mtts

Your #2 reminds me of something Bjorn Lomborg (yeah yeah, I'm not a fan either - nor a hater, in fact, I just don't know enough about the nuances of the issues involved to have an opinion that's well thought out enough to defend) said in an interview on Dutch television years ago.

He said the money spent on implementing Kyoto was much better spent combating the direct effects of global warming, for example by building dikes in areas that were too poor to build them themselves and that were likely to be affected by rising sea levels, like Bangladesh.

To my layman's ears, that sounded quite reasonable.

It still does, in fact.

W3Schools is nothing more than a simple to use (google) and navigate (google) collection of pages with tons of reminders to jog your memory about what exactly it was that a specific css selector or html tag did again.

If you use it to learn PHP programming you're doing it wrong. If you use it to learn MySQL, you're doing it wrong. If you use it to learn how browsers work, you're doing it wrong. As a Cliff's notes for HTML and CSS, however, it is more than adequate.

Jameson, aka the whisk(e)y for people who don't like whisk(e)y.

It's smooth, soft and pleasant, nothing like the nasty, grating stuff they produce in Scotland. A favorite of mine, for sure.

There's no such thing. Tequila is nasty poor man's liquor, only made palatable to yuppy palates by insisting you can only enjoy it by inbibing in a taste bud numbing cocktail of salt and lime juice before you drink it.

That said, I enjoy a good (=nasty) tequila every now and then. Just like I enjoy a good glass of paint thinner aka Moutai on occasion: give the ol' taste buds a little workout.

Maybe that's exactly the point - they're consumer OSes. And while Android already does this, with intents, I doubt most consumers are very happy with this feature (if they even know it exists).

You want to do something with an image, for example, and you're greeted with a huge list of apps that all claim to handle images. Not only is it hard to find the app you want, most of the ones in the list have nothing to do with the task you're trying to accomplish. Hardly user friendly behavior.

FWIW, I personally don't really mind the huge list and can find my way around it, but I'm a heavy Unix user that does most of his work in the terminal already. Most consumers are not.

Wack job ideological frenzy: the cultural revolution

Increase population growth: One of Mao's slogans was "The more people we are, the stronger we are". Some graphs here: http://www.slideshare.net/isc/china-population-policies

> Necessity is the mother of innovation.

It is, but it is not the driver of it. China was an agrarian country with insane population growth before Deng Xiaoping took office and yet the remedy of the government at that time was to increase population growth even further and spur on the youth in some sort of whack job ideological frenzy.

At some point, some people took some responsibility and turned the ship around. To my mind this is the most important thing to keep in mind about the current Chinese government: it may be staggeringly corrupt and have an absolutely frightening human rights record, but for the past thirty years it has done a surprisingly good job in reducing poverty for hundreds of millions of people. This does not mean they should be forgiven their abuses, but their successes definitely deserve credit.

> The state is a mixed bag.

No argument there :-)

> They currently take 15% of my income to pay for my "retirement" when if I had been able to save that I'd end up far more secure in my retirement than I will with social security.

You would, but many others wouldn't. The point of collective plans like this is that it spreads the wealth around to people who otherwise wouldn't have any. Whether you think this is fair is another discussion entirely, but that's what it's meant to do and it does it reasonably well.

> Mix that with the constant wars

This is a problem, yes. The state has little incentive not to be wasteful and the US state has been particularly wasteful in this regard.

> There are a lot of other odd statements in here too such as describing the state as a risk taker as if the state is ever punished for its' failures.

Which is the point, I think. The state can afford to take risks precisely because it won't ever be punished for failures. This leads to waste, but it also allows for investments to be made in endeavors that would be far too risky for a party subject to market forces to take on.

Starting position is Maastricht? You sneaky bastard ;-)

(For non-Dutch people: Maastricht is one of the oldest continuously urban centers in the Netherlands, which makes it nice to show off this kind of technology but it's also very far away from the rest of the country. Nice city though, definitely worth a visit).

This was actually somewhat of a weak point in the story: Chinese people do not leave the heater off out of frugality but because they think it's unhealthy to have a large temperature difference between the outside of a container (a house, say, or your own body) and the inside.

Of course modern, wealthy Chinese are starting to eat ice cream in summer and turning on the heat in winter (and, to be fair, in places where it gets really, really cold, like in Beijing, they've always had heating in winter) so this attitude is changing, but some of it still persists. Bottled water (and beer in restaurants!) is mostly sold unrefrigerated and Chinese shopping malls in summer are nowhere near as glacial as their counterparts in SE Asia or the west.

I'm from Europe myself, but I'm only marginally crushed to see it go. The feature provided you with an offline map of an area, to be sure, but you couldn't navigate using it as calculating routes is done online. On a small phone screen, figuring out which route to take is not an easy task.

So I used the feature, of course, but only to figure out where I was in very limited geographical areas, in other words, mostly for small hikes.

> I bet the number of people that actually used the offline feature was a small percentage anyway.

So do I, because it was impossibly difficult to find.

Otherwise, it was quite a useful feature. For Europeans, on holiday, where they'd otherwise have to pay insanely high roaming charges. Unfortunately Google tends to be rather US-centric, so I guess as far as they were concerned it was a useless feature. Oh well.

Thanks for the tip!

I'm bored, so I'll bite. Yes, officially, Mandarin is the native language of the vast majority of China's 1.3 billion people. Unofficially, however, at most a large minority in China speak it natively. What is called a "dialect" in China often differs as much from standard Mandarin as, say, Romanian from Latin. Speakers of these dialects who live in large cities will often know enough standard Mandarin to get by, but usually only barely. Outside of mainland China and Taiwan the Chinese diaspora usually speaks either Cantonese or Fujianese languages like Hokkien. These languages are related to Mandarin, but certainly not mutually intelligible with it.

It's also a myth that the writing system is the same across Mandarin, Cantonese, Hokkien and all the other "dialects". While all "Chinese" languages use similar characters, written Chinese does not, in contrast to what is often thought, consist of pictographs. The written Chinese of a Cantonese speaker will therefore differ greatly from the written Chinese of a Mandarin speaker. Sometimes one version will merely seem "somewhat off" to a speaker of a different variety of Chinese, at other times it will make no sense at all.

With that in mind, the number of speakers of Mandarin has to be revised way, way down, to the point that it's no longer a serious contender for global language status. English is still supreme in that regard and will be for the foreseeable future, with Spanish coming in second.

Moral of the story: before you shut down a service, run it by the PR department first.

Well, yes, but if you read the result of his tests even with syncing turned off Dropbox is still eating about 500 mAh.

And that is, I would say, rather strange.

Modern ones. Checking for "Mozilla" is one (admittedly not very good) way to check if you're dealing with a browser or with some other kind of user agent, such as a search engine bot or something like that.

Urdu, I'm told by someone who speaks the language, is Hindi written in Arabic script.

Just use Indonesian. It's very non-weird, both according to the article and according to my own experience.

If Afrikaans is a non-weird language that would be because it's a creole (indiginous African and Dutch).

Don't know about Hindi, but since it's used as a lingua franca of sorts that might also be the reason behind its normalness.

Actually, what I think they've tested is wine snobbery, not whether there's a difference between red and white wine. That's what I meant by "bullshit".

Look at the setup of their experiment. They made people say stuff about the wine they were drinking. Unsurprisingly, they found people used "red" words for wine dyed red and "white" words for un-dyed wine. This is not a surprising result. The effect is called "priming" and it has been known for a long time.

It doesn't say anything about being able to taste the difference between red wine and white wine. If you do a blind folded taste test, I can guarantee you you can tell the difference. And if you happen to know red wine tends to be less acidic and more astringent than white wine, I can also guarantee you will be able to pick out which is which.

I call bullshit. There are some red wines that can work where you'd normally go for a white, such as Pinot Noir. I'm willing to accept someone can mistake a full bodied white for a thin Pinot Noir if food coloring was involved. Mistaking a thick red Sicilian wine for a bone dry Chablis? Not going to happen. Unless you're running into the effect where test subjects are trying to please the researchers and they're ignoring the fact that the "red" wine tastes somewhat unusual.

Price does indicate quality, however. In Europe, there's a big difference between EUR 3 wine and EUR 8 wine. Usually.

And only if neither wine has a reputation. A EUR 8 Bourgogne is pretty much guaranteed to be crap: you're paying for the word "Bourgogne" on the label. A EUR 8 Cotes du Rhone, however, is pretty much guaranteed to be very drinkable (a EUR 3 Cotes du Rhone: not so much. EUR 3 Bourgogne doesn't exist).

Once you go above the EUR 10 price point, it becomes hit and miss. None of these wines will be bad, but price will no longer correlate exclusively or at least predominantly with quality. In that sense the article is right.

But at the lower end of the market, where, I'd assume, most mere mortals operate, yes, price indicates quality.

> English grammar is not simple. It has what (12?) tenses. (on the contrary Russian has basically 3 tenses) And it's full of exceptions. Why 'I see', but I'm looking at you. There's simply no reason. It's an exception. Thousands of them.

This is actually not such a great example. Yes, English can express 12 tenses, but it doesn't have them in the sense that Russian, Italian or Czech do with affixes and declensions and what have you.

> Let's just take 2 sounds. etc

In this, of course you're right, but I didn't dispute this fact: English is a Germanic language and as such has a much larger number of phonemes than most other languages in the world (though it has far fewer than other Germanic languages, such as Dutch, Swedish and Norwegian, which have an - by global standards - insane number of vowels). Like I said, English isn't ideal, but it could have been worse. German, Polish or French (which has the added bonus of written French and spoken French being essentially two entirely different languages)would have been much worse. Indonesian/Malay, Tok Pisin or Swahili would have been much better in this regard, but alas, we have English.

> "In general, English spelling does not reflect* the sound changes in the pronunciation of the language that have occurred since the late fifteenth century."

Right. The ortography of English is atrocious and difficult to learn, even for native speakers. So there's that. It's definitely a point against English and it's a matter of taste whether this detracts significantly from its good points.

> Artificial != bad. We have tons of artificial things in our life that are awesome!

This, I think, is our true bone of contention. My argument is Esperanto brings very little to the table an organically developed Western European creole doesn't already have. You're free to disagree, of course, which brings me to:

> Esperanto is several times faster to learn than English for anybody (given similar conditions). Linguists say it and I second that based on experience.

Do you have sources for this? I'd be very interested to see the research on this. I would think the chief difficulty in learning a language that is wildly different from your native language is the fact that it's, well, wildly different from your native language, but I am very much open to evidence that learning a language from an entirely different language family than your own becomes easier if that language is rigorously structured and cleaned up instead of being merely an example of a worse is better organic jumble.

> Besides, once you've learned Chinese, any European language with an alphabet looks easy to learn.

Well, there is the fact that Chinese children learn Pinyin (Chinese romanization) in school. Of course Pinyin attributes different sounds to the letters of the alphabet than Western European languages do, but at least they've already seen the characters when they start learning.

In theory, maybe. In practice I've been to a number of them where they only spoke German. :-)

I think you're missing the point. A creole language, which English is, after a fashion, is a language that comes about when speakers of different languages come together and come up with something that's intelligible to speakers of both languages(1). It is by its very nature simple. Grammatical complexity is very much reduced and the phonology converges on what is pronouncable by all speakers of the new language (and therefore is reduced in complexity as well.

Now I'll grant you that the differences between Old English and Old French aren't that large, which probably accounts to English being relatively complex for a creole language, but if you compare English grammar and phonology to that of related non-creole languages such as German, Danish or French, you'll find in English they're much, much simpler. Not as simple as in Indonesian/Malay (which jumbles Arabic, Sanskrit and a bunch of Austronesian languages) or Tok Pisin (which jumbles English and a bunch of mutually unrelated Papuan tongues) but at least as Germanic languages go, English is fairly easy to learn.

Of course Esperanto is a jumble as well, but it's a jumble that is entirely artificial. I'd argue that a natural creole such as English or Swahili is superior: it's developed over dozens of years by a large number of speakers of widely differing skill levels whereas Esperanto was thought up by a small number of highly skilled language experts.

I'll agree with you that for native speakers of Indo-European langues (like mine, which isn't English, by the way), Esperanto is easy to learn and use. But my point is it is not easy to learn for people who aren't native speakers of an Indo-European language and that if you're going to make these people learn an Indo-European language anyway, you might as well just make it English.

(1) technically speaking, that's a pidgin, of course. But once the pidgin starts having native speakers, it becomes a creole, so the point still stands

edit: typo

Most contracted languages in existence are ridiculous. Esperanto is especially bad: it's just a jumble of Germanic and Romance languages that is just as difficult for a native speaker of a non-Indo-European language to learn as the languages it steals from.

In actual fact, English as a lingua franca isn't all that bad. It's a creole (of sorts) and therefore has a relatively simple grammar. The drawback to English is the fact that it's a Germanic creole and that Germanic languages have a comparatively large number of phonemes to work with. It would probably be more useful to most people in the world if a choice were made to go for a creole with a more reasonable number of phonemes, such as Swahili, Indonesian/Malay or Tok Pisin. Until that happens, however, using English is quite a reasonable thing to do.

As another data point, in the Netherlands, both variable names and comments are in (atrociously bad) English.

Wait .. doesn't turning on the bill printing machine weaken a currency instead of strengthening it?