You greatly misunderstand how language works in general and in China specifically. One has to distinguish the Chinese writing system from the Han languages of China. The writing system itself does not present a major challenge, because all speakers of Han languages master it: they can read in it, and write in it. The Chinese writing system is more or less the same across all Han languages -- the Cantonese will simply read the characters out loud with the Cantonese pronounciation, Wu speakers will read the characters out loud in the Wu pronounciation, etc.
What hinders fluency in Mandarin is not the writing system, for the writing system is the very same one speakers of other Han languages use for their own language. It is a lack of successful teaching methods and practice. If Han got such teaching and practice, they would not find Mandarin very difficult at all, since in terms of morphosyntax and lexicon (once one can subconsciously trace the Mandarin lexemes back to the Middle Chinese heritage common to all) Mandarin is very close to their own language.
An average literate Chinese can read something written from around 2,000 years ago because the language has changed so little.
While they may be able to recognize the characters and assign a phonetic value to them, this is not the same as "reading something". The grammar of Classical Chinese is different from contemporary Chinese, many of the particles used in Old Chinese have fallen out of us, or they have come to mean something different in contemporary Chinese. Only those with special training can make sense of Classical Chinese texts.
Maybe if the language wasn't so difficult it would see more widespread adoption. I honestly believe that the Chinese should switch to some sort of romanization like pinyin,
The people mentioned in the article learn how to read characters, they simply ascribe the characters the phonetic value of their own dialect/language as opposed to the phonetic value that Mandarin peoples ascribe to them. Your argument against the Chinese writing system is in the wrong place here.
Just because the NSA toughened some standards in the 1970s doesn't mean they are good guys now. After all, many familiar with the inner workings of the agency have said that the mood there changed greatly after 9/11 to "privacy be damned", and the Snowden documents leaked the other day admit right now that the NSA has inserted backdoors into cryptosystems used by the general public.
i dont know of a single internet company who DOESNT cap your internet speed
Is this a US thing? With my ISP here in Romania, I've never experienced caps even going into the hundreds of gigabytes a month (I torrent a lot of Blurays).
I read Gateway last week, as it happens. The protagonist's rolling in the hay with the female inhabitants of the station (often with inhibited judgement thanks to his fondness for grass), as well as his working out his gay sex fantasies with the computer psychologist, take up a large portion of the novel. I was very disappointed to find that the actual science-fiction, the big revelation of his tragic visit to the black hole which was long anticipated, was passed over in just 2-3 pages. I really see little difference between Pohl and Heinlein, or between Pohl and The Ringworld Throne-era Niven.
I've recommended the Heechee Saga to probably dozens of younger SciFi readers.
You recommend to young people a series that starts with a novel dwelling on the protagonist's consequence-free sex with multiple partners? It's not 1977 anymore. AIDS happened, and the creepy old man sex fantasies of Pohl and other SF authors working in the 1970s seem very irresponsible in retrospective.
Nobody at NASA ever got sent to Siberia because their project failed, you know.
Nor did they in the Soviet Union. The Russian space expansion took place after the death of Stalin, when people were no longer sent to gulags for professional failures. (Repression certainly continued in the USSR, but it was of a different stripe.)
They should start working towards building better space stations that have artificial gravity, radiation shielding and all the stuff that makes it possible to actually live in space, rather than die faster than normal.
If the Singularity is near, expending so much effort to make space stations "livable" is unnecessary. Machine bodies won't have the same demands for gravity, water and food.
If the Singularity is not near, then it's still not worthwhile, as a resource-collapsed Earth would not be able to continue expansion into space. A collapsed Earth would still be more livable than any other planet.
Jolla won't be an open OS. The UI layer they've made for Sailfish is closed source.
I used to be enthusiastic about Jolla, but it seems that Ubuntu Phone has stolen much of its thunder, and among the idealistic users who want everything to be open the Neo-900 project is gaining buzz.
If you think it's worse now and need a flashback reminder as to how half the planet lived back then go and live in fucking North Korea.
North Korea resembles life in the USSR only under Stalin. However, the Cold War continued for decades after his death, and as stagnant and oppressive as Soviet politics were under later leaders, the USSR was for most of its history not so completely totalitarian like North Korea. After Stalin, dissidents were merely exiled or hospitalized, not shot dead or sent to labour camps with no food like North Korea.
I don't attend classes. I study when I can make time for it, on my own, in my house. Then, come the finals, all I do is pop up on campus and take the exams. So, although my university is heavily subsidized, I actually don't cost my school anything, and I essentially pay the tuition for the priviledge of taking that school's exams.
Even if you don't attend lectures, the university is still paying a lecturer to come in and speak to those students who do attend lecturers, so your sitting it out doesn't save the university anything.
Some days I dream about what the Internet might have been like had Canter and Siegel been definitively smacked down back in '94, setting an inviolable precedent that the 'Net was not a platform welcoming/any/ advertising.
The global economy would be smaller and internet access would be less available worldwide. Once the model of advertising-supported services arose, people in the third world could have nice things like e-mail and entertainment in spite of their countries' lack of means or an infrastructure where individuals could pay for whatever they used themselves.
It's easy for someone in the West to say, "They should just bill you $20 a month for your usage of service x, and get rid of advertising", but try to be considerate of the rest of the world.
Uncontrolled members of the public should be questioning everything their government does and voting for the party most in line with their interests. And forming that party if it doesn't already exist.
Only an uninformed daydreamer would propose voting for a third-party as a solution. It is a widespread consensus in political science that the United States' particular voting setup leads inevitably to a two-party system. Changing this would require a constitutional amendment, and this is simply not going to happen.
Even when growing (but still single-digit) support for a third party pushes one of the two established parties to change their platform, this is a process that usually takes several electional cycles and affects only a small aspect of overall policy.
The anonymous coward above must be facetious, as few have the money for an attorney at every step. However, a system where every citizen is entirely aware of the legality of every single one of his actions, is simply an ideal that has never existed even in successful democracies. As far back as Athenian democracy (I highly recommend reading Lysias), where laws were debated by every free male of the polis, there were numerous cases where citizens broke those laws unknowingly, or the laws were worded in such a way that an action believed legal nonetheless drew state prosection and it had to be fought out in court.
If one's government really were criminalizing commonplace behaviour, chances are Joe Public would become aware of it by seeing someone else in his society prosecuted, and then would not be ignorant of the law. Only a tiny amount of people would thus be taken completely by surprise.
There is public debate and input: election cycles. It is unreasonable to expect public debate of every law when understanding such laws in detail (as opposed to misunderstanding it or falling for a caricature the opposition spreads in the popular press) requires considerable legal training. While there will always be some tiny amount of votes who read the text of a law and write in to their representatives to voice their opinion, the general public is simply incapable of following the detailed legalese involved.
It's no surprise that social people will find social ways to advance their career and make their work easier, but that doesn't mean there aren't other ways to do so that don't require that face-to-face interaction.
Airplanes don't have to be carbon polluters. You could run them on biofuels
Even if you run them on biofuels, once you factor in the amount of carbon produced in the manufacture and transport of those biofuels, airplanes are still considerably greater carbon polluters than trains which draw on an electric grid.
So many billions would probably pay for an extra/improved airport or two. Airplanes don't require any infrastructure in between, and you could link the airports to the city center with regular rail at a fraction of the cost.
Airplanes produce an enormous amount of CO2 compared to trains. One is not really saving money with that externality involved. In the long run, it would be prudent for the state to support rail travel and discourage air travel.
What is the obsession with flinging your sack of water down a track at 300 miles per hour. In a world of diminishing cheap energy, why travel fast?
Indeed, in a world of increasing teleconferencing and telecommuting, you'd think the attraction of high-speed travel would be less pressing with each year that goes by.
I'm not saying that the human race is going to end up as a race of hermits plugged into virtual reality 24/7 and never leaving their homes like some science-fiction envisions, but at some point the amount of business travellers that these schemes depend on is going to fall low enough that it won't seem worthwhile.
Why crowdfunding? Shuttleworth should just cancel his next trip to mars to raise the funds.
The point of this exercise was to show hardware makers that there is a crowd out there willing to pay lots of money for a non-Android/non-iOS/non-Windows OS, so they will get onboard and start offering Ubuntu Phone.
The Internet didn't stay a government secret, and universities were involved pretty much from the get-go. That's a big difference from companies cashing in by providing three-letter agencies with technologies are going to stay classified for a good long time.
Sorry, but "Romanian" as a label of national origin (which is how it is used most of the time outside of Romania) encompasses both ethnic Romanians and ethnic Roma/Saxons/Hungarians/Banat Bulgarians/Dobrogean Tatars and whoever else was born in the country. Trying to claim that Roma are not Romanians when the word is used in that sense shows a great misunderstanding of how English works.
Slashdot Mirror
You greatly misunderstand how language works in general and in China specifically. One has to distinguish the Chinese writing system from the Han languages of China. The writing system itself does not present a major challenge, because all speakers of Han languages master it: they can read in it, and write in it. The Chinese writing system is more or less the same across all Han languages -- the Cantonese will simply read the characters out loud with the Cantonese pronounciation, Wu speakers will read the characters out loud in the Wu pronounciation, etc.
What hinders fluency in Mandarin is not the writing system, for the writing system is the very same one speakers of other Han languages use for their own language. It is a lack of successful teaching methods and practice. If Han got such teaching and practice, they would not find Mandarin very difficult at all, since in terms of morphosyntax and lexicon (once one can subconsciously trace the Mandarin lexemes back to the Middle Chinese heritage common to all) Mandarin is very close to their own language.
While they may be able to recognize the characters and assign a phonetic value to them, this is not the same as "reading something". The grammar of Classical Chinese is different from contemporary Chinese, many of the particles used in Old Chinese have fallen out of us, or they have come to mean something different in contemporary Chinese. Only those with special training can make sense of Classical Chinese texts.
The people mentioned in the article learn how to read characters, they simply ascribe the characters the phonetic value of their own dialect/language as opposed to the phonetic value that Mandarin peoples ascribe to them. Your argument against the Chinese writing system is in the wrong place here.
Just because the NSA toughened some standards in the 1970s doesn't mean they are good guys now. After all, many familiar with the inner workings of the agency have said that the mood there changed greatly after 9/11 to "privacy be damned", and the Snowden documents leaked the other day admit right now that the NSA has inserted backdoors into cryptosystems used by the general public.
Is this a US thing? With my ISP here in Romania, I've never experienced caps even going into the hundreds of gigabytes a month (I torrent a lot of Blurays).
I read Gateway last week, as it happens. The protagonist's rolling in the hay with the female inhabitants of the station (often with inhibited judgement thanks to his fondness for grass), as well as his working out his gay sex fantasies with the computer psychologist, take up a large portion of the novel. I was very disappointed to find that the actual science-fiction, the big revelation of his tragic visit to the black hole which was long anticipated, was passed over in just 2-3 pages. I really see little difference between Pohl and Heinlein, or between Pohl and The Ringworld Throne-era Niven.
You recommend to young people a series that starts with a novel dwelling on the protagonist's consequence-free sex with multiple partners? It's not 1977 anymore. AIDS happened, and the creepy old man sex fantasies of Pohl and other SF authors working in the 1970s seem very irresponsible in retrospective.
Nor did they in the Soviet Union. The Russian space expansion took place after the death of Stalin, when people were no longer sent to gulags for professional failures. (Repression certainly continued in the USSR, but it was of a different stripe.)
If the Singularity is near, expending so much effort to make space stations "livable" is unnecessary. Machine bodies won't have the same demands for gravity, water and food.
If the Singularity is not near, then it's still not worthwhile, as a resource-collapsed Earth would not be able to continue expansion into space. A collapsed Earth would still be more livable than any other planet.
Jolla won't be an open OS. The UI layer they've made for Sailfish is closed source.
I used to be enthusiastic about Jolla, but it seems that Ubuntu Phone has stolen much of its thunder, and among the idealistic users who want everything to be open the Neo-900 project is gaining buzz.
North Korea resembles life in the USSR only under Stalin. However, the Cold War continued for decades after his death, and as stagnant and oppressive as Soviet politics were under later leaders, the USSR was for most of its history not so completely totalitarian like North Korea. After Stalin, dissidents were merely exiled or hospitalized, not shot dead or sent to labour camps with no food like North Korea.
Even if you don't attend lectures, the university is still paying a lecturer to come in and speak to those students who do attend lecturers, so your sitting it out doesn't save the university anything.
Snowden has already worked with Der Spiegel.
The global economy would be smaller and internet access would be less available worldwide. Once the model of advertising-supported services arose, people in the third world could have nice things like e-mail and entertainment in spite of their countries' lack of means or an infrastructure where individuals could pay for whatever they used themselves.
It's easy for someone in the West to say, "They should just bill you $20 a month for your usage of service x, and get rid of advertising", but try to be considerate of the rest of the world.
Only an uninformed daydreamer would propose voting for a third-party as a solution. It is a widespread consensus in political science that the United States' particular voting setup leads inevitably to a two-party system. Changing this would require a constitutional amendment, and this is simply not going to happen.
Even when growing (but still single-digit) support for a third party pushes one of the two established parties to change their platform, this is a process that usually takes several electional cycles and affects only a small aspect of overall policy.
The anonymous coward above must be facetious, as few have the money for an attorney at every step. However, a system where every citizen is entirely aware of the legality of every single one of his actions, is simply an ideal that has never existed even in successful democracies. As far back as Athenian democracy (I highly recommend reading Lysias), where laws were debated by every free male of the polis, there were numerous cases where citizens broke those laws unknowingly, or the laws were worded in such a way that an action believed legal nonetheless drew state prosection and it had to be fought out in court.
If one's government really were criminalizing commonplace behaviour, chances are Joe Public would become aware of it by seeing someone else in his society prosecuted, and then would not be ignorant of the law. Only a tiny amount of people would thus be taken completely by surprise.
There is public debate and input: election cycles. It is unreasonable to expect public debate of every law when understanding such laws in detail (as opposed to misunderstanding it or falling for a caricature the opposition spreads in the popular press) requires considerable legal training. While there will always be some tiny amount of votes who read the text of a law and write in to their representatives to voice their opinion, the general public is simply incapable of following the detailed legalese involved.
This discussion suggests this is a spurious quote, like most attempts to lend prestige to a banal remark by attaching this writer's name to it.
It's no surprise that social people will find social ways to advance their career and make their work easier, but that doesn't mean there aren't other ways to do so that don't require that face-to-face interaction.
Even if you run them on biofuels, once you factor in the amount of carbon produced in the manufacture and transport of those biofuels, airplanes are still considerably greater carbon polluters than trains which draw on an electric grid.
Airplanes produce an enormous amount of CO2 compared to trains. One is not really saving money with that externality involved. In the long run, it would be prudent for the state to support rail travel and discourage air travel.
Indeed, in a world of increasing teleconferencing and telecommuting, you'd think the attraction of high-speed travel would be less pressing with each year that goes by.
I'm not saying that the human race is going to end up as a race of hermits plugged into virtual reality 24/7 and never leaving their homes like some science-fiction envisions, but at some point the amount of business travellers that these schemes depend on is going to fall low enough that it won't seem worthwhile.
The point of this exercise was to show hardware makers that there is a crowd out there willing to pay lots of money for a non-Android/non-iOS/non-Windows OS, so they will get onboard and start offering Ubuntu Phone.
The Internet didn't stay a government secret, and universities were involved pretty much from the get-go. That's a big difference from companies cashing in by providing three-letter agencies with technologies are going to stay classified for a good long time.
Sorry, but "Romanian" as a label of national origin (which is how it is used most of the time outside of Romania) encompasses both ethnic Romanians and ethnic Roma/Saxons/Hungarians/Banat Bulgarians/Dobrogean Tatars and whoever else was born in the country. Trying to claim that Roma are not Romanians when the word is used in that sense shows a great misunderstanding of how English works.