Such as DVD's. And play them on a hand held DVD player. And DVD's do not count against your 3G data allowance for the month.
In this day and age, it's seen as unnecessary and a burden to carry around a music player like an iPod or a separate point-and-shoot digital camera, because people recognize that as basically a computer in their pocket, the smartphone they already have should do it all. You really think that people want to cart around a portable DVD player too?
For those that "never really learn Finnish" what language do they take classes in? Do they take the classes in Finnish, but never get to a conversational level?
Teaching full degree programmes in English is a very common phenomenon in Europe now, it's a general part of European integration (universities in a given country want to be open to students from other EU nations) but lots of Americans, Chinese, wealthy Arabs, etc. take advantage of this too.
For those degree programmes where there is not teaching in English, you have to understand that except for the hard sciences (which requires visiting a lab), attendance at lectures is not obligatory in Finland and various other European countries. You are free to simply do the reading on your own and just come in twice a year to take exams. Since so much assigned reading is in English, and many departments will allow you to write the exam in English, there isn't much need for Finnish skills to make it through university. Of course, to fulfill degree requirements, one must at some point take a three-semester course of Finnish as a foreign language, but many people pass the exam for that without ever really reaching conversational ability in the language.
So you spoke Russian (something more common in foreign students than Finnish), but that's not on the "allowed" languages for free tuition.
Actually, I didn't speak Russian when I arrived there either. My first year or two was thus spent learning Finnish and Russian, and only then I moved on to taking courses related to my "major". But there is no list of "'allowed languages for free tuition", there were no language demands on me when I went to study there. When it came to the application process and proving my qualifications, I did all that in English.
If Google wanted to hire non-CS-degree people that show critical thinking about language skills, they would more likely turn to people with a linguistics or maths degree who have at least some familiarity with computational linguistics. Indeed, as a Iinguist, though working in a different part of the field, I have a number of colleagues who swiftly found gainful employment at IT companies because they could demonstrate interest in the computational side of the field.
However, as much as I respect the scholarship involved in an English degree, and read quite a bit of literary criticism as a hobby, I don't think that that field really prepares students in a way that makes them desirable to specialist IT teams.
The professor might realize that this situation is unfair and decide that he will do things differently in the next academic year (but you will have moved on by then). However, American universities often have a strong financial interest in making their students buy expensive textbooks year after year, because they run campus bookstores.
Why would you have expected the EU to go to the aid of Georgia? For one, Georgia already was ineligible to join NATO because it lacked full control over the territory it claimed (Abkhazia having been de facto independent since the 1990s), so it had no guarantees as a part of a defensive alliance. Two, the Russians were seizing a single province that had already expressed discontent with being part of Georgia, and it was not threatening the survival of Georgia in general as an independent state. Three, as countries where the army is mainly seen as defensive, projecting force into the faraway Caucasus is probably not something they've ceaselessly drilled on. Fourth, the broad population here does not care much about Georgia, it is just too far away and while Georgia is in fact culturally remarkably "European", most people in the EU don't know that.
now after promising to protect Ukraine if it gave up it's nuclear arsenal, they are sitting and watching Russia toy with it too.
The same point about lack of broad public support holds for Ukraine too. I live in a EU country bordering on Ukraine and there is zero passion about protecting Ukrainians from aggression. They are seen as belonging to a very different cultural sphere from the EU nations of Central Europe. Furthermore, many EU residents simply feel that they lack an understanding of the "complicated" ethnic relations in the area and so can't judge the rightness or wrongness of the situation.
Europeans would probably be happy if Ukraine turned westward, but many years would have to go by before Ukraine was considered "one of us" enough to go to war to protect.
I live in Europe but own no car. However, I travel around ten thousand kilometres a year here by hitchhiking, so in talking with my drivers I have long thought about the demographics of car ownership on the continent. Basically, it comes down to:
Businessmen who can afford the luxury
Families with children; the convenience of being able to cart your tykes around on weekends and holidays makes up for the expense
People who live in remote areas where there are only one or two buses a day
However, it is much less common for young, single and lower-middle class people here to own a car. In my student years, not a single one of my acquaintances at university owned a car, while friends from high school back in the US often couldn't live without one if they were studying outside of a city centre.
How many people in France know Finnish? Almost none?
Hi there, I'm an American who studied in Finland for free, and the process of going there to study was pretty effortless. Even if I spoke no Finnish (or Russian, my field's lingua franca), my department was happy to let me concentrate on language learning for the first year or two before moving on to my real coursework. University of Helsinki is full of foreigners, some of which never really learn Finnish, so your claim that the language is a real barrier doesn't wash.
As for having the money to study here, beyond there being no tuition fees, nearly all non-EU foreigners who come to study in Finland get funding (800€ a month, not luxury but sufficient) and housing for their first year as a matter of course. With a year's head start, one then has plenty of time to find some part-time employment or scholarship for the following years.
Why should the OP, presumably living outside Russia, "get involved" when this is something that ultimately depends on the Russian people? The ultimate reason that Snowden cannot start a conversation is widespread apathy among the Russian population, and the OP is in no position to change that without opening himself up to claims of "political interference" or "furthering US (EU, whatever) interests".
I'm not sure that amateur radio has been dumbed down as much it moved from proficiency in something annoying to young people (Morse code, inhaling solder) to something annoying to older people (digital modes, software stacks) while keeping the level of brainwork involved about the same. I've since left the hobby, but when I was active in my local club, the old boys who ran the show didn't really care for discussion of new technology, since computers baffled them. They much rather would have talked about CW on a QRP transmitter that they soldered themselves (without really understanding how it works) from a QST article.
The human race was not the only race in that book. The spacefarer woman encountered other planets whose civilizations had disappeared (eventually meeting the last centaur). It was with that subplot that the idea of a race holding its ground instead of expanding outward was explored.
Russia has just admitted that it really did move members of its armed forces into Crimea prior to the annexation. How do you think they managed that without people catching on?
Could you cite this please? It was my understanding that the "little green men" were simply Russian servicemen already stationed there because the peninsula has long served mainly as a large military installation that Russia leased from Ukraine. These servicemen just put on new uniforms without insignia and drove off their bases to seize the surrounding area. I'd be interested in any publication you might point to that claimed that the "little green men" were secretly moved there from Russia proper. (And even if they were, considering the normal flow of personnel between Russia and Russia's base on the peninsula, it probably could have been kept low-key regardless of the actions of a Snowden.)
Because the future of humanity depends on getting off of this rock eventually.
Using a phrase like "the future of humanity" suggests that humanity as it currently exists has a future. As technology progresses and the merging of man and machine becomes a possibility, who knows that future inhabitants of this planet will want or need. In his novel Marooned in Realtime, which deals with a technological singularity, Vernor Vinge speculated that an advanced race might decide to just burrow deep underground and live in a virtual reality there instead of expanding out into the cosmos. Sure, you could argue that billions of years from now civilization would be threatened by the sun expanding into a red giant, but that's hardly a case for the need for human beings to get off Earth now or anytime soon.
If he were a whistleblower, we would have seen revelations in the press, not a document dump to the public.
The "document dump" to the public wasn't from Snowden, it was from Greenwald and Poitras. Like a number of whistleblowers who Americans have come to praise in respect, Snowden gave these documents to journalists and asked them to redact them before release to the public. If you have any issues with how that played out, Greenwald, Poitras and other news figures involved are the ones to blame.
Not to mention a lack of taking several hard drives full of data to the Russians
Rumours circulate that most if not all of the hard drives that Snowden had with him upon his flight to Hong Kong were decoys.
Hesiod never said that and that same quotation has been ascribed to many people. Failing to check a citation and perpetuating a spurious quotation is little different from lying.
That would be 2001. I had a PDA (Pocket PC) at that time that was internet-capable. However, when wi-fi was not yet widespread, the only way you could get on the internet with the thing was a complicated modem setup, plugging a cable into an extension card. Getting data over a mobile phone link still involved the horribly primitive technology WAP. So, a fat lot of good your portable device did you. The smartphone and the tablet could not really take off until wi-fi and cheap 3G did.
Keep belittling the power of people, forget about Rosa Parks and many others who through civil disobedience have change this country for better.
Rosa Parks was not a "spontaneous uprising". While in American schools her story tends to be misportrayed as a case of a solitary dissident (an issue fascinatingly explored in educator Herbert Kohl's Should We Burn Babar?), in reality she was active in the local NAACP and her and her fellow civil rights aspirants had been waiting for the perfect moment to further their cause.
Rosa Parks is an example of dramatic social change coming from committed, organized groups and not spontaneous outbursts of individual discontent.
Which is of course regulated by law, for German the Duden holds the currently recognized words and their correct spellings as well as meanings in common use.
I take it you weren't around in the 1990s during the last major German spelling reform, when a number of German-language institutions announced that they would not be following the new rules in their publications?
As a linguist, I am very familiar with Truss's book, and I can assure you that it is not taken seriously as scholarship. As prescriptive pleading, sure, it's a classic, but it offers no support for the claim that loosening of orthographical standards seriously impedes human communication (or one's thought process, going back to the OP).
Sorry, that should read "Human language naturally contains some level of ambiguity, it is simply unavoidable. However, this does not typically lead to mutual unintelligibility."
it may now be safe to start teaching how to read fraktur / black letter type again or the German speaking nations will miss out entirely on the original books and literature pre 1930 or so.
Lots of peoples have abandoned their publications of earlier eras to obscurity and don't think twice about it, sad as it may be for lovers of books. Ottoman Turkish is completely unintelligible to contemporary Turks, partially because the Arabic script in which it was written was swiftly disposed or and even most educated Turks can't be arsed to learn it and read their heritage. Geoffrey Lewis's The Turkish Language Reform: A Catastrophic Success is a pretty accessible presentation of this phenomenon.
Similarly, Latin-alphabet scripts were created for the minorities of Russia after the October Revolution, and there was an explosion of native-language reading and writing in the 1920s. However, Stalin came along and obliged all minorities to use a Cyrillic-based script, and no one makes an effort to read the Latin-script books that have survived today (athough most were pulped, as paper was scarce at the time of the switch).
Kazakhstan has long toyed with the notion of switching to the Latin alphabet, as Turkey, Turkmenistan, and the Tatar intelligentsia have done, but the prospect of the people being cut off from a century of Kazakh literature gives official circles pause.
Eventually if too many linguistic rules and word meanings are discarded, communication becomes essentially impossible as statements don't have the same meaning to both parties in the discussion.
You really need to read some Saussure, especially the principle of l'arbitraire du signe and the distinction between langue and parole. This science is a century old at this point, there's no excuse for an educated person not knowing it. Human language naturally contains some level of ambiguity, it is simply avoidable. However, this does not typically lead to multual intelligibility, and most of the human population handles diaglossia just fine.
Furthermore, this is a discussion about a writing system, not a language. Writing systems too have a great deal of ambiguity, starting from the ambiguity in the speech they represent and then going from there. Just think about how many different lexemes are represented in speech and writing as <set>, or how two different tense forms with two different pronunciations are represented as the single grapheme <read>. And yet, readers handle that just fine.
As an English speaker, your own language's history in writing should be enough to disabuse of the notion that divergent spellings are a threat to society. English spelling in the 18th century was not yet firmly established, and yet that era saw an explosion in popular literacy and scholarly publication.
We've tried "free trade" for the last thirty years, ask a 22 year old on their 500th resume submission how well that's worked out for us.
That 22 year-old might not hear you, because he'll be too busy staring at the screen of his smartphone, which he was able to afford because the Western companies developing the technology were able to outsource the manufacture to somewhere cheaper. Knocking down trade barriers does have its drawbacks, but it also allowed the explosion of cheap electronics that people today do not want to live without regardless of how hard the job search might be.
You told your fellows here to look at a Google image search where there were both murals painted as a result of some community-authorized project and others painted without permission. For you to now claim that you were advocating for authorized artworks is disingenuous.
Slashdot Mirror
In this day and age, it's seen as unnecessary and a burden to carry around a music player like an iPod or a separate point-and-shoot digital camera, because people recognize that as basically a computer in their pocket, the smartphone they already have should do it all. You really think that people want to cart around a portable DVD player too?
Teaching full degree programmes in English is a very common phenomenon in Europe now, it's a general part of European integration (universities in a given country want to be open to students from other EU nations) but lots of Americans, Chinese, wealthy Arabs, etc. take advantage of this too.
For those degree programmes where there is not teaching in English, you have to understand that except for the hard sciences (which requires visiting a lab), attendance at lectures is not obligatory in Finland and various other European countries. You are free to simply do the reading on your own and just come in twice a year to take exams. Since so much assigned reading is in English, and many departments will allow you to write the exam in English, there isn't much need for Finnish skills to make it through university. Of course, to fulfill degree requirements, one must at some point take a three-semester course of Finnish as a foreign language, but many people pass the exam for that without ever really reaching conversational ability in the language.
Actually, I didn't speak Russian when I arrived there either. My first year or two was thus spent learning Finnish and Russian, and only then I moved on to taking courses related to my "major". But there is no list of "'allowed languages for free tuition", there were no language demands on me when I went to study there. When it came to the application process and proving my qualifications, I did all that in English.
If Google wanted to hire non-CS-degree people that show critical thinking about language skills, they would more likely turn to people with a linguistics or maths degree who have at least some familiarity with computational linguistics. Indeed, as a Iinguist, though working in a different part of the field, I have a number of colleagues who swiftly found gainful employment at IT companies because they could demonstrate interest in the computational side of the field.
However, as much as I respect the scholarship involved in an English degree, and read quite a bit of literary criticism as a hobby, I don't think that that field really prepares students in a way that makes them desirable to specialist IT teams.
The professor might realize that this situation is unfair and decide that he will do things differently in the next academic year (but you will have moved on by then). However, American universities often have a strong financial interest in making their students buy expensive textbooks year after year, because they run campus bookstores.
Why would you have expected the EU to go to the aid of Georgia? For one, Georgia already was ineligible to join NATO because it lacked full control over the territory it claimed (Abkhazia having been de facto independent since the 1990s), so it had no guarantees as a part of a defensive alliance. Two, the Russians were seizing a single province that had already expressed discontent with being part of Georgia, and it was not threatening the survival of Georgia in general as an independent state. Three, as countries where the army is mainly seen as defensive, projecting force into the faraway Caucasus is probably not something they've ceaselessly drilled on. Fourth, the broad population here does not care much about Georgia, it is just too far away and while Georgia is in fact culturally remarkably "European", most people in the EU don't know that.
The same point about lack of broad public support holds for Ukraine too. I live in a EU country bordering on Ukraine and there is zero passion about protecting Ukrainians from aggression. They are seen as belonging to a very different cultural sphere from the EU nations of Central Europe. Furthermore, many EU residents simply feel that they lack an understanding of the "complicated" ethnic relations in the area and so can't judge the rightness or wrongness of the situation.
Europeans would probably be happy if Ukraine turned westward, but many years would have to go by before Ukraine was considered "one of us" enough to go to war to protect.
I live in Europe but own no car. However, I travel around ten thousand kilometres a year here by hitchhiking, so in talking with my drivers I have long thought about the demographics of car ownership on the continent. Basically, it comes down to:
However, it is much less common for young, single and lower-middle class people here to own a car. In my student years, not a single one of my acquaintances at university owned a car, while friends from high school back in the US often couldn't live without one if they were studying outside of a city centre.
Hi there, I'm an American who studied in Finland for free, and the process of going there to study was pretty effortless. Even if I spoke no Finnish (or Russian, my field's lingua franca), my department was happy to let me concentrate on language learning for the first year or two before moving on to my real coursework. University of Helsinki is full of foreigners, some of which never really learn Finnish, so your claim that the language is a real barrier doesn't wash.
As for having the money to study here, beyond there being no tuition fees, nearly all non-EU foreigners who come to study in Finland get funding (800€ a month, not luxury but sufficient) and housing for their first year as a matter of course. With a year's head start, one then has plenty of time to find some part-time employment or scholarship for the following years.
Why should the OP, presumably living outside Russia, "get involved" when this is something that ultimately depends on the Russian people? The ultimate reason that Snowden cannot start a conversation is widespread apathy among the Russian population, and the OP is in no position to change that without opening himself up to claims of "political interference" or "furthering US (EU, whatever) interests".
I'm not sure that amateur radio has been dumbed down as much it moved from proficiency in something annoying to young people (Morse code, inhaling solder) to something annoying to older people (digital modes, software stacks) while keeping the level of brainwork involved about the same. I've since left the hobby, but when I was active in my local club, the old boys who ran the show didn't really care for discussion of new technology, since computers baffled them. They much rather would have talked about CW on a QRP transmitter that they soldered themselves (without really understanding how it works) from a QST article.
The human race was not the only race in that book. The spacefarer woman encountered other planets whose civilizations had disappeared (eventually meeting the last centaur). It was with that subplot that the idea of a race holding its ground instead of expanding outward was explored.
While the disappearance of humanity remained a mystery for the whole novel, Vinge ascribed this fate to another, alien species.
Could you cite this please? It was my understanding that the "little green men" were simply Russian servicemen already stationed there because the peninsula has long served mainly as a large military installation that Russia leased from Ukraine. These servicemen just put on new uniforms without insignia and drove off their bases to seize the surrounding area. I'd be interested in any publication you might point to that claimed that the "little green men" were secretly moved there from Russia proper. (And even if they were, considering the normal flow of personnel between Russia and Russia's base on the peninsula, it probably could have been kept low-key regardless of the actions of a Snowden.)
Using a phrase like "the future of humanity" suggests that humanity as it currently exists has a future. As technology progresses and the merging of man and machine becomes a possibility, who knows that future inhabitants of this planet will want or need. In his novel Marooned in Realtime , which deals with a technological singularity, Vernor Vinge speculated that an advanced race might decide to just burrow deep underground and live in a virtual reality there instead of expanding out into the cosmos. Sure, you could argue that billions of years from now civilization would be threatened by the sun expanding into a red giant, but that's hardly a case for the need for human beings to get off Earth now or anytime soon.
The "document dump" to the public wasn't from Snowden, it was from Greenwald and Poitras. Like a number of whistleblowers who Americans have come to praise in respect, Snowden gave these documents to journalists and asked them to redact them before release to the public. If you have any issues with how that played out, Greenwald, Poitras and other news figures involved are the ones to blame.
Rumours circulate that most if not all of the hard drives that Snowden had with him upon his flight to Hong Kong were decoys.
Hesiod never said that and that same quotation has been ascribed to many people. Failing to check a citation and perpetuating a spurious quotation is little different from lying.
That would be 2001. I had a PDA (Pocket PC) at that time that was internet-capable. However, when wi-fi was not yet widespread, the only way you could get on the internet with the thing was a complicated modem setup, plugging a cable into an extension card. Getting data over a mobile phone link still involved the horribly primitive technology WAP. So, a fat lot of good your portable device did you. The smartphone and the tablet could not really take off until wi-fi and cheap 3G did.
Rosa Parks was not a "spontaneous uprising". While in American schools her story tends to be misportrayed as a case of a solitary dissident (an issue fascinatingly explored in educator Herbert Kohl's Should We Burn Babar? ), in reality she was active in the local NAACP and her and her fellow civil rights aspirants had been waiting for the perfect moment to further their cause.
Rosa Parks is an example of dramatic social change coming from committed, organized groups and not spontaneous outbursts of individual discontent.
I take it you weren't around in the 1990s during the last major German spelling reform, when a number of German-language institutions announced that they would not be following the new rules in their publications?
As a linguist, I am very familiar with Truss's book, and I can assure you that it is not taken seriously as scholarship. As prescriptive pleading, sure, it's a classic, but it offers no support for the claim that loosening of orthographical standards seriously impedes human communication (or one's thought process, going back to the OP).
Sorry, that should read "Human language naturally contains some level of ambiguity, it is simply unavoidable. However, this does not typically lead to mutual unintelligibility."
Lots of peoples have abandoned their publications of earlier eras to obscurity and don't think twice about it, sad as it may be for lovers of books. Ottoman Turkish is completely unintelligible to contemporary Turks, partially because the Arabic script in which it was written was swiftly disposed or and even most educated Turks can't be arsed to learn it and read their heritage. Geoffrey Lewis's The Turkish Language Reform: A Catastrophic Success is a pretty accessible presentation of this phenomenon.
Similarly, Latin-alphabet scripts were created for the minorities of Russia after the October Revolution, and there was an explosion of native-language reading and writing in the 1920s. However, Stalin came along and obliged all minorities to use a Cyrillic-based script, and no one makes an effort to read the Latin-script books that have survived today (athough most were pulped, as paper was scarce at the time of the switch).
Kazakhstan has long toyed with the notion of switching to the Latin alphabet, as Turkey, Turkmenistan, and the Tatar intelligentsia have done, but the prospect of the people being cut off from a century of Kazakh literature gives official circles pause.
You really need to read some Saussure, especially the principle of l'arbitraire du signe and the distinction between langue and parole. This science is a century old at this point, there's no excuse for an educated person not knowing it. Human language naturally contains some level of ambiguity, it is simply avoidable. However, this does not typically lead to multual intelligibility, and most of the human population handles diaglossia just fine.
Furthermore, this is a discussion about a writing system, not a language. Writing systems too have a great deal of ambiguity, starting from the ambiguity in the speech they represent and then going from there. Just think about how many different lexemes are represented in speech and writing as <set>, or how two different tense forms with two different pronunciations are represented as the single grapheme <read>. And yet, readers handle that just fine.
As an English speaker, your own language's history in writing should be enough to disabuse of the notion that divergent spellings are a threat to society. English spelling in the 18th century was not yet firmly established, and yet that era saw an explosion in popular literacy and scholarly publication.
Can you cite this from a peer-reviewed publication, please? If this is really such a problem, surely you can back it up with scholarship.
That 22 year-old might not hear you, because he'll be too busy staring at the screen of his smartphone, which he was able to afford because the Western companies developing the technology were able to outsource the manufacture to somewhere cheaper. Knocking down trade barriers does have its drawbacks, but it also allowed the explosion of cheap electronics that people today do not want to live without regardless of how hard the job search might be.
You told your fellows here to look at a Google image search where there were both murals painted as a result of some community-authorized project and others painted without permission. For you to now claim that you were advocating for authorized artworks is disingenuous.