Another problem with transliteration is that standard systems often produce results which look very odd to English speakers. For example, under the 1997 passport system would be transliterated Mariya. Under the 2010 system it would be Mariia which is even worse. But there already is a standard spelling of this name in English: Maria.

I know of two people who asked the workers in an Eastern European passport office to transliterate their names in a particular way. Both requests were accepted without argument.

Tsarnayev is an example of such an odd result which one might wish to change to Tsarnaev.

For a general discussion about the ways actual people's names can cause problems for computer programmers, see:

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/

It would not be worth the effort for one website or even ten. But what is proposed is an improvement to the most commonly used JPEG implementation in the world. The cost will be amortized over millions of websites as software is upgraded over the next few years.

To see how this works, let's make up some numbers. Lets say that the whole effort will consume $100,000 worth of labor. Let's guess that within five years it will be installed on one million websites. That means it will cost $0.10 per website. Is it worth spending $0.10 per website to reduce the bandwidth use (and increase speed of loading) by a few percent?

As others have pointed out, improvements to this JPEG compressor would not reduce the size of existing static images. But it would help with images which are under the control of some kind of content managment system which recompress the images. Nowadays almost all non-trivial websites fit that description.

Some inventions come about because the inventor had an insight which his contemporaries did not. Others come about because someone financed a long course of trial and error. But you shouldn't be able to get a patent just because you paid an engineer to implement an idea which half of his peers could have described to you during a preliminary consultation.

Have you ever taken a bite of the Creationism Musuem? Now try some of this Whole Foods bread with a little cheese. Do you understand the difference now?

How about arguments against it made by gays? There are at least some who believe that the gay-marriage movement is unnessary or counter-productive.

For example, this essay by a gay man can be found on the BBC website: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/maga...

And here is a blog by a gay man who disavows the gay marriage movement: http://nogaymarriage.wordpress...

Here is a site with lots of links on the subject: http://www.againstequality.org...

Admittedly, the positions taken in these essays are not as strong as those of certain religions organizations, but they are definitly arguments against gay marriage.

It is not all or nothing. When rights conflict a balance must be struck. To refuse blacks service in McDonald's would clearly be illegal because any freedom of association argument would be frivilous. (A white person's argument that he is being forced to associate with black people because he can see some of them at another table while he is eating his Big Mac is pretty silly.)

However, the KKK absolutely can refuse to accept black people as members. If they have a clubhouse with a lunch counter, they absolutely can prohibit black people from eating at it just by making a members-only rule.

Maybe this should be changed. If it were, then we could find a KKK chapter with a clubhouse and 50 members. We could then find 51 black volunteers who would join up. At the next club business meeting they could all come and vote to disband the chapter or amend its charter to support racial equality.

In theory this would be a good thing since it deprives an obnoxious organization of its clubhouse. But remember how it goes: "First they came for the KKK, but I did not speak up because I am not a racist." all the way down to "Then they came for me and no one spoke up because there was no one left."

People certainly have a choice about whether to attend a particular church or not. But I am not sure religious belief is something you can just turn off. I suppose you could drive them into the um... closet.

To say that it is OK to discriminate against ideas is dangerous because then someone has to decide which ideas are incorrect and thus fair game. If that had been the way things worked, then the gay rights movement would never have gotten off the ground.

I think that would depend a lot on the nature of the service. There is a big difference between seating the pastor of the Westboro Baptist Church in your restaurant as part of the lunch crowd and renting him the banquet hall for a dinner celebrating his organization's programs.

Similiarly, I think there is a difference between a photographer taking a picture of two men who come into his or her studio and say that they want a family portrait just like the man and woman before them got and going to their wedding with the express purpose of memorializing it.

I think the difference that in the second parts of the examples above is that speach is the central element of the event. Furthure, the person providing the service is expected to stand in the view of the audiance and smile and provide services supporting the speakers including (in the case of our hypothetical photographer) services which amplify and transmit that speach.

I don't think making people pretend to support speach which they find repugnant is fair or reasonable. On the other hand, it is not right to deny unpopular speakers a meaningful way to express their views. I am not sure how to balance this.

(If you are wondering why I have implied that a wedding is speech, that is because a declaration is the central defining element of a wedding in all cultures of which I am aware. It has sometimes taken the form of a solomn oath pronounced in front of one or more witnesses, sometimes it has been the signing of a document, in some ancient cultures the groom went to the bride's father's home and led her pompously through the streets to his home in the company of friends and relations.)

Interesting. What would you do if you were a graphic artist and someone came into your shop and asked you to design a poster for an anti-gay campaign? Do you believe the situations are the same or different?

The 'abuse' we are talking about is basically "turning the volume up too high". That might make sense if a high-powered audio system had been damaged where the "too high" means deafening. But this is a laptop. Frequently "all the way up" still isn't high enough to hear clearly.

He is not saying that everything should be designed for maximum durability. He is saying that things should be designed so that they don't break the first itme something a little unusual happens. A bridge which collapses under a bumper-to-bumper traffic jam is defective. A laptop computer sound system which breaks if certain sounds are played with the volume all the way up is also defective. (After all, laptops are frequently operated with he volumn all the way up.) Here Dell is claiming that VLC filtered the sound in a certain way and that their speakers are not designed to play that sound. That is just silly. It is as silly as a highway bridge designer who says that he didn't know that his bridge was suppose to be able to handle bumper-to-bumper traffic.

Actually, no, higher wattage speakers do not automatically draw more power. The power rating on a speaker specifies the amount of power which the amplier can pump through the speaker without damaging it. How much power actually goes into the speaker is determined by the number of volts which the amplifier puts on the line and the impediance of the speaker (which is generally 4 or 8 ohms). With the volume control set to zero there are zero volts on the line and the speaker is consuming zero power, no matter what its rating. As we raise the volume the voltage rises and the speaker starts consuming power and producing sound. As we raise the volume the amplifier will get to a point where it is producing the maximum voltage of which it is physically capable. That may be less than the speaker could endure, but so what?

Saying that speakers with a too-high power rating will blow an amplifier is like saying that tires with a too-high speed rating will cause a car to go too fast. How fast the car goes depends on how strong the engine is and how much you press the gas pedal, not no how strongly the tires are constructed.

I think it probably had more to do with the fact that wages are generally a lot lower in India. This improved Oracle's bargaining position in wage negotiations. If they had offered someone already in the US less then the going rate, he would likely refuse in the hope of getting a better offer. But if this employee refused their offer, he would remain in India and get much less than their lowball offer. Is this unfair, exploitive, and illegal? Of course it is. But the decision to exploit him may have had more to do with his poor bargaining position than his skin color.

I agree with you about the nerdy satisfaction to be had, even for those who do not agree with the theology. The last three quarters of Genesis with its descriptions of early Middle Eastern cultures is fascinating. The book of Ester gives us a look into a vanished culture as well as a being gripping story full of dramatic and subtle turns of events. The gospels are also worth reading, but for a different reason. They completely lack the pomp and solemnity so familiar from artistic depictions. In them Jesus is a dynamic figure who criscrosses the country on foot and whose speeches so anger the establishment that he sometimes has to flee immediately after giving them. Finally, I would recommend the book of Acts for its depictions of the Roman world of the first century including extensive descriptions of sea voyages, legal proceedings, and city life.

Sometimes this is because an activist has staked out the article as his territory. These articles take a position for or against something but contain very little hard information about it. There will also be broken fragments of arguments against the article's position. When an innocent editor starts editing for clarity and style, removes material that does not seem to be relevant, and finds and introduces actually informative sources, the activist sees this as an attack from 'them'. This kind of activist doesn't like to see opposing views described in an evenhanded way (become someone "might mistakenly think they have validity") and doesn't want any marginally relevant and poorly integrated material removed because it represents talking points which he just has to get in.

I have noticed that. Paragraphs tend to deteriorate and eventually become incomprehensible as one person after another adds what he regards as clarifications without intergrating them properly into the whole.