Actually, Italy haven't been profligate for years, they have been taking more tax revenue than they spend, and paying down their old loans.
The problem for Italy now is that the ratings agencies are downgrading them, and thus causing the interest they have to pay to increase, such that they will no longer have a balanced budget, causing them to be more likely to default, causing their rating to be downgraded again, increasing interest payment still further, making the budget deficit increase, causing their rating... and so on. Basically, in the case of Italy the ratings agencies are creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. If they had never had downgraded Italy, Italy would still today be taking more tax revenues than they were spending, and would still be paying back their loans.
Before a release, everyone has said how they hated the new interface. It happened with Windows 3.1 users when they saw Windows 95, it happened with Windows 98 users when they saw Windows XP, it happened with Windows XP users when they saw Windows Vista and Windows 7. But in the end, everyone just laps it up anyway when it comes out. The only real exception was Vista and that was because of problems other than just the UI changing.
The same will happen with Metro, everyone will whine but go ahead and buy it anyway.
1000 probably would make humans extinct or nearly extinct.
Calculations made *independently* by western scientists and Soviet scientists in the mid 1980s reached the conclusion that an exchange of this order would create a nuclear winter. Except nuclear winter is really a misnomer; more like nuclear 6 month long night (a 3000 megaton exchange would result in so much stratospheric soot that the light levels at mid-day in the northern hemisphere would be that of a moonlit night).
The nuclear winter was revisited only three or four years ago, and the report published in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. It turns out that the 1980s calculations were too optimistic, it would actually be worse. Calculations were also done for a hypothetical regional nuclear conflict of subtropical countries each with 50 Hiroshima-sized weapons. The conclusion is that it would cause a "decade without a summer", and a reduced growing season in the US midwest of 60 days in the immediate years after the war - the hypothetical war would kill 2 billion people not due to radioactivity or blast effects, but starvation (think severe food shortages in the west, and famine everywhere else).
Nuclear weapons are suicide. We need to be getting rid of as many as we can.
The Amiga *was* really popular in Europe. In around 1990 or so, if you had a modern personal computer in your home, it was most likely an Amiga or an Atari ST, the IBM compatibles were far too expensive for most people and had very poor graphics capabilities.
It died out because the PC got a lot cheaper and gained all the things that the Amiga had, but that wasn't until around 1994-1995 when the PC finally had what the Amiga had for years.
(I have no horse in this race, I never owned an Amiga back in the day. I managed to get a clearance deal on an 80386 in 1990 or so. I was more interested in trying to get something that would run something Unixy in 1991, rather than graphics).
If you don't defend trademarks, you can end up losing them. Therefore if a company sees a possible trademark dilution, they have to make some effort to defend it. What in reality will probably happen is that there will be some kind of negotiation between the companies, an agreement signed, and Blackberry will use BBX, as will the original company; they'll just agree not to move into each other's areas.
The thing though that cracks me up about these cases is the talk of customers being confused. A couple of years ago, SPARC International ceased and desisted SparkFun Electronics because SparkFun was confusingly similar to SPARC, and that SPARC's customers might get confused. I saw this as an enormous insult to the intelligence of SPARC's customers. They aren't room temperature IQ drooling cretins (as SPARC's law firm seems to think), SPARC's customers are generally pretty intelligent and will never get confused between SPARC and SparkFun. SparkFun and SPARC ended up making an agreement, no money changed hands.
The difference between this and usual military contract outs or prior NASA contract outs is this. NASA in the past would come up with something and ask a contractor to build it for them, especially a bespoke product (think the Shuttle).
In this instance, NASA are doing the equivalent of buying airline tickets.
In which case you've not been looking hard enough (possibly, not looking at all)
Here is the list of what they would like:
* End the Collusion Between Government and Large Corporations/Banks, So That Our Elected Leaders Are Actually Representing the Interests of the People (the 99%) and Not Just Their Rich Donors (the 1%).
* Investigate Wall Street and Hold Senior Executives Accountable for the Destruction in Wealth that has Devastated Millions of People.
* Return the Power of Coining Money to the U.S. Treasury and Return to Sound Money
* Limit the Size, Scope and Power of Banks so that None are Ever Again âoeToo Big to Failâ and in Need to Taxpayer Bailouts
* Eliminate âoePersonhoodâ Legal Status for Corporations
* Repeal the Patriot Act, End the War on Drugs and Protect Civil Liberties
* End the Imperial Wars of Aggression, Bring the Troops Home from All Countries, Cut the Military Budget and Limit The Military Role to Protection of the Homeland
Now you might not agree with all of them, but those are the core demands. I found them on the first page of Google results by googling "occupy wall street core demands". More detail on the banking ones is that they would like the Glass-Steagall act to be re-enacted, and the separation of retail banks from the casino style investment banking.
Who gives a flying fsck how he dresses? He could be in a cheerleader's outfit for all I care. The important thing is the results, not how the quadraplegic test participant is dressed.
Your faulty assumption is that everyone is responsible, everyone is good with money, and everyone will do the sums. In reality, maybe only a minority do.
While it is a borrower's responsibility to only borrow within their means, many borrowers don't do this. Banks are criminally naive if they assume all borrowers will do the sums and can be trusted to borrow only what they can. Most won't, they just see "ooh shiny McMansion". When the banks lend to so many people with no questions asked such that it means that when all these people start defaulting, the bank becomes insolvent and has to be bailed out by the taxpayer, it absolutely IS the bank's fault for just blindly trusting every borrower. While borrowers have a responsibility to make sure they can pay back, banks also have a responsibility to verify this because if they don't, they end up insolvent and having to be bailed out, or they end up going bust and taking depositor's money in the process. Can you not see this?
The euro crisis is brought on by something similar to this. Greece knew they had too many debts to join the euro, but with the aid of Wall Street, deliberately hid many of their debts to look better than they were. Does this mean it's 100% Greece's fault? No. A very large portion of the fault lies with the Eurozone for accepting them - basically the eurozone, in a headlong and breathless rush to get the single currency going didn't do their due diligence and didn't check Greece's story out. The result is that Greece's problems may actually destroy the euro. Some of the fault is that of the eurozone for not doing a proper job in calculating the risk of bringing Greece on board.
Take the new job, but tell your current employer for a limited time, you'll support them after hours for up to an hour a day (the hour you're currently losing to commuting). Overall, no net loss to your life, and in the end you gain an hour you didn't have before.
Losing the commute is very important. Not only do you get the hour of your life back, even if the new job had the same pay you're effectively gaining the money you'd have to spend on fuel and your car. Fuel prices are only set to go up. You might even be able to sell your car (which is a colossal expense), or if you're a 2 car family, you may be able to go down to a 1 car family.
Not really a good case, Linus Torvalds wasn't an Apple user. He started with a relative's Commodore VIC-20 and continued on with a Sinclair QL for quite a while before getting a 386 based PC.
The heat is being trapped in the troposphere, and hence not reaching the stratosphere. The more heat that gets trapped in the troposphere and cannot escape into the stratosphere, the less thermal energy there is in the stratosphere. Therefore the troposphere's temperature increases (the troposphere is where the climate we care most about basically happens) and as a direct result the stratosphere's temperature decreass.
Why is the lack of helmets daft? There is little evidence that helmet wearing has a meaningful reduction of the injury rate to on-road cyclists. The compulsion of helmets would be a lot more daft.
ARM was originally developed as a desktop CPU, and it was on the desktop - it's been and gone.
ARM stood originally for Acorn Risc Machine, it was developed by Acorn because they couldn't find an adequate processor for what they wanted to do to follow on from the 6502. Many of the CISC chips at the time (mid 1980s) had very poor utilization of memory bandwidth and poor interrupt response (Steve Furber in one of his talks recently on the development of the ARM - he's one of the two people who developed the first ARM CPU, pointed out in particular the National Semi 32016 (IIRC) that they were thinking of using, until they found out the multiply instruction took over 100 clock cycles and could not be interrupted).
They also wanted ARM to be low power, not to make their new line of desktop computers energy efficient particularly, but because they needed it to be cheap so the computers could be affordable. If they could get it under 1 watt, they could use plastic packaging instead of ceramic packaging which reduces the cost by an order of magnitude. They had no tools for estimating power, so they just designed *everything* on the chip for low power. When they got the first samples back from the fab, they were blown away when they found the chip consumed 0.1 watts - they had massively overachieved.
We had the Acorn Archimedes in school. IIRC, it had an 8MHz ARM and it could emulate - in software - an IBM PC with VGA graphics faster than the original IBM PC ran. That's how much faster the ARM was at the time compared to anything else around. Without needing to be in a ceramic package.
Not really. I live in the Isle of Man, we have a rather famous road race here called the Isle of Man TT. The last 2 or 3 years there's also been an electric bike race added to the schedule.
Each lap of the circuit is 37.75 miles long (it's probably the world's longest motorcycle race circuit). The current lap record is an average speed of 131 mph on a Yamaha R6. The electric bikes still fall very, very, very far short of this, their lap record, they are averaging in the mid 80s if I remember correctly, 50 mph slower than the machines with internal combustion engines.
While it's probably true you can make a faster electric drag strip bike that doesn't have to go around corners nor travel more than a quarter mile, a practical electric bike is still a long way of getting even near the performance of a standard sportsbike.
What bothers me is these things make war easier to wage. When Americans aren't coming home in coffins, it's a lot easier for the public and politicians to accept war, therefore we're more likely to start wars.
If we're risking our own soldiers and pilots, at least we might think twice and look for other solutions before starting a war. However, once you've made war palatable to your own public, too often it becomes the first resort especially amongst the hawkish (and religious right versus non-Christian enemies)
There exists something called Kryoflux. I think what it does is makes a high-fidelity copy of the actual magnetic values of the disc, so you can make a very good copy on which you can work without worrying about degrading your floppies further.
From the website, this is probably what you care about most:
Main Features
Read at lowest level possible - precisely sampling the magnetic flux transition timing. Custom formats? Recording scheme violations? Encodings? KryoFlux reads them all!
They probably work OK. I have a pile of 5.25 inch discs for my BBC Micro (a computer popular in the 1980s in Britain). All of them read fine.
The schoolteacher who ran our computer labs in the late 80s recently sent me the discs that had the programs I wrote back then. I could get all the data back without problems, copying the files to the internal CF card that's in my Beeb.
The problems are really with 3.5in discs, despite their hard shell they seem to be far less durable than 5.25 inch discs. The later 3.5in discs are the worst.
Oh now you're getting onto a favorite rant of mine.
I was forced to do French for something like 7 years at school. I can barely speak a word of French today, even though they started us at 9 years old, when we're supposedly very receptive to this sort of thing. I was recently in Belgium, and our hosts took us out to dinner and the subject of learning languages came up. It turns out our host speaks not only English fluently, but also two other languages, and can get by in one more. They had mandatory language classes at school, too. They are a LOT more successful at it.
A lot of people draw a conclusion from this, that English speakers just aren't good at learning other languages, but this is actually a load of rubbish. English speakers are as good as anyone else at acquiring lanugage, but it's the ghastly way languages are taught at school that's the problem. Languages should be fun to learn. They should also not be hugely difficult, after all, learning language is a fundamentally basic human function. But the method of teaching language in Britain, at least my exposure to it, was turned into an incredibly boring chore. (A bit like how ICT is taught now, it seems). No wonder so many Brits are bad at foreign languages, their first exposure is learning French in the most dull manner possible, contrived to make it difficult to learn the language, giving us the impression that learning languages is really hard. The people who came out speaking French well did so in spite of their French lessons, not because of them.
And it hasn't changed. The way students are taught means they still don't learn French in a meaningful way despite being able to get good GCSE grades. An item on Radio 4 about 2 years back discussed the subject of language learners (and the lack of interpreters who were native English speakers), interviewed some students who had just done French GCSEs. The interviewer asked an A grade student to describe her morning in French, which for an A grade student should be trivial. She really struggled.
The reason that article caught my attention was that I had at that stage been teaching myself Spanish for about 9 months or so and I was able to describe my morning in Spanish about 100 times better, despite never having a formal lesson in the language. Not only that as I'm in my 30's according to the accepted wisdom I'm not supposed to be able to learn a language well because "I'm too old to learn one" (which is also a bunch of BS too). After 6 months of learning Spanish I had learned more than I ever did of French after 7 years of French at school. Why have I been so much more successful? Because I've been learning the language the fun way, doing relevant things in the language etc. It becomes a lot easier once it is fun. Now after just 3 years of the language I'm at an advanced level (after all I can understand what women in Madrid say, despite their machine-gun delivery!), and I think all I need would be 3 months living in Spain and I'm pretty confident I could convert this to fluency, the only thing that slows me down right now is I don't have enough opportunities to converse.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, Italy haven't been profligate for years, they have been taking more tax revenue than they spend, and paying down their old loans.
The problem for Italy now is that the ratings agencies are downgrading them, and thus causing the interest they have to pay to increase, such that they will no longer have a balanced budget, causing them to be more likely to default, causing their rating to be downgraded again, increasing interest payment still further, making the budget deficit increase, causing their rating... and so on. Basically, in the case of Italy the ratings agencies are creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. If they had never had downgraded Italy, Italy would still today be taking more tax revenues than they were spending, and would still be paying back their loans.
Don't be so sure to count MS out.
Before a release, everyone has said how they hated the new interface. It happened with Windows 3.1 users when they saw Windows 95, it happened with Windows 98 users when they saw Windows XP, it happened with Windows XP users when they saw Windows Vista and Windows 7. But in the end, everyone just laps it up anyway when it comes out. The only real exception was Vista and that was because of problems other than just the UI changing.
The same will happen with Metro, everyone will whine but go ahead and buy it anyway.
1000 probably would make humans extinct or nearly extinct.
Calculations made *independently* by western scientists and Soviet scientists in the mid 1980s reached the conclusion that an exchange of this order would create a nuclear winter. Except nuclear winter is really a misnomer; more like nuclear 6 month long night (a 3000 megaton exchange would result in so much stratospheric soot that the light levels at mid-day in the northern hemisphere would be that of a moonlit night).
The nuclear winter was revisited only three or four years ago, and the report published in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. It turns out that the 1980s calculations were too optimistic, it would actually be worse. Calculations were also done for a hypothetical regional nuclear conflict of subtropical countries each with 50 Hiroshima-sized weapons. The conclusion is that it would cause a "decade without a summer", and a reduced growing season in the US midwest of 60 days in the immediate years after the war - the hypothetical war would kill 2 billion people not due to radioactivity or blast effects, but starvation (think severe food shortages in the west, and famine everywhere else).
Nuclear weapons are suicide. We need to be getting rid of as many as we can.
The Amiga *was* really popular in Europe. In around 1990 or so, if you had a modern personal computer in your home, it was most likely an Amiga or an Atari ST, the IBM compatibles were far too expensive for most people and had very poor graphics capabilities.
It died out because the PC got a lot cheaper and gained all the things that the Amiga had, but that wasn't until around 1994-1995 when the PC finally had what the Amiga had for years.
(I have no horse in this race, I never owned an Amiga back in the day. I managed to get a clearance deal on an 80386 in 1990 or so. I was more interested in trying to get something that would run something Unixy in 1991, rather than graphics).
But did you try to find out if the person in the corner wearing a mini skirt actually had a recipe for cheesecake? You never know...
If you don't defend trademarks, you can end up losing them. Therefore if a company sees a possible trademark dilution, they have to make some effort to defend it. What in reality will probably happen is that there will be some kind of negotiation between the companies, an agreement signed, and Blackberry will use BBX, as will the original company; they'll just agree not to move into each other's areas.
The thing though that cracks me up about these cases is the talk of customers being confused. A couple of years ago, SPARC International ceased and desisted SparkFun Electronics because SparkFun was confusingly similar to SPARC, and that SPARC's customers might get confused. I saw this as an enormous insult to the intelligence of SPARC's customers. They aren't room temperature IQ drooling cretins (as SPARC's law firm seems to think), SPARC's customers are generally pretty intelligent and will never get confused between SPARC and SparkFun. SparkFun and SPARC ended up making an agreement, no money changed hands.
The difference between this and usual military contract outs or prior NASA contract outs is this. NASA in the past would come up with something and ask a contractor to build it for them, especially a bespoke product (think the Shuttle).
In this instance, NASA are doing the equivalent of buying airline tickets.
In which case you've not been looking hard enough (possibly, not looking at all)
Here is the list of what they would like:
* End the Collusion Between Government and Large Corporations/Banks, So That Our Elected Leaders Are Actually Representing the Interests of the People (the 99%) and Not Just Their Rich Donors (the 1%).
* Investigate Wall Street and Hold Senior Executives Accountable for the Destruction in Wealth that has Devastated Millions of People.
* Return the Power of Coining Money to the U.S. Treasury and Return to Sound Money
* Limit the Size, Scope and Power of Banks so that None are Ever Again âoeToo Big to Failâ and in Need to Taxpayer Bailouts
* Eliminate âoePersonhoodâ Legal Status for Corporations
* Repeal the Patriot Act, End the War on Drugs and Protect Civil Liberties
* End the Imperial Wars of Aggression, Bring the Troops Home from All Countries, Cut the Military Budget and Limit The Military Role to Protection of the Homeland
Now you might not agree with all of them, but those are the core demands. I found them on the first page of Google results by googling "occupy wall street core demands". More detail on the banking ones is that they would like the Glass-Steagall act to be re-enacted, and the separation of retail banks from the casino style investment banking.
I managed to accidentally hit lovethecock.com instead of slashdot.org, the keys are right next to each other...
Who gives a flying fsck how he dresses? He could be in a cheerleader's outfit for all I care. The important thing is the results, not how the quadraplegic test participant is dressed.
It's not that hard to find American soldiers to shoot American civilians.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_State_shootings
Yes, the bank is largely to blame.
Your faulty assumption is that everyone is responsible, everyone is good with money, and everyone will do the sums. In reality, maybe only a minority do.
While it is a borrower's responsibility to only borrow within their means, many borrowers don't do this. Banks are criminally naive if they assume all borrowers will do the sums and can be trusted to borrow only what they can. Most won't, they just see "ooh shiny McMansion". When the banks lend to so many people with no questions asked such that it means that when all these people start defaulting, the bank becomes insolvent and has to be bailed out by the taxpayer, it absolutely IS the bank's fault for just blindly trusting every borrower. While borrowers have a responsibility to make sure they can pay back, banks also have a responsibility to verify this because if they don't, they end up insolvent and having to be bailed out, or they end up going bust and taking depositor's money in the process. Can you not see this?
The euro crisis is brought on by something similar to this. Greece knew they had too many debts to join the euro, but with the aid of Wall Street, deliberately hid many of their debts to look better than they were. Does this mean it's 100% Greece's fault? No. A very large portion of the fault lies with the Eurozone for accepting them - basically the eurozone, in a headlong and breathless rush to get the single currency going didn't do their due diligence and didn't check Greece's story out. The result is that Greece's problems may actually destroy the euro. Some of the fault is that of the eurozone for not doing a proper job in calculating the risk of bringing Greece on board.
Heat your water with a solar thermal panel instead of photo voltaic. It'll be much cheaper and work out much better.
What you can do is this.
Take the new job, but tell your current employer for a limited time, you'll support them after hours for up to an hour a day (the hour you're currently losing to commuting). Overall, no net loss to your life, and in the end you gain an hour you didn't have before.
Losing the commute is very important. Not only do you get the hour of your life back, even if the new job had the same pay you're effectively gaining the money you'd have to spend on fuel and your car. Fuel prices are only set to go up. You might even be able to sell your car (which is a colossal expense), or if you're a 2 car family, you may be able to go down to a 1 car family.
Not really a good case, Linus Torvalds wasn't an Apple user. He started with a relative's Commodore VIC-20 and continued on with a Sinclair QL for quite a while before getting a 386 based PC.
The heat is being trapped in the troposphere, and hence not reaching the stratosphere. The more heat that gets trapped in the troposphere and cannot escape into the stratosphere, the less thermal energy there is in the stratosphere. Therefore the troposphere's temperature increases (the troposphere is where the climate we care most about basically happens) and as a direct result the stratosphere's temperature decreass.
Why is the lack of helmets daft? There is little evidence that helmet wearing has a meaningful reduction of the injury rate to on-road cyclists. The compulsion of helmets would be a lot more daft.
You might be waiting a while. The B777 was in service for 14 years before one was crashed.
ARM was originally developed as a desktop CPU, and it was on the desktop - it's been and gone.
ARM stood originally for Acorn Risc Machine, it was developed by Acorn because they couldn't find an adequate processor for what they wanted to do to follow on from the 6502. Many of the CISC chips at the time (mid 1980s) had very poor utilization of memory bandwidth and poor interrupt response (Steve Furber in one of his talks recently on the development of the ARM - he's one of the two people who developed the first ARM CPU, pointed out in particular the National Semi 32016 (IIRC) that they were thinking of using, until they found out the multiply instruction took over 100 clock cycles and could not be interrupted).
They also wanted ARM to be low power, not to make their new line of desktop computers energy efficient particularly, but because they needed it to be cheap so the computers could be affordable. If they could get it under 1 watt, they could use plastic packaging instead of ceramic packaging which reduces the cost by an order of magnitude. They had no tools for estimating power, so they just designed *everything* on the chip for low power. When they got the first samples back from the fab, they were blown away when they found the chip consumed 0.1 watts - they had massively overachieved.
We had the Acorn Archimedes in school. IIRC, it had an 8MHz ARM and it could emulate - in software - an IBM PC with VGA graphics faster than the original IBM PC ran. That's how much faster the ARM was at the time compared to anything else around. Without needing to be in a ceramic package.
Not really. I live in the Isle of Man, we have a rather famous road race here called the Isle of Man TT. The last 2 or 3 years there's also been an electric bike race added to the schedule.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isle_of_Man_TT
Each lap of the circuit is 37.75 miles long (it's probably the world's longest motorcycle race circuit). The current lap record is an average speed of 131 mph on a Yamaha R6. The electric bikes still fall very, very, very far short of this, their lap record, they are averaging in the mid 80s if I remember correctly, 50 mph slower than the machines with internal combustion engines.
While it's probably true you can make a faster electric drag strip bike that doesn't have to go around corners nor travel more than a quarter mile, a practical electric bike is still a long way of getting even near the performance of a standard sportsbike.
Perhaps they could call such a system WOPR :-)
What bothers me is these things make war easier to wage. When Americans aren't coming home in coffins, it's a lot easier for the public and politicians to accept war, therefore we're more likely to start wars.
If we're risking our own soldiers and pilots, at least we might think twice and look for other solutions before starting a war. However, once you've made war palatable to your own public, too often it becomes the first resort especially amongst the hawkish (and religious right versus non-Christian enemies)
There exists something called Kryoflux. I think what it does is makes a high-fidelity copy of the actual magnetic values of the disc, so you can make a very good copy on which you can work without worrying about degrading your floppies further.
http://www.kryoflux.com/
From the website, this is probably what you care about most:
Main Features
Read at lowest level possible - precisely sampling the magnetic flux transition timing. Custom formats? Recording scheme violations? Encodings? KryoFlux reads them all!
They probably work OK. I have a pile of 5.25 inch discs for my BBC Micro (a computer popular in the 1980s in Britain). All of them read fine.
The schoolteacher who ran our computer labs in the late 80s recently sent me the discs that had the programs I wrote back then. I could get all the data back without problems, copying the files to the internal CF card that's in my Beeb.
The problems are really with 3.5in discs, despite their hard shell they seem to be far less durable than 5.25 inch discs. The later 3.5in discs are the worst.
Oh now you're getting onto a favorite rant of mine.
I was forced to do French for something like 7 years at school. I can barely speak a word of French today, even though they started us at 9 years old, when we're supposedly very receptive to this sort of thing. I was recently in Belgium, and our hosts took us out to dinner and the subject of learning languages came up. It turns out our host speaks not only English fluently, but also two other languages, and can get by in one more. They had mandatory language classes at school, too. They are a LOT more successful at it.
A lot of people draw a conclusion from this, that English speakers just aren't good at learning other languages, but this is actually a load of rubbish. English speakers are as good as anyone else at acquiring lanugage, but it's the ghastly way languages are taught at school that's the problem. Languages should be fun to learn. They should also not be hugely difficult, after all, learning language is a fundamentally basic human function. But the method of teaching language in Britain, at least my exposure to it, was turned into an incredibly boring chore. (A bit like how ICT is taught now, it seems). No wonder so many Brits are bad at foreign languages, their first exposure is learning French in the most dull manner possible, contrived to make it difficult to learn the language, giving us the impression that learning languages is really hard. The people who came out speaking French well did so in spite of their French lessons, not because of them.
And it hasn't changed. The way students are taught means they still don't learn French in a meaningful way despite being able to get good GCSE grades. An item on Radio 4 about 2 years back discussed the subject of language learners (and the lack of interpreters who were native English speakers), interviewed some students who had just done French GCSEs. The interviewer asked an A grade student to describe her morning in French, which for an A grade student should be trivial. She really struggled.
The reason that article caught my attention was that I had at that stage been teaching myself Spanish for about 9 months or so and I was able to describe my morning in Spanish about 100 times better, despite never having a formal lesson in the language. Not only that as I'm in my 30's according to the accepted wisdom I'm not supposed to be able to learn a language well because "I'm too old to learn one" (which is also a bunch of BS too). After 6 months of learning Spanish I had learned more than I ever did of French after 7 years of French at school. Why have I been so much more successful? Because I've been learning the language the fun way, doing relevant things in the language etc. It becomes a lot easier once it is fun. Now after just 3 years of the language I'm at an advanced level (after all I can understand what women in Madrid say, despite their machine-gun delivery!), and I think all I need would be 3 months living in Spain and I'm pretty confident I could convert this to fluency, the only thing that slows me down right now is I don't have enough opportunities to converse.