I don't see this as being necessarily a bad thing. Of course the system won't teach you to be a great, publishable writer, but most people don't have what it takes to do that anyway. What it will teach you is how to follow guidelines without going off in your own crazy direction when it's not called for, and how to write an essay that has a minimal amount of structure. It seems to me that these are worthwhile things to learn.
Wrong, in fact I agree with Lomborg on most things (though not all --- I think he is far too sanguine on biodiversity for instance). That doesn't change the fact that he's strongly biased against this movie's claims. Surely another expert's argument would be more persuasive, especially since there is no shortage of people lining up to trash this film.
As for "scientifically based": everyone except crackpots tries to base their environmental opinions on scientific facts. Bias comes in when you interpret them.
Have you been following this debate? Few people, even his supporters, would claim that Bjorn Lomborg is a model, unbiased, expert scientist. He strongly believes that environmental concerns are diverting resources from more important projects like the reduction of poverty, and argues forcefully that they must be taken less seriously. Lomborg has an axe to grind.
Bjorn Lomborg is known to be biased against all environmental disaster scenarios. Of course he'll try to discredit the movie.
There are much better sources you can look to if you want to attack this film. E.g. look at this New Republic article from a believer in global warming, who worries that the film is so exaggerated that it will only serve to discredit the global warming cause:
By trivializing the greenhouse effect into a subject as ludicrous as the premise of a scientifically illiterate disaster movie, The Day After Tomorrow may serve mainly to convince audiences the prospect of global warming is just another Hollywood gimmick. Unfortunately, it may not be. The real science behind the need for greenhouse gas reform is plenty troubling without preposterous exaggeration.
If that impulse has not yet got us to Mars, then you have to ask what will?
I agree with you: the technology is currently not cheap and safe enough for commercial exploitation, nor will it be in the short-term future (i.e. it is not worth it for Exxon's shareholders for the company to invest in research on space mining). So, we can't expect companies to make any progress in this area.
So, what will create that greed impulse? Public research. If NASA pours enough money into spaceflight for "romance" and no immediate benefit, then several decades from now, the technology will be improved enough for companies to see short-term investment opportunities, and we will see lots of money pouring in from the private sector. But without government research, this will never happen --- because only the government is able to sink money down a hole for 50 years without profit.
Note that I'm not supporting Bush's Mars program; I think it's rather misguided, and should be focusing much more on unmanned spaceflight. But I do think an expensive Mars program of some kind is called for.
I would guess in this case it was probably a forum. Reporters like to call everything a "chat room". I'll bet that almost none of those famous "Chinese chat rooms" are actually chat rooms, either.
You have a point --- both companies have similar philosophies of quality and innovation --- but before suggesting a merger, remember that Nintendo is a Japanese company, and Apple is American. It's not really feasible to execute a merger across such a major cultural rift, and I can't think of any examples personally. Japanese management is notoriously closed to foreigners.
Yeah, that makes me wonder if the DS is going to have some kind of touchscreen system, like PDAs. At first the 2-screen idea sounded like a disaster to me, but precisely because of the prima facie crappiness of the idea, I think Nintendo may have some kind of clever surprise up their sleeve...
I've also heard that the 640k quote was taken out of context from an interview Gates gave about DOS 4.0, and that in context it meant something rather specific about the capabilities of that operating system, and wasn't a statement about the amount of memory anyone would ever need. I know that in the article you quoted, Gates has denied ever saying it, but he may simply have forgotten. Nobody remembers every single sentence they've ever uttered.
I've spent a few hours searching the web on this, but the truth is not clear to me. Gates may well have uttered that sentence at some point in the past. At any rate, the important point is that whether the quote was invented or taken out of context, Gates knew demand for memory and CPU would keep on increasing, and never stupidly believed there would be a cap. This is obvious simply because he wouldn't have become the richest man in the world if he completely misunderstood the workings of the industry.
It's not quite as advanced as what you propose, but handheld electronic dictionaries are already very widespread in Japan. Having used one, let me say they beat the pants off any paper dictionary --- 7-8 massive dictionaries in one tiny package, and instant word/ideogram lookup and cross-reference. I'm not ever going back to dead tree dictionaries.
Of course, though, it's still not that useful to someone who can't speak the language at all. It will be interesting to see if portable babelfishes like you suggest ever become good enough to be widely marketed.
But this discussion neglects the fact that your frozen body is unlikely to survive the economic and/or political upheavals that seem likely to occur (even in free countries) in a time interval of several hundred years. If a total war is on, do you think anyone will care if there's a power outage to the cryonics building? Even if peace lasts somehow, there is a considerable risk from ordinary disasters like fires, earthquakes and floods. I'd say chances of cryo giving any results in practice are next to nil.
Just a nice, clean button saying "I feel Private" or somesuch thing.
I've been thinking the same thing. The thing is that the encryption must be client-side, for 2 reasons. One, encryption should be personal and we shouldn't trust Google's servers to do it for us. Two, encryption is so CPU-intensive that I suspect it would be too much even for Google's super-cluster to encrypt 50% of the e-mail going through it.
So I was thinking Google could release an open-source web-browser plugin using GPG that enabled encryption. The user would only have to click "install plugin", enter a personal password, walk through key auto-generation, and then they could easily encrypt and decrypt their mail whenever they use Gmail.
The main problem with encryption is that it makes it impossible for Google to show targeted ads. If most people start using it it will amount to suicide for them. That's why --- as much as I think Google are good guys --- I don't think it'll happen.
IANA physicist, but my understanding is that relativity's predictions directly contradict quantum mechanics'. Since both of these theories have been proven to be very good at predicting certain things (relativity for large-scale effects like the sun bending light, and quantum mechanics for tiny atom-level effects), they must both be right in essence but wrong in their boundary cases, much like Newtonian mechanics was shown to be wrong when very high speeds/distances/etc were involved.
This is why we have a bunch of new candidate theories like string theory and supersymmetry, which seek to bridge the gap between the two major theories. We don't know which of them (if any) is right, but we know that relativity and quantum mechanics must be wrong or incomplete.
It probably had something to do with the posted signs saying "Don't be evil."
Wow, I didn't know they had that. That rocks. That little detail makes me trust them even more than I already do. If not-evilness permeates their company to that extent, that makes me think that maybe we don't have to worry so much about their IPO after all. It's hard to imagine a company like that turning its back on its users.
It's just because Go is the underdog in the Western world, and the Go people want to make it more popular. Chess is already popular, it doesn't need to fight Go for dominance. Same for Linux and Windows, actually.
I played for a while, but I never found it to be nearly as interesting as chess.
I don't get the impression you've played for very long. Now of course you're entitled not to enjoy Go and play something else, but don't go around claiming it's a "simple" game, with no "real and interesting" nuances. You say that the complexity arises out of the magnitude but in fact even a Go game played on a 9x9 board is interesting on a tactical level. 19x19 is not more interesting merely because it has more combinations, but because it adds strategic depth as well as increasing the importance of phenomena like ko fights, joseki and pincer attacks (do you even know enough about Go to know what I'm referring to here?).
19x19 tic-tac-toe has plenty of "nuances," too, I'm sure. And the same holds for 19x19 othello/reversi, checkers, etc.
Comments like this are what make me think you haven't given this any thought. This is just false. Tic-tac-toe on 19x19 would obviously not add much depth to the game (playing it on different topologies like Klein bottles and 4-dimensional space does, though:). Othello and checkers would not get much benefit either, because pieces in those games only have power in close proximity. Go benefits from a large sized board because the objective is territory-grabbing, not killing your opponent.
Beginners often don't see what's so deep about Go. For example, I might play a piece somewhere, and the beginner watching my game sees me just playing a piece in a random-looking position on an empty area of the board. But in fact, the move has a great deal of strategic significance: I'm loosely connecting a group which has insufficient eye space as well as establishing territory on the left side, and I carefully choose the fourth line instead of the third to cancel out my opponent's advantage in the center. Moreover, to choose this move above all possible others, I had to examine the rest of the board to decide there are no urgent tactical situations nor more efficient strategic moves elsewhere. There was a great deal of complexity in my move, and I may well have given it 30 seconds of thought before making it. And this wasn't just stupid examination of combinations but real, deep strategy, as good as striving for a positional advantage in chess. "Simple" indeed.
And I'm not even getting into the variety of tactical situations. Life-and-death, capturing races and the various tesuji situations can necessitate reading ahead the tree of moves up to 10 moves in advance. Go is just as analytical as chess, especially in the endgame.
Now I would not claim Go is more interesting than chess --- both are very deep games --- but if you think Go involves less nuance or less deep strategy than chess, you haven't examined it on any but the most superficial level. You've been fooled by the fact that the rules are so simple. But I can only point out that the rules of logic are also very simple, and yet the whole of mathematical theory springs out of them.
P.S. Normal practice is for you to now mod me down to 0 and suck my karma for daring to say something negative about the Slashdot community, or positive about Microsoft.
No it isn't. Normal practice is to mod you up to 5 (especially if you claim you'll be modded down). I don't know if it was intentional in your case, but it's oldest karma whore tactic in the book.
Anyway, I for one have long given up criticizing the slashdot editors. They just don't care.
Sure Modplug has better quality. But realistically, I constantly hop from mp3s to mods to videoclips while working, and it's too much of a pain to open up more than one window. Especially since, last I checked, modplug isn't nearly as compact and convenient as winamp in terms of screen real estate. I usually prefer to suffer the quality loss.
What I don't get is why the modplug people don't make a plugin for winamp already instead of forcing people to use their poorly designed interface.
This doesn't have a lot to do with bloat, AFAIK. It's a simple buffer overflow, affecting the Fasttracker 2 input module, which has been there for a long time. I wouldn't be so sure I'm safe if I were you. Make sure to check if you have it and disable the module (... if your old version of winamp supports disabling modules, that is...).
Great points. I would just add that I think it depends on the law whether its goal is to enforce morals or to hold together society. For example, corporate and contract law exists mainly to keep the economy functioning, I would say --- a lot of it is not obviously based on any moral principles.
Nope. These are hardly Hitler's worst evils. Any way you spin it, comparing Bush with Hitler is obviously preposterous. It should only take a few minutes of thought and use of common knowledge to notice the gigantic differences between the two men. I'm sure you're smart and educated enough to know them already, but just aren't bothering to seriously think about the issue. I would be insulting your intelligence if I took the time to enumerate them for you. I encourage you to just think of 5 ways in which Hitler is worse than Bush. After this, can you really come back after that and tell me again that they're comparable?
Don't get me wrong, I strongly oppose Bush myself. But extreme comparisons like this only serve to discredit those who oppose Bush for sensible policy reasons.
Yeah, what struck me as especially strange was that he kept enthusing about all the "bargains" he got from spam. My understanding was that spammers were mostly scammers who either send you crap products or don't send them at all. But here he is claiming he got nice things like cheap computer parts from spam. Really? My spam doesn't generally advertise anything nearly so useful. It's hard not to suspect that this guy is a spammer trying to increase the appeal of spam.
It's true that the ratio of good games to bad has been worsening considerably lately, but what really counts is the total number of good games. If you choose carefully and don't get discouraged by the reams of trash, this is a great time to be a gamer. GTA, for all the bad rap it gets over its violence, is the greatest experiment in nonlinear gameplay in video gaming's short history. MMORPGs are maturing into an increasingly interesting social form of gaming, and music games like Dance Dance Revolution (though old news in Japan) are finally gaining popularity in the Western world. And if anyone is claiming that everyone cares only about graphics nowadays, remember that on the Game Boy Advance, we're seeing some of the most refined 2d platformers ever made (the physics are just delicious in the new Metroids).
But that's not what really gets me excited. I'm seeing the first sign that video games (or at least a few of them) are maturing into a serious artform --- something I've long been saying they have the potential to be (since games are a superset of film) but which nobody's really attempted so far. Anyone who thinks gaming has been stagnating in the past few years absolutely needs to check out Ico. It's a radiant and strangely moving game. The virtual architecture has a kind of majestic, soothing emptiness. I think the relative lack of constraints on level design (e.g. useless wide open spaces are okay) means the creators of Ico could achieve an effect impossible for real-life architects. Ico showed that games can be aesthetically pleasing on a higher level than just "big guns, big boobs". Although it wasn't a huge commercial success, I think (or at least hope) that many future game designers will be influenced by it.
Sturgeon's law applies to gaming, just like it does to novels, film or any other type of entertainment. If instead of looking the amount of crap, you look at the number of gems, it's clear that gaming is alive and well.
I disagree. Branding decreases risk, and consumers dislike risk in general and are willing to pay a premium for it.
To give another supermarket example, last week I tried switching from my usual 1$ megacorp-brand concentrated orange juice to 50 cent store-brand. But I had a bad experience with the store brand (I found it too bitter) and switched back to the megacorp brand. I got burned by trying an unknown, unproven noname brand; whereas megacorp brands offer extremely reliable and consistent products, which I like. Now let's say I change supermarkets, I will be reluctant to try the (different, and possibly better than the previous) store brand, and prefer to stick to the megacorp brand for a small price premium. Even if I haven't tried all the possibilities, is that really so irrational?
I would argue brand-based decision making is not a surrogate for rational decision making --- it is rather a surrogate for collecting additional evidence on the quality of products. And since this collection of evidence can require paying $$$ on unproven products, brand-based decisions are on the contrary often very rational (with the exception of "lifestyle branding" influence).
Another note: last year I travelled to a foreign country where most brands were different from my home country. It was a disconcerting experience: almost every product purchase was an unpredictable risk, and I got burned many times before learning the brands I preferred. Of course, this was part of the fun experience of travel --- but imagine if we had no brands and everyone had to suffer this in their home country! I learned to appreciate the value of branding after that.
(All that said, I repeat that I think "lifestyle branding" is idiotic, and certainly don't care whether happy people use my toothpaste on TV.)
They are however based on, or atleast closely tied to, the latin alphabet. Try giving the example you just gave, in, say, chinese.
That's easy, given a variant of C that supports Unicode for user-defined names. (A quick google search doesn't seem to turn one up, but it would be simple to modify an existing compiler to add that support.) The only latin-alphabet word would then be the "for".
The public service announcement some courageous, publicly minded techie slipped into the broadcast stream exposing [insert favorite president here]'s criminal participation in [insert favorite crime here], against the wishes of both his conglomerate's bosses and the ruling party.
Huh? But why would anyone want to do such a thing nowadays when you can just put up an.avi on your website? Even if your paranoid vision of modern America were correct, surely the Internet would be the distribution system for any such "revolutionary" propanganda, not mainstream TV.
And if you want evidence, just look at China (a country which really is oppressed --- and I wonder if you've ever lived in a country outside the free world, if you think America is so bad). I do recall one case of TV hijacking in China a few years ago, but for the most part the Internet seems the main channel for dissent.
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I don't see this as being necessarily a bad thing. Of course the system won't teach you to be a great, publishable writer, but most people don't have what it takes to do that anyway. What it will teach you is how to follow guidelines without going off in your own crazy direction when it's not called for, and how to write an essay that has a minimal amount of structure. It seems to me that these are worthwhile things to learn.
As for "scientifically based": everyone except crackpots tries to base their environmental opinions on scientific facts. Bias comes in when you interpret them.
Have you been following this debate? Few people, even his supporters, would claim that Bjorn Lomborg is a model, unbiased, expert scientist. He strongly believes that environmental concerns are diverting resources from more important projects like the reduction of poverty, and argues forcefully that they must be taken less seriously. Lomborg has an axe to grind.
There are much better sources you can look to if you want to attack this film. E.g. look at this New Republic article from a believer in global warming, who worries that the film is so exaggerated that it will only serve to discredit the global warming cause:
I agree with you: the technology is currently not cheap and safe enough for commercial exploitation, nor will it be in the short-term future (i.e. it is not worth it for Exxon's shareholders for the company to invest in research on space mining). So, we can't expect companies to make any progress in this area.
So, what will create that greed impulse? Public research. If NASA pours enough money into spaceflight for "romance" and no immediate benefit, then several decades from now, the technology will be improved enough for companies to see short-term investment opportunities, and we will see lots of money pouring in from the private sector. But without government research, this will never happen --- because only the government is able to sink money down a hole for 50 years without profit.
Note that I'm not supporting Bush's Mars program; I think it's rather misguided, and should be focusing much more on unmanned spaceflight. But I do think an expensive Mars program of some kind is called for.
I would guess in this case it was probably a forum. Reporters like to call everything a "chat room". I'll bet that almost none of those famous "Chinese chat rooms" are actually chat rooms, either.
You have a point --- both companies have similar philosophies of quality and innovation --- but before suggesting a merger, remember that Nintendo is a Japanese company, and Apple is American. It's not really feasible to execute a merger across such a major cultural rift, and I can't think of any examples personally. Japanese management is notoriously closed to foreigners.
Yeah, that makes me wonder if the DS is going to have some kind of touchscreen system, like PDAs. At first the 2-screen idea sounded like a disaster to me, but precisely because of the prima facie crappiness of the idea, I think Nintendo may have some kind of clever surprise up their sleeve ...
I've spent a few hours searching the web on this, but the truth is not clear to me. Gates may well have uttered that sentence at some point in the past. At any rate, the important point is that whether the quote was invented or taken out of context, Gates knew demand for memory and CPU would keep on increasing, and never stupidly believed there would be a cap. This is obvious simply because he wouldn't have become the richest man in the world if he completely misunderstood the workings of the industry.
Of course, though, it's still not that useful to someone who can't speak the language at all. It will be interesting to see if portable babelfishes like you suggest ever become good enough to be widely marketed.
But this discussion neglects the fact that your frozen body is unlikely to survive the economic and/or political upheavals that seem likely to occur (even in free countries) in a time interval of several hundred years. If a total war is on, do you think anyone will care if there's a power outage to the cryonics building? Even if peace lasts somehow, there is a considerable risk from ordinary disasters like fires, earthquakes and floods. I'd say chances of cryo giving any results in practice are next to nil.
I've been thinking the same thing. The thing is that the encryption must be client-side, for 2 reasons. One, encryption should be personal and we shouldn't trust Google's servers to do it for us. Two, encryption is so CPU-intensive that I suspect it would be too much even for Google's super-cluster to encrypt 50% of the e-mail going through it.
So I was thinking Google could release an open-source web-browser plugin using GPG that enabled encryption. The user would only have to click "install plugin", enter a personal password, walk through key auto-generation, and then they could easily encrypt and decrypt their mail whenever they use Gmail.
The main problem with encryption is that it makes it impossible for Google to show targeted ads. If most people start using it it will amount to suicide for them. That's why --- as much as I think Google are good guys --- I don't think it'll happen.
This is why we have a bunch of new candidate theories like string theory and supersymmetry, which seek to bridge the gap between the two major theories. We don't know which of them (if any) is right, but we know that relativity and quantum mechanics must be wrong or incomplete.
Wow, I didn't know they had that. That rocks. That little detail makes me trust them even more than I already do. If not-evilness permeates their company to that extent, that makes me think that maybe we don't have to worry so much about their IPO after all. It's hard to imagine a company like that turning its back on its users.
It's just because Go is the underdog in the Western world, and the Go people want to make it more popular. Chess is already popular, it doesn't need to fight Go for dominance. Same for Linux and Windows, actually.
I don't get the impression you've played for very long. Now of course you're entitled not to enjoy Go and play something else, but don't go around claiming it's a "simple" game, with no "real and interesting" nuances. You say that the complexity arises out of the magnitude but in fact even a Go game played on a 9x9 board is interesting on a tactical level. 19x19 is not more interesting merely because it has more combinations, but because it adds strategic depth as well as increasing the importance of phenomena like ko fights, joseki and pincer attacks (do you even know enough about Go to know what I'm referring to here?).
19x19 tic-tac-toe has plenty of "nuances," too, I'm sure. And the same holds for 19x19 othello/reversi, checkers, etc.
Comments like this are what make me think you haven't given this any thought. This is just false. Tic-tac-toe on 19x19 would obviously not add much depth to the game (playing it on different topologies like Klein bottles and 4-dimensional space does, though :). Othello and checkers would not get much benefit either, because pieces in those games only have power in close proximity. Go benefits from a large sized board because the objective is territory-grabbing, not killing your opponent.
Beginners often don't see what's so deep about Go. For example, I might play a piece somewhere, and the beginner watching my game sees me just playing a piece in a random-looking position on an empty area of the board. But in fact, the move has a great deal of strategic significance: I'm loosely connecting a group which has insufficient eye space as well as establishing territory on the left side, and I carefully choose the fourth line instead of the third to cancel out my opponent's advantage in the center. Moreover, to choose this move above all possible others, I had to examine the rest of the board to decide there are no urgent tactical situations nor more efficient strategic moves elsewhere. There was a great deal of complexity in my move, and I may well have given it 30 seconds of thought before making it. And this wasn't just stupid examination of combinations but real, deep strategy, as good as striving for a positional advantage in chess. "Simple" indeed.
And I'm not even getting into the variety of tactical situations. Life-and-death, capturing races and the various tesuji situations can necessitate reading ahead the tree of moves up to 10 moves in advance. Go is just as analytical as chess, especially in the endgame.
Now I would not claim Go is more interesting than chess --- both are very deep games --- but if you think Go involves less nuance or less deep strategy than chess, you haven't examined it on any but the most superficial level. You've been fooled by the fact that the rules are so simple. But I can only point out that the rules of logic are also very simple, and yet the whole of mathematical theory springs out of them.
No it isn't. Normal practice is to mod you up to 5 (especially if you claim you'll be modded down). I don't know if it was intentional in your case, but it's oldest karma whore tactic in the book.
Anyway, I for one have long given up criticizing the slashdot editors. They just don't care.
What I don't get is why the modplug people don't make a plugin for winamp already instead of forcing people to use their poorly designed interface.
This doesn't have a lot to do with bloat, AFAIK. It's a simple buffer overflow, affecting the Fasttracker 2 input module, which has been there for a long time. I wouldn't be so sure I'm safe if I were you. Make sure to check if you have it and disable the module (... if your old version of winamp supports disabling modules, that is ...).
Great points. I would just add that I think it depends on the law whether its goal is to enforce morals or to hold together society. For example, corporate and contract law exists mainly to keep the economy functioning, I would say --- a lot of it is not obviously based on any moral principles.
Nope. These are hardly Hitler's worst evils. Any way you spin it, comparing Bush with Hitler is obviously preposterous. It should only take a few minutes of thought and use of common knowledge to notice the gigantic differences between the two men. I'm sure you're smart and educated enough to know them already, but just aren't bothering to seriously think about the issue. I would be insulting your intelligence if I took the time to enumerate them for you. I encourage you to just think of 5 ways in which Hitler is worse than Bush. After this, can you really come back after that and tell me again that they're comparable?
Don't get me wrong, I strongly oppose Bush myself. But extreme comparisons like this only serve to discredit those who oppose Bush for sensible policy reasons.
Yeah, what struck me as especially strange was that he kept enthusing about all the "bargains" he got from spam. My understanding was that spammers were mostly scammers who either send you crap products or don't send them at all. But here he is claiming he got nice things like cheap computer parts from spam. Really? My spam doesn't generally advertise anything nearly so useful. It's hard not to suspect that this guy is a spammer trying to increase the appeal of spam.
But that's not what really gets me excited. I'm seeing the first sign that video games (or at least a few of them) are maturing into a serious artform --- something I've long been saying they have the potential to be (since games are a superset of film) but which nobody's really attempted so far. Anyone who thinks gaming has been stagnating in the past few years absolutely needs to check out Ico. It's a radiant and strangely moving game. The virtual architecture has a kind of majestic, soothing emptiness. I think the relative lack of constraints on level design (e.g. useless wide open spaces are okay) means the creators of Ico could achieve an effect impossible for real-life architects. Ico showed that games can be aesthetically pleasing on a higher level than just "big guns, big boobs". Although it wasn't a huge commercial success, I think (or at least hope) that many future game designers will be influenced by it.
Sturgeon's law applies to gaming, just like it does to novels, film or any other type of entertainment. If instead of looking the amount of crap, you look at the number of gems, it's clear that gaming is alive and well.
To give another supermarket example, last week I tried switching from my usual 1$ megacorp-brand concentrated orange juice to 50 cent store-brand. But I had a bad experience with the store brand (I found it too bitter) and switched back to the megacorp brand. I got burned by trying an unknown, unproven noname brand; whereas megacorp brands offer extremely reliable and consistent products, which I like. Now let's say I change supermarkets, I will be reluctant to try the (different, and possibly better than the previous) store brand, and prefer to stick to the megacorp brand for a small price premium. Even if I haven't tried all the possibilities, is that really so irrational?
I would argue brand-based decision making is not a surrogate for rational decision making --- it is rather a surrogate for collecting additional evidence on the quality of products. And since this collection of evidence can require paying $$$ on unproven products, brand-based decisions are on the contrary often very rational (with the exception of "lifestyle branding" influence).
Another note: last year I travelled to a foreign country where most brands were different from my home country. It was a disconcerting experience: almost every product purchase was an unpredictable risk, and I got burned many times before learning the brands I preferred. Of course, this was part of the fun experience of travel --- but imagine if we had no brands and everyone had to suffer this in their home country! I learned to appreciate the value of branding after that.
(All that said, I repeat that I think "lifestyle branding" is idiotic, and certainly don't care whether happy people use my toothpaste on TV.)
That's easy, given a variant of C that supports Unicode for user-defined names. (A quick google search doesn't seem to turn one up, but it would be simple to modify an existing compiler to add that support.) The only latin-alphabet word would then be the "for".
Huh? But why would anyone want to do such a thing nowadays when you can just put up an .avi on your website? Even if your paranoid vision of modern America were correct, surely the Internet would be the distribution system for any such "revolutionary" propanganda, not mainstream TV.
And if you want evidence, just look at China (a country which really is oppressed --- and I wonder if you've ever lived in a country outside the free world, if you think America is so bad). I do recall one case of TV hijacking in China a few years ago, but for the most part the Internet seems the main channel for dissent.