Yeah, thats the 4 kilo version of a CVT hub. Great if you have a carbon bike and think its too light for some reason, but theres still room for improvement:)
You don't understand the underlying joke, that is, the only time you find a laywer arguing for following the spirit of the law is when the spirit of it is blatantly miserly, arrogant and insincere:)
Software industry has lowest per unit cost/fixed cost ratio in the world...
Even if you count the 90-day tech support contract that comes with a legit copy of a program?
Nobody who isn't a corporate buisness cares about that, and I should know, because I do that 'tech support' (read: fixing the damn thing) for everyone I know indefinitely. I claim 500 hours of stolen time back from Microsoft! Few if any individuals would be able to withstand that amount of lost wages!
I think I can see both sides of the coin, for people without much money, it's generally safer to go with what you know, and no amount of being told they will like it will break that barrier, even if it is the truth, like feeding a toddler vegetables. But I bet they don't want to be hungry and/or toothless from too many sweets either.
So, people in my opinion do like originality, and it can never be entirely destroyed, but if it's too easy to get crap, then crap is what will happen, and people will convince themselves that they like it.
For what its worth, all the games I am most fond of are either original, different, or at least the first in their genre that I have played.
Yes I understand, the masses are fools etc etc. So big companies pump out dumbed down stuff for boring people. I don't have any trouble accepting that people are boring too, I just don't want to be a part of it. So if this person has an original idea or is the type of person who likes games that are different why be suicidal and try and pitch it at a jaded and cynical industry that is already set for life? I'm not a developer like yourself, but I have had great fun just toying with mods and hacks, and have worked on somebodys college project/game we built from scratch, and all of that is good too. Everyone wants to make a big computer game but if they actually try and get on the scene they usually get bludgeoned down by people who already do make games for aspiring to do too much, instead of getting the good advice of doing something for themselves which is what I am subtly trying to achieve.
PS, I am curious about your game now that I know about it... but how can I check it out if you won't even mention it by name?
Lots of concepts that are interesting end up beaten into submission by ones that are tired, boring and easy to reproduce. Big companies are pansies that just want to be safe and boring and comfortable, they have lots of money but they aren't ever actually going to do anything interesting with it other than get their yachts and hair surgery. I would say everyone on the planet who owns a computer has had a brilliant idea or flash of inspiration for a computer game, because they make it so easy when everything is the same.
So what I am saying is, the hard part would be actually making the thing. If you can get a prototype working, thats a million times better than a bunch of figments and ideas on a piece of paper, because then you and they know that it works in practice. So make the rough, backyard welded version of what you have in mind, and then at least you get some fun out of it before sending it to the wolves.
I've watched television for decades and funnily enough I don't even know half of the people responsible for it. Oh well, I guess that means that they aren't important then!
That's actually quite interesting to know even a drug that is supposedly a one way ticket is recoverable from. In my opinion addicts are the exception not the rule, the laws are designed only to protect those who have the sense to avoid it anyway. Not that I think it should be encouraged, but the only reason drugs make so much money for a few people is probably because being underground and distributed by murderous thugs, they can charge what they like. If the attitude was 'you can do whatever you like to your body, even be a complete fucking moron if you like', it would send a stronger message than 'drugs will make your brains explode if you even touch them... sooo... dont try! theres no reason to put that theory to the test!'. Because I hate being lied to, even for my own 'good'. As a bonus, driving the supply channels into daylight would force everybody to play nice, it would probably get taken over by bored hippies making locally, rather than criminal gangs of Afghan's who are all having a laugh at us for claiming the moral high ground.
Comparing games to food and drink is just ridiculous. One you can't do without - the other, you think you can't do without because obviously you have more money than sense. Well, some people 'can't live' without heroin either, I'm sure they convince themselves that the drug is more important than food, a roof, friends and family. Good for them, and good for you!
Of course it is like a luxury item that people will stop buying. YOU are addicted to gaming if you think that nobody has the resolve to just unplug from the cycle. I haven't bought or played any games for years - DRM has always been one of my hates because it punishes ME for what everybody else is doing, but primarily because outright bullshitting on the system requirements by every single company made it impossible to judge what to buy, without doing incredibly monotonous research on hardware and benchmark sites which no one should have to be subjected to. Hardly as big or invasive an issue as DRM, but still enough more me to think 'fuck this for a laugh', so just how much worse is DRM in my opinion and in the minds of millions of other people?
I struggle to understand how anyone can be intrested in 15 pages of pie charts and framerates for every single graphics card that has ever been packaged as if it tells you anything more than how much money you owe Nvidia or ATI to keep getting the next-next-gen franchise-ware that EA/Activision/UBI have carefully appropriated unscrupulously from more independent and imaginative companies and proceeded to either bastardise into the recurring sports-themed-shit production line or just senselessly killed off for no other reason that to sit on the rights so that no one else can be a threat to them. Good riddance big gaming companies, you'll be driven into the ground by the same simple minded, overbearing buisness environment that you created to make yourself fat and rich off people's ignorance.
Don't take it too personally, all the racist stuff here, just a bunch of geeks showing everyone how socially retarded they are. None of them would say it to anyone's face because that would earn them the swift kick in the teeth they deserve! As it happens, they are so ashamed they won't even say what they think using their USERNAMES... on the INTERNET!
In what way does that change the fact that the label is a gross exaggeration?
I grew up in many places where piracy was the norm, and not once bore witness to a copyright holder being keel-hauled or run through with a cutlass. Whether a modern term or one that can be demonstrated in old history, it is still a childish attempt to demonize what is essentially a comparitively harmless act. It is not successful, it simply waters down the original sense of the word with something weaker. Hence the 'Pirate' party can exist without being hunted down, hung drawn and quartered!
Plus 90% of everything is and has always been crap.
That's probably the real motivation for piracy right there. If the industry stopped flooding the market with more shite that any human can dig through in a lifetime in order to find the real gems, then all that would be left would be quality music and films that you dont mind paying for!
That's explaining why journalism needs a kick in the teeth, not further doting encouragment. Nobody in this world needs opinions given to them on a plate, and if you think that, then you believe that people should be uninvasively lobotomised on a large scale by having their own thought processes undercut. You can't contribute anything to anyone if you are just regurgitating what everyone else has said, you just become another domino for somebody else's self amusement.
This entire subject is bollox... if tablets weren't twice the price as equivalently spec'd laptops, they would have taken over the market as expected. It's got nothing to do with the os or any special software support or any of that shit. As it happens, no one is prepared to pay extortionate prices just to be rid of their meeces, which up until now have done perfectly well fulfilling the role of providing a tactile interface to the computer. What is so unbelievably ironic about this is that there isn''t any more sensible way to be able to manipulate a computer screen than to use your fingers or a stylus, and if there was any sense in the world, then there wouldn't be a computer WITHOUT touch screen support. After all, what is the mouse other than a poor placeholder for being able to directly manipulate the GUI? This article is just trying to dig for a reason why the mass market wont buy tablet pcs, when the obvious reason is they are still sold as if they are an exclusive, niche item only for people with money to throw away.
I know it is, I have read it - but it doesn't change my point: "Spontaneously created words aren't the sole domain of famous English authors" (by which I meant George Orwell, although I didn't realise I had to spell it out). Now think about anyone who hasn't read Orwell. Do they understand the word? I would say more than likely, in context, yes, because newspeak is a system that actually makes logical sense.
I also don't really agree with Orwell, newspeak is a bit of a fantasy that can't become a reality. It is possible to introduce a new catchphrase that washes over people, eg 'The War on Terror' (instead of terrorism or terrorists or something that isn't an intangible emotional state), but only if it doesn't stick out like a sore thumb. That's just erosion that is happening all around us, it's why we speak modern english instead of olde englisc, why italians speak italian instead of latin.
I can't remember if I said it already, but dictionaries follow the people, not the other way round, look at the recent action of the Real Acadamia Espanola to acknowledge all forms of Spanish across the world as legitimate in their own right, or the continuous inclusion in the Oxford dictionary of new slang. Dictionaries aren't a prescription of how to speak in the first place, they are a tool to find meaning of a word the user doesn't know. They are too basic and clumsy to be anything BUT that. As a resource of actual vocabulary to use every day, they are 100% useless, because it's all out of context, listed in an arbitrary form based on the spelling rather than the meaning or subject matter, a method designed for easy and quick lookup rather than in depth and detailed study. Try learning a foreign language by sitting down and reading the dictionary and see how far you get!
So the continuously revised newspeak dictionary wouldn't have any real effect anyway unless forced on people at gunpoint - in which case it would be the guns doing the dumbing down, not the vocabulary.
You mean like Scientology? You'll have to forgive me then, but I thought schemes like that were ten a penny. They are unfortunate but can't simply be tackled head on because the social conditions that allow for them and the momentum they can gain from that are far greater than any single scam or individual, its part of the weave of society itself.
I put it to you a different way - people have been conditioned so strongly to blindly accept the word of the educated, that they are defenceless against people who have mastered the simple art of looking and sounding clever. You can't hate the huckster, despicable though he is, because the conditions that allow him to thrive are the true enemy.
The barriers to becoming 'educated' themselves are too high. We are in a state of intellectual apartheid just by acknowledging the fact that one can be educated or not - it is logistically impossible for the entire world to be educated to one standard, and even if it were, individuals would overtake that standard and others would lag behind.
We are to blame for people allowing themselves to be misled, because we have created a world were no one is allowed to be sure of what they think unless they have been told it's true - by simplifying something so indefinable and incredible as human intelligence into an endless parade of 'stupid until proven clever'. We have become so tranfixed with the mission of 'educating' everyone we don't even notice how pathetic the standard of that education has to sink in order to reach that noble goal. That is the dirty soul of the western education system.
People were smart or stupid long before mass education became a right of civilised countries. The only difference now is there are more informed smart and stupid people, but since the information all comes generally from a central authoritarian source that is liable to corruption, even the value of that information is dubious. What about the horrifying propaganda that was taught in childrens schools before the world wars?
Nobody in this so called uneducated group is buying into any particular scheme, they just want a quick fix to this amazing world changing power that education apparently radiates from every orifice. They are the lost of the education system that the rest of society has given up on, but wont set free. In effect, the smarter members of society are indirectly herding them into this unnesscesary self flagellation by putting book learning, instead of raw wit, on such a high pedestal that to appear stupid in any way is worse than death.
We bludgeon the need for simple human common sense, Thus there is a market for deranged self help schemes and the like, or anything to lift the depression of everyday live even momentarily. They won't solve anything for anyone, but they aren't exactly a threat to your own intelligence. And if they do exist, we only have ourselves to blame for not knowing how to foster a society where the demand for optimistic cure all bullshit is nil.
But everyone understood what he meant, just like everybody got the meaning of your word, 'doubleplusungood'. Spontaneously created words aren't the sole domain of famous English authors, neither are they inherently lacking in meaning. Predictioneer may be a kludge of a word, but its also quite obvious what the guy meant. It may catch on, it may not. As can be shown by your OTT reaction, language is self cleaning. At least things like this stand to signify that the language we use isn't set down in concrete, and we don't get to decide anything. If we try to control the language too pedantically, people will lose intrest because at that stage, it is impossible to make it 'your own' - it devolves into the constant strain of trying to please die hard grammar nazis that dont have anything encouraging or constructive to say.
One of the best things about English is it doesn't have a trumped up 'Acadamie Anglaise' to bleach out any foreign influence, replace it with new words that only mean anything to ourselves, and then try to tell us all we don't know how to speak properly!
Don't be so high and mighty. The English language owes all of its current fame to flexibility. At one point in its history it completely resembled German through and through, and then various cultures had their way with it, expanding the vocabulary and refining or simplifying the pronounciation. English scholars of that era liked that so much, they even developed their own habit of coining new words from foreign languages, which is probably one of the secret reasons why even after it was long dead, Latin was still being taught religiously in England until last century - it gave us a handy source of vocabulary to draw on when our own ran out. All the languages of the world are made from other languages, and new words come into existence every single day, surviving for as long as other people recognise their use and intelligability, sometimes even by accident as foreign learners introduce words that make logical sense, but had not been in use for whatever reason.
One can only hope that those un-indoctrinated people will use their initiative, and finally break the back of our pompous, contrived, third rate and ridiculously incongruous spelling system for us, the worst in modern Europe, ridiculed by people in countries that have half our literacy rate , since all we can do is stand up on high and piss all over anyone who doesn't give it 100% respect.
I've done Ha Noi to Sapa on an old overnight sleeper years ago, and I thoroughly enjoyed the experience - that was back when I was about ten though. I'm sure had I been older, I would have had a much more acceptable level of jadedness.
you'd be on that train for about 39 hours. Air France can do it in 11.
And I really don't care if Air France can do it in 5 hours. Its such an impossible position to argue, but being able to slow down and appreciate the journey has merits that being airlifted to your destination in a flying hermetically sealed container tramples all over. The Airplane is an invention for people that hate the act of traveling. You're so impatient to get there, you don't realise that there is anything in between! How many times do you have get to travel in your life, and why choose specifically to get the whole dirty buisness over with as quickly as possible so you can get back to whatever dull existence you have back home?
I've been lucky enough to be introduced to sailing in my lifetime, and let me tell you, when you spend 3 months in a tin can travelling from Ecuador to Brisbane (thats about 8000 miles at jogging pace, incidentally), and really see everything in between, you really learn to appreciate just how vast the world is, and how every other form of transport trivialises the distance.
By all means, enjoy your buisness class 'convenience' travel and the smug feeling of comfort it gives you, but its not for me! It's for the same philosophical reason I stick with a bicycle when all the other people in my town punish themselves day in day out with parking, petrol prices and standstill traffic. Have fun with that is all I'm saying! I can't think of anything more boring!
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Yeah, thats the 4 kilo version of a CVT hub. Great if you have a carbon bike and think its too light for some reason, but theres still room for improvement :)
thats not much of a joke though is it...
You don't understand the underlying joke, that is, the only time you find a laywer arguing for following the spirit of the law is when the spirit of it is blatantly miserly, arrogant and insincere :)
Software industry has lowest per unit cost/fixed cost ratio in the world...
Even if you count the 90-day tech support contract that comes with a legit copy of a program?
Nobody who isn't a corporate buisness cares about that, and I should know, because I do that 'tech support' (read: fixing the damn thing) for everyone I know indefinitely. I claim 500 hours of stolen time back from Microsoft! Few if any individuals would be able to withstand that amount of lost wages!
Doh, I don't have a psp.
I think I can see both sides of the coin, for people without much money, it's generally safer to go with what you know, and no amount of being told they will like it will break that barrier, even if it is the truth, like feeding a toddler vegetables. But I bet they don't want to be hungry and/or toothless from too many sweets either.
So, people in my opinion do like originality, and it can never be entirely destroyed, but if it's too easy to get crap, then crap is what will happen, and people will convince themselves that they like it.
For what its worth, all the games I am most fond of are either original, different, or at least the first in their genre that I have played.
Yes I understand, the masses are fools etc etc. So big companies pump out dumbed down stuff for boring people. I don't have any trouble accepting that people are boring too, I just don't want to be a part of it. So if this person has an original idea or is the type of person who likes games that are different why be suicidal and try and pitch it at a jaded and cynical industry that is already set for life? I'm not a developer like yourself, but I have had great fun just toying with mods and hacks, and have worked on somebodys college project/game we built from scratch, and all of that is good too. Everyone wants to make a big computer game but if they actually try and get on the scene they usually get bludgeoned down by people who already do make games for aspiring to do too much, instead of getting the good advice of doing something for themselves which is what I am subtly trying to achieve.
PS, I am curious about your game now that I know about it... but how can I check it out if you won't even mention it by name?
Lots of concepts that are interesting end up beaten into submission by ones that are tired, boring and easy to reproduce. Big companies are pansies that just want to be safe and boring and comfortable, they have lots of money but they aren't ever actually going to do anything interesting with it other than get their yachts and hair surgery. I would say everyone on the planet who owns a computer has had a brilliant idea or flash of inspiration for a computer game, because they make it so easy when everything is the same.
So what I am saying is, the hard part would be actually making the thing. If you can get a prototype working, thats a million times better than a bunch of figments and ideas on a piece of paper, because then you and they know that it works in practice. So make the rough, backyard welded version of what you have in mind, and then at least you get some fun out of it before sending it to the wolves.
I've watched television for decades and funnily enough I don't even know half of the people responsible for it. Oh well, I guess that means that they aren't important then!
http://fsfe.org/
That's actually quite interesting to know even a drug that is supposedly a one way ticket is recoverable from. In my opinion addicts are the exception not the rule, the laws are designed only to protect those who have the sense to avoid it anyway. Not that I think it should be encouraged, but the only reason drugs make so much money for a few people is probably because being underground and distributed by murderous thugs, they can charge what they like. If the attitude was 'you can do whatever you like to your body, even be a complete fucking moron if you like', it would send a stronger message than 'drugs will make your brains explode if you even touch them... sooo... dont try! theres no reason to put that theory to the test!'. Because I hate being lied to, even for my own 'good'. As a bonus, driving the supply channels into daylight would force everybody to play nice, it would probably get taken over by bored hippies making locally, rather than criminal gangs of Afghan's who are all having a laugh at us for claiming the moral high ground.
Comparing games to food and drink is just ridiculous. One you can't do without - the other, you think you can't do without because obviously you have more money than sense. Well, some people 'can't live' without heroin either, I'm sure they convince themselves that the drug is more important than food, a roof, friends and family. Good for them, and good for you!
Of course it is like a luxury item that people will stop buying. YOU are addicted to gaming if you think that nobody has the resolve to just unplug from the cycle. I haven't bought or played any games for years - DRM has always been one of my hates because it punishes ME for what everybody else is doing, but primarily because outright bullshitting on the system requirements by every single company made it impossible to judge what to buy, without doing incredibly monotonous research on hardware and benchmark sites which no one should have to be subjected to. Hardly as big or invasive an issue as DRM, but still enough more me to think 'fuck this for a laugh', so just how much worse is DRM in my opinion and in the minds of millions of other people?
I struggle to understand how anyone can be intrested in 15 pages of pie charts and framerates for every single graphics card that has ever been packaged as if it tells you anything more than how much money you owe Nvidia or ATI to keep getting the next-next-gen franchise-ware that EA/Activision/UBI have carefully appropriated unscrupulously from more independent and imaginative companies and proceeded to either bastardise into the recurring sports-themed-shit production line or just senselessly killed off for no other reason that to sit on the rights so that no one else can be a threat to them. Good riddance big gaming companies, you'll be driven into the ground by the same simple minded, overbearing buisness environment that you created to make yourself fat and rich off people's ignorance.
It's a saying that makes sense in the original word order - wanting to eat ones cake, and have it too (ie keep it).
Don't take it too personally, all the racist stuff here, just a bunch of geeks showing everyone how socially retarded they are. None of them would say it to anyone's face because that would earn them the swift kick in the teeth they deserve! As it happens, they are so ashamed they won't even say what they think using their USERNAMES... on the INTERNET!
In what way does that change the fact that the label is a gross exaggeration?
I grew up in many places where piracy was the norm, and not once bore witness to a copyright holder being keel-hauled or run through with a cutlass. Whether a modern term or one that can be demonstrated in old history, it is still a childish attempt to demonize what is essentially a comparitively harmless act. It is not successful, it simply waters down the original sense of the word with something weaker. Hence the 'Pirate' party can exist without being hunted down, hung drawn and quartered!
Plus 90% of everything is and has always been crap.
That's probably the real motivation for piracy right there. If the industry stopped flooding the market with more shite that any human can dig through in a lifetime in order to find the real gems, then all that would be left would be quality music and films that you dont mind paying for!
That's explaining why journalism needs a kick in the teeth, not further doting encouragment. Nobody in this world needs opinions given to them on a plate, and if you think that, then you believe that people should be uninvasively lobotomised on a large scale by having their own thought processes undercut. You can't contribute anything to anyone if you are just regurgitating what everyone else has said, you just become another domino for somebody else's self amusement.
so is that 11 types of people then?
Because it comes with chocolate and some assembly required?
Hah, if they charged 200 for monopoly, I would get two sheets of A3 and some kinder eggs and MAKE my own version!
Yarr!
This entire subject is bollox... if tablets weren't twice the price as equivalently spec'd laptops, they would have taken over the market as expected. It's got nothing to do with the os or any special software support or any of that shit. As it happens, no one is prepared to pay extortionate prices just to be rid of their meeces, which up until now have done perfectly well fulfilling the role of providing a tactile interface to the computer. What is so unbelievably ironic about this is that there isn''t any more sensible way to be able to manipulate a computer screen than to use your fingers or a stylus, and if there was any sense in the world, then there wouldn't be a computer WITHOUT touch screen support. After all, what is the mouse other than a poor placeholder for being able to directly manipulate the GUI? This article is just trying to dig for a reason why the mass market wont buy tablet pcs, when the obvious reason is they are still sold as if they are an exclusive, niche item only for people with money to throw away.
I know it is, I have read it - but it doesn't change my point: "Spontaneously created words aren't the sole domain of famous English authors" (by which I meant George Orwell, although I didn't realise I had to spell it out). Now think about anyone who hasn't read Orwell. Do they understand the word? I would say more than likely, in context, yes, because newspeak is a system that actually makes logical sense.
I also don't really agree with Orwell, newspeak is a bit of a fantasy that can't become a reality. It is possible to introduce a new catchphrase that washes over people, eg 'The War on Terror' (instead of terrorism or terrorists or something that isn't an intangible emotional state), but only if it doesn't stick out like a sore thumb. That's just erosion that is happening all around us, it's why we speak modern english instead of olde englisc, why italians speak italian instead of latin.
I can't remember if I said it already, but dictionaries follow the people, not the other way round, look at the recent action of the Real Acadamia Espanola to acknowledge all forms of Spanish across the world as legitimate in their own right, or the continuous inclusion in the Oxford dictionary of new slang. Dictionaries aren't a prescription of how to speak in the first place, they are a tool to find meaning of a word the user doesn't know. They are too basic and clumsy to be anything BUT that. As a resource of actual vocabulary to use every day, they are 100% useless, because it's all out of context, listed in an arbitrary form based on the spelling rather than the meaning or subject matter, a method designed for easy and quick lookup rather than in depth and detailed study. Try learning a foreign language by sitting down and reading the dictionary and see how far you get!
So the continuously revised newspeak dictionary wouldn't have any real effect anyway unless forced on people at gunpoint - in which case it would be the guns doing the dumbing down, not the vocabulary.
You mean like Scientology? You'll have to forgive me then, but I thought schemes like that were ten a penny. They are unfortunate but can't simply be tackled head on because the social conditions that allow for them and the momentum they can gain from that are far greater than any single scam or individual, its part of the weave of society itself.
I put it to you a different way - people have been conditioned so strongly to blindly accept the word of the educated, that they are defenceless against people who have mastered the simple art of looking and sounding clever. You can't hate the huckster, despicable though he is, because the conditions that allow him to thrive are the true enemy.
The barriers to becoming 'educated' themselves are too high. We are in a state of intellectual apartheid just by acknowledging the fact that one can be educated or not - it is logistically impossible for the entire world to be educated to one standard, and even if it were, individuals would overtake that standard and others would lag behind.
We are to blame for people allowing themselves to be misled, because we have created a world were no one is allowed to be sure of what they think unless they have been told it's true - by simplifying something so indefinable and incredible as human intelligence into an endless parade of 'stupid until proven clever'. We have become so tranfixed with the mission of 'educating' everyone we don't even notice how pathetic the standard of that education has to sink in order to reach that noble goal. That is the dirty soul of the western education system.
People were smart or stupid long before mass education became a right of civilised countries. The only difference now is there are more informed smart and stupid people, but since the information all comes generally from a central authoritarian source that is liable to corruption, even the value of that information is dubious. What about the horrifying propaganda that was taught in childrens schools before the world wars?
Nobody in this so called uneducated group is buying into any particular scheme, they just want a quick fix to this amazing world changing power that education apparently radiates from every orifice. They are the lost of the education system that the rest of society has given up on, but wont set free. In effect, the smarter members of society are indirectly herding them into this unnesscesary self flagellation by putting book learning, instead of raw wit, on such a high pedestal that to appear stupid in any way is worse than death.
We bludgeon the need for simple human common sense, Thus there is a market for deranged self help schemes and the like, or anything to lift the depression of everyday live even momentarily. They won't solve anything for anyone, but they aren't exactly a threat to your own intelligence. And if they do exist, we only have ourselves to blame for not knowing how to foster a society where the demand for optimistic cure all bullshit is nil.
But everyone understood what he meant, just like everybody got the meaning of your word, 'doubleplusungood'. Spontaneously created words aren't the sole domain of famous English authors, neither are they inherently lacking in meaning. Predictioneer may be a kludge of a word, but its also quite obvious what the guy meant. It may catch on, it may not. As can be shown by your OTT reaction, language is self cleaning. At least things like this stand to signify that the language we use isn't set down in concrete, and we don't get to decide anything. If we try to control the language too pedantically, people will lose intrest because at that stage, it is impossible to make it 'your own' - it devolves into the constant strain of trying to please die hard grammar nazis that dont have anything encouraging or constructive to say.
One of the best things about English is it doesn't have a trumped up 'Acadamie Anglaise' to bleach out any foreign influence, replace it with new words that only mean anything to ourselves, and then try to tell us all we don't know how to speak properly!
Don't be so high and mighty. The English language owes all of its current fame to flexibility. At one point in its history it completely resembled German through and through, and then various cultures had their way with it, expanding the vocabulary and refining or simplifying the pronounciation. English scholars of that era liked that so much, they even developed their own habit of coining new words from foreign languages, which is probably one of the secret reasons why even after it was long dead, Latin was still being taught religiously in England until last century - it gave us a handy source of vocabulary to draw on when our own ran out. All the languages of the world are made from other languages, and new words come into existence every single day, surviving for as long as other people recognise their use and intelligability, sometimes even by accident as foreign learners introduce words that make logical sense, but had not been in use for whatever reason.
One can only hope that those un-indoctrinated people will use their initiative, and finally break the back of our pompous, contrived, third rate and ridiculously incongruous spelling system for us, the worst in modern Europe, ridiculed by people in countries that have half our literacy rate , since all we can do is stand up on high and piss all over anyone who doesn't give it 100% respect.
I've done Ha Noi to Sapa on an old overnight sleeper years ago, and I thoroughly enjoyed the experience - that was back when I was about ten though. I'm sure had I been older, I would have had a much more acceptable level of jadedness.
you'd be on that train for about 39 hours. Air France can do it in 11.
And I really don't care if Air France can do it in 5 hours. Its such an impossible position to argue, but being able to slow down and appreciate the journey has merits that being airlifted to your destination in a flying hermetically sealed container tramples all over. The Airplane is an invention for people that hate the act of traveling. You're so impatient to get there, you don't realise that there is anything in between! How many times do you have get to travel in your life, and why choose specifically to get the whole dirty buisness over with as quickly as possible so you can get back to whatever dull existence you have back home?
I've been lucky enough to be introduced to sailing in my lifetime, and let me tell you, when you spend 3 months in a tin can travelling from Ecuador to Brisbane (thats about 8000 miles at jogging pace, incidentally), and really see everything in between, you really learn to appreciate just how vast the world is, and how every other form of transport trivialises the distance.
By all means, enjoy your buisness class 'convenience' travel and the smug feeling of comfort it gives you, but its not for me! It's for the same philosophical reason I stick with a bicycle when all the other people in my town punish themselves day in day out with parking, petrol prices and standstill traffic. Have fun with that is all I'm saying! I can't think of anything more boring!