them. That's important; part of the point of a URL is that www.slashdot.org is memorable. But if I'm not fluent in English, even if I can recognize individual characters, it won't be. How frustrating would it be if you had to transliterate English into Greek or Cyrillic everytime you wanted to write a URL? I want my name in my email address, not some mangled foreign version.
It's been those who are idealistic, but also understand how the world works.
Vladimir Lenin was pragmatic and changed things, but he needed the impractical writer Karl Marx. Saul of Tarsis was pragmatic and changed things, but he needed the wandering preacher Jesus Christ. Sure, pragmatists are usually the ones to change the world, but they often rely on fanatics for how and why they are changing the world. Linus Torvald has changed the way the world looks at Free software more than RMS has, but if it wasn't for RMS, Linux never would have been released under the GPL.
Certainly not in terms of the number of characters!
But in terms of number of characters per text or sq. cm. of paper. The "What is Unicode" page is smaller byte-size in Chinese than any other language, IIRC, even with each Chinese character taking 3 bytes and most Latin character taking 1.
Again, when responding the the comment about "what if China had created the Internet", I didn't know it was fair game to also imply "what if China became a Republic in the 1800s", "what if Russia/China/etc. had pioneered computing" and so on.
Any scenario where China created the Internet naturally presuposses major changes in what China was, as China was in no position to build a large network of computers at the time the Internet was created.
On the other hand, if all of Western Europe and the Americas had to start learning katakana, cyrillic or Korean letters (let alone Chinese(!), which is what I was responding to), I think they would have rather developed their own way of handling the Internet, keeping the Chinese(or whatever) "Internet" confined within China.
Had the shoe been on the other foot, and April 1st, 1983 carried a message about WashVAX instead of KremVAX, I think they would have happily jumped on board whatever was in place. What self-respecting geek is going to let a language - much less a writing system - get in the way of getting hooked up to the Internet?
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't know that Mozart put on 'The Magic Flute' as a one-man show
That still doesn't approach the size or complexity of modern film.
Even back before copyright, it cost money to create art
I don't remember one pre-copyright art work that required anywhere near the expenditure of modern film. Items that were arguably works of art that took huge amounts of effort - cathedrals and pyramids - were built on the backs of slaves and peasants.
It's the 21st century - power does not come from above. We can't depend on rich folks to pay for all our entertainment; the only way to get funding is to get the people who want to watch it to pay for it. We don't live in a world where everyone can come to the Globe theater to watch Shakespear; we live in a world where works of art are made for the world, and distribution is an important part of that.
This is just crap. Ever hear of Bach, Mozart, or Beethoven? They're these old dead guys who used to write some tunes.
But they didn't produce Apollo 13. Apollo 13 took hundreds of people to make, who each spent months working on it. Projects like that can't be made by one person, or even a small group, and they can't be made cheaply; camera, film, computers all cost money.
There are projects that are out of the reach of one person or a small group of people working in their spare time. Copyrights are used to fund them. It would be surprising if somebody who worked hard for his money would be willing to pay for the billions of dollars spent to make movies; it's a very different proposal from paying for one Beethoven, Bach, or Mozart.
You can't have a reliable roundtrip conversion, when you don't even have a reliable freaking one way conversion!
How can you have a reliable conversion if the origin is ill-defined?
And there is no longer any translation table at all.
All Unicode did was move it into the OBSOLETE directory. They certainly didn't search the web and destroy every copy they could find.
The impetus for asians to use unicode has all but evaporated,
Which is why all operating systems sold in China must support GB18030, a format of Unicode.
the only people using unicode for asian data interchange is westerners.
Sure, the email may be in ISO-2022-JP; but the emailer that sent it probably stored it in Unicode and displayed it using a Unicode text display engine. This is true for Outlook Express, Mozilla, and anything written for KDE or Gnome 2.
For many language encodings the conversion to unicode is a one-way ticket, there is no roundtrip possible
Really? Name a few. The Unicode consortium and ISO 10646 went through a lot of trouble to round trip everything through Unicode. They recently added ARABIC TAIL FRAGMENT to roundtrip some ancient IBM Arabic character sets through Unicode. There are hundreds of characters in Unicode whose only point is roundtrip other character sets through Unicode.
There is no longer any official translation table for japanese encodings to unicode.
Those were never official. Two different systems didn't always agree on the definition of various characters in those encodings, making it hard to make an accurate universal translation table. Also, Unicode doesn't consider the defintion of various Japanese standards its business.
One particular time, a translator looked at the japanese and translated the words as "fingering the ulimate nothingness that underlies everything". This was from part of some C programming instructions. Took me nearly eight hours to figure out that the phrase was "pointer to void"
Okay, now hand the same phrase to Joe Translator, who doesn't speak C. I seriously doubt that you'll get anything better. The problem was not that you were using an automatic translator; it was that you were using a translator, human or otherwise, that didn't know the jargon of the field you were translating.
If congress could ever intelligently craft legislation and keep crippling amendments away from it, there will be a better chance of something like this not being thrown out on "protected speech" rulings.
Um, how? The complaint wasn't that it was sloppy, or crippled by special interests. The complaint was that filtering software is illegal under the first amendment. No matter how you craft it, that's going to be a crippling problem.
I also believe that it is wrong for the government to actively undermine the efforts of parents to raise their children in a moral manner
Of course, some parents would consider the Bible to be at least as bad as pornography in this case. And part of the problem is that with filtering software is that some of the makers agree with you, and filter stuff like NOW or gay and lesbian stuff, which you may find fine, but I find rather offensive.
the librarians, hampered by legal constraints, stand by silently with their arms folded.
What legal constraints? My local public library had me sign a paper saying I wouldn't do that before they'd let me access the Internet, giving them grounds to remove anyone doing that. Heck, they could be arrested for lewd acts in public, if they have their hands in their pants.
(because presumably, men want a woman who looks like a porn star)?
In my experiance with porn, there is no one shape for the porn star. They come in all shapes and sizes. So don't blame porn for hangups about shape and size.
How many men learn to look only at a woman's outward appearance when looking for a girlfriend; worse, how many see women as nothing more than a means to a sexual end, and have no intentions of ever being a husband to one?
Many people who do that haven't seen porn; it just comes naturally to them. I don't think it's fundamentally much different from the places in the world where men can have many wives and women are to be seen but not heard, and in most of those places, pornography is banned.
Any competent computer science grad student should be able to write a servicable compiler. Thousands of people are capable of doing this, and the only remarkable aspect of GCC is that it was released under the GPL
Then why do the BSD people still use it? It seems instead of being dependent on the GNU project for the compiler, they would have written their own. Or maybe a good optimizing, multi-architecture compiler is a non-trivial thing to write, eh?
We require all the sciences to use the metric system.
The metric system - all the average person needs to use - is describable on one small page at normal size print. No language comes close, especially not English. In any case, if you want to be a scientist, you have to take 10 years of college; there should be no unnessecary requirements on what you have to learn to use a computer.
most information is in English,
Most people use the Internet more for communication than information. It's like comparing the amount of water in two lakes when you're looking to water your roses. It doesn't matter how much information there is, so long as there's enough. I would guess there's enough information out there in Spanish or German or Chinese or most other major languages.
people learn that they need to know english well enough to ask a question, read a manual, read a book on programming, etc.
Right. Most people don't go around reading manuals (that didn't come with their computer) or books on programming (at all).
Again, we aren't talking about hackers here. People seriously into any field are going to pick up the language common in that field, and computers are no exception. You're asking the masses to learn a language to use computers, which is entirely different.
You don't sound like someone who's tried to learn languages here. I've taken years of classes to learn German, and can still only stutter through. Reading a half-page of technical information in German took me a hour, at which point I gave up trying to read it. I can't imagine ordering everyone in the world to learn a language to use a computer.
The ae and oe to which you refer are indeed ASCII...
If you use Linux, try man ascii. That will show you all the characters in ascii. See Roman Czyborra's character set page for more detail than you could ever want. As a point, ae and oe are not in ASCII; oe isn't even in Latin-1.
Mathematics has it's own language which I doubt Unicode can rival.
Huh? What's that supposed to mean?
As far as culture, you can keep your native language... Just keep one language standard on the internet!
You can keep your language, as long as we don't see it, then? Use our language where we can see it. That's not arrogant? What if you were asked to learn Mandarian Chinese (the language of more people than any other) before you could use the Internet?
One of the amazing things about the Internet are when grandparents can communicate with grandchildren; forcing old dogs to learn new tricks and young kids to pick up a second language before they've fully learned their first isn't going to make the Internet more accessable to everyone.
So... you can't respect other people's personal decisions on spirituality? Granted, the 900-numbers are gimmicky. But why should Astrology books be discredited as non-sense?
So you feel it's all right to knock 900-numbers, but astrology books are something that everyone should respect, eh?
You can't just call something faith, and say that no one should say anything about it. Astrology makes certain checkable statements, which tend to found wrong. Most branchs of Christianity and Judaism make few checkable statements; belief in them is a matter of faith.
(1) Which glyphs are the same are entirely font dependent.
(2) Greek letter A lowercased should look like ; Latin letter A lowercase should look like a. There are 23 o-like characters, some symbols, some alphabetic characters, 1 ideograph; each of them has their own properies, and many of them may or may not look the same depending on the font.
I'm shocked at how hard it is to install applications, partly because of how the use shared libraries, and all the hassles associated with having the wrong version of the libraries, having them in the wrong place, etc.
What distribution are you using? I use Debian, wherein apt just downloads whatever versions of the various libraries I need along with the program. Whenever this comes up, RPM people claim their various systems use apt or some other system to solve the problem just as elegantly.
What are you doing on Linux that you weren't doing on Unix? As far as I can tell, the same problems should pop up with add-on packages and Unix.
Oh dear, my idealism is shattered, now that I know that Slashdot readers listen to "pop"ular music as opposed to only Pagannine, Vivaldi, and Mozart.
This really surprises you? I would have guessed that the Slashdot audience listened to classical music slightly more than their age group, and country music slightly less, but I wouldn't expect a real strong correlation anyway.
Personally, what little classical music I listen to is usually fast and furious, although I also enjoy a good classical orchastra backing up a good rock band.
Well of course the Republic of China was formed in 1912, so that fits in with your timescale :-).
.
Oops. Asian history isn't really my forte . .
So perhaps your divergence is that the communist revolution failed.
I'd think it be more important that whatever problems let it get started disappear.
The development of something akin to unicode would have been fundamental, not an afterthought.
One of my personal annoyances, and something I don't entirely understand, is that China, Taiwan and Japan all had multibyte character since at least 1980, but none of them really tried to be multilingal; the impetus behind Unicode was largely American. (To be fair, America had multibit character sets since the 50's, but expanding the number of bits to include the everyone didn't really occur to us until the mid-80s.) Looking at history, a multibyte character set would have been used, but I don't think something like Unicode would have appeared until the world just plain shrunk enough and people got tired of dealing with dozens of different character sets everywhere.
E.g. bq--rusMicroSoft.com wouldn't be confused with Microsoft.com
Yes, but bq--asdiv8nern.com could easily get confused with bq--adiv8narn.com. No one's going to want to look at the ASCII mangled names.
There is a reason why all airline pilots are required to speak the same language. It happens to be English, but that's not what's important.
Yes, but airline pilots are highly trained professionals who may kill people if there's a communication problem. The Internet should be accessable to everyone, not just those who know English.
Conventions could be adopted to convert their display into other character sets, but the ASCII version should be the official one.
That's what they're doing - I believe a leading bq-- will signal that it's supposed to be Unicode. How is bq--asdiv8nern.com much better than 129.22.21.99, though?
HOWEVER, what I'd like best of all would be to replace the dumb keyboard (hit a key, get the character printed on the key cap) with smart input methods at the OS level (maybe keyboard driver level if you don't have a GUI).
Will the X input manager framework not support this? I've looked at it repeatedly, but I read none of the CJK languages XIM is primarily designed for and primarily documented in.
I know it's only X, but I've given up any hope of Linux and X agreeing on the keyboard.
nothing like a good bash of the perceived 'English Language Oligarchy' that rules the planet.
You're saying the _American_ Standard For Information Interchange should be the _universal_ standard for URLs, and so far, more or less, it has been. Of any non-invented language in the world, English has the most people who say "why don't they all speak my language". How many American journals publish in a non-English language? How many Japanese journals publish in a non-Japanese language? And what language is that usually? It's not an overt thing; no oligarchy exists per se. But there are distinct biases towards English, and it's very frustrating when those biases are gratitious.
URLs must be standardized on a universally recognizable (and unconfused) character-set.
Why must the character set be universally recognizable? Yes, I'm not likely to type in www..com. So what? If they want my business, they probably need to register an ASCII domain name. If they don't want my buisness, they can go on being www..com.
Every literate person on the planet can read them.
Um, no? At best, _many_ people literate in languages using non-Latin scripts can recognize them. That's a far cry from reading them. That's important; part of the point of a URL is that www.slashdot.org is memorable. But if I'm not fluent in English, even if I can recognize individual characters, it won't be. How frustrating would it be if you had to transliterate English into Greek or Cyrillic everytime you wanted to write a URL? I want my name in my email address, not some mangled foreign version.
You cannot make money selling software unless you can (ostensibly) control how the software is distributed.
Of course, the fact that Cygnus and ACT (the makers of GNAT, the GNU Ada compiler) do shouldn't affect your argument in any way.
It's been those who are idealistic, but also understand how the world works.
Vladimir Lenin was pragmatic and changed things, but he needed the impractical writer Karl Marx. Saul of Tarsis was pragmatic and changed things, but he needed the wandering preacher Jesus Christ. Sure, pragmatists are usually the ones to change the world, but they often rely on fanatics for how and why they are changing the world. Linus Torvald has changed the way the world looks at Free software more than RMS has, but if it wasn't for RMS, Linux never would have been released under the GPL.
What if I choose to exercise my freedom to write an application in pure machine code?
Then that would clearly be the preferred form for changing the code under the GPL, which accords with the FSF's idea of source code.
Certainly not in terms of the number of characters!
But in terms of number of characters per text or sq. cm. of paper. The "What is Unicode" page is smaller byte-size in Chinese than any other language, IIRC, even with each Chinese character taking 3 bytes and most Latin character taking 1.
Again, when responding the the comment about "what if China had created the Internet", I didn't know it was fair game to also imply "what if China became a Republic in the 1800s", "what if Russia/China/etc. had pioneered computing" and so on.
Any scenario where China created the Internet naturally presuposses major changes in what China was, as China was in no position to build a large network of computers at the time the Internet was created.
On the other hand, if all of Western Europe and the Americas had to start learning katakana, cyrillic or Korean letters (let alone Chinese(!), which is what I was responding to), I think they would have rather developed their own way of handling the Internet, keeping the Chinese(or whatever) "Internet" confined within China.
Had the shoe been on the other foot, and April 1st, 1983 carried a message about WashVAX instead of KremVAX, I think they would have happily jumped on board whatever was in place. What self-respecting geek is going to let a language - much less a writing system - get in the way of getting hooked up to the Internet?