If you want to learn Spanish, learn it in Central or South America.
Spaniards speak incredibly quickly, have dramatic regional accents, and are impatient with learners.
In Latin America, on the other hand, they speak more slowly and clearly, there's - surprisingly - less variation (among mainstream urban Spanish dialects) continentwide than just on the Iberian Peninsula, and random strangers are happy to sit around all afternoon helping you master the language. And let's face it, only a tiny fraction of these 400m Spanish speakers are speaking the Spain varieties.
1. Het is verboden een winkel voor het publiek geopend te hebben:
a. op zondag;
Albert Heijn just behind the Queen's palace in Amsterdam is open all day Sunday. As is the one in Leidsestraat.
c. op werkdagen voor 6 uur en na 22 uur.
This is clearly not the case either, as there are many shops in Amsterdam open until 3am. They had to trade away morning hours in order to stay open at night. And of course the shops in petrol stations, the airport, train stations, etc., are open whenever they want to be.
I still say that's nonsense. The "defacto standard for communication" is the local language, even in the Netherlands for example where English training is quite intense.
You are misusing the word "standard". Insofar as there is a standard, it's English. "The local language" is a runtime variable; a standard has to be a constant.
People are talking more Dutch than English everywhere except the large international business (but... most business conducted is not international, is it?).
It's also the teaching medium in more and more graduate and even undergraduate programmes. And there's no shortage of smaller businesses and NGOs in Amsterdam where English is the main spoken language.
1. Make sure that you are submitting an American-style résumé and not an Australian-looking CV.
2. Get someone to translate your academic qualifications into American-speak.
At the end of the day, though, it sounds like you are offering commodity skills (MS-whatever certification) which puts you at a disadvantage. You are foreign, so they'll have to go through the time and trouble of getting you a visa. But you're Australian, which means they'll have to pay you a lot. That's not the most appealing prospect, when they can get 3 Indian guys with the same commodity skillset for the same price. Come up with some special skills (maybe you already have them but haven't mentioned them in the post I'm replying to) and you'll have a much easier time convincing employers that you're worth hiring.
Spanish, however, is up there with English and Chinese in terms of global adoption and up there with English and Japanese in terms of international business relevance.
Nothing, and especially not Japanese, is "up there with English" in terms of "international business relevance".
What sort of bizarro-world do you live in? Atheism is at its most rampant in the big cities and academic communities, where everyone is living side by side. There's a corresponding correlation between gated communities and church attendance (or at least professed intention toward church attendance).
As to the medieval fortresses, I fail to grasp what sort of point you might be trying to make. Church entrances were not guarded because the people inside were so nice that nobody would want to attack them? And do we live in medieval times? Do I therefore get to invoke the crusades and inquisitions and papal loot-hoarding and all the other good stuff that goes along with the period?
What is the basic difference between an atheist and a Christian, well simple :
-> a Christian works to advance the glory of God ("be merry and fertile", the ten commandments, "love thy neighbour",...)
-> an atheist works to advance himself, without open regard for others (this does not mean he has to be a murderer, just that he does not see the need to consider the effect on strangers before deciding on a course of action)
This is more or less exactly the opposite of what many decades of interactions with Christians and atheists has shown me.
Christians by and large seem to be motivated by a sort of Kohlbergs-first-stage fear of retribution from a mean invisible man their parents told them about.
The atheists I've known, largely without exception, have been more community-minded, more altruistic, and more open to cooperation.
Granted, it's just my experience, and maybe I've just known really shallow Christians or exemplary atheists, but I sort of doubt it. And in any case my experience invalidates your claim.
You realise that there's a finite amount of goods and hence money around the world right? And since you've accepted yourself that money = goods, when profit is created on both sides of the transaction in money terms this is the same as you having a net "creation" of goods. If this continues for every transaction then you end up magically making more goods than exist.
There is not a finite amount of value that can be created from the raw materials on the earth. I can turn silicon, which is the second most abundant element on earth, into computer chips that cost thousands of dollars per gram.
Production processes do indeed "magically" make "more" goods than previously existed. That's the whole point. That's why not everyone is just selling rocks and dirt.
Final point, your analogy is so ridiculously stupid it isn't even funny - though I did chuckle.
Make up your mind: funny or not? People need to know how to mod me.
You're claiming that because I paid for something, that hypothetically would cost me more from another source, I've profited? That's like saying if buy Item A from Shop 1 for $20, and it's available at Shop 2 for $30 I've profited $10.
No it's not. You can't take someone's analogy, change the parameters and conclusions around, and then batter it about. We in the sham rhetoric business call that a straw man argument.
No, you haven't "profited". You haven't "made" any money. You've "spent" slightly less than you would have if you bought it elsewhere, but you're still paying more than the worth of the product since the person you're buying it from is making his own profit which can only be created by charging you more.
By all means feel free to bake your own bread, sew your own clothes, and wire up your own internet, as it seems you don't profit from the efficiencies of using the infrastructure and processes others have already established for these things. I sure ain't stopping you. Enjoy your zero-sum life.
My cellphone subscription is cheaper than my landline subscription, but I do pay a lot more for international calls, unfortunately. More expensive subscriptions may make international calls closer to the price of land lines.
That's not necessarily the case, though. I use the cheapest of the cheap prepaid mobile services here, and international calls are so cheap (US$1 = RM3.2) I often make them on the mobile phone instead of using a free VoIP service at home.
Tunneling UDP (e.g. streaming video) in OpenSSH doesn't work right. If the outside tunnel drops a packet, everything backs up, which shouldn't happen. Use OpenVPN.
Apparently, mutually agreeing to rules and then fraudulently breaking them and then repeatedly lying about it is not always wrong to you. It's always wrong to me.
That's what it comes down to for me as well. I don't have a strong position on 14-year-olds doing gymnastics.
But what China is doing here - and I don't doubt it for a moment - is behaving dishonorably, pure and simple.
It's like they planted some clear plastic flippers in their swimmer's lane so he could put them on and out-pace his competition. Or giving their boxer a set of brass knuckles. It's cheating and it's pathetic. It says that they knew they were going to lose a fair competition, so they had to win by deception.
I use the Spamhaus PBL which is mostly populated by the ISPs responsible for the listed address ranges. If there are false positives, they have been rare enough not to come to my attention, as I said before.
Unfortunately we live in an age where some sort of accountability is necessary before I'll accept your email. A dynamic IP address means no accountability, and it means your email doesn't get through.
As far as I can tell, the only people still self-delivering email from dynamic IP addresses are hobbyists who collect knives and home-school their kids, and whom neither I nor any of my clients have ever wanted to correspond with. I have never once received a report of email delivery problems that traced back to dynamic-IP blacklisting.
Don't get me wrong - when I first got DSL in 1999 I was thrilled about running my own mail server in the hall closet and did so for years. But times changed and I changed with them.
Greylisting is a one-time ordeal. If you're receiving email from someone you've _never_ had email correspondance with, it's going to happen. Three times deferred, then added to internal whitelist. Takes no more than half an hour.
The reason I eventually gave up on greylisting is because it turns out that most of the time when I want to receive email from someone I've never communicated with before, I particularly want it promptly.
The most obvious case is signing up on new web sites that require confirmation of a received email before activation. When I actually go to the trouble of signing up for a web site, it's because I want to do something right then, not in half an hour. It was when I was in a foreign country trying to buy a train ticket online with just an hour to spare that I finally abandoned the whole thing.
I rest my case. If they can make you pay the bill, they can trace your online activities.
In many cases there's no need to pay in order to get online.
Also, other paid examples come to mind. Airzed is a paid service but they accept cash at convenience stores, and there's no effective requirement for identifying myself when I sign up.
And here's a company that sells wifi access via SMS. If they don't know at the time that I send the SMS that I plan to do something "bad" later, then they will not be able to trace my location.
All these are in a country which is somewhat paranoid about political activity and aggressively clamps down on press freedom. It's not as bad as China, but among the worst.
As to using a cellphone, locating you while you are connected (by triangulation) is trivial for most operators, with modern equipment.
But in this case they can only locate where I roughly was when I received the one confirmation message. If indeed I received one at all - if they didn't pass a token through one then there's no reason to use a valid phone number either.
You connect through a phone line, right? That phone line is registered to you, right?
This is one of those countries where phone lines are often registered to the property and pass from person to person over the years. I have lived in places where nobody had any idea who the person named on the phone bill was.
Of course they can still work out the location, though they never seem to be able to find the place when I request repairs.
But okay, landlines can eventually be traced. Take wireless instead. Have a look at the registration form for the free metro wifi service in Kuala Lumpur. They ask for name, email, and mobile phone. Anyone can pick up a SIM card for cash over the counter, or could even use one from a different country. We all know how easy it is to get a throwaway email account. Tracing me in this case would require a lot of advanced equipment and know-how. I could be in a car, I could be in an apartment building 5km away using a directional antenna.
You think the government and the criminal police are unable to contact another country's agency to verify your passport number, if they really want to?
No, I just don't see how that's relevant.
1. I buy a scratch card.
2. I dial up and it asks me to create a new account, and asks me for my passport number.
3. I enter a random number and click "Ok" and it creates my account.
What does international police cooperation have to do with this scenario? Does my country have a database that predicts which random numbers I'm likely to invent?
Nevertheless I wish they would do something to indicate the point values. I memorized them years ago but still find it distracting that they're not shown in Wordscraper. And it will be downright confusing to people who are not so experienced at Scrabble.
There are plenty of ways they could do this. e.g., little dots around the outside of the circle, or colors that varied from white for 1 point to intense for the 10-point letters.
Able to conduct business with far less arbitrary restriction and bureaucracy.
I don't buy that for a minute.
I've done lots of business in both China and the US. The US is a piece of cake by comparison. In China you have to get permission from half a dozen bureaucracies just to scratch your ass. You may not be aware of it if your company has hired a local fixer who makes these problems disappear with well-placed payments, but corruption is not the same as efficiency.
Slashdot Mirror
You heard wrong. Finland is a cold and dismal place, and too many Finns are cold and dismal people.
Plus, the booze costs too much.
If you want to learn Spanish, learn it in Central or South America.
Spaniards speak incredibly quickly, have dramatic regional accents, and are impatient with learners.
In Latin America, on the other hand, they speak more slowly and clearly, there's - surprisingly - less variation (among mainstream urban Spanish dialects) continentwide than just on the Iberian Peninsula, and random strangers are happy to sit around all afternoon helping you master the language. And let's face it, only a tiny fraction of these 400m Spanish speakers are speaking the Spain varieties.
Albert Heijn just behind the Queen's palace in Amsterdam is open all day Sunday. As is the one in Leidsestraat.
This is clearly not the case either, as there are many shops in Amsterdam open until 3am. They had to trade away morning hours in order to stay open at night. And of course the shops in petrol stations, the airport, train stations, etc., are open whenever they want to be.
You are misusing the word "standard". Insofar as there is a standard, it's English. "The local language" is a runtime variable; a standard has to be a constant.
It's also the teaching medium in more and more graduate and even undergraduate programmes. And there's no shortage of smaller businesses and NGOs in Amsterdam where English is the main spoken language.
Even I know that he didn't leave off the 'a' in 'an'.
A couple suggestions:
1. Make sure that you are submitting an American-style résumé and not an Australian-looking CV.
2. Get someone to translate your academic qualifications into American-speak.
At the end of the day, though, it sounds like you are offering commodity skills (MS-whatever certification) which puts you at a disadvantage. You are foreign, so they'll have to go through the time and trouble of getting you a visa. But you're Australian, which means they'll have to pay you a lot. That's not the most appealing prospect, when they can get 3 Indian guys with the same commodity skillset for the same price. Come up with some special skills (maybe you already have them but haven't mentioned them in the post I'm replying to) and you'll have a much easier time convincing employers that you're worth hiring.
Nothing, and especially not Japanese, is "up there with English" in terms of "international business relevance".
What sort of bizarro-world do you live in? Atheism is at its most rampant in the big cities and academic communities, where everyone is living side by side. There's a corresponding correlation between gated communities and church attendance (or at least professed intention toward church attendance).
As to the medieval fortresses, I fail to grasp what sort of point you might be trying to make. Church entrances were not guarded because the people inside were so nice that nobody would want to attack them? And do we live in medieval times? Do I therefore get to invoke the crusades and inquisitions and papal loot-hoarding and all the other good stuff that goes along with the period?
This is more or less exactly the opposite of what many decades of interactions with Christians and atheists has shown me.
Christians by and large seem to be motivated by a sort of Kohlbergs-first-stage fear of retribution from a mean invisible man their parents told them about.
The atheists I've known, largely without exception, have been more community-minded, more altruistic, and more open to cooperation.
Granted, it's just my experience, and maybe I've just known really shallow Christians or exemplary atheists, but I sort of doubt it. And in any case my experience invalidates your claim.
You asked if they were married??
Your apology is graciously accepted.
There is not a finite amount of value that can be created from the raw materials on the earth. I can turn silicon, which is the second most abundant element on earth, into computer chips that cost thousands of dollars per gram.
Production processes do indeed "magically" make "more" goods than previously existed. That's the whole point. That's why not everyone is just selling rocks and dirt.
Make up your mind: funny or not? People need to know how to mod me.
No it's not. You can't take someone's analogy, change the parameters and conclusions around, and then batter it about. We in the sham rhetoric business call that a straw man argument.
By all means feel free to bake your own bread, sew your own clothes, and wire up your own internet, as it seems you don't profit from the efficiencies of using the infrastructure and processes others have already established for these things. I sure ain't stopping you. Enjoy your zero-sum life.
That's not necessarily the case, though. I use the cheapest of the cheap prepaid mobile services here, and international calls are so cheap (US$1 = RM3.2) I often make them on the mobile phone instead of using a free VoIP service at home.
Yes, because it's the case in a typical voluntary transaction. It's been explained above ad nauseum.
Loaf of bread costs bakery $1 to produce.
It sells for $1.50.
It would cost me $2 to make my own loaf of bread.
Both parties profit by $0.50.
Indeed.
Read the article. When governments tried to shut him down, the phone-toting masses defended him.
Tunneling UDP (e.g. streaming video) in OpenSSH doesn't work right. If the outside tunnel drops a packet, everything backs up, which shouldn't happen. Use OpenVPN.
That's what it comes down to for me as well. I don't have a strong position on 14-year-olds doing gymnastics.
But what China is doing here - and I don't doubt it for a moment - is behaving dishonorably, pure and simple.
It's like they planted some clear plastic flippers in their swimmer's lane so he could put them on and out-pace his competition. Or giving their boxer a set of brass knuckles. It's cheating and it's pathetic. It says that they knew they were going to lose a fair competition, so they had to win by deception.
I use the Spamhaus PBL which is mostly populated by the ISPs responsible for the listed address ranges. If there are false positives, they have been rare enough not to come to my attention, as I said before.
Have you seen their coal-fired spam engines? Those things produced almost one ton of carbon for each 500 messages delivered.
Unfortunately we live in an age where some sort of accountability is necessary before I'll accept your email. A dynamic IP address means no accountability, and it means your email doesn't get through.
As far as I can tell, the only people still self-delivering email from dynamic IP addresses are hobbyists who collect knives and home-school their kids, and whom neither I nor any of my clients have ever wanted to correspond with. I have never once received a report of email delivery problems that traced back to dynamic-IP blacklisting.
Don't get me wrong - when I first got DSL in 1999 I was thrilled about running my own mail server in the hall closet and did so for years. But times changed and I changed with them.
The reason I eventually gave up on greylisting is because it turns out that most of the time when I want to receive email from someone I've never communicated with before, I particularly want it promptly.
The most obvious case is signing up on new web sites that require confirmation of a received email before activation. When I actually go to the trouble of signing up for a web site, it's because I want to do something right then, not in half an hour. It was when I was in a foreign country trying to buy a train ticket online with just an hour to spare that I finally abandoned the whole thing.
In many cases there's no need to pay in order to get online.
Also, other paid examples come to mind. Airzed is a paid service but they accept cash at convenience stores, and there's no effective requirement for identifying myself when I sign up.
And here's a company that sells wifi access via SMS. If they don't know at the time that I send the SMS that I plan to do something "bad" later, then they will not be able to trace my location.
All these are in a country which is somewhat paranoid about political activity and aggressively clamps down on press freedom. It's not as bad as China, but among the worst.
But in this case they can only locate where I roughly was when I received the one confirmation message. If indeed I received one at all - if they didn't pass a token through one then there's no reason to use a valid phone number either.
This is one of those countries where phone lines are often registered to the property and pass from person to person over the years. I have lived in places where nobody had any idea who the person named on the phone bill was.
Of course they can still work out the location, though they never seem to be able to find the place when I request repairs.
But okay, landlines can eventually be traced. Take wireless instead. Have a look at the registration form for the free metro wifi service in Kuala Lumpur. They ask for name, email, and mobile phone. Anyone can pick up a SIM card for cash over the counter, or could even use one from a different country. We all know how easy it is to get a throwaway email account. Tracing me in this case would require a lot of advanced equipment and know-how. I could be in a car, I could be in an apartment building 5km away using a directional antenna.
No, I just don't see how that's relevant.
1. I buy a scratch card.
2. I dial up and it asks me to create a new account, and asks me for my passport number.
3. I enter a random number and click "Ok" and it creates my account.
What does international police cooperation have to do with this scenario? Does my country have a database that predicts which random numbers I'm likely to invent?
Nevertheless I wish they would do something to indicate the point values. I memorized them years ago but still find it distracting that they're not shown in Wordscraper. And it will be downright confusing to people who are not so experienced at Scrabble.
There are plenty of ways they could do this. e.g., little dots around the outside of the circle, or colors that varied from white for 1 point to intense for the 10-point letters.
I don't buy that for a minute.
I've done lots of business in both China and the US. The US is a piece of cake by comparison. In China you have to get permission from half a dozen bureaucracies just to scratch your ass. You may not be aware of it if your company has hired a local fixer who makes these problems disappear with well-placed payments, but corruption is not the same as efficiency.