They made him a "martyr" in a way, and martyrs have a tendency to have a long shelf-life. Plus, it brought a lot of questionable US practices into light and on public mind. At this point, I do not think we saw the end of it all yet.
204 karma · joined January 3, 2019
A fair warning to those who haven't read the article yet but are planning to: Be warned that it contains very explicit elements, not for the feeble of heart.
For example in Valais while most people pay it, you are not obligated to do so.
The entire "serverless" movement seems to preach something that is impossible. You can't have internet without a server. You can offload server management and maintenance onto a provider, that is true, but you can't remove it entirely from your stack. So preaching "serverless" architecture is disingenuous and IMHO rather ignorant.
What I mean by that is, when weighing between keeping 911 records sealed for the sake of privacy; against releasing them to the public for the sake of public service (for example for performance review, reconstruction of the chain of events ...), shouldn't the public's interest prevail (as in many versus one)?
As a European, this bothers me on so many levels. Government should not for one, sell your personal data and furthermore should make sure if it provides access to it, that it isn't used for anything marketing like.
From what I've been able to gather from that website, PugSQL is a wrapper around SQLAlchemy. So my question, why do we need a wrapper around an already well established, popular, robust and very powerful library?
Where I live (Switzerland) the minimum to have is the information text translated (the one at the back). But the brand itself can remain as it is. Usually however, you do see a bit more translated, such as subtitles or things like what type of product that is, like "whole-grained bread" and things like that.
Also we're lucky to be in the middle of Europe, so companies that export to France and Germany tend to create one double translated product for both countries and it's imported to Switzerland as well.
But yea, if you force double work on the companies without any rational reason behind, then they might try to reduce costs by simply avoiding the market altogether.
Romansh is spoken only in one of our "provinces" (Canton Graubünden) thus is considered too tiny to be supported on the national scale for official purposes.
If your only argument against doing business in a country because of the language requirements, you aren't a good businessman/woman. Because you are sacrificing a market share for something that can be easily done: translate once, print indefinitely.
It's not about whether anybody cares about a specific language anywhere outside of a province. It's about maintaining a language as one of the elements of the culture and country's identity.
If only criterion to keep or strike a language as official one was whether it's spoken by a majority or a minority, then you'd be living in a dictatorship of the masses (where majority decides for everybody else).
Learning a second or a third language is not a burden. It's an opportunity. An opportunity to immerse one self into a different culture, different world view... It should be seen as gift to widen one's perspective and not a financial burden.
And using the money as an argument against this or that is a dangerous slippery slope. Because with the same argument one could argue against a lot of other things: "Why maintain a universal healthcare, it costs too much!", "What? Maintain free education? Who needs that, it costs too much!"... And so forth, and so forth.
"We should adopt English and move on; majority of people know it and study it. Why regress?" - Sorry but I have to disagree here. While I think it is important to study English, I am not convinced it would be a great idea to abandon other languages in favor of it. Languages are part of a culture and it's traditions. Abandoning the language might lead to a progressive death of certain cultural aspects of one's identity and that wouldn't be progress, imho, that would be the exact opposite.
Why is there an absolute must to only have one official language? Why not chose several most widely spoken ones, including English, and let each speaker chose the one that suits them best?
I live in a country where we have 4 national languages and 3 official ones. Our members of parliament can express themselves in the language of their choosing and their speech/intervention is translated for the rest. That way people can express themselves in the language they are most comfortable in (that is often not English, unless it's their mother tongue) and that does not put older generations (who never learnt English) at a disadvantage.
Having one single language in a multicultural setting can be tricky.
Source: [1] -> Q&A regarding the public intrusion test -> Is the federal government allowed to pay for hacker attacks?
[1]: https://www.bk.admin.ch/bk/en/home/politische-rechte/e-votin...