and it is nice to have an online system not attached to my computer
Um... one word: why? Surely it is better only to need to connect ONE device to the internet. If you need to connect two, you're either talking about needing 2 phone lines or the computer having DSL or cable, but the Xbox would presumably still tie up your phone line. IMHO, it'd be far better if the Xbox could connect THROUGH your broadband PC internet connection.
If Japanese conains 'so many homophones', maybe it's a crap language to start with. Sure, it's fine if you're reading it, but if you're talking and a word sounds identical to 100 others, it introduces ambiguity. Ideally every different semantic would *sound* different.
And Latin script has a way of dealing with different semantics; it arranges letters differently, as your example so well pointed out (there, they're and their).
I am not talking authoritatively, this is my humble opinion.
That's a ridiculous comparison. C is only slightly harder to learn than basic, if at all. Hell, the first programming language I ever learnt was Perl.
I don't think that significant 'depth and power' is lost in using Latin script. Seems that we get along with it just fine. If we didn't, we would surely have invented something more appropriate.
Valium's legal in the US. It is controlled by prescription, however.
Controlled by prescription != legal. Legal is over-the-counter. I want to be able to buy such drugs in the same was I buy Paracetemol or Asprin (I presume they're over-the-counter in the US, as they are in the UK?)
Actually, I think that for Microsoft to be exterminated from the OS market would be a good thing, if replaced by a GPL OS. With a GPLed OS, there can never be any secret backdoors or unfair advantges for one company developing for the OS, as the sourcecode is open to everyone. Let MS compete when it comes to applications based on that opensource OS.
The European Commission is not interested in competition, it's interested in exactly the opposite: protecting EU industry from American/Far-East competition.
Frankly, what else is it meant to do when the American government is protecting ITS firms? You can't sit back and let yours die. What needs to happen is the US government needs to get a clue!
Nah, if you genuinely are for the legalization (over-the-counter) of soft drugs such as cannabis, diazepam, etc, then I'm with you. It's just that not many people, and virtually no one in America, happens to agree with me on this.
There's a couple of massive benefits of using a small character set.
For one, with things such as computers, it is *far* easier to represent 26 Latin characters, 10 numerals and a few other things. What's a Japanese keyboard like? A Japanese typewriter?
Whatsmore, I suspect that because of the relative simplicity of the design of our characters, and their uniqueness, it is far easier to apply styling to them whilst not incurring ambiguity. You are able to very significantly change the shapes of our characters in order to make your presentation look nicer, yet they are still perfectly readable by humans. By contrast, I suspect that if you tried to 'style' Japanese characters beyond very basic stuff like making them bold, they could very easily start being confused with one another. IOW, 'fonts' are pretty much out of the question.
There's a certain balance between simplicity (binary?) and complexity (Mandarin) to be achieved in script, and I think that Latin just about gets it right.
An American being liberal on drugs? I never thought I'd live to see the day:-)
Oh wait... you weren't GENUINELY being liberal, were you... you just thought it was impractical. You'd still like to see any substance that has any effect on a human, other than making them feel less hungry, be banned.
You don't know what you're talking about. Hiragana and Katakana are purely phonetical, meaning that every symbol has its own distinct pronounciation,
Well, duh. If they didn't all have a unique pronunciation, there would hardly be a need for a seperate symbol, would there?
whereas the pronounciation of Western words (among others) is never fully clear.
This is pretty irrelevant. The fact that a few words have unclear pronunciation is a very minor tradeoff for the fact that we only have to learn 26 characters. It's a matter of whether you'd rather try to memorize 26 symbols and thousands of arrangements of those symbols (many of these arrangements can be guessed by *listening* to the word being spoken), or try to memorize 2000 (or more?) symbols, with no predictable 'arrangement'. I firmly choose the former.
I agree. Also pussy (;-) ), I think another that would encourage a great deal more variety on the airwaves would be to ABOLISH THE BBC RADIO STATIONS! We have Radio 1, 2, 3 and 4 not just on one frequency, but on about 10 each! It's not uncommon for me to be seeking throuh the FM frequency and get BBC radio stations found about 30 times in a row. With BBC stations hogging all this frequency, no wonder there is little room for competition stations.
The PRC government WANTS to be isolated from the rest of the world. IMHO, its virtually incomprehensible language is one of its greatest weapons in that isolationism. It's just *easier* to learn and speak a Latin-based language. Now, Japan doesn't want that. So they should make their language easier to learn.... hrm. Well, ok, they should start speaking English:-)
The Japanese are, on the whole, intelligent. Why would they want to negociate a (temporary) better deal with a foreign closed-source company when they could make a permenantly better, more trustable OS?
As an aside, I was once venting frustration to a friend while studying kanji - "When are the Japanese going to give up this crap and just use roman letters like the rest of the world??" "Never!" she replied, "Because once you've learned kanji, it's too fscking convenient!"
Euh... how is it convenient to use a character set of near 2000, when 26 will suffice perfectly well to represent the range of sounds that can be created by the human vocal chords?
1) Become a multibillionaire selling Windows 2) Buy every country in the world (start with US) 3) Make it a legal requirement to buy and use Windows globally 4) Profit!!!
The conventional wisdom around web stuff that's been free, but converts to pay is that "they die off, no one wants to use it anymore etc etc", but I think what people fail to realize is that for many businesses, less people is *just fine*, if those people are paying.
I think it depends entirely on the service. Some are far more appropriate to being charged for than others. For example, I pay an annual charge for my e-mail account and I'm pretty happy with it, but I wouldn't dream of paying for websites. I think they should be funded by adverts.
The reasons are that 1) E-mail is ONE service, whereas there are *millions* of websites. You can't be expected to pay a seperate fee for each site. I don't want to, anyway. OK, a choice of paying to remove ads is fine as well. and 2) Websites are a much more natural environment for advertising. If you receive your e-mail through POP or IMAP, you aren't going to see any banners unless they're sent to you (pseudo-spam). Ads can be integrated into websites and I *personally* have no problem with that.
But anyway, Yahoo! are keeping their free e-mail service; this one appears to be merely an additional service they're offering, no one seems to lose out much.
To put it another way, Linux is cheap enough, being free, to justify the vast amount of work those places had to put into it. But the numbers don't start making sense until you get up into the hundreds of instances.
Which means that if software developers like Adobe started porting their products to Linux so it had some decent software, it would economically be worth everyone in the world switching to Linux!
Oh please. They never handle the damn meat with their hands, they use tongs FFS (over here, anyway). Besides, you Americans are FAR too stuck up on hygiene. You don't seem to realise that too much hygiene is BAD. Your body is not made to fight weak(ish) microbes if everything is utterly pristene, and when you actually DO get something remotely bad, your body can't fight it. I've had loads of kebabs and am in very good health:-)
I like this. I will install this plug-in on my son's computer soon that way, he can not accidentaly get to sites taht have nasty things on them.
Much as I'd like to see anything which discourages widespread net censorship succeed, I really can't see this working. For one, if your son has a brain, he can either uninstall this or just download another browser. For two, do you REALLY think all sites which have 'nasty things on them' will be covered? Just like all sites are covered under the current firewalls and other forms of censorship?
Censoring stuff is like trying to patch up a decapitation with a plaster. In not only won't work properly, it SHOULDN'T work properly, as it's not the correct method. The correct method is to teach children what is right and wrong so that they can decide for themselves what they will visit. Censoring what they experience online is merely delaying the inevitable.
I really agree with your opinion. The idea that capitalism is more about having a *free* market, and *encouraging* the development of society through competition, rather than guarenteeing profits for people, is an idea which many people have forgotten. And, is that why I couldn't find any kebab places when I visited the US? Don't know what you're missing!;-)
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and it is nice to have an online system not attached to my computer
Um... one word: why? Surely it is better only to need to connect ONE device to the internet. If you need to connect two, you're either talking about needing 2 phone lines or the computer having DSL or cable, but the Xbox would presumably still tie up your phone line. IMHO, it'd be far better if the Xbox could connect THROUGH your broadband PC internet connection.
If Japanese conains 'so many homophones', maybe it's a crap language to start with. Sure, it's fine if you're reading it, but if you're talking and a word sounds identical to 100 others, it introduces ambiguity. Ideally every different semantic would *sound* different.
And Latin script has a way of dealing with different semantics; it arranges letters differently, as your example so well pointed out (there, they're and their).
I am not talking authoritatively, this is my humble opinion.
LOL!!!! Sounds like Taco is obviously a kid that hasn't grown up. :-)
That's a ridiculous comparison. C is only slightly harder to learn than basic, if at all. Hell, the first programming language I ever learnt was Perl.
I don't think that significant 'depth and power' is lost in using Latin script. Seems that we get along with it just fine. If we didn't, we would surely have invented something more appropriate.
Valium's legal in the US. It is controlled by prescription, however.
Controlled by prescription != legal. Legal is over-the-counter. I want to be able to buy such drugs in the same was I buy Paracetemol or Asprin (I presume they're over-the-counter in the US, as they are in the UK?)
Actually, I think that for Microsoft to be exterminated from the OS market would be a good thing, if replaced by a GPL OS. With a GPLed OS, there can never be any secret backdoors or unfair advantges for one company developing for the OS, as the sourcecode is open to everyone. Let MS compete when it comes to applications based on that opensource OS.
You mean comparatively cheap, commodity items?
Just like it's cheap to buy a computer now with WinXP and OfficeXP pre-installed?
The European Commission is not interested in competition, it's interested in exactly the opposite: protecting EU industry from American/Far-East competition.
Frankly, what else is it meant to do when the American government is protecting ITS firms? You can't sit back and let yours die. What needs to happen is the US government needs to get a clue!
we have a nation-wide non-stop automated system for paying the highway toll
Heh. Technology at its worst.
Nah, if you genuinely are for the legalization (over-the-counter) of soft drugs such as cannabis, diazepam, etc, then I'm with you. It's just that not many people, and virtually no one in America, happens to agree with me on this.
Erm, if you read my argument, I did NOT say that we should switch to binary, I said that there was a BALANCE to be struck!
There's a couple of massive benefits of using a small character set.
For one, with things such as computers, it is *far* easier to represent 26 Latin characters, 10 numerals and a few other things. What's a Japanese keyboard like? A Japanese typewriter?
Whatsmore, I suspect that because of the relative simplicity of the design of our characters, and their uniqueness, it is far easier to apply styling to them whilst not incurring ambiguity. You are able to very significantly change the shapes of our characters in order to make your presentation look nicer, yet they are still perfectly readable by humans. By contrast, I suspect that if you tried to 'style' Japanese characters beyond very basic stuff like making them bold, they could very easily start being confused with one another. IOW, 'fonts' are pretty much out of the question.
There's a certain balance between simplicity (binary?) and complexity (Mandarin) to be achieved in script, and I think that Latin just about gets it right.
An American being liberal on drugs? I never thought I'd live to see the day :-)
Oh wait... you weren't GENUINELY being liberal, were you... you just thought it was impractical. You'd still like to see any substance that has any effect on a human, other than making them feel less hungry, be banned.
You don't know what you're talking about. Hiragana and Katakana are purely phonetical, meaning that every symbol has its own distinct pronounciation,
Well, duh. If they didn't all have a unique pronunciation, there would hardly be a need for a seperate symbol, would there?
whereas the pronounciation of Western words (among others) is never fully clear.
This is pretty irrelevant. The fact that a few words have unclear pronunciation is a very minor tradeoff for the fact that we only have to learn 26 characters. It's a matter of whether you'd rather try to memorize 26 symbols and thousands of arrangements of those symbols (many of these arrangements can be guessed by *listening* to the word being spoken), or try to memorize 2000 (or more?) symbols, with no predictable 'arrangement'. I firmly choose the former.
I agree. Also pussy ( ;-) ), I think another that would encourage a great deal more variety on the airwaves would be to ABOLISH THE BBC RADIO STATIONS! We have Radio 1, 2, 3 and 4 not just on one frequency, but on about 10 each! It's not uncommon for me to be seeking throuh the FM frequency and get BBC radio stations found about 30 times in a row. With BBC stations hogging all this frequency, no wonder there is little room for competition stations.
The PRC government WANTS to be isolated from the rest of the world. IMHO, its virtually incomprehensible language is one of its greatest weapons in that isolationism. It's just *easier* to learn and speak a Latin-based language. Now, Japan doesn't want that. So they should make their language easier to learn.... hrm. Well, ok, they should start speaking English :-)
Let's pray that most world legislators don't think in the same way as the US government, then.
The Japanese are, on the whole, intelligent. Why would they want to negociate a (temporary) better deal with a foreign closed-source company when they could make a permenantly better, more trustable OS?
As an aside, I was once venting frustration to a friend while studying kanji - "When are the Japanese going to give up this crap and just use roman letters like the rest of the world??"
"Never!" she replied, "Because once you've learned kanji, it's too fscking convenient!"
Euh... how is it convenient to use a character set of near 2000, when 26 will suffice perfectly well to represent the range of sounds that can be created by the human vocal chords?
O well I have positive karma...
1) Become a multibillionaire selling Windows
2) Buy every country in the world (start with US)
3) Make it a legal requirement to buy and use Windows globally
4) Profit!!!
The conventional wisdom around web stuff that's been free, but converts to pay is that "they die off, no one wants to use it anymore etc etc", but I think what people fail to realize is that for many businesses, less people is *just fine*, if those people are paying.
I think it depends entirely on the service. Some are far more appropriate to being charged for than others. For example, I pay an annual charge for my e-mail account and I'm pretty happy with it, but I wouldn't dream of paying for websites. I think they should be funded by adverts.
The reasons are that
1) E-mail is ONE service, whereas there are *millions* of websites. You can't be expected to pay a seperate fee for each site. I don't want to, anyway. OK, a choice of paying to remove ads is fine as well.
and 2) Websites are a much more natural environment for advertising. If you receive your e-mail through POP or IMAP, you aren't going to see any banners unless they're sent to you (pseudo-spam). Ads can be integrated into websites and I *personally* have no problem with that.
But anyway, Yahoo! are keeping their free e-mail service; this one appears to be merely an additional service they're offering, no one seems to lose out much.
To put it another way, Linux is cheap enough, being free, to justify the vast amount of work those places had to put into it. But the numbers don't start making sense until you get up into the hundreds of instances.
Which means that if software developers like Adobe started porting their products to Linux so it had some decent software, it would economically be worth everyone in the world switching to Linux!
Oh please. They never handle the damn meat with their hands, they use tongs FFS (over here, anyway). Besides, you Americans are FAR too stuck up on hygiene. You don't seem to realise that too much hygiene is BAD. Your body is not made to fight weak(ish) microbes if everything is utterly pristene, and when you actually DO get something remotely bad, your body can't fight it. I've had loads of kebabs and am in very good health :-)
I like this. I will install this plug-in on my son's computer soon that way, he can not accidentaly get to sites taht have nasty things on them.
Much as I'd like to see anything which discourages widespread net censorship succeed, I really can't see this working. For one, if your son has a brain, he can either uninstall this or just download another browser. For two, do you REALLY think all sites which have 'nasty things on them' will be covered? Just like all sites are covered under the current firewalls and other forms of censorship?
Censoring stuff is like trying to patch up a decapitation with a plaster. In not only won't work properly, it SHOULDN'T work properly, as it's not the correct method. The correct method is to teach children what is right and wrong so that they can decide for themselves what they will visit. Censoring what they experience online is merely delaying the inevitable.
I really agree with your opinion. The idea that capitalism is more about having a *free* market, and *encouraging* the development of society through competition, rather than guarenteeing profits for people, is an idea which many people have forgotten. And, is that why I couldn't find any kebab places when I visited the US? Don't know what you're missing! ;-)
Mod the parent up!!!!