English is a bastard mixture of other European languages, so of course you can recognize quite a few words in other Germanic and Romance languages. It's more than just using the same writing system - try recognizing words in Finnish or Malay, which use the Latin alphabet but are unrelated to English. Also I find German words can sound familiar even if they look unintelligible when written, which is the opposite of the case in Spanish and other Romance languages.
Japanese, Korean and Chinese (though Malay/Indonesian and several Indian languages have more speakers than Korean and even Japanese) are all quite easy languages to learn to speak. They are grammatically and phonetically much simpler than English, though the tonality of Chinese may be difficult to get used to at first. Where Korean stands out is the written language, as they have completely abandoned Hanja characters for everyday life (students still learn them for studying classical literature, though a lot of younger Koreans don't seem to retain knowledge of many characters beyond exam time) and their syllabic writing system is much easier conceptually for someone used to the Latin alphabet as each syllabic character is made up of individual sub-letters similar to the alphabet, whereas Japanese kana are individual characters for each syllable with no visual similarity between phonetically related syllables, in addition to the fact that there are two kana systems for different purposes within the language as well as around 1200 Kanji in common use.
Spain is very much Old World, and US is very much New World. "First" and "Second" world are made up terms based on the existence of Third World, which denotes countries that were never colonised in great numbers by the European powers and is today commonly used to refer to undeveloped nations, since development through the 17th - 19th centuries pretty much followed European migration patterns. During the cold war, first and second world were sometimes used to refer to political alliances, but that doesn't seem to apply to how its being used here either.
To speak a language fluently, you need full immersion for about 6 months (maybe longer as you reach adulthood). If you can't get full immersion, then I think it depends on your personality whether faux immersion or learning to translate the grammar rules and vocab will get you some progress quicker.
3. As of June 25th, 2008, it seems that they no longer even offer a free product. This is strange to me because it seems like my free versions are still downloading updates. Can anyone please clarify for me whether the free product still exists or not?
For a while now, there's been no link from www.grisoft.com, you have to go directly to free.grisoft.com to get the free version.
For any app for which Flash gives real benefits over plain HTML, the textual content is going to be dynamically loaded from the server anyway, so this change buys nothing. For annoying little Flash ads and annoying big animated full page Flash "sites" that break the browser's back button, it might make a difference.
They seem to be redirecting the call before answering it. To seamlessly transfer a call in progress requires cooperation from the cellular operator, which I can't see happening any time soon.
In none of those places has violent crime decreased after the passage of such laws to a greater degree than the national decrease.
The murder rate in Chicago has more than halved since the early 1990s when gun control was introduced. Is the national rate of decrease really that dramatic?
In the US, places with strict gun control seem to be the places that had major problems with gun crime. The gun control is a reaction to that crime, not the cause of it.
Japan was the first country to hit dangerous levels of air pollution in the 1960's, and has had to find ways to deal with it without sacrificing industrial output. Other countries with cities in the list are still at the point where they have not yet accepted that they have a major problem, and should be looking at what countries like Japan and some European countries have done since the 1980s to clean things up. That said, flying into Kansai International Airport a couple of years back, the smog over the Osaka-Kobe region still looks really bad compared with what I'm used to in London (I live just outside London with a good view over the city, so I can see the smog dome most days, and especially at nights when it scatters the light from below).
I have noticed that the healthy foods I choose have been systematically replaced in the grocery store by less healthy alternatives.
I've noticed this sort of thing happening in two circumstances. The first is when the majority of purchasers are non-loyalty card holders (i think this happens with health food a lot, there seems to be a correlation between caring about your health and caring about privacy). Either their systems for analysing purchases are buggy and miss non-loyalty card purchases completely, so they end up seeing a lot of these products coming into the store, but don't see any customers purchasing them, or they are deliberately harassing non-loyalty card users to get rid of them as customers.
The second circumstance I see this happening is when they are about to introduce a new overpriced "premium" range. They clear the shelves of the older equiavlents well before so that customers don't notice the massive price hike for essentially the same item. Sometimes they'll even bring back the old product in exactly the same packaging with a new "premium" price on it. Again, this sort of thing tends to affect health foods a lot.
I have to concur. I'm now on the job market for the first time since 2000, and the situation now compared with then is dire. I'm seeing a lot of jobs advertised in London (with one of the highest costs of living in the world) looking for people with 5+ years development experience and willing to pay £25,000 - £30,000. I can't feed my family on that, and having looked into the benefits I could get, I'd be better off on the dole. Meanwhile, people with an MCSE can get a job as an "Enterprise Architect" recommending how many Microsoft servers to deploy, and get paid 80k+ for the privilege. It is really messed up when the people most valued are in a job position that has been invented by the monopoly vendor to sell more of their software into businesses, and the least valued are the people who create value in the business.
Seriously, when they turn 21, is your kid going to sit through around 20 hours of unedited video of when they were 1 year old? (I'm assuming here you've archived DV video, if its already compressed to DVD format, or god forbid MP4, then it'll be even more). Plus the video you shoot over the next 20 years of their life?
Edit it down to a disk or two of the highlights and worry about keeping that in whatever formats are still readable over his or her lifetime.
If it's peak time in the US, and the middle of the night in Japan and Netherlands, then that may not be such a bad thing. There are more factors to consider in load balancing than physical proximity, and the pipes between Japan and Europe and the US are pretty fat, so could be faster (download time, not latency) than local servers at times.
I'd assumed that the geo in www-mozilla-com.geo.mozilla.com implied that the mirror site was chosen geographically, but maybe I'm wrong. Randomization itself is not necessarily a bad thing, as there may be many more users than the FTP server can cope with geographically (or network topologically) close to a major ISPs server for example, while other FTP mirrors not attached to ISPs are reasonably traffic free despite having a fat pipe available and not being too far removed from the same users.
Mozilla does have a content distribution network. www.mozilla.com is an alias for www-mozilla-com.geo.mozilla.com, which resolves to several different addresses at different times even from the same location. The downloads are further passed off to various mirror servers around the world.
On second thoughts, maybe it was a matter of which mirror you were redirected to for the download, as it was less than an hour to go until the official start, so they were probably getting things ready at that stage.
Slashdot Mirror
English is a bastard mixture of other European languages, so of course you can recognize quite a few words in other Germanic and Romance languages. It's more than just using the same writing system - try recognizing words in Finnish or Malay, which use the Latin alphabet but are unrelated to English. Also I find German words can sound familiar even if they look unintelligible when written, which is the opposite of the case in Spanish and other Romance languages.
Japanese, Korean and Chinese (though Malay/Indonesian and several Indian languages have more speakers than Korean and even Japanese) are all quite easy languages to learn to speak. They are grammatically and phonetically much simpler than English, though the tonality of Chinese may be difficult to get used to at first. Where Korean stands out is the written language, as they have completely abandoned Hanja characters for everyday life (students still learn them for studying classical literature, though a lot of younger Koreans don't seem to retain knowledge of many characters beyond exam time) and their syllabic writing system is much easier conceptually for someone used to the Latin alphabet as each syllabic character is made up of individual sub-letters similar to the alphabet, whereas Japanese kana are individual characters for each syllable with no visual similarity between phonetically related syllables, in addition to the fact that there are two kana systems for different purposes within the language as well as around 1200 Kanji in common use.
Spain is very much Old World, and US is very much New World. "First" and "Second" world are made up terms based on the existence of Third World, which denotes countries that were never colonised in great numbers by the European powers and is today commonly used to refer to undeveloped nations, since development through the 17th - 19th centuries pretty much followed European migration patterns. During the cold war, first and second world were sometimes used to refer to political alliances, but that doesn't seem to apply to how its being used here either.
To speak a language fluently, you need full immersion for about 6 months (maybe longer as you reach adulthood). If you can't get full immersion, then I think it depends on your personality whether faux immersion or learning to translate the grammar rules and vocab will get you some progress quicker.
For a while now, there's been no link from www.grisoft.com, you have to go directly to free.grisoft.com to get the free version.
For any app for which Flash gives real benefits over plain HTML, the textual content is going to be dynamically loaded from the server anyway, so this change buys nothing. For annoying little Flash ads and annoying big animated full page Flash "sites" that break the browser's back button, it might make a difference.
I thought media specific tags (even trusty old img) were being deprecated in favor of <OBJECT TYPE="video/ogg" ...> in the new HTML specifications.
They seem to be redirecting the call before answering it. To seamlessly transfer a call in progress requires cooperation from the cellular operator, which I can't see happening any time soon.
You haven't been to Japan, have you? In addition to cigarettes, two of the above are also widely available from vending machines in Japan.
It doesn't look much different than insider trading to me. It should be illegal in all jurisdictions.
The murder rate in Chicago has more than halved since the early 1990s when gun control was introduced. Is the national rate of decrease really that dramatic?
In the US, places with strict gun control seem to be the places that had major problems with gun crime. The gun control is a reaction to that crime, not the cause of it.
Japan was the first country to hit dangerous levels of air pollution in the 1960's, and has had to find ways to deal with it without sacrificing industrial output. Other countries with cities in the list are still at the point where they have not yet accepted that they have a major problem, and should be looking at what countries like Japan and some European countries have done since the 1980s to clean things up. That said, flying into Kansai International Airport a couple of years back, the smog over the Osaka-Kobe region still looks really bad compared with what I'm used to in London (I live just outside London with a good view over the city, so I can see the smog dome most days, and especially at nights when it scatters the light from below).
I've noticed this sort of thing happening in two circumstances. The first is when the majority of purchasers are non-loyalty card holders (i think this happens with health food a lot, there seems to be a correlation between caring about your health and caring about privacy). Either their systems for analysing purchases are buggy and miss non-loyalty card purchases completely, so they end up seeing a lot of these products coming into the store, but don't see any customers purchasing them, or they are deliberately harassing non-loyalty card users to get rid of them as customers.
The second circumstance I see this happening is when they are about to introduce a new overpriced "premium" range. They clear the shelves of the older equiavlents well before so that customers don't notice the massive price hike for essentially the same item. Sometimes they'll even bring back the old product in exactly the same packaging with a new "premium" price on it. Again, this sort of thing tends to affect health foods a lot.
So actually, its only half a house and half a jetski. Better keep that in mind when you're bidding upwards of AU$300k.
I have to concur. I'm now on the job market for the first time since 2000, and the situation now compared with then is dire. I'm seeing a lot of jobs advertised in London (with one of the highest costs of living in the world) looking for people with 5+ years development experience and willing to pay £25,000 - £30,000. I can't feed my family on that, and having looked into the benefits I could get, I'd be better off on the dole. Meanwhile, people with an MCSE can get a job as an "Enterprise Architect" recommending how many Microsoft servers to deploy, and get paid 80k+ for the privilege. It is really messed up when the people most valued are in a job position that has been invented by the monopoly vendor to sell more of their software into businesses, and the least valued are the people who create value in the business.
Seriously, when they turn 21, is your kid going to sit through around 20 hours of unedited video of when they were 1 year old? (I'm assuming here you've archived DV video, if its already compressed to DVD format, or god forbid MP4, then it'll be even more). Plus the video you shoot over the next 20 years of their life? Edit it down to a disk or two of the highlights and worry about keeping that in whatever formats are still readable over his or her lifetime.
Is this really news to anyone? A simple google search will find read-only clones of wikipedia content + added advertising all over the net.
If it's peak time in the US, and the middle of the night in Japan and Netherlands, then that may not be such a bad thing. There are more factors to consider in load balancing than physical proximity, and the pipes between Japan and Europe and the US are pretty fat, so could be faster (download time, not latency) than local servers at times.
I'd assumed that the geo in www-mozilla-com.geo.mozilla.com implied that the mirror site was chosen geographically, but maybe I'm wrong. Randomization itself is not necessarily a bad thing, as there may be many more users than the FTP server can cope with geographically (or network topologically) close to a major ISPs server for example, while other FTP mirrors not attached to ISPs are reasonably traffic free despite having a fat pipe available and not being too far removed from the same users.
Mozilla does have a content distribution network. www.mozilla.com is an alias for www-mozilla-com.geo.mozilla.com, which resolves to several different addresses at different times even from the same location. The downloads are further passed off to various mirror servers around the world.
On second thoughts, maybe it was a matter of which mirror you were redirected to for the download, as it was less than an hour to go until the official start, so they were probably getting things ready at that stage.
Help/About Mozilla Firefox, and the welcome page you get when you first install.
This is currently pointing to RC3, not the official release.