My apologies, your excellency, I was confused. Here I am in Taiwan, an island of 22 million people, reading the "Tao Te Ching", having some Peking duck and using the de facto Wade-Giles Romanization system. How wrong that is! Good thing the pinyin police are here to rid the world of cultural pollution and wrong ways of thinking.
From wikipedia:
Dào is the pinyin romanization of the Chinese character , representing a word that was usually rendered in English as Tao, and used as the root word for the English term Taoism. Taoism is a native Chinese philosophy and religion that, along with its various offshoot sects and syncretisms with other traditions (Chan Buddhism, Neo-Confucianism), has influenced much of East Asia for thousands of years. More recently, it has gained worldwide recognition.
The concepts of Taoism were first widely studied in the West before the development of pinyin, when the older Wade-Giles transliteration system was in use in English speaking countries. Consequently, the Wade-Giles spellings are still generally used in most English language editions of the Tao Te Ching and other major Taoist works, and thus most commonly used and recognized by native speakers of English. "Taoism" appeared first in English in 1836 (Oxford English Dictionary) as a translation of the Chinese term (Wade-Giles tao4 chiao4, pinyin dào jiào).
However, in academia and politics, there has been a strong trend towards using pinyin, which is recommended by the government of the People's Republic of China and widely used in teaching Chinese language. Joseph Lau's translation of the Tao Te Ching (pub. Penguin) has been renamed "Daodejing" in its latest edition; similarly, Burton Watson's translation of Chuang Tzu (pub. Columbia Univ. Press) is now titled "Zhuangzi" instead. Both texts have abandoned Wade-Giles in favor of pinyin.
Due to fundamental differences between Chinese and English phonology, in English neither d nor t can be considered adequate phonetic representations for the consonant at the beginning of the word Dao/Tao (in pinyin d represents the sound exactly). The Chinese pronunciation is voiceless (like t and not like d), but it is also unaspirated (without the puff of air which is normally a part of English t but which is never a part of English d). One perspective holds that both transliterations when used in English are thus in theory technically equally close to (or far from) the Mandarin pronunciation of . However in practice, due to partial de-voicing of "d" in English in certain situations, the only reliable phonetic difference between initial/d/ and/t/ in English is aspiration, not voicing, just as in Chinese. Therefore to the ear of most English speakers the Chinese pronunciation sounds more like an English "d" than an English "t", thus some argue that "Dao" is in that sense more accurate than "Tao".
Generally, in the case of Chinese words that are not assimilated into English by the end of the 20th century, like most place or persons names, pinyin is preferably used by international community and has largely been accepted as the standard romanization. In the case of words with Chinese origins that have long been assimilated into English, opinions differ. Some people think that existing words in English which come from Chinese words should be remodeled after the pinyin transliteration scheme. Others think that the older forms should be retained because those spellings have become English words in their own right--and hence are not Chinese anymore--while new borrowings should be written according to the official transliteration scheme.
The way Roman letters in Pinyin represent sounds in Chinese is different from how other languages that use the Roman alphabet represent sound. Letters such as j, q, x or zh indicate sounds that do not correspond to any exact sound in English. This usage, the most problematic being pinyin's use of "q" for a sound usually heard as something like "ch" by most Westerners (see Qi), have contributed to the confusion in popular usage.
I first thought, Bill is just trying to apply the ancient chinese philosophy of the Tao Te Ching:
"The way that advances appears to retreat."
and
"In conflict it is better to be receptive than aggressive, better to retreat a foot than advance an inch."
But wait a minute, the Tao Te Ching also says:
"A good planner doesn't have to scheme."
and
"The sage doesn't hoard."
Ah, well... We can take solace in a quote from the new updated open source translation:
"The Linux programmer acts without effort and teaches by quiet example. He accepts things as they come, creates without possessing, nourishes without demanding, accomplishes without taking credit."
and
"Amass possessions, establish positions, display your pride: Soon enough Linux drives you to your knees."
if we had an unlimited supply of bread that could be reproduced and distributed to everyone at no cost, would we expect people to continue paying for it?
Sure, someone has to bake the initial batch, but that doesn't count for much as we approach infinity.
In other words, the rice ladle has gone down the river and it ain't comin' back!
In the future, it will be very difficult to make considerable profits off anything that can be put into digital form because piracy will be so pervasive.
The grand old idea that you can control the distribution of a film, a song, or a piece of software is coming to an end. But if you still want to attempt to control it top-down style, and keep all profits to yourself, make efforts to prevent others from having it unless they pay you, and basically be a gangster, then you could always go the avenue of embedding advertising, just as they do in films with product placement, but there is a limit to how much can be done before it becomes a nuisance and artistic abortion that nobody will be interested in.
Open source and other altruistic style collaborations are the future of software and media production in the long run, though big screen movie theatres will have their appeal for productions with a lot of spectacle.
'if you are not doing anything wrong, why should you worry about it?'
junior, you're right, down there playing xbox in your parents' basement, you won't need to worry about it.
for the rest of us who are living in a post-nietzschean world where absolute standards of right and wrong do not exist and cannot be meaningfully codified into a series of laws, a plan which furthers the extent to which an external police force can monitor and impose imaginary laws on the people is not going to go over real well...
As Montaigne put it, "Laws are now maintained in credit, not because they are just but because they are laws. It is the mystical foundation of their authority; they have none other."
"Do not let yourself be deceived: great intellects are sceptical. Zarathustra is a sceptic. The strength, the freedom which proceed from intellectual power, from a superabundance of intellectual power, manifest themselves as scepticism. Men of fixed convictions do not count when it comes to determining what is fundamental in values and lack of values. Men of convictions are prisoners. They do not see far enough, they do not see what is below them: whereas a man who would talk to any purpose about value and non-value must be able to see five hundred convictions beneath him--and behind him. . . . A mind that aspires to great things, and that wills the means thereto, is necessarily sceptical. Freedom from any sort of conviction belongs to strength, and to an independent point of view. . . That grand passion which is at once the foundation and the power of a sceptic's existence, and is both more enlightened and more despotic than he is himself, drafts the whole of his intellect into its service; it makes him unscrupulous; it gives him courage to employ unholy means; under certain circumstances it does not begrudge him even convictions. Conviction as a means: one may achieve a good deal by means of a conviction. A grand passion makes use of and uses up convictions; it does not yield to them--it knows itself to be sovereign.--On the contrary, the need of faith, of some thing unconditioned by yea or nay, of Carlylism, if I may be allowed the word, is a need of weakness. The man of faith, the "believer" of any sort, is necessarily a dependent man--such a man cannot posit himself as a goal, nor can he find goals within himself. The "believer" does not belong to himself; he can only be a means to an end; he must be used up; he needs some one to use him up. His instinct gives the highest honours to an ethic of self-effacement; he is prompted to embrace it by everything: his prudence, his experience, his vanity. Every sort of faith is in itself an evidence of self-effacement, of self-estrangement. . . When one reflects how necessary it is to the great majority that there be regulations to restrain them from without and hold them fast, and to what extent control, or, in a higher sense, slavery, is the one and only condition which makes for the well-being of the weak-willed man, and especially woman, then one at once understands conviction and "faith." To the man with convictions they are his backbone. To avoid seeing many things, to be impartial about nothing, to be a party man through and through, to estimate all values strictly and infallibly--these are conditions necessary to the existence of such a man. But by the same token they are antagonists of the truthful man--of the truth. . . . The believer is not free to answer the question, "true" or "not true," according to the dictates of his own conscience: integrity on this point would work his instant downfall. The pathological limitations of his vision turn the man of convictions into a fanatic--Savonarola, Luther, Rousseau, Robespierre, Saint-Simon--these types stand in opposition to the strong, emancipated spirit. But the grandiose attitudes of these sick intellects, these intellectual epileptics, are of influence upon the great masses--fanatics are picturesque, and mankind prefers observing poses to listening to reasons. .."
1. Pretend Nietzsche never wrote "Beyond Good and Evil"
2. Create a meaningless bullshit motto that presupposes absolute ideals of good and evil really exist
3. Join forces with oppressive regimes to deprive people of alternative points of view
4. Profit!!!
Quite the contrary. Nietzsche abhorred anti-semitism, nationalism and patriotism as the worst vulgarities. Some people erroneously identify him with the Nazis because of the way that the Nazis misappropriated his concept of the ubermensch, which had nothing to do with the eugenic program of the Nazis and other similar xenophobic hate groups. This is one of the most common misconceptions about Nietzsche. I suggest you read some of Nietzsche's actual published works to find out what he really thought. Using the term "saint" to describe Nietzsche also shows a great lack of familiarity with the man who wrote "The Antichrist".
Actually, the phony ideals of enlightenment humanism have been discredited by well over a hundred years of intellectual development in Western culture, going back to Nietzsche and Max Stirner.
Instead of giving the world bullshit about an "axis of evil", we ought be giving them "Beyond Good and Evil".
This story once again points out the deep absurdity of IP laws, and the complete lack of any absolute authority for laws in general, or what Montaigne referred to as the "mystical foundation of authority" in law:
"Laws are now maintained in credit, not because they are just, but because they are laws. It is the mystical foundation of their authority; they have none other." -- from "Essais 3", ch. 13
In the information age, its clear that the idea of ownership of specific sets of ones and zeros is pretty ridiculous and only continues because of government approved thuggery. Its interesting to see the ways that even this attempt at authority is being gradually eroded in the 21st century.
Considering that gutenberg.org is also banned over here, I see this as a much broader attempt at keeping the people uneducated with regard to certain kinds of dangerous ideas which might be a threat to processes of exploitation.
Of course, this kind of thing is going on in many countries, albeit using subtler methods, including the United States and Europe. Keep the people stupid, that is the best way to keep your power over them.
I'm an expat and have been living in China for the last 5 months. While I have been pretty annoyed by the fact that Wikipedia is blocked, people in China do have one kind of freedom that Americans don't have...
You see, over here in the PRC, they don't have any of those bastard weasel RIAA lawyers... I'm free to download all the music and movies I want with no possibility at all of being prosecuted by American legal system thugs!!
Slashdot Mirror
Now to figure out how to turn that ball of energy into Kelly LeBrock!
Oh, the pinyin police are here!!
/d/ and /t/ in English is aspiration, not voicing, just as in Chinese. Therefore to the ear of most English speakers the Chinese pronunciation sounds more like an English "d" than an English "t", thus some argue that "Dao" is in that sense more accurate than "Tao".
My apologies, your excellency, I was confused. Here I am in Taiwan, an island of 22 million people, reading the "Tao Te Ching", having some Peking duck and using the de facto Wade-Giles Romanization system. How wrong that is! Good thing the pinyin police are here to rid the world of cultural pollution and wrong ways of thinking.
From wikipedia:
Dào is the pinyin romanization of the Chinese character , representing a word that was usually rendered in English as Tao, and used as the root word for the English term Taoism. Taoism is a native Chinese philosophy and religion that, along with its various offshoot sects and syncretisms with other traditions (Chan Buddhism, Neo-Confucianism), has influenced much of East Asia for thousands of years. More recently, it has gained worldwide recognition.
The concepts of Taoism were first widely studied in the West before the development of pinyin, when the older Wade-Giles transliteration system was in use in English speaking countries. Consequently, the Wade-Giles spellings are still generally used in most English language editions of the Tao Te Ching and other major Taoist works, and thus most commonly used and recognized by native speakers of English. "Taoism" appeared first in English in 1836 (Oxford English Dictionary) as a translation of the Chinese term (Wade-Giles tao4 chiao4, pinyin dào jiào).
However, in academia and politics, there has been a strong trend towards using pinyin, which is recommended by the government of the People's Republic of China and widely used in teaching Chinese language. Joseph Lau's translation of the Tao Te Ching (pub. Penguin) has been renamed "Daodejing" in its latest edition; similarly, Burton Watson's translation of Chuang Tzu (pub. Columbia Univ. Press) is now titled "Zhuangzi" instead. Both texts have abandoned Wade-Giles in favor of pinyin.
Due to fundamental differences between Chinese and English phonology, in English neither d nor t can be considered adequate phonetic representations for the consonant at the beginning of the word Dao/Tao (in pinyin d represents the sound exactly). The Chinese pronunciation is voiceless (like t and not like d), but it is also unaspirated (without the puff of air which is normally a part of English t but which is never a part of English d). One perspective holds that both transliterations when used in English are thus in theory technically equally close to (or far from) the Mandarin pronunciation of . However in practice, due to partial de-voicing of "d" in English in certain situations, the only reliable phonetic difference between initial
Generally, in the case of Chinese words that are not assimilated into English by the end of the 20th century, like most place or persons names, pinyin is preferably used by international community and has largely been accepted as the standard romanization. In the case of words with Chinese origins that have long been assimilated into English, opinions differ. Some people think that existing words in English which come from Chinese words should be remodeled after the pinyin transliteration scheme. Others think that the older forms should be retained because those spellings have become English words in their own right--and hence are not Chinese anymore--while new borrowings should be written according to the official transliteration scheme.
The way Roman letters in Pinyin represent sounds in Chinese is different from how other languages that use the Roman alphabet represent sound. Letters such as j, q, x or zh indicate sounds that do not correspond to any exact sound in English. This usage, the most problematic being pinyin's use of "q" for a sound usually heard as something like "ch" by most Westerners (see Qi), have contributed to the confusion in popular usage.
I first thought, Bill is just trying to apply the ancient chinese philosophy of the Tao Te Ching: "The way that advances appears to retreat."
and
"In conflict it is better to be receptive than aggressive, better to retreat a foot than advance an inch."
But wait a minute, the Tao Te Ching also says:
"A good planner doesn't have to scheme."
and
"The sage doesn't hoard."
Ah, well... We can take solace in a quote from the new updated open source translation:
"The Linux programmer acts without effort and teaches by quiet example. He accepts things as they come, creates without possessing, nourishes without demanding, accomplishes without taking credit."
and
"Amass possessions, establish positions, display your pride: Soon enough Linux drives you to your knees."
Mod up!!
Basically, it comes down to this:
if we had an unlimited supply of bread that could be reproduced and distributed to everyone at no cost, would we expect people to continue paying for it?
Sure, someone has to bake the initial batch, but that doesn't count for much as we approach infinity.
In other words, the rice ladle has gone down the river and it ain't comin' back!
In the future, it will be very difficult to make considerable profits off anything that can be put into digital form because piracy will be so pervasive.
The grand old idea that you can control the distribution of a film, a song, or a piece of software is coming to an end. But if you still want to attempt to control it top-down style, and keep all profits to yourself, make efforts to prevent others from having it unless they pay you, and basically be a gangster, then you could always go the avenue of embedding advertising, just as they do in films with product placement, but there is a limit to how much can be done before it becomes a nuisance and artistic abortion that nobody will be interested in.
Open source and other altruistic style collaborations are the future of software and media production in the long run, though big screen movie theatres will have their appeal for productions with a lot of spectacle.
"News for nerds that never went to Japan"
I used one of these computerized toilets at a friend's house in Japan way back in 1997.
Hey, did you know you can now buy a robotic dog too??? WOW!!!!!!!!!!
'if you are not doing anything wrong, why should you worry about it?'
junior, you're right, down there playing xbox in your parents' basement, you won't need to worry about it.
for the rest of us who are living in a post-nietzschean world where absolute standards of right and wrong do not exist and cannot be meaningfully codified into a series of laws, a plan which furthers the extent to which an external police force can monitor and impose imaginary laws on the people is not going to go over real well...
As Montaigne put it, "Laws are now maintained in credit, not because they are just but because they are laws. It is the mystical foundation of their authority; they have none other."
"Do not let yourself be deceived: great intellects are sceptical. Zarathustra is a sceptic. The strength, the freedom which proceed from intellectual power, from a superabundance of intellectual power, manifest themselves as scepticism. Men of fixed convictions do not count when it comes to determining what is fundamental in values and lack of values. Men of convictions are prisoners. They do not see far enough, they do not see what is below them: whereas a man who would talk to any purpose about value and non-value must be able to see five hundred convictions beneath him--and behind him. . . . A mind that aspires to great things, and that wills the means thereto, is necessarily sceptical. Freedom from any sort of conviction belongs to strength, and to an independent point of view. . . That grand passion which is at once the foundation and the power of a sceptic's existence, and is both more enlightened and more despotic than he is himself, drafts the whole of his intellect into its service; it makes him unscrupulous; it gives him courage to employ unholy means; under certain circumstances it does not begrudge him even convictions. Conviction as a means: one may achieve a good deal by means of a conviction. A grand passion makes use of and uses up convictions; it does not yield to them--it knows itself to be sovereign.--On the contrary, the need of faith, of some thing unconditioned by yea or nay, of Carlylism, if I may be allowed the word, is a need of weakness. The man of faith, the "believer" of any sort, is necessarily a dependent man--such a man cannot posit himself as a goal, nor can he find goals within himself. The "believer" does not belong to himself; he can only be a means to an end; he must be used up; he needs some one to use him up. His instinct gives the highest honours to an ethic of self-effacement; he is prompted to embrace it by everything: his prudence, his experience, his vanity. Every sort of faith is in itself an evidence of self-effacement, of self-estrangement. . . When one reflects how necessary it is to the great majority that there be regulations to restrain them from without and hold them fast, and to what extent control, or, in a higher sense, slavery, is the one and only condition which makes for the well-being of the weak-willed man, and especially woman, then one at once understands conviction and "faith." To the man with convictions they are his backbone. To avoid seeing many things, to be impartial about nothing, to be a party man through and through, to estimate all values strictly and infallibly--these are conditions necessary to the existence of such a man. But by the same token they are antagonists of the truthful man--of the truth. . . . The believer is not free to answer the question, "true" or "not true," according to the dictates of his own conscience: integrity on this point would work his instant downfall. The pathological limitations of his vision turn the man of convictions into a fanatic--Savonarola, Luther, Rousseau, Robespierre, Saint-Simon--these types stand in opposition to the strong, emancipated spirit. But the grandiose attitudes of these sick intellects, these intellectual epileptics, are of influence upon the great masses--fanatics are picturesque, and mankind prefers observing poses to listening to reasons. . ."
1. Pretend Nietzsche never wrote "Beyond Good and Evil"
2. Create a meaningless bullshit motto that presupposes absolute ideals of good and evil really exist
3. Join forces with oppressive regimes to deprive people of alternative points of view
4. Profit!!!
Quite the contrary. Nietzsche abhorred anti-semitism, nationalism and patriotism as the worst vulgarities. Some people erroneously identify him with the Nazis because of the way that the Nazis misappropriated his concept of the ubermensch, which had nothing to do with the eugenic program of the Nazis and other similar xenophobic hate groups. This is one of the most common misconceptions about Nietzsche. I suggest you read some of Nietzsche's actual published works to find out what he really thought. Using the term "saint" to describe Nietzsche also shows a great lack of familiarity with the man who wrote "The Antichrist".
Actually, the phony ideals of enlightenment humanism have been discredited by well over a hundred years of intellectual development in Western culture, going back to Nietzsche and Max Stirner.
Instead of giving the world bullshit about an "axis of evil", we ought be giving them "Beyond Good and Evil".
This story once again points out the deep absurdity of IP laws, and the complete lack of any absolute authority for laws in general, or what Montaigne referred to as the "mystical foundation of authority" in law:
"Laws are now maintained in credit, not because they are just, but because they are laws. It is the mystical foundation of their authority; they have none other." -- from "Essais 3", ch. 13
In the information age, its clear that the idea of ownership of specific sets of ones and zeros is pretty ridiculous and only continues because of government approved thuggery. Its interesting to see the ways that even this attempt at authority is being gradually eroded in the 21st century.
Considering that gutenberg.org is also banned over here, I see this as a much broader attempt at keeping the people uneducated with regard to certain kinds of dangerous ideas which might be a threat to processes of exploitation.
Of course, this kind of thing is going on in many countries, albeit using subtler methods, including the United States and Europe. Keep the people stupid, that is the best way to keep your power over them.
I'm an expat and have been living in China for the last 5 months. While I have been pretty annoyed by the fact that Wikipedia is blocked, people in China do have one kind of freedom that Americans don't have...
You see, over here in the PRC, they don't have any of those bastard weasel RIAA lawyers... I'm free to download all the music and movies I want with no possibility at all of being prosecuted by American legal system thugs!!