So let me get it straight, freedom of press is OK only when it's of no consequence? Do you tell me that North Korea and the USSR had been making the right decision to block and jam the Western radio?

That's OK. ISPs just have to provide equal opportunities (within reasonable bounds) for Netflix competitors to interconnect their own CDNs.

Should that matter? Freedom of speech should mean even the freedom of speech that you don't like. Even if you think its propaganda or pure nonsense.

There are double standards in play in Europe.

Yes, that's OK as long as CDNs are independent business entities and ISPs do not discriminate on price and hosting conditions.

If they are independent entities then I don't see a problem. If an ISP starts to discriminate against them (for example, favoring one CDN) then the bill will apply to that situation.

CDNs are third-party entities that provide you a service. ISPs are not allowed to discriminate against them.

President Holland declared that France will stand for freedom of speech with more than 100000 people marching out to support it.

Meanwhile in Lithuania just today two Russian TV channels were banned because of their 'one-sided views' on lots of problems.

Dude, taxes are way down since 50-s or even 60-s. Stop smoking that untaxed crack cocaine.

I speak a little bit of Udmurt which is in the same language family as Finnish so I know what you're speaking about. Simple comparisons like this are meaningless. With highly flective languages it's important to learn the grammar - it then starts helping you by giving cues to the meaning of unknown words.

You can reasonably expect to being able to read novels and newspapers after 1 year of studying an 'easy' language like French or German. You certainly won't be fluent but you'll be able to understand the general idea of any reasonable text. With Chinese it's more like 3-5 years (I've heard that Japanese is actually easier).

Uhm, I'm a non-native English speaker. I'd say that learning that the word order in English sentences is meaningful is one of the stumbling blocks but not even the most painful one. My native language is Russian and the word order is not fixed there, so Yoda sentences like: "When nine hundred years old you reach, look as good you will not" are often completely normal for Russian speakers.

For me the most complicated part of English is. its pronunciation. And also maybe its grammar tenses (Russian has no direct equivalent of present perfect and future-in-the-past).

Whut? English is _easy_: no grammar cases, simple pluralization rules (with a handful of exceptions), only about 100-200 of irregular verbs that are still in use, grammar tense system familiar for just about every West European language speaker and so on.

Sure, there are problems like a disconnect between spelling and pronunciation but this is minor compared to, say, leaning the grammar case system in Finnish. And even the pronunciation problem is not so bad if you mostly communicate in _writing_.

Mandarin as a language is not that hard to learn. It's fairly regular and very analytic (almost no word changes), even tones are not that hard to get right after you practice a little. I was able to pick up enough of Mandarin from my girlfriend in several months to be able to ask for directions in China.

However, _written_ Chinese is unlearnable. Simply forget about it. You really need to memorize thousands of symbols just to be able to read an everyday newspaper. Writing is just as hard - imaging having to learn several completely new scripts (Russian, Greek aaand Arabic) at the same time.

Phonetic spelling using one of many Romanization schemes is also problematic because Chinese is very homophonic - lots of words sound exactly the same.

Platinum and other noble metals are expensive because they are genuinely hard to extract - the yearly production is measured in _tons_. If we had access to cheaper supply of these metals from asteroids then we'd be able to significantly increase their use. And that means cheaper fuel cells, more durable alloys, better catalysts in chemical plants and so on.

No, I'm not breaking the speed limit on purpose, local traffic laws allow some slack for transient violations. And it certainly is nowhere near as dangerous as running red lights.