No. You need to study/speak a language like Mandarin to really appreciate that tones are fundamentally different that merely pronouncing vowels differently or having an accent or conveying mood (occasionally). English speakers might pronounce 'tomato' differently between the US and UK, might raise their voices at the end when angry or yelling, Japanese might "swallow" a trailing -u, everyone might have a regional accent that pronounces words "funny" compared to elsewhere, but none of that is tonal in the sense that Mandarin is a tonal language.

In Mandarin, tones are part of the correct pronunciation of a word. Different tone = different word. As in "shi" with a rising tone can mean "10" and "shi" with a falling tone can mean "vision" and "shi" with a neutral tone can mean "poem". Japanese and English are not like this.

Yes, somebody with a US southern drawl may pronounce ten, the number, close to tan, the color, but that's a regional access a not a tone. Somebody emphasizing a syllable or raising the voice (mad or asking a question) is also not a tone - it is not part of the correct pronunciation of the word.

Japanese grammar is more complicated that English or Mandarin in a few ways (I don't know about Korean, I never studied that language), but at the same time it is highly regular. One example is verb/adjective conjugation. In English, if a car is red or was red, the adjective "red" stays the same, present or past tense. Similarly, in Mandarin, the chejì would be hóng, same word form. In Japanese, the kuruma would be akai or akakatta (or akakunai or akakunakatta to complete the conjugations). On the other hand, there are basically 2 kinds of adjectives in Japanese (-i and -na) and they follow fairly regular patterns with only a handful of exceptions.

English is complicated because so many words have multiple meanings, wildly different (spring as coiled metal, a season of the year, jumping) so almost everything requires context to decode, it is highly idiomatic, has a large number of exceptions to almost any grammar rule from conjugations to pluralizing and so on, pronunciation is a crap shoot with general rules about sounds and again as many exceptions as their are rules. One thing about Japanese and Mandarin is the pronunciation is consistent (and you start by studying pinyin or hiragana/katakana) even if it is difficult.

You've confused their share price (what shareholders own) and their cash balance (shareholders definitely do NOT own). These are unrelated or at best, indirectly or doubly indirectly related.

Nobody fights for the users because they are the product, as they are utilizing Tumblr's services for free and are thus not customers.

Besides, this is a private corporation in corporate America, which is by definition infinitely wise in how they allocate their hard earned resources because they are guided by the never-erring invisible hand. If this somehow turns out to be a huge mistake (gasp!), they will be suitable punished by the market, whereby punished means senior executive make their payday anyway while the stock price is pummeled and the shareholders take the loss.

It depends on how you go against it. Do you have credible research of your own, that can be reviewed and tested? Or are you just inventing controversy and fake contradictions?

What, so libertarians now want to be given a place of their own? Is there any part of their philosophy which isn't hypocritical through the core?

Screw that, they should have to defend their claims against a military onslaught, just like countless other countries/peoples have had to do over the years.

Take for example Native Americans, whose land was seized by force. Libertarians are OK with that, but not OK with having to carve out their own land in a similar way?

Gutless hypocritcal cowards, that what libertarians are.

Same as education, which under your "brilliant" logical healthcare reasoning, is also a claim on another person's labor. Therefore, education is a privilege so it and healthcare are only for the elite?

So as a counterpoint to your "small problem" - how the hell can you run a modern 21st century superpower without providing the basics for its own citizens? The US is the wealthiest nation in the history of the world and can't get these two things correct, because some greedy disgusting people at the top want to continuing maximizing their benefit to themselves?

Sounds like the free market to me, buyers and sellers auctioning off products in a competitive environment. Perhaps corporations with their billions of quarterly profits can reinvest that money into buying exploits so they can fix them.

Too damn bad, move out of the boondocks if you simply must get drunk and also have cheap transportation home.

Unconstitutional, seriously?

This is a restriction on drinking then driving, where exactly is that a guaranteed right in the Constitution?

Oh it's way more than a technical issue, I think this issues stretches all the way to the core philosophy of BitCoin. To sum up: how to you "force" a software upgrade into a system with no central authority, and indeed is designed and aimed towards anti-authority types? Wouldn't a forced upgrade by exactly the kind of *coercion* these people are always going on about?

What's the incentive for folks to upgrade? In the pure selfishness randian libertarian anti-authority mindset, why would I exert any effort to *help* the new clients out? Their blocks aren't recognized - BFD to me, I don't care at all. *My* blocks are and that's all I care about. Right?

I see how BitCoin handles this as crucial, and they are fucked either way they go. Force an upgrade - this means arbitrary changes can be coerced in, death knell to the currency (today's upgrade might be client bug fixes, tomorrows forced upgrade might introduce government control, cryptographic weakening, anonymity breaking). Don't force an upgrade - future bugs, errors in implementation, etc undermine confidence and threaten to bring down the currency. People that want the 0.8 client to reign will need to stage a compute network takeover.

Should be fun to watch this play out.

So what's the incentive for everyone else to upgrade their client software and help you (0.8 clients) out?

Several other posters keep mentioning other currencies have done this (reissue new currency) but entirely miss the point that it was a central authority that forced the issue. Given BitCoin has no central authority and can't require this kind of upgrade (oh the irony that BitCoin needs a central authority to coerce its network to upgrade) how is this going to work?

It seems to me people that want to use the 0.8 client will need to stage a compute power takeover. If I'm running a bunch of nodes on an earlier client, why do I give a crap that the coins you produce aren't recognized by my nodes? Given an ultra selfish libertarian/randian anti coercion attitude, how will you reconcile the cooperation needed so 0.8 clients are accepted? If I'm invested in a lot of hardware or miners on an earlier client, I can't see how I give a flying crap about helping the new client out. Right?

Sure, countries replace currency all the time. But in all those cases there is a central control "the government" which makes it happen "legal force/coercion".

BitCoin doesn't have either. In fact, it is expressly designed to avoid that. There is no central control and the whole experiment appeals to an anti-central-authority no-coercion crowd. Given that, how BitCoin coerces - isn't forcing a software upgrade a type of coercion? - the network of miners into upgrading is kind of an open question.

Fundamentally, how do you push out needed software fixes/upgrades in a decentralized anti-authority crowd. I'd laugh my ass off if this does cause a currency fork or if the BitCoin devs mandate the upgrade. The latter shows that sometimes having a central authority is needed.

Yes, "that's all" clients need to do. But since the BitCoin enthusiasts are generally anti-government anti-central-control Libertarian types, how do you force anyone in particular to upgrade? Won't they see that as some sort of central control coercing them against their will?

To me, this is the most fascinating about BitCoin so far and I'm interested to see how it is handled. In a network with no central control made of anti authority anti coercion attitudes, how to you force a client software upgrade? Maybe some dedicated hardware miners can't upgrade?. Especially if a significant block of miners remains on pre-bugfix clients? Maybe they just won't give a shit and ignore post-bugfix signature blocks.

No, it didn't. Private Corporation XYZ said let's make 2 billion a quarter PROFIT (and throw our employees under the bus) instead of 1.99 billion a quarter PROFIT (and cover their healthcare). Fuck them and you for being their brainless apologist.

As they should, because the bills and spending Bush ran up didn't magically vanish when his terms ended. He left the country fighting 2 basically unfunded wars, deep tax cuts, and a special going away present of a Wall Street bailout. Did you forget all that stuff?