I understand that you're trying to be sophisticated and European in using the European system of decimal and comma notation, however it just doesn't work in English. When you speak English, it's $3,000 (or $3000). If you want to write your posts in German or Romanian, then go ahead and write $3.000. Both otherwise, you just look like a moron who's trying to be cool but doesn't quite get it.
It could also be that the German government, either federal or state, offers the discounts or requires BMW to offer the discounts. I know that Volkswagen is, in fact, mostly owned by a German state, and the German government entities traditionally have a huge amount of control over certain "important national industries," a category in which high-end automobiles certainly falls.
And here in Bucharest -- Romania being a country not even in the EU (yet, although not if you Germans get your way) -- new cop cars are also BMWs, but I think that has a lot more to do with the fact that BMWs are just extremely solid, fast, and easy-to-maintain cars (that and Romanians refuse to drive Mercedes thanks to the ominous "party affiliation" connotation they earned during communism).
Uh, wow, you've succeeded in increasing the quantity of text by a lot without increasing the information contained in it by a damned thing. I second the anonymous coward's opinion.
Your rationale for Russia is just ridiculous - Russia has most of its population in Europe. Maybe not land, but the people in western Russia are a far more important asset than the tundra in Siberia.
As for history, the Russia monarchy has a long history of blood ties with Western European monarchies. Up until the late 1800s, Russia was just as European as any European country - sure, they might have fallen behind on democracy, but so has Belarus; would you consider that "not European"? Does the past century of non-democracy erase millennia of cultural ties? Ever hear of a little war called World War I, where Russia duked it out with the most European of Europeans? And what about Russia as the center of Slavic culture? Or the largest Eastern Orthodox church in the world?
Why don't you ask a Pole or a Ukrainian how un-European Russia is.
As for Turkey, your historical ignorance is also duly noted. If Turkey is good enough to be considered European by the EU, then shouldn't it be good enough for you? What about the Ottoman empire's hegemony over the Balkans for much of the last thousand years? Or Atatürk's aggressive westernization of the country? Or the distinctly western brand of secularism that Turkey, the Muslim world's largest democracy and most stable regime, practices? To say that simply because a country is Muslim therefore it is not European verges on bigotry. For much of its history, Spain was a Muslim country. Islam is Europe's fastest-growing religion, and it has a very important ties to the Balkans and the Iberian peninsula. Islam is the plurality religion of Bosnia & Herzegovina and was, pre-WWII, the largest religion in Albania and Macedonia.
You seem to have a very skewed vision of Europe - there's more to it than just the Louvre and the Renaissance, you know!
Except that EU != Europe. There are plenty of European countries who aren't a member of the EU. Switzerland? Norway? Russia? Iceland? Romania? Bulgaria? Moldova? Serbia? Ukraine? Turkey?
Uh, it's called non-price competition (marketing, brand recognition,...quality?) and it's often more powerful than price competition, especially when price is negligible in the long-term within a certain range (if you spend $3000 on a workstation, does it matter all that much whether you spend $200 on an OS or nothing?). Clearly Windows hasn't had all that difficult of a time competing with Linux, considering it's pre-installed on approximately 100.0000% of consumer x86 PCs.
If I had mod points, I'd mod you up in a second. This pisses me off to no end -- especially when they do it with things like nytimes.com or microsoft.com. Or when they link both the news source and the article, and so without hovering over the link, you can't be sure what is what.
Urdu and Bangladeshi are mutually intelligible, or close to it -- this would be about as remarkable as an accurate machine translation from Danish to Swedish. I.e., not very.
You say "one Arabic sentence" as if it's a minor thing. Unless they cheated, just the fact that they could translate this simple sentence is absolutely remarkable. In the time that it would take a native English speaker to learn Arabic fluently, I'll bet they could do any other two Indo-European languages fluently.
Plus, I don't know if you have any linguistic training (I do) or experience in a non-Indo-European language (or a non-Germanic language, or, hell, even a non-English language!), but translating from a Semitic language to English based on a whole bunch of rules absolutely boggles my mind; I can guarantee you that if this thing can translate Arabic that well, its Swedish, French, Russian, etc. must be near flawless.
These are all relatively insignificant (and poorly-designed, at that) parts of the Microsoft behemoth, most likely only in place to prop up their desktop OS and productivity software hegemony.
For Google, on the other hand, this is what made them one of the most popular stocks on Wall Street.
A service has searched through an absolutely huge corpus with little or no additional input other than "make these fit," and was able to translate perfectly (or near-perfectly, as I can't read Arabic) a fairly semantically-complex sentence, which with using the old methods of translation was an absolute disaster. I'd say this is a pretty sure indication that they're almost done with the heavy technical stuff (could you even begin to conceive of a way to parse the corpus?).
Dell and Cisco are not in this business. IBM is not hemorrhaging with cash in the way Google is. Microsoft is not in the business of providing free Internet accessories. In any case, Google has a track record of innovative ideas ("innovative ideas" meaning that not only did they come up with it and implement it partially, but they invested full-on into it, bet money on it, and made it better than the competition) and is most likely of any company who would announce this to actually pull through with it. If some little start-up announced this (as I'm sure a few have), people would take it with a grain of salt. But that Google announces it, I'm sure most people believe fully that Google will deliver on its promise.
And you're right, people have thought of this exact idea (I'm sure every other computer major and linguist has, in fact, since the birth of ENIAC--I know the idea's crossed my mind tons of times, not that I'd have the slightest clue how to do it), however actually attempting to do it with a reasonable chance of success? I'm going to say Google is the first.
Plus, I got the impression from the article that the serve is operational, just not available to the public. If you'll read the article, you'll find that the translator properly translated a fairly complicated phrase from Arabic to English. I'd guess that this service is, from a technical standpoint, at least 95% done -it's just the packaging and touching-up that needs to be done.
No, it's because Google has tons of talent, money, already-archived text to work with, computers, respect in the industry, and consumer base. I can't think of a company that possesses these characteristics more so than Google.
The "french" in "french fries" (lowercase) is a cooking method, not related at all to La république française...
New Orleans is about as French as the Republic of Moldova...very, very few people actually speak French as their first language, and the ones that do speak a creole of it that's about as French as Romanian.
Merci beaucoup de votre attention, et j'espère que vous avez appris quelque chose !
...oh, what's that? You think that the Carthaginians' Mediterranean supremacy millennia ago is now as militarily irrelevant as France's military power centuries ago?!
Does anyone else find it bizarre that throughout the article they keep telling us how old everyone is? And that they tell us twice that this "Parsons" fellow is 57? Why in the hell are the ages -57 and 50, extraordinarily normal ages for executives -of these people at all significant??
I think it's absolutely ridiculous that, on the MTA, I have to pay $2.00 to go the same distance as someone who wants to ride that shit all over the fucking city. If fares weren't that annoying "ONE FLAT FARE" BS, I probably wouldn't jump the turnstiles.
If you don't like it, don't go to the site. Just because you happen to have the power to block ads without any recourse doesn't mean it's ethical/fair.
Locking cell phones should be outlawed in the US, no question. It's a completely artificial barrier whose only purpose is to make switching to different providers more expensive for consumers without giving them any benefit at all.
Slashdot Mirror
I understand that you're trying to be sophisticated and European in using the European system of decimal and comma notation, however it just doesn't work in English. When you speak English, it's $3,000 (or $3000). If you want to write your posts in German or Romanian, then go ahead and write $3.000. Both otherwise, you just look like a moron who's trying to be cool but doesn't quite get it.
It could also be that the German government, either federal or state, offers the discounts or requires BMW to offer the discounts. I know that Volkswagen is, in fact, mostly owned by a German state, and the German government entities traditionally have a huge amount of control over certain "important national industries," a category in which high-end automobiles certainly falls.
And here in Bucharest -- Romania being a country not even in the EU (yet, although not if you Germans get your way) -- new cop cars are also BMWs, but I think that has a lot more to do with the fact that BMWs are just extremely solid, fast, and easy-to-maintain cars (that and Romanians refuse to drive Mercedes thanks to the ominous "party affiliation" connotation they earned during communism).
Uh, wow, you've succeeded in increasing the quantity of text by a lot without increasing the information contained in it by a damned thing. I second the anonymous coward's opinion.
Your rationale for Russia is just ridiculous - Russia has most of its population in Europe. Maybe not land, but the people in western Russia are a far more important asset than the tundra in Siberia.
As for history, the Russia monarchy has a long history of blood ties with Western European monarchies. Up until the late 1800s, Russia was just as European as any European country - sure, they might have fallen behind on democracy, but so has Belarus; would you consider that "not European"? Does the past century of non-democracy erase millennia of cultural ties? Ever hear of a little war called World War I, where Russia duked it out with the most European of Europeans? And what about Russia as the center of Slavic culture? Or the largest Eastern Orthodox church in the world?
Why don't you ask a Pole or a Ukrainian how un-European Russia is.
As for Turkey, your historical ignorance is also duly noted. If Turkey is good enough to be considered European by the EU, then shouldn't it be good enough for you? What about the Ottoman empire's hegemony over the Balkans for much of the last thousand years? Or Atatürk's aggressive westernization of the country? Or the distinctly western brand of secularism that Turkey, the Muslim world's largest democracy and most stable regime, practices? To say that simply because a country is Muslim therefore it is not European verges on bigotry. For much of its history, Spain was a Muslim country. Islam is Europe's fastest-growing religion, and it has a very important ties to the Balkans and the Iberian peninsula. Islam is the plurality religion of Bosnia & Herzegovina and was, pre-WWII, the largest religion in Albania and Macedonia.
You seem to have a very skewed vision of Europe - there's more to it than just the Louvre and the Renaissance, you know!
Except that EU != Europe. There are plenty of European countries who aren't a member of the EU. Switzerland? Norway? Russia? Iceland? Romania? Bulgaria? Moldova? Serbia? Ukraine? Turkey?
Uh, it's called non-price competition (marketing, brand recognition, ...quality?) and it's often more powerful than price competition, especially when price is negligible in the long-term within a certain range (if you spend $3000 on a workstation, does it matter all that much whether you spend $200 on an OS or nothing?). Clearly Windows hasn't had all that difficult of a time competing with Linux, considering it's pre-installed on approximately 100.0000% of consumer x86 PCs.
If I had mod points, I'd mod you up in a second. This pisses me off to no end -- especially when they do it with things like nytimes.com or microsoft.com. Or when they link both the news source and the article, and so without hovering over the link, you can't be sure what is what.
The "really dangerous work"? Huh?
Oh, I get it -- you're talking about the deplete uranium reserves in iPods.
Yeah, terrible. Poor US workers.
Urdu and Bangladeshi are mutually intelligible, or close to it -- this would be about as remarkable as an accurate machine translation from Danish to Swedish. I.e., not very.
You say "one Arabic sentence" as if it's a minor thing. Unless they cheated, just the fact that they could translate this simple sentence is absolutely remarkable. In the time that it would take a native English speaker to learn Arabic fluently, I'll bet they could do any other two Indo-European languages fluently.
Plus, I don't know if you have any linguistic training (I do) or experience in a non-Indo-European language (or a non-Germanic language, or, hell, even a non-English language!), but translating from a Semitic language to English based on a whole bunch of rules absolutely boggles my mind; I can guarantee you that if this thing can translate Arabic that well, its Swedish, French, Russian, etc. must be near flawless.
These are all relatively insignificant (and poorly-designed, at that) parts of the Microsoft behemoth, most likely only in place to prop up their desktop OS and productivity software hegemony.
For Google, on the other hand, this is what made them one of the most popular stocks on Wall Street.
A service has searched through an absolutely huge corpus with little or no additional input other than "make these fit," and was able to translate perfectly (or near-perfectly, as I can't read Arabic) a fairly semantically-complex sentence, which with using the old methods of translation was an absolute disaster. I'd say this is a pretty sure indication that they're almost done with the heavy technical stuff (could you even begin to conceive of a way to parse the corpus?).
Dell and Cisco are not in this business. IBM is not hemorrhaging with cash in the way Google is. Microsoft is not in the business of providing free Internet accessories. In any case, Google has a track record of innovative ideas ("innovative ideas" meaning that not only did they come up with it and implement it partially, but they invested full-on into it, bet money on it, and made it better than the competition) and is most likely of any company who would announce this to actually pull through with it. If some little start-up announced this (as I'm sure a few have), people would take it with a grain of salt. But that Google announces it, I'm sure most people believe fully that Google will deliver on its promise.
And you're right, people have thought of this exact idea (I'm sure every other computer major and linguist has, in fact, since the birth of ENIAC--I know the idea's crossed my mind tons of times, not that I'd have the slightest clue how to do it), however actually attempting to do it with a reasonable chance of success? I'm going to say Google is the first.
Plus, I got the impression from the article that the serve is operational, just not available to the public. If you'll read the article, you'll find that the translator properly translated a fairly complicated phrase from Arabic to English. I'd guess that this service is, from a technical standpoint, at least 95% done -it's just the packaging and touching-up that needs to be done.
No, it's because Google has tons of talent, money, already-archived text to work with, computers, respect in the industry, and consumer base. I can't think of a company that possesses these characteristics more so than Google.
I'm actually not American...I'm Romanian.
The "french" in "french fries" (lowercase) is a cooking method, not related at all to La république française...
New Orleans is about as French as the Republic of Moldova...very, very few people actually speak French as their first language, and the ones that do speak a creole of it that's about as French as Romanian.
Merci beaucoup de votre attention, et j'espère que vous avez appris quelque chose !
Let's not even get started on those Tunisians!
...oh, what's that? You think that the Carthaginians' Mediterranean supremacy millennia ago is now as militarily irrelevant as France's military power centuries ago?!
THX FOR THE INFO. pls give more, tho!
Does anyone else find it bizarre that throughout the article they keep telling us how old everyone is? And that they tell us twice that this "Parsons" fellow is 57? Why in the hell are the ages -57 and 50, extraordinarily normal ages for executives -of these people at all significant??
I'd always wondered why we had mandatory four years of English and no shop program at my old public high school!
May I remind you of Quirk's exception:
Intentional invocation of this so-called "Nazi Clause" is ineffectual.
I think it's absolutely ridiculous that, on the MTA, I have to pay $2.00 to go the same distance as someone who wants to ride that shit all over the fucking city. If fares weren't that annoying "ONE FLAT FARE" BS, I probably wouldn't jump the turnstiles.
If you don't like it, don't go to the site. Just because you happen to have the power to block ads without any recourse doesn't mean it's ethical/fair.
Uh, Moldova is MD...how hard is that to remember?? M is the first letter, D is the start of the emphasized syllable...
Ah ! You are not a Francophone. N'est-ce pas ?
(It's "n'est-ce," not "n'est," and in French you put spaces before certain punctuation marks, including the exclamation point and question mark.)
Locking cell phones should be outlawed in the US, no question. It's a completely artificial barrier whose only purpose is to make switching to different providers more expensive for consumers without giving them any benefit at all.