Well, mine’s the case of a minority language (Irish) where, even on the off chance that some professional outfit were paid to do the translation, it’d more than likely be of very low quality. Basically either (a) it wouldn’t get done or (b) it’d be really bad, so in the end I’d rather just do it myself, even for free.
As someone who’s done a fair bit of translation on Twitter’s crowdsourced translation dealio (https://translate.twitter.com/), I can say that Twitter’s deliberately ambiguous use of language (for various reasons, e.g., as here, avoiding any explicit specification of tense, as well as of gender, number, &c.) can be very difficult to parse in a precise and accurate manner, especially without enough context.
Metric is taught and used in school (middle, high, university) in the US for any sort of math or science, leastways anywhere I’ve ever been… If I were using any kind of tools to measure things and make calculations, I’d use metric, but in daily life, viz. in speech, it’s easier for me to just use the familiar imperial—especially if I want to make myself easily understood to normal people.
If such an innate (genetic) tendency towards fairness existed in humans, it would likely have quite a spectrum of phenotypic expressions. I.e., even if everyone had a sense of fairness, odds are that such a sense would not be exactly the same for each individual.
Not really the best analogy: telegraph/phone lines sit there passively and pose no apparent immediate danger, while the aforementioned UAVs would present an active threat to wrongdoers’ wrongdoing and thus become targets...
The low carrier support and the lackluster hardware have indeed hindered the platform. As a college student with a Windows Phone, however, I can attest anecdotally both to the operating system's (mostly the UI's) popular appeal and, on the other hand, to widespread popular distaste for the brand itself.
With other, tech-ignorant college students as my data points, I have found that most people's first impressions of the OS are quite positive, ranging from "oh, that phone's nice" (and they aren't talking about the physical device, a bland, somewhat chubby HTC Trophy) to "that's the coolest phone I've ever seen." As mentioned, these aren't people into tech I'm talking about—most of them have iPhones because they wanted one, or everyone else has one, or because there parents got them, so they did, too. I thus do not actively promote my phone in any way—all I've been doing, when I've gotten these sorts of responses, has been showing someone what someone else texted me, or some other datum or whatnot.
When they inevitably ask—"what kind of phone is that?"—and I say "Windows Phone," they, just as inevitably, immediately lose all interest.
This may parallel, I suppose, the reason Xbox, for example, remains instead successful years after its introduction: one of my uncles called my dad on Christmas day this year concering some computer or network problem (my dad, as a software engineer, of course bears that burden in our family), and mentioned incidentally that he had gotten my cousin an Xbox as a gift. My dad, who used to work for Microsoft and still gets a discount on their software, suggested that he might have been able to save some cash had my uncle told him ahead of time, or that he could still save on games if he wanted. What did my uncle say, however, but "oh, I didn't know it [Xbox] was Microsoft." Indeed, my uncle to this day refers to Microsft in conversation with my dad as "the evil empire."
So yeah, I think the brand name itself, however irrational the reason, hasn't helped at all. Also, there isn't a single actual window in the Windows Phone OS... Time to change up the name.
Not necessarily—at least for some Flash interfaces, you can still get images loaded by Flash out of your browser's cache, as, e.g., with Opera's opera:cache cache explorer.
I guess you're right, though, in that by removing the plain old right-click+save option it adds at least somewhat of a barrier for the unmotivated or uneducated would-be thief.
Well, some people show up on mine with whom I've never interacted save making/accepting the initial friend request: this would seem to indicate that recent interactions weren't necessarily part of it.
