Maybe, or then again, it could just be a westerner with his heart set to demonize China no matter what the facts maybe. Maybe bitter because his job was outsourced.

Growing up in the tiny island of Taiwan I was taught through out my school year to regard the Chinese communists as the "commie bandits of 10,000 evils".... but that does prevent me from seeing how much China has progressed in the past few decades. The zomgzlolwtfbbqgreencard used to be synonymous with a pass to the garden of Eden, no longer has that much draw. In fact, with the recent economic boom in China and the decline in America, many Asian immigrants in the west have moved to China for opportunities. Their government actually is offering some nice intensives for talents to 'return to the motherland', and people are taking the offer. Besides, as the US Freedom(TM) getting raped and eroded day after day, the human right gap is becoming much smaller than it was 20 years ago. You can keep siting cultural revolution and Tienanmen over and over, but the fact is, those horses are deader than dead, yes they are significant historical lessons, but there is not much use keep beating on them trying to milk more propaganda mileage


So don't kid yourself that you can cause a mass exodus of top scientists just by dangling a green card over them. Like many things this day and age, a big wad of bank notes would likely fare much better.

Would you conclude all hamburgers are bad from eating every kind of burgers in McDonald's and Wendy's?

I am not saying everyone should love sushi, just trying to point out, even the simple salmon/tuna, there can be massive difference depending on what you are getting from where. IMHO, anything made from farmed Atlantic salmon should go straight into a can of cat food, or just into the can. Albacore tuna is just a slimy and tasteless mess. However, I would never say no to a piece of properly made nigiri sushi topped with blue-fin tuna or wild sockeye salmon (although, both are now close to depletion).

That was my first thought as well. Wouldn't it be better to not have electronics in your laundry? A detachable waist band/arm band/strap would have been much logical... unless of course, the point is to collect vital data without the knowledge of the wearer....

apperantly...

Which was why I specifically said written.. As a native Chinese speaker, the spoken tones are meaningful clues to me. They are not present, however, in written form. So the kanji do offer valuable clues. Also, while it's possible to tell the difference in context sometimes, other times, it just can't be deciphered without the kanji... -_-;

It's even worse when it's written in romaji, where you may get things like a "n" followed by a kana from the first row....

FYI, kau as in "to buy" starts with a low pitch and goes up, and kau as in "to raise" starts with a higher pitch and goes down.

It's not really modifying a character set. We are talking about character that were originally use prior to the 1960s, but were taken out of school curriculum as "commonly used kanji". They are just adding them back to the list of "you need to write these out as kanji in an exam".

The current font set actually already contain them anyways and many people already recognize them (based on discussion on slashdot.jp).

Because, dufus, while a different font only offer a variation of the same set of basic shapes, a different case actually is a very different shape. Then the cursive is yet another very different set. This may not be obvious for those who learned the letters very young and have not yet started teaching their young ones, but it's very obvious to those who learned English later on in life of are observing young children learning the alphabet.

It depends. Chinese characters are constructed in a number of ways, one group does contain pronunciation cues.
Also, they are NOT words. Especially not the way they are used in Japanese. It takes a combination of kanji or kanji and kana to form a word.

Except English contains irregular spelling variations and lots more pronounceable sounds. So there are many fewer homophone and they can be differentiated in writing. This is not the case if you were to write Japanese without kanji... they can be damn confusing.

Onyumi is the original pronouciation of the Chinese character. Usually used for proper names and nouns. Kunyumi is when the character retrofitted into a Japanese word, usually used as verbs. They don't really 'serve the same use as kana', Using the proper kanji instead of spelling it out with kana provides more definition, but hides the pronunciation.

Not exactly. They are NOT equivalent to words. they can be, and often are complex, but ambiguous in meaning, unless used in groups.

This article provides some basic idea.

Says the the person typing in a language using at least 4 sets. {capital, lower case}x{printed, cursive}

Actually, 3 systems:

• hiragana, which are based on cursive Chinese characters; used as phonetics to spell out words in native language
• katakana, which are based on partial Chinese characters; used to spell out foreign words
• kanji, Chinese characters integrated into the Japanese language; used as names, nouns or the root of verbs.

IMO, Kanji are used partly due to the fact that Japanese has a limited set of pronounceable sounds (~70) which creates many ambiguous situations. Writing the kanji root out instead of having bare hiragana helps to remove some of that ambiguity... So it's actually the OPPOSITE to abbreviation as it provides more accurate information.

Also there are those who consider it more 'elegant' as it's a time-consuming process to lean and use kanji, and even more time consuming to write them with elegance. (something even many Chinese people are struggling with).

Not exactly... You are thinking of US made "Canadian style bacon".. -_-;


Up here it's a lean cut from the loin, sweet pickle cured, rolled in peameal (hence the alt name: peameal bacon) or more often nowadays, corn meal. It it NOT smoked.

It's a bit more than a mere unit change. Going from MPG, which is a distance/fuel, to a fuel/distance gives you the inverse. This way ,to figure out fuel consumption/fuel saved, rather than a division, you are doing a multiplication, which is much more intuitive for most people. The numbers are even directly comparable in a linear fashion.



an example:
Fuel saved over a 200 mile trip going from 10MPG to 20MPG:

(200miles / 10MPG) - (200miles / 20MPG) = 20 gallons - 10 gallons = 10 gallon.

Fuel saved over a 200km trip going from 15L/100km to 10L/100km:

200km * 15L/100km - 100km * 10L/100km

but because of the calculation being multiplication now, most can now easily perform this in their heads:

200km * (15L/100km - 10L/100km) = 200km * 5L/100km = 10L

The difference with eating butter and salt is that the only person it's going to kill is you..

Really? Tell that to this boy.

more examples.

"they write the patent so it loosly covers anything that might interact with that gene to alter or manipulate its function"

Maybe I should patent the nerves on the penis and clitoris, and collect a fee whenever someone try to manipulate those....