Purchasing the regionless DVD player is not illegal in the US, but manufacturing it is a breach of contract. If you are worried about it being a breach of the DMCA on the consumer's part, I would assume no -- you are not breaking encryption when you use a regionless DVD player.
However, IANAL (yet!), so take my musings with a grain of salt.
a lot of them do perfect collections for a lot off the individual cost
Hehe. Yup, someone's been immersing themselves too much in Japanese wording -- in English we say "complete series", not "perfect collection";) Japanese-made English (wasei eigo) is fun and all, but it most likely confuses those who aren't familiar with the terminology.
That aside, your post was very nice. I also posit that another reason for the remaining high prices despite the change in the anime economy in the west is that previously, the shows were available only as a dubbed or a subbed copy on VHS. However, on a typical DVD, you find both dub and sub and raw, so the price has to be expensive. Otherwise, among the obvious things, Japanese fans will just import our DVDs, as Japanese DVDs are prohibitively expensive. I wanted to buy the original Love Hina DVDs when I first got to Japan, but they were over 30 dollars each at a second-hand store.
Just spend some time on WinMX -- many Japanese do not have broadband. Instead, they pack up their mp3 collection, go to an internet cafe and, because they are paying per hour of usage, quickly PM people who have the files they want and offer a trade so they don't have to wait in queues.
This explains why many users who don't speak Japanese get random PMs on WinMX with random ASCII characters that make no sense (WinMX is a non-unicode program, so on XP it uses the codepage attached to your region and, in America, this ISO-8859-1 or something like that).
who want to patent their controller software for their cars
What is Volkswagen going to do? Stroll into Mercedes' manufacturing plant and say, "You have been manufacturing cars at such a rapid pace, that you must be using the same method as us!"
This controller software is one thing that has no need to be patented, unless the company is also selling the software, and I doubt they are doing that.
Even better idea: why don't we just start referring to the shills in Washington who really work for the money as "child rapists". I'm going to start doing that on my blog from now on!
I think that an old school DOS program called the Encheferizer used to Encheferize "sex" to "bork bork bork", so I can assure you that is something no/.er ever has to learn.
It was either "bork bork bork" or "bouncy bouncy bouncy"...
most seasoned English speakers understand...and therein lies the rub. First you quantified with "most", implying that there are some seasoned English speakers who wouldn't understand. That's strike one against the errors. What about younger English speakers (those who are not "seasoned")? They will fail as well to understand. That's strike two. What about foreigners who speak English as a second language. That is a huge population of people that you have just cast aside as not relevant.
Earlier in this discussion there were posts from a Mexican who could not understand his English-speaking friend because of the "should of" error. Simply stated, communication failed there. Moreover, Slashdot is a community where a large percentage do not speak English natively.
Additionally, spell-checkers have made things worse, because now no one knows how to spell things correctly by themselves.
You raise an interesting point. In Japan, there is a problem with young people and their knowledge of kanji (Chinese characters). Due to the influx of cellphones and computers, many young people are no longer learning concretely how to write the characters. They can read the characters fine, but as they have no need to handwrite them, they quickly forget the writings for the characters they learned in school. This is the equivalent of me seeing "deja vu" with the proper French diacritical marks -- I can read it, but for the life of me can't remember where the accent grave goes and such.
It has frequently occurred that I will be talking with a Japanese student, and I'll write some kanji I know, and they'll respond with something along the lines of, "Holy crap! I can't even write that kanji."
The German "Ich-Laut" ("Ich-sound") is a voiceless palatal fricative.
*sigh* That's what I get for trying to wax linguistic about a language I don't speak. I had no idea that there was a difference between an ich-laut and ach-laut, and also assumed they were voiced (again, because I don't speak it).
I am wondering what fellow Slashdotters who have studied German think about the transition from English to German -- I'm thinking about studying German when I get back to the States.
Very true about T9, and newer phones are even featuring "type-ahead" these days so 435 will get you options of help, hell, hello... Heck, it even seems to be frequency-weighted on my phone, so the most likely candidate is the first one to pop up.
I know what you mean -- my Japanese cellphone has some common Japanese phrases for a lookahead-type function. By "phrase" I mean sentence endings and other small things, not actual sayings and sentences. For those keeping score, I am referring to things like "n desu ga" and "to omou" after I have typed "nde" or "too".
What really fascinates me, and has come in handy as it is a pain to type out "Fuchinobe eki" often (I pass through that station every day), is that it learns by changing the weighted values of words and phrases. The first day I had the phone, I sent an email with my address, which included the painful-to-input phrase "sagamiharashikanagawaken" (Sagamihara City, Kanagawa Prefecture). After that, I could type in "saga" and "sagamiharashi" would come up. I could select "sagamiharashi" from the list of suggestions, and "kanagawaken" would come up as a suggestion immediately. That is awesome. I wish US phones were that sophisticated.
I figure you will be one who appreciates the word suggestion: I was thinking that "disambiguity" might be a word, so I searched for it -- "define:disambiguity" yields no word listings on Google. However, a normal search of the word on Google yields as the first link an academic paper of Homograph Disambiguity of Mandarin, so I am willing to trust that an academic linguistics paper would use actual words in the title of the paper.
Yeah, I totally forgot about that whole "African Latin" and "Chinese Latin" movement 1000 years ago;)
That being said (I know what you meant), I've always recognized your posts, Spy der Mann, by your sig with the "should of"/"should've" tip. I'm glad to know the backstory behind it, now.
Oh, Anonymous Coward, how I wish you had posted under your username so I could friend you and watch your other posts. I treasure the insightful posts of linguistic nature that occasionally pop up here.
This voiced velar fricative you speak of that used to exist in English, that wouldn't be the same voiced velar fricative that German uses in words like ich, would it?
I know this post is in jest, but I can't help but point out that I agreed completely up to this point:
Also, al wil agre that the horible mes of silent "e"s in the languag is disgrasful, and they would go.
By teaching English as a second language, I have learned some things about my native language that I never thought about before. I used to complain about the silent 'e' as well, but then I realized something that can best be pointed out by citing the above sentence.
"disgrasful" Unfortunately, English has five vowel characters but upwards of 16 vowel sounds. The silent 'e' helps denote that the vowel preceding the 'e' by two characters should be the "long" vowel instead of the "short" vowel. When you post "disgrasful", it would be read by any native speaker with the short 'a' sound instead of the long 'a' sound (middle syllable as "grass"). Granted, I've never thought about the difference for the English, but for my fellow Americans, it makes a difference: "rate" versus "rat" (note the difference in vowel sound denoted only because of the silent 'e'), "vane" versus "van", "cone" versus "con", "rune" versus "run", "name" versus "Nam", "meme" versus "mem", etc. The final 'e' serves to denote the elongation of the vowel. Without it, thousands upon thousands of words would run together in a way that I thank God English does not do already.
Now, you could alleviate this problem by adding about 10 more vowels to the English language, or adopt a more pure way of representing sounds (for example, choose Spanish vowel sounds a,e,i,o and u, then the 'a' in 'make' can become 'ei', etc.), or you can just leave the silent 'e' in English words. I think leaving it is better.
Don't even get me started on the other words in your post like "horible" - I would read the first syllable as "ho" instead of the correct pronunciation "agre" - I would read that as the English word "acre" but with a voiced consonant (g) instead of unvoiced (c) "languag" - another thing silent e does is change the 'g' to a 'j' sound, so that really should be 'languaj' to be consistant "al" I think men named Al everywhere would be pretty pissed at you assuming 'al' is free to be read as 'all'
In any case, I enjoyed your post, but I felt compelled to post my rather long-winded opinion about the "silent e issue".
I'm not disagreeing with the entitlement attitude some users display, but I felt like pointing out that this is not an "innovative" thing. I used Keyhole 2 years ago when I got my first NVidia card and moved away to college. It was free for a month to anyone with a new NVidia card at that point.
The only innovative thing is giving it away to everyone for free. How long do you expect it to stay that way?
You gotta love the top 10 searches made by Japanese people that month: 1. map (yes, just "map") 2. Winter Sonata - a Korean TV show Japanese ladies went batshit insane over because of the male lead to the point that middle aged women were touring Korea in droves searching for their own "winter sonata" experience 3. weather news 4. wallpaper 5. translation 6. fortune telling 7. typhoon information 8. dictionary 9. lottery 10. mitsubishi motors - I find this the funniest because the previous eight are boring, normal phrases. I wonder what could have happened that put Mitsubishi up in the top 10.
For comparison to how lame Japanese searches were, here is the top 10 overall: euro 2004, harry potter, paul johnson, john kerry, wimbledon, venus transit, fahrenheit 911, bill clinton, ronald reagan, scott peterson Note how these are all proper nouns.
I find it interesting that the Japanese people don't just have weather and lottery information webpages bookmarked already. I'd start making all kinds of propositions here, but that's irrelevant to/.
I just couldn't resist picking on the country I'm living in. ^_^ Call it revenge for making me eat mayonnaise on my pizza.
That sucks for me. I got here in September, and spent months looking for a good deal for broadband. FTTH was advertising JPY7,000 when I got here. I live in Sagamihara, Kanagawa, which borders Tokyo. The price must have changed quite drastically in the past few months. J-Com was expensive for someone who doesn't need TV, so I didn't go with that.
Man, that really sucks! I wish I could have gotten FTTH so cheap in September!
Sorry. It just seemed to me that you were trying to discredit what I said, since the definition you posted didn't include anything that supported my argument of solicitation. My mistake. My point was that solicitation can mean to persuade to lawlessness, and this is what it means in the legal sense (including prostitution).
Slashdot Mirror
Purchasing the regionless DVD player is not illegal in the US, but manufacturing it is a breach of contract. If you are worried about it being a breach of the DMCA on the consumer's part, I would assume no -- you are not breaking encryption when you use a regionless DVD player.
However, IANAL (yet!), so take my musings with a grain of salt.
a lot of them do perfect collections for a lot off the individual cost
;) Japanese-made English (wasei eigo) is fun and all, but it most likely confuses those who aren't familiar with the terminology.
Hehe. Yup, someone's been immersing themselves too much in Japanese wording -- in English we say "complete series", not "perfect collection"
That aside, your post was very nice. I also posit that another reason for the remaining high prices despite the change in the anime economy in the west is that previously, the shows were available only as a dubbed or a subbed copy on VHS. However, on a typical DVD, you find both dub and sub and raw, so the price has to be expensive. Otherwise, among the obvious things, Japanese fans will just import our DVDs, as Japanese DVDs are prohibitively expensive. I wanted to buy the original Love Hina DVDs when I first got to Japan, but they were over 30 dollars each at a second-hand store.
Just spend some time on WinMX -- many Japanese do not have broadband. Instead, they pack up their mp3 collection, go to an internet cafe and, because they are paying per hour of usage, quickly PM people who have the files they want and offer a trade so they don't have to wait in queues.
This explains why many users who don't speak Japanese get random PMs on WinMX with random ASCII characters that make no sense (WinMX is a non-unicode program, so on XP it uses the codepage attached to your region and, in America, this ISO-8859-1 or something like that).
who want to patent their controller software for their cars
What is Volkswagen going to do? Stroll into Mercedes' manufacturing plant and say, "You have been manufacturing cars at such a rapid pace, that you must be using the same method as us!"
This controller software is one thing that has no need to be patented, unless the company is also selling the software, and I doubt they are doing that.
Even better idea: why don't we just start referring to the shills in Washington who really work for the money as "child rapists". I'm going to start doing that on my blog from now on!
Or, however that would go in Swedish.
Bork Bork oon chikin vogsky vogsky gobble gobblee gobblee torkee bork bork börk
I think that an old school DOS program called the Encheferizer used to Encheferize "sex" to "bork bork bork", so I can assure you that is something no /.er ever has to learn.
It was either "bork bork bork" or "bouncy bouncy bouncy"...
most seasoned English speakers understand ...and therein lies the rub. First you quantified with "most", implying that there are some seasoned English speakers who wouldn't understand. That's strike one against the errors. What about younger English speakers (those who are not "seasoned")? They will fail as well to understand. That's strike two. What about foreigners who speak English as a second language. That is a huge population of people that you have just cast aside as not relevant.
Earlier in this discussion there were posts from a Mexican who could not understand his English-speaking friend because of the "should of" error. Simply stated, communication failed there. Moreover, Slashdot is a community where a large percentage do not speak English natively.
Although the lighthouse is shadowboxing...
Aglthuoh teh lghhstioue is sbdhnwxaioog...
I posit that for compound words, this doesn't work too well.
Additionally, spell-checkers have made things worse, because now no one knows how to spell things correctly by themselves.
You raise an interesting point. In Japan, there is a problem with young people and their knowledge of kanji (Chinese characters). Due to the influx of cellphones and computers, many young people are no longer learning concretely how to write the characters. They can read the characters fine, but as they have no need to handwrite them, they quickly forget the writings for the characters they learned in school. This is the equivalent of me seeing "deja vu" with the proper French diacritical marks -- I can read it, but for the life of me can't remember where the accent grave goes and such.
It has frequently occurred that I will be talking with a Japanese student, and I'll write some kanji I know, and they'll respond with something along the lines of, "Holy crap! I can't even write that kanji."
The German "Ich-Laut" ("Ich-sound") is a voiceless palatal fricative.
*sigh* That's what I get for trying to wax linguistic about a language I don't speak. I had no idea that there was a difference between an ich-laut and ach-laut, and also assumed they were voiced (again, because I don't speak it).
I am wondering what fellow Slashdotters who have studied German think about the transition from English to German -- I'm thinking about studying German when I get back to the States.
Very true about T9, and newer phones are even featuring "type-ahead" these days so 435 will get you options of help, hell, hello... Heck, it even seems to be frequency-weighted on my phone, so the most likely candidate is the first one to pop up.
I know what you mean -- my Japanese cellphone has some common Japanese phrases for a lookahead-type function. By "phrase" I mean sentence endings and other small things, not actual sayings and sentences. For those keeping score, I am referring to things like "n desu ga" and "to omou" after I have typed "nde" or "too".
What really fascinates me, and has come in handy as it is a pain to type out "Fuchinobe eki" often (I pass through that station every day), is that it learns by changing the weighted values of words and phrases. The first day I had the phone, I sent an email with my address, which included the painful-to-input phrase "sagamiharashikanagawaken" (Sagamihara City, Kanagawa Prefecture). After that, I could type in "saga" and "sagamiharashi" would come up. I could select "sagamiharashi" from the list of suggestions, and "kanagawaken" would come up as a suggestion immediately. That is awesome. I wish US phones were that sophisticated.
Mushification killing unambiguity
I figure you will be one who appreciates the word suggestion: I was thinking that "disambiguity" might be a word, so I searched for it -- "define:disambiguity" yields no word listings on Google. However, a normal search of the word on Google yields as the first link an academic paper of Homograph Disambiguity of Mandarin, so I am willing to trust that an academic linguistics paper would use actual words in the title of the paper.
Remember latin was universal 1000 years ago.
;)
Yeah, I totally forgot about that whole "African Latin" and "Chinese Latin" movement 1000 years ago
That being said (I know what you meant), I've always recognized your posts, Spy der Mann, by your sig with the "should of"/"should've" tip. I'm glad to know the backstory behind it, now.
You have 100% concurrence from me on this topic.
Oh, Anonymous Coward, how I wish you had posted under your username so I could friend you and watch your other posts. I treasure the insightful posts of linguistic nature that occasionally pop up here.
This voiced velar fricative you speak of that used to exist in English, that wouldn't be the same voiced velar fricative that German uses in words like ich, would it?
I know this post is in jest, but I can't help but point out that I agreed completely up to this point:
Also, al wil agre that the horible mes of silent "e"s in the languag is disgrasful, and they would go.
By teaching English as a second language, I have learned some things about my native language that I never thought about before. I used to complain about the silent 'e' as well, but then I realized something that can best be pointed out by citing the above sentence.
"disgrasful"
Unfortunately, English has five vowel characters but upwards of 16 vowel sounds. The silent 'e' helps denote that the vowel preceding the 'e' by two characters should be the "long" vowel instead of the "short" vowel. When you post "disgrasful", it would be read by any native speaker with the short 'a' sound instead of the long 'a' sound (middle syllable as "grass"). Granted, I've never thought about the difference for the English, but for my fellow Americans, it makes a difference:
"rate" versus "rat" (note the difference in vowel sound denoted only because of the silent 'e'), "vane" versus "van", "cone" versus "con", "rune" versus "run", "name" versus "Nam", "meme" versus "mem", etc. The final 'e' serves to denote the elongation of the vowel. Without it, thousands upon thousands of words would run together in a way that I thank God English does not do already.
Now, you could alleviate this problem by adding about 10 more vowels to the English language, or adopt a more pure way of representing sounds (for example, choose Spanish vowel sounds a,e,i,o and u, then the 'a' in 'make' can become 'ei', etc.), or you can just leave the silent 'e' in English words. I think leaving it is better.
Don't even get me started on the other words in your post like
"horible" - I would read the first syllable as "ho" instead of the correct pronunciation
"agre" - I would read that as the English word "acre" but with a voiced consonant (g) instead of unvoiced (c)
"languag" - another thing silent e does is change the 'g' to a 'j' sound, so that really should be 'languaj' to be consistant
"al" I think men named Al everywhere would be pretty pissed at you assuming 'al' is free to be read as 'all'
In any case, I enjoyed your post, but I felt compelled to post my rather long-winded opinion about the "silent e issue".
I'm not disagreeing with the entitlement attitude some users display
Whoops. That should read, "I'm not disagreeing that some users have entitlement issues"
While Linus Trovalds confirmed
No idea if you did that on purpose to mock Yahoo, but I'm going to pretend you did and say, "Well done, mate!"
I'm not disagreeing with the entitlement attitude some users display, but I felt like pointing out that this is not an "innovative" thing. I used Keyhole 2 years ago when I got my first NVidia card and moved away to college. It was free for a month to anyone with a new NVidia card at that point.
The only innovative thing is giving it away to everyone for free. How long do you expect it to stay that way?
You gotta love the top 10 searches made by Japanese people that month:
/.
1. map (yes, just "map")
2. Winter Sonata - a Korean TV show Japanese ladies went batshit insane over because of the male lead to the point that middle aged women were touring Korea in droves searching for their own "winter sonata" experience
3. weather news
4. wallpaper
5. translation
6. fortune telling
7. typhoon information
8. dictionary
9. lottery
10. mitsubishi motors - I find this the funniest because the previous eight are boring, normal phrases. I wonder what could have happened that put Mitsubishi up in the top 10.
For comparison to how lame Japanese searches were, here is the top 10 overall:
euro 2004, harry potter, paul johnson, john kerry, wimbledon, venus transit, fahrenheit 911, bill clinton, ronald reagan, scott peterson
Note how these are all proper nouns.
I find it interesting that the Japanese people don't just have weather and lottery information webpages bookmarked already. I'd start making all kinds of propositions here, but that's irrelevant to
I just couldn't resist picking on the country I'm living in. ^_^ Call it revenge for making me eat mayonnaise on my pizza.
That sucks for me. I got here in September, and spent months looking for a good deal for broadband. FTTH was advertising JPY7,000 when I got here. I live in Sagamihara, Kanagawa, which borders Tokyo. The price must have changed quite drastically in the past few months. J-Com was expensive for someone who doesn't need TV, so I didn't go with that.
Man, that really sucks! I wish I could have gotten FTTH so cheap in September!
It's not better in Japan. Fiber Optic (I don't know the speed rating) is around 70 USD/mo. I have DSL (45mbit down/?? up) for 35 USDsmo.
I'd really like a link to this one, I'm skeptical. The law mentions firewire?
Sorry. It just seemed to me that you were trying to discredit what I said, since the definition you posted didn't include anything that supported my argument of solicitation. My mistake. My point was that solicitation can mean to persuade to lawlessness, and this is what it means in the legal sense (including prostitution).
Oh it doesn't. How's Princeton, via Google?
"incite, move, or persuade to some act of lawlessness or insubordination; "He was accused of soliciting his colleagues to destroy the documents"