biesnecker

asking the question ‘Do you speak Chinese?’ is akin to asking ‘Do you speak Romance?

As the conference wore on, attacks became increasingly personal. Ironically, dialect differences themselves became fuel for the ire of delegates. At one point a member of the southern faction, Wang Rongbao, happened to use a Shanghai expression for rickshaw, huangbao che, which northerner Wang Zhao misheard as a standard Mandarin curse wangba dan ‘son of a bitch’ (literally, ‘turtle’s egg’). Incensed, Wang Zhao proceeded to bare his arms and physically attack Wang Rongbao, pummelling him with his fists and chasing him from the assembly hall.

In 1919 the National Language Dictionary based upon the committee’s compromise standard was published, under the editorship of Wu Zhihui. But before the champagne bottles could be opened, the dictionary immediately came under harsh criticism. Many scholars continued to argue for a system based on the Beijing dialect. Wu, in his typical bombastic fashion, defended all att

The muzzle grows tighter

Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton condemned both the video and the reaction to it. General Martin Dempsey, then chairman of America’s joint chiefs of staff, contacted Terry Jones, a pastor in Florida who had previously burned a Koran in public, and asked him not to promote the video.

“Consider for a moment: the most senior officer of the mightiest armed forces the world has ever seen feels it necessary to contact some backwoods Florida pastor to beg him not to promote a 13-minute D-movie YouTube upload. Such are the power asymmetries in this connected world,” writes Timothy Garton Ash in “Free Speech”, a fine new book on the subject.

Second, technology firms are having to grapple with horribly complex decisions about censorship. The big global ones such as Facebook and Twitter aspire to be politically neutral, but do not permit “hate speech” or obscenity on their platforms.

The internet's twitter

In response to Dave Winer's post.

I think the short answer is "something like XMPP." XMPP has a lot of things going for it:

It's an open standard (we can all build our own implementations and fork our own features and at a base level it will remain compatible as long as we're not dorks and break the interface).
It's federated (I can choose who I trust, and I don't have to pay for everyone to use my server).

It needs payloads and doesn't need arbitrary length limits.

	import csv
	import json
	from collections import defaultdict

	datafiles = ['./GL{0}.TXT'.format(x) for x in range(1960,2014)]

	counts = defaultdict(lambda: defaultdict(lambda: defaultdict(int)))

	max_i = 0

	/** @jsx React.DOM */

	FBLoginMessageComponent = new React.createClass({
	render: function() {
	var status = this.props.status;
	var message = '';
	if (status === 'logged_in') {
	message = 'You\'re already logged in.';
	} else if (status === 'not_logged_in') {
	message = 'You\'re not logged in yet.';

	/** @jsx React.DOM */

	var GameStatus = {
	NOTSTARTED: 0,
	FINISHED: 1,
	INPROGRESS: 2
	}

	var Suits = ['H', 'D', 'C', 'S'];
	var Cards = [];

	/** @jsx React.DOM */

	var SVGComponent = React.createClass({
	render: function() {
	return this.transferPropsTo(
	<svg>{this.props.children}</svg>
	);
	}
	});

	#!/usr/bin/env python

	# usage: choices choice_a 1 choice_b 5 choice_c 4
	# will return choice_a 10% of the time, choice_b 50% of the time
	# and choice_c 40% of the time

	from random import randrange
	import sys

	options = []

	(require db openssl)

	; connect to a Amazon RDS MySQL instance using SSL

	(define sslcontext
	(let ([ctx (ssl-make-client-context 'tls)])
	(ssl-load-verify-root-certificates! ctx "./rds-combined-ca-bundle.pem")
	(ssl-set-verify! ctx #t) (ssl-set-ciphers! ctx "DEFAULT:!aNULL:!eNULL:!LOW:!EXPORT:!SSLv2")
	(ssl-seal-context! ctx)
	ctx))

	import asyncio
	import functools
	import random

	class Message(object):

	def __init__(self, message, payload={}):
	self.message = message
	self.payload = payload
	self.result = None