I think most of the spanish blogs talking about this would love to have a comment as good as this one, even if it's badly written in spanish. Go ahead and do it. If the ideas are good, the form of the message doesn't really matter.
A spanish blog I read blogged about this... three years ago. And it is freakish that he posted a screenshot of how this should look like, and Google have implemented this in that exact way.
You are a wise man. My Renault Megane (diesel)does 50 mpg, with just 86 HP. This power is enough to get it to 125 mph, on the german autobahns. I cannot fathom why would anybody want much more than this, in the US, where the highest limits are around 75, IIRC.
And also, this car happens to be one of the safest you can buy. More airbags than most, ESP, etc.
This car is also cheaper than a VW. For all this, it has been during several years the highest selling car in most of europe. For those who don't have the pleasure to know it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renault_M%C3%A9gane
DHS officials said that the newly disclosed policies -- which apply to anyone entering the country, including US citizens -- are reasonable and necessary to prevent terrorism...
My god. I can understand that they think those policies are necessary, but nobody can believe that is reasonable.
"We can take everything you own and keep it as long as we want. Only if we feel like it. We think this is a reasonable exchange, you get to enter the country, we get to steal your stuff"
Yes, with this law, it will be perfectly legal to hold a brick to your ear and talk loudly to it. If what bothers people is noise, ban noise. Don't just arbitrarily ban one of the causes of the noise.
I swear honest to god, that if this gets through, I'm going to take a fake mobile phone and talk to it, with some musical parts, all the way from NY to LA.
I don't know if that is the reason, but I can tell for sure, that in my little village in the north of France, there are piles of them on every shop they sell it. And it has been like this at least since christmas. No shortage at all.
Thank you sir, you are a gentleman and a scholar. As we are talking about it, may I ask what would be a good word to be used in this context? Would N.B. (nota bene) be a good alternative?
Thanks for your help, I really appreciate it.
So true. Spanish is my first language, and although I have been to english classes for all my life, when I moved to work into an english-speaking environment, I had a lot of trouble, not because I did not know the words for everything, but because they did not come to my head fast enough. So even being pretty good at writing english, when I speak I sound like I am absolutely dumb. Well, I did, because after six months or so, I improved a lot, and now I feel comfortable speaking english (but it took me more than a year).
French is also spoken at work, and although I understand almost all of it, when I have to speak I am slow, just because it takes a long time to be really fluent in other language, not only do you have to know the rules and the words, but they have to come naturally (which is pretty hard to achieve). Else, you will sound retarded.
Yes, Spain is 8th in total GDP, which basically means nothing. For example, Luxembourg has the highest GDP per capita and is 64th on that list, so that basically measures how big a country is. Not how rich are Spanish people.
About the quality of life, Spain is not too expensive, although salaries are low. It ranks good because it has good weather, a decent public health system and is politically very free (gay marriage, relatively legal abortion, etc).
And the high income list basically list all non-poor countries.
Spain is not a rich coutry, although it is growing fast (well, faster than the rest of Western Europe). I understand perfectly the notion of Spain not being one of the big countries in Europe (economically, I mean). So no, speaking spanish will not get you far in Europe (except in Spain, obviously). It is actually far more useful in the US than in the EU.
Disclaimers: I am spanish, spanish is my first language, and I live in Luxembourg, working for the EU. I also speak English, French and some German, which are far more useful here.
Actually, one of my uncles (the rich one) is a violin collector. He has several antique violines, most of them italian. He actually owns a Guarneri, which are regarded as the best violins, second only to the Stradivarius. It is a wonderful instrument, but the difference with other much less appreciated violins is quite small. It does have a "wider" sound, but you can only tell if you listen carefully, and repeatedly, comparing with another violin. I can hardly tell apart a 10.000$ violin from a 1.000.000$ violin.
When you get to a certain quality, you start getting diminishing returns, and there is really no difference from a certain point on.
It's like encoding music. You can easily tell a 32kbps file from a 128kbps file, but it's harder to tell a 160kbps from a 256kbps. And anything over that is just a waste of bits. A Stradivarius might sound as good as an uncompressed WAV file, but there are many violins that sound as good as a 320kbps mp3. (What a great analogy, better than cars).
I also think there is some other reason why Stradivari violins are so good. It's called bias. Yes, they are fine instruments, no doubt, about the best there is, no doubt. But can you detect a Stradivarius without knowing it is one? And telling it apart from a Guarnerius or Amati? Or even a good quality modern instrument?
There is a good bit of knowing it is an expensive instrument in hearing a big difference. The player plays a much bigger role. A good player on a good day with a cheap violin can sound better than that same player on a bad day with a Stradivarius.
In short, Stradivari violins are not that good. Stop trying to find the magic, because there is none.
Yes, you are right. Also, talking about per capita, is there somewhere a list of downloads per capita en each country? That would be nice to know, as total downloads mean very little (yeah, of course here in luxembourg we had very few downloads, the country is tiny!)
Some random (a bit biased) selection of countries with downloads per capita (x1000). Data comes from the Spread Firefox webpage and population from wikipedia
Canada 23.74
US 25.40
Germany 30.00
UK 19.79
France 15.19
Spain 17.90
Luxembourg 36.72
Now, this tells me more than just downloads per country. Now Luxembourg looks better:).
Yes, Luxembourg is a Grand Duchy, and here in Luxembourg we all love Henri, the Grand Duke, but if Mr. Juncker is going to give us some free spam, we are happy to accept.
That last bit is the way things work in some other places, like Spain. Not in all universities, sure, but for example, speaking from experience, studying Civil Engineering in Madrid works like that. For starters, the undergraduate courses are a minimum of six years, plus the final project. And on the first year, with 400 new students, they separate by means of exams that only around 10 people pass, out of 400. On the easier subjects (like algebra), almost 40 to 50% people pass. This way, the result is that it takes an average of 8 or 9 years to finish (to those who finish, that is around 40% of the initial 400), but people are very well prepared to work under stress, and work hard.
So the idea is that if you get to the end of it, you might not know a lot about actually being a civil engineer, but you certainly have proved that you can work hard.
I agree with you on most of it, let me clarify. I'm not proposing ignoring the dumb children, just leaving them behind, creating classes with different levels. What we cannot do is making all children go at the speed of the slowest one. And all that comes from the inability of the parents to admit their son is on the dumb side.
About the winners and losers, it's just a borrowed expression from a comediant... I don't consider people with low levels of intelligence to be losers, I think that being a very good carpenter, for example, is something fantastic and you don't need to be Einstein. What I call losers are the people who don't want to do their job properly, and who have no interest on learning or being exposed to new stuff. But that is another unrelated story.
I think every education policy needs to be aware of this: Gaussian Function. No matter how you do it, ALWAYS, there will be some brilliant children, some dumb children, and lots of mediocre children. And parents should be aware of this, children are just like any other group. A few winners, and a whole lot of losers, to quote George Carlin.
Just accept that not every child will be the next Nobel prize, and accept that maybe your child is one of the dumb ones, and will have to do simple manual work all his life.
If we leave some children behind, we can run much faster. Sad, but that's life.
C'mon, 85 people from greenland, you cannot say there is no interest. However, Chad, with just 1 download is winning the "Lowest number of the record number of downloads" prize.
Slashdot Mirror
Because in the gaming market cool has no weight whatsoever...
I think most of the spanish blogs talking about this would love to have a comment as good as this one, even if it's badly written in spanish. Go ahead and do it. If the ideas are good, the form of the message doesn't really matter.
We all are.
Yeah, they accidentally the whole town...
... Jamie got big boom.
A spanish blog I read blogged about this... three years ago. And it is freakish that he posted a screenshot of how this should look like, and Google have implemented this in that exact way.
You are a wise man. My Renault Megane (diesel)does 50 mpg, with just 86 HP. This power is enough to get it to 125 mph, on the german autobahns. I cannot fathom why would anybody want much more than this, in the US, where the highest limits are around 75, IIRC. And also, this car happens to be one of the safest you can buy. More airbags than most, ESP, etc. This car is also cheaper than a VW. For all this, it has been during several years the highest selling car in most of europe. For those who don't have the pleasure to know it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renault_M%C3%A9gane
Quoting the great Monty Python, the problem with Australian beer is that it is like making love in a canoe... fucking close to water.
DHS officials said that the newly disclosed policies -- which apply to anyone entering the country, including US citizens -- are reasonable and necessary to prevent terrorism...
My god. I can understand that they think those policies are necessary, but nobody can believe that is reasonable.
"We can take everything you own and keep it as long as we want. Only if we feel like it. We think this is a reasonable exchange, you get to enter the country, we get to steal your stuff"
Yes, with this law, it will be perfectly legal to hold a brick to your ear and talk loudly to it. If what bothers people is noise, ban noise. Don't just arbitrarily ban one of the causes of the noise.
I swear honest to god, that if this gets through, I'm going to take a fake mobile phone and talk to it, with some musical parts, all the way from NY to LA.
I don't know if that is the reason, but I can tell for sure, that in my little village in the north of France, there are piles of them on every shop they sell it. And it has been like this at least since christmas. No shortage at all.
I prefer ninjacy to piracy, because, you know, ninjas are way cooler than pirates.
Thank you sir, you are a gentleman and a scholar. As we are talking about it, may I ask what would be a good word to be used in this context? Would N.B. (nota bene) be a good alternative?
Thanks for your help, I really appreciate it.
Looking forward to hearing from you,
Slashidiot.
So true. Spanish is my first language, and although I have been to english classes for all my life, when I moved to work into an english-speaking environment, I had a lot of trouble, not because I did not know the words for everything, but because they did not come to my head fast enough. So even being pretty good at writing english, when I speak I sound like I am absolutely dumb. Well, I did, because after six months or so, I improved a lot, and now I feel comfortable speaking english (but it took me more than a year).
French is also spoken at work, and although I understand almost all of it, when I have to speak I am slow, just because it takes a long time to be really fluent in other language, not only do you have to know the rules and the words, but they have to come naturally (which is pretty hard to achieve). Else, you will sound retarded.
Let me explain.
Yes, Spain is 8th in total GDP, which basically means nothing. For example, Luxembourg has the highest GDP per capita and is 64th on that list, so that basically measures how big a country is. Not how rich are Spanish people.
About the quality of life, Spain is not too expensive, although salaries are low. It ranks good because it has good weather, a decent public health system and is politically very free (gay marriage, relatively legal abortion, etc).
And the high income list basically list all non-poor countries.
Spain is not a rich coutry, although it is growing fast (well, faster than the rest of Western Europe). I understand perfectly the notion of Spain not being one of the big countries in Europe (economically, I mean). So no, speaking spanish will not get you far in Europe (except in Spain, obviously). It is actually far more useful in the US than in the EU.
Disclaimers: I am spanish, spanish is my first language, and I live in Luxembourg, working for the EU. I also speak English, French and some German, which are far more useful here.
According to wikipedia, African male elephants are about 3.64m tall, so that would be 0.005234 African male elephants.
Just FYI, it would also be 0.00635 African female elephants, or 0.0127 zebras.
Actually, when expressed in these units, it definately looks a bit too thick for a laptop.
Actually, one of my uncles (the rich one) is a violin collector. He has several antique violines, most of them italian. He actually owns a Guarneri, which are regarded as the best violins, second only to the Stradivarius. It is a wonderful instrument, but the difference with other much less appreciated violins is quite small. It does have a "wider" sound, but you can only tell if you listen carefully, and repeatedly, comparing with another violin. I can hardly tell apart a 10.000$ violin from a 1.000.000$ violin.
When you get to a certain quality, you start getting diminishing returns, and there is really no difference from a certain point on.
It's like encoding music. You can easily tell a 32kbps file from a 128kbps file, but it's harder to tell a 160kbps from a 256kbps. And anything over that is just a waste of bits. A Stradivarius might sound as good as an uncompressed WAV file, but there are many violins that sound as good as a 320kbps mp3. (What a great analogy, better than cars).
I also think there is some other reason why Stradivari violins are so good. It's called bias. Yes, they are fine instruments, no doubt, about the best there is, no doubt. But can you detect a Stradivarius without knowing it is one? And telling it apart from a Guarnerius or Amati? Or even a good quality modern instrument?
There is a good bit of knowing it is an expensive instrument in hearing a big difference. The player plays a much bigger role. A good player on a good day with a cheap violin can sound better than that same player on a bad day with a Stradivarius.
In short, Stradivari violins are not that good. Stop trying to find the magic, because there is none.
But Guiness is good for you!
Yes, you are right. Also, talking about per capita, is there somewhere a list of downloads per capita en each country? That would be nice to know, as total downloads mean very little (yeah, of course here in luxembourg we had very few downloads, the country is tiny!)
:).
Some random (a bit biased) selection of countries with downloads per capita (x1000). Data comes from the Spread Firefox webpage and population from wikipedia
Canada 23.74
US 25.40
Germany 30.00
UK 19.79
France 15.19
Spain 17.90
Luxembourg 36.72
Now, this tells me more than just downloads per country. Now Luxembourg looks better
Yes, Luxembourg is a Grand Duchy, and here in Luxembourg we all love Henri, the Grand Duke, but if Mr. Juncker is going to give us some free spam, we are happy to accept.
That last bit is the way things work in some other places, like Spain. Not in all universities, sure, but for example, speaking from experience, studying Civil Engineering in Madrid works like that. For starters, the undergraduate courses are a minimum of six years, plus the final project. And on the first year, with 400 new students, they separate by means of exams that only around 10 people pass, out of 400. On the easier subjects (like algebra), almost 40 to 50% people pass. This way, the result is that it takes an average of 8 or 9 years to finish (to those who finish, that is around 40% of the initial 400), but people are very well prepared to work under stress, and work hard.
So the idea is that if you get to the end of it, you might not know a lot about actually being a civil engineer, but you certainly have proved that you can work hard.
I agree with you on most of it, let me clarify.
I'm not proposing ignoring the dumb children, just leaving them behind, creating classes with different levels. What we cannot do is making all children go at the speed of the slowest one. And all that comes from the inability of the parents to admit their son is on the dumb side.
About the winners and losers, it's just a borrowed expression from a comediant... I don't consider people with low levels of intelligence to be losers, I think that being a very good carpenter, for example, is something fantastic and you don't need to be Einstein. What I call losers are the people who don't want to do their job properly, and who have no interest on learning or being exposed to new stuff. But that is another unrelated story.
I think every education policy needs to be aware of this: Gaussian Function. No matter how you do it, ALWAYS, there will be some brilliant children, some dumb children, and lots of mediocre children. And parents should be aware of this, children are just like any other group. A few winners, and a whole lot of losers, to quote George Carlin.
Just accept that not every child will be the next Nobel prize, and accept that maybe your child is one of the dumb ones, and will have to do simple manual work all his life.
If we leave some children behind, we can run much faster. Sad, but that's life.
C'mon, 85 people from greenland, you cannot say there is no interest. However, Chad, with just 1 download is winning the "Lowest number of the record number of downloads" prize.