From my experience (as a french guys more interested in tech than literature) I really 'learned' spoken english by dating an UK girl (also joined a polyglot club: http://polyglotclub.com/, but living it was a real step forward, nothing compared to years of learning at school). That's the ultimate card up your sleeve to learn a foreign language.
Autism in France is addressed ; autists kids have special classes in public schools (with non autist kids, so they share free time, lunch etc...., this kinds of system is aka as IME). Also those kids are mixed with non-autist kids during classes (a few hours a week). All in all, the system try it's hardest to make them feel normal (IMO).
What would you expect from a society dealings with disabled (nothing bad) ?
Nothing has changed since I last looked when I was living in Quebec.
> What would you expect from a society dealings with disabled (nothing bad) ?
What do I expect, or what do I hope? I expect that people assume that because they hospital visit for a broken leg is "free" and "good", that it carries over to autistic support, and that any suggestion otherwise is absurd and alarmist. This is usually the case.
I'd hope that they take the concerns from parents seriously and not be dismissive, even if it means they have to admit there are flaws in the system.
To my mind the big news is Turbolink, A simple tech to build SPA with the following roots :
- the robustness & ecosystem of the rails server side (great testing stack & battle tested backend)
- the lightweight approach of rails/javascript, which is opting out of jquery : meaning that SPAs won't have to include jQuery and the whole JS world (client side speed will be greatly enhanced)
- the overall simplicity (no huge javascript stack pilling angular, react, redux, flux, webpack etc...).
I just want to say "Privacy matters, thanks you" (even more when FB decided to leverage their like/share button for a global ad netwotk) :-) non tech saavy guys may love a simple .sh / .bat to automatically add those entries to the /etc/hosts on windows & unix
Telling "non tech saavy guys" to pipe URLs into their shell (or hosts file in this instance) is a pretty bad idea. You're training them to engage in risky behaviour and be even more gullible.
I'm using DuckDuckGo as a primary search engine. Unfortunately for complex queries, search results are less relevant than google.
Also Instant search is great when I'm searching for an API method or something really specific.
But form time to time I'm looking for an epiphany search: something focus on programming, close enough to get some inspirations in order to refine my search query a few times : then I find the perfect query.
My feeling is google enable this kind of exploration/iterative searching : not DDG :-(
Saying that I truly want to stick to DDG... and Instant search is not the feature that I need.
So a "dream feature" would be to search only a subset of your index : between 9.AM until 7P.M I only want answers from tech blogs, stackoverflow, stack exhange etc... A kind of "search profile". Is it possible ?
A list of checkboxes in which categories should be searched "programming" with subcats "programming - java" would be nice.
This selection should then automatically include and priorise sites like github, stackoverflow, ....
And users should save this selections to own search preference list which they can switch (one click when you are at work)
That book was a huge eye-opener to me. It's practically a Nazi-level concentration camp situation, but because they're only doing it to their own people and one of their allies is China, the world does nothing.
The world would have watched Hitler in peace too, had he not decided to blast through Belgium into Paris. After that the world watched China end the lives of tens of millions (as many as, or more than the entire NK population) during the Cultural Revolution. The world watches as Boko Haram and countless other organizations murder and rape their way across Africa. The world watches as Qatar puts on the most impressively visible modern example of slavery, and what does the world do? Remain excited with the sport and the event. The world watches as organized crime and cartels wage paramilitary war against the Mexican people, dropping busloads of kids into mass graves. The world watches as political islamic extremists take advantage of crumbling governments in Syria and Iraq to murder, steal, kidnap, and destroy across the region.
Point is: the world watches a lot of things, and when someone like the US steps in, they are lambasted as no greater than the evil we expect them be willing to fight.
North Korea remains unmolested purely because it does not molest other countries. If they do, China will aggressively end that behavior or implicitly allow the US to so through inaction.
Generally speaking I agree with you. However when you get to the "someone like the US steps in", I would like to make a few notes.
1. there is no other nation "like the US" but USA. Not even China or Russia have the kind of global presence and military power. Not saying that the US would be able to win a war against these nations, just pointing out that how you phrased it like the US taking steps is like any other nations taking steps, and this is simply not true.
2. Another issue with the US stepping in, is that from experience when the US steps in, that doesn't end well:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covert_United_States_foreign_re...http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Menu
I do not in any circumstances blame any leader personally for these things, and I definitely do not associate the actions of the US with the citizens of the US, and I also know that even if the US would've been the most peaceful, least aggressive superpower, some other nation might've done worse things.
But I think that the world would be a much better place if the US would've "stepped in" in different ways, or even if they would've not done anything of what in the links are mentioned. (and of course I only scratched the surface here)
no, because they have a shit ton of artillery aimed at Seoul, tunnels under the dmz that can be packed with explosives, possibly nukes (which even if fizzlers could do a lot of damage)... and China.
there are in the perfect situation to do evil and get away with it.
Even funding a insurgency would be difficult. the population is so downtrodden they must have forgotten what freedom is (think 1984). the penalty for disobedience is your entire family in a concentration camp.
I worked with one lady who had a boyfriend in the U.S military stationed in South Korea. Turns out NK often sends over mortars, every time her boyfriend would have to end the conversation. Something which we never hear about.
It's actually a bit silly of me to refer to "the world" as though it's one coherent, unified entity. The U.N. is closer to what I was imagining, but regardless, what I'd like to see is a strong push for North Korea to open it's borders in exchange for a lightening of sanctions. The NK leadership's power is retained almost entirely through keeping people in the dark.
On a wackier, cantankerous note, I also envision a scheme of dropping solar-charged epaper tablets and blasting the entire country with free WiFi to make locking down knowledge about the outside world impossible.
I'm firmly against outright military intervention (no drones either).
> what I'd like to see is a strong push for North Korea to open it's borders in exchange for a lightening of sanctions.
What would the value be to the NK leadership to do that? Worrying about the well being of the population? I think they've made it pretty clear that's not really high on the list of priorities.
As you said, they stay in power by keeping people in the dark. No one voluntarily gives up power.
Also, you might find the Frontline story on North Korea interesting.
If only stuff were as easy (regarding your epaper-plan). Propaganda has been there since ages. It does not work well on foreign nations, because people are suspicious of everything their enemies say. WWII would not have changed a bit if all Germans had known of Auschwitz (many did - people got news from the BBC after all!). Kim Jong Un has lived in Europe, and apparently, he did not like what he saw. People's minds are very complicated.
>The U.N. is closer to what I was imagining, but regardless, what I'd like to see is a strong push for North Korea to open it's borders in exchange for a lightening of sanctions.
That wouldn't fly with them. Their entire governmental ideology is based upon something called "Juche" which means 'self reliance'. It would kinda be like asking the US to give up the first amendment in exchange for some trade goodies. Just not gonna happen.
>The NK leadership's power is retained almost entirely through keeping people in the dark.
This isn't true. People are not in the dark as much as you might think. They are vaguely aware of what goes on outside the country's borders. It would be impossible for them not to be. This is partly why a year ago the NK government released a list of "best places in the world to live". China was #1 because North Koreans are able to watch the Chinese get rich and the government couldn't deny it.
The leadership's power is predicated mostly upon two things :
A) Propaganda that makes the citizens afraid of the outside world - US and Japan mostly. Unfortunately, when the US does shit like invade Iraq, saber rattle Iran, and sticks nukes on the 38th parallel (did you not wonder why NK developed nukes? THAT'S why), it's not that hard to convince North Koreans that they are under mortal threat. The strong censorship helps a lot with this, but the propaganda would probably still hold pretty well without it.
B) A gift economy. The leader showers his underlings with maseratis. He showers his underlings with jewellery. He showers his underlings with alcohol. Etcetera. All the way down. The hierarchy is very well cemented in by strong ties of loyalty. Chop off the head and all of that remains.
>On a wackier, cantankerous note, I also envision a scheme of dropping solar-charged epaper tablets and blasting the entire country with free WiFi to make locking down knowledge about the outside world impossible.
This type of thing has been going on for a long time (hell, we've had short wave radios for how long?). It doesn't really seem to be working.
Yes, the North Koreans get this stuff sometimes, but seeing a DVD of Friends doesn't immediately inspire them to overthrow their government and the smart ones are rightfully terrified of owning such contraband.
I'd be more optimistic about this strategy, too, if propaganda didn't work so well on American citizens, who have all of those things and yet still believe absurd lies fed to them by their leaders.
