Dne Mon, 6 Mar 2000 06:05:53 +0100, [EMAIL PROTECTED] (arachne-digest)
napsal:
>>> This is something you most certainly may do. See the famous essay by
>>> Henry David Thoreau, "Civil Disobedience".
>> Yes, I think that ideas like that are very valuable, but it is not
>> something *any* state would encourage children to learn about at school
>> ;-)))
> In a community not very far from where I live there is a even a public
> elementary school named after Henry David Thoreau. The school is located
> within or in the outskirts of the Town of Vienna, Virginia. I would not
> be at all surprised to learn that there may be many other public schools
> in the US named after this philosopher.
Well, this is exactly one of things which I would call really cool about
USA.
...
> things to different people. The only kind of people who are not patriotic are
> those who for greed, or for fear, would sell themselves out to a repressive
> foreign enemy or to an internal criminal enterprise.
Why do you suspect, that someone, who maybe for fear, maybe for
something else (but not greed) don't want to participate in armed forces
of certain country, would "sell himself to foreign enemy" ? That's
nonsense. I know that the enemy (if some enemy really exist, which I
doubt in case of my country) would hardly be better than my country, and
if I was only into money, it would be far less risky and profitable just
to leave my country and to live somewhere else, than to "sell myself to
enemy" ;-)
...
>> But there is Unicode which has plenty of space for many, many characters,
>> BUT it is not compatible to ascii ... (sure :)) it can't be compatible)
UTF-8 representation should be compatible. I don't know it very well,
but is sort of like HTML enties, IMHO.
...
> characters. I have often wondered about the alternative code systems which
> permit people having non-ascii characters in their language to communicate
> over the internet. Would someone please refer me to a web page that would
> help explain it?
I don't know about HTML page, but the problem separates into two
caregories. Central and Eastern Europeans (including Czech), Hebrew and
AFAIK also Arabaic languages all fit into limit of 128 non-ascii
characters, and therefore they can use just alternative font set, which
is still addressed by classical 8-bit numbers 0-255, and 1st half is
identical to US-ASCII.
Japan, Korean and Chinese won't fit into 256 (not mentioning 128)
character sets, so they use kind of escape code (usually about ASCII
128), which turns on 16-bit encoding (which is not unicode, but
something different for each language). Korean uses alfabet called
Hangul, which is quite logical, and I am planning to add it to Arachne,
as I receivedd some sample code. Chinese is more complicated, and one
company in Shanghai is implementing it to Arachne for me (in exchange
for access to Arachne source code).
. . .
> SH> In the United States I have met some tourists from England and from
> SH> Eastern Europe who tell me that it is just as easy to acquire a gun on
> SH> the black market in their own countries as it is in my country.
> It is definitely possible to aquire a gun, but it is MUCH harder !!
> AND it is socially not accepted to wear a gun in public !!
Not only socialy, but also legaly, AFAIK. At least .cz
> But it IS accepted to drink a beer in the public ....
Yes, definitely. Don't understand this wrong. It someone gets drunken
like animal and becomes noisy and dangerous, it is not accepted and he
may end in special kind of "overnight jail" in this case. But if you can
control yourself when you drink, which most people do, everything is ok.
I think, that these laws which prevent drinking in public originated in
times and places where drinking was much likely to end with being
dangerous and uncontrolable ;-)
> SH> It is their opinion that the reason why Europeans are not as inclined
> SH> to commit crimes with guns is that the punishment is more severe in
> SH> their countries.
> Sorry ... but this is ridiculous ...
> America has capital punishmnent ... show me a punishment which is worse
> than that ...
I also don't undersand this, because EU countries, as well as countries
willing to join EU, like my country, has all given up capital
punishment.
> SH> In the area where I live, if a person is bearing arms openly and not
> SH> behaving in a threatening manner toward anyone, then there is no
> SH> probable cause for the police to consider that person a criminal.
> Yes ... but what I wanted to point out is, that guns are normal 'machines'
> in america ... it is normal to wear them, and gun lobbyists state that it
> is even the law that allows it.
My personal opinion that I would like to see the situation much more
like it is in Switzerland. Yes, adult Swiss men are armed. But they do
not wear small guns and pistols like Americans, which are more likely
to be misused for suicide or by children. In Switzerland, you would
have *realy dangerous* machine gun safely locked at you attick. You
definitely won't show with this machine gun on street, unless there is
military training, which is about once a year.
Well, this is the kind of army I would join without hesitating...
Unfortunately, in our country it is very, very different from that.
. . .
> Eg if letter is written in latin-2, than the mail program will display it
> using a latin-2 font, and all characters are showing up correctly.
Yes, and Arachne can apply translation tables, eg. if you are using
iso-8859-1 fonts, and letter is labelet to be in iso-8859-2 (like my
e-mails, look at headers of e-mails which you received directly from me),
Arachne looks for table in file "system\charsets\8859-2.cp", which can be
eg. translation table from iso-latin-1 to plain ASCII....
. . .
>> of being tired" (proably only in Czech, not in English), and some
>> doctors believe it is caused by certain known virus, so it is often called
>> "E.B.virosis".
> Chronic fatigue syndrome. A friend of mine has it too. Also as a result
> of working too hard.
Well, I probably gave up working too hard, as I am ok now ;-)
> New York State has the toughest gun laws in the nation (the Sullivan Act),
> which requires licensing of *all* handguns. Shotguns must have their
> magazines plugged so that only 3 shells may be in the gun at any one time.
> But this "tough" law has never bothered law breakers, but only applied to
> honest citizens. No criminal in New York State has ever registered a
> handgun! If you are going to kill someone, which is against the law, why
> should you worry about obeying a lesser law and license your handgun?
This is unfortunately true, but do you really think, that criminals
would be afraid of armed citizens ? They would just arm more heavily...
anyway, I don't really have time to discuss that, this is one problem
which I am sure about. I believe that police has kind of monopoly on
enforcing law, and that monopoly proved to be bad thing...
. . .
> But IMHO it will soon be incorporated into alle new OSes.
> (IMHO it would be extremely hard to deliver a Unicode implementation for
> DOS)
Rather impossible, as in DOS programs don't care at all about
underlaying operating system ;)
> I was designated 4F when I was 18 (1963). Good for me.
> I have 10+ High School pals dead in Vietnam. Bad for them.
> Listen to Roger, listen to Sergei, listen to Gloria, listen to Michael
> .... war is f*cked, war is run by people who MAKE MONEY AT WAR!,
> conscription sucks, ... we must be freed of the beast of greed.
Well, the theory is that defensive war can be necessary, and I can
imagine getting angry and wanting to defend my home against some kind of
aggresive attack... but I can hardly imagine that for example our
government would dare to use army consisting of drafted citizens for
some millitary operatin outside our territory. Last government who dared
to do this was Austria-Hungarian emperor in 1914, and it made Czech
people enough upset to separate from Austria forever after the war...
So I think we should tell our goverments to keep consription option for
times of defence, and don't bother normal people by such duties during
peace times like these....
(I hope my comments are getting shorter.. hmm... not much ;-)
--
Michael Polak: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Arachne Labs: http://arachne.cz/
My mobile phone - up to 160 characters: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
