My browser shouts English to the world, so why do they ignore that?
Why limit the language to a country? Look at the language of the browser and use that. If that is not available, use other methods. I do not care what the majority speaks. I do not even care what I speak. I care what I WANT to speak. HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE even gives you the order in which I prefer to see my sites. So if a site is not available in English, it should show it in respectively Dutch, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Default.
Even Accept-Language does not really help:
Users usually don't set the Accept-Language header correctly.
Browsers don't let users assign weights to languages. Web sites usually don't assign weights to languages. (Although German is my mother tongue, I usually prefer the original English version over a German translation.)
Even if weights were implemented correctly, there might be exceptions. For example, I might have different preferences for different websites (e.g. English for tech sites except Google, German for all other sites).
Even if we don't make the switch to cleaner sources, it's still a win. Collecting or cleaning up the emissions at a few thousand power plants should be easier, more efficient and cost-effective than doing it at tens of millions of tailpipes.
That's one way to look at it.
However, replacing all power plants that use fossil fuel with regenerative power sources* would have a much larger beneficial effect on the environment than replacing all car engines. Therefore, it would also make sense to concentrate on replacing the power plants and ignoring vehicles for the moment. Only when nearly all electrical power eventually comes from regenerative sources, one can think about switching vehicles to electrical power** (or harvesting regenerative sources), too.
* To be exact, regenerative power sources aren't. They derive from solar power (which goes out in about four and a half billion years) or from heat/momentum stored in our planet. They are only infinite for all practical purposes. ** stored in batteries or as hydrogen
In most dictatorships, people can actually vote. They might be thrown into jail for voting for the wrong person (i.e. the opposition) or their vote may have no impact (because wrong votes are corrected later) but they can vote.
Look at Egypt, for example. They did have elections, a parliament, and so on. It was just that for some strange reason, Mubarak's followers won the elections by a large margin.
Cell phones won't make car navigation obsolete. They haven't made car stereos obsolete, either.
The real reason, however, is not what the author of the linked article thinks. The real reason is that they are just made for two different types of usages: The cell phone or smartphone is the device you carry with you (absorbing MP3 players and PDAs). The car nav is the device you use in your car. Simple as that.
The two classes of devices do share a lot of common hardware: processors, RAM, flash memory – and yes, some phones do come with GPS and some car navs do come with WWAN radio. But that's not the point. The hardware is not important and its price is neglectible. It's just a container for the functions and usage patterns. In other words, it's not important what the device is but what it does and where it does it.
The smartphone does everything in your pocket; the car nav does navigation in your car. Different devices.
Actually, local solar time instead of a nation-wide time zone was the standard... until the invention of the railway, which cut travel times and brought time tables.
It's not because English is a vernacular language for most people that it is the de facto lingua franca for the rest of the world. Let's not forget that for a very long time, French was the language of diplomacy for a few centuries, and the official language in the European Union, until the UK and Ireland joined in and bullied their way through.
That's b/s. The European Communities did never have a single official language; it used all of the Member States' languages in parallel from the beginning. (Well, some institutions do have a working language, eg the European Court of Justice uses French internally, probably because its located in Luxembourg.)
BTW, when the UK and Ireland joined, there was no European Union.
Please don't confuse lingua franca and a vernacular language.
Please don't confuse modern French and lingua franca, which originally referred to the Frankish language, a West Germanic language only remotely related to Romance languages such as French.
In other words: The rest of the world speaks English because: a/ it's an easy language, b/ most of English speakers are too lazy, or can't be bothered to learn another language.
That's only because English is already useful enough, so there is no need to learn a different language.
The reason for English being such prevalent is, of course, the British Empire spreading it.
No, timezones are one hour apart and the international date line is the edge between two timezones,...
Dead wrong.
Just look at, no readWikipedia: Most of the IDL is actually in international waters at the 180th meridian and separates the +12:00 time zone from the -12:00 time zone. The difference is 24:00, which is the usual time span of one calendar day.
However, inhabitated land masses and islands tend to have deviations in their time zones, yielding differences between 21 hours (between Russia and Alaska) and 25 hours (between Tonga and International Waters around it).
Or just use a different punctuation character for ports. If you think about how the design of URLs could have been better, other decisions are not cast in stone. The ':' also clashes with the separator in IPv6 addresses (which is an oversight on part of those who designed IPv6).
Now the browser would think the protocol is tech.slashdot.org and tries to pass it to a responsible program instead of loading it. This means you would now need to actually type in the http: which none of us do now.
Who is typing the '//', then?
Safari 4 on Mac OS actually interprets//tech.slashdot.org:80/story/09/10/14/1219215/Tim-Berners-Lee-Is-Sorry-About-the-Slashes as file:///tech.slashdot.org/story/09/10/14/1219215/Tim-Berners-Lee-Is-Sorry-About-the-Slashes, which is useless.
I think the lack of female involvement in projects is actually the cause of the sexism, not the other way around. [] So maybe if more women actually bothered to get involved, it wouldn't be considered an all boys club and comments like these wouldn't be made.
Most likely it's a feedback loop: Few women lead to few women.
A few sexist remarks are a much smaller problem than a society that discourages women in subtle ways.
Switherland became part of the Schengen Area on 2008-12-12, which is not exactly âoea few years agoâ. It's less than one year. However, not being a member of the European Union or the European Economic Area, Switzerland is still supposed to check for goods that have to be declared.
The UK is a partial member of the Schengen Agreement.
The law does not ban the use of the swastika per se but the use of the symbols of counter-constitutinal organisations.
If you're using a swastika it in a religious context, you're technically not using a symbol that identifies such an organisation but a symbol identifying religious beliefs. However, you may still get into trouble because nearly everyone will think you're a nazi.
The nazi era has been part of the curriculum for quite a long time in Germany.
Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, there's even stuff following it (the post-war era), so it's not even left out because teachers run out of time. Furthermore, the nazi teachers that did not want to talk about it have retired or died out, too.
Actually, ODF only works well as long as you use OpenOffice.org. OOXML works well as long as you use Microsoft Office. If you start using other applications, you'll lose formattings. So the difference is just that OOo is open source, whereas MS Office isn't.
Well, it takes three levels of government to create such monsters:
The EC made the "Council Regulation (EC) No 820/97 of 21 April 1997 establishing a system for the identification and registration of bovine animals and regarding the labelling of beef and beef products", in German: "Verordnung (EG) Nr. 820/97 des Rates vom 21. April 1997 zur Einführung eines Systems zur Kennzeichnung und Registrierung von Rindern und über die Etikettierung von Rindfleisch und Rindfleischerzeugnissen" or "Rindfleischetikettierungsverordnung" (beef labeling regulation).
Germany at the federal level has the "Rindfleischetikettierungsgesetz" (beef labelling act). They could have named it "Rindfleischetikettierungsverordnungsumsetzungsgesetz" (beef labeling regulation implementation act) but they didn't.
The German state of McPom created the "Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz". They could have named it "Rindfleischetikettierungsausführungsgesetz" (beef labeling implementation law) but they didn't. Fortunately, they could not name it "Rindfleischetikettierungsverodnungsumsetzungsgesetzesdurchführungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz" as the federal legislation already cut some of the parts.;-)
If you take a photograph of a copyrighted work, the photo is copyrighted by both the original author and (possibly) you as the photographer. The original author can't distribute the photograph without your consent and you cannot distribute the photograph without the original author's consent.â"You're just creating a derived work.
Slashdot Mirror
.local is used in mDNS (also known as Zeroconf or Bonjour).
.localhost, however, is reserved in RFC 2606.
My browser shouts English to the world, so why do they ignore that?
Why limit the language to a country? Look at the language of the browser and use that. If that is not available, use other methods. I do not care what the majority speaks. I do not even care what I speak. I care what I WANT to speak.
HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE even gives you the order in which I prefer to see my sites. So if a site is not available in English, it should show it in respectively Dutch, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Default.
Even Accept-Language does not really help:
Even if we don't make the switch to cleaner sources, it's still a win. Collecting or cleaning up the emissions at a few thousand power plants should be easier, more efficient and cost-effective than doing it at tens of millions of tailpipes.
That's one way to look at it.
However, replacing all power plants that use fossil fuel with regenerative power sources* would have a much larger beneficial effect on the environment than replacing all car engines. Therefore, it would also make sense to concentrate on replacing the power plants and ignoring vehicles for the moment. Only when nearly all electrical power eventually comes from regenerative sources, one can think about switching vehicles to electrical power** (or harvesting regenerative sources), too.
* To be exact, regenerative power sources aren't. They derive from solar power (which goes out in about four and a half billion years) or from heat/momentum stored in our planet. They are only infinite for all practical purposes.
** stored in batteries or as hydrogen
In most dictatorships, people can actually vote. They might be thrown into jail for voting for the wrong person (i.e. the opposition) or their vote may have no impact (because wrong votes are corrected later) but they can vote.
Look at Egypt, for example. They did have elections, a parliament, and so on. It was just that for some strange reason, Mubarak's followers won the elections by a large margin.
You are forgetting that some of us smoke because ::gasp:: we enjoy it.
No.
You talk yourself into believing that you enjoy it because you know it's bad and don't want to accept that you're an addict.
Cell phones won't make car navigation obsolete. They haven't made car stereos obsolete, either.
The real reason, however, is not what the author of the linked article thinks. The real reason is that they are just made for two different types of usages: The cell phone or smartphone is the device you carry with you (absorbing MP3 players and PDAs). The car nav is the device you use in your car. Simple as that.
The two classes of devices do share a lot of common hardware: processors, RAM, flash memory – and yes, some phones do come with GPS and some car navs do come with WWAN radio. But that's not the point. The hardware is not important and its price is neglectible. It's just a container for the functions and usage patterns. In other words, it's not important what the device is but what it does and where it does it.
The smartphone does everything in your pocket; the car nav does navigation in your car. Different devices.
Actually, local solar time instead of a nation-wide time zone was the standard... until the invention of the railway, which cut travel times and brought time tables.
It's not because English is a vernacular language for most people that it is the de facto lingua franca for the rest of the world. Let's not forget that for a very long time, French was the language of diplomacy for a few centuries, and the official language in the European Union, until the UK and Ireland joined in and bullied their way through.
That's b/s. The European Communities did never have a single official language; it used all of the Member States' languages in parallel from the beginning. (Well, some institutions do have a working language, eg the European Court of Justice uses French internally, probably because its located in Luxembourg.)
BTW, when the UK and Ireland joined, there was no European Union.
Please don't confuse lingua franca and a vernacular language.
Please don't confuse modern French and lingua franca, which originally referred to the Frankish language, a West Germanic language only remotely related to Romance languages such as French.
In other words: The rest of the world speaks English because: a/ it's an easy language, b/ most of English speakers are too lazy, or can't be bothered to learn another language.
That's only because English is already useful enough, so there is no need to learn a different language.
The reason for English being such prevalent is, of course, the British Empire spreading it.
Or you could just use "steps" (where one RPG "step" = 1 metre).
Well, they're huge steps... but the real-word "foot" isn't quite the average shoe size, either.
No, timezones are one hour apart and the international date line is the edge between two timezones,...
Dead wrong.
Just look at, no read Wikipedia: Most of the IDL is actually in international waters at the 180th meridian and separates the +12:00 time zone from the -12:00 time zone. The difference is 24:00, which is the usual time span of one calendar day.
However, inhabitated land masses and islands tend to have deviations in their time zones, yielding differences between 21 hours (between Russia and Alaska) and 25 hours (between Tonga and International Waters around it).
Or just use a different punctuation character for ports. If you think about how the design of URLs could have been better, other decisions are not cast in stone. The ':' also clashes with the separator in IPv6 addresses (which is an oversight on part of those who designed IPv6).
http:org/slashdot/tech/story/... (use SRV record)
http:[org.slashdot;8080]/story/... (use hostname and port)
http:[123.45.67.8;8080]/foo/... (use IPv4 address)
http:[2F00:BABA::1;8888]/bar/... (use IPv6 address)
http:[47.0012.3400.0000.006F.7123.8f23.4012.0c80.0000.00]/ha/... (just kidding)
tech.slashdot.org:80/story/09/10/14/1219215/Tim-Berners-Lee-Is-Sorry-About-the-Slashes
Now the browser would think the protocol is tech.slashdot.org and tries to pass it to a responsible program instead of loading it. This means you would now need to actually type in the http: which none of us do now.
Who is typing the '//', then?
Safari 4 on Mac OS actually interprets //tech.slashdot.org:80/story/09/10/14/1219215/Tim-Berners-Lee-Is-Sorry-About-the-Slashes as file:///tech.slashdot.org/story/09/10/14/1219215/Tim-Berners-Lee-Is-Sorry-About-the-Slashes, which is useless.
I think the lack of female involvement in projects is actually the cause of the sexism, not the other way around. [] So maybe if more women actually bothered to get involved, it wouldn't be considered an all boys club and comments like these wouldn't be made.
Most likely it's a feedback loop: Few women lead to few women.
A few sexist remarks are a much smaller problem than a society that discourages women in subtle ways.
Switherland became part of the Schengen Area on 2008-12-12, which is not exactly âoea few years agoâ. It's less than one year. However, not being a member of the European Union or the European Economic Area, Switzerland is still supposed to check for goods that have to be declared.
The UK is a partial member of the Schengen Agreement.
It's just one of those things car designers learnt from trial and error, like where to put a petrol tank so it doesn't explode...
This one's easy: Put it outside the view-field of a Hollywood film camera.
Does anyone know if the German laws make exceptions based on religious beliefs?.
The law does not ban the use of the swastika per se but the use of the symbols of counter-constitutinal organisations.
If you're using a swastika it in a religious context, you're technically not using a symbol that identifies such an organisation but a symbol identifying religious beliefs. However, you may still get into trouble because nearly everyone will think you're a nazi.
The nazi era has been part of the curriculum for quite a long time in Germany.
Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, there's even stuff following it (the post-war era), so it's not even left out because teachers run out of time. Furthermore, the nazi teachers that did not want to talk about it have retired or died out, too.
"Disney Buys Marvel For $4B" - That's 75 in decimal. But 75 of what?
Pokémon?
Actually, ODF only works well as long as you use OpenOffice.org. OOXML works well as long as you use Microsoft Office. If you start using other applications, you'll lose formattings.
So the difference is just that OOo is open source, whereas MS Office isn't.
Well, it takes three levels of government to create such monsters:
There's alway hyphenation.
Well, everyone knows that common sense isn't. However, the people in whom it is not do make up the majority of voters. Go figure.
Yeah. But their cars aren't... *cough*
If you take a photograph of a copyrighted work, the photo is copyrighted by both the original author and (possibly) you as the photographer. The original author can't distribute the photograph without your consent and you cannot distribute the photograph without the original author's consent.â"You're just creating a derived work.