2) You are well-meaning, but very ignorant about how China works at a basic level. "These poor people living behind a firewall unable to join the modern world. If only we could, you know, help them somehow..."
China has lived with 5000 years of government which ranges from benignly incompetent to just plain awful. As offensive as it is to Western sensibilities, Hu Jintao and the current crop of losers are above average by historical standards. As a result, being born Chinese means learning literally from when you are out of diapers how to work, hustle, and wheedle whatever it is you need from whatever system you are in. The success of the Chinese diaspora almost anywhere they go is based on an ingrained belief that if you don't want to starve or sleep in a box, you will hustle, hustle, hustle every waking minute of every day. Being a fat, dumb, happy ignorant American requires a good three or four generations of not skipping a meal. (and I say all this as an American who hasn't skipped any meals in three generations).
The people who want to get past the firewall know how to get past the firewall. It's information that is at the same level of secrecy as, say, being able to score pot in your neighborhood.
The many people who don't give a shit will still not give a shit.
I don't want to discourage you from doing good things, but there is probably some social injustice much closer to home that you could work on. Check it out some time.
What's wrong with SCIM? I'm using Ubuntu Feisty, and SCIM is installed with a few mouse clicks. My dad has been using SCIM for a year now to type Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese and Japanese, and it works great.
I have tried using SCIM on Fedora and it's a cluster fuque. Doesn't work correctly for Firefox, doesn't work correctly for Thunderbird. Kind of works correctly for GAIM and Skype, but not really. Input is terrible. No predictive text.
Either your dad is typing in a language other than Chinese which has proper IME functionality, or he's used to suffering when he types.
I'm not a fan of Microsoft at all but it's so completely painful and counter-intuitive to type Chinese on a Linux box it's not worth the bother if you're doing more than a few characters. Use Windows. It works.
North Korea is also part of the "Axis of Evil". However they have WMD's and some pretty nasty long range missiles. They may not be able to strike The US, but they could devastate South Korea, Japan and Taiwan. We keep begging North Korea to please, pretty please, come to the negotiating table. No talk of invasion there.
The fact that NK is known to have missiles, and suspected of having nuclear weapons is one issue.
The other is that it is a miserably poor and broken country that nobody wants. The South ran the numbers on how much it would cost to bring NK up to South Korean living standards and productivity (similar to what West Germany did with the East post-unification), and concluded that the costs were far above and beyond their ability to pay.
There is also the concern that once lil' Kim exits NK, millions of hungry people will stream across the borders into Russia, China, SK, and possibly Japan. (obviously, they need boats to get to Japan, but hungry people will do pretty extreme things).
So the non-invasion of NK continues, since the only thing that might be worse than losing a skirmish with a nuclear-armed country is winning a war against same said country.
Our friends in the Bush administration believed that with all the oil sitting under Iraqi soil, that reconstruction would pay for itself.
The idea is that the people who want to see it donate, and then when there's enough money to make the show, they use that money as the entire budget.
Well, I get it. I am fortunate(?) in that I've worked professionally in software and film. My point is that the money involved to play this game is staggering. In software, a smart programmer working in his basement alone can spend a few months making something cool. The tip jar can then be put out and the programmer can get a buck or two for his hard work. In a few cases, the tips in the jar are enough to hire staff, and get interest in raising enough money to turn a cool idea into a real, live shrink-wrapped product. If not, you still have an interesting piece of software. Shareware and open-source concepts work really well for software.
Movies and TV are only like software in the sense that they exist as 1s and 0s on media somewhere. The underlying dynamics of the business are very, very different.
You need money to begin. Not small money. Not "make an extra payment on the house" money. Not even "buy me a sweet new car" money. More like "buy me a used 747" money, or "Build me a clone of Bill Gates's house" money.
A professionally made art-house film with two actors in a cafe smoking cigarettes is two million dollars. If you want something interesting to happen, then it gets expensive. Really, really really expensive.
If you get only a tenth of that money, you don't get a tenth of a film. You don't get a film that's cool but could be made ten times cooler. You have nothing.
I don't want to discourage novel ideas in finance, especially ones that would help get new and creative stuff made, but there are a few reasons why such a market doesn't exist.
First, because production companies are generally private enterprises, not traded companies, you may run afoul of SEC rules on "qualified investors".
Second, and more importantly, investing in film is pretty much the ultimate in high-risk investment. Unlike software, you don't really get to do a proof of concept, sell a few copies, then spend real money productizing and rolling out to a larger base.
The proof of concept phase will (at best) produce a script and some storyboards. You can use that to convince investors you have a story, but zero end customers are going to plunk down 10 bucks to see two hours of storyboards voiced over by you and your friends.
At that point, you need money to make a movie. A lot of it. If you're in the live action world, sites cost money, cameras cost money, actors cost money, the army of support people cost money, etc.
If you're doing animation, you need a room of computers and 100+ people bending polygons. Nobody will do that for two years straight on promise of future payment. You can do a 5 minute short with evenings, weekends, and hacked software. A full-length movie? No way.
So a production company winds up with several million dollars in what is essentially venture capital. Investors pony up based on the idea that you and your crew are likely to turn many millions of dollars into two hours of watchable film, and not blow the whole thing on coke and whores. If you don't have film experience, you will not get that sort of money.
Likewise, as someone who is not a seasoned investor in film, just a punter who says "hey! this looks cool and I want to see more of it!", your odds of being able to evaluate a production team are zero. Go to Vegas and put your life savings on 36 red. Your odds are about as good.
But wait, there's more!
So, you've done your homework, put in your money, and a team of seasoned film pros is hard at work on the movie you invested your hard-earned bucks in. What's the payoff?
Statistically speaking, about 2.5%/year.
Yes, every year a few movies come out which just make bank. For every one of those, there are 100 others which don't. When you look at those nice numbers on Box Office Mojo, remember that your distribution chain will eat 50% of that gross (or more) off the top. So a movie which cost 35 million to make and grossed 60 million is "unrecouped".
In short, investing in films is a game for people who know what they're doing, who invest with a great likelihood of their money going sideways or losing, in exchange for the slim promise of a big payoff.
Do not try this yourself at home.
Yes, of course IT is a factor
on
IT and Divorce?
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· Score: 1
I work as the alpha IT geek in a female-heavy office. The women are always appreciative and thankful when I fix their systems and software problems.
Then trouble sets in.
Because of female nurturing tendencies, they feel guilty that I'm always helping them, and they're not doing anything for me. Everyone knows I'm commuting and don't get a lot of home cooking when I'm on site.
"Would you like to join my friends and I for dinner?"
"Yes, of course."
One thing leads to another. One day my wife does a surprise visit to my commuter pad in Vancouver and finds the entire bedroom filled with shaving cream, riding crops, toys with knobs and bumps in improbable places, an administrative assistant and a data analyst.
I'm not sure which made her more upset. My infidelity, or the fact that the place is a disaster and she KNOWS it won't get cleaned up unless she does it.
I am now divorced and lost a beautifully restored turn-of-the-century house in Seattle and the chance to see my two children growing up. I manage to barely function at my job while I go to my dark and dirty commuter pad and huff lighter fluid every night. Worse, I get daggers from the AA and the DA every time I walk the halls.
OK. That was pretty silly. The reality is more succinct.
Keeping a relationship together requires time with your spouse. It is very easy to get sucked into work, come home late, and let home stuff slide.
One part of that cock-and-bull story is true: I do commute. However little time you spent with your spouse, I spend less. I promise. The secret is to structure your time. When I'm home, that time is spent with family doing family-related stuff. Not that we don't go shopping or do projects or whatnot, but you keep everyone involved and make sure you're spending time together. If you go to the back room, blob out, and play WoW by yourself, you are doomed.
Another important thing is if you are really going nuts at work, set a time limit on how long that's going to happen. Say "All right. The product ships 1st December. 1st of January, we're going to close it down and spend two weeks in Italy," (You don't have to go to Italy if you don't want to. Go to Vegas. It's all good). This way, if your spouse is feeling alone or neglected, he/she can say "This too will pass. Five more months, and we'll have a normal life." Having an endpoint his helpful and gets you through points where you might otherwise despair.
Finally, if you find you'd rather be at work than with your spouse, there are some other issues going on. At that point, I'd advise either some really serious soul-searching or professional help.
Having worked with many people from the area of Taiwan/China in engineering, I have found that many of them don't understand the concept of craftsmanship and maintainability....I think Communism killed the concept of quality in these countries.
Pity Taiwan was never Communist, or your argument might have some merit.
Just a note that download to computer is old news in a lot of markets.
I have a friend who has been doing various VoD offerings for the last 7 years or so in Taiwan. The Chinese/Taiwanese distribution companies have an implicit understanding that when they release product, it will be pirated, and there is not much they can do about that. They go on to focus on boring stuff like maximizing revenue from their product.
When my friend pitches the idea of offering movies to Chinese stuidos using VoD over the Internet and/or over a building wide LAN, their main concern is with channel overlap. i.e. "If we let you do this, we'll get paid, and that's fine, but will this cut into our DVD sales, and do we need to assuage our video distribution channels that we're not taking money out of their pocket by going to VoD?"
He says American studios are obsessed with DRM, and that conversations with them are hopeless. Evidently the studio execs he's having these conversations with need to hit the local night market and see how well their piracy prevention programs are working out so far.
Depsite much publicity (and on/. too) about how low quality and unreliable many Wikipedia pages are, it never ceases to amaze me how many people link to it from these pages or are willing to trust it to prove their point. I guess most people here are university educated and really should know better. Personally, I would prefer to mod every post with a wikipedia link offtopic (unless obviously intended to be funny) - at least until such time as it is a trusted source.
All right, I'm going to call you on this twice. Once for engaging in the fallacious argumentum ad ignorantiam (argument from ignorance), and once for a straw man argument.
If two people who know nothing about a subject are going to use a Wikipedia page to settle a bar dispute, your argument may have some validity. Generally, in an argument, at least one person has some inkling of what they are talking about.
I'll give an example from another day. Someone was in a political thread stating that because the PRC had used the Viet Cong to mess with the US 30 years ago, therefore they are using Islamic terrorists to mess with us today. I suggested he read up a little bit on the recent history of Xinjiang province and the problems with separatists there before he made such rash statements. I pointed to the Wikipedia article on Xinjiang as a good starting point. This was met with "Well, anyone can write anything on Wikipedia, so fsck you!".
I am not going to provide someone with a bibliography of primary research material on modern Chinese history. There is also no point in me wasting an hour or two of my life writing a briefing paper on cultural and political tensions in China's Far West and why that supports my premise that government feeding of Islamic terrorists is a really bad idea. I've read the books, I speak Mandarin, I have travelled a fair bit of China in my wasted youth, and I browse the papers from Hongkong, Taipei and China to stay current. I've read Wikipedia's articles on modern China, and whoever is writing them either knows what they're talking about, or at least their read of history is not too far off from mine. You can stand here and argue that they made it all up, but I beg to differ. That's the great thing about the Internet though. Maybe I'm making all this up and get my China information from the Flying Saucer People. Here we spin back into an argumentum ad ignorantiam and it begins all over again.
First of all, my argument is not based on technology. I don't give a rip about technology. Technology can be controlled. If you don't believe that, try getting an accurate picture of what's going on in the world by watching that 24" idiot box in your living room.
My argument is that China has agreed to let people come in (for tourism, for business, for study, etc.), and has likewise agreed to let people leave (for all the same reasons). At that point, you have fundamentally lost control of your ability to manage information. It's not about technology. It's about humans.
Now, more importantly, my argument is that China is a nasty place where the government does some things that aren't right. Companies like MS and Google have a choice. They can say that China is simply too dirty, too nasty, and not do business there. Or they can make a morally ambiguous choice and say that the products they offer will be helpful, possibly move the rock forward a little bit, make a buck or two, and unfortunately, will require cooperating at some level with same said dirty, nasty government. Clean, simple, morally unambiguous choices are a lot easier. It's a shame there are so few of them around to choose.
I remember many years ago (when the bad old Soviet Union was in place) talking to a Russian who had, at no small risk to his safety, come over to the United States. I asked him "well, what's it like to live in a country where you can't speak your mind?" His response was "Well, as an American, you know intrinsically that if you walk through a big city at night with $100 bills hanging out of your pocket, you are setting yourself up for trouble. So you internalize not to do that, right? It's the same in the Soviet Union. You know the rules, and you follow them.". This is a reality of bad China that doesn't get talked about enough. You can do lots of stuff in China. You can make money, you can buy cars, you can live a fairly comfortable life, have one girlfriend or five if your constitution is up for it. The streets are fairly safe at night, and people are generally pretty nice, at least to a point. Most people don't have microphones in their bedrooms or secret police following them. Most people know what they would have to do to bring that sort of interference into their lives, and they don't do it. The people you see that are being thrown in jail are usually tweaking authority's nose early and often. It's good that they do that, as it helps move the country forward. But it's not like saying one bad word about Hu Jintao or the Party will have the secret police kicking your door down.
One big error people make about political systems is to believe that the leaders dispose and the rest of us squat and take whatever they throw out. Too many perfectly smart people even think that way about democracies at some level. In some completely wretched places like North Korea, that may be true. In most of the rest of the world, you have the choice to change your government. It may or may not be done at a ballot box, but it is a choice you have.
The message Chinese media has managed is that that there are more choices over our leadership in other countries, but in exchange for freedom, you have to deal with a lot of disorder. Street violence in the US is talked up a lot, as are religious riots in India and other democracies. Disorder in China does not get reported so much. Zhou Sixpack evaluates this information and internalizes something like this: "Making money is important. The Party lets you do business and make money. Democracy will not mean more money. It will probably mean more disorder, which can only mean less money. Making money is important. Don't worry about politics and get back to work". At a certain point, either the balance will change that stuffing your bank account isn't the most important thing in the world, or the Party will stumble on its so-far impressive record of funneling in more money. When that happens, the balance of government will change. Not all at once. The Great Wall will not come down, and Mao's picture won't be unhung from Tiananmen Square just yet. A little bit at a time.
I really don't feel like justifying the actions of the government of the People's Republic of China. I am not Chinese, and as such, my opinions are really not worth much. If somebody made me the first lao wai emperor of China, it would be a different place. For my first order, there should be lots of hawt dark-haired women appointed into the Imperial Civil Service.
I HAVE asked people's opinion about the Chinese embassy bombing, Tibet, and Taiwan. I used to live in Taiwan, so when I went to China, I always got an earful.
Everyone defines their reality by what information they take in. If your reality of Chinese politics is dictated by reading the Qiao Bao (the Chinese language CCP newspaper in the US), and watching the six o'clock news on CCTV 4, you will probably believe that the CCP is looking out for you, and is the only thing that stands in the way of China falling apart. If your reality is defined by reading Newsweek and watching NBC, you'll get this rather disjointed image of tall buildings, whizzy microchip factories, and terrible human rights abuses. All of this really happens. How much is relevant to the majority of the people living in China? Ehhh. Not so much.
Frankly, if your exposure is to people in college, everyone is a little dippy at that age. Life is very certain, and has a lot of black, white, and pointy edges. It doesn't matter if you're Dem, Republican, Communist, Kuomintang, etc. None of us are very nuanced at that age.
If you want to understand Chinese politics in fifty words or less, I'll decant it right here: China was cut up into pieces and run by foreigners more or less in the lifetime of the current leadership, and very much in the lifetime of the last generation of leaders. The Chinese leadership will do some things that appear to be very dumb and against their better interests in order to show that China cannot be pushed around by foreigners ever again.
Actually, there are a class of hanzi (characters) commonly used for transliterating foreign words.
It's kind of ad-hoc.
In the case of ka-fe, the kou (mouth) radical is "appended" to a common homonym, giving the inferrence of "sounds like". These characters are traditionally used to phoneticize, but they also have other uses.
The "yin" character is used for a number of other things, and is not at all phonetic.
Unlike Japanese, where there is a specific character set (katakana) for foreign words, it is left to the translator whether to phoneticize a word (i.e. coffee, people's surnames, etc.), or whether to "sinicize" the word (i.e "hard drive" becomes ying die -- literally "hard platter").
On one side, we have a reasonably interesting search engine company.
On the other, we have a control-minded, autocratic government.
The search engine company (that wants to operate in China) is told by the autocratic government "We don't want Bad Things sneaking in through the search engine. Keep Bad Things out."
The search engine company says "OK. We'll play along. Give us a list of things you don't want to see. We'll get rid of them".
"Taiwan Independence" returns 0 results.
"Free Tibet" is delinked.
Various combinations of Tiananmen, 6 and 4 mysteriously vanish.
Unfortunately, Bad Things do not fit into nice little boxes. People mis-spell words. While it is easy to come up with a list of sites that contain Bad Things you do not want to see, new sites come up all the time. Is my friend's picture gallery from Tiananmen just some postcards to the folks back come, or is there some subtle political commentary in there? Well, you'll have to read it and find out.
If I search on (former Taiwanese president) Lee Teng-Hui, does that contain Bad Things? Does it link to Bad Things? How dangerous is a stooped 85 year-old former college professor anyhow?
Is Ghandi axiomatically Bad? Martin Luther King? Doesteyevsky? The list goes on and on and on.
The censors can control the obvious things. Ultimately, they will lose.
The real problem is that China is, for all its faults, a modern country. People come in, people fly out. When I go to China, lots of people ask what's going on in the outside world. I am a little circumspect in what I say, but my memory banks don't magically get erased when I cross over from Hong Kong to Shenzhen. Over 90% of the Chinese students you see toiling away at your local research university will ultimately go home. That's just the way it goes. They too don't forget whatever subversive thoughts may have crept into their heads during five or six years of study abroad.
The deck is stacked, and the good guys will ultimately win.
I don't know how well (if at all) bayesian filtering and stuff would work for "kanji"
All right, this question has come up several times in the thread.
The Mandarin dialect has approximately 31 phonetic components. These can be combined as single phoneme, dual phoneme, and triple phoneme groups. Some sounds always stand alone, some combine into triples, some do not. Some phonemes only exist as initials. Some only as finals, etc. etc. The end result is a hundred-odd unique phonetic combinations.
Then there are tones. Five tones per phonetic combination. There are a few sounds that never appear in certain tone patterns, but this is the exception, and not the rule. So this brings us up into mid 3-digits of total possible sound groupings, including intonation.
Now, you've probably heard somewhere that there are thousands of characters. So if there are only a few hundred unique sounds, but thousands of characters, of course, you have homonyms everywhere.
(I was going to do a demo of how this works, but/. doesn't like me writing in hanzi. Go to http://www.zhongwen.com/ and go to the "pronunciation" section of the dictionary. You'll see it as clear as day that way).
Now, the problem is that there are many characters mapping to each sound. As such, while you can only mess with English words so much before they become unrecognizable (porn, pron, pr0n, prawn, etc.), you can make hundreds of permutations of any common phrase in Chinese simply by swapping out the correct character for a different one.
I am not aware of a Chinese version of l33t-speak. There's trashy, slang Chinese, sure. But either you have the right character, or you don't. Without a standard nomenclature for screwing up words, it becomes hard to try alternate 'spellings' to work around the filter.
The ICAO machine readable documents use a PKI-based challenge/response mechanism to coax the data out. It would not be impossible to get all the pieces required, but it would be quite a good trick.
2) Can anyone who really understand radio propagation explain the factors involved in activating a passive RFID chip from a distance? I understand the distance-squared rule. What I do not understand is what the ramifications are for field strength at the transmitter. You would seem to have to have a lot of power at the transmitter, and you'd have to keep it somewhat portable. Good luck with that.
I wonder how big China will have to get before they realize that it's hopeless to control information.
It's not hopeless at all.
The great firewall doesn't have to be perfect. It isn't, it never has been. It wasn't perfect before there was an Internet. I grew up in the United States. I lived in Taiwan. I traveled to China. Everyone wanted to know what was going on in Taiwan, and I told them. They wanted to know what the United States was like, and I told them that too.
If it keeps most of the information from most of the people most of the time, it's good enough.
Lots of information about a certain American Overseas Adventure never seems to reach network news in the United States. You can dig it up by listening to the BBC, the Guardian, etc. But most people don't. That is all that's needed.
Oh, please. You're not seriously suggesting that China has some well-reasoned philosophy regarding IP, implemented by wise leaders who have given long consideration to moral and ethical concerns?
Well-reasoned in the sense that some uber-bright guy in Beijing promulgated a policy? No. Of course not.
You have thousands of years of culture that is based on two core principles that don't work really well with modern IP:
1) Value is to be found in things that you can drop on your foot. I remember having a discussion with the boss of a trading company about a system that would keep all his faxes digitized so that people could retrieve them from a database. I told him it would run on a server with a muscular hard drive, and I'd charge him about $30,000. The value of me spending 6 months working on this didn't matter. The fact that two office ladies would no longer be running around full time fetching faxes from The Big Room Of Old Faxes didn't matter. What mattered was he knew a pretty good PC from the electronics market was $1000 and I was charging him $29,000 more than that.
This is a particularly egregious example, but you run into this over and over.
2) In Chinese culture, copying is inherently better than writing your own stuff. The recipient of a traditional education will spend a huge portion of it memorizing, reciting, and rewriting the Analects, the Tang Poems, etc. If you decide to take up painting, you should perfect the style of an established master. Once you can do Su Han-Chen as well as Su Han-Chen did, and demonstrate as much to all and asunder, then and only then should you be doing anything clever and unique.
So no. It's not a well thought-out policy. Worse, it's 5000 years of "received wisdom" with all the inertia that comes with it.
Cold is an issue, but the big problem is the layout of Western cities.
There is this big, open flat space. There are no natural impediments to growth outwards. Land is free, or nearly so. So rather than high and packed in, the cities just go on and on and on.
You COULD be car-free in San Francisco, or Vancouver without it messing up your schtick very much. (SF is dense, so not having a car is actually a blessing). Portland and Seattle get runner-up status (i.e. you can do it, but it will have some quality-of-life impact).
Anywhere else West of Chicago? Some people do it, but it is done usually as fallout from a DUI conviction or grinding poverty rather than a "lifestyle choice"
Oh yeah, on top of all that, you get mighty cold waiting for the bus in Edmonton.
Singaporeans speak a mixture of British English, Malay, Mandarin Chinese, Hokkien (sometimes called Min Nan), Teechow (sometimes called Min Bei), and a few other dialects including Cantonese, etc.
Depending on your family background and educational level, you will speak these with varying levels of fluency.
Singlish, or Singaporean English, is an aggrivating mix of all of the above that drives non-Singaporeans insane.
I remember talking with a Singapore colleauge once who seemed to be struggling with what I would consider standard English grammar and intonation. To try to make life easier, I switched to Mandarin. He responded with heavily Hokkien accented Mandarin. (For American English speakers, visualize Southern "trailer park" English and you get the idea).
Aggrivated I went back to English and reviewed everything he said twice to make sure it was clear.
I'll close with a short on-topic rant. I can't stand antivirus subscriptions. Having to track, budget for, and renew subscriptions is a huge PITA. It's not a service - it's software. I'm sort of bummed that so many people have accepted this subscription BS, enabling the vendors to keep pulling it.
Use any anti-virus software with year-old definitions. Tell me how that works out for you.
I get annoyed with the cost of maintaining desktops in my office, but AV software pays for itself the first time it keeps a virus from infecting our network. In terms of Software Stuff That Cheeses Me, it is the least of our problems.
But look, take any large group of people on any subject (especially one that isn't in their "core competency"), and tell me if they can hold a nuanced opinion on that subject.
If you are a Democrat, are you one for any reason other than a gut feeling that comes from your mum telling you that it's good to share, and that advice has served you pretty well since preschool?
If you are a Republican, is that based on anything other than a gut feeling that "Free Enterprise" (which manifests itself in a lot of forms), works better than "Socialism" (see above), and so we should keep doing that?
If you are a Libertarian... Oh, never mind. Large-L Libertarianism is indefensible as anything but a philosophy held by people who don't think very hard.
Unfortunately, we have laws against public nudity, and in many (not all) states of the Union, there are additional laws that make it illegal to be naked in a bar.
I agree with the previous poster on the points of the law, even if I don't think much of the law itself. Being naked in a bar is a big no-no here, as it is in Nebraska. Is the law idiotic? At some level, yeah, it is. Is there a process for changing idiotic laws? Yes. Call your legislator and tell them you like boobs with your beer.
If the owner complained (as a previous poster mentioned) this was likely a CYA move on his/her part. To NOT complain would be open the owner up for the suspension/revocation of the owner's liquor license, plus some truly nifty fines.
LSD was discovered in Switzerland, by Dr. Albert Hofmann, exactly 60 years ago. Not in California.
If I was smart, I wouldn't say anything about this, but I have a demonstrated track record of not being the brainiest person in the world when it comes to remarks.
UNIX was first developed in Bell Labs in New Jersey. LSD was first synthesised in Switzerland. I suspect Kernighan, Ritchie, and Thompson were not big acid heads, but who knows?
Slashdot Mirror
NO.
1) Spam is spam.
2) You are well-meaning, but very ignorant about how China works at a basic level. "These poor people living behind a firewall unable to join the modern world. If only we could, you know, help them somehow..."
China has lived with 5000 years of government which ranges from benignly incompetent to just plain awful. As offensive as it is to Western sensibilities, Hu Jintao and the current crop of losers are above average by historical standards. As a result, being born Chinese means learning literally from when you are out of diapers how to work, hustle, and wheedle whatever it is you need from whatever system you are in. The success of the Chinese diaspora almost anywhere they go is based on an ingrained belief that if you don't want to starve or sleep in a box, you will hustle, hustle, hustle every waking minute of every day. Being a fat, dumb, happy ignorant American requires a good three or four generations of not skipping a meal. (and I say all this as an American who hasn't skipped any meals in three generations).
The people who want to get past the firewall know how to get past the firewall. It's information that is at the same level of secrecy as, say, being able to score pot in your neighborhood.
The many people who don't give a shit will still not give a shit.
I don't want to discourage you from doing good things, but there is probably some social injustice much closer to home that you could work on. Check it out some time.
What's wrong with SCIM? I'm using Ubuntu Feisty, and SCIM is installed with a few mouse clicks. My dad has been using SCIM for a year now to type Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese and Japanese, and it works great.
I have tried using SCIM on Fedora and it's a cluster fuque. Doesn't work correctly for Firefox, doesn't work correctly for Thunderbird. Kind of works correctly for GAIM and Skype, but not really. Input is terrible. No predictive text.
Either your dad is typing in a language other than Chinese which has proper IME functionality, or he's used to suffering when he types.
I'm not a fan of Microsoft at all but it's so completely painful and counter-intuitive to type Chinese on a Linux box it's not worth the bother if you're doing more than a few characters. Use Windows. It works.
North Korea is also part of the "Axis of Evil". However they have WMD's and some pretty nasty long range missiles. They may not be able to strike The US, but they could devastate South Korea, Japan and Taiwan. We keep begging North Korea to please, pretty please, come to the negotiating table. No talk of invasion there.
The fact that NK is known to have missiles, and suspected of having nuclear weapons is one issue.
The other is that it is a miserably poor and broken country that nobody wants. The South ran the numbers on how much it would cost to bring NK up to South Korean living standards and productivity (similar to what West Germany did with the East post-unification), and concluded that the costs were far above and beyond their ability to pay.
There is also the concern that once lil' Kim exits NK, millions of hungry people will stream across the borders into Russia, China, SK, and possibly Japan. (obviously, they need boats to get to Japan, but hungry people will do pretty extreme things).
So the non-invasion of NK continues, since the only thing that might be worse than losing a skirmish with a nuclear-armed country is winning a war against same said country.
Our friends in the Bush administration believed that with all the oil sitting under Iraqi soil, that reconstruction would pay for itself.
Ah well. You win some, you lose some.
The idea is that the people who want to see it donate, and then when there's enough money to make the show, they use that money as the entire budget.
Well, I get it. I am fortunate(?) in that I've worked professionally in software and film. My point is that the money involved to play this game is staggering. In software, a smart programmer working in his basement alone can spend a few months making something cool. The tip jar can then be put out and the programmer can get a buck or two for his hard work. In a few cases, the tips in the jar are enough to hire staff, and get interest in raising enough money to turn a cool idea into a real, live shrink-wrapped product. If not, you still have an interesting piece of software. Shareware and open-source concepts work really well for software.
Movies and TV are only like software in the sense that they exist as 1s and 0s on media somewhere. The underlying dynamics of the business are very, very different.
You need money to begin. Not small money. Not "make an extra payment on the house" money. Not even "buy me a sweet new car" money. More like "buy me a used 747" money, or "Build me a clone of Bill Gates's house" money.
A professionally made art-house film with two actors in a cafe smoking cigarettes is two million dollars. If you want something interesting to happen, then it gets expensive. Really, really really expensive.
If you get only a tenth of that money, you don't get a tenth of a film. You don't get a film that's cool but could be made ten times cooler. You have nothing.
I don't want to discourage novel ideas in finance, especially ones that would help get new and creative stuff made, but there are a few reasons why such a market doesn't exist.
First, because production companies are generally private enterprises, not traded companies, you may run afoul of SEC rules on "qualified investors".
Second, and more importantly, investing in film is pretty much the ultimate in high-risk investment. Unlike software, you don't really get to do a proof of concept, sell a few copies, then spend real money productizing and rolling out to a larger base.
The proof of concept phase will (at best) produce a script and some storyboards. You can use that to convince investors you have a story, but zero end customers are going to plunk down 10 bucks to see two hours of storyboards voiced over by you and your friends.
At that point, you need money to make a movie. A lot of it. If you're in the live action world, sites cost money, cameras cost money, actors cost money, the army of support people cost money, etc.
If you're doing animation, you need a room of computers and 100+ people bending polygons. Nobody will do that for two years straight on promise of future payment. You can do a 5 minute short with evenings, weekends, and hacked software. A full-length movie? No way.
So a production company winds up with several million dollars in what is essentially venture capital. Investors pony up based on the idea that you and your crew are likely to turn many millions of dollars into two hours of watchable film, and not blow the whole thing on coke and whores. If you don't have film experience, you will not get that sort of money.
Likewise, as someone who is not a seasoned investor in film, just a punter who says "hey! this looks cool and I want to see more of it!", your odds of being able to evaluate a production team are zero. Go to Vegas and put your life savings on 36 red. Your odds are about as good.
But wait, there's more!
So, you've done your homework, put in your money, and a team of seasoned film pros is hard at work on the movie you invested your hard-earned bucks in. What's the payoff?
Statistically speaking, about 2.5%/year.
Yes, every year a few movies come out which just make bank. For every one of those, there are 100 others which don't. When you look at those nice numbers on Box Office Mojo, remember that your distribution chain will eat 50% of that gross (or more) off the top. So a movie which cost 35 million to make and grossed 60 million is "unrecouped".
In short, investing in films is a game for people who know what they're doing, who invest with a great likelihood of their money going sideways or losing, in exchange for the slim promise of a big payoff.
Do not try this yourself at home.
I work as the alpha IT geek in a female-heavy office. The women are always appreciative and thankful when I fix their systems and software problems.
Then trouble sets in.
Because of female nurturing tendencies, they feel guilty that I'm always helping them, and they're not doing anything for me. Everyone knows I'm commuting and don't get a lot of home cooking when I'm on site.
"Would you like to join my friends and I for dinner?"
"Yes, of course."
One thing leads to another. One day my wife does a surprise visit to my commuter pad in Vancouver and finds the entire bedroom filled with shaving cream, riding crops, toys with knobs and bumps in improbable places, an administrative assistant and a data analyst.
I'm not sure which made her more upset. My infidelity, or the fact that the place is a disaster and she KNOWS it won't get cleaned up unless she does it.
I am now divorced and lost a beautifully restored turn-of-the-century house in Seattle and the chance to see my two children growing up. I manage to barely function at my job while I go to my dark and dirty commuter pad and huff lighter fluid every night. Worse, I get daggers from the AA and the DA every time I walk the halls.
OK. That was pretty silly. The reality is more succinct.
Keeping a relationship together requires time with your spouse. It is very easy to get sucked into work, come home late, and let home stuff slide.
One part of that cock-and-bull story is true: I do commute. However little time you spent with your spouse, I spend less. I promise. The secret is to structure your time. When I'm home, that time is spent with family doing family-related stuff. Not that we don't go shopping or do projects or whatnot, but you keep everyone involved and make sure you're spending time together. If you go to the back room, blob out, and play WoW by yourself, you are doomed.
Another important thing is if you are really going nuts at work, set a time limit on how long that's going to happen. Say "All right. The product ships 1st December. 1st of January, we're going to close it down and spend two weeks in Italy," (You don't have to go to Italy if you don't want to. Go to Vegas. It's all good). This way, if your spouse is feeling alone or neglected, he/she can say "This too will pass. Five more months, and we'll have a normal life." Having an endpoint his helpful and gets you through points where you might otherwise despair.
Finally, if you find you'd rather be at work than with your spouse, there are some other issues going on. At that point, I'd advise either some really serious soul-searching or professional help.
Having worked with many people from the area of Taiwan/China in engineering, I have found that many of them don't understand the concept of craftsmanship and maintainability....I think Communism killed the concept of quality in these countries.
Pity Taiwan was never Communist, or your argument might have some merit.
Just a note that download to computer is old news in a lot of markets.
I have a friend who has been doing various VoD offerings for the last 7 years or so in Taiwan. The Chinese/Taiwanese distribution companies have an implicit understanding that when they release product, it will be pirated, and there is not much they can do about that. They go on to focus on boring stuff like maximizing revenue from their product.
When my friend pitches the idea of offering movies to Chinese stuidos using VoD over the Internet and/or over a building wide LAN, their main concern is with channel overlap. i.e. "If we let you do this, we'll get paid, and that's fine, but will this cut into our DVD sales, and do we need to assuage our video distribution channels that we're not taking money out of their pocket by going to VoD?"
He says American studios are obsessed with DRM, and that conversations with them are hopeless. Evidently the studio execs he's having these conversations with need to hit the local night market and see how well their piracy prevention programs are working out so far.
Depsite much publicity (and on /. too) about how low quality and unreliable many Wikipedia pages are, it never ceases to amaze me how many people link to it from these pages or are willing to trust it to prove their point. I guess most people here are university educated and really should know better. Personally, I would prefer to mod every post with a wikipedia link offtopic (unless obviously intended to be funny) - at least until such time as it is a trusted source.
All right, I'm going to call you on this twice. Once for engaging in the fallacious argumentum ad ignorantiam (argument from ignorance), and once for a straw man argument.
If two people who know nothing about a subject are going to use a Wikipedia page to settle a bar dispute, your argument may have some validity. Generally, in an argument, at least one person has some inkling of what they are talking about.
I'll give an example from another day. Someone was in a political thread stating that because the PRC had used the Viet Cong to mess with the US 30 years ago, therefore they are using Islamic terrorists to mess with us today. I suggested he read up a little bit on the recent history of Xinjiang province and the problems with separatists there before he made such rash statements. I pointed to the Wikipedia article on Xinjiang as a good starting point. This was met with "Well, anyone can write anything on Wikipedia, so fsck you!".
I am not going to provide someone with a bibliography of primary research material on modern Chinese history. There is also no point in me wasting an hour or two of my life writing a briefing paper on cultural and political tensions in China's Far West and why that supports my premise that government feeding of Islamic terrorists is a really bad idea. I've read the books, I speak Mandarin, I have travelled a fair bit of China in my wasted youth, and I browse the papers from Hongkong, Taipei and China to stay current. I've read Wikipedia's articles on modern China, and whoever is writing them either knows what they're talking about, or at least their read of history is not too far off from mine. You can stand here and argue that they made it all up, but I beg to differ. That's the great thing about the Internet though. Maybe I'm making all this up and get my China information from the Flying Saucer People. Here we spin back into an argumentum ad ignorantiam and it begins all over again.
First of all, my argument is not based on technology. I don't give a rip about technology. Technology can be controlled. If you don't believe that, try getting an accurate picture of what's going on in the world by watching that 24" idiot box in your living room.
My argument is that China has agreed to let people come in (for tourism, for business, for study, etc.), and has likewise agreed to let people leave (for all the same reasons). At that point, you have fundamentally lost control of your ability to manage information. It's not about technology. It's about humans.
Now, more importantly, my argument is that China is a nasty place where the government does some things that aren't right. Companies like MS and Google have a choice. They can say that China is simply too dirty, too nasty, and not do business there. Or they can make a morally ambiguous choice and say that the products they offer will be helpful, possibly move the rock forward a little bit, make a buck or two, and unfortunately, will require cooperating at some level with same said dirty, nasty government. Clean, simple, morally unambiguous choices are a lot easier. It's a shame there are so few of them around to choose.
I remember many years ago (when the bad old Soviet Union was in place) talking to a Russian who had, at no small risk to his safety, come over to the United States. I asked him "well, what's it like to live in a country where you can't speak your mind?" His response was "Well, as an American, you know intrinsically that if you walk through a big city at night with $100 bills hanging out of your pocket, you are setting yourself up for trouble. So you internalize not to do that, right? It's the same in the Soviet Union. You know the rules, and you follow them.". This is a reality of bad China that doesn't get talked about enough. You can do lots of stuff in China. You can make money, you can buy cars, you can live a fairly comfortable life, have one girlfriend or five if your constitution is up for it. The streets are fairly safe at night, and people are generally pretty nice, at least to a point. Most people don't have microphones in their bedrooms or secret police following them. Most people know what they would have to do to bring that sort of interference into their lives, and they don't do it. The people you see that are being thrown in jail are usually tweaking authority's nose early and often. It's good that they do that, as it helps move the country forward. But it's not like saying one bad word about Hu Jintao or the Party will have the secret police kicking your door down.
One big error people make about political systems is to believe that the leaders dispose and the rest of us squat and take whatever they throw out. Too many perfectly smart people even think that way about democracies at some level. In some completely wretched places like North Korea, that may be true. In most of the rest of the world, you have the choice to change your government. It may or may not be done at a ballot box, but it is a choice you have.
The message Chinese media has managed is that that there are more choices over our leadership in other countries, but in exchange for freedom, you have to deal with a lot of disorder. Street violence in the US is talked up a lot, as are religious riots in India and other democracies. Disorder in China does not get reported so much. Zhou Sixpack evaluates this information and internalizes something like this: "Making money is important. The Party lets you do business and make money. Democracy will not mean more money. It will probably mean more disorder, which can only mean less money. Making money is important. Don't worry about politics and get back to work". At a certain point, either the balance will change that stuffing your bank account isn't the most important thing in the world, or the Party will stumble on its so-far impressive record of funneling in more money. When that happens, the balance of government will change. Not all at once. The Great Wall will not come down, and Mao's picture won't be unhung from Tiananmen Square just yet. A little bit at a time.
I really don't feel like justifying the actions of the government of the People's Republic of China. I am not Chinese, and as such, my opinions are really not worth much. If somebody made me the first lao wai emperor of China, it would be a different place. For my first order, there should be lots of hawt dark-haired women appointed into the Imperial Civil Service.
I HAVE asked people's opinion about the Chinese embassy bombing, Tibet, and Taiwan. I used to live in Taiwan, so when I went to China, I always got an earful.
Everyone defines their reality by what information they take in. If your reality of Chinese politics is dictated by reading the Qiao Bao (the Chinese language CCP newspaper in the US), and watching the six o'clock news on CCTV 4, you will probably believe that the CCP is looking out for you, and is the only thing that stands in the way of China falling apart. If your reality is defined by reading Newsweek and watching NBC, you'll get this rather disjointed image of tall buildings, whizzy microchip factories, and terrible human rights abuses. All of this really happens. How much is relevant to the majority of the people living in China? Ehhh. Not so much.
Frankly, if your exposure is to people in college, everyone is a little dippy at that age. Life is very certain, and has a lot of black, white, and pointy edges. It doesn't matter if you're Dem, Republican, Communist, Kuomintang, etc. None of us are very nuanced at that age.
If you want to understand Chinese politics in fifty words or less, I'll decant it right here: China was cut up into pieces and run by foreigners more or less in the lifetime of the current leadership, and very much in the lifetime of the last generation of leaders. The Chinese leadership will do some things that appear to be very dumb and against their better interests in order to show that China cannot be pushed around by foreigners ever again.
Actually, there are a class of hanzi (characters) commonly used for transliterating foreign words.
It's kind of ad-hoc.
In the case of ka-fe, the kou (mouth) radical is "appended" to a common homonym, giving the inferrence of "sounds like". These characters are traditionally used to phoneticize, but they also have other uses.
The "yin" character is used for a number of other things, and is not at all phonetic.
Unlike Japanese, where there is a specific character set (katakana) for foreign words, it is left to the translator whether to phoneticize a word (i.e. coffee, people's surnames, etc.), or whether to "sinicize" the word (i.e "hard drive" becomes ying die -- literally "hard platter").
This seems as good a place to bring it up as any.
Let's do a thought experiment.
On one side, we have a reasonably interesting search engine company.
On the other, we have a control-minded, autocratic government.
The search engine company (that wants to operate in China) is told by the autocratic government "We don't want Bad Things sneaking in through the search engine. Keep Bad Things out."
The search engine company says "OK. We'll play along. Give us a list of things you don't want to see. We'll get rid of them".
"Taiwan Independence" returns 0 results.
"Free Tibet" is delinked.
Various combinations of Tiananmen, 6 and 4 mysteriously vanish.
Unfortunately, Bad Things do not fit into nice little boxes. People mis-spell words. While it is easy to come up with a list of sites that contain Bad Things you do not want to see, new sites come up all the time. Is my friend's picture gallery from Tiananmen just some postcards to the folks back come, or is there some subtle political commentary in there? Well, you'll have to read it and find out.
If I search on (former Taiwanese president) Lee Teng-Hui, does that contain Bad Things? Does it link to Bad Things? How dangerous is a stooped 85 year-old former college professor anyhow?
Is Ghandi axiomatically Bad? Martin Luther King? Doesteyevsky? The list goes on and on and on.
The censors can control the obvious things. Ultimately, they will lose.
The real problem is that China is, for all its faults, a modern country. People come in, people fly out. When I go to China, lots of people ask what's going on in the outside world. I am a little circumspect in what I say, but my memory banks don't magically get erased when I cross over from Hong Kong to Shenzhen. Over 90% of the Chinese students you see toiling away at your local research university will ultimately go home. That's just the way it goes. They too don't forget whatever subversive thoughts may have crept into their heads during five or six years of study abroad.
The deck is stacked, and the good guys will ultimately win.
I don't know how well (if at all) bayesian filtering and stuff would work for "kanji"
/. doesn't like me writing in hanzi. Go to http://www.zhongwen.com/ and go to the "pronunciation" section of the dictionary. You'll see it as clear as day that way).
All right, this question has come up several times in the thread.
The Mandarin dialect has approximately 31 phonetic components. These can be combined as single phoneme, dual phoneme, and triple phoneme groups. Some sounds always stand alone, some combine into triples, some do not. Some phonemes only exist as initials. Some only as finals, etc. etc. The end result is a hundred-odd unique phonetic combinations.
Then there are tones. Five tones per phonetic combination. There are a few sounds that never appear in certain tone patterns, but this is the exception, and not the rule. So this brings us up into mid 3-digits of total possible sound groupings, including intonation.
Now, you've probably heard somewhere that there are thousands of characters. So if there are only a few hundred unique sounds, but thousands of characters, of course, you have homonyms everywhere.
(I was going to do a demo of how this works, but
Now, the problem is that there are many characters mapping to each sound. As such, while you can only mess with English words so much before they become unrecognizable (porn, pron, pr0n, prawn, etc.), you can make hundreds of permutations of any common phrase in Chinese simply by swapping out the correct character for a different one.
I am not aware of a Chinese version of l33t-speak. There's trashy, slang Chinese, sure. But either you have the right character, or you don't. Without a standard nomenclature for screwing up words, it becomes hard to try alternate 'spellings' to work around the filter.
1) How much does the US e-Passport draw from the framework drawn up for machine readable travel documents from the ICAO?
The ICAO machine readable documents use a PKI-based challenge/response mechanism to coax the data out. It would not be impossible to get all the pieces required, but it would be quite a good trick.
2) Can anyone who really understand radio propagation explain the factors involved in activating a passive RFID chip from a distance? I understand the distance-squared rule. What I do not understand is what the ramifications are for field strength at the transmitter. You would seem to have to have a lot of power at the transmitter, and you'd have to keep it somewhat portable. Good luck with that.
Eeeeek!!!!
/pathname -name filename.txt
Grep is good for many many things, but find does that so nicely by itself.
e.g.
find
No pushd, no popd, no grep, and no nasty, resource-hogging pipes.
I wonder how big China will have to get before they realize that it's hopeless to control information.
It's not hopeless at all.
The great firewall doesn't have to be perfect. It isn't, it never has been. It wasn't perfect before there was an Internet. I grew up in the United States. I lived in Taiwan. I traveled to China. Everyone wanted to know what was going on in Taiwan, and I told them. They wanted to know what the United States was like, and I told them that too.
If it keeps most of the information from most of the people most of the time, it's good enough.
Lots of information about a certain American Overseas Adventure never seems to reach network news in the United States. You can dig it up by listening to the BBC, the Guardian, etc. But most people don't. That is all that's needed.
Seems someone didn't use the preview function.
</oops!>
The magic codes are & lt; and & gt;
Remove the spaces and all will be well.
Oh, please. You're not seriously suggesting that China has some well-reasoned philosophy regarding IP, implemented by wise leaders who have given long consideration to moral and ethical concerns?
Well-reasoned in the sense that some uber-bright guy in Beijing promulgated a policy? No. Of course not.
You have thousands of years of culture that is based on two core principles that don't work really well with modern IP:
1) Value is to be found in things that you can drop on your foot. I remember having a discussion with the boss of a trading company about a system that would keep all his faxes digitized so that people could retrieve them from a database. I told him it would run on a server with a muscular hard drive, and I'd charge him about $30,000. The value of me spending 6 months working on this didn't matter. The fact that two office ladies would no longer be running around full time fetching faxes from The Big Room Of Old Faxes didn't matter. What mattered was he knew a pretty good PC from the electronics market was $1000 and I was charging him $29,000 more than that.
This is a particularly egregious example, but you run into this over and over.
2) In Chinese culture, copying is inherently better than writing your own stuff. The recipient of a traditional education will spend a huge portion of it memorizing, reciting, and rewriting the Analects, the Tang Poems, etc. If you decide to take up painting, you should perfect the style of an established master. Once you can do Su Han-Chen as well as Su Han-Chen did, and demonstrate as much to all and asunder, then and only then should you be doing anything clever and unique.
So no. It's not a well thought-out policy. Worse, it's 5000 years of "received wisdom" with all the inertia that comes with it.
Huh?
Cold is an issue, but the big problem is the layout of Western cities.
There is this big, open flat space. There are no natural impediments to growth outwards. Land is free, or nearly so. So rather than high and packed in, the cities just go on and on and on.
You COULD be car-free in San Francisco, or Vancouver without it messing up your schtick very much. (SF is dense, so not having a car is actually a blessing). Portland and Seattle get runner-up status (i.e. you can do it, but it will have some quality-of-life impact).
Anywhere else West of Chicago? Some people do it, but it is done usually as fallout from a DUI conviction or grinding poverty rather than a "lifestyle choice"
Oh yeah, on top of all that, you get mighty cold waiting for the bus in Edmonton.
Wikipedia is your friend:
Summary for those too lazy to read:
Singaporeans speak a mixture of British English, Malay, Mandarin Chinese, Hokkien (sometimes called Min Nan), Teechow (sometimes called Min Bei), and a few other dialects including Cantonese, etc.
Depending on your family background and educational level, you will speak these with varying levels of fluency.
Singlish, or Singaporean English, is an aggrivating mix of all of the above that drives non-Singaporeans insane.
I remember talking with a Singapore colleauge once who seemed to be struggling with what I would consider standard English grammar and intonation. To try to make life easier, I switched to Mandarin. He responded with heavily Hokkien accented Mandarin. (For American English speakers, visualize Southern "trailer park" English and you get the idea).
Aggrivated I went back to English and reviewed everything he said twice to make sure it was clear.
I'll close with a short on-topic rant. I can't stand antivirus subscriptions. Having to track, budget for, and renew subscriptions is a huge PITA. It's not a service - it's software. I'm sort of bummed that so many people have accepted this subscription BS, enabling the vendors to keep pulling it.
Use any anti-virus software with year-old definitions. Tell me how that works out for you.
I get annoyed with the cost of maintaining desktops in my office, but AV software pays for itself the first time it keeps a virus from infecting our network. In terms of Software Stuff That Cheeses Me, it is the least of our problems.
Your post made me smile.
But look, take any large group of people on any subject (especially one that isn't in their "core competency"), and tell me if they can hold a nuanced opinion on that subject.
If you are a Democrat, are you one for any reason other than a gut feeling that comes from your mum telling you that it's good to share, and that advice has served you pretty well since preschool?
If you are a Republican, is that based on anything other than a gut feeling that "Free Enterprise" (which manifests itself in a lot of forms), works better than "Socialism" (see above), and so we should keep doing that?
If you are a Libertarian... Oh, never mind. Large-L Libertarianism is indefensible as anything but a philosophy held by people who don't think very hard.
Unfortunately, we have laws against public nudity, and in many (not all) states of the Union, there are additional laws that make it illegal to be naked in a bar.
I agree with the previous poster on the points of the law, even if I don't think much of the law itself. Being naked in a bar is a big no-no here, as it is in Nebraska. Is the law idiotic? At some level, yeah, it is. Is there a process for changing idiotic laws? Yes. Call your legislator and tell them you like boobs with your beer.
If the owner complained (as a previous poster mentioned) this was likely a CYA move on his/her part. To NOT complain would be open the owner up for the suspension/revocation of the owner's liquor license, plus some truly nifty fines.
LSD was discovered in Switzerland, by Dr. Albert Hofmann, exactly 60 years ago. Not in California.
If I was smart, I wouldn't say anything about this, but I have a demonstrated track record of not being the brainiest person in the world when it comes to remarks.
UNIX was first developed in Bell Labs in New Jersey. LSD was first synthesised in Switzerland. I suspect Kernighan, Ritchie, and Thompson were not big acid heads, but who knows?
I knew all of that when that silly remark of mine started getting circulated on Usenet. It was an off-the-cuff remark mentioned to a few friends. One of them found it witty and wise, and he posted a lot on Usenet to boot. The rest is history.
If you find it funny, laugh. If not, make your own silly quote.
To end another pointless debate (which was missed by the authors of the book), I actually like UNIX!
Jeremy S. Anderson