I love and use GNOME daily, but I think it’s still the case that the interface “needs some getting used to” for a Windows/MacOS user. The design paradigm is just not familiar or self-explanatory to anyone who has regularly used desktop computers in the past decade.
I didn’t say that the dislike for the symbol was rational; I just said that I understand how people could come to dislike it.
I hope your realise that people can understand why others think in a certain way without agreeing with that way of thinking. You seem to think that because I said that I can understand why Finnish people might not like the hammer and sickle, I must therefore support banning it. I don’t.
I don’t think that’s the sole reason. I don’t know anyone who uses WordPad. Like you said, for quick text edits people use Notepad or some other simple text editor and for anything more sophisticated than that people use a full office suite like LibreOffice or MS Office or pirated copies thereof.
It just doesn’t make sense to maintain a third word processor software that nobody bothers to really use.
I’m not gonna say I agree with this or defend censorship but when your country got invaded by the most famous communist country in history and had a bad time under their rule, then it’s quite understandable why people there don’t like symbols associated with said country.
The entire affair is just a mess of history. A fascist dictatorship being replaced with a communist one.
This problem is pretty common across most parts of the Linux space. Everyone wants to volunteer coding work, which is great, but not what’s desperately needed right now.
The Linux community needs more than programmers, or else it will consist only of programmers. We need UI/UX experts, or we’ll never have the simplicity and ease of use of iOS. We need accessibility designers or we’ll never match up to the accessibility of MacOS. We need graphic designers and artists or we’ll never look as good as Windows 11. We need PR professionals and marketing experts or we’ll never be as notable as the Windows XP startup sound.
We don’t have enough volunteers that fit into these categories. The next best thing you can do is contribute your money so that your favourite project can hire the people they need.
There is written Cantonese that is slightly different from written Mandarin, but the vocabulary is similar enough that it is mutually intelligible. It’s about as different as American English and Indian English.
Most of the time when writing Cantonese, you will write it in “formal” terms which are technically pronounced differently. So instead of a casual word, you will write the formal equivalent, but when reading it back you can transcribe it on the fly to the informal equivalent again. If you know Cantonese, you can watch TVB news reports with the subtitles on and you’ll see this being done when they interview people.
For example, the word “without” in Cantonese is 冇 (mou), and in Mandarin it is 没. But a Cantonese speaker will still write “mou” as 没, or 無, even though those characters are supposed to be pronounced “mut” and “wu” in Cantonese and are considered formal. When reading it back, you can either say “mou” or “mut”/“wu” and both are considered fine, it just depends on how formal you want to be.
Another thing is that Mandarin is written exactly as it is said, and if you then read the writing back in Cantonese, it is completely intelligible, it just sounds overly formal and terse. So a Mandarin speaker can write something down and a Cantonese speaker will understand it. A Cantonese speaker can write something down using very formal terms and the Mandarin speaker will also be able to read it.
You can write Cantonese using the actual characters for the informal terms but then only Cantonese people will be able to read it since the characters used aren’t commonly used in Mandarin. Even then many Cantonese speakers only know how to read/write the formal version and will have to guess at the “informal” version.
Another interesting thing is that there is actually a lot of shared vocabulary between Cantonese and Mandarin. In fact, most of the “formal” vocabulary is shared and exactly the same, since the both derive from Classical Chinese. Classical Chinese is really just “peak formality” of regular Chinese (all dialects). Thus if you write in Classical Chinese most educated Chinese speakers will be able to read it! This is why Chinese is described as “the oldest language in the world”. An example is a no-smoking sign. In informal Cantonese, it’s 唔好食烟, which is nonsense to a Mandarin speaker. It would literally mean “?? good eat smoke” in Mandarin (the first character is almost never seen in Mandarin). But you can write the formal term, which is 禁止吸烟, which is exactly the same and 100% readable in both Cantonese and Mandarin. It means “smoking is prohibited” in both languages.
QAnon would have made for an excellent action movie plotline if only people didn’t subscribe to it in real life. Swap in some fake politicians and it’s almost Hollywood-ready.
I’m not a sovereign citizen. This is just a point where the law isn’t fair/doesn’t work in the way that you’d expect. See the updated parent comment for sources + legal reasoning.
The applicable Supreme Court precedent here is Allen v. Cooper. The State of North Carolina published all pictures of a shipwreck within its custody on its website as “public record” and the photography firm that owned the copyright sued. The Supreme Court ruled that Congress cannot abrogate a state’s sovereign immunity under its Article I legislative powers and thus ruled in favour of the state.
Yes, it is federal. Congress can’t abrogate a state’s sovereign immunity to make them liable under copyright law. In fact, they tried and it was deemed unconstitutional (Allen v. Cooper). States can’t be sued in federal court without their permission (Amendment XI).
He used it in the context that whenever either me or my brother complained to him about something, it was because both parties usually were guilty of starting shit and just one of us was complaining about it.
Hongkonger here: Although Cantonese is pretty alive and well in Hong Kong, it’s pretty clear that the Government is being pressured by the mainland to promote Mandarin. It is commonly taught in schools and the Government promotes “trilingualism and biliteracy”. Cantonese and Mandarin are both written in the same script (Hanzi), and the third language/second script is English. It’s pretty clear that not all three languages get equal treatment though. English is not that heavily emphasized but most schoolchildren will learn it anyway because they want to watch American movies and enjoy American meme culture (this is not a joke). Parents also want their children to be trilingual and biliterate for economic reasons. Hong Kong is a city that revolves around money and it’s very common for business to be conducted internationally in English.
That doesn’t mean that Mandarin is doing well in HK though. Hongkongers have a very negative perception of mainlanders for being “uneducated” and Mandarin is associated with mainlanders. I can’t describe it as “racism” since everyone involved is the same race, but Hongkongers think mainlanders spit in the street, smoke in lavatories and don’t know how to sort recycling from rubbish. Doesn’t help that most of these stereotypes are to some extent, true.
The difference in Cantonese usage couldn’t be more stark. I’m currently in Hong Kong. Everyone speaks Cantonese, and if you speak Mandarin, that says to people “This person is a Mainland tourist, let’s overcharge them.”, and if you speak English, that says “This person is a rich foreigner/white person, let’s overcharge them.”. This is despite English and “Chinese” (both variants) being official language in Hong Kong. All Government services are provided in all three languages but if you use anything but Cantonese, you’re going to see significantly more friction and encounter many more difficulties that Cantonese speakers don’t.
In mainland China, even in the eponymous Guangdong province (AKA Canton province), only old people speak Cantonese. When you’re at a restaurant or trying to buy something at a store, it’s 50/50 whether the other person speaks Cantonese and even then it’s likely they’ll greet you in Mandarin
Two types of people in this post:
Libraries can do that. Okay, technically, it’s illegal, but under the doctrine of sovereign immunity, since US libraries are run by political subdivisions of US states, they can’t be sued with the state’s permission which means that a state government can literally not allow the library to be sued for copyright infringement and then they’d get away with it.
The trade-off is that this probably permanently burns all bridges between the library and publishers, who would likely not want to deal with the library any more.
Edit: The controlling US Supreme Court precedent is Allen v. Cooper. The State of North Carolina published a bunch of shipwreck photos. The copyright owner of those photos sued claiming copyright infringement. The Supreme Court ruled in favour of the state saying Congress can’t abrogate a state’s Amendment XI sovereign immunity using copyright law as a pretext, thus the photography firm needs the State’s permission to sue it in federal court.
I remember my aunt (lawyer) coming up with some insane conspiracy-level solution to this problem:
The Supreme Court has ruled in Allen v. Cooper that Congressional attempts to make US state governments liable for copyright infringement are unconstitutional. In other words, US states can’t be sued for copyright infringement under US federal law without their permission. Under standard federal jurisprudence, all subdivisions and departments of a state are considered to be the state they are a part of for the purposes of sovereign immunity. This also applies to organisations that receive most of their funding from and are wholly dependent on state government agencies as well.
The solution would be to have a friend state government either:
This would make the IA fully immune from copyright lawsuits because they would benefit from their patron state’s sovereign immunity. But it comes at the cost that the patron state has a lot of power over the IA. A considerable trade-off.
My father used to love saying: “It takes two to tango”
I saw that, and it is currently the end of the month
I think most of the time if they have a Github/Gitlab repo open to the public opening issues, they will accept an issue that merely describes a problem that needs to be fixed along with how it might be fixed.
Something like this is generally appreciated:
…and if the maintainers ask for contact info, provide it and there you go.