And Japan was shut off from most of the rest of the world for a few hundred years. Couple hundred years later and they're a global economic power that makes everything from cars to video game consoles.
Give the Chinese a hundred years or so to relax their communistic stances and open up their borders and the same thing will happen with them.
I think the general rule for the "come to X country and learn its language" is for people intending to live there, not vacation there.
If I was moving to Thailand, I'd sure as Hell learn Thai as soon as I could - preferably before I got there. You're just so disadvantaged not knowing the local tongue.
That aside, we're becoming a more globalized world every day. I've done odd jobs and had guys ask me in Spanish if they needed extra people. I don't speak the language, but I can understand it to a degree and get out a few sentences.
If you're going into business, Chinese or Arabic should be a goal for you. Quoting:
Albert Saiz, an economist at the University of Pennsylvania, and Elena Zoido, an economist at the consulting group LECG , published a study comparing wage premiums for American college graduates who spoke Spanish, French, German, Italian, Russian and Chinese as a second language.
In their findings, the law of supply and demand prevailed. With its 1.7% wage premium, Spanish was the least valuable, followed by French (2.7%). Knowledge of German, Italian, Russian and Chinese was slightly more valuable, translating into an average 4% income boost.
Those gains are paltry compared with simply staying in school a bit longer. In the same study, Saiz and Zoido found that an extra year of schooling yielded an 8% to 14% wage premium.
But if income maximization is the key, savvy college students would do well to learn high-demand languages instead. According to the MLA, enrollments in Chinese and Arabic between 2002 and 2006 spiked by 51% and 127%, respectively. Enrollments in Spanish courses during the same time increased by only 10.3%.
In addition to Chinese and Arabic, the top 10 most popular languages for American college students include Japanese, Latin, and Russian. American Sign Language is actually the fourth most popular language course, but when excluded from the list of foreign languages, ancient Greek slips into the top 10 with roughly 22,850 enrollments.
Ambitious students with an interest in geopolitics can try taking up Swahili, Urdu, Farsi and Bahasa Indonesian. These are among the FBI's most sought after foreign language skills.
If you learn Farsi, Arabic, etc. you're practically guaranteed a cushy desk job on a government payroll. FBI, NSA, CIA, military, embassies... there's a huge shortage. This is a community that recognizes how valuable certain skills are in this modern age like knowing the latest and most useful computer languages are. Nowadays, it's not just computer languages you ought to be studying.
What I'm wondering is why they only send out one probe. Why not two or three and have some kind of redundancy? For something so mission critical, well... you'd think they would have more than one of them up there.
What's the advantage to building them in the U.S.?
Offhand:
-Property taxes on the factory
-Accountability to regulations
-Easier to enforce accountability
-Materials may come from U.S.A. to save on transportation costs
-That good "Made in U.S.A." feeling
-Manufacturers pay less for batteries (again, lower transportation costs) which may translate to lower consumer costs on batteries and devices that include them.
And New Jersey has insane property taxes - not to mention the cost of homes.
I saw a home in PA... 3 bedroom, 4 bath, driveway and an acre of land. It was going for $200,000 (and this was BEFORE the housing slump). In NJ that would go for $800,000 minimum.
I live in a small house... maybe 1,000 square feet on both floors, a driveway, and a small backyard (~200 square feet) and the property taxes are something on the order of $6,500 a year.
When you insult the pope, large mobs don't raise the placards demanding "behead those who insult Catholicism." They don't execute people on the streets or burn down embassies.
Not anymore, at least. Give the Muslims a couple hundred more years to work it all out.
I recall reading an article on/. where it stated that there's a severe lack of FORTRAN programmers and a lot of legacy systems that need programmers to keep them going.
So I suppose FORTRAN is like Latin... not as important as other codes in the modern day, but you're pretty screwed if you need to hunt someone down who can understand the language.
Every other instance of using an optical drive - PC, DVD player, etc. - picking it up and moving it doesn't destroy the disk. Most people have moved a PS2 while it was running or turned a computer to the side while it was running to plug something in. It's natural to assume the 360 would be the exact same way, but they managed to fuck up the engineering so spectacularly that it doesn't.
Does the OEM downgrade come with an XP OEM CD, or a Dell half-assed "only works on this particular product line" restore CD?
For $150, I'd much rather have an XP Pro OEM CD that's not tied to a Dell Computer. This way, when the computer eventually dies in a couple years I can install on my new one.
Is there any good reason OpenOffice can't have a button where you can configure it to work as much like Word 97/2003/etc. as possible in the sense of button placement and menu layout?
I installed OO on a computer for a buddy of mine and he installed Office instead saying that OO was "ghetto".
What about an archival PC? Low power. Turn it on one day a week to spin up all the drives. Leave it on for a bit and then shut it down. Wouldn't this solve the problem without greatly compromising the life of the drives?
Hell, you could probably use the BIOS and some simple programming to have all of this automated.
Slashdot Mirror
And Japan was shut off from most of the rest of the world for a few hundred years. Couple hundred years later and they're a global economic power that makes everything from cars to video game consoles.
Give the Chinese a hundred years or so to relax their communistic stances and open up their borders and the same thing will happen with them.
I think the general rule for the "come to X country and learn its language" is for people intending to live there, not vacation there.
If I was moving to Thailand, I'd sure as Hell learn Thai as soon as I could - preferably before I got there. You're just so disadvantaged not knowing the local tongue.
That aside, we're becoming a more globalized world every day. I've done odd jobs and had guys ask me in Spanish if they needed extra people. I don't speak the language, but I can understand it to a degree and get out a few sentences.
If you're going into business, Chinese or Arabic should be a goal for you. Quoting:
Albert Saiz, an economist at the University of Pennsylvania, and Elena Zoido, an economist at the consulting group LECG , published a study comparing wage premiums for American college graduates who spoke Spanish, French, German, Italian, Russian and Chinese as a second language.
In their findings, the law of supply and demand prevailed. With its 1.7% wage premium, Spanish was the least valuable, followed by French (2.7%). Knowledge of German, Italian, Russian and Chinese was slightly more valuable, translating into an average 4% income boost.
Those gains are paltry compared with simply staying in school a bit longer. In the same study, Saiz and Zoido found that an extra year of schooling yielded an 8% to 14% wage premium.
Of course, learning to speak a foreign language is not just about increasing one's income. It's silly to try to put a dollar value on the ability to read Sartre in the original French or chat about the latest telenovela in a café in BogotÃ.
But if income maximization is the key, savvy college students would do well to learn high-demand languages instead. According to the MLA, enrollments in Chinese and Arabic between 2002 and 2006 spiked by 51% and 127%, respectively. Enrollments in Spanish courses during the same time increased by only 10.3%.
In addition to Chinese and Arabic, the top 10 most popular languages for American college students include Japanese, Latin, and Russian. American Sign Language is actually the fourth most popular language course, but when excluded from the list of foreign languages, ancient Greek slips into the top 10 with roughly 22,850 enrollments.
Ambitious students with an interest in geopolitics can try taking up Swahili, Urdu, Farsi and Bahasa Indonesian. These are among the FBI's most sought after foreign language skills.
If you learn Farsi, Arabic, etc. you're practically guaranteed a cushy desk job on a government payroll. FBI, NSA, CIA, military, embassies... there's a huge shortage. This is a community that recognizes how valuable certain skills are in this modern age like knowing the latest and most useful computer languages are. Nowadays, it's not just computer languages you ought to be studying.
Profile pages could have just been saved wholesale rather than text files?
Or perhaps it's all in a huge database with a searchable index.
What I'm wondering is why they only send out one probe. Why not two or three and have some kind of redundancy? For something so mission critical, well... you'd think they would have more than one of them up there.
Don't buy it, it's just a bunch of gillette razors in a beer cooler wired to a car battery.
El Nino and La Nina
I always thought it was kinda lame that we let a couple Spanish kids have a say in what our weather will be like.
What's the advantage to building them in the U.S.?
Offhand:
-Property taxes on the factory
-Accountability to regulations
-Easier to enforce accountability
-Materials may come from U.S.A. to save on transportation costs
-That good "Made in U.S.A." feeling
-Manufacturers pay less for batteries (again, lower transportation costs) which may translate to lower consumer costs on batteries and devices that include them.
Translation for the humorless:
"A bit of creative spelling can save both ink and paper. These two sentences have saved 31% of both."
(I've subsequently purchased carbon credits to offset the extra ink and paper I may be using if someone prints out this page.)
And New Jersey has insane property taxes - not to mention the cost of homes.
I saw a home in PA... 3 bedroom, 4 bath, driveway and an acre of land. It was going for $200,000 (and this was BEFORE the housing slump). In NJ that would go for $800,000 minimum.
I live in a small house... maybe 1,000 square feet on both floors, a driveway, and a small backyard (~200 square feet) and the property taxes are something on the order of $6,500 a year.
When you insult the pope, large mobs don't raise the placards demanding "behead those who insult Catholicism." They don't execute people on the streets or burn down embassies.
Not anymore, at least. Give the Muslims a couple hundred more years to work it all out.
I recall reading an article on /. where it stated that there's a severe lack of FORTRAN programmers and a lot of legacy systems that need programmers to keep them going.
So I suppose FORTRAN is like Latin... not as important as other codes in the modern day, but you're pretty screwed if you need to hunt someone down who can understand the language.
Is darkness not the absence of light?
Perhaps Dark Matter is to Matter as Darkness is to Light. The absence of matter? Or something altogether different.
Basically, we would have to look the absence of something rather than the existence of something. A scientific conundrum indeed.
If an Antikythera is a calender... well, basically it comes down to this: what's the opposite of a calender?
Every other instance of using an optical drive - PC, DVD player, etc. - picking it up and moving it doesn't destroy the disk. Most people have moved a PS2 while it was running or turned a computer to the side while it was running to plug something in. It's natural to assume the 360 would be the exact same way, but they managed to fuck up the engineering so spectacularly that it doesn't.
That's patently ridiculous. I thought the cheaper OEM license was due to Microsoft not providing tech support.
I suppose part of the activation stuff transmits what hardware you have installed so it would be obvious if you had reinstalled on a new mobo.
I'm an evil lord of destruction, not a doctor!
I don't see how two ethnicities that look very similar to one another could be racist towards one another. Based on nationality, yes, but racism?
JAPANESE GENERAL: Damn those Chinamen and their slanty, deceptive eyes!
JAPANESE LIEUTENANT: Uh, sir?
Just like some people from certain counties don't laugh at any jokes.
What culture would that be? The Vulcans?
So installing the OEM CD on another computer after the computer it was originall installed on dies actually violates the license?
Does the OEM downgrade come with an XP OEM CD, or a Dell half-assed "only works on this particular product line" restore CD?
For $150, I'd much rather have an XP Pro OEM CD that's not tied to a Dell Computer. This way, when the computer eventually dies in a couple years I can install on my new one.
Stock up beforehand as fast as they can?
At the rate their going, buying a couple hundred licenses would be worth it in the long run, no?
Reminds me of this Non Sequitur comic I saw in the paper a couple days ago...
I gotta agree with you there man. Noncorporeal punishment just doesn't work at all. Most people aren't even scared of ghosts and their whips!
Is there any good reason OpenOffice can't have a button where you can configure it to work as much like Word 97/2003/etc. as possible in the sense of button placement and menu layout?
I installed OO on a computer for a buddy of mine and he installed Office instead saying that OO was "ghetto".
Could you compensate for stiction?
What about an archival PC? Low power. Turn it on one day a week to spin up all the drives. Leave it on for a bit and then shut it down. Wouldn't this solve the problem without greatly compromising the life of the drives?
Hell, you could probably use the BIOS and some simple programming to have all of this automated.