in all history until our time. Now we know why.

Names are essentially what we are willing to be identified by, which the computing culture has decided that it must be representable in writing (or drawing for that matter). Writing is a prerequisite for computing, but assuming that everybody who is not actually computing has a name writable in some conceivable script or alphabet is setting up arbitrary rules for the game - which isn't so much different that setting up rules for "usernames" used for logins. The bottom line for now is, if your name can't be represented in UTF-8, you need to put it in ASCII. Foreign names are represented with the Japanese alphabet in Japan - by putting together characters that approximate the pronunciation of the foreign name - yet for well known people, not any approximation will do - society agrees what that foreign name should be written as. If a person can potentially have a name written in a language he doesn't know, a system that needs to represent "real" name(s) has to draw the line somewhere.

Sure doesn't beat the mystery of the G-spot.

Your children are having a lot more sex than you think. The only way you can discourage them is to teach them programming.

There's nothing wrong with Wikipedia, or reproducing articles to look like a book and sell it for the price of a book. IMHO the problem lies in online bookstores that make such books look like they're worth buying. Publishers naturally publish books that they think they can make a profit out of. That pushes them to choose good authors. But if online bookstores can make crap profitable, it makes good business sense to publish crap. Online bookshops need to find their own system of check-and-balance.

I thought that's the whole point of games and movies, that you don't want to go through the real deal, but want to think that you did?

Is copyright ancillary to the author, or the author ancillary to the copyright? If human lifespan in becoming longer, shouldn't copyright extensions past an author's life be shortened instead of lengthened? Or does it still hold that the good die young?

It occurred to me that capturing genetic code as a database is somewhat (albeit remotely) like taking a photograph of something that already exists in nature. If patents are there to protect invention (ie, to encourage invention by making it profitable), why is literary work not patentable? If a sci-fi writer invents a new scientific concept and builds a story around it, he may be able to patent that scientific concept, but there's nothing to stop other writers from stealing his invention in writing, is there? At the end of the day, I still don't see why software isn't "literary work".

Maybe we should have a world media freedom day or something and have everyone refuse to go to the cinema, or purchase cds, in honor that behind the industry, there is the artist... or maybe we should just have a media tax and convert all media industries into public service.

Where I am, bugs, half-baked functions and missing features allow expensive software contracts to keep development teams alive. As soon as software become stable, customers tend to start killing off support contracts. Well, a little pain, is good for the soul. In this case, the user's pain, for the developers' soul.

Can we just allow companies to patent everything they want and let them be effective for like only 5 years so we can all get on with life? Innovators should not be rewarded for how "clever" they are, but rather compensated for how much it costs to do R&D. Patent duration should depend on the costs associated with innovation in each industry.

Especially Linguistic Anthropology. I think languages are like the OS on which our brain software run. And I believe that when we think about algorithms and systems, there is a mental framework that extends beyond what "natural" languages and cultures provide. They say that to speak another language is to posses another soul. I would like to think that computers make programmers far more soulful and more human than non computing people have the capacity to understand.

This is really nostalgic I almost forgot what MAN meant!

A language may lend itself more naturally to a certain way of thinking, but isn't bending the language for the job the role of the programmer? I personally agree with the author - I think it's always a good mental workout to work in languages that do not give you the wealth of constructs and libraries of the many language popular today, but more than that, starting out in Basic exposed me to the many dialects of Basic very early in my career such that I'm now used to programming in unfamiliar languages.

Granted that Art is not a field foreign to computing, translation is an art that is difficult to satisfactorily automate. It's not about getting the semantics right, or the meaning right, but to translate a piece of work into another cultural context for another person, is a bit like trying to read somebody's mind. The turing test for translation would probably be something like automatically translating a new contemporary musical into another language? IMHO that's more difficult than getting a computer to write its own musical. I believe there is a niche for automated translation, but even for the niche it's trying to fill, it's not good enough. Not especially in my part of the world where there is not only a diversity of languages, but also a great diversity in the language families from which these language take their characteristics.