If you mean noatime, yes, you just add it to the list of options in/etc/fstab for the relevant file system. If you mean tmpfs, yes again; add the following line: tmpfs/tmp tmpfs defaults 0 0
Remember that you have to wipe the current contents of the/tmp directory before mounting tmpfs. Also, you should do this from the console, not a terminal emulator in X, since (in my experience) when you delete all the contents of tmp before mounting you cause some crashes or odd behaviour, in the worst case data loss depending on how applications use temporary files.
That may well be, but I see no reason to stress the disks unnecessarily. The measures I indicated are pointed out in Eee forums as good practice (so I suppose there is some sort of consensus about that), and do not affect performance (unless you run out of memory).
Also, the first Eee units were released just short of one year ago. Whatever the manufacturer is saying about rewrite cycles, what counts is when the SSDs start breaking down among sold units. I'm just making sure that I am not among the first ones, in case the units used in Eees are substandard (they are, after all, cheap laptops).
In any case, mounting with noatime is common practice, and when I found out about tmpfs (which I had been previously too lazy to look up) I started using it for my desktop machine's/tmp folder as well, as a privacy measure: the/tmp folder may contain temporary copies of sensitive data, and it's a good thing they are wiped when the computer is shut down.
Anyway, do you have a link to data about write cycles in the SSD used in Eees? 'Cause that would be interesting to put on the wikis.
I have an Eee 901 [...] I decided to be bold and installed Hardy with no swap partition.
There are better reasons than boldness for not using swap on an Eee. They use solid-state drives (except some 1000-series models and the 904), which are faster than mechanical devices but can be rewritten fewer times. To make sure your drives last longer, do the following:
Mount partitions with noatime, or relatime if you are using one of the very rare programs that use atime (mutt is the only one I know of);
No swap partition, which would predictably have many more writes than the rest of the disk;
Mount/tmp on tmpfs so that temporary files do not wear the disk.
Sure, without swap and with tmpfs you will have less memory available, but I have an Eee 900A and I bought it as a presentation machine, possibly for some occasional work while travelling, not as a workhorse.
I keep hearing this rationalisation time and again and I cannot fathom how one can be so thoroughly brainwashed to accept such a broken system as the electoral college. I mean, if you had to elect a number of representatives it makes some sense, but when you have to elect one guy, the simplest and fairest college is the single one.
it protects is the rural/suburban voter
Why should these guys be "protected" anyway? It's not called protection, it's an unfair privilege. Why should Montanans have more influence than Californians?
It helps put the state of Iowa, for example, on a little more equal footing with New York with its higher population.
That's called "rigging the vote". Iowa does not deserve to be on equal footing with New York, because there are more people in New York, and every single person across the country (in Iowa, New York, California or Alaska) should be on equal footing.
It also helps keep candidates from completely pandering to high-population urban areas and ignoring the rest of us.
This is the single stupidest argument ever. With the electoral college, you can hardly notice there is an election going on if you live in California, New York, Texas or any non-swing state—this way the candidates ignore much larger populations. And anyway, even in swing states, they will pander to high-density areas (every state has a population concentration somewhere): they have limited resources and they try to spend them the way that will guarantee the most return.
Electing one guy to be president is a simple business, and states shouldn't even be involved in the process. It's a federal post, make it a federal election already!
No, come on, you didn't. Not the first time around anyway. However it would have looked better to get it wrong first and right later than the other way around.
You are not looking for cultural homogeneity, you are looking for compatibility. In my work place (research institution in Germany) there are people from all over the world, only about half are German, and I still have to see any act of the slightest cultural embarrassment.
Of course, a lot of idiots are incompatible (not name-calling: look up the word "idiot") with other cultures, because they have been told their culture or race is superior, their god is the only true one, and that they should obey instead of thinking.
Anyway, history is full of counterexamples to your statement: most fascist states have been culturally very homogeneous (not that there was much choice in the matter). If anything, economical homogeneity is more important: look up the wealth distribution of Scandinavian countries, of the USA and other European countries, and plot against an indicator of social disarray. People generally don't really care if their neighbour has two wives (in fact few would mind if he's beating them or worse), but people will be much more pissed off if they have to live on the brink of existence and the main part of the value they create goes to some rich heir (or some foreign rich country) who does nothing for it, but gets to reap the profits.
CO2 from humans (or animals, plants, decomposition or any natural phenomenon) is not pollution, since it comes from carbon we took in with our food. Therefore, it is in equilibrium with the carbon cycle.
The polluting part of CO2 is the one coming from fossil fuels, that is from outside the ecosystem, that gets dumped into it because it's easier than to put it back where you took the carbon.
I am a fuel-cell researcher and when I RTFA'd I gasped—it seems they want to run this on hydrogen. They must be kidding. Normal H2 fuel cells run at about 80 C and require a hell of good cooling. Portable electronics is the domain of passive direct-methanol FCs.
Good luck selling people a can of explosive pressurised gas they have to hold close to their body, and a machine that has to heat up to 80 Celsius before it starts delivering power.
Anyway, I fail to see the inventive step in the camera. Fuel cells are not new. This type in particular does not seem new. The only new thing is that they stuffed it into a camera. Doesn't that qualify for trivial? Or can I file a patent for FC-powered drills and mixers?
it's disheartening that such a large crowd can watch (in person, and around the world) such a display and have no reason to realize they've been duped.
What's the problem? You want a series of impressive images on your screen. What's the issue with having them in CGI instead of real-life fireworks? The end result is the same. I could get your argument if we were talking about some olympic discipline being duped, with doping, corruption or otherwise, but fireworks are just eye candy. How it gets to your retina is quite irrelevant.
And by the way, doing it in CGI is also more environmentally friendly: compounds used in fireworks are not always of the most benign sort.
Because our current prime minister is a hysterically waggling lapdog of your president, I suppose. He's the only one that, when put beside Bush, makes him look like he's the smart one: check here.
[...] are you implying that being proud of your race is a bad trait?
How would that be a good trait?
Races do not exist. DNA measurements demonstrate that average distance between whites and blacks is much lower than variation among whites or among blacks. If you believe in races you are already qualifying yourself as a fool.
If you are proud to be white|black|yellow, you are an imbecile. Whatever your "race" has achieved in history, you have had no merit whatsoever in it.
I am Italian and I am not proud of it because Leonardo da Vinci (or Marconi, or Mazzini, or Bresci) was an Italian as well, because I have no reason to share his merit for everything he achieved. If you need to say that you are proud of being from a place, a social group, an ethnic group, it probably means you have achieved so little in your life that you more or less consciously try to piggyback on people that you somehow associate with.
no, [the Vatican] don't have billions in capital at their disposal. Their annual budget is less than that of Harvard University.
I call bullshit. The Vatican gets at least 0.5% of Italy's tax revenue through the Otto per mille, a way to publicly finance religion in Italy. Through that channel alone, the Vatican got one billion euros (not dollars) last year. That's one tax, for each year, in one country, and that's even a legitimate channel; illegal channels include tax breaks on commercial activities operated by the church, which are granted by my country's government, headed by a "legitimate businessman", in spite of European rules, and financing of religious private schools, forbidden as explicitly as possible by the Constitution of Italy, article 33, which however politicians use as toilet paper; In case you did not know how schools work in Italy, private schools are basically diploma mills for stupid or lazy sons of rich people who can't handle public school, where your professor can flunk you without fear of making the school lose its money.
Read on about cardinal Marcinkus and the IOR to know more about the greed of the Vatican.
... and, by the way, Harvard university's budget is in the range of billions of dollars [pdf], 2.6 in 2005 to be precise.
Hi, I had my PhD in hydrogen fuel cells and see how misleading the sentence you quoted is.
First off, they talk about current, not power. Current is determined by how many electrons you have, which is proportional to the reaction rate. Of fucking course almost all current goes into the reaction, where else should it go? There can be some parasitic losses, but these are usually negligible. What determines the energetic efficiency is the voltage that you have to apply to split water, and that's going to be higher when you want the reaction to go faster.
Anyway, electrolysis is a fairly efficient process anyway. If you measure first-law-efficiency, it could be possible to attain an efficiency slighly higher than 100% because the reaction has a large positive entropy change (gas molecules are formed), resulting in a reaction that cools the water; of course the second-law efficiency cannot go beyond 100% because that is the physical limit.
Finally, what you care about here is the round-trip efficiency for production, storage and consumption. Electrolysis is easy, but hydrogen storage and fuel cells are not. The MIT people of the article worked on the easiest chunk of it, producing hydrogen. Nothing to be found about hydrogen storage (which is probably the most difficult part: hydrogen is a gas and has a very low volumetric energy density, so you either cool it at 22 K and liquefy it, or you compress it at hundreds of atmospheres, or you adsorb it onto some metals to produce hydrides. Neither solution is simple.
Then, there is the issue of making a good fuel cell. The current order of magnitude for efficiency is around 50%, which is still much better than cars, but is a long way to 100%.
The technology is great, but the article is way hyped; in fact I do not see anything radically new in it. However, there is the word patented, which always makes my bullshit detector go crazy: this could just be a PR stunt for a patent.
Just change the user agent. Supposing it works like in KDE 3, go to Settings, Configure Konqueror, Browser Identification tab, and add a specific rule about how to identify to your college's website.
If it still does not work because your college's website uses some ActiveX or otherwise proprietary-nonstandard crap, rephrase your original comment as "my college's website is broken". Though it's a long time since I saw something not working in Konqueror.
Sorry for the late reply: I think you would have no problem, their economy is going strong and they need people. My former shop is actually looking for programmers, if you know C++/Python you may be interested. They already hired an Indian so they should know the paperwork for extra-EU people. Contact me in private for the details.
In detail, that number includes the social security tax (7.8% of gross income), "main" income tax (28% of net income), the top tax (a progressive tax, 9% on income exceeding 420k NOK, which becomes 12% beyond 682k NOK), fortune tax (1.1%), and the effect of various detractions (minimum detraction 38k NOK, plus detractions for interests paid on mortgages).
The best part: the Norwegian state actually fills out all the paperwork for you! I was amazed that the first time I had to deliver an income report: I could just send an SMS to confirm that their data was right. If you need to correct stuff, you can do it over the Internet.
(almost?) free healthcare,
More precisely: if you go to the hospital, you usually pay a relatively small fee for whatever service you got. If during the same year you pay more than a maximum of about 200 dollars, you get a "free card" and the state pays for you from that point for the rest of the year. If you are in a difficult economic condition (not sure how they define that), you can get the free card from the get-go.
Unfortunately and incomprehensibly, dental care is not covered yet, so remember to brush your teeth...
I'd love to find a country that's figured out how they should be balanced and needs a MSEE grad with PM experience that can look past a late-night semi-inebriated/. post...
Norway. It's also the most peaceful place in the world. I lived there until March, I moved since I got a one-of-a-kind job elsewhere. That's still a place I would recommend, though. The health care system is universal, tax levels are supposed to be the highest in the world, but that's not true: they are high for the rich bastards, I never paid more than 29.5% of my income and my last salary was about $7500 a month before taxes.
And, yes, they are desperate to find people there. With the current oil prices their economy is on the way up, but you cannot improvise engineers in a few months, so chances are you can find a job there fairly easily. They also have movies/TV in original language (mostly English) and most people speak decent English too, so you are not completely lost in a foreign country until you learn Norwegian. Norwegians are also efficient as Germans, but without the rudeness; pretty nice people to work with.
I would suggest Norwegian instead. It is kind of a middle point between Swedish and Danish. I for one have learnt it, and can understand Swedish and (written) Danish.
Esperanto (is relatively easy and will make you understandable to just about all Roman and Germanic language speakers)
As an Esperanto speaker: no, unfortunately it won't. Esperanto's grammar provides words and constructs that are just too different from any other language (though they are very easy if you know the few rules). You were probably thinking of Interlingua, which is unfortunately not easy to learn to use actively.
But no, the reality is that with proper immersion most adults can learn a new foreign language in twelve weeks or less
I have Italian as a mother language, and I speak English, Norwegian, and I am learning German. I can guarantee you that you cannot learn a language in a matter of weeks. No-way-in-hell.
You must be a monolingual English speaker to say this. Whoever told you that, was clueless about how much time goes into learning a language. It takes a long time (many months) to get used to the information flow of other languages (you don't get the same items in the same order), it takes time to get used to a new grammar, and especially it takes forever to learn the vocabulary of the new language. If you think you can speak e.g. German after a 12-week course, try going out on the street and have a non-trivial conversation with a native, or just watch TV programs in German.
As for me, It took me 6 months before I dared speak Norwegian (my first Germanic language, English does not really count) to natives, and it did not work well for a long time. After a couple of years I was confident enough that I could speak casually to natives.
So the gist of it is:
Properly learning a language takes an enormous effort. That's why it pays off on your CV.
If you want to learn a language, you have to move for some time to a place where they speak it.
A course in your country may work as introductory, but until you can verbally fight in a language, you don't really know it.
A last note: if you do not know any foreign language at all, you might consider learning Esperanto first. No, really, there are some experiments where students learned Esperanto first, then French, and ended up scoring better in French than students that had studied French all along. It takes little time and helps you understand concepts of language learning, such as case and number concord, future tense without auxiliary verb, different associations of letters to sounds, coping with the perceived awkwardness of the language's words, that usually are the first stumbling block when learning one's first foreign language (sounds reasonable to me, and yes I know some Esperanto). This, and you get a lot of courses and dictioraries for free.
I am learning German now and can agree with most of what you say, but...
(the grammatical sex of every noun, the many irregular verbs, etc.)
The gender of words is indeed a pain (there is no "pointer" as in my original language, Italian, where the word ending usually gives away the gender), but it seems people are quite tolerant of errors. In the latest number of Max-Planck-Forschung, the op-ed on the first page had a gigantic blunder in the article title: Eine Name, der verpflichtet. It's this article (it has of course since been corrected, but I do have a paper copy).
However, German irregular verbs are nothing particularly difficult. As in English, you only need to memorise past tense, participle, and maybe in addition whether to change second and third person of the present tense. Try my language—we have four verb conjugations (you only have one, two if you count irregular verbs as "differently regular"), each with 110 forms, and that's only the regular ones. Then come the irregular ones, that sometime lack parts (we don't have a past participle for "to shine". Really.).
What I find really difficult in German is syntax. I don't have a problem with a language putting its verbs always last (such as Japanese, which I know only superficially), or always second (such as Norwegian, which I do speak), but how on earth you manage to mix these two systems is something I haven't really fathomed yet. Separable verbs are also a major pain in the rear.
There is a Swiss language, spoken by something like 15% of the population and only in one region (I think it is Ticino)
As others noted, the language is Romansh, but it is spoken in Graübunden. Ticino is the only Italian-speaking canton (there is also a small Italian-speaking area in Graübunden, namely Valposchiavo).
Slashdot Mirror
If you mean noatime, yes, you just add it to the list of options in /etc/fstab for the relevant file system. If you mean tmpfs, yes again; add the following line: /tmp tmpfs defaults 0 0
tmpfs
Remember that you have to wipe the current contents of the /tmp directory before mounting tmpfs. Also, you should do this from the console, not a terminal emulator in X, since (in my experience) when you delete all the contents of tmp before mounting you cause some crashes or odd behaviour, in the worst case data loss depending on how applications use temporary files.
That may well be, but I see no reason to stress the disks unnecessarily. The measures I indicated are pointed out in Eee forums as good practice (so I suppose there is some sort of consensus about that), and do not affect performance (unless you run out of memory).
Also, the first Eee units were released just short of one year ago. Whatever the manufacturer is saying about rewrite cycles, what counts is when the SSDs start breaking down among sold units. I'm just making sure that I am not among the first ones, in case the units used in Eees are substandard (they are, after all, cheap laptops).
In any case, mounting with noatime is common practice, and when I found out about tmpfs (which I had been previously too lazy to look up) I started using it for my desktop machine's /tmp folder as well, as a privacy measure: the /tmp folder may contain temporary copies of sensitive data, and it's a good thing they are wiped when the computer is shut down.
Anyway, do you have a link to data about write cycles in the SSD used in Eees? 'Cause that would be interesting to put on the wikis.
There are better reasons than boldness for not using swap on an Eee. They use solid-state drives (except some 1000-series models and the 904), which are faster than mechanical devices but can be rewritten fewer times. To make sure your drives last longer, do the following:
Sure, without swap and with tmpfs you will have less memory available, but I have an Eee 900A and I bought it as a presentation machine, possibly for some occasional work while travelling, not as a workhorse.
I keep hearing this rationalisation time and again and I cannot fathom how one can be so thoroughly brainwashed to accept such a broken system as the electoral college. I mean, if you had to elect a number of representatives it makes some sense, but when you have to elect one guy, the simplest and fairest college is the single one.
Why should these guys be "protected" anyway? It's not called protection, it's an unfair privilege. Why should Montanans have more influence than Californians?
That's called "rigging the vote". Iowa does not deserve to be on equal footing with New York, because there are more people in New York, and every single person across the country (in Iowa, New York, California or Alaska) should be on equal footing.
This is the single stupidest argument ever. With the electoral college, you can hardly notice there is an election going on if you live in California, New York, Texas or any non-swing state—this way the candidates ignore much larger populations. And anyway, even in swing states, they will pander to high-density areas (every state has a population concentration somewhere): they have limited resources and they try to spend them the way that will guarantee the most return.
Electing one guy to be president is a simple business, and states shouldn't even be involved in the process. It's a federal post, make it a federal election already!
No, come on, you didn't. Not the first time around anyway. However it would have looked better to get it wrong first and right later than the other way around.
You are not looking for cultural homogeneity, you are looking for compatibility. In my work place (research institution in Germany) there are people from all over the world, only about half are German, and I still have to see any act of the slightest cultural embarrassment.
Of course, a lot of idiots are incompatible (not name-calling: look up the word "idiot") with other cultures, because they have been told their culture or race is superior, their god is the only true one, and that they should obey instead of thinking.
Anyway, history is full of counterexamples to your statement: most fascist states have been culturally very homogeneous (not that there was much choice in the matter). If anything, economical homogeneity is more important: look up the wealth distribution of Scandinavian countries, of the USA and other European countries, and plot against an indicator of social disarray. People generally don't really care if their neighbour has two wives (in fact few would mind if he's beating them or worse), but people will be much more pissed off if they have to live on the brink of existence and the main part of the value they create goes to some rich heir (or some foreign rich country) who does nothing for it, but gets to reap the profits.
"Poverty of the accused is no excuse".
Fine then, any natural phenomenon in the biosphere. I thought that was understood, but why do I underestimate the stupidity of fellow slashdotters.
CO2 from humans (or animals, plants, decomposition or any natural phenomenon) is not pollution, since it comes from carbon we took in with our food. Therefore, it is in equilibrium with the carbon cycle.
The polluting part of CO2 is the one coming from fossil fuels, that is from outside the ecosystem, that gets dumped into it because it's easier than to put it back where you took the carbon.
I am a fuel-cell researcher and when I RTFA'd I gasped—it seems they want to run this on hydrogen. They must be kidding. Normal H2 fuel cells run at about 80 C and require a hell of good cooling. Portable electronics is the domain of passive direct-methanol FCs.
Good luck selling people a can of explosive pressurised gas they have to hold close to their body, and a machine that has to heat up to 80 Celsius before it starts delivering power.
Anyway, I fail to see the inventive step in the camera. Fuel cells are not new. This type in particular does not seem new. The only new thing is that they stuffed it into a camera. Doesn't that qualify for trivial? Or can I file a patent for FC-powered drills and mixers?
What's the problem? You want a series of impressive images on your screen. What's the issue with having them in CGI instead of real-life fireworks? The end result is the same. I could get your argument if we were talking about some olympic discipline being duped, with doping, corruption or otherwise, but fireworks are just eye candy. How it gets to your retina is quite irrelevant.
And by the way, doing it in CGI is also more environmentally friendly: compounds used in fireworks are not always of the most benign sort.
Because our current prime minister is a hysterically waggling lapdog of your president, I suppose. He's the only one that, when put beside Bush, makes him look like he's the smart one: check here.
Well duh, of course they are. If anything, they may accept planar warming.
How would that be a good trait?
I am Italian and I am not proud of it because Leonardo da Vinci (or Marconi, or Mazzini, or Bresci) was an Italian as well, because I have no reason to share his merit for everything he achieved. If you need to say that you are proud of being from a place, a social group, an ethnic group, it probably means you have achieved so little in your life that you more or less consciously try to piggyback on people that you somehow associate with.
I call bullshit. The Vatican gets at least 0.5% of Italy's tax revenue through the Otto per mille, a way to publicly finance religion in Italy. Through that channel alone, the Vatican got one billion euros (not dollars) last year. That's one tax, for each year, in one country, and that's even a legitimate channel; illegal channels include tax breaks on commercial activities operated by the church, which are granted by my country's government, headed by a "legitimate businessman", in spite of European rules, and financing of religious private schools, forbidden as explicitly as possible by the Constitution of Italy, article 33, which however politicians use as toilet paper; In case you did not know how schools work in Italy, private schools are basically diploma mills for stupid or lazy sons of rich people who can't handle public school, where your professor can flunk you without fear of making the school lose its money.
Read on about cardinal Marcinkus and the IOR to know more about the greed of the Vatican.
... and, by the way, Harvard university's budget is in the range of billions of dollars [pdf], 2.6 in 2005 to be precise.
Hi, I had my PhD in hydrogen fuel cells and see how misleading the sentence you quoted is.
First off, they talk about current, not power. Current is determined by how many electrons you have, which is proportional to the reaction rate. Of fucking course almost all current goes into the reaction, where else should it go? There can be some parasitic losses, but these are usually negligible. What determines the energetic efficiency is the voltage that you have to apply to split water, and that's going to be higher when you want the reaction to go faster.
Anyway, electrolysis is a fairly efficient process anyway. If you measure first-law-efficiency, it could be possible to attain an efficiency slighly higher than 100% because the reaction has a large positive entropy change (gas molecules are formed), resulting in a reaction that cools the water; of course the second-law efficiency cannot go beyond 100% because that is the physical limit.
Finally, what you care about here is the round-trip efficiency for production, storage and consumption. Electrolysis is easy, but hydrogen storage and fuel cells are not. The MIT people of the article worked on the easiest chunk of it, producing hydrogen. Nothing to be found about hydrogen storage (which is probably the most difficult part: hydrogen is a gas and has a very low volumetric energy density, so you either cool it at 22 K and liquefy it, or you compress it at hundreds of atmospheres, or you adsorb it onto some metals to produce hydrides. Neither solution is simple.
Then, there is the issue of making a good fuel cell. The current order of magnitude for efficiency is around 50%, which is still much better than cars, but is a long way to 100%.
The technology is great, but the article is way hyped; in fact I do not see anything radically new in it. However, there is the word patented, which always makes my bullshit detector go crazy: this could just be a PR stunt for a patent.
Just change the user agent. Supposing it works like in KDE 3, go to Settings, Configure Konqueror, Browser Identification tab, and add a specific rule about how to identify to your college's website.
If it still does not work because your college's website uses some ActiveX or otherwise proprietary-nonstandard crap, rephrase your original comment as "my college's website is broken". Though it's a long time since I saw something not working in Konqueror.
Sorry for the late reply: I think you would have no problem, their economy is going strong and they need people. My former shop is actually looking for programmers, if you know C++/Python you may be interested. They already hired an Indian so they should know the paperwork for extra-EU people. Contact me in private for the details.
In detail, that number includes the social security tax (7.8% of gross income), "main" income tax (28% of net income), the top tax (a progressive tax, 9% on income exceeding 420k NOK, which becomes 12% beyond 682k NOK), fortune tax (1.1%), and the effect of various detractions (minimum detraction 38k NOK, plus detractions for interests paid on mortgages).
The best part: the Norwegian state actually fills out all the paperwork for you! I was amazed that the first time I had to deliver an income report: I could just send an SMS to confirm that their data was right. If you need to correct stuff, you can do it over the Internet.
More precisely: if you go to the hospital, you usually pay a relatively small fee for whatever service you got. If during the same year you pay more than a maximum of about 200 dollars, you get a "free card" and the state pays for you from that point for the rest of the year. If you are in a difficult economic condition (not sure how they define that), you can get the free card from the get-go.
Unfortunately and incomprehensibly, dental care is not covered yet, so remember to brush your teeth...
A position at the Max Planck Institute in Germany. Can't really say no to that.
Norway. It's also the most peaceful place in the world. I lived there until March, I moved since I got a one-of-a-kind job elsewhere. That's still a place I would recommend, though. The health care system is universal, tax levels are supposed to be the highest in the world, but that's not true: they are high for the rich bastards, I never paid more than 29.5% of my income and my last salary was about $7500 a month before taxes.
And, yes, they are desperate to find people there. With the current oil prices their economy is on the way up, but you cannot improvise engineers in a few months, so chances are you can find a job there fairly easily. They also have movies/TV in original language (mostly English) and most people speak decent English too, so you are not completely lost in a foreign country until you learn Norwegian. Norwegians are also efficient as Germans, but without the rudeness; pretty nice people to work with.
I would suggest Norwegian instead. It is kind of a middle point between Swedish and Danish. I for one have learnt it, and can understand Swedish and (written) Danish.
As an Esperanto speaker: no, unfortunately it won't. Esperanto's grammar provides words and constructs that are just too different from any other language (though they are very easy if you know the few rules). You were probably thinking of Interlingua, which is unfortunately not easy to learn to use actively.
I have Italian as a mother language, and I speak English, Norwegian, and I am learning German. I can guarantee you that you cannot learn a language in a matter of weeks. No-way-in-hell.
You must be a monolingual English speaker to say this. Whoever told you that, was clueless about how much time goes into learning a language. It takes a long time (many months) to get used to the information flow of other languages (you don't get the same items in the same order), it takes time to get used to a new grammar, and especially it takes forever to learn the vocabulary of the new language. If you think you can speak e.g. German after a 12-week course, try going out on the street and have a non-trivial conversation with a native, or just watch TV programs in German.
As for me, It took me 6 months before I dared speak Norwegian (my first Germanic language, English does not really count) to natives, and it did not work well for a long time. After a couple of years I was confident enough that I could speak casually to natives.
So the gist of it is:
A last note: if you do not know any foreign language at all, you might consider learning Esperanto first. No, really, there are some experiments where students learned Esperanto first, then French, and ended up scoring better in French than students that had studied French all along. It takes little time and helps you understand concepts of language learning, such as case and number concord, future tense without auxiliary verb, different associations of letters to sounds, coping with the perceived awkwardness of the language's words, that usually are the first stumbling block when learning one's first foreign language (sounds reasonable to me, and yes I know some Esperanto). This, and you get a lot of courses and dictioraries for free.
I am learning German now and can agree with most of what you say, but...
The gender of words is indeed a pain (there is no "pointer" as in my original language, Italian, where the word ending usually gives away the gender), but it seems people are quite tolerant of errors. In the latest number of Max-Planck-Forschung, the op-ed on the first page had a gigantic blunder in the article title: Eine Name, der verpflichtet. It's this article (it has of course since been corrected, but I do have a paper copy).
However, German irregular verbs are nothing particularly difficult. As in English, you only need to memorise past tense, participle, and maybe in addition whether to change second and third person of the present tense. Try my language—we have four verb conjugations (you only have one, two if you count irregular verbs as "differently regular"), each with 110 forms, and that's only the regular ones. Then come the irregular ones, that sometime lack parts (we don't have a past participle for "to shine". Really.).
What I find really difficult in German is syntax. I don't have a problem with a language putting its verbs always last (such as Japanese, which I know only superficially), or always second (such as Norwegian, which I do speak), but how on earth you manage to mix these two systems is something I haven't really fathomed yet. Separable verbs are also a major pain in the rear.
As others noted, the language is Romansh, but it is spoken in Graübunden. Ticino is the only Italian-speaking canton (there is also a small Italian-speaking area in Graübunden, namely Valposchiavo).