If everyone was naked all the time, it wouldn't be a problem at all. Erections do not have to be something shameful, it is just our current way of thinking. Also, I don't see the connection with trust you make at the end.
"Does anybody actually really care since we have translate.google.com?" Did you really try to use it with Chinese ? It is a hopeless mess.
It is already struggling with French (http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1927596&cid=34691228), right now it doesn't stand a chance for a language without any common root, without word boundaries, where abbreviations and homophones are used liberally (especially online, with all the slang and censorship going on), where surviving expressions from classical Chinese are common. It may be able to give a useful result one day but give it a lot of time.
The example I always found fascinating is the names of the animals and their meat. English speaking countries don't eat sheep, they eat mutton (French: mouton), they don't eat pig, they eat pork (French:porc), they don't eat cow, they eat beef (French:buf). And why ? Because it was not the same people breeding (farmers) and eating (French-speaking nobility).
In the real world, the teacher would not even read it before submitting it as its work. Very often he would be unable to see if there are any error in it. And it would work because no one else is going to read it either.
I still think you shouldn't keep your SUV and I fail to see your point.
Did you really mean "the others are worse so I can do what I want" ? Doesn't it contradict you last sentence, where you say you should better yourself without judging other people ? You don't want to buy a fuel efficient car just because your parents drive to the grocery store ? Of course driving less is very good, but why can't you drive less than your parents in a small car ?
Hukou is a way to reduce the movement of populations. China especially fears large migrations from the poor west provinces to the rich east coast and from the rural areas to the cities. It is quite similar to the immigration problems all around the world, except that it is inside the country.
However, Liu Xiaobo is by no means the only one criticizing this hukou system and a lot of people want to reform it, arguing that it creates a very unequal society, where citizens don't have the same rights to education, social security, housing, etc. depending on where their official hukou is.
The reason he is in jail right now is rather that he is the main force behind the "Charter 08". This charter is also what prompted the Nobel Price. I'll let you google it yourself, I can't access it from work.
Baidu Search is not censored, so you can search for "liu Xiaobo" "nobel peace prize" without problem, even in Chinese. Google is censored and doesn't give anything when you search for Liu Xiaobo, but I am quite sure it was already the case before. It is very easy to find uncensored English speaking sources of information. The government doesn't really care about the foreigners and the minority of very educated Chinese that can read English fluently.
What IS censored are all the news media in Chinese and the messages that discuss it in the big BBS, so it is harder to discuss it openly.
As usual, the people that want to know will know, but the vast majority doesn't really care (this vast majority probably never heard of him before anyway).
In China, some surnames are very common, but the possibilities for first name are virtually endless. There is not a finite list that most people choose from like in the West (at least the part of 'West' I know). A lot of people share the same surname, but to share the same name completely is very rare. Because of that, it is much more frequent to use the complete name of someone.
Additionally, the system will of course use Chinese characters, not the simplified romanisation used in English press articles and maybe in your company that very often group together twenty or more different characters, so multiply greatly the risk of collisions between two names.
Pinyin should have spaces. However, to be really effective, it would require to space words and not characters, and the notion of words in Chinese is not very understood by a lot of people. Because of that, people often write separating all characters, or without any separations.
Of course, it should use accents too. Accents are essential to know how it is pronounced. Of course, the broken system of Slashdot doesn't allow it... It should be tí bi wàng zì (the 'i' should have a caron)
Maybe we don't define "read" the same way. There are a few characters they will not know, but they will be able to understand the meaning of the text (given it is modern mandarin written in traditional characters, and not classical Chinese). For example, the majority of the lyrics in a karaoke are in traditional, some pirated dramas and mangas floating online come from Taiwan so are in traditional. People still read them.
If you learned simplified and later live in a traditional environment, you will learn very quickly most of the traditional characters with just a few rules.
Let's take your restaurant example, with the most basic words concerning food (you'll have to translate yourself, Slashdot doesn't accept characters) : the most different will be chicken and noodles. These one you have to learn. Fish and soup will be a little bit different but possible to guess. Rice and dumplings will change, but according to a rule concerning the part of the character meaning food, so they are easy to remember. Pork, beef, vegetables, eggplant, cabbage, tomato, potato, tofu, steamed buns, beer : they will all be the same !
Of course it is just some random examples, but I think it shows the trend : you should know enough to impress someone;o)
Your post is so wrong I do not know where to start... Did you ever learn Chinese, went to China or spoke to a Chinese person ?
The simplified characters are not a radical new system, just some little modifications of the old system. Sure the most common characters were made easier to write by hand (as that was the focus at the time) and some general rules are applied to simplify some common forms. But it concerns a few hundreds of the most common characters, while an educated Chinese will know around four or five thousands.
Also, while young Chinese do not write traditional any more, except for calligraphy, almost everyone can read it approximately. It is very often used in shops sign as it suggests culture and tradition, it is essential to enjoy karaoke and online videos coming from Taiwan, and to read any text before 1950. Do you really believe that they stopped reading Confucius after 1950 ? They are very attached to this long literary tradition, and that was the main point against complete romanisation.
Exactly, at least in the Beijing area where I live. They precisely delimited which area each company serve, and redirect you to the other one if you call them but are not in their area.
At a given point, you have a bunch of physical equations taking a set of parameters at time t and giving you these same parameters at time t+1. Of course, the smaller the time step, the better the result.
To have the best possible result, you should consider the whole globe at once (think phenomenon like thermohaline circulation for example). However, you should also consider the finest grid possible, to take into account the heterogeneity of the geography, the local variations due to rivers, etc. It is also important to consider a three-dimensional model if you want to transcribe the atmospheric circulation, the evaporation, etc.
I forgot the exact numbers, but Wikipedia gives an example of a current global climate models using a grid of 500,000 points (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_climate_model ), which is a pretty coarse resolution, working with tiles of tens of thousands kilometer square.
With the current computing capabilities, we can not go much farther for a global model. This is already an impressive improvement compared the first models, which were two dimensional and used very simplified equations, overlooking a large number of important physical mechanism.
At the same time, we have satellite data several orders of magnitude more precise. Data from the satellite ASTER were computed to provide a complete altitude mapping of the globe with a theoretical resolution of 90 m. The vegetation cover can be obtained at a resolution of 8m using commercial satellite like FORMOSAT-2. Even the soil moisture can be measured at a resolution of around 50 km thanks to the new satellite SMOS.
These sets of data are already used at the local level, for example to model the transfer between the soil and the atmosphere, taking into account the vegetation (SVAT modelling). It makes no doubt that a global climate model using a more precise grid and these data would significantly improve its prediction.
"according to Greek or Latin or Germanic principles instead."
Let's not forget French here (chef d'oeuvre, rendezvous, cul-de-sac). It is already strange and difficult for the French themselves, but when you don't know the meaning of the different parts...
BTW, there are spelling contests in France too, but I don't think there are enough Indian immigrants to make statistics.
So in order to be good journalism, it has to say what you want to hear ? Really ? I live in China and I wouldn't say that Chinese are willing and happy to be controlled, but most of them don't care that much to be honest. They are not very interested in politics, don't visit much Facebook or Youtube...
A lot of people do throw away plastic and glass bottles, or other valuable items, but they are picked up by poorer people before arriving at the landfill site.
For a simple access to a blocked website, it is possible to use proxies website, but you have to find new ones very regularly because they are blocked pretty fast.
Tor is an option, I heard good reports about Freegate, but I don't know if it is still valid.
The best way is to have a VPN, either by a geek friend elsewhere (not convenient for most Chinese) or a company like Witopia (but the prices are expensive compared to the cost of life here).
Yes, Chinese dictionaries are mostly organized by pinyin alphabetical order, but there are always look-up tables organized by radicals, and sometimes by stroke count, in order to be able to find a character for which you don't know the pronunciation.
Slashdot Mirror
If everyone was naked all the time, it wouldn't be a problem at all. Erections do not have to be something shameful, it is just our current way of thinking. Also, I don't see the connection with trust you make at the end.
"Does anybody actually really care since we have translate.google.com?" Did you really try to use it with Chinese ? It is a hopeless mess.
It is already struggling with French (http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1927596&cid=34691228), right now it doesn't stand a chance for a language without any common root, without word boundaries, where abbreviations and homophones are used liberally (especially online, with all the slang and censorship going on), where surviving expressions from classical Chinese are common. It may be able to give a useful result one day but give it a lot of time.
The example I always found fascinating is the names of the animals and their meat. English speaking countries don't eat sheep, they eat mutton (French: mouton), they don't eat pig, they eat pork (French:porc), they don't eat cow, they eat beef (French:buf). And why ? Because it was not the same people breeding (farmers) and eating (French-speaking nobility).
But, but, you mean you are not Inigo Montoya ? At least someone did kill your father, right ?
In the real world, the teacher would not even read it before submitting it as its work. Very often he would be unable to see if there are any error in it. And it would work because no one else is going to read it either.
I still think you shouldn't keep your SUV and I fail to see your point.
Did you really mean "the others are worse so I can do what I want" ? Doesn't it contradict you last sentence, where you say you should better yourself without judging other people ? You don't want to buy a fuel efficient car just because your parents drive to the grocery store ? Of course driving less is very good, but why can't you drive less than your parents in a small car ?
Hukou is a way to reduce the movement of populations. China especially fears large migrations from the poor west provinces to the rich east coast and from the rural areas to the cities. It is quite similar to the immigration problems all around the world, except that it is inside the country.
However, Liu Xiaobo is by no means the only one criticizing this hukou system and a lot of people want to reform it, arguing that it creates a very unequal society, where citizens don't have the same rights to education, social security, housing, etc. depending on where their official hukou is.
The reason he is in jail right now is rather that he is the main force behind the "Charter 08". This charter is also what prompted the Nobel Price. I'll let you google it yourself, I can't access it from work.
From inside China :
Baidu Search is not censored, so you can search for "liu Xiaobo" "nobel peace prize" without problem, even in Chinese. Google is censored and doesn't give anything when you search for Liu Xiaobo, but I am quite sure it was already the case before. It is very easy to find uncensored English speaking sources of information. The government doesn't really care about the foreigners and the minority of very educated Chinese that can read English fluently.
What IS censored are all the news media in Chinese and the messages that discuss it in the big BBS, so it is harder to discuss it openly.
As usual, the people that want to know will know, but the vast majority doesn't really care (this vast majority probably never heard of him before anyway).
In China, some surnames are very common, but the possibilities for first name are virtually endless. There is not a finite list that most people choose from like in the West (at least the part of 'West' I know). A lot of people share the same surname, but to share the same name completely is very rare. Because of that, it is much more frequent to use the complete name of someone.
Additionally, the system will of course use Chinese characters, not the simplified romanisation used in English press articles and maybe in your company that very often group together twenty or more different characters, so multiply greatly the risk of collisions between two names.
Pinyin should have spaces. However, to be really effective, it would require to space words and not characters, and the notion of words in Chinese is not very understood by a lot of people. Because of that, people often write separating all characters, or without any separations.
Of course, it should use accents too. Accents are essential to know how it is pronounced. Of course, the broken system of Slashdot doesn't allow it ... It should be tí bi wàng zì (the 'i' should have a caron)
Maybe we don't define "read" the same way. There are a few characters they will not know, but they will be able to understand the meaning of the text (given it is modern mandarin written in traditional characters, and not classical Chinese). For example, the majority of the lyrics in a karaoke are in traditional, some pirated dramas and mangas floating online come from Taiwan so are in traditional. People still read them.
If you learned simplified and later live in a traditional environment, you will learn very quickly most of the traditional characters with just a few rules.
Let's take your restaurant example, with the most basic words concerning food (you'll have to translate yourself, Slashdot doesn't accept characters) : the most different will be chicken and noodles. These one you have to learn. Fish and soup will be a little bit different but possible to guess. Rice and dumplings will change, but according to a rule concerning the part of the character meaning food, so they are easy to remember. Pork, beef, vegetables, eggplant, cabbage, tomato, potato, tofu, steamed buns, beer : they will all be the same !
Of course it is just some random examples, but I think it shows the trend : you should know enough to impress someone ;o)
Right, all stones are of the same weight, so it is logical ...
Your post is so wrong I do not know where to start ... Did you ever learn Chinese, went to China or spoke to a Chinese person ?
The simplified characters are not a radical new system, just some little modifications of the old system. Sure the most common characters were made easier to write by hand (as that was the focus at the time) and some general rules are applied to simplify some common forms. But it concerns a few hundreds of the most common characters, while an educated Chinese will know around four or five thousands.
Also, while young Chinese do not write traditional any more, except for calligraphy, almost everyone can read it approximately. It is very often used in shops sign as it suggests culture and tradition, it is essential to enjoy karaoke and online videos coming from Taiwan, and to read any text before 1950. Do you really believe that they stopped reading Confucius after 1950 ? They are very attached to this long literary tradition, and that was the main point against complete romanisation.
Right, the Iraq War was decided by the UN ...
Exactly, at least in the Beijing area where I live. They precisely delimited which area each company serve, and redirect you to the other one if you call them but are not in their area.
If you take weather simulation :
At a given point, you have a bunch of physical equations taking a set of parameters at time t and giving you these same parameters at time t+1. Of course, the smaller the time step, the better the result.
To have the best possible result, you should consider the whole globe at once (think phenomenon like thermohaline circulation for example). However, you should also consider the finest grid possible, to take into account the heterogeneity of the geography, the local variations due to rivers, etc. It is also important to consider a three-dimensional model if you want to transcribe the atmospheric circulation, the evaporation, etc.
I forgot the exact numbers, but Wikipedia gives an example of a current global climate models using a grid of 500,000 points (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_climate_model ), which is a pretty coarse resolution, working with tiles of tens of thousands kilometer square.
With the current computing capabilities, we can not go much farther for a global model. This is already an impressive improvement compared the first models, which were two dimensional and used very simplified equations, overlooking a large number of important physical mechanism.
At the same time, we have satellite data several orders of magnitude more precise. Data from the satellite ASTER were computed to provide a complete altitude mapping of the globe with a theoretical resolution of 90 m. The vegetation cover can be obtained at a resolution of 8m using commercial satellite like FORMOSAT-2. Even the soil moisture can be measured at a resolution of around 50 km thanks to the new satellite SMOS.
These sets of data are already used at the local level, for example to model the transfer between the soil and the atmosphere, taking into account the vegetation (SVAT modelling). It makes no doubt that a global climate model using a more precise grid and these data would significantly improve its prediction.
"according to Greek or Latin or Germanic principles instead."
Let's not forget French here (chef d'oeuvre, rendezvous, cul-de-sac). It is already strange and difficult for the French themselves, but when you don't know the meaning of the different parts...
BTW, there are spelling contests in France too, but I don't think there are enough Indian immigrants to make statistics.
man touch
The test would be that I can quit reading books this very second for a year where as a smoker is very unlikely to be able to do that.
I doubt it. At least I would not be able to.
So in order to be good journalism, it has to say what you want to hear ? Really ? I live in China and I wouldn't say that Chinese are willing and happy to be controlled, but most of them don't care that much to be honest. They are not very interested in politics, don't visit much Facebook or Youtube ...
A lot of people do throw away plastic and glass bottles, or other valuable items, but they are picked up by poorer people before arriving at the landfill site.
Why is it a little dirty secret ? It is pretty evident, isn't it ? If the population is smaller, everyone has a bigger part of the global cake.
For a simple access to a blocked website, it is possible to use proxies website, but you have to find new ones very regularly because they are blocked pretty fast.
Tor is an option, I heard good reports about Freegate, but I don't know if it is still valid.
The best way is to have a VPN, either by a geek friend elsewhere (not convenient for most Chinese) or a company like Witopia (but the prices are expensive compared to the cost of life here).
I think Danwei is a good place to start :
http://www.danwei.org/
Then you will have a lot of blogs on specialized topics, like for example :
http://www.chinalawblog.com/
http://www.cleanergreenerchina.com/
http://www.chinaenvironmentallaw.com/
Yes, Chinese dictionaries are mostly organized by pinyin alphabetical order, but there are always look-up tables organized by radicals, and sometimes by stroke count, in order to be able to find a character for which you don't know the pronunciation.