since when does "but GNOME's ctrl+space+"fi"+enter is significantly faster" imply using a mouse?
It doesn't, but it implies not wanting to type Chinese, or other CJK scripts.
ctrl+space is the default combination for scim, ibus, and basically any non-European input method.
What's wrong with Alt+F2+"fi"+enter?
It's been there for at least a decade, you know?
Mandarin has four tones. There is a fifth "neutral" tone, but it is rarely used, and you don't really need to learn it.
There are four canonical tones in Mandarin + neutral.
In practice, they have many realisations. The third tone has 3 different pronunciations, the neutral tone has 4 different pronunciations, depending on the context (tone sandhi).
In any case, tones are easy in isolation, but complicated like nothing else in fluent speech. Which is why very few foreigners really master them
The German version of Quake IV (the game was completely in English, only there was a special edition for German market only) had edited some gory sequences out. IIRC, the game was already unsuitable for 16-year olds, this was basically censorship.
You had to run a German-version binary with German-version data or the game would crash.
Not really.
Insulting a police officer will indeed land you a 5000 Euro fine. Insulting a judge should be similar.
You lost me with the music and movies, though. Could you elaborate?
Many of them (though probably not the majority) are encoded using open-source encoders and codecs like Xvid or LAME. Xvid in particular is very popular. So you are benefitting from open source software whenever you watch an Xvid-encoded movie.
Of course, open source players like VLC are very popular too, even among Windows crowds.
I share the same philosophy about computers. I don't want to waste hours of my life on coding software. I'd rather just work 1 hour of overtime, and then go out and buy the program I need.
You don't get the whole point of Free Software in the first place.
But the beauty of it is that even you can profit from its fruits. Every time you surf on the internet, or listen to music or watch a movie. Most of those are running on or were created with Free Software.
I can't bother to RTFA so I sure as hell can't be bothered to read your link, but I have to say that Chinese characters didn't evolve phonetically, but were actual representations (ie drawings) of the word they represent (more complex ideas being made up of combinations of simpler concepts). But as a speaker of Japanese, not Chinese, I only know the history of the characters in Japan, which is not the country of origin.
To the best of my knowledge, this theory is widely discredited today. DeFrancis' book "The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy" is a good read, there is a relevant excerpt online
Over 90% of all Chinese characters have a strong phonetic component in it. Only a tiny number of characters are either true pictographs or a combination of true pictographs. The characters originally developed from pictograms, but soon they were used as a sort of rebus, where pictographs were substituted to represent words that sounded exactly the same. This happened with other pictographic scripts too, like Egyptian hieroglyphs, where most of the pictographs were used phonetically.
Most characters in existence have a phonetic part + a semantic part (radical). In Japanese, the phonetic connection is not always obvious, and in Chinese, you sometimes need to look at several dialects or reconstructions of middle Chinese to see it. In short, Chinese characters are a complicated and inaccurate phonetic writing system.
Despite the bewildering complexity and variety of Chinese characters, there are actually a very limited set of ways to pronounce them. This results in tons and tons of words sounding exactly the same, and the only way to know them apart is by context. It's a real downer for learning the language when you see two native speakers misunderstanding each other. It is also a gold mine for puns, like the story says. Different characters from motherfucker, but sounds the same. Since the internet is not spoken, then technically it's not offensive.
There are about 1200 ways to pronounce a syllable in modern Mandarin, and about 1800 in modern Cantonese. Compare this to the 8000 of English and around 100 in Japanese, and you'll find that Chinese is not that poor phonetically (see DeFrancis: "The Chinese Language" for more details). Furthermore, most words in modern Chinese are composed of several characters. The number of different characters that sound exactly the same is huge, but the number of actual words that sound exactly the same is actually very small. It's still a very context-heavy language, but not as much as people sometimes imagine.
The problem is that people ignore the tones in Chinese, which are extremely important. Grass-mud-horse (cao3 ni2 ma3) sounds very different from "motherfucker" (cao4 ni3 ma1), but it is close enough to be humorous and to get the message across.
A good example is the Three Gorges Dam which displaced millions of people when they flooded the river valley and towns and villages that lived off it(Remember how Bush got slammed for how he handled Hurricane Katrina? This flood was actually man-made and much bigger!). The rationale of this huge dam was that the electricity would help catapult modern china into competition with the other first-world countries, i.e a propaganda move. Essentially, poor Chinese were pushed aside to help develop the modern areas.
Actually, the main reason the dam was built was to stop regular flooding of the Yangze river. Besides producing electricity, the three gorges dam also regulates the flow of the river.
The 1954 flood killed over 30,000 people and left 19 million homeless. The 1998 flood killed over 3,000 and left 14 million homeless. The last flood alone cost almost as much as the construction of the dam, which should help prevent most of such floods and minimise the effects of the remaining ones.
I do agree that the loss for the displaced people is great, and that the value of the cultural relics flooded forever cannot be measured, but this damn prevents much greater disasters than Katrina and the Sichuan earthquake.
After any salary raise, you will have less money at the end of the month than you did before.
