(1) Phonetic spelling. Each letter denotes a sound, and you can pronounce an unknown word just by reading it. (2) The Chinese system. Each word has a picture associated with it that is not related to its pronounciation in any real way. Completely different spoken languages can use the same written language, and people who can't speak to each other can communicate with this written language.
Each has its pros and cons. I much prefer option (1). Perhaps due to just being used to it, but I'll assume (1) is better than (2) in the following.
The long term problem with (1) is that, while it's easy to make your written language phonetic when you first define it, pronounciation will change over the centuries, and if you don't make spelling reforms every 100-200 years, your spelling will be less and less phonetic. And the end game is very clear here. Without maintenance in the form of periodical spelling reform, what started out as phonetic spelling will eventually devolve into the Chinese system! The written form of a word will lose all relation to how it is pronounced, and the sequence of letters will just serve as a picture, symbolizing a concept. Some parts of English is already there.
If you want to avoid a Chinese type system, it is necessary to go through with spelling reforms. As many have rightly pointed out here, it would be quite disruptive when it was implemented. One of many many cases where long term gain can only be achiever through short term pain. And since this maintenance has been mostly neglected for 500 years, it would be extra painful this time. All the more reason to get started.
Under the Shah, corruption in government contracting notoriously added some 15 percent to the cost of everything that was bought, from fertilizers for the ministry of agriculture to helicopters. Now the graft is more like 30 percent; the family and cronies of the Shah, it turns out, were paragons of self-restraint as compared with the clerics. They now form an entire class of exploiters, with the result that a bitter anti-clericalism has become widespread in Iran as it never was before.
2) why this would mean there is no future for religion in Iran. It seems more likely that Iran is a prime breeding form for alternate "spiritual leadership" and ripe for the picking by the hard-core sharia extremists.
But the hard core extremists are actually in power now. There aren't any even more hard core people out there biding their time. And even if there were, the regime stomps down pretty hard on religious dissent.
As you may know, Al Quida hates the Shia only marginally less than the Jews, so that path is not even thinkable.
Some argue that the only hope for the Iranian regime is to provoke an attack from the US, in order to ride on the wave of patriotism that would inevitable produce. The actions of the president seem a lot less inexplicable in that light.
What you say makes obvious sense, but then again so does the idea that the earth is flat.
The US is much more of a theocracy and hot-bed of fundementalism than countries like Finland. When you're not listening, we often refer to it as 'the Iran of the western world'.
My take is that this is because the church is government controlled. The best way to make something tired, lazy and inefficient is to have government run it, and I don't think religion is any exception. So I think the extreme vitality, diversity and power of US churches is there exactly because they are not run or protected by the state, but have to compete with each other on a level playing field for souls, power and money.
By a similar logic, I don't foresee a great future for religion in Iran either. The people despise the ruling mullahs.
A gun kept in the home is 22 times more likely to be used in a homicide, suicide or unintentional shooting than to be used in self-defense.
Just a comment that this statistic almost certainly defines "use" as firing the gun.
In real life, the by far most common use of a gun is to show it, or in the more extreme cases, point it at someone. This almost alwyas achieves the intended effect, but nothing counted as "use" ever occurs, even though lives and property may well have been saved.
The article - and many posts here - present valid arguments for why these formats won't take over this year or next.
But that's a very different thing from them being failures. It just means it will take a few years for them to gain traction. Once most people have HDTVs and are used to that quality, I can't imagine that they'll stick to old school DVDs for much longer.
It may take 3, 5 or even 10 years to get there, but it seems entirely unavoidable to me. The only thing that can stop it would be if something even better came along. But what would that be exactly? The HDTV format is proscribed by law and will be around for decades. The only improvement I can imagine would be if we could get rid of the disks all together, and have some kind of internet based film distribution.
Compare it to the CD. It took several years from it's launch until it was used by anyone except aufiophiles and gadget freaks. Many of the same arguments could correctly have been made in 1982. Nonetheless, the CD completely conquered and ruled the audio world in time.
In other words, they can already handle a full HD movie
They may be a able to show a downsampled 480p version of a HD movie, but I doubt very much they can show actual 1080i or 720p, since it would increase the price of them quite a lot.
I worked with CORBA around 1997-98. It was one of several new technologies in our project, and we never really got it to work properly. Everything was just really complex and error prone. The company got closed for many reasons, but our stuff didn't help things much.
Recently I've done a lot of XML Web Services work. This can actually be made to work, but it feels a lot more like filling out your tax returns than programming. Everything is really verbose, and you have to tell the system the same thing over and over.
I never really connected dots until I read this article, but it is pretty much the same uneasy feeling I have about this that I had about CORBA. And the article even explains how they're similar!
Not that that has to mean they're destined for identical paths, or that I'm a visionary who can sense the fate of a technology years in advance, but it does make me a bit happier that I quit that job last week.
If I had 6 nuclear bombs and wanted to deter the US, I would smuggle them all into major US cities. It shouldn't be any harder than getting a ton of cocaine in there. The delivery system would be to just buy a downtown condo, and leave the bomb there until needed.
Then once the US invades, you blow up one of the cities, preferrably one that voted for the sitting president, and made it clear that more would follow if you were not left alone. I'd be very confident that that would be deterrance enough.
You might actually get away with just making the US think you're likely to have this capability.
These people are highly educated professionals. They already live in Silicon Valley. Most will have new jobs within weeks, perhaps with a minor pay cut. A few may have to relocate. Nobody will be living on the street.
I know this sounds like a disaster for people in many parts of the world, but pretty much everyone in Silicon Valley has been laid off a few times. It's just how things are here, and for most people it doesn't mean much more than a bit of a vacation.
And there are many many Americans with jobs who are in a much tougher situation than these people.
If it's an intentional leak, it is to spread confusion. This rumor won't increase any sales.
Think of it this way: It's impossible to keep rumors of new and important products from happening. Too many people are involved. But if you can drench out the true rumors with tons of false ones, it's gonna be very hard for the public to sort out which ones to believe in. And your product announcements will still be newsworthy and surprising.
Somtimes I think 90% of the crackpot "Art Bell" theories slushing around on the net and other places are planted by the US government in order to cover up the 10% that are actually true.
You're not really addressing what makes Silicon Valley different from all other regions.
Government billons have been pumped into many other places. And Silicon Valley was a phenomenon long before the internet first became economically significant in the mid 90s.
Lets examine the situation you describe, when a programmer writes code to solve his own problem.
Assuming he writes the program in order to use it, there actually is a user, namely the programmer himself.
And since the one user is actually writing all the code, I think it is very apt to describe him as the life blood of that ptoject.
In a bigger project, things are different, but I find it real hard to imagine the usefulness of any programming project that does not have any users...
They can't all be spreading apart, since the earth is not expanding. Where would they go?
The deep oceanic trenches are formed by plates colliding. When they collide, the "fold" can either go up, and produce mountain ranges, or down and produce trenches.
I mean, if human civilization has collapsed so utterly that both historical knowledge and basic nuclear physics is unknown, any additional damage that this could possibly do has to be microscopic in comparision. And why would mining techology still be going strong??
There seems to be some weird assumption that the next 10.000 years will be similar to the last 10.000, on average. I can 100% guarantee it will not!! Most likely, this very discussion will be archived for people then to read!
If you really want the waste to be inaccessible, you should dump it in one of the very deep sea trenches, and have geology fold it into the earth mantle.
Just how random was this? In particular, what was the method of creating random values, and what was the method of assigning values to students, and thus, students to games?
Random is random. It's very easy to divide 100 people in two random groups. The exact method is not relevant. Sure, it's thinkable that some mistake was made there, but then you might as well question if they added the numbers correctly, and a hundred different things.
It SHOULD, but only if the sample is large enough. Was it? We have no way to know.
We know how large the sample was. 100 people. 50 in each group. The statistical properties of that group size is well known. Unless you (see above) want proof they were not miscounted.
Slashdot Mirror
So there are two options for a written language.
(1) Phonetic spelling. Each letter denotes a sound, and you can pronounce an unknown word just by reading it.
(2) The Chinese system. Each word has a picture associated with it that is not related to its pronounciation in any real way. Completely different spoken languages can use the same written language, and people who can't speak to each other can communicate with this written language.
Each has its pros and cons. I much prefer option (1). Perhaps due to just being used to it, but I'll assume (1) is better than (2) in the following.
The long term problem with (1) is that, while it's easy to make your written language phonetic when you first define it, pronounciation will change over the centuries, and if you don't make spelling reforms every 100-200 years, your spelling will be less and less phonetic. And the end game is very clear here. Without maintenance in the form of periodical spelling reform, what started out as phonetic spelling will eventually devolve into the Chinese system! The written form of a word will lose all relation to how it is pronounced, and the sequence of letters will just serve as a picture, symbolizing a concept. Some parts of English is already there.
If you want to avoid a Chinese type system, it is necessary to go through with spelling reforms. As many have rightly pointed out here, it would be quite disruptive when it was implemented. One of many many cases where long term gain can only be achiever through short term pain. And since this maintenance has been mostly neglected for 500 years, it would be extra painful this time. All the more reason to get started.
I think that's fairly uncontroversial among Iran followers - not that I'm an expert one by any means.
Here is an article that seems to have a very clear andinformed view of what's going on in Iran today:
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/Production/file
Excerpt:
2) why this would mean there is no future for religion in Iran. It seems more likely that Iran is a prime breeding form for alternate "spiritual leadership" and ripe for the picking by the hard-core sharia extremists.
But the hard core extremists are actually in power now. There aren't any even more hard core people out there biding their time. And even if there were, the regime stomps down pretty hard on religious dissent.
As you may know, Al Quida hates the Shia only marginally less than the Jews, so that path is not even thinkable.
Some argue that the only hope for the Iranian regime is to provoke an attack from the US, in order to ride on the wave of patriotism that would inevitable produce. The actions of the president seem a lot less inexplicable in that light.
What you say makes obvious sense, but then again so does the idea that the earth is flat.
The US is much more of a theocracy and hot-bed of fundementalism than countries like Finland. When you're not listening, we often refer to it as 'the Iran of the western world'.
My take is that this is because the church is government controlled. The best way to make something tired, lazy and inefficient is to have government run it, and I don't think religion is any exception. So I think the extreme vitality, diversity and power of US churches is there exactly because they are not run or protected by the state, but have to compete with each other on a level playing field for souls, power and money.
By a similar logic, I don't foresee a great future for religion in Iran either. The people despise the ruling mullahs.
A gun kept in the home is 22 times more likely to be used in a homicide, suicide or unintentional shooting than to be used in self-defense.
Just a comment that this statistic almost certainly defines "use" as firing the gun.
In real life, the by far most common use of a gun is to show it, or in the more extreme cases, point it at someone. This almost alwyas achieves the intended effect, but nothing counted as "use" ever occurs, even though lives and property may well have been saved.
The article - and many posts here - present valid arguments for why these formats won't take over this year or next.
But that's a very different thing from them being failures. It just means it will take a few years for them to gain traction. Once most people have HDTVs and are used to that quality, I can't imagine that they'll stick to old school DVDs for much longer.
It may take 3, 5 or even 10 years to get there, but it seems entirely unavoidable to me. The only thing that can stop it would be if something even better came along. But what would that be exactly? The HDTV format is proscribed by law and will be around for decades. The only improvement I can imagine would be if we could get rid of the disks all together, and have some kind of internet based film distribution.
Compare it to the CD. It took several years from it's launch until it was used by anyone except aufiophiles and gadget freaks. Many of the same arguments could correctly have been made in 1982. Nonetheless, the CD completely conquered and ruled the audio world in time.
In other words, they can already handle a full HD movie
They may be a able to show a downsampled 480p version of a HD movie, but I doubt very much they can show actual 1080i or 720p, since it would increase the price of them quite a lot.
I worked with CORBA around 1997-98. It was one of several new technologies in our project, and we never really got it to work properly. Everything was just really complex and error prone. The company got closed for many reasons, but our stuff didn't help things much.
Recently I've done a lot of XML Web Services work. This can actually be made to work, but it feels a lot more like filling out your tax returns than programming. Everything is really verbose, and you have to tell the system the same thing over and over.
I never really connected dots until I read this article, but it is pretty much the same uneasy feeling I have about this that I had about CORBA. And the article even explains how they're similar!
Not that that has to mean they're destined for identical paths, or that I'm a visionary who can sense the fate of a technology years in advance, but it does make me a bit happier that I quit that job last week.
History shows that when met with any kind of military force, the frogs quickly surrender!
And I do apologize...
Whatever the faults of the Chinese regime may be, being beholden to christian fundamentalist interests is not one of them.
If I had 6 nuclear bombs and wanted to deter the US, I would smuggle them all into major US cities. It shouldn't be any harder than getting a ton of cocaine in there. The delivery system would be to just buy a downtown condo, and leave the bomb there until needed.
Then once the US invades, you blow up one of the cities, preferrably one that voted for the sitting president, and made it clear that more would follow if you were not left alone. I'd be very confident that that would be deterrance enough.
You might actually get away with just making the US think you're likely to have this capability.
All living creatures are self-replicating machines. What would make these "berserkers" less living than the life formes it could replace?
In other words, I don't think they can wipe out life since they are life.
The Indian outsourcing industry has grown enormously the last 5-10 years, and is now one of the main pillars of the Indian economy.
If, as you seem to imply, all outsourcing attempts were foolish wastes of money, this fact is completely unexplainable.
Let me explain why I don't care.
These people are highly educated professionals. They already live in Silicon Valley. Most will have new jobs within weeks, perhaps with a minor pay cut. A few may have to relocate. Nobody will be living on the street.
I know this sounds like a disaster for people in many parts of the world, but pretty much everyone in Silicon Valley has been laid off a few times. It's just how things are here, and for most people it doesn't mean much more than a bit of a vacation.
And there are many many Americans with jobs who are in a much tougher situation than these people.
Now only gamblers who do not mind taking risks will continue with online gambling.
If it's an intentional leak, it is to spread confusion. This rumor won't increase any sales.
Think of it this way: It's impossible to keep rumors of new and important products from happening. Too many people are involved. But if you can drench out the true rumors with tons of false ones, it's gonna be very hard for the public to sort out which ones to believe in. And your product announcements will still be newsworthy and surprising.
Somtimes I think 90% of the crackpot "Art Bell" theories slushing around on the net and other places are planted by the US government in order to cover up the 10% that are actually true.
I can not wrap my head around that statement.
The key part you seem to be missing is "here". In that this is hard to do in Silicon Valley these days. As you point out, you can do it elsewhere.
You're not really addressing what makes Silicon Valley different from all other regions.
Government billons have been pumped into many other places. And Silicon Valley was a phenomenon long before the internet first became economically significant in the mid 90s.
It's clearly possible with iTunes. Just burn your tracks to CD and they're as DRM free as any CD.
Lets examine the situation you describe, when a programmer writes code to solve his own problem.
Assuming he writes the program in order to use it, there actually is a user, namely the programmer himself.
And since the one user is actually writing all the code, I think it is very apt to describe him as the life blood of that ptoject.
In a bigger project, things are different, but I find it real hard to imagine the usefulness of any programming project that does not have any users...
Great to see Hollywood legend Carolyn Conroe finally honored this way!
I suppose Intel waited until they had a processor that could produce as much heat as she used to do.
They can't all be spreading apart, since the earth is not expanding. Where would they go?
The deep oceanic trenches are formed by plates colliding. When they collide, the "fold" can either go up, and produce mountain ranges, or down and produce trenches.
I mean, if human civilization has collapsed so utterly that both historical knowledge and basic nuclear physics is unknown, any additional damage that this could possibly do has to be microscopic in comparision. And why would mining techology still be going strong??
There seems to be some weird assumption that the next 10.000 years will be similar to the last 10.000, on average. I can 100% guarantee it will not!! Most likely, this very discussion will be archived for people then to read!
If you really want the waste to be inaccessible, you should dump it in one of the very deep sea trenches, and have geology fold it into the earth mantle.
Just wait.
I've waited for the first MacOS X virus for many productive and fun years now.
Meanwhile, the wait for a freshly installed Windows machine to be infected was counted in minutes last I heard.
That is just a difference in degree, in the same way that the difference between my income and Bill Gates' is.
...proper grammer...
Obviously, I am compelled to suggest you use proper spelling when complaining of the grammar of others.
Just how random was this? In particular, what was the method of creating random values, and what was the method of assigning values to students, and thus, students to games?
Random is random. It's very easy to divide 100 people in two random groups. The exact method is not relevant. Sure, it's thinkable that some mistake was made there, but then you might as well question if they added the numbers correctly, and a hundred different things.
It SHOULD, but only if the sample is large enough. Was it? We have no way to know.
We know how large the sample was. 100 people. 50 in each group. The statistical properties of that group size is well known. Unless you (see above) want proof they were not miscounted.