What happens when something that was once scarce and difficult to produce (content printed on paper, music pressed onto vinyl or CDs) becomes abundant and cheap (digitally copied)?
You're missing the point. News reports are produced by reporting, which is as scarce of a resource as it always has been. The cheapness of reproducing the actual finished report doesn't affect the cost of reporting.
Just because this news 'system' is the only one (btw. it's not) doesn't mean it deserves to work forever. News won't die (neither will music).
Um, I don't know what exactly you mean by "news won't die," but I think you better not mean that reporting will not die. Yes, stuff will still happen all over the world, but it would be quite easy to end up in a situation where nobody can get paid to report on it, which means that the quality of the information you can obtain on the news deteriorates massively.
It would be quite ironic if the Internet destroyed the 19th and 20th centuries' advances in news reporting, and actually resulted in delivering less and worse information to us, wouldn't it?
The reason you hear stories about newspapers failing all over the country is because of the Associated Press. In order to cut costs, newspapers across the country eliminated most of their reporting staff and replaced them with AP newsfeeds. Instead of doing real reporting, they just "rip and read" from the AP feed.
So you seriously think that every local newspaper should send reporters all over the world to cover all of the news stories they cover? So for example, the Podunk Times should have reporters not only in Podunk, but also all over Iraq?
The advent of the internet has given us access to many more news sources than we ever had before. Most of us have realized that all of the news papers have the same stories, word for word.
You're telling me it took you until the advent of the internet to figure this out? Jeez, I already knew this when I was in grade school, back in the mid-80s. I learned it in school!
If newspapers, and other news sources, are going to stay in business, they need to provide valuable content. They need to stop relying on the AP for content, we can get that anywhere.
And just where do you think the AP gets its content from?
This is not an issue about robots.txt. The real question here is much, much simpler: who is going to pay for news reporting on a national and international scale?
The AP does, in effect, two things:
Pay for news reporting all over the country and the world.
Aggregate the news stories and provide them for members and subscribers to republish promptly.
The problem is simple: search engines and other web aggregators are, at best, only good for (2). Even that is arguable, actually, since they only aggregate content that's already been published; the news agencies aggregate before publication. But in any case, the web news aggregators aren't actually doing a lot to actually fund news reporting.
I think they'd probably prefer not to, they'd prefer to go back to simpler times, before this damn internet thing, when they were still making money hand over fist.
Um, the AP isn't really run for profit, silly. It's a cooperative of news organizations that exists to allow its members to share stories, so the papers can publish stories about regions where they don't have reporters. All of the AP's valuable content is supplied by the members. In effect, the AP and the other news agencies are the first news aggregators.
If I offered you a ten dollar line of credit to purchase stock with, you accepted and purchased said stock, I changed my mind, and sold the stock (which is your property) it seems to me that I would get in trouble for fraudulently selling your property. Unless I'm missing something here...
Yes, you're missing something. Margin lending is very strictly regulated, and the regulations allow brokers to sell off your positions in many situations; this is called a margin call. From the SEC investor guidance site:
Always remember that your broker may not be required to make a margin call or otherwise tell you that your account has fallen below the firm's maintenance requirement. Your broker may be able to sell your securities at any time without consulting you first. Under most margin agreements, even if your firm offers to give you time to increase the equity in your account, it can sell your securities without waiting for you to meet the margin call.
In this case, well, if your account is only worth $20k, but you bought a million dollars of stock on margin, you'd very clearly not be meeting initial margin of 50% nor even maintenance margin of 25%. Not even close.
Let me see if I get this straight (understanding that the summary has a typo and should read they shouldn't have on the second statement. You log in your account and find a huge sum of money in their.
You've already gotten it wrong. The summaries bury the reason why.
You log on, and the site says your "Buying Power" is several millions of dollars. However, your buying power isn't your actual cash or asset balance; it's most likely the sum of your cash balance and the amount of margin credit available to you. The cash balance is correct, but the margin credit available is wrong, by orders of magnitude. So they didn't actually credit you any more cash than you already have; they incorrectly allowed you to borrow several million dollars from them.
But if you're not very financially savvy, and fail to understand that your "Buying Power" is not your cash balance, you might think you hit the jackpot. My suspicion is that there's a combination of them handing out margin accounts too easily, without enough customer orientation and screening, and the UI is not making it clear enough to users when they make a transaction how much of it is with money that's really theirs and how much is borrowed money.
From the reports, it sounds like what the Zecco error did wasn't really to increase the amount of cash in the customer accounts, but rather, incease the amount of margin available to them. I.e., it allowed the customers in question to borrow millions of dollars. That makes it doubly dumb to actually try to exploit Zecco's error; you're supposed to pay that money back!
I imagine *many* consumers want their computer to turn on instantly during a cold boot. That's obviously unrealistic for now. But even more certainly, *more* people would prefer it. Now, I know you may not care much -- but if given the chance -- wouldn't you want faster boot times if possible? Why not? So if yes, why not try?
You're missing the point drastically. With my Mac (and I'd assume with any decent Windows laptop, but I haven't tried it), when I want to stop using the computer, I just close the lid, and it goes to sleep. When I want to use it again, I open it up, and it wakes up within a few seconds.
The consumers you're thinking of don't really care about the difference between cold boot and waking up from sleep. They want their computer to be available when they want it, without having to wait for a while. It's OK if sometimes the computer is unavailable for 5 minutes because of updates, as long as they have control over when it happens.
If you want to make things good for consumes, what you want to do is to make sure that sleep/hibernate modes are rock-solid, and minimize the number of situations that require a cold reboot. The latter can be solved with techniques like microkernel design (so more parts of the system can be replaced while it is up), or with kernel hot-patching features. Improving the speed of cold boots comes a very far third behind these.
Health Insurance should work like other insurance policies, for catastrophic issues. My auto insurance doesn't pay for maintenance but that is exactly what people expect from medical insurance.
Auto insurance protects the policyholder from a different kind of risk. Criticizing health insurance for not being like auto insurance is a big mistake. Auto insurance protects against episodic risks; you get into a car accident, so you require a fair chunk of money right away, but after the claim is paid, you don't need any more money.
Health insurance, on the other hand, needs to insure you both against episodic issues and chronic ones. A chronic risk is a risk where, one day, you need a significant amount of money for health care over many years, maybe even the rest of your life. In the general population, people will have acute episodes at some statistical rate, and some proportion of the population will be chronic sufferers. You want to insure yourself both against the episodes, and against the risk that you'll turn out to be one of the chronic sufferers.
Now, the reason health insurance pays for "maintenance," in theory, is because routine care reduces the risk that people will be chronic sufferers. In practice, the private insurers in the USA do not want to insure chronic sufferers, nor pay for routine care, so they structure their products accordingly, by charging chronic sufferers much higher premiums than healthy people, and pushing for higher deductibles and HMOs in order to reduce their routine care costs. These pricing schemes and practices ultimately make it impossible in practice to insure oneself against acquiring chronic health issues.
The reason we need universal health insurance is to force everybody to insure themselves against the chronic risks, because the private sector is just systematically unwilling and incapable of doing so, because they can make more money by not providing that kind of coverage. So it makes sense to have the government provide the compulsory chronic health risk insurance. and private insurers to provide supplemental coverage for episodic risks.
And whats to stop them from driving down the street your house is on and doing the same thing?
Maybe they live in another city. Maybe they judge that the cost of performing that check is not worth it. Maybe it doesn't even occur to them to check out the neighborhood except for the fact that Google makes it trivial for them to do so, without leaving their chairs.
Yes, I am aware that it is counterintuitive to a lot of people that what Google should be restricted* from doing in the large scale is something that anybody is allowed to do in a small scale. Nobody's arguing that it should be forbidden to take a photo of somebody's house. The argument is that systematically taking a full-coverage photo set of every street and every house amounts to systematic surveillance of the whole population, and that putting that geo-tagged database online amounts to indiscriminate disclosure of facts about others.
*And when I say "restricted," I don't necessarily mean "prohibited." I am perfectly willing to consider relatively narrow restrictions that protect people's privacy.
You are talking about a problem of discrimination that is not solved by not allowing Google to take pictures of residential streets for Streetview.
I never claimed that restricting Street View would solve the problem. My claim is that its existence aggravates problems we already have, in countless, unexpected ways.
If you want to conceal the side of your property facing a public street, then get a fence. Your neighborhood could also organize to make the street privately maintained and gated. You have given no justifiable reason to restrict another entity's rights.
Or, as an alternative, my neighborhood could organize to change the laws to forbid Google from freely disseminating the results of their systematic surveillance of our community. Basically, I don't think Google has the right to do that, and that the law, which was written before this problem came into being, needs to change to reflect this (just like the law has needed to change for new problems like upskirtphotography and texting while driving).
You are implying Google is making money at everyone's expense here, and is the only one benefitting. That's funny, because the only reason what Google is doing has commercial value at all is that *that's what massive numbers of people actually want and find useful*.
The problem is that this is just as true of far less controversial attacks on privacy. You can be pretty damn sure that if somebody collected the medical records of millions of Americans and sold copies of them freely, that would have a hell of a lot of commercial value.
What would happen in that situation is that some set of people would make money at the expense of others. Basically, those who stand to profit from discriminating against the unhealthy.
I haven't come to anything close to working this out completely; I seriously believe the topic is too big for one person to work out (not to mention that it would be awfully undemocratic to do this sort of thing without a lot of input from a lot of people!).
So, suppose Google changes the policy and instead of taking the photos, encourages (perhaps paying for the privilege) people to submit photos they took. These could be any legally taken photo by a property owner, a freelance photographer, a tourist, etc. How would this change your response? Can people buy photos of this sort or solicit them for free?
I think the buying and the solicitation is fine, because there are many uses for such pictures that I consider reasonable and well within the rights of the photographers and the buyers. The problems, IMHO, are (a) systematic surveillance (the Google photo vans, or third parties that did the same and sold it to Google), and (b) systematic, indiscriminate correlation and dissemination (the globally accessible search engine of geo-tagged imagery). These activities show a disregard for the people's privacy, understood in the sense of people's legitimate (and limited) rights to control the disclosure, dissemination, correlation and use of information about themselves.
PS What you're describing is already happening; check out Panoramio. Google links maps to Panoramio photos, too...
How so? In a civilized world people don't ask other people in public to stop doing things they don't like.. they tolerate other people.
Yeah. Just like texting while driving on the roads. Nobody likes it, but we all tolerate it. Right?
In case you couldn't unpack the irony here, the point is that we often judge some novel behaviors bad enough to make laws restricting them. This is the reason why all of the people arguing that what Google's doing is legal are missing the point: what the naysayers are really saying is that it shouldn't be legal, and therefore, that we need to pass laws putting limits to it.
But the law, when you get down to it, is a negotiated codification of a bunch of social norms that have been judged important enough to codify, given the circumstances that the society in question has encountered. It is customary to revise the law to forbid new violations of social norms that already existed. Examples:
Many jurisdictions have recently had to pass laws forbidding upskirt photography in public places. One example.
Once upon a time, there were no laws against texting while driving. Well, because once upon a time, there was no text messaging. People who were legally texting while driving in the intervening time were sure as hell violating social norms against what's acceptable to do while driving.
In this case, clearly GP is of the opinion that we need laws regulating geo-tagged databases. If your answer to that is that we don't have any such laws, well, the answer to that, in turn, should be: "are you even listening?"
Nothing preventing Google from indexing those photos, right?
The problem is really what the photos are cross-indexed with, and what lines to draw. I haven't seen any good arguments that a company shouldn't be able to cross-index photos with the text that appears in the webpages where they were taken from; in addition, there's such a thing as robots.txt that can be used to opt out from indexing by many parties.
I still think a geo-tagged systematic database of photos of every residential street in my town is a privacy problem. Such a database "hits closer to home," almost literally; it indiscriminately broadcasts facts about my residence (and thus indirectly about me) to absolutely anybody; and I have no good way to opt out. With a web page index, on the other hand, I have a lot more control about what I disclose and what I choose not to.
If I live in an ugly-looking neighborhood, and I'm applying for a job elsewhere, I don't want the potential employer to Google the home address from my job application, see a bunch of run-down houses, and reject the application for that reason. More generally, people in our society are judged to be perfectly justified to use selective disclosure of information (and even some degree of misinformation) to their own advantage in all kinds of contexts; this is in fact a pretty useful definition of "privacy" to apply in many cases. Google Street View and many other technologies undermine that by making it harder for me to conceal facts about myself that, by societal standards, I'm justified to conceal.
IANAL, but anything plainly viewable from public property is not considered private.
The problem with that is that you're basically assuming that the law is something final, set for all time, instead of an ongoing, gradual, negotiated codification of rules that should apply to everybody, developed as the rules are needed, in response to new circumstances.
There's a fair amount of argument and research going on right now trying to refine the notion of privacy to new circumstances posed by information technology. Some points here are Privacy as Contextual Integrity and A Taxonomy of Privacy.
I would distill the fundamentals of these arguments down to the following: the privacy laws that we have today are tailored to the privacy issues of 50 years ago, when we didn't have the big, emerging privacy problem we have today: the dramatically increased ability to put together disparate pieces of "public" data to discover "private" facts.
We also don't have a case system and hardly conjugate our verbs =).
...and correspondingly, have a gazillion different prepositions and periphrastic constructions, which, since they're not cases or conjugations, the grammar books tend to skimp on. I'm serious, after 25 years of English, I still can't get 'in' vs. 'on' right.
It is true that this is a very rare thing, and I have to admit that I don't know for sure whether it aired, but at the very least, the planned airing of a Portuguese telenovela in Brazil involved dubbing into Brazilian Portuguese.
Just how different is Quebec French from Parisian French? Are vowel sounds elongated, as in the difference between North Carolina English and 'Omaha' (television standard) English? Is the rhthym and the vocabulary markedly different, like Jamica English and 'Omaha' English?
Are they nearly mutually incomprehensible, like Spanish from Madrid vs that of Barcelona?
I speak French reasonably well, and learned mostly from Quebecers, and I'm a linguist, so here's a few answers that will get you going (most of these are not final or very detailed, though):
The biggest difference between Quebec and Parisian French is pronunciation, and within that, the biggest difference is the vowel system. Quebec French vowels are systematically different from Parisian ones. The second biggest difference is vocabulary. Grammar is almost identical.
What you are referring to as "Jamaican English" may in fact be Jamaican Creole, which linguists consider as a different language. The grammar is very different from English, despite the vocabulary being primarily English.
The Quebecers understand the Parisians perfectly well, while the Parisians don't understand the Quebecers. The biggest reason for this is that the Parisians they never hear enough Quebec French often enough to learn it, while the Quebecers see plenty of movies in European French. (A similar situation happens for Brazilian and European Portuguese; the Portuguese understand Brazilian perfectly because they watch Brazilian soap operas, while Portuguese soaps are dubbed for the Brazilian market.)
The Spanish of Madrid and of Barcelona are mutually comprehensible. I believe what you're really thinking of is Catalan, which is a different language than Spanish, official in Catalonia (where Barcelona is located). Catalan is more closely related to the native languages of southern France (e.g., Provençal) than to Spanish. (And some more caution here: the native languages of southern France are not the same thing as the French dialects of southern France...)
I believe nearly all Spanish monolinguals in Barcelona can understand Catalan to a moderate degree, since it's not extremely different from Spanish. They can't speak it, though.
In other words the French are rude. When someone from a foreign country walks into an American store, we do our best to help them, like finding a translator. We certainly don't snub them & pretend to not hear them.
I should tell you about all the times I've gone to an American restaurant or diner in the south or midwest, and been snubbed by the staff because of speaking Spanish at the table--even when all of us spoke English reasonably well.
Lesson for me? Stick to the coasts and the big cities, and fly over all those other places.
The idea that German words are remarkably long is mostly a misconception. In German, noun compounds are written together, with no spaces separating the parts, while in English, the parts of the compound are separated with spaces. This is a superficial, orthographical difference, and not a real grammatical one. English constructions like "senior systems integration engineer" exactly correspond to those long German words.
It would seem obvious to me that those with better cognitive and memory skills are more likely as a result to be bilingual...
...except that how many languages a child learns has next to nothing to do with cognitive and memory skills, but everything to do with their social situation. If your kids talk with their immediate family in one language, speak a second one with other neighborhood kids, and take their classes in school a third language that's widely used in your country, they're going to end up speaking three languages. This is absolutely ordinary in African or Indian cities, for example; home language, city lingua franca, and colonial language.
I'll try to be more precise about this answer. You claim that you learned German from watching TV in Germany, at age 5. You admit that you had interaction in German, but you attribute most of your learning to watching TV.
My answer to this is that it fails to refute the hypothesis that watching TV is sufficient for learning a language at age 5. This is because of the following two possibilities:
That the interactions you had were, in themselves, sufficient for you to learn German.
That the TV did help you learn German, but could not have done so without the interaction.
I'd stress (1), frankly; I'm inclined to think you're underestimating the amount of German-language face-to-face interaction you were involved in at age 5.
Slashdot Mirror
You're missing the point. News reports are produced by reporting, which is as scarce of a resource as it always has been. The cheapness of reproducing the actual finished report doesn't affect the cost of reporting.
Um, I don't know what exactly you mean by "news won't die," but I think you better not mean that reporting will not die. Yes, stuff will still happen all over the world, but it would be quite easy to end up in a situation where nobody can get paid to report on it, which means that the quality of the information you can obtain on the news deteriorates massively.
It would be quite ironic if the Internet destroyed the 19th and 20th centuries' advances in news reporting, and actually resulted in delivering less and worse information to us, wouldn't it?
So you seriously think that every local newspaper should send reporters all over the world to cover all of the news stories they cover? So for example, the Podunk Times should have reporters not only in Podunk, but also all over Iraq?
You're telling me it took you until the advent of the internet to figure this out? Jeez, I already knew this when I was in grade school, back in the mid-80s. I learned it in school!
And just where do you think the AP gets its content from?
This is not an issue about robots.txt. The real question here is much, much simpler: who is going to pay for news reporting on a national and international scale?
The AP does, in effect, two things:
The problem is simple: search engines and other web aggregators are, at best, only good for (2). Even that is arguable, actually, since they only aggregate content that's already been published; the news agencies aggregate before publication. But in any case, the web news aggregators aren't actually doing a lot to actually fund news reporting.
Um, the AP isn't really run for profit, silly. It's a cooperative of news organizations that exists to allow its members to share stories, so the papers can publish stories about regions where they don't have reporters. All of the AP's valuable content is supplied by the members. In effect, the AP and the other news agencies are the first news aggregators.
Yes, you're missing something. Margin lending is very strictly regulated, and the regulations allow brokers to sell off your positions in many situations; this is called a margin call. From the SEC investor guidance site:
You've already gotten it wrong. The summaries bury the reason why.
You log on, and the site says your "Buying Power" is several millions of dollars. However, your buying power isn't your actual cash or asset balance; it's most likely the sum of your cash balance and the amount of margin credit available to you. The cash balance is correct, but the margin credit available is wrong, by orders of magnitude. So they didn't actually credit you any more cash than you already have; they incorrectly allowed you to borrow several million dollars from them.
But if you're not very financially savvy, and fail to understand that your "Buying Power" is not your cash balance, you might think you hit the jackpot. My suspicion is that there's a combination of them handing out margin accounts too easily, without enough customer orientation and screening, and the UI is not making it clear enough to users when they make a transaction how much of it is with money that's really theirs and how much is borrowed money.
From the reports, it sounds like what the Zecco error did wasn't really to increase the amount of cash in the customer accounts, but rather, incease the amount of margin available to them. I.e., it allowed the customers in question to borrow millions of dollars. That makes it doubly dumb to actually try to exploit Zecco's error; you're supposed to pay that money back!
You're missing the point drastically. With my Mac (and I'd assume with any decent Windows laptop, but I haven't tried it), when I want to stop using the computer, I just close the lid, and it goes to sleep. When I want to use it again, I open it up, and it wakes up within a few seconds.
The consumers you're thinking of don't really care about the difference between cold boot and waking up from sleep. They want their computer to be available when they want it, without having to wait for a while. It's OK if sometimes the computer is unavailable for 5 minutes because of updates, as long as they have control over when it happens.
If you want to make things good for consumes, what you want to do is to make sure that sleep/hibernate modes are rock-solid, and minimize the number of situations that require a cold reboot. The latter can be solved with techniques like microkernel design (so more parts of the system can be replaced while it is up), or with kernel hot-patching features. Improving the speed of cold boots comes a very far third behind these.
Auto insurance protects the policyholder from a different kind of risk. Criticizing health insurance for not being like auto insurance is a big mistake. Auto insurance protects against episodic risks; you get into a car accident, so you require a fair chunk of money right away, but after the claim is paid, you don't need any more money.
Health insurance, on the other hand, needs to insure you both against episodic issues and chronic ones. A chronic risk is a risk where, one day, you need a significant amount of money for health care over many years, maybe even the rest of your life. In the general population, people will have acute episodes at some statistical rate, and some proportion of the population will be chronic sufferers. You want to insure yourself both against the episodes, and against the risk that you'll turn out to be one of the chronic sufferers.
Now, the reason health insurance pays for "maintenance," in theory, is because routine care reduces the risk that people will be chronic sufferers. In practice, the private insurers in the USA do not want to insure chronic sufferers, nor pay for routine care, so they structure their products accordingly, by charging chronic sufferers much higher premiums than healthy people, and pushing for higher deductibles and HMOs in order to reduce their routine care costs. These pricing schemes and practices ultimately make it impossible in practice to insure oneself against acquiring chronic health issues.
The reason we need universal health insurance is to force everybody to insure themselves against the chronic risks, because the private sector is just systematically unwilling and incapable of doing so, because they can make more money by not providing that kind of coverage. So it makes sense to have the government provide the compulsory chronic health risk insurance. and private insurers to provide supplemental coverage for episodic risks.
You can't interpret that quoted part of the EULA unless you provide the definition of "Service" being used there, silly.
Maybe they live in another city. Maybe they judge that the cost of performing that check is not worth it. Maybe it doesn't even occur to them to check out the neighborhood except for the fact that Google makes it trivial for them to do so, without leaving their chairs.
Yes, I am aware that it is counterintuitive to a lot of people that what Google should be restricted* from doing in the large scale is something that anybody is allowed to do in a small scale. Nobody's arguing that it should be forbidden to take a photo of somebody's house. The argument is that systematically taking a full-coverage photo set of every street and every house amounts to systematic surveillance of the whole population, and that putting that geo-tagged database online amounts to indiscriminate disclosure of facts about others.
*And when I say "restricted," I don't necessarily mean "prohibited." I am perfectly willing to consider relatively narrow restrictions that protect people's privacy.
I never claimed that restricting Street View would solve the problem. My claim is that its existence aggravates problems we already have, in countless, unexpected ways.
Or, as an alternative, my neighborhood could organize to change the laws to forbid Google from freely disseminating the results of their systematic surveillance of our community. Basically, I don't think Google has the right to do that, and that the law, which was written before this problem came into being, needs to change to reflect this (just like the law has needed to change for new problems like upskirt photography and texting while driving).
The problem is that this is just as true of far less controversial attacks on privacy. You can be pretty damn sure that if somebody collected the medical records of millions of Americans and sold copies of them freely, that would have a hell of a lot of commercial value.
What would happen in that situation is that some set of people would make money at the expense of others. Basically, those who stand to profit from discriminating against the unhealthy.
I haven't come to anything close to working this out completely; I seriously believe the topic is too big for one person to work out (not to mention that it would be awfully undemocratic to do this sort of thing without a lot of input from a lot of people!).
I think the buying and the solicitation is fine, because there are many uses for such pictures that I consider reasonable and well within the rights of the photographers and the buyers. The problems, IMHO, are (a) systematic surveillance (the Google photo vans, or third parties that did the same and sold it to Google), and (b) systematic, indiscriminate correlation and dissemination (the globally accessible search engine of geo-tagged imagery). These activities show a disregard for the people's privacy, understood in the sense of people's legitimate (and limited) rights to control the disclosure, dissemination, correlation and use of information about themselves.
PS What you're describing is already happening; check out Panoramio. Google links maps to Panoramio photos, too...
Yeah. Just like texting while driving on the roads. Nobody likes it, but we all tolerate it. Right?
In case you couldn't unpack the irony here, the point is that we often judge some novel behaviors bad enough to make laws restricting them. This is the reason why all of the people arguing that what Google's doing is legal are missing the point: what the naysayers are really saying is that it shouldn't be legal, and therefore, that we need to pass laws putting limits to it.
But the law, when you get down to it, is a negotiated codification of a bunch of social norms that have been judged important enough to codify, given the circumstances that the society in question has encountered. It is customary to revise the law to forbid new violations of social norms that already existed. Examples:
In this case, clearly GP is of the opinion that we need laws regulating geo-tagged databases. If your answer to that is that we don't have any such laws, well, the answer to that, in turn, should be: "are you even listening?"
The problem is really what the photos are cross-indexed with, and what lines to draw. I haven't seen any good arguments that a company shouldn't be able to cross-index photos with the text that appears in the webpages where they were taken from; in addition, there's such a thing as robots.txt that can be used to opt out from indexing by many parties.
I still think a geo-tagged systematic database of photos of every residential street in my town is a privacy problem. Such a database "hits closer to home," almost literally; it indiscriminately broadcasts facts about my residence (and thus indirectly about me) to absolutely anybody; and I have no good way to opt out. With a web page index, on the other hand, I have a lot more control about what I disclose and what I choose not to.
If I live in an ugly-looking neighborhood, and I'm applying for a job elsewhere, I don't want the potential employer to Google the home address from my job application, see a bunch of run-down houses, and reject the application for that reason. More generally, people in our society are judged to be perfectly justified to use selective disclosure of information (and even some degree of misinformation) to their own advantage in all kinds of contexts; this is in fact a pretty useful definition of "privacy" to apply in many cases. Google Street View and many other technologies undermine that by making it harder for me to conceal facts about myself that, by societal standards, I'm justified to conceal.
The problem with that is that you're basically assuming that the law is something final, set for all time, instead of an ongoing, gradual, negotiated codification of rules that should apply to everybody, developed as the rules are needed, in response to new circumstances.
There's a fair amount of argument and research going on right now trying to refine the notion of privacy to new circumstances posed by information technology. Some points here are Privacy as Contextual Integrity and A Taxonomy of Privacy.
I would distill the fundamentals of these arguments down to the following: the privacy laws that we have today are tailored to the privacy issues of 50 years ago, when we didn't have the big, emerging privacy problem we have today: the dramatically increased ability to put together disparate pieces of "public" data to discover "private" facts.
...and correspondingly, have a gazillion different prepositions and periphrastic constructions, which, since they're not cases or conjugations, the grammar books tend to skimp on. I'm serious, after 25 years of English, I still can't get 'in' vs. 'on' right.
Reference
It is true that this is a very rare thing, and I have to admit that I don't know for sure whether it aired, but at the very least, the planned airing of a Portuguese telenovela in Brazil involved dubbing into Brazilian Portuguese.
I speak French reasonably well, and learned mostly from Quebecers, and I'm a linguist, so here's a few answers that will get you going (most of these are not final or very detailed, though):
I believe nearly all Spanish monolinguals in Barcelona can understand Catalan to a moderate degree, since it's not extremely different from Spanish. They can't speak it, though.
I should tell you about all the times I've gone to an American restaurant or diner in the south or midwest, and been snubbed by the staff because of speaking Spanish at the table--even when all of us spoke English reasonably well.
Lesson for me? Stick to the coasts and the big cities, and fly over all those other places.
The idea that German words are remarkably long is mostly a misconception. In German, noun compounds are written together, with no spaces separating the parts, while in English, the parts of the compound are separated with spaces. This is a superficial, orthographical difference, and not a real grammatical one. English constructions like "senior systems integration engineer" exactly correspond to those long German words.
...except that how many languages a child learns has next to nothing to do with cognitive and memory skills, but everything to do with their social situation. If your kids talk with their immediate family in one language, speak a second one with other neighborhood kids, and take their classes in school a third language that's widely used in your country, they're going to end up speaking three languages. This is absolutely ordinary in African or Indian cities, for example; home language, city lingua franca, and colonial language.
I'll try to be more precise about this answer. You claim that you learned German from watching TV in Germany, at age 5. You admit that you had interaction in German, but you attribute most of your learning to watching TV.
My answer to this is that it fails to refute the hypothesis that watching TV is sufficient for learning a language at age 5. This is because of the following two possibilities:
I'd stress (1), frankly; I'm inclined to think you're underestimating the amount of German-language face-to-face interaction you were involved in at age 5.