If enough stupid people start implanting RFID chips on themselves, it will begin to be the norm. Soon enough it will become "socially acceptable", paving the way for legislation making it compulsory for everyone. There's your slippery slope.
You say: "if everyone stopped buying corporation X's products..." / "If everyone refused working for company Y...". But that can't happen for most values of X and Y. The fact is: most people just don't care about that kind of boycotts because they aren't as paranoid (in the healthy sense) as we on Slashdot are. They will happily buy at the X store, apply for a job at Y, and you won't be able to persuade a reasonable amount of them not to.
Widespread awareness of these issues is a requirement for your "plan for defeating the Orwellian nightmare". History tells us that most people don't become aware at all until it's too late to go back.
The whole discussion is word play. For some people (most people on Slashdot) "operating system" means the kernel only. For others it's the "kernel + basic system utilities and user interface" package.
So you're right in the second sense, but that doesn't mean the other people here are wrong. They just mean a different thing when they say "operating system" (and with reason, since I can perfectly run something other than X over the Linux kernel as a user interface). This is established usage in the computing world (I would dispute your 99.999% figure, but oh well, 99.999% of all statistics are made up...) Learn to appreciate the difference.
It seems to me that putting files up for P2P sharing is the same as putting them on your web site which is the same as publishing. It also seems to me that both the publisher and the downloader are guilty of copyright infringement, assuming that any reasonable downloader would know that the publisher doesn't have the distribution rights.
How would the downloader know? Do you know you're not viewing copyrighted material every time you visit a web page? (downloading an mp3 file, a jpeg or an html document are not technically different things). You can only know that after you've successfully downloaded it (i.e. after committing the actual crime). Apply that logic to every single resource available online, and the World Wide Web is unable to function.
It would be preposterous to place the burden of proving the material is safe on the downloader. Those who distribute should be the guilty ones alone.
The problem isn't just that there isn't enough documentation. It's also that the average user doesn't care about it (i.e. expects everything to work by clicking their way through menus and dialogs, and blames the system when their data is eaten up or similar).
On the second, it attempted to make a W2K machine dual-boot, and (going with all the defaults) instead made it no-boot (Win BSOD). The user then attempted to reinstall Windows, which blew away everything. Now, I'll grant that the user made things worse, but what would you expect them to do? And how would they know?
They would know if Microsoft played nice and displayed a big fucking warning during the Windows installation procedure, "Your MBR will be replaced, denying boot menu access to any other operating system you might have installed."
Or if Microsoft software actually gave the user a choice, instead of assuming all they'll ever want to run on their machine is Windows.
Lets say that you live in microwave owen. In your universe, water molecyles tend to heat up, without any measurable reasons, everything is like it is normally(microwave is allways on, sending it's radiation). When you start to build up things to measure what is happening, you logic is based on fact that this is the normal state of universe(microwave-owen).We have radioactive stuff like uranium that has certain halftimes and things that it does. What if it does these things because of microwave-like backround radiotion that is happening here constantly in same leve lall the time. How can we measure something that we have nothing to compare?
I would point out that if the whole universe is a microwave oven, it's not the job of science to know what happens when you remove the background radiation -- because you'll never be able to witness any phenomenon in its absence, and will thus be unable to test your hypothesis.
On the other hand, if only part of the Universe is the oven (which I think is what you're aiming at), our current theories remain acceptable as long as we don't witness any phenomena happening "outside of the oven" and realise that the laws don't hold. And who knows if we'll ever never know what it is like outside the microwave.
It's pointless to go down the "oh, but we think things happen this way, it's just that there's some hidden phenomena that constitute a better explanation and we don't know about them yet!" road, if you have no evidence to support that those phenomena do, in fact, exist. And what's better evidence than witnessing something that your current theories can't explain?
Maybe there isn't a single explanation for how the Universe works --- maybe there are many, all of them coherent with each other, and we only know about one yet. Or maybe we are doomed to look for more exact theories forever --- Classical Mechanics was replaced by General Relativity, which is likely to be replaced with some kind of unification theory in the future, and who knows what follows?
Being religious isn't a requirement for having a meaning to life. What about the pursuit of knowledge and happiness for mankind (or even for oneself)? There's nothing directly connected with religion in that; yet I'm sure most people, religious and atheist alike, would agree that's something worth living for.
The concept of right and wrong has nothing to do with religion, either; it follows from being part of a society that some things aren't acceptable (it's not acceptable to steal someone, because one has the right to keep their things, and not because some higher being told me so).
One can both have a reason to be here and a notion of right and wrong while being an atheist. We just choose not to base our beliefs in legends, gods and other imaginary beings, because they are not essential to our view of the universe, and can be discarded with no loss of understanding.
I will add something else: most users have their first contact with a program when they click on a file that opens with that program. For example, I don't think anyone runs Adobe Reader directly and uses the File|Open dialog; instead they click on the icon for a PDF file. This way they learn Adobe Reader is a program that reads PDFs.
While this can't be said of some applications that don't have "files to open" (e.g. an IM client), it is certainly true of many of the more common computer operations (e.g. edit a Word document, see an image, listen to an audio file,...). And both Windows and Linux distributions come with default programs for the most common file types, and indeed register those defaults when installing new software.
For the rest, a well-designed "Start menu" equivalent will suffice;)
All of these are quite popular in Windows land. By your logic, since none of them have names that correlate to their function, no one would be willing to use them...
Counter-examples aside, KDE does something useful to help users with this: the K Menu (analogous to Start menu in Windows) can be configured to show the program function alongside its name. So for example Amarok shows up as "Audio Player (Amarok)", or even just "Audio Player".
Your arguement is moot. Guns are easier to get on the black market than they are legally. Anyone who wants to carry a gun, can carry a gun, and most likely will never get caught by the police. Anything short of a police state will not stop guns (and, looking at the miserable state of the US war on drugs or the violence in places like Russia, not even a police state will stop it).
You're missing my point. My point was never about the people who are willing to buy guns on the black market -- those will always get them, with regulation or not. It's about people who lose control of themselves and grab for a gun before they have the time to realize what they're doing. Those people would never do anything illegal to get a gun, but they might have one nearby and see an opportunity to use it.
The only effect your gun control laws have (besides providing an opportunity for demogogy), is to:
A) Make guns more available and easier to get by pushing gun sales from regulated and taxed gun dealers into the black market.
Again, I don't think so. Those who didn't feel the need to break the law to get a gun won't change their mind (if they do, then it's quite likely they're the kind of person who shouldn't be allowed to have one).
B) Making sure that if someone is carrying a gun, they aren't going to bother trying to stop the rampaging gunman unless it is a matter of their own personal survival (because if they do so they go to jail).
As far as I know, the law allows you to act in self-defense, either using a gun or not. That wouldn't change -- only the fact that you might carry one or not would.
No, I never said that only cops should be allowed to carry guns. But the people who do should be certified as able (both physically and mentally) to handle a gun before they go into a store and buy one.
If someone is unable to behave when they have a gun in their hands, I'd rather sacrifice their personal defense than jeopardize mine.
Your argument is based on a specious assumption: that most people aren't competent to own guns. I personally think that's a load of bollocks. But even if you're right, the underlying point is still this: there is NO way to guarantee that you keep guns out of the *wrong* hands. And since the "bad guys" will always have guns, it's wrong to deprive the good guys of the means to defend themselves.
It's not about the "bad guys", it's about people who are hot-headed and do things impulsively without thinking about the consequences first. They won't do it if they don't have a gun with them at the time.
The bad guys with guns should be dealt with by good guys who know how to properly handle guns. Not by some random John Doe or delusional 16-year-old kid playing vigilante.
Sure it is. It is just saying God, as in a higher being, it isn't promoting any ONE religion.....
I supposed you might bring up the atheist...but, that's not a religion...so, doesn't count.
:-)
Freedom of Religion Freedom FROM Religion
Perhaps you were just trying to be witty, but I find it funny how you attempted to shift the argument by invoking the meaning of a preposition.
It's painfully obvious that "freedom of religion" in any acceptable sense *has* to contemplate one's right to be an atheist. To say the contrary is akin to saying that "freedom of speech" compels everyone to shout their opinions out loud.
You're just pretending you didn't understand what the GP meant while you make up silly grammatical excuses.
When it all boils down, a network like the internet requires centralized control, and it's often best to stick with the devil you know. [emphasis mine]
Funny you should say that, since one of the objectives of the US government when designing the Internet (ARPANET at the time) was to create a decentralized network that would remain in operation even in the event individual nodes were lost...
If you have many email accounts like me, it's handy to have a single interface (the mail client) for handling all of them, instead of having to visit multiple sites a day just to check for new mail (let alone search for a particular message when you're not sure in which account it ended up).
You've got it backwards. The situation is that HP is obliged to not sell the computer with the OS. Do you think it's sane and/or reasonable to mandate that CD players can't come with music? TVs can't come with bundled DVD sets? Etc.? I, personally, don't.
I don't have a problem with people bundling content with devices (personally, I usually opt for the no-bundle version, but that's just me). What is happening here, though, is that HP is not offering the choice of buying a PC without Windows under the pretense that it "wouldn't work" otherwise. This is a blatant lie for two reasons: first, the PC without an OS is perfectly "functional" under any sane definition of the term (as I tried to show by analogy in my post); and second, even if
it is true that a PC needs to come with an OS to be labeled "functional", then Windows certainly isn't the only choice (they could even install FreeDOS on them, which would allow them to say it has an OS, even though it's most likely going to be overwritten with something else).
Do I think HP should be obliged to sell PCs with Linux/BSD/Solaris/FreeDOS/whatever preinstalled? Of course not. I think they should sell them without an OS at all. That's the lowest common denominator.
'The PC without an OS is not a product because it doesn't work,' said Alain Spitzmuller [...]
In other news, auto dealers are now obliged to sell cars with all the gasoline they'll ever need to run, CD players must come with the complete works of modern music prepackaged (RIAA fees included), and TV sets have to carry recordings of all future programmes to be aired.
I think the problem is that companies like Adobe still haven't realised "Linux" isn't a single entity. They have to regard different Linux distributions as different (even though similar) targets for their software -- instead of trying to release a "compatible with all Linux distributions, even if we have to include all required libraries instead of using those of the host system" package, which unfortunately is often the case.
As a related note, I don't buy the "standard package manager for Linux" argument. I think in the long run it would be more harmful than benefitial because it would get in the way of developers and users alike. Just like with everything else in Linux, choice is good, and I would rather not trade the ability to make that choice for the convenience of companies that deploy Linux software (besides, I'm sure that if they don't want to do separate packaging for all Linux distributions, the distribution maintainers would be happy to do it themselves...)
Since x is a float, int i = (int)x; would find the (best) integer approximation of x and store it in i. What the author meant to do was take the binary representation of x and have the compiler treat it as the binary representation of an int -- thus the "taking the address", followed by a cast to int *, followed by a dereference to store the actual value in i.
If this gets you confused, I'd definitely suggest trying out both methods in your favorite compiler:)
And survival of the fittest is particularly harsh for the individual unable to adapt but guess what, that's the way the world works, even today in human society. You can either adapt and be happy or don't and die out. You can stick your head in the sand and try to pretend it isn't happening or you can embrace change.
Or you can realize that "change" is not imperative in this case, but rather a matter of choice. You're the only one here who is saying that converging to a single language is inevitable.
You'd rather they were anachronisms preserved in amber for your amusement? You don't think the members of those cultures deserve to benefit from the wider world?
I would rather preserve what you call "anachronisms" than have American culture fed down my throat to supplant my own. I have a right to preserve my culture and language as a righteous part of the legacy of mankind. So does everyone else in the world.
What you don't seem to understand is that going down that path leads not to a wider world but a narrower one, culturally speaking. It is not so much a matter of opinion since it is happening right now, as you can see with your own eyes at least in Europe.
Besides, if you are so convinced that language has little to do with culture, then certainly it isn't hard for you to agree that the ability to have contact with and benefit from other cultures does not require mastery of their respective languages?
I'm still Scottish despite the fact that I speak English and Americans are still American despite the fact that they speak English, Australians are still Australian despite the fact that they speak English, even the Welsh are still Welsh despite the fact that they speak English.
Except that English has been spoken in those parts of the world for centuries. Compare that with the attempt to implant the English language (through cultural items such as movies, music, etc) in countries where it has never been spoken natively, such as Japan, Germany, Spain or Brazil. What worries me is: will the cultures of those countries be preserved after a long exposure to the English/American culture, which the attempt to standardize the world on the English language will undoubtedly bring? (read my reply to your original post.)
What I find most disturbing in your post is that you hint it would be a good thing to standardize on English (or any other widely spoken language, for that matter). In my opinion that would be a very bad idea because it would not only give an unfair advantage to those who already speak it natively, but also open up the door for a dangerous world-scale cultural dominance by the countries in which that language is spoken (something of that kind is already hapenning at a smaller scale at the moment with the "invasion" of American culture pretty much everywhere).
The thing is you can't look at a human language as if it were purely a communication tool, like computer languages or internet protocols are. A human language carries a culture around with it, which is that of the countries it is spoken in (either presently or historically). That happens not only through literature but also through everyday spoken language (as an example consider the phrase "pardon my French" and how well it would bide with french people, were they to standardize on English).
In order for your plan to function adequately you would first have to get rid of all cultural references in your language of choice -- which I reckon is quite an impossible task. Or you could "start from scratch" and use a constructed language like Esperanto (which, incidentally, would suit the role quite well since it is easy to learn and has very consistent rules). Even then you could argue there already exists some kind of an Esperanto culture you'd have to get rid of. In my view it would simply be safer not to go down that path at all.
But back to 3-phase power; yeah, it really doesn't make that much sense for non-industrial applications, because of the extra copper wire you have to run, and the extra complexity.
The great advantage of a three-phase system is that you can convey more power with the same length of copper (as compared to a monophase system). That's because in a monophase system you must run two wires, one to convey power and the other for current return, the latter being just a physical requirement which brings no extra power transfer capacity to the transmission line. On the other hand, in a balanced three-phase system (i.e. one where the loads of the three phases are equal or nearly so), you can do away with the (fourth) neutral wire because current return for a particular phase is assured by the other two. So even though you run three wires (one for each phase), the three of them are actually transferring power, as opposed to a monophase system in which only one of the two conductors does so.
(It must be stressed that in order to do away with the neutral wire you must ensure the loads are balanced. This turns out to be quite doable in practice -- if the loads do not differ that much the neutral current is very small and the earth itself is able to close the circuit.)
So while it doesn't make much sense for non-industrial applications (you don't need three-phase power in your household, for instance), three-phase power makes total sense for long high voltage distribution lines because it is more economical.
Slashdot Mirror
You can't win that war individually.
If enough stupid people start implanting RFID chips on themselves, it will begin to be the norm. Soon enough it will become "socially acceptable", paving the way for legislation making it compulsory for everyone. There's your slippery slope.
You say: "if everyone stopped buying corporation X's products..." / "If everyone refused working for company Y...". But that can't happen for most values of X and Y. The fact is: most people just don't care about that kind of boycotts because they aren't as paranoid (in the healthy sense) as we on Slashdot are. They will happily buy at the X store, apply for a job at Y, and you won't be able to persuade a reasonable amount of them not to.
Widespread awareness of these issues is a requirement for your "plan for defeating the Orwellian nightmare". History tells us that most people don't become aware at all until it's too late to go back.
The whole discussion is word play. For some people (most people on Slashdot) "operating system" means the kernel only. For others it's the "kernel + basic system utilities and user interface" package.
So you're right in the second sense, but that doesn't mean the other people here are wrong. They just mean a different thing when they say "operating system" (and with reason, since I can perfectly run something other than X over the Linux kernel as a user interface). This is established usage in the computing world (I would dispute your 99.999% figure, but oh well, 99.999% of all statistics are made up...) Learn to appreciate the difference.
How would the downloader know? Do you know you're not viewing copyrighted material every time you visit a web page? (downloading an mp3 file, a jpeg or an html document are not technically different things). You can only know that after you've successfully downloaded it (i.e. after committing the actual crime). Apply that logic to every single resource available online, and the World Wide Web is unable to function.
It would be preposterous to place the burden of proving the material is safe on the downloader. Those who distribute should be the guilty ones alone.
The problem isn't just that there isn't enough documentation. It's also that the average user doesn't care about it (i.e. expects everything to work by clicking their way through menus and dialogs, and blames the system when their data is eaten up or similar).
They would know if Microsoft played nice and displayed a big fucking warning during the Windows installation procedure, "Your MBR will be replaced, denying boot menu access to any other operating system you might have installed."
Or if Microsoft software actually gave the user a choice, instead of assuming all they'll ever want to run on their machine is Windows.
I would point out that if the whole universe is a microwave oven, it's not the job of science to know what happens when you remove the background radiation -- because you'll never be able to witness any phenomenon in its absence, and will thus be unable to test your hypothesis.
On the other hand, if only part of the Universe is the oven (which I think is what you're aiming at), our current theories remain acceptable as long as we don't witness any phenomena happening "outside of the oven" and realise that the laws don't hold. And who knows if we'll ever never know what it is like outside the microwave.
It's pointless to go down the "oh, but we think things happen this way, it's just that there's some hidden phenomena that constitute a better explanation and we don't know about them yet!" road, if you have no evidence to support that those phenomena do, in fact, exist. And what's better evidence than witnessing something that your current theories can't explain?
Maybe there isn't a single explanation for how the Universe works --- maybe there are many, all of them coherent with each other, and we only know about one yet. Or maybe we are doomed to look for more exact theories forever --- Classical Mechanics was replaced by General Relativity, which is likely to be replaced with some kind of unification theory in the future, and who knows what follows?
"!Religion == Nihilism" is complete nonsense.
Being religious isn't a requirement for having a meaning to life. What about the pursuit of knowledge and happiness for mankind (or even for oneself)? There's nothing directly connected with religion in that; yet I'm sure most people, religious and atheist alike, would agree that's something worth living for.
The concept of right and wrong has nothing to do with religion, either; it follows from being part of a society that some things aren't acceptable (it's not acceptable to steal someone, because one has the right to keep their things, and not because some higher being told me so).
One can both have a reason to be here and a notion of right and wrong while being an atheist. We just choose not to base our beliefs in legends, gods and other imaginary beings, because they are not essential to our view of the universe, and can be discarded with no loss of understanding.
I will add something else: most users have their first contact with a program when they click on a file that opens with that program. For example, I don't think anyone runs Adobe Reader directly and uses the File|Open dialog; instead they click on the icon for a PDF file. This way they learn Adobe Reader is a program that reads PDFs.
While this can't be said of some applications that don't have "files to open" (e.g. an IM client), it is certainly true of many of the more common computer operations (e.g. edit a Word document, see an image, listen to an audio file, ...). And both Windows and Linux distributions come with default programs for the most common file types, and indeed register those defaults when installing new software.
For the rest, a well-designed "Start menu" equivalent will suffice ;)
So how do Windows users figure out that:
All of these are quite popular in Windows land. By your logic, since none of them have names that correlate to their function, no one would be willing to use them...
Counter-examples aside, KDE does something useful to help users with this: the K Menu (analogous to Start menu in Windows) can be configured to show the program function alongside its name. So for example Amarok shows up as "Audio Player (Amarok)", or even just "Audio Player".
You're missing my point. My point was never about the people who are willing to buy guns on the black market -- those will always get them, with regulation or not. It's about people who lose control of themselves and grab for a gun before they have the time to realize what they're doing. Those people would never do anything illegal to get a gun, but they might have one nearby and see an opportunity to use it.
Again, I don't think so. Those who didn't feel the need to break the law to get a gun won't change their mind (if they do, then it's quite likely they're the kind of person who shouldn't be allowed to have one).
As far as I know, the law allows you to act in self-defense, either using a gun or not. That wouldn't change -- only the fact that you might carry one or not would.
No, I never said that only cops should be allowed to carry guns. But the people who do should be certified as able (both physically and mentally) to handle a gun before they go into a store and buy one.
If someone is unable to behave when they have a gun in their hands, I'd rather sacrifice their personal defense than jeopardize mine.
It's not about the "bad guys", it's about people who are hot-headed and do things impulsively without thinking about the consequences first. They won't do it if they don't have a gun with them at the time.
The bad guys with guns should be dealt with by good guys who know how to properly handle guns. Not by some random John Doe or delusional 16-year-old kid playing vigilante.
Perhaps you were just trying to be witty, but I find it funny how you attempted to shift the argument by invoking the meaning of a preposition.
It's painfully obvious that "freedom of religion" in any acceptable sense *has* to contemplate one's right to be an atheist. To say the contrary is akin to saying that "freedom of speech" compels everyone to shout their opinions out loud.
You're just pretending you didn't understand what the GP meant while you make up silly grammatical excuses.
Funny you should say that, since one of the objectives of the US government when designing the Internet (ARPANET at the time) was to create a decentralized network that would remain in operation even in the event individual nodes were lost...
The usage is established, but "symlink" or "symbolic link" are far more common:
Wikipedia: Wikipedia article (redirects to "Symbolic link" article)
Google hits: ~1M hits for ("symbolic link" OR "symlink") unix vs. ~419K hits for ("soft link" OR "softlink") unix ("unix" appended to avoid potentially irrelevant matches)
Ocurrences in manpages (my Gentoo Linux system):
$ find /usr/share/man -type f -name '*.gz' | xargs zcat | grep -i "soft link" | wc -l /usr/share/man -type f -name '*.gz' | xargs zcat | grep -i "softlink" | wc -l /usr/share/man -type f -name '*.gz' | xargs zcat | grep -i "symlink" | wc -l /usr/share/man -type f -name '*.gz' | xargs zcat | grep -i "symbolic link" | wc -l
27
$ find
1
$ find
380
$ find
1458
(Yes, it might not be that elegant, but my shell scripting skills are not the best.)
If you have many email accounts like me, it's handy to have a single interface (the mail client) for handling all of them, instead of having to visit multiple sites a day just to check for new mail (let alone search for a particular message when you're not sure in which account it ended up).
I don't have a problem with people bundling content with devices (personally, I usually opt for the no-bundle version, but that's just me). What is happening here, though, is that HP is not offering the choice of buying a PC without Windows under the pretense that it "wouldn't work" otherwise. This is a blatant lie for two reasons: first, the PC without an OS is perfectly "functional" under any sane definition of the term (as I tried to show by analogy in my post); and second, even if it is true that a PC needs to come with an OS to be labeled "functional", then Windows certainly isn't the only choice (they could even install FreeDOS on them, which would allow them to say it has an OS, even though it's most likely going to be overwritten with something else).
Do I think HP should be obliged to sell PCs with Linux/BSD/Solaris/FreeDOS/whatever preinstalled? Of course not. I think they should sell them without an OS at all. That's the lowest common denominator.
In other news, auto dealers are now obliged to sell cars with all the gasoline they'll ever need to run, CD players must come with the complete works of modern music prepackaged (RIAA fees included), and TV sets have to carry recordings of all future programmes to be aired.
I think the problem is that companies like Adobe still haven't realised "Linux" isn't a single entity. They have to regard different Linux distributions as different (even though similar) targets for their software -- instead of trying to release a "compatible with all Linux distributions, even if we have to include all required libraries instead of using those of the host system" package, which unfortunately is often the case.
As a related note, I don't buy the "standard package manager for Linux" argument. I think in the long run it would be more harmful than benefitial because it would get in the way of developers and users alike. Just like with everything else in Linux, choice is good, and I would rather not trade the ability to make that choice for the convenience of companies that deploy Linux software (besides, I'm sure that if they don't want to do separate packaging for all Linux distributions, the distribution maintainers would be happy to do it themselves...)
Since x is a float, int i = (int)x; would find the (best) integer approximation of x and store it in i. What the author meant to do was take the binary representation of x and have the compiler treat it as the binary representation of an int -- thus the "taking the address", followed by a cast to int *, followed by a dereference to store the actual value in i.
If this gets you confused, I'd definitely suggest trying out both methods in your favorite compiler :)
Or you can realize that "change" is not imperative in this case, but rather a matter of choice. You're the only one here who is saying that converging to a single language is inevitable.
I would rather preserve what you call "anachronisms" than have American culture fed down my throat to supplant my own. I have a right to preserve my culture and language as a righteous part of the legacy of mankind. So does everyone else in the world.
What you don't seem to understand is that going down that path leads not to a wider world but a narrower one, culturally speaking. It is not so much a matter of opinion since it is happening right now, as you can see with your own eyes at least in Europe.
Besides, if you are so convinced that language has little to do with culture, then certainly it isn't hard for you to agree that the ability to have contact with and benefit from other cultures does not require mastery of their respective languages?
Except that English has been spoken in those parts of the world for centuries. Compare that with the attempt to implant the English language (through cultural items such as movies, music, etc) in countries where it has never been spoken natively, such as Japan, Germany, Spain or Brazil. What worries me is: will the cultures of those countries be preserved after a long exposure to the English/American culture, which the attempt to standardize the world on the English language will undoubtedly bring? (read my reply to your original post.)
What I find most disturbing in your post is that you hint it would be a good thing to standardize on English (or any other widely spoken language, for that matter). In my opinion that would be a very bad idea because it would not only give an unfair advantage to those who already speak it natively, but also open up the door for a dangerous world-scale cultural dominance by the countries in which that language is spoken (something of that kind is already hapenning at a smaller scale at the moment with the "invasion" of American culture pretty much everywhere).
The thing is you can't look at a human language as if it were purely a communication tool, like computer languages or internet protocols are. A human language carries a culture around with it, which is that of the countries it is spoken in (either presently or historically). That happens not only through literature but also through everyday spoken language (as an example consider the phrase "pardon my French" and how well it would bide with french people, were they to standardize on English).
In order for your plan to function adequately you would first have to get rid of all cultural references in your language of choice -- which I reckon is quite an impossible task. Or you could "start from scratch" and use a constructed language like Esperanto (which, incidentally, would suit the role quite well since it is easy to learn and has very consistent rules). Even then you could argue there already exists some kind of an Esperanto culture you'd have to get rid of. In my view it would simply be safer not to go down that path at all.
The great advantage of a three-phase system is that you can convey more power with the same length of copper (as compared to a monophase system). That's because in a monophase system you must run two wires, one to convey power and the other for current return, the latter being just a physical requirement which brings no extra power transfer capacity to the transmission line. On the other hand, in a balanced three-phase system (i.e. one where the loads of the three phases are equal or nearly so), you can do away with the (fourth) neutral wire because current return for a particular phase is assured by the other two. So even though you run three wires (one for each phase), the three of them are actually transferring power, as opposed to a monophase system in which only one of the two conductors does so.
(It must be stressed that in order to do away with the neutral wire you must ensure the loads are balanced. This turns out to be quite doable in practice -- if the loads do not differ that much the neutral current is very small and the earth itself is able to close the circuit.)
So while it doesn't make much sense for non-industrial applications (you don't need three-phase power in your household, for instance), three-phase power makes total sense for long high voltage distribution lines because it is more economical.