The Swedish tax agency also has some arbitrary times to post forms through their web site. I've had it explained to me that this is done to prevent major backlogs with (most likely) erroneous data (as people who send in their tax declaration at 2 am might be more prone to errors than at other times).
This means that if they were to have 24/7 service the taxmen and women would start each day with a back log, and Mondays with a larger backlog and then probably get even more delayed than they already are.
Now, I don't know at all if this is true or not, but I find it a rather plausible explanation.
Me as well, having Romanian parents, being born in Thailand (where they taught me English) and coming to Sweden at age two. Romanian, being the last language I learned well, is the rustiest of course.
But I too feel that one can appreciate the commonalities of all the languages, and that, at least for me, I often can see how languages are built, through the pre- and suffixes, and how they work in a Latin manner. This has helped a lot when I had to learn a fourth language in school (French for 4 years, Spanish for 2 - both being very poor now that I haven't trained).
For these reasons I am shocked that people actually thought that raising a bilingual child would do damage their intelligence, seeing how a lot of smart people have been polyglots - although that was not necessarily something they were raised to be, but still.
Well stated. From my own experience, Asynchronous DNS caused everything to actually load slower. I have no idea why, maybe it's because we are on a shared network or something.
No. I learned English at home, and I kept up with it through TV and school. Also, I've always preferred to read in English, which probably helped a lot.
As a person who was raised with two different household languages at different times, I can offer anecdotal evidence that this holds true. My refugee parents decided that their native language (Romanian) would be an obstacle for me in their new country (Thailand) and went for English instead. Then we got asylum in Sweden and I learned Swedish in kindergarten and so on.
In Sweden my parents started speaking Romanian at home, which I also picked up. It became a coherent triangle of languages, where home we spoke Romanian, outside of home Swedish, and English on TV and in school.
I found a screensaver a couple of years ago that did basically the same thing (http://i.document.m05.de/?page_id=438), and I improved on it some (quadrupled the outputs).
Don't forget that Sweden also has 25 days minimum of vacation time annually. USA is, from what I gather, one of the few countries in the world that does not have a legally required minimum annual leave.
To be let go earlier is not only a problem of asking, it's also that you are entitled to three months of salary. So, most of the time, they would like to keep you in order to not have triple the salary costs (one for you, one for the new guy and (virtually) a third for whomever is occupied with training the new guy instead of doing their regular job).
Rather, there was no widespread knowledge and/or consensus on how a social network should be at the time. Models were a plenty. For example, Lunarstorm started out some 3 years (2000) before MySpace and in a year (2001) reached 600k users (it would plateau at 1.2m in 2007) but it had none of the Geocities stylings of MySpace. Instead it had a feed of your friends' activities, private messaging, notes (called diary), and message boards. It's just that the Internet back then was not the sharing ground it has grown into today, and people in other countries than Sweden were probably not aware of this particular site.
This is not far from how most of Sweden operates. Most offices comply to the idea of "half-day before holiday" notion and as where fixing the dates wouldn't interfere with that too much, I doo believe that fixing Christmas to a Saturday would make a lot of Swedes angry.
For one, we celebrate the 24th, and having the 25th on a Saturday sure gives Friday and half of Thursday off. But the 26th is also a holiday, which would then be on a regular Sunday. New Years Eve is not a holiday, and having that on a constant Friday would open the days between Christmas and NYE as a work week. Where as now some years you can have a nice long (10-14 days) vacation with only a couple days of actual leave, because the rest are considered national holidays. (Example: 2012 I can get 14 days off with only 5 days of leave.)
