yeah I laughed at the *similiar culture* but. US and Canada are like chalk and cheese. Candians being a commonwealth county have more akin to New Zealanders and Australians than Americans.
The article was comparing Canadian outsourcing to Indian and Chinese outsourcing.
Look, I don't want to be rude here, but I keep hearing this kind of thinking from Canadians. I know lots of Canadians don't WANT to be like Americans... but face it, you are. Not the same, but very similar. Canadians and Americans aren't like "chalk and cheese". Canadians and Americans are like colby and cheddar. Canadians and Chinese are like chalk and cheese.
For what it's worth, I'm sure working with Aussie's, while not quite as easy as working with Canadians (do to time zone and accent), is a heck of a lot simpler than working with Indians or Chinese. Take my word for it. I live in China, and though I speak and read Chinese, it's a hell of a lot easier to get business done with Canadians than Chinese. I don't have to deal with lots of attempts to cheat "the ignorant foreigner", guanxi, companies with connections to corrupt officials, or any of that crap. I don't care if a thousand Canadians argue until they're blue in the face about how different you are from Americans like me. To me, despite whatever nationalism prejudice you harbor against me, you are still familiar and easier to relate to or work with than just about anyone else in the world.
Sorry, pal. That's the common usage. When someone says "American", 99% of the time it means "a person from the United States of America". Heck some langauges such as Japanese have taken America as a loan word to mean ONLY that. Considering that "the United States" is ambiguous in that it could refer to "the United States of Mexico", and no other countries in North America have "America" in their name, it's a quick and reasonable way to refer to the place.
What do you want America to mean? Does it just include the United States of America and Canada? Should Mexico be included so that "America" means North America? Or how about including Central and South Americans too? Then "America" would mean the Americas. See where this is headed?
It's simplest to just go by common usage. "America" means the USA. North America also includes Canada and Mexico, and the Americas means the entire "New World". Besides, if Canadians waste their time worrying about diction they can't change, maybe they won't have as much time to invest in making nationalistic insults, watching "Talking to Americans", or generally being rude to us. And THAT, would be good news for all Americans.
I did google it, and I came up with a lot of irrelevant stuff. Maybe you should google it before you flame people. Even after modifying the search terms, I still found a lot of demos written years ago. In fact a good deal of the demos I saw were written for dead systems (c64, amiga, etc...). That's why I posted, and while a few assholes fired back sarcastic responses, I got some useful links too.
I really used to love all those demos. They were small, they were fast and they looked great. Basically they were the cutting edge. I used to hang out with 5 of my buddies and watch them on a 486 in my basement. At that time, the demos looked better than anything in any game. But going back and looking at them now is a little sad. It just makes me think of how the demo scene pretty much dried up.
Have any of you seen a demo that supports hardware acceleration? Maybe something that uses openGL? That would be sweet, a modern demo. I mean, a normal video games graphics beat the heck out of any of the old demos now. But the way I see it, at this point it wouldn't be too tough to make hardware accelerated demos that rivaled or surpassed movie graphics. That is, if anybody bothered making them.
If anybody's got links to show me I'm wrong and there are modern demos, PLEASE POST THEM NOW!!!
I wasn't grappling for anything. I find your post unnecessarily rude. "Costed" is acceptable as a past tense or a past participle for the intransitive verb "cost", according to dictionary.com, among others. "Costed" is in widespread use.
Some take it as a personal crusade to chase down split infinitives, 3rd person singular "they"s, and failure to use "whom" in the objective case. I prefer to not to waste everybody's time being so anal, especially not in a forum like this. Face it, language is not a static thing. Ultimately, it is common usage that drives the grammar books, and not the other way around.
You got it wrong. A vote for Nader is NOT a vote for Bush. It's a vote for Nader. I really don't see why so many people struggle with this concept. I voted for Nader last time. My second choice was Bush, not Gore. Actually, Nader costed Bush my vote, at least.
Nader supporters aren't some sort of "extreme democrat". Actually, the things that drew me to Nader are issues on which the major parties took the same stand. Campaign finance reform is one. Sticking it to Microsoft is another. Not selling out to the MPAA and RIAA was a big factor too. Oh, and lest I forget, ending the war on drugs. There are a bunch issues where I have no respect for either the democrat or republican platform, but Nader was right on the money.
If I had to pick between Bush and Gore, it would have been Bush, though. Gore had already shown himself to be a compulsive liar (not saying Bush didn't later), and just as importantly dems tend to be even more willing to play bitch to the RIAA and MPAA.
There you go. A vote for Nader is a vote for Nader, not for Bush, Kerry, Bill Gates, or the tooth fairy. Got it?
I mean what gets cooler than the borg? They're huge, powerful, and they're a threat to humanity. Just like microsoft, right? They have a hive mind, they just mindless want to assimilate EVERYTHING into their system kind of like Windows assimilated web browsers, media players and then messengers into the OS! The parallels just don't stop! Both are evil! Both are cool!
If only Microsoft had the guts to play up their evil borg-ishness, THEN they could be cool. Honestly, what is cooler than a seemingly unstoppable evil force?
He knew English, but not French. He could, conceivably have been an American who had spent a lot of time practicing how to say "about" and "sorry" like a Canadian. I really doubt it, though. Guatemalans are really friendly to Americans, I don't see why people would want to pretend to be Canadian there.
What you said about not being sure about Hawaii and Alaska is true of many Canadians I've met. I have NEVER met an adult American who didn't know how many states there are. Every freaking elementary school kid learns about how there's one star on the flag for each state, yada yada yada...
Well, I don't have a problem with all Canadians. I certainly don't start bitching at people as soon as I find out where they're from. I was just responding to the post that generalized Canadians as 'polite'.
HOWEVER, I do like a lot of Canadian bands and comedians. Other than Rush, I also enjoy Sarah Mclachlan, most of the old Saturday Night Live crowd and countless other Canadians who didn't jump at me with lots of nationalist insults and taunts. Maybe if I met some of them I would find them to rude or nationalist too... but there's no denying that Neil Peart is one hell of a drummer or that Mike Myers is a very funny man.
What are you smoking? In my experience, Canadians are a bunch of insensitive, prejudiced bastards. While living in Guatemala, I'd say about 3/4 of the Canadians I met were rude, insulting, and offensive to me JUST because I'm American. I never had any negative ideas about Canadians until I travelled out of the country and met several.
It seems par for the course to be assumed to be stupid, uneducated, and some how, less "sophisticated". I can't even count the number of times I was told I'm supporting an "Imperialit Regime" because I grew up in the US, paid my taxes, and didn't revolt over foriegn policy (which I didn't make).
I even met one Canadian who told me that "Americans don't know anything about the rest of the world". This is from some fucker not only couldn't speak ANY of the local language in the country we were living, but can't even speak his own country's two languages. I, on the other hand speak English, Spanish, and Chinese. Do most Americans? No. But a fair number of southern Californians do. It's not right to just say that ALL Americans are ignorant. The best part was when he gave me a "pop quiz" on how many provinces Canada has. I knew, and then I asked him how many states the US has. He didn't know. He didn't know.
Grassroots is the only way, huh? Haven't terrorists been keeping more powerful enemies at bay in asymetrical confrontations like this for decades? Wouldn't attacks upon the executives and upon company property slow them down a bit? I'm not advocating it; I'm just saying it looks like the way things may be headed if the law truly is unfixable.
At 5 years in prison, all lawyers fees, and $150,000 per song, the penalties for filesharing 1 whole album are more than those for theft, burglary, manslaughter, rape, and arson. It's only a matter of time before SOMEONE decides that there is no justice in American laws.
I don't think creatine has any really serious side effects. Many people have been taking it for years, and nothing too serious has come out of it. I started taking it myself in '98. Here's what I've found personally:
1. Weight gain I put on a lot more muscle after I started taking creatine. I had been stuck at a plateau for months before I started, but once I started, growth got started. Some of the weight gain was water weight. My strenght improved, as did my sprint times (I'm a swimmer), but for distance I got slower.
2. Muscular endurace improvement I said above that my distance times suffered. This is because of increased body weight, and the extra cardio vascular work that ensues. However, I have found that while I am supplementing with creatine, I am able to force out more work after getting to the point where my muscles hurt from lactic acid. This may be 90% of the reason my sprints are improved.
Beyond this, many others have reported body odor. Some college wrestlers died a few years backafter intensive workouts in rubber suits. It was reported that they had elevated blood creatine levels. Some media said supplementation was a cause of death. Most mainstream sports journals contended creatine is always elevated after intense work outs, and it was especially so in this case because the wresters had dehydrated themselves to try to cut weight.
One last concern I have heard of is adaptation. Creatine does come from meats, but the body also manufactures it. Some have said that if you regularly take creatine for a long period of time, that your body might lose the ability to make it. This is the only one that worries me. So, I say just use it cyclicly, and don't worry. There are thousands who started using it years ago, and any long term damage will get them first, and then you can stop taking it.
In the mean time, get HUGE!!! Oh, and uh, smart, too.
I'm quite familiar with Japanese input. Actually what you say about Japanese forgetting how to write by hand is true. Most young Japanese have problems remembering characters. Japanese has a HUGE disadvantage compared with Mandarin (or any other langauge I know) for input. There are 2 big problems.
1) Japanese has 3 character sets Whenever you write a word you have to chose whether you want it to be hiragana, katakana or kanji. There are general rules to be followed, but the are not absolute! Grammatical particles are always kanji, and foriegn loan words are always katakana, BUT many times the same word could be written in any of the 3 depending on situation and the feeling the author wants to communicate. Usually you would see hiragana in a personal context, kanji in a formal context, and katakana in advertising. The result of all of this is that a phonetic input system must be used, and after phonetics are input, the user must select which of the 3 alphabets to use. In the best case scenario the computer would choose correctly wherever only one script is permited, and require just a few strikes of the space bar in other cases. This is still slow.
2. Lots of homonyms Japanese has borrowed a huge portion of its vocabulary from Chinese. Chinese was (and still is)tonal. Japanese isn't. As a result Japanese has a LOT of homonyms. For example, "denki" can mean a light, electrical appliances in general, a romance novel, or a biography. They all have different Chinese characters, but the sound are the same. In cases like this the user has no choice but to either hit the space bar until they get the word they want or worse yet pick up the mouse and click the desired character from a box. This is madenning. I have never met ANY Japanese programmer who types over 100wpm, EVEN if you count hiragana particles as words!!!
In Mandarin, you will never have problem #1. If you use a phonetic input system such as bpmf as most novices do, you have problem #2 to a small extent. Being tonal, there are far fewer homonyms in Mandarin than in Japanese, but there are a few. I realize inputting the tone takes a keyboard strike, but even counting the tone, no word is more than 4 keystrokes (and you don't need spaces between them, like in English).
If you use canjie (cangjie to some), or another radical based system you well never have problem #1 or problem #2.
I hope this was informative, I work with Japanese who come to Taiwan for business on a regular basis, as well as corrospond with them through email, and these have been my experiences. If there is some newer and better Japanese input out there, I'd love to see it. It would be a big time saver for me!
Apparently you know very little about Mandarin, or it's input. For Japanese input, there is a big speed penalty. But Chinese input is faster.
Most people in Taiwan use either bpmf input or canjie. Most people in mainland China use either pinyin or canjie. Bpmf and pinyin are phonetic input methods which are approximately the same speed as English. Canjie input is based upon the structure of a character instead, and is MUCH faster than English input. I can type over 200 words per minute with canjie, and many professional typists can type at over 300.
There is no "slowing factor" in typing Mandarin. In fact, I would argue that by lacking a meaning based orthographic system, that English is a "slowing factor".
I live in Taiwan, and just about EVERY km or 2 in any city there's a night market, most of which are sell cheap CD's, and VCD's. I can buy a CD for only about 1.5 USA dollars, or a movie for 3. ANYWHERE.
You have a pretty much guaranteed job as an English teacher, and China DOES NOT have an extradition treaty with the US. Once you know Chinese, you'll have numerous job opportunities and your children will enjoy a much better public schooling system too.
Even with windows, unicode is not useful for Chinese. There are a couple of reasons.
1) Unicode doesn't allocate enough characters to Chinese. If you write in Unicode, there will be many undisplayable words.
2) Han Reunification- This was a very stupid idea a bunch of western standards groups came up with. Basically, there are many words that are similar in Chinese, Japanese and Korean. About 200 years ago, those differences didn't exist, but the written languages have diverged a bit. For example the word for 'a couple' (of something) was identical in all three languages prior to WWII. Afterwords, during MacArthur's program to simplify Japanese writing, the character was simplified in Japanese. Then, 20 years later, Chairman Mao simplified the same character in a different way in mainland China, but Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Korea all still use the old form. The result is that there are three very similar characters that mean the same thing.
Han Reunification means that some westerners arbitrarily decided which characters will be used (by all parties) for each word. The result is that Chinese and Koreans have to use a Japanese word sometimes, while other times Japanese and Koreans must use a Chinese word. This is similar to forcing French and English speakers to use the Spanish word for house, while forcing the Spanish and French to use the English word for computer. It's stupid, and no one is going to do that if they have an alternative that will allow them to write more normally in their native language.
Anyway, nobody uses unicode for Chinese. Depending on where you live, you'll use either Big5 or GBK.
Computer go has also been extensively researched
on
Men vs. Machines
·
· Score: 1
Actually, go is a very popular game world wide, arguably more popular than chess. It's true that the areas in which go is popular aren't the most affluent in the world, but there are a great deal of programmers working on go. A very wealthy Tawainese man, the late Mr. Ing set up a foundation to award $40 million (TWD) to the first go program to beat a 1-dan player. He also set up incremental prizes for each kyu level a computer could advance to. Literally thousands of programs have competed, and none can win against a one dan amateur, even with a 9 stone handicap.
Go is very unlike chess. Chess computers improve greatly with improvements in hardware. In fact, very straight forward chess programs with simple evaluation algorithms and minimal pruning can defeat master level chess players when run on modern PCs. One example is the ever popular TSCP . Go programs on the other hand do not improve notably simply by using a brute force approach. Handtalk, the former computer go champion plays less than one kyu better on an Athlon2000 than it does on a 386. For more info, check the links on Mick's Computer Go Page
"This argument is simply stupid. Most of us aren't elite athletes, and what works for them won't necessarily work for us. If a normal person ate like Michael Jordan, they'd be fat as hell, because they don't get the degree of exercise that Jordan does. High-intensity exercise does indeed need carbohydrate for fuel. But most of us don't care for that sort of exercise."
Actually, I do care for a good deal of exercise. I'm sure it's not as intense as Micheal Jordan's, but I do run about 40-50km/week. So, I'd say on average I exercise 40 minutes/day. I don't see how wanting a diet to fuel exercise makes me stupid, though. Maybe another reason so many Americans are fat is because they are lazy. But, in any case I can see your point about what is ideal for athletes being different from most people. But, there are still over 2 billion people eating a rice or noodle based diet, and they aren't fat like Americans are with their higher protien diets.
"Oh, and about the second-generation Asians thing: One good friend of mine is an second-generation Chinese girl who has lost something like 80 pounds, a gut, and two chins over the last year. On the Atkins diet."
Thank you, you just illustrated my point. How many Chinese (living in China and eating about 70% carb diets) have 80 pound guts and double chins to lose? I don't think you can say that carbohydrates are the root of fatness!
And Japanese people live a whole lot longer than Americans. Why do you think that is? Genetics, you say? Well, actually second generation Japanese-Americans are much fatter, and more prone to diabetes, and heart attacks than their relatives who grow up in Japan. So are second generation Chinese living in America. But second generation Chinese living in Japan are fine.
All of this carb bashing is senseless. The longest lived people in the world get nearly 50% of their calories from rice... and then eat noodles frequently too! In fact, it is those segments who have adopted western diets who are those with obesity problems. It's sheer insanity to just read your Atkins book, nod your head and figure that carbs are the root of your eating problems. I am suspicous of all the sugar in western food, but NOODLES AND RICE EATERS DON'T HAVE TO BE FAT!!!
Now, back to that evolutionary argument. Where exactly were all of our ancestors getting juicy porter house steak? As I understand it, most wild game such as deer or elk have less than 10% of their calories coming from fat. I don't see how any primitive human could have come close to the over 30% of calories from fat diet that is popular in America. What else did they eat? Fruits? I'm not really willing to buy the idea that we've all evolved to need cow meat (or at least not any more than we need agriculture).
Oh, and by the way... Japan isn't the only country of carbohydrate eaters who are skinner and longer living than Americans. The French also fit the bill (though not as extremely). How many fat Chinese people do you know? Or Indonesians? Or Thai? You know what? It's not eating many carbohydrates that makes you fat. It's eating many calories.
The answer is simple. The "article" was a promotion for the Atkins diet. Here is my challenge to anyone who disagrees (and I am interested): Find me one elite athlete in any power , speed, or endurance sport who follows the Atkins diet.
It just amazes me how many people like to knock slashdot for its "lack of journalistic integrity". The fact is that every news publication makes mistakes every now and then. But on slashdot, those mistakes come to light quickly in the comments made to an erroneous article. Actually the headline usually gets updated, too. When's the last time you saw CNN post corrections to itself like that? Slashdot's comment system is great.
daVinci spent a great deal of time drawing dragons, pasting paper wings on lizards, and cutting up dead bodies. Be assured his contemporaries found his behaviour fucking psycho. It certainly met the requisites for being 'antisocial'.
While you can rant about things being RIGHT, and WRONG, sometimes there is more than one side to the story.
Why does Dave Mathews support Napster? Why do so many others? It's because copying is NOT theft. When you copy a Sting CD, he does not suddenly lose 15 bucks. He loses and gains nothing. If you chose to buy his CD he'll get about a buck... since he's been around long enough to get a VERY good contract deal. In general artists don't get even a tenth of the money from an album sale that the label takes. If you go to his concert, or join his fan club though, then he'll see some cash
So... using napster is not theft and using it doesn't "take anyone's money". If you really like the RIAA, buy the album. If you like the artist go see them in concert and buy a T-shirt.
I think the RIAA is a bunch of ass ponies, and that making a business of gathing a monopoly of other people's music related IP is the truely unethical act here. The reason our founding fathers created IP laws was to encourage more innovation. With the advent of rediculously long copyright lifetimes, long trademark lifetimes, software patents, and attempts to make file sharing illegal, it is clear that our IP laws are no longer working as intended. They stifle more innovation than they encourage.
Trying to shut down file sharing is just further evidence that the RIAA is run by some unethical types. People who chose to invest in companies such as RIAA members are chosing to put money against the advancing free trade of information. I think that they might want to reconsider their options now that we are living in a wired world.
Slashdot Mirror
The article was comparing Canadian outsourcing to Indian and Chinese outsourcing.
Look, I don't want to be rude here, but I keep hearing this kind of thinking from Canadians. I know lots of Canadians don't WANT to be like Americans... but face it, you are. Not the same, but very similar. Canadians and Americans aren't like "chalk and cheese". Canadians and Americans are like colby and cheddar. Canadians and Chinese are like chalk and cheese.
For what it's worth, I'm sure working with Aussie's, while not quite as easy as working with Canadians (do to time zone and accent), is a heck of a lot simpler than working with Indians or Chinese. Take my word for it. I live in China, and though I speak and read Chinese, it's a hell of a lot easier to get business done with Canadians than Chinese. I don't have to deal with lots of attempts to cheat "the ignorant foreigner", guanxi, companies with connections to corrupt officials, or any of that crap. I don't care if a thousand Canadians argue until they're blue in the face about how different you are from Americans like me. To me, despite whatever nationalism prejudice you harbor against me, you are still familiar and easier to relate to or work with than just about anyone else in the world.
Sorry, pal. That's the common usage. When someone says "American", 99% of the time it means "a person from the United States of America". Heck some langauges such as Japanese have taken America as a loan word to mean ONLY that. Considering that "the United States" is ambiguous in that it could refer to "the United States of Mexico", and no other countries in North America have "America" in their name, it's a quick and reasonable way to refer to the place.
What do you want America to mean? Does it just include the United States of America and Canada? Should Mexico be included so that "America" means North America? Or how about including Central and South Americans too? Then "America" would mean the Americas. See where this is headed?
It's simplest to just go by common usage. "America" means the USA. North America also includes Canada and Mexico, and the Americas means the entire "New World". Besides, if Canadians waste their time worrying about diction they can't change, maybe they won't have as much time to invest in making nationalistic insults, watching "Talking to Americans", or generally being rude to us. And THAT, would be good news for all Americans.
I did google it, and I came up with a lot of irrelevant stuff. Maybe you should google it before you flame people. Even after modifying the search terms, I still found a lot of demos written years ago. In fact a good deal of the demos I saw were written for dead systems (c64, amiga, etc...). That's why I posted, and while a few assholes fired back sarcastic responses, I got some useful links too.
Sometimes asking actual people is the best way.
I really used to love all those demos. They were small, they were fast and they looked great. Basically they were the cutting edge. I used to hang out with 5 of my buddies and watch them on a 486 in my basement. At that time, the demos looked better than anything in any game. But going back and looking at them now is a little sad. It just makes me think of how the demo scene pretty much dried up.
Have any of you seen a demo that supports hardware acceleration? Maybe something that uses openGL? That would be sweet, a modern demo. I mean, a normal video games graphics beat the heck out of any of the old demos now. But the way I see it, at this point it wouldn't be too tough to make hardware accelerated demos that rivaled or surpassed movie graphics. That is, if anybody bothered making them.
If anybody's got links to show me I'm wrong and there are modern demos, PLEASE POST THEM NOW!!!
I wasn't grappling for anything. I find your post unnecessarily rude. "Costed" is acceptable as a past tense or a past participle for the intransitive verb "cost", according to dictionary.com, among others. "Costed" is in widespread use.
Some take it as a personal crusade to chase down split infinitives, 3rd person singular "they"s, and failure to use "whom" in the objective case. I prefer to not to waste everybody's time being so anal, especially not in a forum like this. Face it, language is not a static thing. Ultimately, it is common usage that drives the grammar books, and not the other way around.
You got it wrong. A vote for Nader is NOT a vote for Bush. It's a vote for Nader. I really don't see why so many people struggle with this concept. I voted for Nader last time. My second choice was Bush, not Gore. Actually, Nader costed Bush my vote, at least.
Nader supporters aren't some sort of "extreme democrat". Actually, the things that drew me to Nader are issues on which the major parties took the same stand. Campaign finance reform is one. Sticking it to Microsoft is another. Not selling out to the MPAA and RIAA was a big factor too. Oh, and lest I forget, ending the war on drugs. There are a bunch issues where I have no respect for either the democrat or republican platform, but Nader was right on the money.
If I had to pick between Bush and Gore, it would have been Bush, though. Gore had already shown himself to be a compulsive liar (not saying Bush didn't later), and just as importantly dems tend to be even more willing to play bitch to the RIAA and MPAA.
There you go. A vote for Nader is a vote for Nader, not for Bush, Kerry, Bill Gates, or the tooth fairy. Got it?
I mean what gets cooler than the borg? They're huge, powerful, and they're a threat to humanity. Just like microsoft, right? They have a hive mind, they just mindless want to assimilate EVERYTHING into their system kind of like Windows assimilated web browsers, media players and then messengers into the OS! The parallels just don't stop! Both are evil! Both are cool!
If only Microsoft had the guts to play up their evil borg-ishness, THEN they could be cool. Honestly, what is cooler than a seemingly unstoppable evil force?
He knew English, but not French. He could, conceivably have been an American who had spent a lot of time practicing how to say "about" and "sorry" like a Canadian. I really doubt it, though. Guatemalans are really friendly to Americans, I don't see why people would want to pretend to be Canadian there.
What you said about not being sure about Hawaii and Alaska is true of many Canadians I've met. I have NEVER met an adult American who didn't know how many states there are. Every freaking elementary school kid learns about how there's one star on the flag for each state, yada yada yada...
Well, I don't have a problem with all Canadians. I certainly don't start bitching at people as soon as I find out where they're from. I was just responding to the post that generalized Canadians as 'polite'.
HOWEVER, I do like a lot of Canadian bands and comedians. Other than Rush, I also enjoy Sarah Mclachlan, most of the old Saturday Night Live crowd and countless other Canadians who didn't jump at me with lots of nationalist insults and taunts. Maybe if I met some of them I would find them to rude or nationalist too... but there's no denying that Neil Peart is one hell of a drummer or that Mike Myers is a very funny man.
What are you smoking? In my experience, Canadians are a bunch of insensitive, prejudiced bastards. While living in Guatemala, I'd say about 3/4 of the Canadians I met were rude, insulting, and offensive to me JUST because I'm American. I never had any negative ideas about Canadians until I travelled out of the country and met several.
It seems par for the course to be assumed to be stupid, uneducated, and some how, less "sophisticated". I can't even count the number of times I was told I'm supporting an "Imperialit Regime" because I grew up in the US, paid my taxes, and didn't revolt over foriegn policy (which I didn't make).
I even met one Canadian who told me that "Americans don't know anything about the rest of the world". This is from some fucker not only couldn't speak ANY of the local language in the country we were living, but can't even speak his own country's two languages. I, on the other hand speak English, Spanish, and Chinese. Do most Americans? No. But a fair number of southern Californians do. It's not right to just say that ALL Americans are ignorant. The best part was when he gave me a "pop quiz" on how many provinces Canada has. I knew, and then I asked him how many states the US has. He didn't know. He didn't know.
Grassroots is the only way, huh? Haven't terrorists been keeping more powerful enemies at bay in asymetrical confrontations like this for decades? Wouldn't attacks upon the executives and upon company property slow them down a bit? I'm not advocating it; I'm just saying it looks like the way things may be headed if the law truly is unfixable.
At 5 years in prison, all lawyers fees, and $150,000 per song, the penalties for filesharing 1 whole album are more than those for theft, burglary, manslaughter, rape, and arson. It's only a matter of time before SOMEONE decides that there is no justice in American laws.
I don't think creatine has any really serious side effects. Many people have been taking it for years, and nothing too serious has come out of it. I started taking it myself in '98. Here's what I've found personally:
1. Weight gain
I put on a lot more muscle after I started taking creatine. I had been stuck at a plateau for months before I started, but once I started, growth got started. Some of the weight gain was water weight. My strenght improved, as did my sprint times (I'm a swimmer), but for distance I got slower.
2. Muscular endurace improvement
I said above that my distance times suffered. This is because of increased body weight, and the extra cardio vascular work that ensues. However, I have found that while I am supplementing with creatine, I am able to force out more work after getting to the point where my muscles hurt from lactic acid. This may be 90% of the reason my sprints are improved.
Beyond this, many others have reported body odor. Some college wrestlers died a few years backafter intensive workouts in rubber suits. It was reported that they had elevated blood creatine levels. Some media said supplementation was a cause of death. Most mainstream sports journals contended creatine is always elevated after intense work outs, and it was especially so in this case because the wresters had dehydrated themselves to try to cut weight.
One last concern I have heard of is adaptation. Creatine does come from meats, but the body also manufactures it. Some have said that if you regularly take creatine for a long period of time, that your body might lose the ability to make it. This is the only one that worries me. So, I say just use it cyclicly, and don't worry. There are thousands who started using it years ago, and any long term damage will get them first, and then you can stop taking it.
In the mean time, get HUGE!!! Oh, and uh, smart, too.
I'm quite familiar with Japanese input. Actually what you say about Japanese forgetting how to write by hand is true. Most young Japanese have problems remembering characters. Japanese has a HUGE disadvantage compared with Mandarin (or any other langauge I know) for input. There are 2 big problems.
1) Japanese has 3 character sets
Whenever you write a word you have to chose whether you want it to be hiragana, katakana or kanji. There are general rules to be followed, but the are not absolute! Grammatical particles are always kanji, and foriegn loan words are always katakana, BUT many times the same word could be written in any of the 3 depending on situation and the feeling the author wants to communicate. Usually you would see hiragana in a personal context, kanji in a formal context, and katakana in advertising. The result of all of this is that a phonetic input system must be used, and after phonetics are input, the user must select which of the 3 alphabets to use. In the best case scenario the computer would choose correctly wherever only one script is permited, and require just a few strikes of the space bar in other cases. This is still slow.
2. Lots of homonyms
Japanese has borrowed a huge portion of its vocabulary from Chinese. Chinese was (and still is)tonal. Japanese isn't. As a result Japanese has a LOT of homonyms. For example, "denki" can mean a light, electrical appliances in general, a romance novel, or a biography. They all have different Chinese characters, but the sound are the same. In cases like this the user has no choice but to either hit the space bar until they get the word they want or worse yet pick up the mouse and click the desired character from a box. This is madenning. I have never met ANY Japanese programmer who types over 100wpm, EVEN if you count hiragana particles as words!!!
In Mandarin, you will never have problem #1. If you use a phonetic input system such as bpmf as most novices do, you have problem #2 to a small extent. Being tonal, there are far fewer homonyms in Mandarin than in Japanese, but there are a few. I realize inputting the tone takes a keyboard strike, but even counting the tone, no word is more than 4 keystrokes (and you don't need spaces between them, like in English).
If you use canjie (cangjie to some), or another radical based system you well never have problem #1 or problem #2.
I hope this was informative, I work with Japanese who come to Taiwan for business on a regular basis, as well as corrospond with them through email, and these have been my experiences. If there is some newer and better Japanese input out there, I'd love to see it. It would be a big time saver for me!
UA+/-+/-oItuvwoIj/(R)t|h@1/4EO. /|nearomanji. iOromanjieJkS|/eJkS|/oO. 1/4gea(R)EOA+/-oihiragana,katakanaAUO~|r(kanji),1/ 4ga(R)EOo|rO~|r. (C)OHS|ik1/4gea@1/4EO.
nOAIU3/4eIU,A@(C)w|r+/-oO. |HU3/4eAo3/4C,iO3/4C|nHaAnI^aH(R)Aa|h! @hOI`eJkAU|n,iOq{|+/-`|IU3/4eeJk. |pGAn+/-HUemail, R"NOSPAM" U|n(C)_,3/4DAIOeJk.
p (analogueNOkidSP@silAMiconashes.net
Apparently you know very little about Mandarin, or it's input. For Japanese input, there is a big speed penalty. But Chinese input is faster.
Most people in Taiwan use either bpmf input or canjie. Most people in mainland China use either pinyin or canjie. Bpmf and pinyin are phonetic input methods which are approximately the same speed as English. Canjie input is based upon the structure of a character instead, and is MUCH faster than English input. I can type over 200 words per minute with canjie, and many professional typists can type at over 300.
There is no "slowing factor" in typing Mandarin. In fact, I would argue that by lacking a meaning based orthographic system, that English is a "slowing factor".
China will own IT.
I live in Taiwan, and just about EVERY km or 2 in any city there's a night market, most of which are sell cheap CD's, and VCD's. I can buy a CD for only about 1.5 USA dollars, or a movie for 3. ANYWHERE.
You have a pretty much guaranteed job as an English teacher, and China DOES NOT have an extradition treaty with the US. Once you know Chinese, you'll have numerous job opportunities and your children will enjoy a much better public schooling system too.
Even with windows, unicode is not useful for Chinese. There are a couple of reasons.
1) Unicode doesn't allocate enough characters to Chinese. If you write in Unicode, there will be many undisplayable words.
2) Han Reunification- This was a very stupid idea a bunch of western standards groups came up with. Basically, there are many words that are similar in Chinese, Japanese and Korean. About 200 years ago, those differences didn't exist, but the written languages have diverged a bit. For example the word for 'a couple' (of something) was identical in all three languages prior to WWII. Afterwords, during MacArthur's program to simplify Japanese writing, the character was simplified in Japanese. Then, 20 years later, Chairman Mao simplified the same character in a different way in mainland China, but Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Korea all still use the old form. The result is that there are three very similar characters that mean the same thing.
Han Reunification means that some westerners arbitrarily decided which characters will be used (by all parties) for each word. The result is that Chinese and Koreans have to use a Japanese word sometimes, while other times Japanese and Koreans must use a Chinese word. This is similar to forcing French and English speakers to use the Spanish word for house, while forcing the Spanish and French to use the English word for computer. It's stupid, and no one is going to do that if they have an alternative that will allow them to write more normally in their native language.
Anyway, nobody uses unicode for Chinese. Depending on where you live, you'll use either Big5 or GBK.
Actually, go is a very popular game world wide, arguably more popular than chess. It's true that the areas in which go is popular aren't the most affluent in the world, but there are a great deal of programmers working on go. A very wealthy Tawainese man, the late Mr. Ing set up a foundation to award $40 million (TWD) to the first go program to beat a 1-dan player. He also set up incremental prizes for each kyu level a computer could advance to. Literally thousands of programs have competed, and none can win against a one dan amateur, even with a 9 stone handicap.
Go is very unlike chess. Chess computers improve greatly with improvements in hardware. In fact, very straight forward chess programs with simple evaluation algorithms and minimal pruning can defeat master level chess players when run on modern PCs. One example is the ever popular TSCP . Go programs on the other hand do not improve notably simply by using a brute force approach. Handtalk, the former computer go champion plays less than one kyu better on an Athlon2000 than it does on a 386. For more info, check the links on Mick's Computer Go Page
"This argument is simply stupid. Most of us aren't elite athletes, and what works for them won't necessarily work for us. If a normal person ate like Michael Jordan, they'd be fat as hell, because they don't get the degree of exercise that Jordan does. High-intensity exercise does indeed need carbohydrate for fuel. But most of us don't care for that sort of exercise."
Actually, I do care for a good deal of exercise. I'm sure it's not as intense as Micheal Jordan's, but I do run about 40-50km/week. So, I'd say on average I exercise 40 minutes/day. I don't see how wanting a diet to fuel exercise makes me stupid, though. Maybe another reason so many Americans are fat is because they are lazy. But, in any case I can see your point about what is ideal for athletes being different from most people. But, there are still over 2 billion people eating a rice or noodle based diet, and they aren't fat like Americans are with their higher protien diets.
"Oh, and about the second-generation Asians thing: One good friend of mine is an second-generation Chinese girl who has lost something like 80 pounds, a gut, and two chins over the last year. On the Atkins diet."
Thank you, you just illustrated my point. How many Chinese (living in China and eating about 70% carb diets) have 80 pound guts and double chins to lose? I don't think you can say that carbohydrates are the root of fatness!
And Japanese people live a whole lot longer than Americans. Why do you think that is? Genetics, you say? Well, actually second generation Japanese-Americans are much fatter, and more prone to diabetes, and heart attacks than their relatives who grow up in Japan. So are second generation Chinese living in America. But second generation Chinese living in Japan are fine.
All of this carb bashing is senseless. The longest lived people in the world get nearly 50% of their calories from rice... and then eat noodles frequently too! In fact, it is those segments who have adopted western diets who are those with obesity problems. It's sheer insanity to just read your Atkins book, nod your head and figure that carbs are the root of your eating problems. I am suspicous of all the sugar in western food, but NOODLES AND RICE EATERS DON'T HAVE TO BE FAT!!!
Now, back to that evolutionary argument. Where exactly were all of our ancestors getting juicy porter house steak? As I understand it, most wild game such as deer or elk have less than 10% of their calories coming from fat. I don't see how any primitive human could have come close to the over 30% of calories from fat diet that is popular in America. What else did they eat? Fruits? I'm not really willing to buy the idea that we've all evolved to need cow meat (or at least not any more than we need agriculture).
Oh, and by the way... Japan isn't the only country of carbohydrate eaters who are skinner and longer living than Americans. The French also fit the bill (though not as extremely). How many fat Chinese people do you know? Or Indonesians? Or Thai? You know what? It's not eating many carbohydrates that makes you fat. It's eating many calories.
The answer is simple. The "article" was a promotion for the Atkins diet. Here is my challenge to anyone who disagrees (and I am interested): Find me one elite athlete in any power , speed, or endurance sport who follows the Atkins diet.
I'd say the going monthly cell phone rate is about 15000yen/month or ~$125/month. I don't know too many people who pay that much in the US.
It just amazes me how many people like to knock slashdot for its "lack of journalistic integrity". The fact is that every news publication makes mistakes every now and then. But on slashdot, those mistakes come to light quickly in the comments made to an erroneous article. Actually the headline usually gets updated, too. When's the last time you saw CNN post corrections to itself like that? Slashdot's comment system is great.
daVinci spent a great deal of time drawing dragons, pasting paper wings on lizards, and cutting up dead bodies. Be assured his contemporaries found his behaviour fucking psycho. It certainly met the requisites for being 'antisocial'.
While you can rant about things being RIGHT, and WRONG, sometimes there is more than one side to the story.
Why does Dave Mathews support Napster? Why do so many others? It's because copying is NOT theft. When you copy a Sting CD, he does not suddenly lose 15 bucks. He loses and gains nothing. If you chose to buy his CD he'll get about a buck... since he's been around long enough to get a VERY good contract deal. In general artists don't get even a tenth of the money from an album sale that the label takes. If you go to his concert, or join his fan club though, then he'll see some cash
So... using napster is not theft and using it doesn't "take anyone's money". If you really like the RIAA, buy the album. If you like the artist go see them in concert and buy a T-shirt.
I think the RIAA is a bunch of ass ponies, and that making a business of gathing a monopoly of other people's music related IP is the truely unethical act here. The reason our founding fathers created IP laws was to encourage more innovation. With the advent of rediculously long copyright lifetimes, long trademark lifetimes, software patents, and attempts to make file sharing illegal, it is clear that our IP laws are no longer working as intended. They stifle more innovation than they encourage.
Trying to shut down file sharing is just further evidence that the RIAA is run by some unethical types. People who chose to invest in companies such as RIAA members are chosing to put money against the advancing free trade of information. I think that they might want to reconsider their options now that we are living in a wired world.