How are you going to enter these URLs on a standard keyboard from a different region? What about Blackberry/Treo style devices?
Unless you change the input method (a couple of clicks), you're not. Which is fine; you're not the target for the information - you don't know how to write the language you don't know how to read it either after all. Handheld devices in the region can enter it just fine. And in any case, how often do you actually type in a URL? You practically always go there by clicking a link you got from somewhere, like an email, Google search or another web page somewhere.
You keep looking at it from the point of view of US/Western Europe. To a large degree we are irrelevant. URL's in a local language aim squarely at speakers and residents of that language area. How much do you worry about your web pages being understandable to a Japanese, Vietnamese or Chinese user that can't deal with English?
We may live under an illusion that "everybody knows English" but that is simply not the case; the English-language web is completely self-selected. Most Japanese web users, for instance, never go to a non-Japanese language page, and a fair number does not even understand the meaning of a domain name in English and has little ability to transcribe the Japanese name of a company, say, to its most probable URL. In China the proportion will be even higher. Why should the majority of the world be denied using their own language just for the convenience of people that are the target and would not understand the contents anyhow?
You're making the assumption that the computer should display characters in the order in which they were typed.
And you're making another fallacy (I think; I may just misunderstand you a bit). You assume that "first character typed = leftmost character" and that the "natural" order for a computer to display them is from the left. And of course neither is true. If you take a Japanese text, you can switch it from left-to-right, right-to-left and top-to bottom and you of course never actually change the text; all you do is flip the switch on which direction to run it by default.
The computer still displays the first character first, the second character second; all that changes is the position of the first, second, third character and so on on the output surface. You could have an output method that writes each character in a random position and it would still not change the actual text which is still in the reading order, only the rendering (now gibberish).
In the ancestor post, I pointed out that this nullifies the point of DNS. So yes, they may as well be using IP addresses.
Um, no. Having an easily recognizeable word or phrase as an URL is much, much easier to remember and relate to than an IP address. It's not for your benefit but for people that can read the language. But you can't read it and so you - not them - can use the IP address as an easy-to-type substitute.
The Internet is to some extent and should continue to be one place where all people around the world start working and communicating and trading and problem solving together. A Lingua Franca is clearly needed if this is to remain true. So true! So.. when are you starting your Mandarin studies?
In a net cafe on the other side of the world? And whenever I go to a foreign netcafé I find I can't type my own languages' special characters in email and web forms anymore. But somehow or other that does not negate the usefulness of being able to use my own language whenever I'm at a computer that can.
You can cut and paste. Or click a link pointing to the site. Or use the IP address. Though why you would want to if you can't read the contents I don't know.
I bet Neil DeGrasse Tyson will be on 7 Discovery channel specials talking about these new discoveries inside of the week. You know, if he would happen to disappear, a victim of foul play, and his body found long after the crime, the forensic people need to be thourough. If they want to determine when he died by looking at the amount of mold on the body they need to turn it over; DeGrasse is always greener on the other side.
Try put both Japanese and English text in it. Or try to make a slide template and use it. Or any of a dozen other ways you can trigger weird formatting bugs, or lose content.
Just run KOffice under Gnome. It's not like either the KDE nor Gnome libraries are particularly large or anything by today's standards; the resource requirements of a large app (or just the Java vm) is totally dominant by comparison.
That said, for wp I much prefer Abiword; it's not nearly as full-featured, of course, but apart from the lack of real handling of Japanese fonts and input (it works but is a hassle since you need to switch to a capable font manually) it does everything I ever use. Gnumeric is the best spreadsheet of the ones I've tried, and Inkscape is also plenty good enough (though not without its problems of course).
The one thing I'm missing is a presentation app. And no, Impress is not, well, impressive. You breathe at the wrong time and the thing drops your formatting, or destroys half your slides, or just refuses to work in several dozen unintuitive, frustrating ways. Seriously, drop the thing. Start over. It's hideous. That is one area were I actually prefer the hassle of using Powerpoint on my secondary machine at work rather than doing it on my main computer.
The presentation issue is really frustrating actually. No solution is really there yet. If, for instance, Inkscape had more solid text tools (so the association between text and a frame was actually stable for instance, and so you could flow text from one frame to another) you could make slides there for instance, but as it is, it's not good enough.
Just pushing for people / companies to actually register in the appropriate TLD's for their country? As it is, there's nothing to prevent you from purchasing a.com domain from a registrar in China, for a website to host in China. Like having US websites register in the.us domain?
If it's a commercial website it's fine in.com no matter where it's located.
The new form of the protein may be less efficient at its regular job. Or slower to produce. Or having a negative side effect on some other process. Or it's larger, so it takes more resources. Generally, there was a reason for the other form to have been preferred in the first place.
Never mind ID did not predict any specific design intent about appendix other than, "we are designed, so there must be some use for all the useless organs". Well, as long as they can't give an ID explanation for why they have a frontal cortex they're not off that particular hook in any case.
It's a little trickier than that. It is clear life in general is very good at adapting to just about anything; there's been experiments done where microorganisms have ben pressured to adapt to conditions no less bad than bleach. But a lot of people forget that most adaptations also have negative effects. And if the bad condition is rare enough then it may simply not be worth it, evolutionary speaking, to adapt to it.
There's a beetle on the British isles that lays its eggs in shallow water. So the female flies around, looking for small water collections (small lakes, ponds, that sort of thing) in which to lay her eggs. But her detection system is simplistic, mainly looking for ground surfaces of a certain size that polarize light. And that includes stuff like wet asphalt and newly washed cars. So there's a lot of beetles diving right into newly clean cars, making a mess at the very least opportune moment.
But even without cars and asphalt, it's pretty clear her detection system is on the rough side. The reason they don't have better "pond detectors" is most likely that the current one is good enough; a lot of the beetles do hit good water, and a more complex system would penalize the individuals with it (in energy and development time as juveniles if nothing else) more than they'd gain by being more precise with their egg-laying attempts.
Similarly, from a bacterias point of view, a disinfected surface is rare - really rare. Any adaptation to in with even a slightly negative side effect is likely to disappear unless the individuals and their offspring can rely on staying in that environment for a long time, making it a separate niche. Which they can't since a disinfected surface normally doesn't stay that way. There is no long-term survival benefit in being good at surviving that environment.
This is why cutting down on antibiotic use would not just slow down resistance, but can actually reverse it. Make the antibiotic rare enough and resistance genes won't remain.
Let me put it this way: would it be a good things if most of the worlds religions are facing extinction, wouldn't that be a good thing? Replace "most" with "all" and I'll agree with you.
A graduate student is doing research - real, publishable research - during their training. They are doing work in other words, presumably work that is valued enough by their employer to be worth spending a chunk of money on. A lot of the gruntwork on any research project is done by graduate students and post-docs, and the money, whether a research grant, stipend or other form, is renumeration for that. Yes, they're studying as well - but on the other hand they're underpaid for the real-work part. In many countries a graduate student position really is a job, a four or five-year employment with salary, vacation days, child leave, employer evaluations and all the rest of it.
In this sense it's no different from funding post-docs or visiting professorships, most of whom usually come from abroad as well. The funding agency is paying them to do a job, and hopefully, on average feel that the results in form of published research, skill transfer, furtherance of projects, taught classes and so on are worth it. And just like other contract work, what the worker does once the contract is up isn't really an ongoing concern anymore. Academic research is pretty much predicated on this kind of movement for spreading ideas and furthering results.
Why, exactly? Not that making a bundle is a bad thing - I'd love to as well - but, I mean, what's so terrible about both adults in the household earning a salary? He didn't say, or even insinuate, that it's a universally terrible thing. Most likely just his preference. I'd like to make enough money so that my wife didn't have to work as well. And that's not a bad thing. I don't say it's a terrible thing either. I just don't understand it - what is the reason some people seem to think it is good? You just assert that "..that's not a bad thing" as well, with no reason given.
Nobody is denying you the choice to have a partner stay home. Do so if you want. But it's kind of a weak argument to say that it somehow becomes the responsibility of your employer to pay you enough to do so. I want the choice of a second home in Hokkaido; that doesn't mean I can rightfully expect to get enough of a salary that I can have it.
I'm willing to give up a lot to have such a great job but I think I should still make enough to support me and my wife without my wife needing to work too. Why, exactly? Not that making a bundle is a bad thing - I'd love to as well - but, I mean, what's so terrible about both adults in the household earning a salary?
Were there really that many lens flares or were you just having fun in post? They're real. The 28/3.5 lens I used is absolutely great in many ways (one of the better lenses Pentax ever made), but it is a thirty year old lens and strong light right into the front will make it flare. In this case I don't mind; I think it adds to the image.
The only use for multiple cores and 4 gigs of RAM is if 80% of your CPU cycles are given over to DRM and Norton 360. Postprocess a 10mp RAW file and you easily use upwards of half a gig and one core (the other core making sure your other apps don't stutter while you're running some heavy processing script). Do a panorama from 22 of those images and a couple of gigabytes (and a good deal of patience) comes in handy.
I wonder if the EU would be so vigilant if Google was started and owned by a pair of Europeans? Actually, yes. Most antitrust action in the EU has been concerning European companies, not outside ones. And if anything, the commission tends to be harsher towards those than others (since it violates the idea of free trade within the EU).
You also might find it more difficult to collect on the debts owed to you.
Not to come off unpleasantly, but there is no shortage of foreign countries that already are nearly impossible for the US to collect debt from. It's considered 'a serious crisis for the third world' by many handwringers. Which was sort of the point. If a country reneges on its debt it's not the external lenders that suffer heavily (in a sense, it's money they weren't using at the moment anyway), but the country itself, and the internal lenders. Nobody wants to lend more money until they've cleared off the current defaults, but getting the ailing economy going again needs a lot of funds - funds they can't raise since nobody is willing to lend them any. Just like people or companies that default, they get trapped in a hole that is very difficult to get out of again.
Defaulting on your debt payments is not something any country would want to do. And no, the pain would not be on the same order of magnitude for the lenders as for the country.
Could be slightly off topic but I had to sound off on this one...
While I appreciate USB's capability for backwards computability, I would much rather have a plug shaped in such a way that I didn't have to flip it over every time I try to plug it in. I don't know about you guys but this is one of the most annoying aspects of using my computer, and I run Windows! You know, you should only need to flip it over half the time. If you really need to do it more often than that, either your subconscious is an a*hole that likes messing with your self; or the world really is out to get _you_, specifically.
Or having more than one mass storage device, video camera and microphone, speakers and so on hanging off the same USB hub you plug into your laptop. One connector for everything, and that without the expensive, model-specific docking stations we've been using so far.
Slashdot Mirror
How are you going to enter these URLs on a standard keyboard from a different region? What about Blackberry/Treo style devices?
Unless you change the input method (a couple of clicks), you're not. Which is fine; you're not the target for the information - you don't know how to write the language you don't know how to read it either after all. Handheld devices in the region can enter it just fine. And in any case, how often do you actually type in a URL? You practically always go there by clicking a link you got from somewhere, like an email, Google search or another web page somewhere.
You keep looking at it from the point of view of US/Western Europe. To a large degree we are irrelevant. URL's in a local language aim squarely at speakers and residents of that language area. How much do you worry about your web pages being understandable to a Japanese, Vietnamese or Chinese user that can't deal with English?
We may live under an illusion that "everybody knows English" but that is simply not the case; the English-language web is completely self-selected. Most Japanese web users, for instance, never go to a non-Japanese language page, and a fair number does not even understand the meaning of a domain name in English and has little ability to transcribe the Japanese name of a company, say, to its most probable URL. In China the proportion will be even higher. Why should the majority of the world be denied using their own language just for the convenience of people that are the target and would not understand the contents anyhow?
You're making the assumption that the computer should display characters in the order in which they were typed.
And you're making another fallacy (I think; I may just misunderstand you a bit). You assume that "first character typed = leftmost character" and that the "natural" order for a computer to display them is from the left. And of course neither is true. If you take a Japanese text, you can switch it from left-to-right, right-to-left and top-to bottom and you of course never actually change the text; all you do is flip the switch on which direction to run it by default.
The computer still displays the first character first, the second character second; all that changes is the position of the first, second, third character and so on on the output surface. You could have an output method that writes each character in a random position and it would still not change the actual text which is still in the reading order, only the rendering (now gibberish).
In the ancestor post, I pointed out that this nullifies the point of DNS. So yes, they may as well be using IP addresses.
Um, no. Having an easily recognizeable word or phrase as an URL is much, much easier to remember and relate to than an IP address. It's not for your benefit but for people that can read the language. But you can't read it and so you - not them - can use the IP address as an easy-to-type substitute.
should continue to be one place where all people around the world start working
and communicating and trading and problem solving together. A Lingua Franca
is clearly needed if this is to remain true. So true! So.. when are you starting your Mandarin studies?
You can cut and paste. Or click a link pointing to the site. Or use the IP address. Though why you would want to if you can't read the contents I don't know.
Solve it for who? The people who the site is presumably aiming for can read and write it just fine.
Besides, no matter what character set, you can cut and paste it without having to be able to type it (or read it for that matter).
Try put both Japanese and English text in it. Or try to make a slide template and use it. Or any of a dozen other ways you can trigger weird formatting bugs, or lose content.
Just run KOffice under Gnome. It's not like either the KDE nor Gnome libraries are particularly large or anything by today's standards; the resource requirements of a large app (or just the Java vm) is totally dominant by comparison.
That said, for wp I much prefer Abiword; it's not nearly as full-featured, of course, but apart from the lack of real handling of Japanese fonts and input (it works but is a hassle since you need to switch to a capable font manually) it does everything I ever use. Gnumeric is the best spreadsheet of the ones I've tried, and Inkscape is also plenty good enough (though not without its problems of course).
The one thing I'm missing is a presentation app. And no, Impress is not, well, impressive. You breathe at the wrong time and the thing drops your formatting, or destroys half your slides, or just refuses to work in several dozen unintuitive, frustrating ways. Seriously, drop the thing. Start over. It's hideous. That is one area were I actually prefer the hassle of using Powerpoint on my secondary machine at work rather than doing it on my main computer.
The presentation issue is really frustrating actually. No solution is really there yet. If, for instance, Inkscape had more solid text tools (so the association between text and a frame was actually stable for instance, and so you could flow text from one frame to another) you could make slides there for instance, but as it is, it's not good enough.
If it's a commercial website it's fine in
The new form of the protein may be less efficient at its regular job. Or slower to produce. Or having a negative side effect on some other process. Or it's larger, so it takes more resources. Generally, there was a reason for the other form to have been preferred in the first place.
It's a little trickier than that. It is clear life in general is very good at adapting to just about anything; there's been experiments done where microorganisms have ben pressured to adapt to conditions no less bad than bleach. But a lot of people forget that most adaptations also have negative effects. And if the bad condition is rare enough then it may simply not be worth it, evolutionary speaking, to adapt to it.
There's a beetle on the British isles that lays its eggs in shallow water. So the female flies around, looking for small water collections (small lakes, ponds, that sort of thing) in which to lay her eggs. But her detection system is simplistic, mainly looking for ground surfaces of a certain size that polarize light. And that includes stuff like wet asphalt and newly washed cars. So there's a lot of beetles diving right into newly clean cars, making a mess at the very least opportune moment.
But even without cars and asphalt, it's pretty clear her detection system is on the rough side. The reason they don't have better "pond detectors" is most likely that the current one is good enough; a lot of the beetles do hit good water, and a more complex system would penalize the individuals with it (in energy and development time as juveniles if nothing else) more than they'd gain by being more precise with their egg-laying attempts.
Similarly, from a bacterias point of view, a disinfected surface is rare - really rare. Any adaptation to in with even a slightly negative side effect is likely to disappear unless the individuals and their offspring can rely on staying in that environment for a long time, making it a separate niche. Which they can't since a disinfected surface normally doesn't stay that way. There is no long-term survival benefit in being good at surviving that environment.
This is why cutting down on antibiotic use would not just slow down resistance, but can actually reverse it. Make the antibiotic rare enough and resistance genes won't remain.
Keyword: "research grant".
A graduate student is doing research - real, publishable research - during their training. They are doing work in other words, presumably work that is valued enough by their employer to be worth spending a chunk of money on. A lot of the gruntwork on any research project is done by graduate students and post-docs, and the money, whether a research grant, stipend or other form, is renumeration for that. Yes, they're studying as well - but on the other hand they're underpaid for the real-work part. In many countries a graduate student position really is a job, a four or five-year employment with salary, vacation days, child leave, employer evaluations and all the rest of it.
In this sense it's no different from funding post-docs or visiting professorships, most of whom usually come from abroad as well. The funding agency is paying them to do a job, and hopefully, on average feel that the results in form of published research, skill transfer, furtherance of projects, taught classes and so on are worth it. And just like other contract work, what the worker does once the contract is up isn't really an ongoing concern anymore. Academic research is pretty much predicated on this kind of movement for spreading ideas and furthering results.
Nobody is denying you the choice to have a partner stay home. Do so if you want. But it's kind of a weak argument to say that it somehow becomes the responsibility of your employer to pay you enough to do so. I want the choice of a second home in Hokkaido; that doesn't mean I can rightfully expect to get enough of a salary that I can have it.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jannem/449271968/
Not to come off unpleasantly, but there is no shortage of foreign countries that already are nearly impossible for the US to collect debt from. It's considered 'a serious crisis for the third world' by many handwringers. Which was sort of the point. If a country reneges on its debt it's not the external lenders that suffer heavily (in a sense, it's money they weren't using at the moment anyway), but the country itself, and the internal lenders. Nobody wants to lend more money until they've cleared off the current defaults, but getting the ailing economy going again needs a lot of funds - funds they can't raise since nobody is willing to lend them any. Just like people or companies that default, they get trapped in a hole that is very difficult to get out of again.
Defaulting on your debt payments is not something any country would want to do. And no, the pain would not be on the same order of magnitude for the lenders as for the country.
While I appreciate USB's capability for backwards computability, I would much rather have a plug shaped in such a way that I didn't have to flip it over every time I try to plug it in. I don't know about you guys but this is one of the most annoying aspects of using my computer, and I run Windows! You know, you should only need to flip it over half the time. If you really need to do it more often than that, either your subconscious is an a*hole that likes messing with your self; or the world really is out to get _you_, specifically.
Sucks either way.
How about hi-def video?
Or having more than one mass storage device, video camera and microphone, speakers and so on hanging off the same USB hub you plug into your laptop. One connector for everything, and that without the expensive, model-specific docking stations we've been using so far.