Slashdot Mirror

But no, the reality is that with proper immersion most adults can learn a new foreign language in twelve weeks or less

I have Italian as a mother language, and I speak English, Norwegian, and I am learning German. I can guarantee you that you cannot learn a language in a matter of weeks. No-way-in-hell.

You must be a monolingual English speaker to say this. Whoever told you that, was clueless about how much time goes into learning a language. It takes a long time (many months) to get used to the information flow of other languages (you don't get the same items in the same order), it takes time to get used to a new grammar, and especially it takes forever to learn the vocabulary of the new language. If you think you can speak e.g. German after a 12-week course, try going out on the street and have a non-trivial conversation with a native, or just watch TV programs in German.

As for me, It took me 6 months before I dared speak Norwegian (my first Germanic language, English does not really count) to natives, and it did not work well for a long time. After a couple of years I was confident enough that I could speak casually to natives.

So the gist of it is:

• Properly learning a language takes an enormous effort. That's why it pays off on your CV.
• If you want to learn a language, you have to move for some time to a place where they speak it.
• A course in your country may work as introductory, but until you can verbally fight in a language, you don't really know it.

A last note: if you do not know any foreign language at all, you might consider learning Esperanto first. No, really, there are some experiments where students learned Esperanto first, then French, and ended up scoring better in French than students that had studied French all along. It takes little time and helps you understand concepts of language learning, such as case and number concord, future tense without auxiliary verb, different associations of letters to sounds, coping with the perceived awkwardness of the language's words, that usually are the first stumbling block when learning one's first foreign language (sounds reasonable to me, and yes I know some Esperanto). This, and you get a lot of courses and dictioraries for free.

I reccommend Alan, which is very easy to use.

This home page has been around for a while. Worth a look. At the very least, seeing it may change one's opinions on one or two few things, home pages among them.

http://welcome.to/foundation/

metapad is my notepad replacement. Small, fast, keyboard shortcuts for save, search, etc, unlimited file sizes. Free as in beer. Excellent.

Only if your PC has a Cup Holder. As a member of CUPS I ought to know.

http://welcome.to/metapad

It's the Notepad alternative!

Don't make fun of Emmy award winning retard Chris Burke. His moving role as Corky on ABC's Life Goes On has won the accolades of his peers both in Hollywood and in the Retard Sanitorium.

Mainstream news companies don't need to try very hard, now do they?

It could easily simulate a Furby or Mindstorms, and it creates as well a million other interesting forms, if only for the eyes and ears. In fact, says Pesce, the PS2 could well be seen as a spaceship for scouring the universe of ideas.

Secondly, several commentators have noted that the Dreamcast (which cost less than a million dollars in 1999) may be from a practical standpoint a superior console (http://www.segaweb.com/features/ps2tech.html), yet despite this fact, Dreamcast users seem to have not yet achieved the digital nirvana predicted for PS2 users. It must be the trippy black and blue case.

Admittedly, it is amusing to think of John Carmack as the Shaman of the global village.

The platonic reality is that general purpose computers and the hackers that use them are what is transforming society beyond recognition, computer games are simply one of the most accessible and thus the most tangible shadows on the cave wall. To extend the analogy past the breaking point, the PS2 is a corporatist shadow puppet show on the cave wall.

Roger Penrose, a mathematics professor at Oxford, makes a compelling argument that no digital computer will ever be able to do abstract reasoning and be intelligent in the way that most define the word "intelligent."

He attacks this issue differently from Turing (there's an old saying that most people can't pass the Turing test anyway) and takes an approach similar to Kurt Gödel's work in incompleteness of formal systems, which showed that any system you can come up with will always have propositions that cannot be proved or disproved in that system.

He argues that certain things that humans do all the time, like comprehending paradoxes, self-reference, abstract assocation, world modeling, etc. cannot be done by any deterministic system (including digital computers), in a finite amount of time.

He also has a controversial theory that brains use quantum mechanical effects to employ "multiple universes" to get from point A to point B. His argument is way out there, but it's pretty airtight.

The Sir Roger Penrose Society discusses this a lot and has lots of links to other similar discussions.

It's also a good way for those who aren't considered normal in most communities to form thier own communities in which they are normal. For example, neo-nazi's and other such people.


--

No, I'm just an 18-year-old pseudo-geek. Closest thing to a game company I work for is CMB Soft where I made Tank Squared and helped on RamLance. They're inefficient and simplistic, but I'd like to think they're fun.

Let me explain my experience with them:

I wanted to learn more about Baroque music so I went to their site searched on Baroque and found several groups that played that style of music. I downloaded example songs from their CDs. Decided I liked a group called Moscow Baroque I ordered their CDs at less than what I would buy a cd for in a brick and morter. They arrived quickly. The CDs had both audio tracks for cdplayers and MP3 files.

Now this is a group that is a group that is not big enough to be picked up by a big label and sold. But the MP3 people can sell their music, and allow me to preview it.

BTW I do not have anything to do with mp3.com except as a customer.

:)

Noel

RootPrompt.org -- Nothing but Unix

Yes, we've been working on ZZT engine workalikes for some time now. I've done a good bit of work on the subject. In my document The ZZT File Format, I have a lot of detailed information for anyone interested in working with ZZT files.

I've also been working on various other ZZT projects. I see JZig has pointed out my attempts at combining OpenGL and ZZT (he missed a picture). I dunno how well this will work out due to performance issues -- it's a lot more polygons than you think in those ZZT screens :) Part of this has been my ever-evolving libzzt, which is almost working now.

If you're interested in helping development (or any other slashdaughters for that matter), I could eventually clean this stuff up and put it up on sourceforge...

The other ZZT clone project of note is ZZT++, a C++ reimplementation of ZZT. It's very DOS centric, but the source is GPLd, so it doesn't have to stay that way. See zzt.org for general ZZT info and news (or trap.cx/zarchive since zzt.org seems not to be resolving)

That enough ZZT info for you? :)
- k e v

Others who are doing robotics can be found via searches, or by following the links on most robotics clubs pages. I'm directly involved with Twin Cities Robotics. There are a bunch of others around the country, Portland Area Robotics (PARTS), Seattle Robotics Society (SRS), Triangle Amateur Robotics, Dallas Personal Robotics Group, Central Illinois Robot Club, Home Brew Robotics, and San Francisco Robotics Society of America to name a few.

You want the Creative Labs Dxr2 drive, and a utility called remoteselector. Much more information is available at: dvd underground