I notice everytime I use JAVA, it simply eats processing time, even though I am not currently running anything.
That problem is solved if everything runs in Java, and Java is part of the kernel.
Heck, playing devil's advocate here, as I think JAVA as such has a very nice API.
I agree. Of the languages I am allowed to code in nowadays, it is also the most elegant one. One of the problems of Java is that there are gigabytes of example code on the internet of how not to program. Crappy memory and resource management and bad string manipulation are the worst problems. I rarely have performance problems, as long as I don't have to write a GUI or use an application server or XML related library.
Most people are 'radical middle' people in the sense that they combine principles from different party programmes, but that does not mean that if you totally accept one of both parties in the US you make a clear choice between 'left' and 'right', firstly because both parties in the US represent fairly moderate (and inconsistent) mixes of principles in the first place, and secondly because there are more axes of political choice than 'left' and 'right'. Green left and the Socialists are both extreme left, but very different and do not work together at all. Extreme right calvinist fundamentalists and Fortuyn's secular 'liberal nationalists' (pro-choice, pro-euthanasia etc.) are completely different and will avoid eachother.
Fortuyn's hard right will sometimes form a secular voting bloc against the christians with socialists and social democrats on freedom of lifestyle issues, while they are enemies on social-economic, justice, and foreign policy issues.
I don't know what country you're from (I'm from the US), but I've heard some parlimentary systems run like this:
1. People vote for a party, not a person.
2. The seats in the legislative body are allocated according to each party's respective portion of the popular vote.
If this is true, where is the accountability? To get into office, you get in good with a party, and then hope your party gets enough votes that you make it in.
In the United States, lawmakers are accountable directly to the voters they represent. Having party backing is usually very helpful, but not a necessity- you can get into office and survive without party backing (it happens) but you cannot get into office, or keep it, unless a majority of the people you represent like what you're doing.
I'm of the opinion the more accountable government is, the better, and I was wondering how it worked under a parlimentary system, and your thoughts on it. Thanks.
I am from the Netherlands. One does vote for a person, but excess votes for that person are 'shifted down' to the next candidate on the party list. It is the responsibility of that person you vote for to make sure he is on the right list, isn't it? Given that there are only minimal barriers to registering a new party, it is easy to get into parliament without backing by an existing party. Certainly you remember the rightwing politician shot in the Netherland a few days before the election who won 14% of votes (and therefore 14% of seats) in parliament after his death. He founded his "party" some 9 weeks before the election. Since you don't need to win a majority in districts it is far easier to enter for newcomers than it is in the USA, where the electoral system protects existing parties from challenge.
The disadvantage of the system is that it never produces clear majorities and therefore you always get a coalition government. The party has to make compromises with other parties, and therefore you never get what you chose for. Of course, a decent party will indicate to the voter in advance what they are and are not willing to do, and a decent representative will break party discipline in parliament if he has to.
In the US it is the pragmatic voter who has to make the bigger compromise with his own conscience, as he chooses for one of the two mainstream parties because that is the only way to have an influence on policy at all.
The disadvantage of that system is that it doesn't expose discontent with the establishment as well as our system does. In the US it is mostly the internal elections within the "red" and "blue" party and opinion polls that expose discontent, and troublemakers appear from the scene after that (instead of ending up in parliament).
We have four elections for councils of representatives with legislative powers on different levels: Realm, Province, Water County, Municipality. Turnout usually ranges from 80-90% (for Realm level) to 50%. Citizens have the right to organize a referendum (in the Realm and sometimes in the Municipality - there are regular referenda in Amsterdam for instance). Mayors, Governors, Water Counts etc. are appointed by the Crown, based on the advice of her Majesty's Government.
In a few years we will also elect the Mayor, but he will have no clear mandate to do anything. It is a meaningless compromise by the current government with a small (4%) social liberal party that they desperately needed to get a rightwing majority. The vast majority will ignore that election, just as it ignores the European Parliament election (some 30% turnout).
you have to be all the way to the left or all the way to the right
As a foreigner I don't even understand what that means. The two political parties in the US both represent a mix of completely unrelated issues and schools of thought, and accomodate politicians in the same party who wouldn't want to be seen together dead in many other countries.
We have 9 parties in parliament right now, and people complain about lack of choice.
The really shocking news is we now have scientific proof that the US/UK two-party democracy is the only right system for mankind.
More refined distinctions between schools of thought in the multi-party systems in continental Europe are unnecessary and confusing to our brains.
We don't need environmentalists, socialists, communists, social democrats, social liberals, social christians, conservative liberals, christian conservatives, constitutional christians, conservative nationalists, national socialists etc. Just "blue" and "red" will do fine. There is no such thing as a "green" brain, and nazis do not exist. They are just "blue" and "red". Or vice versa.
"many are rigorous and respectful of the intellectual property rights, while others speak of intellectual property rights with open contempt."
Since when is speaking with contempt of something wrong? Does that make you a "software pirate"? Let's see how these guys define "intellectual property" in a previous publication about intellectual property theft linked by Slashdot:
"Today, intellectual property is not just patents, copyrights and trademarks, it is processes, techniques, methodology and talent; described by many experts as intellectual capital."
This apparently means that: 1. My talents are the property of my employer because the value of my talents is part of the capital valuation of the company on the market. If I leave that constitutes intellectual property theft. 2. If intangible capital valuation on the market decreases because someone else is doing the same things better or cheaper than you that constitutes intellectual property theft (instead of competition).
I do not know what they are trying to promote, but it surely is not freedom or competition. This conception of intellectual property is based on a fundamental misconception of the value of knowledge. It is also a great threat to freedom and world peace.
Greece and Bulgaria also produce very capable programmers. I have worked with people from both countries. The Bulgarians usually have better general education, in particular in mathematics, than most EU and US citizens.
There are hundreds of search engines that only index pages in a single language, and I also know some specialized search engines for finding historical documents that use language-specific heuristic rules (for consonant shifts) for alternative or old spelling rules. English is particularly easy to search on because nouns are compounded with spaces, but that's not the case in a number of other European languages. So even if generic search engines like Google work for other languages, it is always possible to improve recall by taking language-specific heuristics into account.
The fiercely competitive American search engine market will of course quickly converge because fierce monopolist Micro$oft has entered, but the rest of the world is still safe because most departments of Micro$oft (except the legal department basically) have apparently not yet discovered that it exists.
I have been involved as a coder in an Unreal Tournament mod in the past. Finding creative adolescents that are willing to design levels for a mod for just the fun of it is no problem at all. Some of these level designers are really good, but never get paid. Level design is not an obvious career choice; Expect a low salary & long working hours & relocation required.
Many of the good level designers that work for free already have a decent daytime job or refuse to move for the jobs offered to them (Europe -> US for instance).
First try to convince a wellknown mod to include your levels in the first place, and then start thinking about getting paid for it.
If we create an artificial scarcity of food people might even do it for just food. I am sure there are millions of volunteers right now. The next stage is to create a class of *well-educated* hungry people. That's progress...
What is needed is for Israel to completely defeat the "Palestinian" military, and for the "Palestinian" military to totally cease aggression (like Japan had to do). Then Israel can finally pull out of the territories.
This view is certainly not the official point of view of Jewish organizations in Europe I am aware of. It is also not the only view, or even the dominant view, in Israeli newspapers. I have read very different analyses of Israel's situation by Ha'aretz columnists. Are you suggesting they are anti-semitic or don't understand the position of Israel?
If I lived in Israel, I certainly wouldn't be happy with 'friends of Israel' like you.
I am free to dislike Israel's government, Jewish religion, or klezmer music if I want. I live in a democracy and do not need prior permission to express my thoughts as the constitution tells me. Israeli citizens are probably also free to dislike whatever governments or religions they want. The constitution does not allow me to hold jews responsible for any of the above merely because of their 'jewishness', though.
American bigots think Europeans have a huge racism problem, European bigots think Americans have a huge racism problem. Classical racism is being replaced by bigotry disguised as political correctness nowadays.
NGOs make clear that the US does not compile statistics on racism incidents that allow fair comparisons with the EU member state reports on that subject. European racist groups usually have their websites in the US because the legislators in Europe are more oppressive as far as hate speech is concerned.
The US refuses cooperation with the Dutch government to trace IP numbers of Dutch users of racist websites in the US. Dutch government only targeted two forum websites this year because the other major offenders were all in the US.
The observed increase in incidents (reported on by CNN a number of months ago) is btw. 1) anti-muslim by the natives, 2) "anti-semitism" by the muslim minority, and 3) racism directed against native Dutchmen (which has quadrupled over the last year).
Already sue the individuals? Why don't they try suing the ISPs, hard disk manufacturers, CD burner manufacturers, CD manufacturers etc. first for making these criminal networks possible in the first place? They can even sue Microsoft for its mediaplayer!
This is a textbook example of sine qua non causality: without memory storage devices illegal copying of music would be impossible!
Compare that to guns: people were killed even before the existence of guns, even though it was messy and risky thing to do. Even obesity is older than McDonalds!
So GW Bush is smart, but consistently behaves like an idiot? That's really frightening.
It's a good strategy, though. GB Shaw already remarked that democracy makes sure that a people gets no better government than they deserve. It's not surprising that many voters choose a "dim light" to represent them, if given the chance.
Offtopic: Yes! The Netherlands is smarter than Belgium, France, and the USA! I already suspected that!
The cultural differences are there regardless of language. If I speak English, I still have to be aware of subtle differences in meaning.
On one sound, one symbol: Just because we can have one symbol for the spirant guttural g or velar nasal ng doesn't have to mean you know what phoneme corresponds with it, of course. Dissecting words into phonemes is also an acquired skill.
Still, a simple controlled English along the lines of COBOL or ACE for user interfaces, specifications, manuals, etc. as a standard would be nice.
My objection was mainly to the analogy between English and unix. I wanted to point out that the process by which English has become a de facto standard, is comparable to the process by which windows has become a de facto standard. clear specification or "fitness" of the language as such are clearly not relevant factors.
I use a keyboard with US layout (cheapest and most choice) and always install English (preferably UK) versions of software now, because not everything is available in all languages and very often only the English version of an application is patched regularly. In the past I had a bug-ridden and confusing mixture of Dutch, German, and English applications on my computer. This is the method by which English becomes a de facto standard, isn't it?
UNICODE (and punycode for domain names) is mostly relevant for reducing the number of different spellings used as workarounds (e after umlaut, prefix hyphen instead of trema, etc.) I have to try to find names of people, companies, etc in some languages. I never considered domain names a problem (just IP numbers would be fine with me), but phasing out obsolete character sets in standard protocols is a sensible idea.
American is not a language. It is a dialect of English, with only minor differences. Brits and Americans even understand eachother's spoken and written language.
English is not comparable to W3C recommendations. There is no body maintaining the specification of standard English, as opposed to some other European languages.
English is the M$ windows of languages on the internet. Just because lots of people use it, doesn't mean it is any good. Sentence constructions are often ambiguous, requiring semantics to parse the sentence, and the relation between English phonemes and graphemes is a complete mess. English should be replaced by a neutral exchange language designed for that purpose.
You asked: If Japanese don't buy American games because of the cultural differences, why do Americans buy so many Japanese games?
I think because the Japanese write certain games with the American and European market in mind, and the Americans don't write games with the Japanese market in mind. In other words, the Japanese are currently just better at crossing cultural borders.
Just because US companies are hugely successful in selling games, movies, music, etc. in many other cultures doesn't mean they are specifically designing products for other cultures. The US just has a huge internal market, huge budgets, and therefore good entertainment products. It also happens to have strong historical and cultural links with many other wealthy cultures. Japan has a sizable internal market, which translates to competitive budgets, and is therefore hard to be successful in. India and China will also get harder as they get wealthier. Many other cultures don't have that internal market and just adapt to a dominant culture.
(One of the reasons I like some low-budget European RTS games is that it gives me the opportunity to play the Dutch on a European map. Some US games go as far as making the Netherlands part of France on maps, for instance, and that is definitely a sales mistake in this particular market. US game makers make these Europe-centred games for the US market. Strong sales in Europe or former colonies of European countries are little more than a side effect.)
The relevant factors for success for entertainment products in foreign markets is 1) relative size of home market to foreign market (no control and anti-symmetric), 2) cultural affinity with foreign market (no control and symmetric), 3) effort in adapting to foreign market (under control). From the US point of view factor 1 is dominant in the case of Japan.
An example is movies: Dutch productions are some 10 times more profitable relative to budget than American productions inside the Netherlands. Still only 3 Dutch movies make the top 10 for the year on average, and producing a Dutch movie with a budget of a few millions is a highly risky exercise because you absolutely must reach a sizable proportion of the population to survive as a producer.
The most profitable movies made here are weird movies like Antonia that do pretty badly here, get an Oscar for best foreign movie, and lure a few million Americans and Europeans to the cinema to watch an 'art' movie.
Japan can be a very good market for westerners: The two biggest attraction parks in Japan are Disneyland Tokyo and Netherlands-history-themed park Huis ten Bosch in Nagasaki, after all. From the Netherlands point of view (again relative to home market size) Japan is a very important foreign market and no more difficult to access than the US or even France for entertainment products like music.
It is unfortunate that the Japanese are sometimes portrayed as 'xenophobic' just because they are capable of producing a lot what they like for themselves. In the Netherlands people would moan the loss of Dutch culture if an American attraction park even dared to compete successfully with the venerable Efteling. The Japanese are in fact remarkably open to exploring exotic Western culture if presented the right way. But you would probably agree to that.
The pro's are often so good that they spoil the game from the perspective of a spectator. I have once watched a member of the winning team in last year's Real Aim Infiltration League (for Unreal Tournament mod Infiltration, a fps shooter) play a live match for the league. I don't recall seeing what killed him, just as his opponents never saw him coming. Many kills were made with the knife to prevent noise. No exciting firefights with two sides participating at all.
I also played him one one one: Basically you walk around for some time, and then you drop dead and respawn. I am a fairly accomplished network player myself.
If you show LIVE matches you also need professional camerateams for this type of game.
There is some similarity with soccer, which is the greatest spectator sport worldwide: If you understand what they are trying to do, you can be excited about all those things that almost happen. If you are just waiting for a few goals that might or might not be scored in those 90 minutes, you will certainly be bored.
Good camera work is the key: the camera must be in position to show the guy who is going to surprise the enemy sneaking up on them. It is frustrating to be completely surprised about a goal because the camera was positioned wrong.
The 3d maps in computer games are usually much more complicated for the camera and the spectator than the map soccer is played on.
I even watch Time Commanders on the BBC (Total War engine) sometimes, even though the players on that show play it so bad it is irritating.
The "car that parks itself" was the biggest disappointment of 2003 for me. I sometimes drive around for 40 minutes searching for a parking space near my house in Amsterdam. I would love to have a car that finds itself a space after I get home.
Turns out it only manages the 2 second parallel parking routine. Now that helps. And it "senses kerbs": I wouldn't try this on the canalside parking spaces we have a lot of here. This system isn't even a good idea for tourist rental cars.
My wife works for a government child protection organization in the Netherlands. Last few months the major ISPs over here have started using spam filters for their clients, and the organisation's email accounts are now continually blacklisted, once even by the Ministry of Justice ISP. On average, about 60% of email reaches its destination.
In the past, angry fathers hijacked domain names and search terms. Now blacklisting lets them interfere directly with daily work.
These blacklisting schemes are criminally stupid, and their use should (and probably will) be prohibited. Interfering with the delivery of a paper letter is usually treated as an offense, and could (in a similar context) theoretically lead to max. 18 months in prison here. A complaint of spam should at least be verified in an acceptable way before mail interception (and that includes being read by a speaker of the language it is written in, of course, and verifying that the sender is not a government agency legally competent to "spam" citizens in the public interest).
Now this is the official logic of the infamous Spamcop: "If people report your site as a source of spam, it will be listed. If people stop reporting your site as a source of spam, it will be de-listed after 48 hours. The only way you can be removed from this list is to avoid users reporting your site as a source of spam - either by changing your behavior, or by negotiating a cease-fire with the unhappy users." Has anyone ever pointed out to these guys that there are other roles in communication than that of "user". Surely sometimes you are justified in not "negotiating" with your "unhappy users".
You are right. This US general's excuse is a bit too transparent.
Let's start a EU space program to put fight... ermm garbage collectors in space that can vaporize the enem... ermm debris in space for the benefit of mankind. And equip satellites with a defense system to prevent being shot... ermm knocked down by debris.
And pretty quick, because the ermm... ermm... Chinese for instance may weaponize space and lock us out in the future. Oh damn. This argument is out of place.
I mean, the EU is only putting its own GPS network GALILEO up to ermm... "provide future European sovereignty in telematics infrastructure", whatever that may mean. The European armies will keep relying on US GPS and Russian GLONASS signals, of course, because we trust the US and Russia not to mess with it.
The only way to be absolutely sure that the vote counted is the one you cast, is to drop a well-established rule: expose to the world who voted what. Drop the anonymity principle and make all votes available to whoever wants to collect them. When you vote, the fact that you voted and who you voted for can be made public immediately. Technology makes this radical new system feasible now.
Problem is that this opens up another wellknown way of influencing elections: Undemocratic supporters of candidates could visit you and beat the crap out of you. But at least it would be 'transparent' to everyone what is happening.
Slashdot Mirror
That problem is solved if everything runs in Java, and Java is part of the kernel.
Heck, playing devil's advocate here, as I think JAVA as such has a very nice API.
I agree. Of the languages I am allowed to code in nowadays, it is also the most elegant one. One of the problems of Java is that there are gigabytes of example code on the internet of how not to program. Crappy memory and resource management and bad string manipulation are the worst problems. I rarely have performance problems, as long as I don't have to write a GUI or use an application server or XML related library.
Most people are 'radical middle' people in the sense that they combine principles from different party programmes, but that does not mean that if you totally accept one of both parties in the US you make a clear choice between 'left' and 'right', firstly because both parties in the US represent fairly moderate (and inconsistent) mixes of principles in the first place, and secondly because there are more axes of political choice than 'left' and 'right'. Green left and the Socialists are both extreme left, but very different and do not work together at all. Extreme right calvinist fundamentalists and Fortuyn's secular 'liberal nationalists' (pro-choice, pro-euthanasia etc.) are completely different and will avoid eachother.
Fortuyn's hard right will sometimes form a secular voting bloc against the christians with socialists and social democrats on freedom of lifestyle issues, while they are enemies on social-economic, justice, and foreign policy issues.
I am from the Netherlands. One does vote for a person, but excess votes for that person are 'shifted down' to the next candidate on the party list. It is the responsibility of that person you vote for to make sure he is on the right list, isn't it? Given that there are only minimal barriers to registering a new party, it is easy to get into parliament without backing by an existing party. Certainly you remember the rightwing politician shot in the Netherland a few days before the election who won 14% of votes (and therefore 14% of seats) in parliament after his death. He founded his "party" some 9 weeks before the election. Since you don't need to win a majority in districts it is far easier to enter for newcomers than it is in the USA, where the electoral system protects existing parties from challenge.
The disadvantage of the system is that it never produces clear majorities and therefore you always get a coalition government. The party has to make compromises with other parties, and therefore you never get what you chose for. Of course, a decent party will indicate to the voter in advance what they are and are not willing to do, and a decent representative will break party discipline in parliament if he has to.
In the US it is the pragmatic voter who has to make the bigger compromise with his own conscience, as he chooses for one of the two mainstream parties because that is the only way to have an influence on policy at all.
The disadvantage of that system is that it doesn't expose discontent with the establishment as well as our system does. In the US it is mostly the internal elections within the "red" and "blue" party and opinion polls that expose discontent, and troublemakers appear from the scene after that (instead of ending up in parliament).
We have four elections for councils of representatives with legislative powers on different levels: Realm, Province, Water County, Municipality. Turnout usually ranges from 80-90% (for Realm level) to 50%. Citizens have the right to organize a referendum (in the Realm and sometimes in the Municipality - there are regular referenda in Amsterdam for instance). Mayors, Governors, Water Counts etc. are appointed by the Crown, based on the advice of her Majesty's Government.
In a few years we will also elect the Mayor, but he will have no clear mandate to do anything. It is a meaningless compromise by the current government with a small (4%) social liberal party that they desperately needed to get a rightwing majority. The vast majority will ignore that election, just as it ignores the European Parliament election (some 30% turnout).
As a foreigner I don't even understand what that means. The two political parties in the US both represent a mix of completely unrelated issues and schools of thought, and accomodate politicians in the same party who wouldn't want to be seen together dead in many other countries.
We have 9 parties in parliament right now, and people complain about lack of choice.
The really shocking news is we now have scientific proof that the US/UK two-party democracy is the only right system for mankind.
More refined distinctions between schools of thought in the multi-party systems in continental Europe are unnecessary and confusing to our brains.
We don't need environmentalists, socialists, communists, social democrats, social liberals, social christians, conservative liberals, christian conservatives, constitutional christians, conservative nationalists, national socialists etc. Just "blue" and "red" will do fine. There is no such thing as a "green" brain, and nazis do not exist. They are just "blue" and "red". Or vice versa.
Quote from this publication:
"many are rigorous and respectful of the intellectual property rights, while others speak of intellectual property rights with open contempt."
Since when is speaking with contempt of something wrong? Does that make you a "software pirate"? Let's see how these guys define "intellectual property" in a previous publication about intellectual property theft linked by Slashdot:
"Today, intellectual property is not just patents, copyrights and trademarks, it is processes, techniques, methodology and talent; described by many experts as intellectual capital."
This apparently means that:
1. My talents are the property of my employer because the value of my talents is part of the capital valuation of the company on the market. If I leave that constitutes intellectual property theft.
2. If intangible capital valuation on the market decreases because someone else is doing the same things better or cheaper than you that constitutes intellectual property theft (instead of competition).
I do not know what they are trying to promote, but it surely is not freedom or competition. This conception of intellectual property is based on a fundamental misconception of the value of knowledge. It is also a great threat to freedom and world peace.
Greece and Bulgaria also produce very capable programmers. I have worked with people from both countries. The Bulgarians usually have better general education, in particular in mathematics, than most EU and US citizens.
There are hundreds of search engines that only index pages in a single language, and I also know some specialized search engines for finding historical documents that use language-specific heuristic rules (for consonant shifts) for alternative or old spelling rules. English is particularly easy to search on because nouns are compounded with spaces, but that's not the case in a number of other European languages. So even if generic search engines like Google work for other languages, it is always possible to improve recall by taking language-specific heuristics into account.
The fiercely competitive American search engine market will of course quickly converge because fierce monopolist Micro$oft has entered, but the rest of the world is still safe because most departments of Micro$oft (except the legal department basically) have apparently not yet discovered that it exists.
I have been involved as a coder in an Unreal Tournament mod in the past. Finding creative adolescents that are willing to design levels for a mod for just the fun of it is no problem at all. Some of these level designers are really good, but never get paid. Level design is not an obvious career choice; Expect a low salary & long working hours & relocation required.
Many of the good level designers that work for free already have a decent daytime job or refuse to move for the jobs offered to them (Europe -> US for instance).
First try to convince a wellknown mod to include your levels in the first place, and then start thinking about getting paid for it.
If we create an artificial scarcity of food people might even do it for just food. I am sure there are millions of volunteers right now. The next stage is to create a class of *well-educated* hungry people. That's progress...
This view is certainly not the official point of view of Jewish organizations in Europe I am aware of. It is also not the only view, or even the dominant view, in Israeli newspapers. I have read very different analyses of Israel's situation by Ha'aretz columnists. Are you suggesting they are anti-semitic or don't understand the position of Israel?
If I lived in Israel, I certainly wouldn't be happy with 'friends of Israel' like you.
I am free to dislike Israel's government, Jewish religion, or klezmer music if I want. I live in a democracy and do not need prior permission to express my thoughts as the constitution tells me. Israeli citizens are probably also free to dislike whatever governments or religions they want. The constitution does not allow me to hold jews responsible for any of the above merely because of their 'jewishness', though.
American bigots think Europeans have a huge racism problem, European bigots think Americans have a huge racism problem. Classical racism is being replaced by bigotry disguised as political correctness nowadays.
NGOs make clear that the US does not compile statistics on racism incidents that allow fair comparisons with the EU member state reports on that subject. European racist groups usually have their websites in the US because the legislators in Europe are more oppressive as far as hate speech is concerned.
The US refuses cooperation with the Dutch government to trace IP numbers of Dutch users of racist websites in the US. Dutch government only targeted two forum websites this year because the other major offenders were all in the US.
The observed increase in incidents (reported on by CNN a number of months ago) is btw. 1) anti-muslim by the natives, 2) "anti-semitism" by the muslim minority, and 3) racism directed against native Dutchmen (which has quadrupled over the last year).
This is a textbook example of sine qua non causality: without memory storage devices illegal copying of music would be impossible!
Compare that to guns: people were killed even before the existence of guns, even though it was messy and risky thing to do. Even obesity is older than McDonalds!
Don't hold your breath. You first have to be elected to be at the other end of the camera.
Right. Those RotK soldiers just cheated and read the book. When they discovered they were on Sauron's side, they ran.
It's a good strategy, though. GB Shaw already remarked that democracy makes sure that a people gets no better government than they deserve. It's not surprising that many voters choose a "dim light" to represent them, if given the chance.
Offtopic: Yes! The Netherlands is smarter than Belgium, France, and the USA! I already suspected that!
The cultural differences are there regardless of language. If I speak English, I still have to be aware of subtle differences in meaning.
On one sound, one symbol: Just because we can have one symbol for the spirant guttural g or velar nasal ng doesn't have to mean you know what phoneme corresponds with it, of course. Dissecting words into phonemes is also an acquired skill.
Still, a simple controlled English along the lines of COBOL or ACE for user interfaces, specifications, manuals, etc. as a standard would be nice.
My objection was mainly to the analogy between English and unix. I wanted to point out that the process by which English has become a de facto standard, is comparable to the process by which windows has become a de facto standard. clear specification or "fitness" of the language as such are clearly not relevant factors.
I use a keyboard with US layout (cheapest and most choice) and always install English (preferably UK) versions of software now, because not everything is available in all languages and very often only the English version of an application is patched regularly. In the past I had a bug-ridden and confusing mixture of Dutch, German, and English applications on my computer. This is the method by which English becomes a de facto standard, isn't it?
UNICODE (and punycode for domain names) is mostly relevant for reducing the number of different spellings used as workarounds (e after umlaut, prefix hyphen instead of trema, etc.) I have to try to find names of people, companies, etc in some languages. I never considered domain names a problem (just IP numbers would be fine with me), but phasing out obsolete character sets in standard protocols is a sensible idea.
American is not a language. It is a dialect of English, with only minor differences. Brits and Americans even understand eachother's spoken and written language.
English is not comparable to W3C recommendations. There is no body maintaining the specification of standard English, as opposed to some other European languages.
English is the M$ windows of languages on the internet. Just because lots of people use it, doesn't mean it is any good. Sentence constructions are often ambiguous, requiring semantics to parse the sentence, and the relation between English phonemes and graphemes is a complete mess. English should be replaced by a neutral exchange language designed for that purpose.
You asked: If Japanese don't buy American games because of the cultural differences, why do Americans buy so many Japanese games?
I think because the Japanese write certain games with the American and European market in mind, and the Americans don't write games with the Japanese market in mind. In other words, the Japanese are currently just better at crossing cultural borders.
Just because US companies are hugely successful in selling games, movies, music, etc. in many other cultures doesn't mean they are specifically designing products for other cultures. The US just has a huge internal market, huge budgets, and therefore good entertainment products. It also happens to have strong historical and cultural links with many other wealthy cultures. Japan has a sizable internal market, which translates to competitive budgets, and is therefore hard to be successful in. India and China will also get harder as they get wealthier. Many other cultures don't have that internal market and just adapt to a dominant culture.
(One of the reasons I like some low-budget European RTS games is that it gives me the opportunity to play the Dutch on a European map. Some US games go as far as making the Netherlands part of France on maps, for instance, and that is definitely a sales mistake in this particular market. US game makers make these Europe-centred games for the US market. Strong sales in Europe or former colonies of European countries are little more than a side effect.)
The relevant factors for success for entertainment products in foreign markets is 1) relative size of home market to foreign market (no control and anti-symmetric), 2) cultural affinity with foreign market (no control and symmetric), 3) effort in adapting to foreign market (under control). From the US point of view factor 1 is dominant in the case of Japan.
An example is movies: Dutch productions are some 10 times more profitable relative to budget than American productions inside the Netherlands. Still only 3 Dutch movies make the top 10 for the year on average, and producing a Dutch movie with a budget of a few millions is a highly risky exercise because you absolutely must reach a sizable proportion of the population to survive as a producer.
The most profitable movies made here are weird movies like Antonia that do pretty badly here, get an Oscar for best foreign movie, and lure a few million Americans and Europeans to the cinema to watch an 'art' movie.
Japan can be a very good market for westerners: The two biggest attraction parks in Japan are Disneyland Tokyo and Netherlands-history-themed park Huis ten Bosch in Nagasaki, after all. From the Netherlands point of view (again relative to home market size) Japan is a very important foreign market and no more difficult to access than the US or even France for entertainment products like music.
It is unfortunate that the Japanese are sometimes portrayed as 'xenophobic' just because they are capable of producing a lot what they like for themselves. In the Netherlands people would moan the loss of Dutch culture if an American attraction park even dared to compete successfully with the venerable Efteling. The Japanese are in fact remarkably open to exploring exotic Western culture if presented the right way. But you would probably agree to that.
I also played him one one one: Basically you walk around for some time, and then you drop dead and respawn. I am a fairly accomplished network player myself.
If you show LIVE matches you also need professional camerateams for this type of game.
There is some similarity with soccer, which is the greatest spectator sport worldwide: If you understand what they are trying to do, you can be excited about all those things that almost happen. If you are just waiting for a few goals that might or might not be scored in those 90 minutes, you will certainly be bored.
Good camera work is the key: the camera must be in position to show the guy who is going to surprise the enemy sneaking up on them. It is frustrating to be completely surprised about a goal because the camera was positioned wrong. The 3d maps in computer games are usually much more complicated for the camera and the spectator than the map soccer is played on.
I even watch Time Commanders on the BBC (Total War engine) sometimes, even though the players on that show play it so bad it is irritating.
The "car that parks itself" was the biggest disappointment of 2003 for me. I sometimes drive around for 40 minutes searching for a parking space near my house in Amsterdam. I would love to have a car that finds itself a space after I get home.
Turns out it only manages the 2 second parallel parking routine. Now that helps. And it "senses kerbs": I wouldn't try this on the canalside parking spaces we have a lot of here. This system isn't even a good idea for tourist rental cars.
My wife works for a government child protection organization in the Netherlands. Last few months the major ISPs over here have started using spam filters for their clients, and the organisation's email accounts are now continually blacklisted, once even by the Ministry of Justice ISP. On average, about 60% of email reaches its destination. In the past, angry fathers hijacked domain names and search terms. Now blacklisting lets them interfere directly with daily work.
These blacklisting schemes are criminally stupid, and their use should (and probably will) be prohibited. Interfering with the delivery of a paper letter is usually treated as an offense, and could (in a similar context) theoretically lead to max. 18 months in prison here. A complaint of spam should at least be verified in an acceptable way before mail interception (and that includes being read by a speaker of the language it is written in, of course, and verifying that the sender is not a government agency legally competent to "spam" citizens in the public interest).
Now this is the official logic of the infamous Spamcop: "If people report your site as a source of spam, it will be listed. If people stop reporting your site as a source of spam, it will be de-listed after 48 hours. The only way you can be removed from this list is to avoid users reporting your site as a source of spam - either by changing your behavior, or by negotiating a cease-fire with the unhappy users." Has anyone ever pointed out to these guys that there are other roles in communication than that of "user". Surely sometimes you are justified in not "negotiating" with your "unhappy users".
You are right. This US general's excuse is a bit too transparent.
Let's start a EU space program to put fight... ermm garbage collectors in space that can vaporize the enem... ermm debris in space for the benefit of mankind. And equip satellites with a defense system to prevent being shot... ermm knocked down by debris.
And pretty quick, because the ermm... ermm... Chinese for instance may weaponize space and lock us out in the future. Oh damn. This argument is out of place.
I mean, the EU is only putting its own GPS network GALILEO up to ermm... "provide future European sovereignty in telematics infrastructure", whatever that may mean. The European armies will keep relying on US GPS and Russian GLONASS signals, of course, because we trust the US and Russia not to mess with it.
The only way to be absolutely sure that the vote counted is the one you cast, is to drop a well-established rule: expose to the world who voted what. Drop the anonymity principle and make all votes available to whoever wants to collect them. When you vote, the fact that you voted and who you voted for can be made public immediately. Technology makes this radical new system feasible now. Problem is that this opens up another wellknown way of influencing elections: Undemocratic supporters of candidates could visit you and beat the crap out of you. But at least it would be 'transparent' to everyone what is happening.