Actually, there was a great shot of Australia sweeping by and it was significantly darker before brightening again, because it has a relatively low specularity compared to the surrounding ocean (the hotspot was traveling over it.) The specular highlight was correct; the ocean does indeed have a highlight like that.
I think calculating a 23-degree angle with absolutely no point of reference would be a bit of a challenge (it assumes the probe's camera is aligned to the solar ecliptic, which is pretty unlikely.)
I think the problem is that most photos are very close and pretty much with the sun behind the photographer. Another good indication that this was real instead of animated - the complete lack of stars. Astronauts have commented that the reflected sunlight off of the earth completely drowns out the background stars - in other words, reality looks fake because it doesn't resemble the fake reality Hollywood has taught us to expect.
Considering that a run of 1,000 professionally produced DVDs will cost you about $2,000 from a DVD publishing facility (in other words, $2 per DVD), you definitely would be taking a serious loss on the manufacturing process.
I'm in the same boat, having lived in Germany for two years. However, you shouldn't feel embarrassed just because you're following the law and refusing to endanger people. Donating blood is supposed to save lives. Not donating harmful blood saves lives, too, right?:)
Sorry, but I thought that my original comment was neither rude nor indirect. Upon further review, I suppose it could be seen as rude, since it is rather terse. I apologize for that and will keep it in mind for future commenting.
As for keeping things friendly, you need some give and take, you know? You immediately started by making fun of my nickname (coming from somebody named "klept;" sorry, but the only thing that comes to mind is "kleptomaniac," so you've got me beat there.) You also continually mocked me by insinuating that I'd been drinking. If you were interested in having a friendly discussion, you could have simply asked for clarification. Going back, it looks like a discussion between two people who didn't know each other and weren't doing a very good job expressing themselves.
Just to clarify, the Japanese do not use the English imperial system of measurement, but use metric instead. Before that, they used "kanejaku", which they still use today, for example, in room measurements (I had to buy my A/C based on how many jo, or tatami mats of area it could cool.) That makes a literal translation of such a proverb doubtful. As for the people I asked, they were native teachers of Japanese, and very good at what they do (you'd hope.)
I've been collecting proverbs as I study Japanese, as they have some really amazingly colorful ones ("In three days you can tire of a beautiful woman and get used to an ugly one.") One of their most interesting idioms is "like piss in a frog's face" as a counterpart to the western "like water off a duck."
I'll keep searching for the one you've mentioned, as I wouldn't put it past the Japanese to not have something in a similar vein. They have a dangerous sense of humor sometimes. Anyway, I will work on trying to not sound like such an arrogant hard-ass in future conversations.
I'm not sure how much clearer I can express it, but I'll give it one more go, for your sake. There is no such expression in Japanese. We do agree on one point, though: let's stick to the topic at hand and stop this pointless thread.
Good for you. Anyway, I *live* in Japan, so have a rather large pool of people I can check with on that proverb. The only talent required was being able to ask a simple question.
MidnightBrewer as in somebody who makes coffee at midnight. Anyway, since I've been living in Japan for several years, I'm in a unique position to test the validity of Japanese kotowaza, or proverbs.
Not anymore. People are getting a lot taller due to the change in diet over the last few decades; more red meat means taller people. It's rather depressing, really; I'm no taller than average over here than I was back home.
The truth is, America is practically a closed market and therefore can pretty much dictate terms to its customers. It's the old monopoly effect; why compete when you can get someone to legislate that you don't have to?
On the "land area is total bunk" front, I would like to add that you also need to remember that the US is broken down into 50 different states, most of which are on par land-area-wise with your average European country. Technology roll-outs happen on a state-by-state basis, not a national basis. The fact is the tech companies simply don't feel like it, and they charge for the privilege to boot.
As an American living in Japan, I can tell you that there is an awful lot of geography tied up in a very tiny space that most people don't even think about. Japan is pretty much straight up-and-down. The fact that they are able to roll out anything like a national network is a tribute to their determination. And since their economy comes in third after the state of California (at roughly the same land area), it begs the question as to why California is lagging behind? Have they no pride?
As to why America needs broadband, it isn't just so that every Joe Sixpack in the sticks can have always-on broadband, but also to reduce the load on the rest of us. It's also a matter of the chicken and the egg: perhaps you don't think you need broadband because there are no services that really take advantage of it. However, until fast, cheap access is established, the services won't be developed.
Here's a good reason for you: VoIP. I call home at a rate of 1.3 cents per minute with my broadband telephone, and free if I use Skype or iChat, or call someone else with the same kind of broadband phone. I can video-chat as well, and it's awesome. The best part is, my normal phone bill is ridiculously cheap and never goes above the base rate. I pay less for VoIP over broadband than I did for a regular phone service plus dialup. Saving money is always a good reason to do something, I find.
I am a minority in Japan, and find my current working conditions more than accommodating. Things change. We're not at war anymore. We haven't been for almost 50 years. How old are you, that you can remember all that?
The Chinese have also done horrendous things in their 5,000-year history (to pretty much everybody, and the only thing that stopped them from doing it to Japan was a bit of water and bad weather.) Speaking of Korea, do you also remember this? For sheer nastiness, the only thing Koreans have to fear is themselves.
War is ugly, but it is not unique to Japan. Nor is hatred fashionable, just because it seems to be fashionable right now to hate the Japanese. How can you pretend to be better than somebody when you can't even forgive them for something that happened before you were even born?
I come from America, and we've committed our share of war atrocities (a lot of them against the Japanese, and that's not counting the American ones.) Luckily, we're also powerful and usually on the winning side, so we get to help out with how the history books are written. It works out well for the whole PR campaign.
That would be one of the sites you're working on, but how about the rest? Also, there are several important questions to address:
1. Is the design any good? 12,000 pages of black-on-white text with no graphics is not a design. Programmers and designers often clash because they both have a different idea of how things should work. Just because rectangles and left-justified text are good enough for one man does not mean they're good enough for everybody.
2. Clients. Clients, when faced with two designers offering to work for the same price will invariably pick the one with the flashier design skills. They want their content to look unique and well-presented. You can't use the same 3 style sheets with every client you have, or they start to feel cheated.
3. When you say standards-compliant, which standards? CSS 1.0, which was approved five years ago, and which IE continues to fail to support properly? Are you referring to reverse-compatibility with 4.x browsers as well? Believe it or not, some people actually still use those.
So, in the real world, there is no easy panacea, and there is no such thing as "zero extra work." I write a page to be standards-compliant and then go back and create additional code that makes it work in IE, too. And that's just because I'm stubborn enough to insist on using standards that were approved five years ago. Silly me. I agree that, as a good designer, I can't fall back on a message telling users to get a certain browser, but that's assuming the client gives me a choice. Sometimes a person's limitations are dictated by the wallets of others.
The same way that anything Microsoft releases is immediately an "industry standard": they own 90% of the market, ergo everything they do is a standard. Whenever iRiver or the Creative Zen's market share goes above single digit percentages, then they can get cool jargon, too.
If it makes you feel better, the word "pod" existed before the iPod. Of course, that probably makes all the listeners "pod people"...
Government will always seek an excuse to exercise more control over its people - it is a natural tendency. The reasons may seem benign at first, and may be made out of a sincere desire for peace and prosperity for all, but governments are invariably run by people, and people are notoriously unreliable.
The good people who start something get replaced by less-adequate, or even corrupt, people, and eventually things go wrong. Not an absolute, but history has shown this time and time again.
There has never been a "safe" time in human history. Every century has seen a score of wars across the globe. Terrorism is just the latest name for it, but the cause and effect are the same. Do something to fight the enemy, but don't sacrifice the very thing you're fighting for in the process. How can the USA claim to be the "land of the free" if we sacrifice freedom in the name of, well, freedom? It doesn't make sense. We've forgotten what we're fighting for, and worse yet, who we're supposed to be fighting, and now we're turning it in on ourselves.
There was a great time in French history when the aristocracy was overthrown and a true government of the people was established to allow them to finally be a free, democratic people. It came later to be known as Robespierre's Reign of Terror. They lacked a Department of Home Security, but they did have the Department of Public Safety.
I live in Japan, have the same "average" salary, but haven't made the mistake of living in the heart of Tokyo, which everyone seems to confuse with the rest of Japan (comparable to say that New York represents average life in America.) Living in Osaka, for example, is comparable, or cheaper, than living in Los Angeles. I can easily save US $500 a month without trying, and $1000 if I really feel like it - all without sacrificing a very comfortable lifestyle.
That being said, I wasn't surprised to see the iTMS Japan prices being so high - I figured that's what was holding things up. The Japanese *hate* dropping prices on anything, and Apple even attempting to propose ¥100 per song would have had the Japanese gently, but firmly, pushing them out the door. The media industry over here has a stranglehold on prices, and we regularly pay at least twice as much as the rest of the world (that's okay, because my German friends legitimately pay half as much as I did in the US.) As for the, "some songs will be ¥150," I'm still looking. Most of them are in the ¥300 to ¥400 range, which means that basically Apple caved completely to the dictates of the Japanese companies.
I'm surprised to hear that anime songs are scarce - Avex, one of the biggest labels that signed, releases a lot of anime music over here. I'm sure it'll start popping up, as a large number of Japanese consumers will want it just as much as the American otakus do.
The corporate environment is not the home environment. The entire draw of the personal computer - emphasis on "personal" - is that you could have your very own. People want to possess, and they don't want other people messing with their stuff. This is why Apple has pushed laptops so much in recent years, recognizing that people are not only straying further towards having their own computer, they want to be able to carry it around with them, too.
That being said, I think there will be a natural evolution towards a more centralized system per household. Wifi networks are the beginning of this trend, in a way. However, until a server becomes as easy to install as any other appliance (turn it on and forget about it), then it's not going to become mainstream.
I appreciate the information. As for fighting the war on terror, my suggestion is that there really isn't any good way to fight it at all (as people have pointed out before, "terror" is a word, not a country.)
My suggestion is to do as the English have done, roll with the punches, and keep going. America is a bright and shining example of what happens when terrorism wins - people live in paranoia and fear, which is only egged on by the media and the government. Government makes a lot of noise about security, but hasn't really accomplished a lot more than banning nail clippers from airlines and an arbitrary color-coded threat level based on ambiguous criteria that has a lot more to do with convincing people that somebody is doing *something* rather than actually attempting to fix a situation that everyone knows is impossible to control.
We are no better off than we were before - *security* is no better than it was before - but there are a lot more little annoyances everywhere you go in the name of safety that really don't help at all. London, with its thousands of security cameras in every public space, was unable to avert not only one, but six bombs. I seriously doubt confiscating my nail clippers at the airport is really making our skies safer.
Meanwhile, in the rest of the world (I live abroad), life goes on pretty much as it has before, and people don't spend a lot of time worrying about it. It's a lot less stressful, I can tell you.
Bush -- because spreading democracy in the middle east is better than the current chatter in Europe about mass deportations of muslims back to their kleptomullahcracies. It is harder but it still is the right thing to do.
Bush doesn't deport them, he just puts them in a concentration camp in Cuba without just cause and with no determined release date. Is being put in prison so much better than being sent home? As for immigration laws, America's current policy is to block access to intelligent, educated people regardless of country of origin, while giving blanket citizenship to illegal aliens from Mexico because it's easier than shipping them home again.
As for "spreading democracy," all he's accomplished so far is bombing a country back into the Stone Age and leaving them with a non-functioning puppet government and near anarchy, which is only being held at bay by America's continued military rule.
Just because somebody shares the same nationality as we do doesn't mean we have to instantly be proud of them. Every country is responsible for its share of assholes. They crop up in the most amazing places.
You have to boot into DOS to flash your video card? Wow. On OSX, they let you do it right from the desktop. No *wonder* the video card vendors charge me hundreds more than for the PC version.;)
(I am a Mac user slamming video card vendors, not the Mac.)
Whoops. End of the first paragraph above should read, "otherwise, arguing over an acceptable alternate spelling that only involves removing one stroke from a letter is just anal.
Actually, I did read the article and it doesn't affect my opinion at all. For the purposes of a Slashdot comment section, arguably one of the least important places to be a Typography Nazi (now there's a new one), it seems to be a little unnecessary to go hunt the character down since it isn't readily apparent on my keyboard.
You might as well argue that people are wrong because they capitalize a company's name or product when the company itself always spells it lowercase, or with mixed capitals (for example, "discreet's combustion" is "properly" all lowercase.) The ç is correct if you are displaying it in a situation that requires a trademarked logo; otherwise, an acceptable alternate spelling that only involves removing one serif from a letter is just anal.
If you want to go that far, then as a speaker of German I suppose I should demand that all umlauts and essets are properly observed, even on non-German forums? Of course not; unless you're a German speaker as well, in which case you already know better. Anyway, we've wasted enough bandwidth on this argument already. If we aren't commenting on the game, we should go ahead and wrap this up.
Amazingly enough, Oxford's American Dictionary disagrees with you. "Facade" with a "c" is a perfectly legitimate spelling. It always pays to back up your pedantry with research.
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Actually, there was a great shot of Australia sweeping by and it was significantly darker before brightening again, because it has a relatively low specularity compared to the surrounding ocean (the hotspot was traveling over it.) The specular highlight was correct; the ocean does indeed have a highlight like that.
I think calculating a 23-degree angle with absolutely no point of reference would be a bit of a challenge (it assumes the probe's camera is aligned to the solar ecliptic, which is pretty unlikely.)
I think the problem is that most photos are very close and pretty much with the sun behind the photographer. Another good indication that this was real instead of animated - the complete lack of stars. Astronauts have commented that the reflected sunlight off of the earth completely drowns out the background stars - in other words, reality looks fake because it doesn't resemble the fake reality Hollywood has taught us to expect.
Considering that a run of 1,000 professionally produced DVDs will cost you about $2,000 from a DVD publishing facility (in other words, $2 per DVD), you definitely would be taking a serious loss on the manufacturing process.
I'm in the same boat, having lived in Germany for two years. However, you shouldn't feel embarrassed just because you're following the law and refusing to endanger people. Donating blood is supposed to save lives. Not donating harmful blood saves lives, too, right? :)
Sorry, but I thought that my original comment was neither rude nor indirect. Upon further review, I suppose it could be seen as rude, since it is rather terse. I apologize for that and will keep it in mind for future commenting.
As for keeping things friendly, you need some give and take, you know? You immediately started by making fun of my nickname (coming from somebody named "klept;" sorry, but the only thing that comes to mind is "kleptomaniac," so you've got me beat there.) You also continually mocked me by insinuating that I'd been drinking. If you were interested in having a friendly discussion, you could have simply asked for clarification. Going back, it looks like a discussion between two people who didn't know each other and weren't doing a very good job expressing themselves.
Just to clarify, the Japanese do not use the English imperial system of measurement, but use metric instead. Before that, they used "kanejaku", which they still use today, for example, in room measurements (I had to buy my A/C based on how many jo, or tatami mats of area it could cool.) That makes a literal translation of such a proverb doubtful. As for the people I asked, they were native teachers of Japanese, and very good at what they do (you'd hope.)
I've been collecting proverbs as I study Japanese, as they have some really amazingly colorful ones ("In three days you can tire of a beautiful woman and get used to an ugly one.") One of their most interesting idioms is "like piss in a frog's face" as a counterpart to the western "like water off a duck."
I'll keep searching for the one you've mentioned, as I wouldn't put it past the Japanese to not have something in a similar vein. They have a dangerous sense of humor sometimes. Anyway, I will work on trying to not sound like such an arrogant hard-ass in future conversations.
I'm not sure how much clearer I can express it, but I'll give it one more go, for your sake. There is no such expression in Japanese. We do agree on one point, though: let's stick to the topic at hand and stop this pointless thread.
Good for you. Anyway, I *live* in Japan, so have a rather large pool of people I can check with on that proverb. The only talent required was being able to ask a simple question.
MidnightBrewer as in somebody who makes coffee at midnight. Anyway, since I've been living in Japan for several years, I'm in a unique position to test the validity of Japanese kotowaza, or proverbs.
Not anymore. People are getting a lot taller due to the change in diet over the last few decades; more red meat means taller people. It's rather depressing, really; I'm no taller than average over here than I was back home.
Would be more plausible if the Japanese used inches and feet, don't you think?
The truth is, America is practically a closed market and therefore can pretty much dictate terms to its customers. It's the old monopoly effect; why compete when you can get someone to legislate that you don't have to?
On the "land area is total bunk" front, I would like to add that you also need to remember that the US is broken down into 50 different states, most of which are on par land-area-wise with your average European country. Technology roll-outs happen on a state-by-state basis, not a national basis. The fact is the tech companies simply don't feel like it, and they charge for the privilege to boot.
As an American living in Japan, I can tell you that there is an awful lot of geography tied up in a very tiny space that most people don't even think about. Japan is pretty much straight up-and-down. The fact that they are able to roll out anything like a national network is a tribute to their determination. And since their economy comes in third after the state of California (at roughly the same land area), it begs the question as to why California is lagging behind? Have they no pride?
As to why America needs broadband, it isn't just so that every Joe Sixpack in the sticks can have always-on broadband, but also to reduce the load on the rest of us. It's also a matter of the chicken and the egg: perhaps you don't think you need broadband because there are no services that really take advantage of it. However, until fast, cheap access is established, the services won't be developed.
Here's a good reason for you: VoIP. I call home at a rate of 1.3 cents per minute with my broadband telephone, and free if I use Skype or iChat, or call someone else with the same kind of broadband phone. I can video-chat as well, and it's awesome. The best part is, my normal phone bill is ridiculously cheap and never goes above the base rate. I pay less for VoIP over broadband than I did for a regular phone service plus dialup. Saving money is always a good reason to do something, I find.
I am a minority in Japan, and find my current working conditions more than accommodating. Things change. We're not at war anymore. We haven't been for almost 50 years. How old are you, that you can remember all that?
The Chinese have also done horrendous things in their 5,000-year history (to pretty much everybody, and the only thing that stopped them from doing it to Japan was a bit of water and bad weather.) Speaking of Korea, do you also remember this? For sheer nastiness, the only thing Koreans have to fear is themselves.
War is ugly, but it is not unique to Japan. Nor is hatred fashionable, just because it seems to be fashionable right now to hate the Japanese. How can you pretend to be better than somebody when you can't even forgive them for something that happened before you were even born?
I come from America, and we've committed our share of war atrocities (a lot of them against the Japanese, and that's not counting the American ones.) Luckily, we're also powerful and usually on the winning side, so we get to help out with how the history books are written. It works out well for the whole PR campaign.
That would be one of the sites you're working on, but how about the rest? Also, there are several important questions to address:
1. Is the design any good? 12,000 pages of black-on-white text with no graphics is not a design. Programmers and designers often clash because they both have a different idea of how things should work. Just because rectangles and left-justified text are good enough for one man does not mean they're good enough for everybody.
2. Clients. Clients, when faced with two designers offering to work for the same price will invariably pick the one with the flashier design skills. They want their content to look unique and well-presented. You can't use the same 3 style sheets with every client you have, or they start to feel cheated.
3. When you say standards-compliant, which standards? CSS 1.0, which was approved five years ago, and which IE continues to fail to support properly? Are you referring to reverse-compatibility with 4.x browsers as well? Believe it or not, some people actually still use those.
So, in the real world, there is no easy panacea, and there is no such thing as "zero extra work." I write a page to be standards-compliant and then go back and create additional code that makes it work in IE, too. And that's just because I'm stubborn enough to insist on using standards that were approved five years ago. Silly me. I agree that, as a good designer, I can't fall back on a message telling users to get a certain browser, but that's assuming the client gives me a choice. Sometimes a person's limitations are dictated by the wallets of others.
The same way that anything Microsoft releases is immediately an "industry standard": they own 90% of the market, ergo everything they do is a standard. Whenever iRiver or the Creative Zen's market share goes above single digit percentages, then they can get cool jargon, too.
If it makes you feel better, the word "pod" existed before the iPod. Of course, that probably makes all the listeners "pod people"...
Government will always seek an excuse to exercise more control over its people - it is a natural tendency. The reasons may seem benign at first, and may be made out of a sincere desire for peace and prosperity for all, but governments are invariably run by people, and people are notoriously unreliable.
The good people who start something get replaced by less-adequate, or even corrupt, people, and eventually things go wrong. Not an absolute, but history has shown this time and time again.
There has never been a "safe" time in human history. Every century has seen a score of wars across the globe. Terrorism is just the latest name for it, but the cause and effect are the same. Do something to fight the enemy, but don't sacrifice the very thing you're fighting for in the process. How can the USA claim to be the "land of the free" if we sacrifice freedom in the name of, well, freedom? It doesn't make sense. We've forgotten what we're fighting for, and worse yet, who we're supposed to be fighting, and now we're turning it in on ourselves.
There was a great time in French history when the aristocracy was overthrown and a true government of the people was established to allow them to finally be a free, democratic people. It came later to be known as Robespierre's Reign of Terror. They lacked a Department of Home Security, but they did have the Department of Public Safety.
I live in Japan, have the same "average" salary, but haven't made the mistake of living in the heart of Tokyo, which everyone seems to confuse with the rest of Japan (comparable to say that New York represents average life in America.) Living in Osaka, for example, is comparable, or cheaper, than living in Los Angeles. I can easily save US $500 a month without trying, and $1000 if I really feel like it - all without sacrificing a very comfortable lifestyle.
That being said, I wasn't surprised to see the iTMS Japan prices being so high - I figured that's what was holding things up. The Japanese *hate* dropping prices on anything, and Apple even attempting to propose ¥100 per song would have had the Japanese gently, but firmly, pushing them out the door. The media industry over here has a stranglehold on prices, and we regularly pay at least twice as much as the rest of the world (that's okay, because my German friends legitimately pay half as much as I did in the US.) As for the, "some songs will be ¥150," I'm still looking. Most of them are in the ¥300 to ¥400 range, which means that basically Apple caved completely to the dictates of the Japanese companies.
I'm surprised to hear that anime songs are scarce - Avex, one of the biggest labels that signed, releases a lot of anime music over here. I'm sure it'll start popping up, as a large number of Japanese consumers will want it just as much as the American otakus do.
That's why I saved myself the frustration and moved here. Plus, the girls dig tech, too.
The corporate environment is not the home environment. The entire draw of the personal computer - emphasis on "personal" - is that you could have your very own. People want to possess, and they don't want other people messing with their stuff. This is why Apple has pushed laptops so much in recent years, recognizing that people are not only straying further towards having their own computer, they want to be able to carry it around with them, too.
That being said, I think there will be a natural evolution towards a more centralized system per household. Wifi networks are the beginning of this trend, in a way. However, until a server becomes as easy to install as any other appliance (turn it on and forget about it), then it's not going to become mainstream.
Not "King of 100 Beasts," just "King of Beasts." Semantic instead of literal translation.
I appreciate the information. As for fighting the war on terror, my suggestion is that there really isn't any good way to fight it at all (as people have pointed out before, "terror" is a word, not a country.)
My suggestion is to do as the English have done, roll with the punches, and keep going. America is a bright and shining example of what happens when terrorism wins - people live in paranoia and fear, which is only egged on by the media and the government. Government makes a lot of noise about security, but hasn't really accomplished a lot more than banning nail clippers from airlines and an arbitrary color-coded threat level based on ambiguous criteria that has a lot more to do with convincing people that somebody is doing *something* rather than actually attempting to fix a situation that everyone knows is impossible to control.
We are no better off than we were before - *security* is no better than it was before - but there are a lot more little annoyances everywhere you go in the name of safety that really don't help at all. London, with its thousands of security cameras in every public space, was unable to avert not only one, but six bombs. I seriously doubt confiscating my nail clippers at the airport is really making our skies safer.
Meanwhile, in the rest of the world (I live abroad), life goes on pretty much as it has before, and people don't spend a lot of time worrying about it. It's a lot less stressful, I can tell you.
Bush -- because spreading democracy in the middle east is better than the current chatter in Europe about mass deportations of muslims back to their kleptomullahcracies. It is harder but it still is the right thing to do.
Bush doesn't deport them, he just puts them in a concentration camp in Cuba without just cause and with no determined release date. Is being put in prison so much better than being sent home? As for immigration laws, America's current policy is to block access to intelligent, educated people regardless of country of origin, while giving blanket citizenship to illegal aliens from Mexico because it's easier than shipping them home again.
As for "spreading democracy," all he's accomplished so far is bombing a country back into the Stone Age and leaving them with a non-functioning puppet government and near anarchy, which is only being held at bay by America's continued military rule.
Just because somebody shares the same nationality as we do doesn't mean we have to instantly be proud of them. Every country is responsible for its share of assholes. They crop up in the most amazing places.
...
;)
You have to boot into DOS to flash your video card? Wow. On OSX, they let you do it right from the desktop. No *wonder* the video card vendors charge me hundreds more than for the PC version.
(I am a Mac user slamming video card vendors, not the Mac.)
Whoops. End of the first paragraph above should read, "otherwise, arguing over an acceptable alternate spelling that only involves removing one stroke from a letter is just anal.
:)
Man, now I'm grammar-naziing myself.
Actually, I did read the article and it doesn't affect my opinion at all. For the purposes of a Slashdot comment section, arguably one of the least important places to be a Typography Nazi (now there's a new one), it seems to be a little unnecessary to go hunt the character down since it isn't readily apparent on my keyboard.
You might as well argue that people are wrong because they capitalize a company's name or product when the company itself always spells it lowercase, or with mixed capitals (for example, "discreet's combustion" is "properly" all lowercase.) The ç is correct if you are displaying it in a situation that requires a trademarked logo; otherwise, an acceptable alternate spelling that only involves removing one serif from a letter is just anal.
If you want to go that far, then as a speaker of German I suppose I should demand that all umlauts and essets are properly observed, even on non-German forums? Of course not; unless you're a German speaker as well, in which case you already know better. Anyway, we've wasted enough bandwidth on this argument already. If we aren't commenting on the game, we should go ahead and wrap this up.
If you were in on creating a universe, you'd want to make sure you got your name listed in the credits, too.
Amazingly enough, Oxford's American Dictionary disagrees with you. "Facade" with a "c" is a perfectly legitimate spelling. It always pays to back up your pedantry with research.