The reality is that people who view piracy as some sort of moral duty and right like you do are in the minority, that is why most of the public quite happily go along with more stringent copyright laws being drafted by the politicians they elect.
Come visit us in Eastern Europe sometime. Furthermore, even in more affluent countries, it seems to me that an enormous proportion of the youth are getting their music from YouTube, not from buying CDs or purchasing legal downloads. You can find nearly any album from any era on there. Yes, Google might send a little bit of advertising revenue to whoever complains, but most of those songs were uploaded by a third party, not the copyright holders or artists.
In our implementation, the CDM will have no access to the user's hard drive or the network
As with all DRM schemes, it's only a matter of time before this is broken. However, to save the decrypted content to the hard drive, one has to, well, have access to the hard drive. Does Firefox's architecture actually get in the way of users eventually pirating the content? Might have to switch browsers if that's the case.
I thought the loudness wars ended over a decade ago? So if the remaster is from the last 5 years, you'd THINK they'd be remastering to reclaim the full dynamic range...
Nope, labels are aware that their remasters are going to be listened to in cars and through tiny earbuds while walking down the street. People who are consuming music that way don't want dynamic range, because the noise around the listener would render much of the music inaudible. So, the levels get pushed up so that classic rock music can compete with the noise of traffic or the subway.
Another problem is when the remastering is directed by a bloke who was a great performer in the band decades ago, but is now a middle-aged man who is becoming hard of hearing. Such people push the levels up much more than a younger engineer. This was a big problem with the Cocteau Twins remasters; Robin Guthrie should have given it to a younger man instead of doing it himself.
In practice, properly dithered 16/44 is enough [xiph.org] to cover the entire painless range of human hearing.
The key word there is "in practice", and music lovers can dream of a future practice. While humans can only directly hear tones below 20kHz, they can perceive the beats between two tones above that range, and this has sometimes been used to musical effect. Per Nørgård's Symphony No.5, for example, at one point has a percussionist blow through two dog whistles, and the beats between the two are audible to a concert audience.
However, allowing this to be audible to home listeners would require not only an expanded digital audio standard, but speaker design would have to change as well, because speakers are typically not designed to reproduce frequencies above 20 kHz.
I don't believe that vinyl is a superior medium compared to CD or MP3/FLAC, but in many cases there's a huge difference between the masters produced for vinyl and for digital media.
Yeah, I hear you. For R.E.M.'s Accelerate and Rush's Clockwork Angels albums a few years back, I bought the CDs to support the artists, but I put them on only to discover that the CDs were compressed to hell. The vinyl, however, had been mastered with the preference of more audiophile-y people in mind. So, I just went to a torrent community and downloaded a high-quality vinyl rip to FLAC, and now I play exclusively this.
It's sad that in order to get real dynamic range and avoid the loudness-wars sludge, one has to resort to this workaround. Even if these vinyl rip uploaders are using the highest-quality rig, some fidelity is inevitably lost in the process.
When I learn of an older recording I might like, I tend to torrent a FLAC of it right away, and then go off in search of a physical copy because I like having the physical artifact. I would love to buy more vinyl, because there is so much artistic cover art out there that looks great at full size. However, labels are doing such limited pressings that by the time I discover a recording, the vinyl has all sold out.
For example, I've been trying to purchase Belle and Sebastian's discography, and I was able to get some albums in vinyl because they had been reissued by another label, but the vinyl of their 2005 The Life Pursuit is only available used (so I cannot even support the artist by buying it) and for almost a hundred bucks. Fuck that. So, I have to settle for the CD.
There's definitely a niche market out there hungry for physical artifacts, whether young hipsters or an older nostalgic crowd, who would be willing to buy vinyl, but labels aren't letting us buy what we want.
His dad was much the same, so if you want to claim he's committing genocide show me some facts.
Perhaps you are confusing me with another poster. I never made the claim that Assad is committing genocide.
Facts speak to me, not opinion based largely on fallacy and false information.
And yet you were the one who claimed that Syria has "plenty of Jews". Do you really want to claim that a dwindling population of well under a hundred people qualifies as "plenty", or are you man enough to admit that you were wrong?
With regard to your quotation from the Wikipedia article I linked to, that passage in no way contradicts the evidence elsewhere in that article that Syria's Jewish community had nearly vanished by the time the revolution broke out.
I think you need to learn to read better, and understand that if you make claims, people are going to check them and hold you to them.
There were plenty of Christians and Jews and yes several varieties of Muslims.
Geez, and if you think that Syria had "plenty of Jews", now I'm sure you've never been there. There are only a handful of Jews left in Syria, fewer than one hundred people, and post-1948 Jews faced enormous restrictions. (Wikipedia even has an article on the subject for your edification). For me personally, one of the most poignant aspects of my own spell in Syria was having knowledgeable locals point out former Jewish sites, which were seized by the state and turned to other purposes without the least commemoration of their former function.
The people revolting have actually been "revolting" since at least the 1980s attempting to over throw the Government of Syria primarily to convert the country to Sharia Law under 1 Islamic Religion.
If you really think that, I can only imagine you've never been to Syria. The revolt against Assad in 2011 originally had the participation of more than Islamists. The Aleppo intelligentsia, many of whom were freethinkers and envisioned a Syria as free as European states, played a major role in that city's uprising. If Assad had not responded with such violence, which drove Aleppo's educated classes to flee to Turkey or the West, then Islamists would not have had such a vacuum to step into.
And for what it's worth, Syria does privilege Islam and put constraints on other religions. It is illegal for Christians to seek to convert Muslims, but Muslims are allowed to engage in dawah among the Christian population. Christian places of worship may not display a cross on top of their buildings. Yes, I am aware that the Islamist opposition is infinitely worse, but Syria does not quite limit the influence of Islam vis-a-vis other religions like Lebanon does.
They're just emulating their heroes. They love the way the Republicans rule here and have implemented a theocracy where you are often murdered for opposing religion.
The troll who first posted this is probably beyond hope, but it is worth pointing out that the SEA is on the side of Assad, not the Islamist rebels. Sure, Assad privileges his own Alawite sect and it's not easy to publicly be an atheist in Syria (though when I was there before the war, lots of young people would discreetly identify as such), but if you want to talk about a Syrian group wanting to impose "theocracy" right now, you wouldn't point to Assad.
So you really do believe 64MB if flash is all they could technically fit?
No, I said nothing about the Navy's or its contractor's capabilities. I said it was strange that the designers of this device have have chosen to put so little memory in the device (or so few books assuming the storage is in fact larger).
I first really encountered Giger's art when I was collecting the Taschen "Basic Art" series of short full-colour introductions to various artists. There's a Giger one. Frankly, I think him fairly mediocre as an artist for traditional gallery exhibition. Limited range and repetitive concerns. However, he definitely made an incredible contribution to film (and LP cover art)
I do wonder how long his popularity will last after his death. He started making an institution of himself early, and there is a Giger museum in Switzerland. However, Vasarely for example did the same four decades ago and interest in him has collapsed greatly.
If you read the press coverage of this, you'll find that the device includes a number of recent publications from e.g. Harper Collins, so not public domain. Clearly the government simply negotiated a deal with publishers. Furthermore, even if they limited themselves to public domain titles, they could put a whole lot more than 300 titles on the device: Project Gutenberg currently stands at 45538 titles.
And the closest we can come to even calling those votes/referendums illegal, they violate the will of a group of thugs who overthrew the legitimate, democratically elected Ukraine government a few months ago.
Ukraine's "democratically elected" government was hardly overthrown: the composition of the Rada remains the same as it was before the trouble started. Svoboda, for example, was already in parliament under Yanukovych. All that changed was that Yanukovych fled, and then most of the the members of his Party of Regions in parliament said that they no longer wanted to further his platform. An acting president was voted in, in a parliamentary vote that met the quorum, and it is extremely obvious that he doesn't particularly want to be there.
Whether or not Crimea really wants to join Russia or not, we have imposed sanctions against private individuals because unrelated third parties held protest-votes that make the UN look bad.
Strange that you think that, since most commentary on the sanctions is that they have been overly cautious, applied only to a handful of officials who were patently involved in the separatist campaign, and they leave out many people close to Putin who Western intelligence sources hint are covertly involved.
Pooty hasn't actually "done" anything yet.
Putin has in fact already admitted that he covertly moved thousands extra troops into Crimea to ensure control well before the referendum: the "green men" were not simply Russian forces already stationed in the peninsula under treaty. Sure, he could have done much, much more in the region, but he's hardly impassive.
It's a complex situation and it's hard to tell which side is subjectively "right", but could I ask you to read a larger amount of news and commentary on this in both Russian and English?
Read the article. The book isn't just for manuals, it also has plenty of reading for pleasure material. If one wants to offer a good representation of both the English canon and contemporary publications, one very quickly exceeds 300 titles.
However, the other reply to my comment which states that some of the manuals may be unusually large, may explain the small amount of titles on this device.
Assuming that all the books are in the MOBI or EPUB formats, which are quite compact, one can only assume that the designers really skimped on memory. My Kindle has hundreds more books with plenty of room left. And as this is a technology made to a military contract, one can assume that this device inferior to off-the-shelf consumer items costs much more than them.
Speaking as one working in this field, you would do better to get some training in the field so that you can understand how to filter the wheat from the chaff in these studies, many of which are taken up in the mass media and made out to seem more than they really are. As I said, the strong form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (and you definitely are pointing to the strong form in your presumptions) is UNIVERSALLY dismissed by linguistics after decades and decades of proof against it. The weak form of this hypothesis, which is usually the one involved in the studies that hit the mass media and to which you seem to have been exposed, is just that, weak. I know not a single reputable linguist who would dare claim it influences the direction of societies.
To someone with training in this field, you sound like e.g. a Creationist who comes across a discussion among biologists dealing with a need to revise a small area of evolutionary theory, and then assumes that the whole thing is bunk. Damn, son, if you have been reading Slashdot you ought to be tired of people like that by now.
those that have a language which can describe a working model of reality are best suited to success.
What you repeatedly fail to understand is that language is malleable. Whenever a population needs to describe a certain concept, they will ensure that the language they speak has a way of expressing it. You mention the lack of a number "zero": in all European languages, the lexeme for "zero" is of a fairly recent (late medieval) date. Were Europeans unthinking simpletons before that? Of course not. A glimpse at Euclid is enough to show that.
As a former ham, I thought that ham radio sucked as a form of language exchange. Even the ragchewers just found ways to have longer conversations about nothing but the gear they use. Besides, the FCC regs require one to steer clear of politics or profanity. All in all, when using a foreign language and DXing with people in other countries, you can get exposure to and practice only a very limited slice of that language.
This background is entirely relevant to your claim above. You say that languages affect the direction of a society, the building of a civilization. Such changes don't happen overnight, they take generations. The Chinese language has changed in measurable ways over those generations. So which particular version of the Chinese language has the magical key to success?
Furthermore, as human languages consist of a limited number of possible features, anything found in the Chinese language since its earliest attestations can be easily located in dozens of other languages around the world, whose speakers may or may not have achieved whatever you think the Chinese have. Maybe language isn't the magical key to success you think it is?
Anyway, cool how you ignored the rest of my post, including my request that you actually inform yourself of this science before thinking that you've got a challenge to the consensus. After I last posted I looked around a bit at whatever layman-friendly introduction have appeared since I entered the field years ago, and I would have been happy to share them if only asked.
That's precisely the problem. You risk making people load content from a site other than the one they have chosen to read, and whoever controls YouTube can determine which IPs are currently visiting Slashdot.
When the Chinese became more unified, they did so through language unification and even simplification.
Oh, and then is just godawful, you obvious have no concept of typology or cyclical change. For one, the Chinese language has not become "more simple", inasmuch as languages don't ever become "more complex" or "more simple" in the way that the general public thinks.
However, in the case of Chinese, most of the America general public would assume that Chinese has grown more complex. Due to contact with Mongolic and Tungusic languages, Mandarin Chinese has come to have more inflection, which is usually the marker of "complexity" for laymen daunted by French or Latin. Early stages of Mandarin, or some of the other regional lects even today, had less inflection (expressing the same things syntactically), which again the general public would see as "more simple".
The Chinese are not a counter-example. When the Chinese became more unified, they did so through language unification and even simplification.
Chinese language unification involved the spread of a lingua franca, but the country continues to have regional languages. Bilingualism is the norm for most of the world. People are entirely capable of speaking their regional language and another language. So your hopes of language death are simply unnecessary.
It's far from pseudoscience when there have been many studies on the connection between language and intelligence which lead to this general understanding.
As a linguist, I am reminded day in and day out that e.g. the strong form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that sometimes the uninformed public come to believe in, is utterly unfounded. Studies have pointed to some possibility of the weak form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis being true, but this involves things like colour perception, and among the peoples speaking a language with perception X, they have built societies of different types in spite of their similar languages.
Languages that lack a zero, seriously? I don't think you'll find any language which has developed a written form for use on the internet (which is what the OP was asking about) that hasn't simply borrowed the term from another language or coined its own lexeme.
And once again, in case I wasn't clear, there is no 3000 year old Chinese language. Mandarin, in its current form doesn't go back that far. The oldest standard goes back what? Just over 600 years or so? So if you think you are right, please try again.
There is indeed a 3000 year-old Chinese language. Chinese is historically (roughly Archaic Chinese/Old Chinese - Middle Chinese and the modern languages) divided into several stages, each of which flowed into one another with unbroken continuity, and which has split into regional lects. Mandarin is simply one descendent of the language of the first bone inscriptions.
You seem to have no training in this topic, whether formal or informal but rigorous. Can I kindly ask you to get a clue? It's not like there aren't a boatload of recent popular introductions to linguistics.
Whatevs, bro. Maybe someday you'll pick up a popular introduction to linguistics and stop spouting pseudoscience.
The Chinese know this? Looking at the Chinese language over the three millennia of its attestation, it has undergone continual change (and even passed through three different typological categorizations) in spite of the continuity of "Chinese civilization". If anything, they are a counterexample to your thinking. Peoples succeed or fail regardless of what languages they speak.
Slashdot Mirror
Come visit us in Eastern Europe sometime. Furthermore, even in more affluent countries, it seems to me that an enormous proportion of the youth are getting their music from YouTube, not from buying CDs or purchasing legal downloads. You can find nearly any album from any era on there. Yes, Google might send a little bit of advertising revenue to whoever complains, but most of those songs were uploaded by a third party, not the copyright holders or artists.
As with all DRM schemes, it's only a matter of time before this is broken. However, to save the decrypted content to the hard drive, one has to, well, have access to the hard drive. Does Firefox's architecture actually get in the way of users eventually pirating the content? Might have to switch browsers if that's the case.
Nope, labels are aware that their remasters are going to be listened to in cars and through tiny earbuds while walking down the street. People who are consuming music that way don't want dynamic range, because the noise around the listener would render much of the music inaudible. So, the levels get pushed up so that classic rock music can compete with the noise of traffic or the subway.
Another problem is when the remastering is directed by a bloke who was a great performer in the band decades ago, but is now a middle-aged man who is becoming hard of hearing. Such people push the levels up much more than a younger engineer. This was a big problem with the Cocteau Twins remasters; Robin Guthrie should have given it to a younger man instead of doing it himself.
The key word there is "in practice", and music lovers can dream of a future practice. While humans can only directly hear tones below 20kHz, they can perceive the beats between two tones above that range, and this has sometimes been used to musical effect. Per Nørgård's Symphony No.5, for example, at one point has a percussionist blow through two dog whistles, and the beats between the two are audible to a concert audience.
However, allowing this to be audible to home listeners would require not only an expanded digital audio standard, but speaker design would have to change as well, because speakers are typically not designed to reproduce frequencies above 20 kHz.
Yeah, I hear you. For R.E.M.'s Accelerate and Rush's Clockwork Angels albums a few years back, I bought the CDs to support the artists, but I put them on only to discover that the CDs were compressed to hell. The vinyl, however, had been mastered with the preference of more audiophile-y people in mind. So, I just went to a torrent community and downloaded a high-quality vinyl rip to FLAC, and now I play exclusively this.
It's sad that in order to get real dynamic range and avoid the loudness-wars sludge, one has to resort to this workaround. Even if these vinyl rip uploaders are using the highest-quality rig, some fidelity is inevitably lost in the process.
When I learn of an older recording I might like, I tend to torrent a FLAC of it right away, and then go off in search of a physical copy because I like having the physical artifact. I would love to buy more vinyl, because there is so much artistic cover art out there that looks great at full size. However, labels are doing such limited pressings that by the time I discover a recording, the vinyl has all sold out.
For example, I've been trying to purchase Belle and Sebastian's discography, and I was able to get some albums in vinyl because they had been reissued by another label, but the vinyl of their 2005 The Life Pursuit is only available used (so I cannot even support the artist by buying it) and for almost a hundred bucks. Fuck that. So, I have to settle for the CD.
There's definitely a niche market out there hungry for physical artifacts, whether young hipsters or an older nostalgic crowd, who would be willing to buy vinyl, but labels aren't letting us buy what we want.
Perhaps you are confusing me with another poster. I never made the claim that Assad is committing genocide.
And yet you were the one who claimed that Syria has "plenty of Jews". Do you really want to claim that a dwindling population of well under a hundred people qualifies as "plenty", or are you man enough to admit that you were wrong?
With regard to your quotation from the Wikipedia article I linked to, that passage in no way contradicts the evidence elsewhere in that article that Syria's Jewish community had nearly vanished by the time the revolution broke out.
I think you need to learn to read better, and understand that if you make claims, people are going to check them and hold you to them.
Geez, and if you think that Syria had "plenty of Jews", now I'm sure you've never been there. There are only a handful of Jews left in Syria, fewer than one hundred people, and post-1948 Jews faced enormous restrictions. (Wikipedia even has an article on the subject for your edification). For me personally, one of the most poignant aspects of my own spell in Syria was having knowledgeable locals point out former Jewish sites, which were seized by the state and turned to other purposes without the least commemoration of their former function.
If you really think that, I can only imagine you've never been to Syria. The revolt against Assad in 2011 originally had the participation of more than Islamists. The Aleppo intelligentsia, many of whom were freethinkers and envisioned a Syria as free as European states, played a major role in that city's uprising. If Assad had not responded with such violence, which drove Aleppo's educated classes to flee to Turkey or the West, then Islamists would not have had such a vacuum to step into.
And for what it's worth, Syria does privilege Islam and put constraints on other religions. It is illegal for Christians to seek to convert Muslims, but Muslims are allowed to engage in dawah among the Christian population. Christian places of worship may not display a cross on top of their buildings. Yes, I am aware that the Islamist opposition is infinitely worse, but Syria does not quite limit the influence of Islam vis-a-vis other religions like Lebanon does.
The troll who first posted this is probably beyond hope, but it is worth pointing out that the SEA is on the side of Assad, not the Islamist rebels. Sure, Assad privileges his own Alawite sect and it's not easy to publicly be an atheist in Syria (though when I was there before the war, lots of young people would discreetly identify as such), but if you want to talk about a Syrian group wanting to impose "theocracy" right now, you wouldn't point to Assad.
No, I said nothing about the Navy's or its contractor's capabilities. I said it was strange that the designers of this device have have chosen to put so little memory in the device (or so few books assuming the storage is in fact larger).
I first really encountered Giger's art when I was collecting the Taschen "Basic Art" series of short full-colour introductions to various artists. There's a Giger one. Frankly, I think him fairly mediocre as an artist for traditional gallery exhibition. Limited range and repetitive concerns. However, he definitely made an incredible contribution to film (and LP cover art)
I do wonder how long his popularity will last after his death. He started making an institution of himself early, and there is a Giger museum in Switzerland. However, Vasarely for example did the same four decades ago and interest in him has collapsed greatly.
If you read the press coverage of this, you'll find that the device includes a number of recent publications from e.g. Harper Collins, so not public domain. Clearly the government simply negotiated a deal with publishers. Furthermore, even if they limited themselves to public domain titles, they could put a whole lot more than 300 titles on the device: Project Gutenberg currently stands at 45538 titles.
Ukraine's "democratically elected" government was hardly overthrown: the composition of the Rada remains the same as it was before the trouble started. Svoboda, for example, was already in parliament under Yanukovych. All that changed was that Yanukovych fled, and then most of the the members of his Party of Regions in parliament said that they no longer wanted to further his platform. An acting president was voted in, in a parliamentary vote that met the quorum, and it is extremely obvious that he doesn't particularly want to be there.
Strange that you think that, since most commentary on the sanctions is that they have been overly cautious, applied only to a handful of officials who were patently involved in the separatist campaign, and they leave out many people close to Putin who Western intelligence sources hint are covertly involved.
Putin has in fact already admitted that he covertly moved thousands extra troops into Crimea to ensure control well before the referendum: the "green men" were not simply Russian forces already stationed in the peninsula under treaty. Sure, he could have done much, much more in the region, but he's hardly impassive.
It's a complex situation and it's hard to tell which side is subjectively "right", but could I ask you to read a larger amount of news and commentary on this in both Russian and English?
Sorry, that should have read "The ebook reader isn't just for manuals".
Read the article. The book isn't just for manuals, it also has plenty of reading for pleasure material. If one wants to offer a good representation of both the English canon and contemporary publications, one very quickly exceeds 300 titles.
However, the other reply to my comment which states that some of the manuals may be unusually large, may explain the small amount of titles on this device.
Assuming that all the books are in the MOBI or EPUB formats, which are quite compact, one can only assume that the designers really skimped on memory. My Kindle has hundreds more books with plenty of room left. And as this is a technology made to a military contract, one can assume that this device inferior to off-the-shelf consumer items costs much more than them.
Speaking as one working in this field, you would do better to get some training in the field so that you can understand how to filter the wheat from the chaff in these studies, many of which are taken up in the mass media and made out to seem more than they really are. As I said, the strong form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (and you definitely are pointing to the strong form in your presumptions) is UNIVERSALLY dismissed by linguistics after decades and decades of proof against it. The weak form of this hypothesis, which is usually the one involved in the studies that hit the mass media and to which you seem to have been exposed, is just that, weak. I know not a single reputable linguist who would dare claim it influences the direction of societies.
To someone with training in this field, you sound like e.g. a Creationist who comes across a discussion among biologists dealing with a need to revise a small area of evolutionary theory, and then assumes that the whole thing is bunk. Damn, son, if you have been reading Slashdot you ought to be tired of people like that by now.
What you repeatedly fail to understand is that language is malleable. Whenever a population needs to describe a certain concept, they will ensure that the language they speak has a way of expressing it. You mention the lack of a number "zero": in all European languages, the lexeme for "zero" is of a fairly recent (late medieval) date. Were Europeans unthinking simpletons before that? Of course not. A glimpse at Euclid is enough to show that.
As a former ham, I thought that ham radio sucked as a form of language exchange. Even the ragchewers just found ways to have longer conversations about nothing but the gear they use. Besides, the FCC regs require one to steer clear of politics or profanity. All in all, when using a foreign language and DXing with people in other countries, you can get exposure to and practice only a very limited slice of that language.
This background is entirely relevant to your claim above. You say that languages affect the direction of a society, the building of a civilization. Such changes don't happen overnight, they take generations. The Chinese language has changed in measurable ways over those generations. So which particular version of the Chinese language has the magical key to success?
Furthermore, as human languages consist of a limited number of possible features, anything found in the Chinese language since its earliest attestations can be easily located in dozens of other languages around the world, whose speakers may or may not have achieved whatever you think the Chinese have. Maybe language isn't the magical key to success you think it is?
Anyway, cool how you ignored the rest of my post, including my request that you actually inform yourself of this science before thinking that you've got a challenge to the consensus. After I last posted I looked around a bit at whatever layman-friendly introduction have appeared since I entered the field years ago, and I would have been happy to share them if only asked.
I use Duck Duck Go.
That's precisely the problem. You risk making people load content from a site other than the one they have chosen to read, and whoever controls YouTube can determine which IPs are currently visiting Slashdot.
Oh, and then is just godawful, you obvious have no concept of typology or cyclical change. For one, the Chinese language has not become "more simple", inasmuch as languages don't ever become "more complex" or "more simple" in the way that the general public thinks.
However, in the case of Chinese, most of the America general public would assume that Chinese has grown more complex. Due to contact with Mongolic and Tungusic languages, Mandarin Chinese has come to have more inflection, which is usually the marker of "complexity" for laymen daunted by French or Latin. Early stages of Mandarin, or some of the other regional lects even today, had less inflection (expressing the same things syntactically), which again the general public would see as "more simple".
Chinese language unification involved the spread of a lingua franca, but the country continues to have regional languages. Bilingualism is the norm for most of the world. People are entirely capable of speaking their regional language and another language. So your hopes of language death are simply unnecessary.
As a linguist, I am reminded day in and day out that e.g. the strong form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that sometimes the uninformed public come to believe in, is utterly unfounded. Studies have pointed to some possibility of the weak form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis being true, but this involves things like colour perception, and among the peoples speaking a language with perception X, they have built societies of different types in spite of their similar languages.
Languages that lack a zero, seriously? I don't think you'll find any language which has developed a written form for use on the internet (which is what the OP was asking about) that hasn't simply borrowed the term from another language or coined its own lexeme.
There is indeed a 3000 year-old Chinese language. Chinese is historically (roughly Archaic Chinese/Old Chinese - Middle Chinese and the modern languages) divided into several stages, each of which flowed into one another with unbroken continuity, and which has split into regional lects. Mandarin is simply one descendent of the language of the first bone inscriptions.
You seem to have no training in this topic, whether formal or informal but rigorous. Can I kindly ask you to get a clue? It's not like there aren't a boatload of recent popular introductions to linguistics.
Whatevs, bro. Maybe someday you'll pick up a popular introduction to linguistics and stop spouting pseudoscience.
The Chinese know this? Looking at the Chinese language over the three millennia of its attestation, it has undergone continual change (and even passed through three different typological categorizations) in spite of the continuity of "Chinese civilization". If anything, they are a counterexample to your thinking. Peoples succeed or fail regardless of what languages they speak.