In belgium, there are two (well actually three, but German isn't that wide-spread) national languages: dutch (also referred to as flemish) and french. (for the record, I'm speaking as a Flemish person)
You start learning French at school at about 10 years of age, so people usually grow up speaking both flemish and french to some degree. In high school, they usually throw in a bit of german or spanish. English is also usually a big factor in high school, but even if it's not, it's becoming very widespread amongst the younger generations.
That multilingual nature is rather deeply entrenched in our culture. On the train the other day a couple was alternating between dutch and french during a conversation. In casual conversation it's not unusual (especially online) to switch between say dutch and english. Lectures at college are sometimes in different languages as well. For example, sometimes the course material is in english, but the teacher speaks dutch, or the other way around. Or the teacher teaches in english, but takes questions in dutch.
I have never (thank science!) seen a dubbed movie, they are simply accompanied by subtitles (in theaters the subtitles are both in french and flemish at the same time: top one is french, bottom one is flemish).
As far as I understand, there is some limited automated captcha breaking, but most captcha's are broken by outsourcing them to foreign countries where people just look at them and send back the answer. If this is correct, then there is simply no way to make a good captcha.
Cloud computing, as we generally view it: keeping data offsite and running apps over say a browser. There is nothing worse in my eyes. First, I like to hang on to my data myself, second, I like being able to toy with programs (read: open source & local).
And yet, I develop most of my apps to be website-driven.
This is because I like to have most of my stuff on a central computer under my control. Also, I generally develop my apps so I can in fact host them somewhere else, but very easily retrieve copies of the data. This make them highly accessible and yet circumvents the problems I stated above. I still control the data and I can toy with the program as much as I want.
What I never get when it comes to these copyright-infringing applications and cease and desist notices being sent about and what not...why not simply host it outside the US? How can anyone actually stop applications such as this is they are hosted all over say Europe and Asia. Outside of the US (and the UK, which I generally see as America's sidekick), there are a lot of countries without such stringent laws or where they are simply not being enforced as much as in the US. (serious question by the way, I always wonder about this when I see copyright infringement, patent cases etc...)
PS: I don't mean big companies who have to actually be legitimate entities in order to do bussiness, I'm talking about small programs made in someone's free time
In Belgium, I just go out to the store, by myself a cellphone of my own choice, pop in a sim card of whatever operator and buy prepaid cards. Want to switch providers? No problem, you can keep your number and everything.
As far as I know (seem to remember reading something about this in the paper around the time the iphone first came out), it's even forbidden here to couple contracts to cellphones.
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In belgium, there are two (well actually three, but German isn't that wide-spread) national languages: dutch (also referred to as flemish) and french. (for the record, I'm speaking as a Flemish person)
You start learning French at school at about 10 years of age, so people usually grow up speaking both flemish and french to some degree. In high school, they usually throw in a bit of german or spanish. English is also usually a big factor in high school, but even if it's not, it's becoming very widespread amongst the younger generations.
That multilingual nature is rather deeply entrenched in our culture. On the train the other day a couple was alternating between dutch and french during a conversation. In casual conversation it's not unusual (especially online) to switch between say dutch and english. Lectures at college are sometimes in different languages as well. For example, sometimes the course material is in english, but the teacher speaks dutch, or the other way around. Or the teacher teaches in english, but takes questions in dutch.
I have never (thank science!) seen a dubbed movie, they are simply accompanied by subtitles (in theaters the subtitles are both in french and flemish at the same time: top one is french, bottom one is flemish).
As far as I understand, there is some limited automated captcha breaking, but most captcha's are broken by outsourcing them to foreign countries where people just look at them and send back the answer. If this is correct, then there is simply no way to make a good captcha.
Cloud computing, as we generally view it: keeping data offsite and running apps over say a browser. There is nothing worse in my eyes. First, I like to hang on to my data myself, second, I like being able to toy with programs (read: open source & local).
And yet, I develop most of my apps to be website-driven.
This is because I like to have most of my stuff on a central computer under my control. Also, I generally develop my apps so I can in fact host them somewhere else, but very easily retrieve copies of the data. This make them highly accessible and yet circumvents the problems I stated above. I still control the data and I can toy with the program as much as I want.
What I never get when it comes to these copyright-infringing applications and cease and desist notices being sent about and what not...why not simply host it outside the US? How can anyone actually stop applications such as this is they are hosted all over say Europe and Asia. Outside of the US (and the UK, which I generally see as America's sidekick), there are a lot of countries without such stringent laws or where they are simply not being enforced as much as in the US.
(serious question by the way, I always wonder about this when I see copyright infringement, patent cases etc...)
PS: I don't mean big companies who have to actually be legitimate entities in order to do bussiness, I'm talking about small programs made in someone's free time
In Belgium, I just go out to the store, by myself a cellphone of my own choice, pop in a sim card of whatever operator and buy prepaid cards. Want to switch providers? No problem, you can keep your number and everything.
As far as I know (seem to remember reading something about this in the paper around the time the iphone first came out), it's even forbidden here to couple contracts to cellphones.