An Open Letter from the President of the United States of Google

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/tims/archive/2011/01/11/an-open-letter-from-the-president-of-the-united-states-of-google.aspx

by hardik988 • 16 years ago

65 30 16 years ago

blogs.msdn.com

rubyrescue• 16 years ago

title doesn't really match the article content

ot• 16 years ago

It does, look at the links. It's tongue-in-cheek.

henrikschroder• 16 years ago

As usual, the devil is in the details. Check where his links actually go, he's not really talking about Esperanto...

joakin• 16 years ago

Childish?

Suddently reminded me to the web page that criticizes Mac apps from the store

dmaz• 16 years ago

Not equivalent; HTML5 video is still being defined and is not yet in the mainstream.

bad_user• 16 years ago

English is free even for commercial use.

mahmud4• 16 years ago

كما هي اللغة العربية التي لا تقدر بثمن، مع انها لا تكلف قرشاً

dhimes• 16 years ago

Upvoted in hopes of translation...

adnanc• 16 years ago

The language is Arabic, which is priceless,

Not too sure about - مع انها لا تكلف قرشاً

Seth_Kriticos• 16 years ago

I grew up with Esperanto, and I don't really see a reason to use it as a pun in this context. It's a nice and useful language and everybody has the option to use it or leave it.

The parallels (to VP8) with the blog post pretty much end there, as you don't actually have to pay your pants off with royalties to some group, just because you are teaching English (h264).

I really like ironic humor, but this one didn't get to me.

recoiledsnake• 16 years ago

>You don't actually have to pay your pants off with royalties to some group

Really? How is paying a few cents a user 'paying your pants off' ?

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/bott/h264-patents-how-much-do-they...

ZeroGravitas2• 16 years ago

$6.5 million per year buys a lot of pants where I come from.

Kylekramer• 16 years ago

If English was as only developed and entrenched as H.264 is currently when Esperanto was introduced, I know I would be willing to take the very minor setback.

tomjen3• 16 years ago

Nice parodi, but besides the (huge) costs of switching, Esperanto (with an Ascii character set rather than the the current (Polish?) letters) would properly be better by far than English.

At least we would have no more grammar fights - the entirety of Esperanto grammar is significantly shorter than the linked article.

And don't worry, you would still have Wikipedia [http://eo.wikipedia.org/wiki/].

As for Klingon, well I guess that remains a pipedream.

JonnieCache• 16 years ago

Good luck with the whole poetry thing in a language with no ambiguity to it.

jokermatt999• 16 years ago

I'm pretty sure I've seen poetry in Lojban which is specifically design for lack of ambiguity. YMMV, but it's possible to have poetry without ambiguity in my opinion.

marteno• 16 years ago

As a matter of fact, there is a lot of poetry in Esperanto. "but no grammar fights" --- not so; a lot of grammar fights as well :P

SmokenJoe• 16 years ago

It is a good analogy but it would be more appropriate to use a theocracy or a benovelonet dictatorship that wants to take over the world. It cam free everyone of dangerous choices that way.

ZeroGravitas2• 16 years ago

English -> Chinese might have been a more apt analogy, particularly as China are pushing heavily for royalty free standards (and will simply take your patent if you try to hold up the standard) as part of their plans for world domination.

EGreg• 16 years ago

Brilliant, I like how this is a spoof of what Google is doing with h264 .

Of course, facebook's been doing this the whole time and it's been pissing people off, but most of those people were developers who signed on to this ever-changing environment.

Deprecating a format that most people use is a little harsh. On the other hand, it is once again a symptom of intellectual monopoly protected by the government. Apple can charge people for the codec, and google won't have it. Makes sense.

I would like to highlight this fact. A lot of the problems we are encountering are symptoms of intellectual monopolies (as Thomas Jefferson preferred to call it) granted by the government. The activities of the RIAA, Interval Licensing, pharma companies, and Disney may grab headlines, but they are perfectly viable in a system that is set up to grant, and then go to great lengths to enforce, copyright and patent protection.

How can we in the west criticize China's "zi-lu" laws, discount Baidu and Tencent for following their country's laws (see http://www.quora.com/Why-does-Facebook-get-so-much-more-hype...) but at the same time pass laws like this:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04/u-k-passes-internet-di...

and this:

http://www.zeropaid.com/news/91378/feds-seize-domain-names-o...

Seems due process goes out the window when copyright is involved. The same western nations that are against censorship of the internet in China, censor the internet as soon as copyright comes up. I am not sure this situation is very stable -- something has to change.

An Open Letter from the President of the United States of Google

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