China already has a problem with this already. Due to their one-child policy, many families had sex-based abortions. In particular, since sons were much more popular, they would abort daughters. Now, China has about 120 men for every 100 women.
This might not seem like such a serious problem on the surface, but it really is. Among other things, China now has an extremely active underground wife selling system, in comparison to other countries, at least. Since there just aren't enough Chinese women to go around, men are willing to break laws and pay high prices to get a wives.
It seems like that the difference in population also makes discrimination more likely. There's no clear evidence on how the discrimination would work out, but discrimination is usually more common in disparate populations.
The 'ease' of English applies even with its convolutedness. The main advantage people run into with English is that the grammar is so deformed that almost anything can be said. Many people who are new to the language can actually speak it with their native grammar set and be intelligible, although very odd sounding. Also, a lot of what you noted is an issue with written English, but simply doesn't apply to spoken English.
Basically, being somewhat understandable with English is 'easy' while being fluent in English is 'the next best thing to impossible'.
However, I have to agree with those 'other reasons' for being popular. One of the major ones is that most modern computing originated in the US, in English. And, with us being in the 'information age', that leaves tidbits of English in every country in the world. Similarly, the disgustingly large amount of media exported by the US and the UK (they are the only net-exporters of media, as I recall) leaves more English scattered about the globe.
That their errors derived from netspeak does not place the blame there. People have been failing English papers for years due to spelling and grammar problems derived from some place or another. All that is new is the source, not the fact that most people suck at writing. English didn't die before, and it won't die now.
You are presuming, however, that this will not be overturned. If it is overturned, it's a fairly good example of how the system works properly. And, seeing as similar laws in other states have already been overturned, this one may be as well.
"So, violating GPL by copying stuff without complying with the license is bad and wrong.
but
Buying songs from iTunes without complying with the ToS is big and clever because music must be free?"
No, GPL violations are violations. This is clever because, well, it's pretty damn clever. That this is maybe also wrong has no relation to its being clever. Similarly, violating the GPL requires no cleverness whatsoever, but is wrong.
Well, they hire a large team of coders, have a good set of test machines, get any hardware the need before it comes out and...oh yeah...ONLY SUPPORT ONE ARCHITECTURE. Hmmm...I wonder how they manage to get one architecture's speed to compete with a compiler suite that works on something like ten languages and damn near every arch out there.
"So, Europe and Japan waited until about 1985 to start rebuilding their damaged infrastructure, did they? Or do you think they had cellular phone networks in mind from 1945 onwards when they were making things work again?"
No, I think that, having been rebuilding since 1945 to 1985, they didn't have nearly as entrenched of a system as the US did.
"...The article mainly discusses mobile phone usage, though."
Well, that's the thing, then, isn't it? In the US, dirt is pretty cheap and plentiful, so land lines and wires that require poles to by strung up everywhere have predominated where the relative scarcity of space in European and Japanese cities has forced a much higher adoption rate for mobile technologies.
Tell me if I'm wrong, eh?
You're wrong. The relative non-existence of cell-phones when land-lines in the US were being laid resulted in laying a land line making more sense than imagining you had something better.
By contrast, the EU and Japan had half of all there infrastructure destroyed a bit before the fifties (see if you can guess why!) and then had a chance to rebuild with something newer.
An FCC report said American mobile users talk more and pay less than Europeans, citing it as "evidence that the U.S. market is effectively competitive" compared to Europe and Japan.
But eight of 10 European Union residents have mobile phone numbers while only six of 10 Americans do.
Wow, more EU residents have cells than US residents do. With the differences they're citing, it's no wonder, seeing as America generally has a better POTS than Europe. In the US, it costs just a little bit of money to have unlimited local and incoming calls on a land-line, plus it never has an error, ever, of any sort. So, it's not much of a surprise that the US has slightly lower cell uptake.
What always throws me off with these sites that reuse the WikiPedia content is that they aren't editable. They give full access to the wiki's end product, they just don't actually have a wiki.
I'm not sure whether or not this hurts the wiki, but it definitely bothers me. On the one hand, most of these sites are more targetted towards the general populace, which has a history of destroying any open forum it gets its hands on. On the other hand, people reading answers.com have no way of knowing that they could be contributing to such a beautiful resource.
I wish that these sites would try to give a bit more back to WikiPedia, at least by making it easy for people to learn that the real WikiPedia exists. After all, they are somewhat dependent on WikiPedia for their continued existence.
Wait...so GNOME apps don't need glib and gnome-print? And bonobo-ui and gconf and gnome-vfs and libglade and libgnome and gtk+ and...
Hmmm...that's a whole lot of stuff.
"I've yet to see a KDE app that doesn't require all of QT, kde-base and kde-libs to run."
Actually, those dependencies are false. The reason is that KDE itself only packages things down to that level and the distros don't bother to do otherwise, so kde-libs is only one package. That doesn't mean that a program needs all those libs, it just means that dependency checkers will think they need all those libs. If you were to build KDE from source yourself, you could pare down the deps a ton.
This is a very important distinction, as you will notice that the size in memory of most KDE apps isn't nearly as large as those theoretical dependencies would imply.
"I'm actually surprised that they didn't fix this a long time ago."
I've always used BlackBox or KDE, and they've had that functionality for years. I just assumed all the OSS desktops had it. So, this new release almost counts as a mark against GNOME, in my book. I mean, what were the developers doing that they didn't get this until now. And these are the same people who constantly lambast KDE about usability!
This has affected you, and you seem to be a well-spoken individual. Would it be possible for you to setup a website dedicated to getting a law of that sort passed?
If the site is put together properly and has a good forum system, then is posted on Slashdot, it should be able to get something done. Just make certain you have the contact information for senators and representatives in each state (they all have fairly easy numbers to find), contact info for Bush, some easy to fill-in templates to message these people, and an online petition that people can sign. Also, include a testimonials section on the forum. Not because people looking to make the law necessarily will look at it, but because then it might be possible to dig through for the really good ones, allowing for easy quoting of weepiness-inducing soundbytes.
But Linux doesn't need them for Linux to succeed. Linux is succeeding in the router, the PVR, the supercomputer, the cellphone, everything. The desktop can come last, or even not at all, and Linux will be a success anyway.
Not really. The Logitech MX-1000 does try to get the fingers slightly further forward, but it undermines that same goal by leaving the scroll-wheel and thumb-groove back so that if the hand is as far forward as the buttons allow, the scroll-wheel is awkward and the thumb-buttons are misplaced.
By contrast, the horse appears to have changed the thumb-groove so its more of a shelf, giving more support and allowing the hand to rest at most any point along it. Also, the image implies that the scroll wheel may be moved there, making it easy to use while the fingers are extremely far forward. It would be even easier to use if the scroll-wheel were at the center of a rocker, as on the MX-1000.
Slashdot Mirror
China already has a problem with this already. Due to their one-child policy, many families had sex-based abortions. In particular, since sons were much more popular, they would abort daughters. Now, China has about 120 men for every 100 women.
This might not seem like such a serious problem on the surface, but it really is. Among other things, China now has an extremely active underground wife selling system, in comparison to other countries, at least. Since there just aren't enough Chinese women to go around, men are willing to break laws and pay high prices to get a wives.
It seems like that the difference in population also makes discrimination more likely. There's no clear evidence on how the discrimination would work out, but discrimination is usually more common in disparate populations.
"Obviously, I'm not saying they used the HPC Challenge as a design document, but clearly Cell is meant as a supercomputer first and a PS3 second."
I'd say it seems a lot more like they thought a supercomputer would be kickass for running a PS3 and designed it accordingly.
The 'ease' of English applies even with its convolutedness. The main advantage people run into with English is that the grammar is so deformed that almost anything can be said. Many people who are new to the language can actually speak it with their native grammar set and be intelligible, although very odd sounding. Also, a lot of what you noted is an issue with written English, but simply doesn't apply to spoken English.
Basically, being somewhat understandable with English is 'easy' while being fluent in English is 'the next best thing to impossible'.
However, I have to agree with those 'other reasons' for being popular. One of the major ones is that most modern computing originated in the US, in English. And, with us being in the 'information age', that leaves tidbits of English in every country in the world. Similarly, the disgustingly large amount of media exported by the US and the UK (they are the only net-exporters of media, as I recall) leaves more English scattered about the globe.
That their errors derived from netspeak does not place the blame there. People have been failing English papers for years due to spelling and grammar problems derived from some place or another. All that is new is the source, not the fact that most people suck at writing. English didn't die before, and it won't die now.
You are presuming, however, that this will not be overturned. If it is overturned, it's a fairly good example of how the system works properly. And, seeing as similar laws in other states have already been overturned, this one may be as well.
For anyone who doesn't know about wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia
No, Opera took a page from either Netcaptor's or Mozilla's book, both of which proceeded it to tabbed browsing.
"So, violating GPL by copying stuff without complying with the license is bad and wrong.
but
Buying songs from iTunes without complying with the ToS is big and clever because music must be free?"
No, GPL violations are violations. This is clever because, well, it's pretty damn clever. That this is maybe also wrong has no relation to its being clever. Similarly, violating the GPL requires no cleverness whatsoever, but is wrong.
Well, they hire a large team of coders, have a good set of test machines, get any hardware the need before it comes out and...oh yeah... ONLY SUPPORT ONE ARCHITECTURE. Hmmm...I wonder how they manage to get one architecture's speed to compete with a compiler suite that works on something like ten languages and damn near every arch out there.
"an analyst in the article predicts homes and businesses could see some 150 calls a day from overseas call centers."
Sometimes I love all those red states and the way they've kept up their lynching techniques.
"So, Europe and Japan waited until about 1985 to start rebuilding their damaged infrastructure, did they? Or do you think they had cellular phone networks in mind from 1945 onwards when they were making things work again?"
No, I think that, having been rebuilding since 1945 to 1985, they didn't have nearly as entrenched of a system as the US did.
Sorry, I wasn't clear. Cell phones have errors, land-lines don't. Since land-lines are next-to-free in the US, that combination makes them desireable.
By contrast, the EU and Japan had half of all there infrastructure destroyed a bit before the fifties (see if you can guess why!) and then had a chance to rebuild with something newer.
"Wouldn't the higher population density cause less phone calls to be made?"
No.
"Why call when you can walk next store or just find them down at the pub?"
Why walk next store or down to the pub to try to find them, when you could just ring them and be certain they're there?
Wow, more EU residents have cells than US residents do. With the differences they're citing, it's no wonder, seeing as America generally has a better POTS than Europe. In the US, it costs just a little bit of money to have unlimited local and incoming calls on a land-line, plus it never has an error, ever, of any sort. So, it's not much of a surprise that the US has slightly lower cell uptake.
What always throws me off with these sites that reuse the WikiPedia content is that they aren't editable. They give full access to the wiki's end product, they just don't actually have a wiki.
I'm not sure whether or not this hurts the wiki, but it definitely bothers me. On the one hand, most of these sites are more targetted towards the general populace, which has a history of destroying any open forum it gets its hands on. On the other hand, people reading answers.com have no way of knowing that they could be contributing to such a beautiful resource.
I wish that these sites would try to give a bit more back to WikiPedia, at least by making it easy for people to learn that the real WikiPedia exists. After all, they are somewhat dependent on WikiPedia for their continued existence.
Wait...so GNOME apps don't need glib and gnome-print? And bonobo-ui and gconf and gnome-vfs and libglade and libgnome and gtk+ and...
Hmmm...that's a whole lot of stuff.
"I've yet to see a KDE app that doesn't require all of QT, kde-base and kde-libs to run."
Actually, those dependencies are false. The reason is that KDE itself only packages things down to that level and the distros don't bother to do otherwise, so kde-libs is only one package. That doesn't mean that a program needs all those libs, it just means that dependency checkers will think they need all those libs. If you were to build KDE from source yourself, you could pare down the deps a ton.
This is a very important distinction, as you will notice that the size in memory of most KDE apps isn't nearly as large as those theoretical dependencies would imply.
"I'm actually surprised that they didn't fix this a long time ago."
I've always used BlackBox or KDE, and they've had that functionality for years. I just assumed all the OSS desktops had it. So, this new release almost counts as a mark against GNOME, in my book. I mean, what were the developers doing that they didn't get this until now. And these are the same people who constantly lambast KDE about usability!
This has affected you, and you seem to be a well-spoken individual. Would it be possible for you to setup a website dedicated to getting a law of that sort passed?
If the site is put together properly and has a good forum system, then is posted on Slashdot, it should be able to get something done. Just make certain you have the contact information for senators and representatives in each state (they all have fairly easy numbers to find), contact info for Bush, some easy to fill-in templates to message these people, and an online petition that people can sign. Also, include a testimonials section on the forum. Not because people looking to make the law necessarily will look at it, but because then it might be possible to dig through for the really good ones, allowing for easy quoting of weepiness-inducing soundbytes.
"It could run into efforts underway now in the state capital by Big Telecom to shut out muni Internet in Illinois."
Apparently, you are not familiar with Mayor Daley. You see, in the US, the state legislates the city, but in Chicago, the city legislates the state.
Many people intentionally use it on the desktop, therefore it is ready for their desktops.
This is one of those laws that most people forget to write down because they think it's so goddamned obvious no one would ever doubt it:
- If it happened, it must be possible -
Linux is used on the desktop, therefore it is ready to be used on the desktop. To argue otherwise is shear idiocy.
Blogging is a method of speech.
But Linux doesn't need them for Linux to succeed. Linux is succeeding in the router, the PVR, the supercomputer, the cellphone, everything. The desktop can come last, or even not at all, and Linux will be a success anyway.
Not really. The Logitech MX-1000 does try to get the fingers slightly further forward, but it undermines that same goal by leaving the scroll-wheel and thumb-groove back so that if the hand is as far forward as the buttons allow, the scroll-wheel is awkward and the thumb-buttons are misplaced.
By contrast, the horse appears to have changed the thumb-groove so its more of a shelf, giving more support and allowing the hand to rest at most any point along it. Also, the image implies that the scroll wheel may be moved there, making it easy to use while the fingers are extremely far forward. It would be even easier to use if the scroll-wheel were at the center of a rocker, as on the MX-1000.