His point is simple: if you have a previously profitable business model, and it suddenly becomes unprofitable, you are shit out of luck. For example: at one point, much of the economy of Hawaii was dependent on cane sugar. This sugar was being sold on the mainland, primarily, because let's face it, there aren't a lot of people in Hawaii, relatively speaking. It wasn't long before some enterprising farmers realised that sugar cane grows remarkably well in California, and that by producing it in California, they saved big bucks on transportation and labour costs. The result? Cheaper sugar, and they undercut the Hawaiians.
Now, this sucks big time for Hawaii: nowadays, cane sugar plantations are rare, and the industry that once held up the entire Hawaiian economy disappeared essentially overnight. Sucks to be them.
What did not happen in this scenario is, the Hawaiian sugar plantation owners didn't lobby congress to pass laws making the cultivation of sugar cane illegal in California. But if you extend this analogy to the RIAA, that's exactly what they'd like to do.
Here's the situation: DRM is unworkable, for technical reasons, for the same reason that software copy-protection has been unworkable and will continue to be so. The people have already woken up to the convenience of digital media, however, and are not going to roll back the clocks and carry around a bulky discman when an iPod or similar can hold so much more music and play for so much longer. This is simple common sense. Further, we're purchasing everything else on the internet these days, and the average consumer wants to purchase music this way too.
But because DRM is unworkable, the record companies feel that distributing music on-line is inviting copyright infringement. So they resist the migration. The result? A great demand for on-line music, already encoded in MP3 format for ease of use on the iPod and similar, and a very limited RIAA-sanctioned supply.
Well, the way the free market normally works is, I see that consumers want the media, and so I start my own business to take advantage of the high demand and low supply, and make money hand over fist. That's how business works. There's nothing stopping me from starting a CD business, for example: I can purchase a bunch of CDs in bulk and resell them. But because we're dealing with digital media, this avenue isn't open to me, at least not legally. I can't sell a bunch of Britney Spears on-line in MP3 format, because those tracks don't "belong" to me in the sense that I don't have copyright.
So the result is, illegal or questionably legal sites like allofmp3.com do it anyway, and make money hand over fist. People are willing to pay for music if the price is right; 99 cents for an AAC track with Fairplay that will only play on one particular kind of portable music player and will suddenly cease to be functional after your operating system is upgraded or re-installed 5 times, on the other hand, is unsurprisingly much less popular.
The sick thing is, the RIAA could absolutely afford to match allofmp3.com's services and prices and be just as profitable as they are -- more so, in fact, because the fact that they are legally sanctioned and don't require transactions in rubles would make the vast majority of consumers far more willing to buy, and they have the infrastructure required do the sales on a much larger, international scale.
But they won't, because they're married to their extremely high margins. It's amazing, really. They make a ton and a half of money, and the prospect they face is making less money, not no money, and so their response is luddite lobbying of legislatures around the world to somehow make their outdated business model sustainable. But this is a stopgap measure: there are songs and albums that people want to buy in CD form, and there are catchy singles and tunes that people would rather get as an MP3. Saying "no you can't" to the iPod generation isn't going to work.
Given that my odds of being killed by a terrorist are several magnitudes less than my odds of being killed driving my car, which I do everyday, I think I can live with the risk.
I'll take freedom, please. Do the words of Patrick Henry mean nothing to you? What is wrong with this country?
The fact that the USSR, Cuba, and China are/were not democratic doesn't mean that democracy and communism are incompatible, anymore than the large number of capitalist dictatorships around mean that capitalism and totalitarianism go hand in hand.
Because some people think of "evolution" and the "big bang" as being questionable (I don't), it's worth pointing out that gravity, too, is just a theory. Just to underscore that "theory" in a scientific context means something different than it does in a non-scientific context.
In such situations, you should add "(sic)" after the mispelled or ungrammatical words in the quotiation. That's the established way of letting your readership know that the error was in the original quotiation and not in your transcription.
does anyone agree that this needs to be stopped before it becomes a reality?
This is the sort of ridiculous, slippery-slope argument that the government loves to throw in our faces when trying to justify the erosion of our civil rights and the wanton military spending that are ostensibly necessary "because of the terrorists."
There are not going to be actual "gangs" of Islamic fundamentalists running around in your neighborhood, killing people in front of your kids. First, there are not actually enough fundamentalists to make this happen. Second, we do have a police force, you know -- it's their job to deal with gangs. You could argue that they don't do a particularly good job of that in some parts of LA, but to be honest, even there is nothing like it is in the movies. People with families live in Compton. There are gangs, to be sure, but even there, people killing others in front of your kids is an uncommon occurence, not an everyday affair.
Let's talk about a "reasoned" response: 3000 people died on 9/11, that's all. It's tragic, but come on. How many people die in car crashes every year? The reason people keep bringing it up is because, every year, nearly 40 thousand people do!
Here's the reality of the situation: 6 years later, we've accomplished nothing that is actually relevant to 9/11. Osama Bin Laden is still at large, as much as the government tries to understate his importance. No replacement for the WTC is on the horizon, despite much in the way of planning.
However, we have used the event to justify tremendous, unreasonable spending on cockamamy schemes like this one that will do exactly nothing to help prevent terrorism. Seriously, the people that came up with the 9/11 plan and executed it were brilliant, from a logistical, strategic, and creativity perspective. Do you really think they're a one-trick pony? That now that they've done 9/11, the only possible terrorist attack they can think of involves running a plane into a building? Because that seems to be the way our administration thinks.
We've gone to the ends of the earth to make flying a pain, hurting our economy and annoying our passengers. And for what? To prevent another 9/11? Why not just blow up a building? Why bother with the plane? We're expecting it, it would be stupid.
Maybe George Bush was right, after all -- maybe they did attack us because they "hate our freedom." Lamentably, our response seems to be to throw our freedom away to appease them.
Here's a wild thought: how about just ignoring them?
Re:Paper trails are worse than useless
on
Who won?
·
· Score: 1
If it shows one thing on the paper receipt and another on the screen, or the wrong thing on both, you have an easily verifiable malfunction of the machine. It's certainly true that complaining to a poll-worker might make your vote non-secret, but at what cost? The main concern of everyone involved would be the fact that the voting machine appears to have been hacked, not what your vote was. Far better than the current scenario, where no one knows and no one can verify.
Re:...Unless you have a recount
on
Who won?
·
· Score: 1
No one (that I'm aware of) is seriously suggesting giving voters receipts. It's dangerous, because it allows people other than yourself to verify how you voted. The whole point of a secret ballot is to guarantee that you are able to easily have political views different from your employer, your parents, the local police, whomever.
If you were given a receipt with how you voted written on it, your employer (for example) could conceivably require you to display that receipt to him. Of course, we could make this illegal (it probably already is), but that wouldn't stop it from happening... after all, most people don't want to lose their jobs, and so they wouldn't report it.
Coercive voting is a real problem and having vote receipts makes it easy. It's also, as you said, completely useless, because there's no guarantee that the receipt the voting machine printed out is even accurate.
I think the confusion that is evident in this thread comes from people talking about how "ATMs have a paper trail -- why don't voting machines?" and people who have never taken a close look at how an ATM works from the inside assume that by "paper trail" what is meant is "receipt". Actually, an ATM keeps a roll of all transactions printed out on the inside, to facilitate auditing.
Re:Paper trails are worse than useless
on
Who won?
·
· Score: 1
You. Most voting machines I've used (admittedly not Diebold ones) display the printed result (through a plexiglass window) next to the screen of the voting machine. Then, after you've confirmed your vote, it clears the screen and scrolls your receipt away. You do not get a copy of the receipt.
Of course, I live in Silicon Valley, where awareness of these issues is high, so it's to be expected that their voting machines are less problematic.
You're right, of course. You know, looking around the internet on this subject yesterday, I came across something amusing: the "Celsiheit" scale. Apparently I'm not the only one who used Farenheit for high temperatures and Celsius for low ones -- in Britain, which has been slowly converting to metric for nearly forty years now, it's apparently common (or was) for meterologists to do exactly that on TV no less! What's worse, they didn't tell you what scale they were using. They'd say things like "It's going to be 2 degrees out today" and mean Celsius, but "It's 75 today" and mean Farenheit.
This mix of systems was christened the Celsiheit scale by critics. It apparently is quite widespread. In case you're wondering, I'm not trying to make any point, just sharing something I thought was amusing with you. Google for Celsiheit for more information, if you're curious.:)
Um, who cares about the data CD? How is that even relevant? Aren't we talking about stripping an iTunes track of its DRM?
AAC and MP3 are not the same format, anyway, so even if it were possible to do this in one step, you'd still be decoding the AAC to raw PCM audio, and then feeding that into an MP3 encoder, and burning that image onto the CD. The only thing that's changed is where you do the burning (with an audio CD, you burn at the PCM stage). Either way you end up with an audio file encoded twice with a lossy encoder.
I'm American, I grew up with imperial, and with Farenheit. I see Farenheit everywhere, on the news, on temperature displays in malls, everywhere. My parents are European, and I spent a certain amount of time in Europe -- much less time than I spent in the US -- and centigrade made automatic sense to me, despite being exposed to it less. Here in the Bay Area, I'm exposed to a lot of temperatures in the 70-90 F range (although not recently, it's been bloody cold) and so I have a pretty good notion of what temperatures those are.
But with colder temperatures, I (and many other people who don't necessarily associate this with Celsius specifically) tend to use freezing as a base point. As in, "it's below freezing" or "freezing" or "just above freezing". From the beginning, when we went skiing, someone saying it's 20 degrees F or 38 degrees F or whatever was difficult to parse. -5 C, though? 8 C? These small numbers made it clear that it was fucking cold.
It's clear to me that had I grown up in Minnesota, things would likely be different. It's entirely due to the fact that I wasn't often exposed to low temperatures that I never got an intuitive grasp for what those temperatures meant on the Farenheit scale. But here's the thing: having had no experience with either scale at low temperatures, and having been chiefly exposed to Farenheit in my youth, I still found centigrade more intuitive for low degrees. So for many years I used a mixed system -- Farenheit for California summer temperatures, because the numbers were big and served to emphasize the heat in my mind, and centigrade for temperatures near freezing, or pretty much any time I felt cold.
Later, living abroad, I got used to centigrade for high temperatures too. It was easy, there was no real need to convert for me, because of the intervals I mentioned -- that and remembering that body temperature was 37. For many expats living in the US, however, Farenheit remains stubbornly difficult, and many of them persist in converting Farenheit degrees into centigrade. And when someone says to me, it's 45 F outside, I have absolutely no idea how cold that is, and I need to convert it to celsius. I'm American!
Pounds, feet, miles, these things I'm fluent in, and in fact, although I prefer the metric system from an elegance standpoint, I'll admit that I'm more comfortable with feet than meters, pounds than kilos, and miles than kilometers. But not Farenheit. Farenheit I just can't get to make sense, and I grew up with it.
I know the plural of anecdote is not data, but to me this serves to illustrate that Celsius is objectively simpler. None of my expat friends when I was living abroad could stand Farenheit after about 2 years. I'm telling you, Farenheit is borked.
I see this argument repeated a lot, but the truth is, very few people can actually feel the difference between 65 and 66 degrees Farenheit. Whereas 22 degrees C and 23 degrees C feel different (although not drastically), a 1 degree F difference is so subtle that only the hypersensitive can reliably distinguish it.
If you ask most non-Americans what the temperature is, they're generally be able to estimate it with a 1 degree error margin, and they often nail it exactly, just by feel. The error margin for Farenheit degrees is generally closer to plus or minus 3. Sure, 73 degrees Farenheit is more "accurate" than 23 degrees C, but what does that accuracy matter if you can't actually feel it?
Plus, centigrade lends itself to very nice 10 degree intervals. Anything less than 0 is freezing, ok, we all know that. 0-9 is cold, 10-19 is temperate, 20-29 is warm to hot (think spring), 30-39 is bloody hot, and anything above 40 is Saudi Arabia/Death Valley stuff. So if you go out and it's a warmish spring day, without even having a good feeling for degrees C you can say, it's probably in the 20s. On the cooler side of a spring day? Low twenties.
Farenheit, because of its smaller intervals, doesn't work as intuitively, lending itself more to 15 degree intervals. Further, Farenheit is really stupid for cold temperatures. Let's face it, freezing (admittedly unlike boiling) is actually an important temperature point for humans. Stuff happens at 0 C. That cold rain turns to slush and snow. There starts being ice on the roads. Freezing makes a good base point. 0 degrees F? This temperature is completely useless to everyone. Why make the basepoint of scale a useless point?
I admit that 100 degrees C is not very useful outside of scientific applications, and Farenheit's "100 degrees is body temperature" idea isn't a bad one, for what it's worth. But overall, 100 degrees is a much less important point on a scale than 0, for the simple reason that below 0 things are negative, which really serves to emphasize.
That's true, you don't lose any quality if you use a lossless codec to encode. But lossless codecs produce huge files -- there's nothing wrong with this if you're encoding from a high quality master, but in your case, you're producing it from a master that was previously lossy encoded. So, you get exactly the same quality as the DRM-encumbered AAC you purchased, certainly, but at 3 or 4 times the file size, and the quality is still inferior to what you would have had had you just purchased the CD instead.
Wow, dude, it's amazing how incredibly misinformed you are about how all this works. Not only are you completely wrong about essentially everything you say, but you apparently don't have the reading comprehension to understand what the GP said in the first place, and, to top it all off, you're rude and condescending, all while looking like a fool to the vast majority of Slashdot readers, who do know that repeated use of a lossy encoder (hint: CDs don't store music in MP3 or AAC format) results in considerable loss of quality.
There are a number of concepts that you should become familiar with before you spout off: first, what is a lossy encoding? What is a lossless encoding? Which is MP3, which is AAC, and which is used by a CD? Why is the concept relevent?
What does "128" mean? You don't seem to understand. What's the difference between ABR, CBR, and VBR?
You'd better spend a bit of time thinking about this before you put on your Apple Fanboy hat and try ineffectually to flame someone who clearly understands all of these things, when it's blatantly clear that you do not.
There's nothing wrong with being ignorant, per se. It's being condescending and ignorant that really makes you look like a fool and a jerk.
One nitpick: "goodwill" has a very specific definition in accounting and one cannot write whatever one wants off as goodwill. "Goodwill" comes from the acquisition of one company by another. Suppose Company A makes a bid for company B. Now, suppose that the total value of Company B's assets is 10 million dollars, but because Company B is worth more to Company A as a going concern, that is, worth more than the sum of its parts (assets), Company A actually purchases it for 15 million dollars. Then an accounting problem has presented itself: after the acquisition, when Company B's assets are merged in with Company A's, there is a discrepency of 5 million dollars. This "value in excess of base asset value" is termed goodwill. It is generally amortised or re-evaluated, depending on whether one is following FASB rules (US GAAP) or IASB rules.
FWIW, and I don't know if this was the GP's intention, but in science 2000mA is not the same as 2A -- the former is 4 significant figures and the latter only 1. So 2000mA is in reality 2000mA plus or minus some error quantity (3 or 5, perhaps) in the last digit, ie, 1997mA ~ 2003mA. 2A is the same, which could mean 0 to 4A, a rather large difference. So it would be more correct to say that 2000mA is equivalent to 2.000A.
In fact, this latter notation would be more correct, as scientific notation generally requires that there be only one digit in front of the decimal point. When SI prefixes are being used, the SI prefix which minimises the number of digits before the decimal point should be chosen.
I don't know, I think that any question is valid. It's just that some questions don't have answers (or at least, answers we can verify.) I personally don't care much about why we're here, nor do I care much about whether there's a god or not. But some people do. I think it's important to respect them enough to allow them to ask such questions.
You're completely wrong about stock not financing a company. In fact, that's the whole point. There are basically two ways of financing a company: equity (stock) and debt (bonds), and for any company there is an optimal mixure of both.
You seem to be vaguely aware that when you buy stock on a secondary market (like the NYSE or NASDAQ) you aren't giving money to the company, and that's true: companies only get your money when you buy the stock directly from them, which means in practice that you are either buying their treasury shares or newly issued equity. So when I go and buy stock I am not directly financing a company. This seems to be your main point, though, and that confuses me. Because bonds are not normally bought on primary markets either -- you're usually also purchasing them from an underwriter, or on a secondary bond market. Acting like there's a huge difference between stocks and bonds from this perspective doesn't make sense.
So once we've established that most of the time you buy stocks or bonds on the open market you aren't buying from the company directly, the natural question is, how does the trading of stock by non-company hands affect the wealth of the issuing company? Certainly, if a company issues a bunch of shares in an IPO at a price of 10 cents per share, and subsequent trading of said stock on the NYSE boosts the price per share ten-fold to a dollar per share, the company that sold the stock originally still only has 10 cents per share sold in capital as a result of their equity transaction. But you're ignoring capital gains -- because the company can issue stock whenever it wants, at no extra cost to it. As long as the amount of new stock it issues does not constitute a large percentage of shares outstanding, there will only be a negligible effect on the market price of the stock in the secondary markets when new equity is issued. So for example, if there are currently 10,000 shares outstanding, I can issue 100 more without materially affecting the market price of the stock. So if I previously was only able to sell stock at 10 cents per share, and can now sell it at 1 dollar per share, I've clearly gained. So the increase in the market value of a company's stock translates into an increase in leverage for the company: they can raise more money subsequently as a result of their higher stock price.
Do not forget, either, that a company may buy back its stock, and companies often do so. If a company is relatively certain that its stock is going to go up, it can buy back its own stock as an investment, and sell it back at a higher market rate in the future.
And speaking of buy backs, you seem to be conflating two distinct concepts -- buying back outstanding shares of stock and a stock split. These are not the same. The latter is purely an accounting practice, and produces no long term net increase in wealth for the firm. When a stock split occurs, the amount of shares outstanding is increased (decreased) by a proportion p and the value of each share is decreased (increased) by 1/p, resulting in no net increase or decrease in value for the firm or the individual shareholders. If you owned 100 dollars of walmart stock before the split, after the split, you still own 100 dollars worth of walmart stock. You also still own exactly the same percentage of outstanding shares as you did before, so your ownership of walmart is unaffected. Evidence has shown that a stock split usually results in a short term increase in stock price, because of something economists call signaling theory: investors often interpret a stock split as indication that something good is going to happen, and act accordingly, boosting the effective price of the stock. But if that something good doesn't materialise over a relatively short timespan, the stock price returns to its previous (effective) levels.
So why have a stock split at all? Well, many CFOs feel that there is an optimal price range for stock. They feel that if the price is too low, investors will
The US was also the only reasonably populous developed country to come out of World War II unscathed. It is worth noting that this was, coincidentally, also the time that we emerged as a world superpower.
While I agree that this story is stupid, I think you're oversimplifying the situation. As for everyone having the ability to become a millionaire in the US, there was a study in the Economist a few years ago that showed that social mobility in Europe was greater than in the US (ie, the average European dies wealthier than the average American does.)
The Economist is not what I would call a liberal newspaper.
While I agree that the write-up's use of "pseudoscience" was meant to be flamebait, pseudoscience most certainly has an objective definition, and it doesn't involve the assumption that science is whatever the majority says. Science by definition is a set of theories built up inductively from empirical evidence based on the scientific method, which states that any new model must be falsifiable and better represent available data than the old model does, with a general preference for simplicity and logic.
Pseudoscience is anything masquerading as science which does not fit this definition. "Pseudo" comes from Greek and means fake or false. It's really fairly logical.
Religion is not pseudoscience by definition, because most religious people know full well that religion and science are not the same thing and in fact attempt to explain fundamentally different concepts. This is why, for example, many of the world's greatest scientific minds have been devoutly religious and have seen no contradiction in this. However, when one attempts to equate science and religion, or advance religious explanations as competing scientific theories, the use of the word pseudoscience becomes appropriate.
In the case of "creationist science" (their term, not mine) you have an explanation that fails to qualify as science on many different levels. This does not mean you shouldn't believe in it, but it's important to recognise that you are accepting it as an article of faith -- faith being the definining center of most religion. When you attempt to make creationism into science by suggesting it as a competing theory for (in this case) the origin of man and animals, you are, as per the scientific method, suggesting that it is a better theory than evolution for the data we have, and that it is falsifiable. It is not falsifiable, evidently. The religious man sees Genesis as canon, and does not question its veracity -- but questioning the veracity of anything, including evolution, is at the heart of science. Ultimately, science cannot address the existence or non-existence of God, because there is no evidence either way. In fact, taking the leap of faith, accepting Jesus as your Lord and Saviour, well, these things are sort of central to the Christian experience. In my mind -- and I am admittedly not a fundamentalist -- if God's existance were scientifically verifiable, no reversal of the original sin would truly be possible. But that's theology, not science.
Remember too, and this is important, the questions that science and religion aim to address. They are not the same, and it is wise not to conflate them. Science addresses the how, and never the why -- by science's very nature, asking why will always lead to an infinite regression, and so scientists avoid asking why, and limit themselves instead to how. Science is misrepresented to the layman by the media in this respect, which is why I think there is often so much conflict between spirituality and science. For example, when Newton developed his theory of gravitation, and when Einstein later refined it, these men (religious, both of them) were not asking "why" does the apple fall or the earth rotate the sun, but rather they were explaining "how", quantitatively, such a thing occured, and how one could go about predicting it. The why, well, that's a much more difficult question. If you think on this a moment, you'll realise that saying "Two objects are attracted to each other by a force proportional to their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them" does not in anyway explain "why" this effect exists. Indeed, science cannot explain why gravity exists, or why we exist, or what our role is, or how we fit into the greater cosmic plan, or if there is such a plan.
Taking evolution, the person who answers "Why are we here" with "Because we evolved from apes" has misunderstood the question. His answer, at best, explains how the human species came to be, but even then, it explains only the last ste
You're on crack. It is true that Stalin sent a lot of people coming back from the Great Patriotic War to the gulag, but most of them were generals, war heroes, and similar. The reasoning was not because life was "so good" in the West, but rather because these people had possibly had contact with rightist and or imperialist elements in Western Europe (not quality of life, but other people) and because their hero status conferred a great deal of credit upon them in the eyes of the Russian people, it was feared that their ability to do damage as spies or their ability to influence the government would be unduly large. Not that I'm condoning this, mind you.
But to say that they were afraid of people in the East seeing "how good" life in the West was at that time is pure cold war propaganda. The West had just come out of the great depression, which at the time was believed (by western economists) to be a result of the inherent instability of markets. A great deal of thought was put into how to prevent that sort of thing -- Keynes made his name doing just that. The one nation that was essentially unaffected by the Great Depression was the Soviet Union -- their economic growth (which was huge under Stalin) chugged along just fine, and most Soviet leaders and economists believed that it was only a matter of time before the West fell back into another great depression. They were wrong, but they didn't know it. Incidentally, much of the "New Deal" (which is largely credited with the creation of the middle class in the US) was consciously modeled on the Soviet social model, precisely because they seemed to be immune to economic depression.
Any Soviet soldier in Eastern Europe (the British and the Americans met them in Berlin, lest we forget) would have seen mostly undeveloped, war torn nations filled with masses of refugees, along with the aftermath of the Holocaust. Life in the Soviet Union was not good under Stalin, to be sure, but what little of war torn Europe they were exposed to was not enough to make most of them doubt the rightness of the propaganda they'd been exposed to. And let's not forget, either, that most of the Europe the Russians were exposed to they annexed.
Ok, if I were you, I'd install the scim, scim-pinyin, and scim-gtk2-immodule packages (I use Debian, not Ubuntu, so there may be some differences in package names, but I sort of doubt it.) Most GNOME apps will immediately have access to the input method without you doing anything else because of the scim-gtk2-immodule, I think. However, to make it work in generic X apps, you will need to do some configuring.
Basically, you'll want to somehow do the following on gnome startup (I don't use GNOME, I like my old-school window managers):
# this tells apps you run to use the SCIM input method export XMODIFIERS='@im=SCIM'
# You probably don't need to set the following, I think GNOME handles your # locale settings... export LANG=en_US.UTF-8 export LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8
# This tells GTK2 to use the scim immodule... under GNOME you might not need to do this, it might do it # automatically. Actually, you don't need to bother with the immodule stuff at all if you don't want, # as gtk also understands XIM (all X apps do). export GTK_IM_MODULE=scim
# This runs SCIM as a daemon, you need to do this part exec scim -d & # This sets up SCIM for the immodule stuff, you may or may not need to do this exec scim -f socket -ns socket -c simple -d &
SCIM's smart pinyin input method really is one of the best input methods I've seen on any operating system, and my guess is that your wife and her friends will find it very usable. You can make it even more usable by configuring it (there's a GUI configuration tool) to use the same keystroke commands as the input method she uses on Windows. If she's a southerner, she'll probably appreciate SCIM's retroflex ambiguity settings (so, for example, she can enter si for characters whose pronunciation is actually shi) and also maybe n/l ambiguity settings. It learns intelligently and picks characters accordingly. It's very high quality software.
I admit that having to futz with scripts and such is a pain -- maybe nowadays there's a way to not do that, but I don't know because I'm still stuck in the 70s:) -- but once you have SCIM setup properly, installing new scim packages (there are tons for lots of different languages) will work automagically, so think of it as a one-time annoyance.
Also, make sure that you install MS's (and maybe Apple's if you have them) fonts, in particular SimSun and SimHei, because there really aren't any readable Free Asian fonts, unfortunately.
Slashdot Mirror
His point is simple: if you have a previously profitable business model, and it suddenly becomes unprofitable, you are shit out of luck. For example: at one point, much of the economy of Hawaii was dependent on cane sugar. This sugar was being sold on the mainland, primarily, because let's face it, there aren't a lot of people in Hawaii, relatively speaking. It wasn't long before some enterprising farmers realised that sugar cane grows remarkably well in California, and that by producing it in California, they saved big bucks on transportation and labour costs. The result? Cheaper sugar, and they undercut the Hawaiians.
Now, this sucks big time for Hawaii: nowadays, cane sugar plantations are rare, and the industry that once held up the entire Hawaiian economy disappeared essentially overnight. Sucks to be them.
What did not happen in this scenario is, the Hawaiian sugar plantation owners didn't lobby congress to pass laws making the cultivation of sugar cane illegal in California. But if you extend this analogy to the RIAA, that's exactly what they'd like to do.
Here's the situation: DRM is unworkable, for technical reasons, for the same reason that software copy-protection has been unworkable and will continue to be so. The people have already woken up to the convenience of digital media, however, and are not going to roll back the clocks and carry around a bulky discman when an iPod or similar can hold so much more music and play for so much longer. This is simple common sense. Further, we're purchasing everything else on the internet these days, and the average consumer wants to purchase music this way too.
But because DRM is unworkable, the record companies feel that distributing music on-line is inviting copyright infringement. So they resist the migration. The result? A great demand for on-line music, already encoded in MP3 format for ease of use on the iPod and similar, and a very limited RIAA-sanctioned supply.
Well, the way the free market normally works is, I see that consumers want the media, and so I start my own business to take advantage of the high demand and low supply, and make money hand over fist. That's how business works. There's nothing stopping me from starting a CD business, for example: I can purchase a bunch of CDs in bulk and resell them. But because we're dealing with digital media, this avenue isn't open to me, at least not legally. I can't sell a bunch of Britney Spears on-line in MP3 format, because those tracks don't "belong" to me in the sense that I don't have copyright.
So the result is, illegal or questionably legal sites like allofmp3.com do it anyway, and make money hand over fist. People are willing to pay for music if the price is right; 99 cents for an AAC track with Fairplay that will only play on one particular kind of portable music player and will suddenly cease to be functional after your operating system is upgraded or re-installed 5 times, on the other hand, is unsurprisingly much less popular.
The sick thing is, the RIAA could absolutely afford to match allofmp3.com's services and prices and be just as profitable as they are -- more so, in fact, because the fact that they are legally sanctioned and don't require transactions in rubles would make the vast majority of consumers far more willing to buy, and they have the infrastructure required do the sales on a much larger, international scale.
But they won't, because they're married to their extremely high margins. It's amazing, really. They make a ton and a half of money, and the prospect they face is making less money, not no money, and so their response is luddite lobbying of legislatures around the world to somehow make their outdated business model sustainable. But this is a stopgap measure: there are songs and albums that people want to buy in CD form, and there are catchy singles and tunes that people would rather get as an MP3. Saying "no you can't" to the iPod generation isn't going to work.
All
Given that my odds of being killed by a terrorist are several magnitudes less than my odds of being killed driving my car, which I do everyday, I think I can live with the risk.
I'll take freedom, please. Do the words of Patrick Henry mean nothing to you? What is wrong with this country?
I believe the reason Kerala is considered communist is because the Communist Party of India has majority control in that state, see for example a list of the current members of the Kerala Legislative Assembly. In fact, when the state of Kerala was formed in 1956, the rather famous E.M.S. Namboodiripad, a lifelong Marxist, headed the government.
The fact that the USSR, Cuba, and China are/were not democratic doesn't mean that democracy and communism are incompatible, anymore than the large number of capitalist dictatorships around mean that capitalism and totalitarianism go hand in hand.
Because some people think of "evolution" and the "big bang" as being questionable (I don't), it's worth pointing out that gravity, too, is just a theory. Just to underscore that "theory" in a scientific context means something different than it does in a non-scientific context.
In such situations, you should add "(sic)" after the mispelled or ungrammatical words in the quotiation. That's the established way of letting your readership know that the error was in the original quotiation and not in your transcription.
This is the sort of ridiculous, slippery-slope argument that the government loves to throw in our faces when trying to justify the erosion of our civil rights and the wanton military spending that are ostensibly necessary "because of the terrorists."
There are not going to be actual "gangs" of Islamic fundamentalists running around in your neighborhood, killing people in front of your kids. First, there are not actually enough fundamentalists to make this happen. Second, we do have a police force, you know -- it's their job to deal with gangs. You could argue that they don't do a particularly good job of that in some parts of LA, but to be honest, even there is nothing like it is in the movies. People with families live in Compton. There are gangs, to be sure, but even there, people killing others in front of your kids is an uncommon occurence, not an everyday affair.
Let's talk about a "reasoned" response: 3000 people died on 9/11, that's all. It's tragic, but come on. How many people die in car crashes every year? The reason people keep bringing it up is because, every year, nearly 40 thousand people do!
Here's the reality of the situation: 6 years later, we've accomplished nothing that is actually relevant to 9/11. Osama Bin Laden is still at large, as much as the government tries to understate his importance. No replacement for the WTC is on the horizon, despite much in the way of planning.
However, we have used the event to justify tremendous, unreasonable spending on cockamamy schemes like this one that will do exactly nothing to help prevent terrorism. Seriously, the people that came up with the 9/11 plan and executed it were brilliant, from a logistical, strategic, and creativity perspective. Do you really think they're a one-trick pony? That now that they've done 9/11, the only possible terrorist attack they can think of involves running a plane into a building? Because that seems to be the way our administration thinks.
We've gone to the ends of the earth to make flying a pain, hurting our economy and annoying our passengers. And for what? To prevent another 9/11? Why not just blow up a building? Why bother with the plane? We're expecting it, it would be stupid.
Maybe George Bush was right, after all -- maybe they did attack us because they "hate our freedom." Lamentably, our response seems to be to throw our freedom away to appease them.
Here's a wild thought: how about just ignoring them?
If it shows one thing on the paper receipt and another on the screen, or the wrong thing on both, you have an easily verifiable malfunction of the machine. It's certainly true that complaining to a poll-worker might make your vote non-secret, but at what cost? The main concern of everyone involved would be the fact that the voting machine appears to have been hacked, not what your vote was. Far better than the current scenario, where no one knows and no one can verify.
No one (that I'm aware of) is seriously suggesting giving voters receipts. It's dangerous, because it allows people other than yourself to verify how you voted. The whole point of a secret ballot is to guarantee that you are able to easily have political views different from your employer, your parents, the local police, whomever.
If you were given a receipt with how you voted written on it, your employer (for example) could conceivably require you to display that receipt to him. Of course, we could make this illegal (it probably already is), but that wouldn't stop it from happening... after all, most people don't want to lose their jobs, and so they wouldn't report it.
Coercive voting is a real problem and having vote receipts makes it easy. It's also, as you said, completely useless, because there's no guarantee that the receipt the voting machine printed out is even accurate.
I think the confusion that is evident in this thread comes from people talking about how "ATMs have a paper trail -- why don't voting machines?" and people who have never taken a close look at how an ATM works from the inside assume that by "paper trail" what is meant is "receipt". Actually, an ATM keeps a roll of all transactions printed out on the inside, to facilitate auditing.
I described such a system in my other post in this thread.
You. Most voting machines I've used (admittedly not Diebold ones) display the printed result (through a plexiglass window) next to the screen of the voting machine. Then, after you've confirmed your vote, it clears the screen and scrolls your receipt away. You do not get a copy of the receipt.
Of course, I live in Silicon Valley, where awareness of these issues is high, so it's to be expected that their voting machines are less problematic.
You're right, of course. You know, looking around the internet on this subject yesterday, I came across something amusing: the "Celsiheit" scale. Apparently I'm not the only one who used Farenheit for high temperatures and Celsius for low ones -- in Britain, which has been slowly converting to metric for nearly forty years now, it's apparently common (or was) for meterologists to do exactly that on TV no less! What's worse, they didn't tell you what scale they were using. They'd say things like "It's going to be 2 degrees out today" and mean Celsius, but "It's 75 today" and mean Farenheit.
:)
This mix of systems was christened the Celsiheit scale by critics. It apparently is quite widespread. In case you're wondering, I'm not trying to make any point, just sharing something I thought was amusing with you. Google for Celsiheit for more information, if you're curious.
Um, who cares about the data CD? How is that even relevant? Aren't we talking about stripping an iTunes track of its DRM?
AAC and MP3 are not the same format, anyway, so even if it were possible to do this in one step, you'd still be decoding the AAC to raw PCM audio, and then feeding that into an MP3 encoder, and burning that image onto the CD. The only thing that's changed is where you do the burning (with an audio CD, you burn at the PCM stage). Either way you end up with an audio file encoded twice with a lossy encoder.
They're called lossy for a reason, you know.
I'm American, I grew up with imperial, and with Farenheit. I see Farenheit everywhere, on the news, on temperature displays in malls, everywhere. My parents are European, and I spent a certain amount of time in Europe -- much less time than I spent in the US -- and centigrade made automatic sense to me, despite being exposed to it less. Here in the Bay Area, I'm exposed to a lot of temperatures in the 70-90 F range (although not recently, it's been bloody cold) and so I have a pretty good notion of what temperatures those are.
But with colder temperatures, I (and many other people who don't necessarily associate this with Celsius specifically) tend to use freezing as a base point. As in, "it's below freezing" or "freezing" or "just above freezing". From the beginning, when we went skiing, someone saying it's 20 degrees F or 38 degrees F or whatever was difficult to parse. -5 C, though? 8 C? These small numbers made it clear that it was fucking cold.
It's clear to me that had I grown up in Minnesota, things would likely be different. It's entirely due to the fact that I wasn't often exposed to low temperatures that I never got an intuitive grasp for what those temperatures meant on the Farenheit scale. But here's the thing: having had no experience with either scale at low temperatures, and having been chiefly exposed to Farenheit in my youth, I still found centigrade more intuitive for low degrees. So for many years I used a mixed system -- Farenheit for California summer temperatures, because the numbers were big and served to emphasize the heat in my mind, and centigrade for temperatures near freezing, or pretty much any time I felt cold.
Later, living abroad, I got used to centigrade for high temperatures too. It was easy, there was no real need to convert for me, because of the intervals I mentioned -- that and remembering that body temperature was 37. For many expats living in the US, however, Farenheit remains stubbornly difficult, and many of them persist in converting Farenheit degrees into centigrade. And when someone says to me, it's 45 F outside, I have absolutely no idea how cold that is, and I need to convert it to celsius. I'm American!
Pounds, feet, miles, these things I'm fluent in, and in fact, although I prefer the metric system from an elegance standpoint, I'll admit that I'm more comfortable with feet than meters, pounds than kilos, and miles than kilometers. But not Farenheit. Farenheit I just can't get to make sense, and I grew up with it.
I know the plural of anecdote is not data, but to me this serves to illustrate that Celsius is objectively simpler. None of my expat friends when I was living abroad could stand Farenheit after about 2 years. I'm telling you, Farenheit is borked.
I see this argument repeated a lot, but the truth is, very few people can actually feel the difference between 65 and 66 degrees Farenheit. Whereas 22 degrees C and 23 degrees C feel different (although not drastically), a 1 degree F difference is so subtle that only the hypersensitive can reliably distinguish it.
If you ask most non-Americans what the temperature is, they're generally be able to estimate it with a 1 degree error margin, and they often nail it exactly, just by feel. The error margin for Farenheit degrees is generally closer to plus or minus 3. Sure, 73 degrees Farenheit is more "accurate" than 23 degrees C, but what does that accuracy matter if you can't actually feel it?
Plus, centigrade lends itself to very nice 10 degree intervals. Anything less than 0 is freezing, ok, we all know that. 0-9 is cold, 10-19 is temperate, 20-29 is warm to hot (think spring), 30-39 is bloody hot, and anything above 40 is Saudi Arabia/Death Valley stuff. So if you go out and it's a warmish spring day, without even having a good feeling for degrees C you can say, it's probably in the 20s. On the cooler side of a spring day? Low twenties.
Farenheit, because of its smaller intervals, doesn't work as intuitively, lending itself more to 15 degree intervals. Further, Farenheit is really stupid for cold temperatures. Let's face it, freezing (admittedly unlike boiling) is actually an important temperature point for humans. Stuff happens at 0 C. That cold rain turns to slush and snow. There starts being ice on the roads. Freezing makes a good base point. 0 degrees F? This temperature is completely useless to everyone. Why make the basepoint of scale a useless point?
I admit that 100 degrees C is not very useful outside of scientific applications, and Farenheit's "100 degrees is body temperature" idea isn't a bad one, for what it's worth. But overall, 100 degrees is a much less important point on a scale than 0, for the simple reason that below 0 things are negative, which really serves to emphasize.
That's true, you don't lose any quality if you use a lossless codec to encode. But lossless codecs produce huge files -- there's nothing wrong with this if you're encoding from a high quality master, but in your case, you're producing it from a master that was previously lossy encoded. So, you get exactly the same quality as the DRM-encumbered AAC you purchased, certainly, but at 3 or 4 times the file size, and the quality is still inferior to what you would have had had you just purchased the CD instead.
Realistically, this is not a feasible workaround.
Wow, dude, it's amazing how incredibly misinformed you are about how all this works. Not only are you completely wrong about essentially everything you say, but you apparently don't have the reading comprehension to understand what the GP said in the first place, and, to top it all off, you're rude and condescending, all while looking like a fool to the vast majority of Slashdot readers, who do know that repeated use of a lossy encoder (hint: CDs don't store music in MP3 or AAC format) results in considerable loss of quality.
There are a number of concepts that you should become familiar with before you spout off: first, what is a lossy encoding? What is a lossless encoding? Which is MP3, which is AAC, and which is used by a CD? Why is the concept relevent?
What does "128" mean? You don't seem to understand. What's the difference between ABR, CBR, and VBR?
You'd better spend a bit of time thinking about this before you put on your Apple Fanboy hat and try ineffectually to flame someone who clearly understands all of these things, when it's blatantly clear that you do not.
There's nothing wrong with being ignorant, per se. It's being condescending and ignorant that really makes you look like a fool and a jerk.
Well, and Haiti = French...
That boneheaded vendor being Lockheed Martin, unfortunately...
One nitpick: "goodwill" has a very specific definition in accounting and one cannot write whatever one wants off as goodwill. "Goodwill" comes from the acquisition of one company by another. Suppose Company A makes a bid for company B. Now, suppose that the total value of Company B's assets is 10 million dollars, but because Company B is worth more to Company A as a going concern, that is, worth more than the sum of its parts (assets), Company A actually purchases it for 15 million dollars. Then an accounting problem has presented itself: after the acquisition, when Company B's assets are merged in with Company A's, there is a discrepency of 5 million dollars. This "value in excess of base asset value" is termed goodwill. It is generally amortised or re-evaluated, depending on whether one is following FASB rules (US GAAP) or IASB rules.
FWIW, and I don't know if this was the GP's intention, but in science 2000mA is not the same as 2A -- the former is 4 significant figures and the latter only 1. So 2000mA is in reality 2000mA plus or minus some error quantity (3 or 5, perhaps) in the last digit, ie, 1997mA ~ 2003mA. 2A is the same, which could mean 0 to 4A, a rather large difference. So it would be more correct to say that 2000mA is equivalent to 2.000A.
In fact, this latter notation would be more correct, as scientific notation generally requires that there be only one digit in front of the decimal point. When SI prefixes are being used, the SI prefix which minimises the number of digits before the decimal point should be chosen.
I don't know, I think that any question is valid. It's just that some questions don't have answers (or at least, answers we can verify.) I personally don't care much about why we're here, nor do I care much about whether there's a god or not. But some people do. I think it's important to respect them enough to allow them to ask such questions.
You're completely wrong about stock not financing a company. In fact, that's the whole point. There are basically two ways of financing a company: equity (stock) and debt (bonds), and for any company there is an optimal mixure of both.
You seem to be vaguely aware that when you buy stock on a secondary market (like the NYSE or NASDAQ) you aren't giving money to the company, and that's true: companies only get your money when you buy the stock directly from them, which means in practice that you are either buying their treasury shares or newly issued equity. So when I go and buy stock I am not directly financing a company. This seems to be your main point, though, and that confuses me. Because bonds are not normally bought on primary markets either -- you're usually also purchasing them from an underwriter, or on a secondary bond market. Acting like there's a huge difference between stocks and bonds from this perspective doesn't make sense.
So once we've established that most of the time you buy stocks or bonds on the open market you aren't buying from the company directly, the natural question is, how does the trading of stock by non-company hands affect the wealth of the issuing company? Certainly, if a company issues a bunch of shares in an IPO at a price of 10 cents per share, and subsequent trading of said stock on the NYSE boosts the price per share ten-fold to a dollar per share, the company that sold the stock originally still only has 10 cents per share sold in capital as a result of their equity transaction. But you're ignoring capital gains -- because the company can issue stock whenever it wants, at no extra cost to it. As long as the amount of new stock it issues does not constitute a large percentage of shares outstanding, there will only be a negligible effect on the market price of the stock in the secondary markets when new equity is issued. So for example, if there are currently 10,000 shares outstanding, I can issue 100 more without materially affecting the market price of the stock. So if I previously was only able to sell stock at 10 cents per share, and can now sell it at 1 dollar per share, I've clearly gained. So the increase in the market value of a company's stock translates into an increase in leverage for the company: they can raise more money subsequently as a result of their higher stock price.
Do not forget, either, that a company may buy back its stock, and companies often do so. If a company is relatively certain that its stock is going to go up, it can buy back its own stock as an investment, and sell it back at a higher market rate in the future.
And speaking of buy backs, you seem to be conflating two distinct concepts -- buying back outstanding shares of stock and a stock split. These are not the same. The latter is purely an accounting practice, and produces no long term net increase in wealth for the firm. When a stock split occurs, the amount of shares outstanding is increased (decreased) by a proportion p and the value of each share is decreased (increased) by 1/p, resulting in no net increase or decrease in value for the firm or the individual shareholders. If you owned 100 dollars of walmart stock before the split, after the split, you still own 100 dollars worth of walmart stock. You also still own exactly the same percentage of outstanding shares as you did before, so your ownership of walmart is unaffected. Evidence has shown that a stock split usually results in a short term increase in stock price, because of something economists call signaling theory: investors often interpret a stock split as indication that something good is going to happen, and act accordingly, boosting the effective price of the stock. But if that something good doesn't materialise over a relatively short timespan, the stock price returns to its previous (effective) levels.
So why have a stock split at all? Well, many CFOs feel that there is an optimal price range for stock. They feel that if the price is too low, investors will
The US was also the only reasonably populous developed country to come out of World War II unscathed. It is worth noting that this was, coincidentally, also the time that we emerged as a world superpower.
While I agree that this story is stupid, I think you're oversimplifying the situation. As for everyone having the ability to become a millionaire in the US, there was a study in the Economist a few years ago that showed that social mobility in Europe was greater than in the US (ie, the average European dies wealthier than the average American does.)
The Economist is not what I would call a liberal newspaper.
While I agree that the write-up's use of "pseudoscience" was meant to be flamebait, pseudoscience most certainly has an objective definition, and it doesn't involve the assumption that science is whatever the majority says. Science by definition is a set of theories built up inductively from empirical evidence based on the scientific method, which states that any new model must be falsifiable and better represent available data than the old model does, with a general preference for simplicity and logic.
Pseudoscience is anything masquerading as science which does not fit this definition. "Pseudo" comes from Greek and means fake or false. It's really fairly logical.
Religion is not pseudoscience by definition, because most religious people know full well that religion and science are not the same thing and in fact attempt to explain fundamentally different concepts. This is why, for example, many of the world's greatest scientific minds have been devoutly religious and have seen no contradiction in this. However, when one attempts to equate science and religion, or advance religious explanations as competing scientific theories, the use of the word pseudoscience becomes appropriate.
In the case of "creationist science" (their term, not mine) you have an explanation that fails to qualify as science on many different levels. This does not mean you shouldn't believe in it, but it's important to recognise that you are accepting it as an article of faith -- faith being the definining center of most religion. When you attempt to make creationism into science by suggesting it as a competing theory for (in this case) the origin of man and animals, you are, as per the scientific method, suggesting that it is a better theory than evolution for the data we have, and that it is falsifiable. It is not falsifiable, evidently. The religious man sees Genesis as canon, and does not question its veracity -- but questioning the veracity of anything, including evolution, is at the heart of science. Ultimately, science cannot address the existence or non-existence of God, because there is no evidence either way. In fact, taking the leap of faith, accepting Jesus as your Lord and Saviour, well, these things are sort of central to the Christian experience. In my mind -- and I am admittedly not a fundamentalist -- if God's existance were scientifically verifiable, no reversal of the original sin would truly be possible. But that's theology, not science.
Remember too, and this is important, the questions that science and religion aim to address. They are not the same, and it is wise not to conflate them. Science addresses the how, and never the why -- by science's very nature, asking why will always lead to an infinite regression, and so scientists avoid asking why, and limit themselves instead to how. Science is misrepresented to the layman by the media in this respect, which is why I think there is often so much conflict between spirituality and science. For example, when Newton developed his theory of gravitation, and when Einstein later refined it, these men (religious, both of them) were not asking "why" does the apple fall or the earth rotate the sun, but rather they were explaining "how", quantitatively, such a thing occured, and how one could go about predicting it. The why, well, that's a much more difficult question. If you think on this a moment, you'll realise that saying "Two objects are attracted to each other by a force proportional to their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them" does not in anyway explain "why" this effect exists. Indeed, science cannot explain why gravity exists, or why we exist, or what our role is, or how we fit into the greater cosmic plan, or if there is such a plan.
Taking evolution, the person who answers "Why are we here" with "Because we evolved from apes" has misunderstood the question. His answer, at best, explains how the human species came to be, but even then, it explains only the last ste
You're on crack. It is true that Stalin sent a lot of people coming back from the Great Patriotic War to the gulag, but most of them were generals, war heroes, and similar. The reasoning was not because life was "so good" in the West, but rather because these people had possibly had contact with rightist and or imperialist elements in Western Europe (not quality of life, but other people) and because their hero status conferred a great deal of credit upon them in the eyes of the Russian people, it was feared that their ability to do damage as spies or their ability to influence the government would be unduly large. Not that I'm condoning this, mind you.
But to say that they were afraid of people in the East seeing "how good" life in the West was at that time is pure cold war propaganda. The West had just come out of the great depression, which at the time was believed (by western economists) to be a result of the inherent instability of markets. A great deal of thought was put into how to prevent that sort of thing -- Keynes made his name doing just that. The one nation that was essentially unaffected by the Great Depression was the Soviet Union -- their economic growth (which was huge under Stalin) chugged along just fine, and most Soviet leaders and economists believed that it was only a matter of time before the West fell back into another great depression. They were wrong, but they didn't know it. Incidentally, much of the "New Deal" (which is largely credited with the creation of the middle class in the US) was consciously modeled on the Soviet social model, precisely because they seemed to be immune to economic depression.
Any Soviet soldier in Eastern Europe (the British and the Americans met them in Berlin, lest we forget) would have seen mostly undeveloped, war torn nations filled with masses of refugees, along with the aftermath of the Holocaust. Life in the Soviet Union was not good under Stalin, to be sure, but what little of war torn Europe they were exposed to was not enough to make most of them doubt the rightness of the propaganda they'd been exposed to. And let's not forget, either, that most of the Europe the Russians were exposed to they annexed.
The rest of your post I agree with entirely.
Ok, if I were you, I'd install the scim, scim-pinyin, and scim-gtk2-immodule packages (I use Debian, not Ubuntu, so there may be some differences in package names, but I sort of doubt it.) Most GNOME apps will immediately have access to the input method without you doing anything else because of the scim-gtk2-immodule, I think. However, to make it work in generic X apps, you will need to do some configuring.
Basically, you'll want to somehow do the following on gnome startup (I don't use GNOME, I like my old-school window managers):
SCIM's smart pinyin input method really is one of the best input methods I've seen on any operating system, and my guess is that your wife and her friends will find it very usable. You can make it even more usable by configuring it (there's a GUI configuration tool) to use the same keystroke commands as the input method she uses on Windows. If she's a southerner, she'll probably appreciate SCIM's retroflex ambiguity settings (so, for example, she can enter si for characters whose pronunciation is actually shi) and also maybe n/l ambiguity settings. It learns intelligently and picks characters accordingly. It's very high quality software.
I admit that having to futz with scripts and such is a pain -- maybe nowadays there's a way to not do that, but I don't know because I'm still stuck in the 70s :) -- but once you have SCIM setup properly, installing new scim packages (there are tons for lots of different languages) will work automagically, so think of it as a one-time annoyance.
Also, make sure that you install MS's (and maybe Apple's if you have them) fonts, in particular SimSun and SimHei, because there really aren't any readable Free Asian fonts, unfortunately.
Good luck. Hope this information helps.