As universal languages go, lojban is much more interesting conceptually.
Conceptually, yes, but Esperanto would be better in this case. Learning lojban requires you to really think about the grammar and memorize the roots. Esperanto, on the other hand, is Indo-European enough for speakers of English and Portuguese to learn quickly, and they don't need to learn the theory behind its sentence structure. As Linux has shown, people want to be able to use things without knowing exactly how they work, and this applies to languages too.
Is Apache okay because they don't actually say 'you can't take us to court'? Rather they say 'taking action terminates this license'. Consequently the patent holder is free to take action, as long as they wear the consequences of their Apache license being cancelled?
The Apache license is very different. It says that any contributors who add patented material implicitly give all Apache users the right to use the specific patents that they added. If you later sue Apache for using the patented material that you contributed, you have to give up the right to use Apache (and the patents granted by that use).
The MS contract, on the other hand, basically says "We can take all your patents and you can't sue us about it. Ever."
Then Microsoft should ask for licenses to the specific patents that Sony wants it to use in Windows. That way, Microsoft doesn't get to steal Sony's patent on a "system and method for inducing the destruction of a city by means of a giant robot" or any other patents totally irrelevant to supporting Sony's hardware.
And it is certainly an abuse of Microsoft's monopoly to demand the use of hardware companies' entire patent portfolios. Choosing to drop Microsoft is committing financial seppuku right now, although in a few years it might not be as big a deal. Microsoft would never be able to get away with a contract like that if manufacturers had an alternative other than bankruptcy.
To follow up on your analogy, you could not sign away their right to sue.
AFAIK, you can sign away your right to pursue a civil case, but you can't prevent a criminal case from being brought up. If you sign a contract saying you won't sue someone for anything they say about you, you can't later demand compensation for a damaged reputation. However, a contract allowing someone to stab you doesn't prevent them from being thrown in jail for it if the police catch them.
I think your other points are all right; I was just pointing out that there are really two cases. (Well, sort of three: you can allow someone by contract to do something otherwise illegal if you can legally transfer to them your right to do it. Since you can give away patents/cars, you can allow people to "steal" them, but stabbing yourself is a non-transferable right [if it's a right at all].)
A search for "google" only brings up pages on *.google.*, and google.com is near the end. Either they don't index many pages or they limit the number of results for each search. (It's also possible that they just hate google.)
I think it applies specifically to _corporate_ web sites. A company has to make its website accessible just like it has to make its stores accessible. That doesn't mean they have to provide everything in audio (that's what text-to-speech is for); it just means they have to provide their services in a way that meets certain accessibility standards. It isn't any different from having to build a ramp if your entrance isn't wheelchair-accessible, except making an accessible website is a lot easier and costs less (especially when someone does it for you for free).
I'm teaching myself Hebrew with Rosetta Stone's software, and it's a lot better than any of the books I've tried before. I haven't tried any other software to compare it to, but on a scale from 1 to awesome it's definitely somewhere past "good enough". (YMMV with Arabic, of course.)
But ad-games would be a sure sign that the email was spam. Most real messages have no need for interactive content, and spam has to look like a legitimate message to escape filters.
You can't really blame MS for not supporting CSS3; the standard is just a draft now, not a recommendation. Not supporting large areas of CSS2 (and even some of CSS1), on the other hand, is totally inexcusable.
Without understanding some kind of grammar, vocabulary size doesn't matter that much. You don't understand language unless you can figure out how the concepts in a sentence relate to each other. Language wouldn't work very well if you had to memorize a word for every possible idea you wanted to convey.
"DotGNU will be a complete replacement for.NET (and not just a Free Software implementation). The goals are to provide a reasonably compatible system and then improve on what Microsoft is offering."
In other words, they're trying to embrace and extend DotNET. Once they get enough of the.Net market, they can start innovating. There's certainly room to improve.Net, and with backwards-compatible free software there isn't much of a barrier to switching away from MS's version.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder, is it also going mark as plusungood all mail from organizations that don't use proper Newspeak?
As universal languages go, lojban is much more interesting conceptually.
Conceptually, yes, but Esperanto would be better in this case. Learning lojban requires you to really think about the grammar and memorize the roots. Esperanto, on the other hand, is Indo-European enough for speakers of English and Portuguese to learn quickly, and they don't need to learn the theory behind its sentence structure. As Linux has shown, people want to be able to use things without knowing exactly how they work, and this applies to languages too.
Is Apache okay because they don't actually say 'you can't take us to court'? Rather they say 'taking action terminates this license'. Consequently the patent holder is free to take action, as long as they wear the consequences of their Apache license being cancelled?
The Apache license is very different. It says that any contributors who add patented material implicitly give all Apache users the right to use the specific patents that they added. If you later sue Apache for using the patented material that you contributed, you have to give up the right to use Apache (and the patents granted by that use).
The MS contract, on the other hand, basically says "We can take all your patents and you can't sue us about it. Ever."
Then Microsoft should ask for licenses to the specific patents that Sony wants it to use in Windows. That way, Microsoft doesn't get to steal Sony's patent on a "system and method for inducing the destruction of a city by means of a giant robot" or any other patents totally irrelevant to supporting Sony's hardware.
And it is certainly an abuse of Microsoft's monopoly to demand the use of hardware companies' entire patent portfolios. Choosing to drop Microsoft is committing financial seppuku right now, although in a few years it might not be as big a deal. Microsoft would never be able to get away with a contract like that if manufacturers had an alternative other than bankruptcy.
To follow up on your analogy, you could not sign away their right to sue.
AFAIK, you can sign away your right to pursue a civil case, but you can't prevent a criminal case from being brought up. If you sign a contract saying you won't sue someone for anything they say about you, you can't later demand compensation for a damaged reputation. However, a contract allowing someone to stab you doesn't prevent them from being thrown in jail for it if the police catch them.
I think your other points are all right; I was just pointing out that there are really two cases. (Well, sort of three: you can allow someone by contract to do something otherwise illegal if you can legally transfer to them your right to do it. Since you can give away patents/cars, you can allow people to "steal" them, but stabbing yourself is a non-transferable right [if it's a right at all].)
A search for "google" only brings up pages on *.google.*, and google.com is near the end. Either they don't index many pages or they limit the number of results for each search. (It's also possible that they just hate google.)
I think it applies specifically to _corporate_ web sites. A company has to make its website accessible just like it has to make its stores accessible. That doesn't mean they have to provide everything in audio (that's what text-to-speech is for); it just means they have to provide their services in a way that meets certain accessibility standards. It isn't any different from having to build a ramp if your entrance isn't wheelchair-accessible, except making an accessible website is a lot easier and costs less (especially when someone does it for you for free).
You can do that in C++ with operator overloading if you're willing to give up the "in" keyword.
I'm teaching myself Hebrew with Rosetta Stone's software, and it's a lot better than any of the books I've tried before. I haven't tried any other software to compare it to, but on a scale from 1 to awesome it's definitely somewhere past "good enough". (YMMV with Arabic, of course.)
But ad-games would be a sure sign that the email was spam. Most real messages have no need for interactive content, and spam has to look like a legitimate message to escape filters.
You can't really blame MS for not supporting CSS3; the standard is just a draft now, not a recommendation. Not supporting large areas of CSS2 (and even some of CSS1), on the other hand, is totally inexcusable.
Without understanding some kind of grammar, vocabulary size doesn't matter that much. You don't understand language unless you can figure out how the concepts in a sentence relate to each other. Language wouldn't work very well if you had to memorize a word for every possible idea you wanted to convey.
"DotGNU will be a complete replacement for .NET (and not just a Free Software implementation). The goals are to provide a reasonably compatible system and then improve on what Microsoft is offering."
.Net market, they can start innovating. There's certainly room to improve .Net, and with backwards-compatible free software there isn't much of a barrier to switching away from MS's version.
In other words, they're trying to embrace and extend DotNET. Once they get enough of the