This company makes Apple, Google, MS et al look silly.
Hmm, after a bit of googling, I have the impression that the Roman Catholic Church isn't all that wealthy. According to the stats in this it's comparable in wealth / turnover to a major sports team. (By the way, major sports teams are another example of entities that everyone assumes to be a lot bigger and more powerful than they really are.)
Maybe a lot of money could be made in some sort of execution sale, by selling off art work, churches and that lovely piece of real estate in the center of Rome, but then there's the question who is the owner of these things? It's not the pope or the Vatican. It's me, and a billion other people. No one has the authority to just close up shop and sell everything off. The Sistine Chapel is free for anyone to view. They're not charging admission, nor are cathedrals. All it will cost you is your time; the line can be very long.
To summarise: I believe you are underestimating the value of knowing two (or more) languages, not only for actual real-world use, but also as a generic mental tool.
I know, or at least I've learned four languages, but the only one I use every day is English, despite not even living in an English speaking country. I know the value of learning languages you'll never use again: very very small.
Living in Holland, I can absolutely confirm that students here do have time for that yes. The way you learn languages here is devoid of rote memorization and not the time sink you seem to think it is.
This is not something I 'think', it's something I know. Years of my own time gushed down that sink.
If you live in the low countries you DO get to use those languages every day.
No you don't. All you need is English and sometimes Dutch.
The problem with Chinese is just it's such an awful language, with a bizarre and retarded method of writing it down which just makes it incredibly hard to learn.
Pot. Kettle. Black. This is off topic, but this kind of remarks makes it easy to spot the Dutch on the internet.
I suspect the Chinese will end up learning English, not English speakers learning Chinese.
The Chinese are just as proud and chauvinistic about their language and culture as Americans are, possibly more so. Anyway, whether English or Chinese will be dominant in the future will not be determined by what foreign languages Americans or Chinese are learning. Much more interesting is the question what language will be used in a business meeting between a companies from India and Russia, or China and Indonesia. I'm betting it will be a form of English.
Knowing more languages broadens ones horizon and enables one to read foreign literature without translation losses.
This is only true if you're more fluent in said foreign language than the translator, which probably isn't the case. And it only works for one language. Six years of studying French for several hours a week doesn't help you read Dostoyevsky or Kafka without translation losses.
I hated French lessons with a passion, but 12 years later I was in Belgium at the customer site and noone there could speak any of the three languages I am fluent in. My broken French, on the other hand, was sufficiently understandable for them.
Do you feel 4 to 6 years of taking French classes were a good investment of your time because of this one incident 12 years later? I certainly don't. Give me back those wasted years.
Reminds me of a Dutch exchange student in middle school. The usual moron was making fun of his accent until a couple of us pointed out that said exchange student was getting an A in English while he was getting a C, even though English was his second language (of about 4).
You have to admit, it isn't a particularly flattering accent...
Three of those 4 languages are of very little use unless you don't mind being confined to western Europe. While Dutch kids spend those 12+ hours a week learning geographically confined languages like Dutch, French and German, native English speaking kids have 12+ extra hours a week to learn more useful things, and still be able to communicate more effectively and with more people than someone who is fluent in Dutch and speaks some French, German and English. American kids can take classes like art, drama, debating, literature etc. and play in the school band. Do you think kids who are forced to study three foreign languages have time for this? Worse still, try to find an adult who still knows those foreign languages (other than the same basic English half the world speaks) a few years after their graduation.
Learning a language other than English is worse than useless if you don't end up using it every day. The skill just fades away. You could have spent that time learning skills you might actually use in your life.
As for TFA: start learning Chinese if you have concrete plans to spend a lot of time in China. Unless you use it every day, you won't get fluent in it any way, and you'll forget all you've learned, so there is no point in preemptively learning it.
All I ask for is an income in line with everyone else who spent 6 to 10 years in college to get their job. You know: doctors, lawyers, MBA's, pretty much everyone with a degree not working as a techie or at a university. My hourly rate is a bit more than twice that of a qualified and experienced plumber. I don't think think that's outrageous. A doctor wouldn't blow his nose for that rate.
I don't need a Ferrari every single time I finish a project (though a doctor or lawyer could afford one...). One every other project would be good enough for me.
Had you written your comment in your own obscure euro dialect, no one would have read it.
I speak three languages, though not all equally well. One is for talking to my kids, another for ordering a meal or shouting at jerks in traffic. For anything serious and of more than fleeting interest, the only option is English.
When was the last time something worth reading was written or said in a language other than English? We're not just talking decades here, but generations, possibly centuries.
In 1971, Paul Ehrlich predicted a maximum sustainable world population of 1.2 billion people. By 1994 Ehrlich raised his estimate to 2 billion saying, "the present population of 5.5 billion [..] has clearly exceeded the capacity of Earth to sustain it." Two decades later we're closing in on 7 billion souls the overwhelming majority of which are not expected to starve to death or otherwise suffer a Malthusian catastrophe.
Overpopulation alarmism has become trite and hackneyed.
I'm not familiar with Paul Ehrlich's calculations, but 1.2 billion may well have been a realistic estimate of the maximum sustainable level with 1971 technology. I suspect that with today's technology and slightly warmer climate, the number may be higher (that's right, I'm that guy who does believe in global warming, but believes it is mostly a good thing).
A population of 7 billion isn't proof that 7 billion is a sustainable number unless you assume we've already reached an equilibrium. It is perfectly possible to own more cars than you can afford in the long run, and in certain places in Australia you can find enormous piles of dead rabbits and mice, where the population spiked in one season beyond a level that could be sustained the next season.
There is a certain amount of renewable resources we use, such as food and a certain percentage of our energy. There are other resources we use that are used up on a human time scale, but only renewed on a geological time scale, such as the products of mining, specifically metals and fossil fuels. Our standard of living is only sustainable when we are using these materials up at the same rate they are replenished.
The older generations have been uttering this complaint for at least the last 25 centuries, but presumably ever since writing was invented.
The older you get, and the closer to the age of irrelevance, the more people seem to forget how little they themselves knew when they were 16.
Every generation is going to be poorly adapted to the time when their elders were kids. They'll be well adapted to the time when we are old and scared of change.
I could not disagree more strongly. Office 2007 was the first office suite that I didn't hate. Word et al. no longer have a clutter of shortcut bars that take up a quarter of your effective screen, no longer is there a series of pop up dialogs for every simple action, I think it's great. The features you actually use are now one or two clicks away. The UI even works on a laptop, with a much smaller screen. Just give it a try, once you get used to it, and unlearn the office 95 ways, it's quite good.
I have seen computers before by the way; I started programming them when I was about 10 yrs old, in the mid 80's.
This is VERY bad news to an already weakened dollar.
The dollar has been overvalued for decades, and look at the result: manufacturing jobs have moved overseas, and a vastly negative trade balance. With an over valued currency, It's simply cheaper to import something than to produce it locally.
A high exchange rate doesn't make a currency strong anyway, long term stability and low inflation are more important.
1: People in general are rational. People with a business degree make way more money than engineers, live in nicer houses, have bigger cars, and more attractive sexual partners. This is true here as well as in China, Russia or India. Perhaps there is more opportunity to be a lawyer or a business man in the US than there is in China.
2: citation needed.
3: Espionage, all countries that are capable of it do it. Asians do it, Europeans do it (though only Russia and France still seem to have the means there) and especially the Americans. Not because Americans are inherently more dishonest, they simply have the means to spy in ways no other country is currently capable of.
4: This may be true, but an American college graduate will have made up that difference in education investment in just a few years, due to the considerably higher wages.
There is no decline, only a relative decline, which can be entirely explained by the fact that some previously extremely poor countries with huge populations opened up their economies somewhat and have been getting less poor as a result. China is well on its way to getting an average standard of living comparable to Mexico. You just need to keep in mind that their population is four times that of the USA, and so is that of India (which is still shockingly poor in per capita terms).
The USA has less than 5% of the world's population. China and India together have 35%. It makes sense to me that over time, the former will slowly move in the direction of 5% of the global economy and the latter in the direction of 35%. Probably not in our lifetime though. This is the golden age. Western, and especially American civilization are at their peak. Try to enjoy it more.
Google already censors auto complete to avoid offending people. Try typing queries like 'why are nig' or 'how do we get rid of'. You know what would pop up if they didn't have certain filters in their algorithm.
I just tried searching for Silvio Berlusconi on google.it, assuming he is the unnamed plaintiff. It looks like they've already deployed a fix.
And as for the internet thing, what you really mean is: Microsoft didn't get into the World Wide Web until 1995. This isn't terribly surprising, since the WWW hadn't been around yet when windows 3.1 was released. At the time, the WWW was one of several possible futures. The one MS first wanted to bet on was the 'Microsoft Network'. Of course, that's not the path history ended up taking, so they had to adapt.
who has supported the worst sort of despots throughout Africa
I agree with the other parts of your statement, but this one is a little silly. The major powers (US, USSR, UK and France) have been the ones supporting ruthless dictators for political reasons, while Khadaffi had more of a habit of supporting insurgents, such as the PLO and the ANC, one of the reasons why the other ruthless dictators don't like him much, and fleeing the country isn't a serious option for him.
China has a huge number of people, but they don't really speak the same language, the words are written more or less the same way, but good luck using the same dialect all over China.
This statement is both true and misleading. True, they don't all speak the same language, but about a billion of them do, and the rest tend to speak Mandarin as a second language.
Then again, referring to the number of sites in a certain language as a measure of dominance doesn't seem terrible relevant to me. People will only use sites in languages they understand, the rest of the internet might as well not exist.
Common sense says taking a picture from a publically accessable location is fair game. After that the rest of your argument falls apart.
Common sense says my home is clearly visible from the street, yet if I catch you taking pictures of it, you have some fast explaining to do before something violent happens.
An integral requires that you know a formula that describes the curve. I think (can only see the abstract) this paper deals with measurement curves from lab tests. Other techniques apply there. I don't know if dr. Tai's technique was an important new development, but I do know that this slashdot item is bogus.
If one or more of these can be embedded into multiple browsers (IE, Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera would be the obvious set and cover almost the entire browser market), Java would face some serious competition - at least at the browser end. Java applications and servlets would depend on whether the Java ABI was covered by the patents. If the ABI (in and of itself) is not IP-protected, then it would be possible to write virtual machines that run entirely differently than "native Java" VMs but which support Java objects. Bring GCJ up to Java 7 and have a backend to GCC that supports a portable virtual machine. You then have something that will handle existing Java bytecode and will allow a gradual weaking off of Java to any language GCC supports.
(Since IBM -is- permitted to contribute to GCC, this is another direction IBM might be looking into. Especially if they can get a Java bytecode frontend working for GCC. Java applications natively compiled to IBM's processors would be very appealing, especially if it didn't break any standards in the process.)
For the first part, Java doesn't have a whole lot to do with browsers these days. I don't think it would cause major problems if applets disappeared completely. However, seeing as cobol, pl/1, rpg etc are still widely used in the business world, I don't think it is realistic to dream about Java being replaced in our lifetime. Sure, it will not be #1 for ever, but corporations around the world will keep depending on it for decades to come.
I don't think Java losing its #1 spot is much of an issue from Oracle's point of view. Even if a new policy causes half the Java customers switch to something else, they could probably still count on a massive increase in revenue if that means that the other half starts paying for it.
Slashdot Mirror
This company makes Apple, Google, MS et al look silly.
Hmm, after a bit of googling, I have the impression that the Roman Catholic Church isn't all that wealthy. According to the stats in this it's comparable in wealth / turnover to a major sports team. (By the way, major sports teams are another example of entities that everyone assumes to be a lot bigger and more powerful than they really are.)
Maybe a lot of money could be made in some sort of execution sale, by selling off art work, churches and that lovely piece of real estate in the center of Rome, but then there's the question who is the owner of these things? It's not the pope or the Vatican. It's me, and a billion other people. No one has the authority to just close up shop and sell everything off. The Sistine Chapel is free for anyone to view. They're not charging admission, nor are cathedrals. All it will cost you is your time; the line can be very long.
To summarise: I believe you are underestimating the value of knowing two (or more) languages, not only for actual real-world use, but also as a generic mental tool.
I know, or at least I've learned four languages, but the only one I use every day is English, despite not even living in an English speaking country. I know the value of learning languages you'll never use again: very very small.
Living in Holland, I can absolutely confirm that students here do have time for that yes. The way you learn languages here is devoid of rote memorization and not the time sink you seem to think it is.
This is not something I 'think', it's something I know. Years of my own time gushed down that sink.
If you live in the low countries you DO get to use those languages every day.
No you don't. All you need is English and sometimes Dutch.
The problem with Chinese is just it's such an awful language, with a bizarre and retarded method of writing it down which just makes it incredibly hard to learn.
Pot. Kettle. Black. This is off topic, but this kind of remarks makes it easy to spot the Dutch on the internet.
I suspect the Chinese will end up learning English, not English speakers learning Chinese.
The Chinese are just as proud and chauvinistic about their language and culture as Americans are, possibly more so. Anyway, whether English or Chinese will be dominant in the future will not be determined by what foreign languages Americans or Chinese are learning. Much more interesting is the question what language will be used in a business meeting between a companies from India and Russia, or China and Indonesia. I'm betting it will be a form of English.
Knowing more languages broadens ones horizon and enables one to read foreign literature without translation losses.
This is only true if you're more fluent in said foreign language than the translator, which probably isn't the case. And it only works for one language. Six years of studying French for several hours a week doesn't help you read Dostoyevsky or Kafka without translation losses.
I hated French lessons with a passion, but 12 years later I was in Belgium at the customer site and noone there could speak any of the three languages I am fluent in. My broken French, on the other hand, was sufficiently understandable for them.
Do you feel 4 to 6 years of taking French classes were a good investment of your time because of this one incident 12 years later? I certainly don't. Give me back those wasted years.
Reminds me of a Dutch exchange student in middle school. The usual moron was making fun of his accent until a couple of us pointed out that said exchange student was getting an A in English while he was getting a C, even though English was his second language (of about 4).
You have to admit, it isn't a particularly flattering accent...
Three of those 4 languages are of very little use unless you don't mind being confined to western Europe. While Dutch kids spend those 12+ hours a week learning geographically confined languages like Dutch, French and German, native English speaking kids have 12+ extra hours a week to learn more useful things, and still be able to communicate more effectively and with more people than someone who is fluent in Dutch and speaks some French, German and English. American kids can take classes like art, drama, debating, literature etc. and play in the school band. Do you think kids who are forced to study three foreign languages have time for this? Worse still, try to find an adult who still knows those foreign languages (other than the same basic English half the world speaks) a few years after their graduation.
Learning a language other than English is worse than useless if you don't end up using it every day. The skill just fades away. You could have spent that time learning skills you might actually use in your life.
As for TFA: start learning Chinese if you have concrete plans to spend a lot of time in China. Unless you use it every day, you won't get fluent in it any way, and you'll forget all you've learned, so there is no point in preemptively learning it.
All I ask for is an income in line with everyone else who spent 6 to 10 years in college to get their job. You know: doctors, lawyers, MBA's, pretty much everyone with a degree not working as a techie or at a university. My hourly rate is a bit more than twice that of a qualified and experienced plumber. I don't think think that's outrageous. A doctor wouldn't blow his nose for that rate.
I don't need a Ferrari every single time I finish a project (though a doctor or lawyer could afford one...). One every other project would be good enough for me.
Had you written your comment in your own obscure euro dialect, no one would have read it.
I speak three languages, though not all equally well. One is for talking to my kids, another for ordering a meal or shouting at jerks in traffic. For anything serious and of more than fleeting interest, the only option is English.
When was the last time something worth reading was written or said in a language other than English? We're not just talking decades here, but generations, possibly centuries.
In 1971, Paul Ehrlich predicted a maximum sustainable world population of 1.2 billion people. By 1994 Ehrlich raised his estimate to 2 billion saying, "the present population of 5.5 billion [..] has clearly exceeded the capacity of Earth to sustain it." Two decades later we're closing in on 7 billion souls the overwhelming majority of which are not expected to starve to death or otherwise suffer a Malthusian catastrophe.
Overpopulation alarmism has become trite and hackneyed.
I'm not familiar with Paul Ehrlich's calculations, but 1.2 billion may well have been a realistic estimate of the maximum sustainable level with 1971 technology. I suspect that with today's technology and slightly warmer climate, the number may be higher (that's right, I'm that guy who does believe in global warming, but believes it is mostly a good thing).
A population of 7 billion isn't proof that 7 billion is a sustainable number unless you assume we've already reached an equilibrium. It is perfectly possible to own more cars than you can afford in the long run, and in certain places in Australia you can find enormous piles of dead rabbits and mice, where the population spiked in one season beyond a level that could be sustained the next season.
There is a certain amount of renewable resources we use, such as food and a certain percentage of our energy. There are other resources we use that are used up on a human time scale, but only renewed on a geological time scale, such as the products of mining, specifically metals and fossil fuels. Our standard of living is only sustainable when we are using these materials up at the same rate they are replenished.
Students barely read anymore;
The older generations have been uttering this complaint for at least the last 25 centuries, but presumably ever since writing was invented.
The older you get, and the closer to the age of irrelevance, the more people seem to forget how little they themselves knew when they were 16.
Every generation is going to be poorly adapted to the time when their elders were kids. They'll be well adapted to the time when we are old and scared of change.
I could not disagree more strongly. Office 2007 was the first office suite that I didn't hate. Word et al. no longer have a clutter of shortcut bars that take up a quarter of your effective screen, no longer is there a series of pop up dialogs for every simple action, I think it's great. The features you actually use are now one or two clicks away. The UI even works on a laptop, with a much smaller screen. Just give it a try, once you get used to it, and unlearn the office 95 ways, it's quite good.
I have seen computers before by the way; I started programming them when I was about 10 yrs old, in the mid 80's.
This is VERY bad news to an already weakened dollar.
The dollar has been overvalued for decades, and look at the result: manufacturing jobs have moved overseas, and a vastly negative trade balance. With an over valued currency, It's simply cheaper to import something than to produce it locally.
A high exchange rate doesn't make a currency strong anyway, long term stability and low inflation are more important.
1: People in general are rational. People with a business degree make way more money than engineers, live in nicer houses, have bigger cars, and more attractive sexual partners. This is true here as well as in China, Russia or India. Perhaps there is more opportunity to be a lawyer or a business man in the US than there is in China.
2: citation needed.
3: Espionage, all countries that are capable of it do it. Asians do it, Europeans do it (though only Russia and France still seem to have the means there) and especially the Americans. Not because Americans are inherently more dishonest, they simply have the means to spy in ways no other country is currently capable of.
4: This may be true, but an American college graduate will have made up that difference in education investment in just a few years, due to the considerably higher wages.
There is no decline, only a relative decline, which can be entirely explained by the fact that some previously extremely poor countries with huge populations opened up their economies somewhat and have been getting less poor as a result. China is well on its way to getting an average standard of living comparable to Mexico. You just need to keep in mind that their population is four times that of the USA, and so is that of India (which is still shockingly poor in per capita terms).
The USA has less than 5% of the world's population. China and India together have 35%. It makes sense to me that over time, the former will slowly move in the direction of 5% of the global economy and the latter in the direction of 35%. Probably not in our lifetime though. This is the golden age. Western, and especially American civilization are at their peak. Try to enjoy it more.
Google already censors auto complete to avoid offending people. Try typing queries like 'why are nig' or 'how do we get rid of'. You know what would pop up if they didn't have certain filters in their algorithm.
I just tried searching for Silvio Berlusconi on google.it, assuming he is the unnamed plaintiff. It looks like they've already deployed a fix.
It's not like the tablet fad caught Microsoft completely by surprise:
Bill Gates unveils Microsoft's new Tablet PC in 2002
And as for the internet thing, what you really mean is: Microsoft didn't get into the World Wide Web until 1995. This isn't terribly surprising, since the WWW hadn't been around yet when windows 3.1 was released. At the time, the WWW was one of several possible futures. The one MS first wanted to bet on was the 'Microsoft Network'. Of course, that's not the path history ended up taking, so they had to adapt.
who has supported the worst sort of despots throughout Africa
I agree with the other parts of your statement, but this one is a little silly. The major powers (US, USSR, UK and France) have been the ones supporting ruthless dictators for political reasons, while Khadaffi had more of a habit of supporting insurgents, such as the PLO and the ANC, one of the reasons why the other ruthless dictators don't like him much, and fleeing the country isn't a serious option for him.
To be fair, the movie had very realistic space aliens and flying saucers
China has a huge number of people, but they don't really speak the same language, the words are written more or less the same way, but good luck using the same dialect all over China.
This statement is both true and misleading. True, they don't all speak the same language, but about a billion of them do, and the rest tend to speak Mandarin as a second language.
Then again, referring to the number of sites in a certain language as a measure of dominance doesn't seem terrible relevant to me. People will only use sites in languages they understand, the rest of the internet might as well not exist.
Common sense says taking a picture from a publically accessable location is fair game. After that the rest of your argument falls apart.
Common sense says my home is clearly visible from the street, yet if I catch you taking pictures of it, you have some fast explaining to do before something violent happens.
An integral requires that you know a formula that describes the curve. I think (can only see the abstract) this paper deals with measurement curves from lab tests. Other techniques apply there. I don't know if dr. Tai's technique was an important new development, but I do know that this slashdot item is bogus.
Dutch commenters on Engadget have equated the Dutch paper doing the quoting with the UK's The Sun or The National Enquirer in the US.
Then where are the titties???
It would be more accurate to compare the telegraaf to Fox News: one ultra conservative 800 lb gorilla in a jungle of moderate or liberal silk monkeys.
If one or more of these can be embedded into multiple browsers (IE, Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera would be the obvious set and cover almost the entire browser market), Java would face some serious competition - at least at the browser end. Java applications and servlets would depend on whether the Java ABI was covered by the patents. If the ABI (in and of itself) is not IP-protected, then it would be possible to write virtual machines that run entirely differently than "native Java" VMs but which support Java objects. Bring GCJ up to Java 7 and have a backend to GCC that supports a portable virtual machine. You then have something that will handle existing Java bytecode and will allow a gradual weaking off of Java to any language GCC supports.
(Since IBM -is- permitted to contribute to GCC, this is another direction IBM might be looking into. Especially if they can get a Java bytecode frontend working for GCC. Java applications natively compiled to IBM's processors would be very appealing, especially if it didn't break any standards in the process.)
For the first part, Java doesn't have a whole lot to do with browsers these days. I don't think it would cause major problems if applets disappeared completely. However, seeing as cobol, pl/1, rpg etc are still widely used in the business world, I don't think it is realistic to dream about Java being replaced in our lifetime. Sure, it will not be #1 for ever, but corporations around the world will keep depending on it for decades to come.
I don't think Java losing its #1 spot is much of an issue from Oracle's point of view. Even if a new policy causes half the Java customers switch to something else, they could probably still count on a massive increase in revenue if that means that the other half starts paying for it.
Replacing Java with another JVM language doesn't help you one bit if you have a problem with relying on Oracle software
IIRC Jammie Thomas owes 1.5 million for 24 songs.
So how much did SAP copy? The equivalent of 240 songs?
That would be a little harsh. How about 20 songs and a porn video?