Crud. Meant this to go to the list! ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Jonathan S. Shapiro <[email protected]> Date: Wed, Mar 23, 2011 at 7:35 PM Subject: Re: [bitc-dev] String encoding, again To: [email protected]
On Wed, Mar 23, 2011 at 6:21 PM, Ben Kloosterman <[email protected]> wrote: > > Maybe we're trying to solve the wrong end of the problem here. How hard can > it really be to get China to officially adopt a Western language? :-) > > > And Japan , Korea , Taiwan and HongKong…which use the old chinese chars.. > Well, between earthquakes and TEPCo, Japan has bigger things to worry about than adopting BitC at the moment. I figure that if we wait a few months, Korea and HongKong will be part of China anyway, so maybe this problem is short-term. :-) The TEPCo folks scare me. Given their willingness to evade inspections, the fact that they built the reactor on a fault line, and their level of transparency, I tend to believe that TEPCo management is completely capable of turning a merely "real bad" situation into a full China Syndrome melt-through if we give them a little more time. The American NRC team was officially welcomed within 30 minutes of Emperor Akihito's speech. A key point of that speech was that Japan should "share the burden" of this disaster. For those of you in America and Australia (I love you guys, but like us you're not big on subtlety), that translates from Imperial Japanese as: "We obviously can't trust either the fools at TEPCo or the complicit regulators to give us a clear picture about what's going on, so we're going to bring in the Americans to do it, and I'm hereby issuing a standing offer to find a Wakizashi and a second for anyone who has a problem with that." If you don't accept that read on the speech, then for trivia bonus points: when was the *last* time the Japanese Royal Family pre-empted national radio to make a speech? For the emperor of Japan to intercede in this way requires a matter of national survival. Think real hard about that for just a minute. Emperor Akihito has learned the lessons of his father's mistakes. I think we should all be very grateful that at this moment of crisis there is a leader in Japan who is strong enough to lead, intelligent enough to lead well, and wise enough to learn from the experience of others in advance of need. The Japanese hierarchy grates on me, because dominance is too often divorced from leadership. I would not have any difficulty bowing in deep respect to Akihito, but I would not wish to disgrace him or shame myself in my ignorance of how to do it properly. shap
_______________________________________________ bitc-dev mailing list [email protected] http://www.coyotos.org/mailman/listinfo/bitc-dev
