If you want to help fight against these sort of injustices, considering donating to the Institue for Justice. They are available as an option for Amazon Smile. Read more about civil asset forfeiture on their website:
> there are studies to suggest that populations that spend excessive time in a deep squat (hours per day), do have a higher incidence of knee and osteoarthritis issues.
They linked to one study. Here's the method they used:
"We recruited a random sample of Beijing residents age > or =60 years. Subjects answered questions on joint symptoms, and knee radiographs were obtained. Subjects were also asked to recall the average amount of time spent on squatting each day at youth (25 years or so)."
The full text of the paper is unavailable (404) so I can't say whether they controlled for factors such as family income, occupational history, weight issues etc. Relying on people in their 60s to remember how much they used to squat daily 30+ years ago doesn't seem like it will give necessarily accurate or reliable data (though I also can't think of other methods that don't involve time travel).
I think more studies, with better quality data, are needed to definitively state that prolonged squatting leads to knee issues. And in the Western world, many can't even do a full-depth squat, let alone prolonged squatting, so maybe start with that before worrying about knee issues.
> “Every joint in our body has synovial fluid in it. This is the oil in our body that provides nutrition to the cartilage,” Jam says. “Two things are required to produce that fluid: movement and compression. So if a joint doesn’t go through its full range—if the hips and knees never go past 90 degrees—the body says ‘I’m not being used’ and starts to degenerate and stops the production of synovial fluid.”
Cisco did sue Apple over the trademark for iPhone[1]. When Apple later used the name iOS they came to a private agreement with Cisco[2]. If they just used the same name without coming to terms with Cisco, they surely would have been sued again.
And now you can only type code in the set of blessed editors and correctly displaying fonts. "Make code pretty" should be a matter of presentation, not actual source code.
To use your example, typing "=>" could display the "follows" sign, but the string representation should not depend on exotic characters like "ř", "⸙", or "" (is that a box symbol, or "symbol not found in current font"? Oh wait, the HTML input field ate it! See?!).
In general, I agree with the principle: presentation and source code are not tied together. But we've been constrained to ASCII for programming for far too long. Sure, there are benefits, but is there a way forward? How can we know if we don't explore it.
Most development IDEs are configurable and extendable in such a way. Or well, at least the one I am using is (Emacs). Just like opinionated languages have not had those choices stop them from becoming widespread (eg Python re indentation), so shouldn't the character set used either.
You could also redefine your keyboard layout (eg. a happy hacking keyboard has no marks on the keyboard) or come up with a programming input method (IM) to use — not everyone would have to do it, someone would make it and others would use it. But making wider use of the characters available has to start somewhere, and it can't start with input systems (before there's a widespread need for them).
Sure, it's possible, with major compat breaks. What I'm asking is this: what is the (commensurate) benefit from this change? I just don't see "looks prettier by default" as a strong enough reason - what am I missing?
Unicode and its transformation formats (UTF-8, -16) were major "compat breaks", and to be honest, still are. We did not push for them for the emojis, but for the ability to be more precise and more expressive.
Mathematics has developed a very large alphabet for the very same reasons, and if it was constrained to ASCII, we'd be learning integrals today in the "Newtonian way".
If you don't see those properties as offering any benefits to a craft that is based on precision and that has new languages popping up regularly to cater to new expression forms, that's fine. I still believe it's an unexplored area, and we'll only see benefits once we start to make heavy use of the advances.
Quite the contrary, UTF-8 is backward compatible to ASCII...it was a compat break from the local character encodings.
As to mathematics: do you imply that using a wider charset is akin to completely new mathematical methods? Or that a symbol needs to be one character? Both sounds implausible, I still must be misunderstanding...
Sure, UTF-8 is backwards compatible with ASCII, but as you figured out, I was referring to all the 8bit encodings that were in widespread use (eg. HTTP defaults to ISO-8859-1/latin1). And even with "pure" 7-bit ASCII, there is still no reliable way to send an email to неко@негде.срб. You may believe that there are no compatibility problems, but I disagree.
As for maths, I was referring to the fact that notation (signs we express ourselves in in writing) matters, and that further advances in calculus were enabled by using a nicer and more concise character set vs doing everything with "fluxions" and "fluents". You seem to insist on keeping us restricted to ASCII, whereas I am open to exploring new approaches without understanding if there are any benefits first (I am not focused in RoI :)).
Yes, many fonts use double story 'a' for roman and single story 'ɑ' for italic. Calibri, Segoe UI, Times New Roman, Droid Serif, Merriweather, Consolas, and Source Sans Pro are examples I found from quick searching.
Many fonts having "real italics" would use a different shape, whereas those with only "slanted fonts" would not (like Verdana). It's only a rough rule, but you can assume that most serif fonts will use "real italics".
To be honest, I wasn't :) For those not familiar with terminology, they might think that "italics" represents both (because eg. most software would use one or the other if you click on the slanted "I"talic button), which is why I differentiated between "real" or not real italics.
And while I agree "oblique" is a more technical term, "slanted" is frequently used to mean the same thing, and is probably more understandable. Perhaps I am wrong and it isn't :)
Free speech is a principle. The first amendment states that the US government shall not violate this principle. The principle and the amendment are separate things.
"Hate speech" is one of the most abused terms in political discourse today, so often being used by people as a mere political cudgel.
Ignoring that for a moment, how is Moleyneux preventing others from reaching an audience, which would be the definition of stifling speech? It seems the only groups actually responsible for doing that are the social media companies so fond of deplatforming people because of either capricious and arbitrary enforcement of standards or public pressure campaigns.
Why don't you just come out and admit it: you don't like what Moleyneux has to say, and you are happy he is being deplatformed. Simple as that.
I don't like what Moleyneux has to say either, but capricious deplatforming makes a mockery of free speech.
Can you point me to where he is trying to step on the free speech of others? That seems like what you are doing. By saying his ideas are hate, you are trying to stop him from saying them.
Free speech is a theory that doesn’t describe anything that actually exists, and it’s used as a crutch to support weirdly political points of outrage.
You can’t say what you want without consequences anywhere in life.
This makes me think of “How To Win Friends and Influence People.” Saying exactly what’s on your mind will rarely get you the ideal outcome you are after.
> Freedom of speech is a principle that supports the freedom of an individual or a community to articulate their opinions and ideas without fear of retaliation, censorship, or legal sanction.
> the exercise of these rights carries "special duties and responsibilities" and may "therefore be subject to certain restrictions" when necessary "[f]or respect of the rights or reputation of others" or "[f]or the protection of national security or of public order (order public), or of public health or morals".
> Freedom of speech and expression, therefore, may not be recognized as being absolute, and common limitations or boundaries to freedom of speech relate to libel, slander, obscenity, pornography, sedition, incitement, fighting words, classified information, copyright violation, trade secrets, food labeling, non-disclosure agreements, the right to privacy, dignity, the right to be forgotten, public security, and perjury.
The real world is messy and rights can't be absolute because each could encroach on others. We try to find the right equilibrium.
It wouldn't be very hard to argue scientific racisms very purpose is to encroach on the rights of other races. By painting them as lesser and dehumanizing them.
All of what you say is true. And I believe that social media platforms deplatforming people according to arbitrary judgements or public pressure is unacceptable in a free society. It deviates from the "right equilibrium".
https://ij.org/issues/private-property/civil-forfeiture/