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Showing posts from March, 2010

AFP: Google prepared to quit China over censor feud: executive

AFP: Google prepared to quit China over censor feud: executive : "Republican Representative Chris Smith pointed to a Forbes magazine report quoting Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer as saying Google was acting irrationally and vowing to censor search results if instructed to do so. 'If the Chinese government gives us proper legal notice, we'll take that piece of information out of the Bing search engine,' the magazine quoted Ballmer as telling oil company executives in Texas in January." We can't say that Microsoft's search engine Bing actually is rubbish 'Bin' compared with Google, but Microsoft has more products to make money out of Chinese pockets, such as Windows operating system, while Google has nothing besides it's Chinese search engine Google.cn, and Gmail. If Chinese government keeps it ever-tightening policy of censorship, the only thing Google can do is to quit, and do it outside the Great Fire Wall(GFW), and help Chinese ne

Boustrophedon

Originally, the Greek alphabet was written from right to left, but a form of writing called boustrophedon later developed. In boustrophedon, lines of text alternated direction: One line would run from right to left, then the next line would run from left to right, then the next line from right to left again, and so on in zigzag fashion down the page. Gradually, this system died out and all lines were written from left to right. Boustrophedon was generally seen just in Greek writing, but some early examples of Etruscan and Latin writing also use it, so it's not completely unheard-of for Latin-alphabet text to be written right to left. In boustrophedon, the shape of a letter on a right-to-left line was the mirror image of its shape on a left-to-right line, enabling the reader to tell easily the direction of a given line of text.