English is actually more similar to Frisian (a language only spoken in Friesland, a province in the north of Netherland) than to Dutch.
Definitely - but generally only for the sound of the language. The spelling is VERY different* (classic example being, "Bûter, brea, en griene tsiis; wa't dat net sizze kin, is gjin oprjochte Fries" - spoken, any English speaker can understand it, but as it's written it's a bit hard!).
But isn't that English's fault? English pronunciation has become completely disjointed from spelling. Frisian has a pretty phonetic spelling for sounds that are very similar to English.
I keep hearing complaints from foreigners that they can't learn Dutch because everybody is always speaking English.
That does happen, but when I lived there, I really didn't have a hard time learning it. I had a Dutch girlfriend who I once asked to NEVER speak English to me. She was willing to do that, and my Dutch improved VERY quickly after that.
I can see how that helps. I know a guy who has a Brazilian girlfriend and although they initially communicated in English, he now speaks only Dutch to her. The constant need to communicate with a loved one you live with is probably one of the best ways to learn a language.
The only places I have ever seen such toilets, are in primary schools and army barracks; the reason is that such toilets are more hygienic.
It is much more difficult to make a mess with such toilets.
More difficult to make a mess? It's always been my impression that it's really easy to pee over your own shoes on toilets like that. Their biggest advantage is probably that they're trivial to clean.
But if I'ld have to choose freely, I'ld of course go to the Netherlands, where you can legally buy and smoke pot. Their language is like a mix of english and german and seemingly easy to learn, but it is not spoken by too many people around the globe.
Dutch is my second language, after English (French is my third, and German is my fourth). Don't let a Dutchman hear you describe their language that way!
The best description of our language I've ever heard was from an Italian who called it a throat disease (Dutch has very harsh consonants).
German dialects from the north-west are practically indistinguishable from Dutch dialects from the nort-east. I can certainly understand them, even though I'm not from the north-east of Netherland, and I don't speak German. Official Dutch and official German are completely different languages, however.
English is actually more similar to Frisian (a language only spoken in Friesland, a province in the north of Netherland) than to Dutch.
Suffice to say, it's definitely easier for an English speaker to learn than German is,
I'm not so sure about that. I keep hearing complaints from foreigners that they can't learn Dutch because everybody is always speaking English.
There's a saying in the Netherlands that the only two laws anyone REALLY cares about are speeding and taxes. If you don't speed, and do pay your taxes, you can feel free to do pretty much anything that doesn't hurt others.
And even for speeding, there are websites and radio stations that keep track of the latest locations of speeding cameras. Only tax evasion is a big no-no, and people can get quite upset when they find out someone (or some group) has not been paying their share of the collective bill.
They take academic titles much more seriously in Europe than the US, and it isn't unusual for people to be called by their title and not their name.
They take academic titles much more seriously in Germany than in the US. Or the rest of Europe, for that matter. In Germany, you also don't adress your boss by his first name (though I'm sure there are many exceptions). Germany is a lot more formal and hierarchical than Netherland, for example.
The statements about women and dark skinned people are 100% incorrect (NL is one of the most tolerant countries I've ever been to - there's a small racial issue with migrants from some places, but it's NOTHING like the problems elsewhere in the world).
Netherland used to be incredibly tolerant and proud of it, but Dutch politics have taken nasty turn towards xenophobia during the last decade. I'm sure it's temporary, though.
Most people in Belgium, and especially in Brussels, speak English quite well.
This has been surprisingly untrue in my experience. I had a long-term consultancy job with a company in Brussels, and not only did none of the people I worked with speak Dutch, but only two of them spoke decent English. And these were young IT professionals. The kind who, in Germany or even France, would probably be fluent in English.
And due to the language issues with the 2 Belgians communities (Walloon/French and Flemish), they end up speaking English together if one doesn't speak the other's language.
My impression was that Flemish usually speak some French, but Walloons rarely speak Dutch or even English. I think Wallonia would do well to give a lot more attention to language education. Particularly the languages of their own country.
And don't forget beers and chocolate!;-)
That's definitely true. No people in the world can brew beer as well as Belgians can.
I think foreign language education in the Netherlands must be really good.
I think it's because we subtitle all films and TV series, instead of dubbing them in Dutch.
Well, it's bound to be a factor anyway. But many Dutch (not me, though) are also pretty good at French or German. But rarely as good as they are at English.
Even so, I've also encountered a Dutch manager in an international bank who worked with a mix of Dutch, Indian, German and English programmers, whose English really made me cringe. (The manager's English, I mean. Not the English programmers'.) In fact, there are a lot of English books written by Dutchmen about how awful some Dutch are at English. Some of them are quite funny, most just try to be.
I don't understand your point. I never said that the Bush administration wasn't hypocritical or miusguided, I was merely pointing out that it is unfair to blame the average American.
No, it's very fair to blame the average American. They voted him into power a second time. After the first time, they could have said "we didn't know he was gonna pull this kind of shit", but even after he got you into the mess in Iraq, he still got re-elected.
And even after it was clear that he lied, violated the constitution, got the US into the biggest debt ever and supported violation of the Geneva convention, and that his cronies endangered government officials, there still wasn't a mass of average Americans demanding that he'd be impeached.
If ever there was a US president that required impeachment, it's Bush. Yet Americans aren't even talking about it. That's something you can blame on the average American.
There's not much the average citizen can do.
There is something the average citizen can do. They can vote for the other guy. They can vote against everyone who has ever supported him.
This is why voter turnout is so poor; people know that their elected representatives, when push comes to shove, will obey the whips, not their constituents (your third point).
That's only because they know the constituents won't whip them. Senators and congressmen aren't in office forever. Vote against the ones who betray their constituents and the rest will learn to listen.
Its a flawed system, it's just still better than the alternatives.
Which alternatives? The ones where democracy does work? In Netherland, any governing party that doesn't listen to the voters, will lose seats at the next election. Admittedly most voters are too cowardly to vote for any but the three or four largest parties, but it still seems to work a lot better than the US system.
There are Boundary Commissions, but the problem is that it's not been politically possible to do much since Maggie got in, because in her term Liverpool and the North-west were almost in open revolt; try removing constituencies then. The Labour party are quite happy as it gives them a boost, so nothing has moved since 1997. Actually, the Boundaries may change in the next couple of years (first time since 1997 in England) and solve the problem, as happened just before 2005 in Scotland (where many constituencies were merged). But they have traditionally had an interesting definition of "fair" whereby proximity to parliament makes you less worthy of representation.
But why stick to such a silly district system in the first place? Why not use propertional representation like most other democracies?
I wonder if you've got any idea what my thesis actually was. Anyways, you are doing it wrong. Check this out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_laureates_per_capita. It's quite obvious that Noble prize / capita is a useless stat or do you really believe that the Faroe Islands are the cutting edge of science?
That is not obvious at all. What should be obvious is that the population of the Faroe Islands is so small that a single laureate will have a dramatic impact on the Nobel prize per capita statistic. Most small countries are at the bottom of the list, having never produced a single laureate. But the occasional small country that does have a laureate immediately jumps to the top of the list.
However, as soon as you get to countries that have a couple of million inhabitants, the laureate per capita number gets as meaningful as statistics about Nobel laureates can possibly get (which may still not mean a lot).
But I'll concede anyways: isn't it appearant from the wiki that the US is right in the middle of the european countries? THAT was my thesis: americans aren't particulary stupid.
That's definitely a good point. But despite the particular lack of stupidity among Americans, there are a lot of really odd ideas in the US, and they have a nasty tendency to have some impact on the rest of the world. (Although it's only fair to say that good ideas from the US also tend to have a big impact in the rest of the world.)
Serious point here, though: the toilets in Europe. They are fucking awful. They do not have water in the toilet bowl.
While the perfect toilet still hasn't been invented, there are many different types of toilets in Europe, the vast majority of which do have water in the toilet bowl.
The only toilets that realy are fucking awful are the ones you find on French camping grounds: just a hole in the ground. "French toilets" are notorious, but even in France most toilets are actually quite normal.
I will strongly recommend both Sweden and Denmark. They both have very strong economies currently and very low unemployment. Denmark alone is missing thousands of IT professional to fill vacant positions. As for a choice between Denmark and Sweden; Denmark pays around 25% higher salaries but is 25% more expensive to live in, so evens out unless you are looking to save up. IT salaries for non-educated developers starts at 5000$/month, for a computer scientist they start around 7000$/month.
I wanted to recommend Netherland, because we also have low unemployment and a serious shortage of IT people, but that shortage is probably caused by the fact that managers are generally better paid than programmers. Salaries start quite a bit lower here. Cost of living is probably lower than in Scandinavia, but finding a house in Amsterdam is impossible. (And as a foreigner, it is ofcourse the most fun to live in Amsterdam.)
Also, Dutch is almost impossible to learn, because everybody will immediately switch to English when they realise Dutch is not your first language.
I've hired about 100 programmers in my career. There were a few rare gems among the self-educated, but you had to apply a bit of focus to the educated, too. The ones who brought samples of their work and were willing to enthuse over it in the interview were the ones I kept.
Code is vital. We always have an assessment where programmers look at and criticise a small programming assignment that prospective employees have to do. If it works, the code is readable and you handle your exceptions well, you're hired. It's amazing how many people fail at this, particularly considering they did make it past the first interview.
One of the best programmers I know quit university in his second year.
One of my co-workers didn't have any education past high school (or possibly trade-school; not sure what the correct equivalent it here). He's self-taught and knows his way around a linux server and various scripting languages, and is good at what he does, which is what we need.
On the other hand, we also have PhDs and other people with excellent credentials. As long as they get the job done. That's what counts.
Strange you should mention that. The very best programmers -- the genius coders -- I had working for me, with rare exception, had a background in classical music and played one or more instruments. I'm not sure that's causative, but there was a clear trend.
I read somewhere (the jargon file?) about someone who prefered to hire jazz musicians, because hack mode is comparable to mindset during jazz improvisations.
wasn't we talking about laptops? or you are planning to do video editing on the eee pc?
Contrary to popular belief, not every laptop is an eee pc.
as the parent said, 16+16gb is more than enough for a portable, if you use the damn thing as a portable!
If you use the damn thing the way you use a damn portable. Which probably means "for nothing particularly useful".
Lots of people here have jobs which require their laptops to be a portable workstation. That means both speed and size of the harddisk are important.
A co-worker just got a new laptop with SSD, and it boots Windows in about 2 seconds. I assure you there are many situations where that's well worth the money.
Then burn it to DVD. The point is that if you need more than 16 gb of data storage you're either being really lazy or doing things that put you well outside the needs of a normal user.
Not everybody is a normal user. Lots of people aren't, in fact. Not everybody uses his laptop just for watching anime. Mine contains development tools, several big software projects, and tons of data to with. And, allright, the occasional game.
All of these things have been getting a lot bigger in the last 20 years, and having storage space be a severely limiting factor is annoying and time consuming.
The outer Oort cloud [...]. Its total mass is not known with certainty, but, assuming that Halley's comet is a suitable prototype for all comets within the outer Oort cloud, the estimated combined mass is 3x10^28 grams, or roughly five times the mass of the Earth. Earlier it was thought to be more massive (up to 380 Earth masses), but improved knowledge of the size distribution of long-period comets has led to much lower estimates. The mass of the inner Oort cloud is not currently known.
Wait, Halley's Comet? Doesn't that one have a period of 70 years or thereabouts? That's way too short for an Oort Cloud comet.
Now I'm not an astronomer, so I don't really feel qualified to fix this, but to my layman's ears it sounds like Wikipedia is misleading here.
Looking at that picture, there don't appear to be any trains going in or out. That's going to be fun for a million-plus people with nowhere to park a car.
I think the scale and perspective of the picture is such that it doesn't show the underground car parks and train stations in much detail.
Slashdot Mirror
English is actually more similar to Frisian (a language only spoken in Friesland, a province in the north of Netherland) than to Dutch.
Definitely - but generally only for the sound of the language. The spelling is VERY different* (classic example being, "Bûter, brea, en griene tsiis; wa't dat net sizze kin, is gjin oprjochte Fries" - spoken, any English speaker can understand it, but as it's written it's a bit hard!).
But isn't that English's fault? English pronunciation has become completely disjointed from spelling. Frisian has a pretty phonetic spelling for sounds that are very similar to English.
I keep hearing complaints from foreigners that they can't learn Dutch because everybody is always speaking English.
That does happen, but when I lived there, I really didn't have a hard time learning it. I had a Dutch girlfriend who I once asked to NEVER speak English to me. She was willing to do that, and my Dutch improved VERY quickly after that.
I can see how that helps. I know a guy who has a Brazilian girlfriend and although they initially communicated in English, he now speaks only Dutch to her. The constant need to communicate with a loved one you live with is probably one of the best ways to learn a language.
The only places I have ever seen such toilets, are in primary schools and army barracks; the reason is that such toilets are more hygienic.
It is much more difficult to make a mess with such toilets.
More difficult to make a mess? It's always been my impression that it's really easy to pee over your own shoes on toilets like that. Their biggest advantage is probably that they're trivial to clean.
France most toilets are actually quite normal.
Not in my experience. I had a 'flat-flusher' in a French hotel I stayed in. Yes, hotel.
Well, nothing wrong with a flat-flusher, is there? Although most public places do seem to prefer deep-flushers. Not sure why.
But if I'ld have to choose freely, I'ld of course go to the Netherlands, where you can legally buy and smoke pot. Their language is like a mix of english and german and seemingly easy to learn, but it is not spoken by too many people around the globe.
Dutch is my second language, after English (French is my third, and German is my fourth). Don't let a Dutchman hear you describe their language that way!
The best description of our language I've ever heard was from an Italian who called it a throat disease (Dutch has very harsh consonants).
German dialects from the north-west are practically indistinguishable from Dutch dialects from the nort-east. I can certainly understand them, even though I'm not from the north-east of Netherland, and I don't speak German. Official Dutch and official German are completely different languages, however.
English is actually more similar to Frisian (a language only spoken in Friesland, a province in the north of Netherland) than to Dutch.
Suffice to say, it's definitely easier for an English speaker to learn than German is,
I'm not so sure about that. I keep hearing complaints from foreigners that they can't learn Dutch because everybody is always speaking English.
There's a saying in the Netherlands that the only two laws anyone REALLY cares about are speeding and taxes. If you don't speed, and do pay your taxes, you can feel free to do pretty much anything that doesn't hurt others.
And even for speeding, there are websites and radio stations that keep track of the latest locations of speeding cameras. Only tax evasion is a big no-no, and people can get quite upset when they find out someone (or some group) has not been paying their share of the collective bill.
If you support officially Bush in a diner, then you can expect some hot discussions. (But looks like they have nothing against Mc Cain).
In fact, I've read good arguments about why McCain would be better for Europe than Obama.
They take academic titles much more seriously in Europe than the US, and it isn't unusual for people to be called by their title and not their name.
They take academic titles much more seriously in Germany than in the US. Or the rest of Europe, for that matter. In Germany, you also don't adress your boss by his first name (though I'm sure there are many exceptions). Germany is a lot more formal and hierarchical than Netherland, for example.
The statements about women and dark skinned people are 100% incorrect (NL is one of the most tolerant countries I've ever been to - there's a small racial issue with migrants from some places, but it's NOTHING like the problems elsewhere in the world).
Netherland used to be incredibly tolerant and proud of it, but Dutch politics have taken nasty turn towards xenophobia during the last decade. I'm sure it's temporary, though.
This person obviously does not appreciate the beer :-)
Or the pot. To some Italian expats I know, it's one of the bigger advantages of living in Amsterdam.
Most people in Belgium, and especially in Brussels, speak English quite well.
This has been surprisingly untrue in my experience. I had a long-term consultancy job with a company in Brussels, and not only did none of the people I worked with speak Dutch, but only two of them spoke decent English. And these were young IT professionals. The kind who, in Germany or even France, would probably be fluent in English.
And due to the language issues with the 2 Belgians communities (Walloon/French and Flemish), they end up speaking English together if one doesn't speak the other's language.
My impression was that Flemish usually speak some French, but Walloons rarely speak Dutch or even English. I think Wallonia would do well to give a lot more attention to language education. Particularly the languages of their own country.
And don't forget beers and chocolate! ;-)
That's definitely true. No people in the world can brew beer as well as Belgians can.
I think foreign language education in the Netherlands must be really good.
I think it's because we subtitle all films and TV series, instead of dubbing them in Dutch.
Well, it's bound to be a factor anyway. But many Dutch (not me, though) are also pretty good at French or German. But rarely as good as they are at English.
Even so, I've also encountered a Dutch manager in an international bank who worked with a mix of Dutch, Indian, German and English programmers, whose English really made me cringe. (The manager's English, I mean. Not the English programmers'.) In fact, there are a lot of English books written by Dutchmen about how awful some Dutch are at English. Some of them are quite funny, most just try to be.
I don't understand your point. I never said that the Bush administration wasn't hypocritical or miusguided, I was merely pointing out that it is unfair to blame the average American.
No, it's very fair to blame the average American. They voted him into power a second time. After the first time, they could have said "we didn't know he was gonna pull this kind of shit", but even after he got you into the mess in Iraq, he still got re-elected.
And even after it was clear that he lied, violated the constitution, got the US into the biggest debt ever and supported violation of the Geneva convention, and that his cronies endangered government officials, there still wasn't a mass of average Americans demanding that he'd be impeached.
If ever there was a US president that required impeachment, it's Bush. Yet Americans aren't even talking about it. That's something you can blame on the average American.
There's not much the average citizen can do.
There is something the average citizen can do. They can vote for the other guy. They can vote against everyone who has ever supported him.
This is why voter turnout is so poor; people know that their elected representatives, when push comes to shove, will obey the whips, not their constituents (your third point).
That's only because they know the constituents won't whip them. Senators and congressmen aren't in office forever. Vote against the ones who betray their constituents and the rest will learn to listen.
Its a flawed system, it's just still better than the alternatives.
Which alternatives? The ones where democracy does work? In Netherland, any governing party that doesn't listen to the voters, will lose seats at the next election. Admittedly most voters are too cowardly to vote for any but the three or four largest parties, but it still seems to work a lot better than the US system.
There are Boundary Commissions, but the problem is that it's not been politically possible to do much since Maggie got in, because in her term Liverpool and the North-west were almost in open revolt; try removing constituencies then. The Labour party are quite happy as it gives them a boost, so nothing has moved since 1997. Actually, the Boundaries may change in the next couple of years (first time since 1997 in England) and solve the problem, as happened just before 2005 in Scotland (where many constituencies were merged). But they have traditionally had an interesting definition of "fair" whereby proximity to parliament makes you less worthy of representation.
But why stick to such a silly district system in the first place? Why not use propertional representation like most other democracies?
I wonder if you've got any idea what my thesis actually was. Anyways, you are doing it wrong. Check this out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_laureates_per_capita. It's quite obvious that Noble prize / capita is a useless stat or do you really believe that the Faroe Islands are the cutting edge of science?
That is not obvious at all. What should be obvious is that the population of the Faroe Islands is so small that a single laureate will have a dramatic impact on the Nobel prize per capita statistic. Most small countries are at the bottom of the list, having never produced a single laureate. But the occasional small country that does have a laureate immediately jumps to the top of the list.
However, as soon as you get to countries that have a couple of million inhabitants, the laureate per capita number gets as meaningful as statistics about Nobel laureates can possibly get (which may still not mean a lot).
But I'll concede anyways: isn't it appearant from the wiki that the US is right in the middle of the european countries? THAT was my thesis: americans aren't particulary stupid.
That's definitely a good point. But despite the particular lack of stupidity among Americans, there are a lot of really odd ideas in the US, and they have a nasty tendency to have some impact on the rest of the world. (Although it's only fair to say that good ideas from the US also tend to have a big impact in the rest of the world.)
There are two simple reasons:
a) people don't eat curry in the EU
People do eat curry, even in the non-UK parts of hte EU.
b) if you dump a hard big pile into a toilet with water in the bowl it splashes all over your butt.
Euros don't like shitty water on their butt unlike Americans.
This is true, however. I hate deep-flushers exactly because the water splashes against your butt. But flat-flushers have their own disadvantages.
I'd really appreciate it if someone would hurry up with inventing the perfect toilet.
Serious point here, though: the toilets in Europe. They are fucking awful. They do not have water in the toilet bowl.
While the perfect toilet still hasn't been invented, there are many different types of toilets in Europe, the vast majority of which do have water in the toilet bowl.
The only toilets that realy are fucking awful are the ones you find on French camping grounds: just a hole in the ground. "French toilets" are notorious, but even in France most toilets are actually quite normal.
I will strongly recommend both Sweden and Denmark. They both have very strong economies currently and very low unemployment. Denmark alone is missing thousands of IT professional to fill vacant positions. As for a choice between Denmark and Sweden; Denmark pays around 25% higher salaries but is 25% more expensive to live in, so evens out unless you are looking to save up. IT salaries for non-educated developers starts at 5000$/month, for a computer scientist they start around 7000$/month.
I wanted to recommend Netherland, because we also have low unemployment and a serious shortage of IT people, but that shortage is probably caused by the fact that managers are generally better paid than programmers. Salaries start quite a bit lower here. Cost of living is probably lower than in Scandinavia, but finding a house in Amsterdam is impossible. (And as a foreigner, it is ofcourse the most fun to live in Amsterdam.)
Also, Dutch is almost impossible to learn, because everybody will immediately switch to English when they realise Dutch is not your first language.
I've hired about 100 programmers in my career. There were a few rare gems among the self-educated, but you had to apply a bit of focus to the educated, too. The ones who brought samples of their work and were willing to enthuse over it in the interview were the ones I kept.
Code is vital. We always have an assessment where programmers look at and criticise a small programming assignment that prospective employees have to do. If it works, the code is readable and you handle your exceptions well, you're hired.
It's amazing how many people fail at this, particularly considering they did make it past the first interview.
One of the best programmers I know quit university in his second year.
One of my co-workers didn't have any education past high school (or possibly trade-school; not sure what the correct equivalent it here). He's self-taught and knows his way around a linux server and various scripting languages, and is good at what he does, which is what we need.
On the other hand, we also have PhDs and other people with excellent credentials. As long as they get the job done. That's what counts.
Strange you should mention that. The very best programmers -- the genius coders -- I had working for me, with rare exception, had a background in classical music and played one or more instruments. I'm not sure that's causative, but there was a clear trend.
I read somewhere (the jargon file?) about someone who prefered to hire jazz musicians, because hack mode is comparable to mindset during jazz improvisations.
Time to burn some Karma...
Funny how something like that virtually guarantees you're going to be modded up.
But in this case, I think it would have happened without a reference to karma; this is interesting.
wasn't we talking about laptops? or you are planning to do video editing on the eee pc?
Contrary to popular belief, not every laptop is an eee pc.
as the parent said, 16+16gb is more than enough for a portable, if you use the damn thing as a portable!
If you use the damn thing the way you use a damn portable. Which probably means "for nothing particularly useful".
Lots of people here have jobs which require their laptops to be a portable workstation. That means both speed and size of the harddisk are important.
A co-worker just got a new laptop with SSD, and it boots Windows in about 2 seconds. I assure you there are many situations where that's well worth the money.
Then burn it to DVD. The point is that if you need more than 16 gb of data storage you're either being really lazy or doing things that put you well outside the needs of a normal user.
Not everybody is a normal user. Lots of people aren't, in fact. Not everybody uses his laptop just for watching anime. Mine contains development tools, several big software projects, and tons of data to with. And, allright, the occasional game.
All of these things have been getting a lot bigger in the last 20 years, and having storage space be a severely limiting factor is annoying and time consuming.
I'm more worried about the effect on Cesium decay. Did we accidentally base our definition of time on a variable rather than a constant?
Diamonds are generally best friends, not dating material.
The outer Oort cloud [...]. Its total mass is not known with certainty, but, assuming that Halley's comet is a suitable prototype for all comets within the outer Oort cloud, the estimated combined mass is 3x10^28 grams, or roughly five times the mass of the Earth. Earlier it was thought to be more massive (up to 380 Earth masses), but improved knowledge of the size distribution of long-period comets has led to much lower estimates. The mass of the inner Oort cloud is not currently known.
Wait, Halley's Comet? Doesn't that one have a period of 70 years or thereabouts? That's way too short for an Oort Cloud comet.
Now I'm not an astronomer, so I don't really feel qualified to fix this, but to my layman's ears it sounds like Wikipedia is misleading here.
Oh, I didn't realise that Dubai had an underground rail network.
I didn't even know they had a railroad at all, but these guys have been building lots of big lately. A railroad tunnel is trivial in comparison.
Looking at that picture, there don't appear to be any trains going in or out. That's going to be fun for a million-plus people with nowhere to park a car.
I think the scale and perspective of the picture is such that it doesn't show the underground car parks and train stations in much detail.