Interesting. I didn't know they moved the Siegessäule. Reminds me of what I read about the approach to the Vatican and the way Mussolini obliterated bits of (messy) historic city to achieve a suitably scenic and impressive vista.
For a look at just how hands on early motoring was, check out this article about Kipling and cars (he was an enthusiastic "early adopter"): http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/rg_steamtactics_kipearly.htm
Reading this really does sound like the early days of computing (or as I imagine from reading about it).
I guess this is why I have free to play games sitting on my phone but never play them. They take me through a tutorial full of tasks and menus and resources and I subconsciously feel intimated by all the work.
Yup. By no means a developer, but I Python was the first programming language I learned and I always felt it was my native language. I was happy to stick around with 2.7 for as long as it was there, but I guess this is the motivation I needed to learn Ruby or Haskell. :-(
The quotes in the Wired article are all kind of the opposite though. For example:
"Today, 99.9 percent of humanity cannot beat the best commercial software at blitz chess. Within the decade, it's likely the machine on your desk will know how to play chess better than any human has played the game since its invention in AD 600."
I suppose that really just makes your point though. Even in 1995 we were only really trying to delay the inevitable. If playing chess is ultimately a mechanical process and baking bread is ultimately a mechanical process, then ultimately we should be make able to make a machine that does it better than we can.
Yes, I remember my local supermarket had 'recommended' products that were marked like they were specials, but were not actually discounted at all. I appreciated the business logic, but basically stopped shopping there.
Yup, almost everything in I have ever worked with in Japanese to English translation has been shackled by the need to produce English translations optimized for English speaking Japanese readers.
I think I'm going to go back and finish Paolo Bacigalupi's The Water Knife. It feels less like dystopian science fiction and more like realistic observation than ever at this point.
Well, Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy had both. The premise of William Gibson's The Peripheral also seems to be that the development of futuristic technology is not going to stop, it's just going to exacerbate the unequal distribution of resources.
From the article:
"From left to right, these rosettes show the surprisingly beautiful paths of Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus as seen from Earth. "
One of the university labs I had to use did not allow access to Netscape for whatever reason, so I actually used Lynx a lot. For reading text on webpages it actually did a quite sturdy job.
You can pass N2 in one year of full time study (if you apply yourself). The multiple years tend to be when people are trying to pass it doing part time study.
If you only hear it spoken, or you don't understand the naming convention and start making guesses about what you think is going on. People in countries where middle names are normal also tend to make the assume that one of the syllables is a middle name.
I deal with the reverse of this problem all the time. Living in Japan, my bank cards (and other ID) all have my name in the Japanese order, with my surname first followed by my first name and my middle name last. Without fail, the staff at the counter will address me by my middle name, on the assumption that foreigners' names have the family name last, so that must be the right name to use.
Notably there have only been two reigning empresses since the 8th Century and none at all in the modern era. The current Imperial Household Law only allows males to ascend the throne, so they were in real trouble 10 or 15 years back before the birth of the current Emperor's nephew who is now 2nd in line to the throne. The succession is not fixed by the constitution, so they could change the law any time they like. But they probably won't unless they have to.