You clearly have never seen Return of the Living Dead. Just destroying the brain is not enough. You must ether be cremated or at least have an ample supply of brains to eat, otherwise you will be driven mad by the pain of your own flesh rotting.

Sorry, but you're wrong. 1500 characters won't get you much unless you're working vocabulary is much bigger. First, I know a little over 3000 characters and about 11,000 words, but I can barely handle newspapers without the aid of a dictionary, much less doctoral thesese. My reading speed is painfully slow. Second, because of my inability to process newspapers, newscasts, etc., I would not comfortably call myself fluent. Maybe a low level of fluency, but that is really pushing it. I'm hoping that once I get to around 15,000 words and 3500 characters, that I will be just about there.

While I do call in to question the GP's figure of 50, I would say that true fluency is a rare thing among westeners. A near native proficency can still make you a clebrity here.

The author states that he intends to be fluent by 2016 by studying in his free time. I don't think this is likely to achieve fluency unless you're living full time in a Chinese speaking enviornment. Of course 'fluent' word that tends to get thrown around indiscriminantly and rarely used in the linguistic sense of true fluency. If he means functional or conversant, then it's definitely doable. If, however he means C2 on the CEFR scale, then 5 years of full time study might be enough to achieve that, but it's not guaranteed.

I will say that he's on the right path using Pleco & spaced repetition. These tools mostly appeal to us engineering types, but I can tell you that they truly exploit the power of your memory.

Chinese is just a harder language than others. It presents numerous challenges for non-native speakers, especially westerners. These include:

* Difficult writing system
* awkward pronunciation
* difficulty distinguishing tones
* numerous characters associated with any given syllable which makes it diffulcult to infer meaning of new words that you haven't heard before.
* abbreviated forms, (i.e. huan2bao3 - huan2jing4 bao3hu4)
* Larger vocabulary. To understand 90% of all content in English, you need to know about 5000 terms, with Chinese, that number is about 9000.

So, if you're the type that likes a challenge, then it can be very rewarding, but just realize what you're really up against. Most folks who take it on give up before reaching true fluency.

Depends on your goal and circumstances. If your goal is to be conversant, I would say go with simplified, unless you plan to live in a country where traditional is used heavily. If your goal is to be fluent, that is a very very long road, so to study both forms requires less than 5% additional effort if you do it the right way.

Yes, they apparently needed a foreign expert to teach the locals how to stand in line. Those of you who have been to China will know that standing in line is a skill that is in short supply among local Chinese.

Now that technology has made this largely irrelevant, congress finally passes a law. This would have never happened 20 years ago when commercial interests would have kicked and screamed saying that it's not fair. If we pass laws it should actually count for something. This was a total waste of congress's time and enforcing it will be a waste of money.

I would assume that deciding to do it separately would be the only logical decision. Traditional to Simplified mapping is not 1:1. There are a decent number of cases where two or more Traditional characters map to 1 simplified character. There are also other cases that are 2:2. Managing the transformations centrally would likely be a nightmare.

Maybe this bit of science doesn't have much practical usage just yet, but maybe they could somehow exploit the improved memories of these snails on meth to prevent dups right here on Slashdot.

If it's really such a great force, how come the pipe itself is not just eroding? Wouldn't that kind of force just rupture the steel?

And for these critical pipes, wouldn't it be better to design them with an external conector so that a larger pipe could be easily places around it and attached in cases like this?

So maybe this is a stupid question, but why can't they just design a big plug and stick it in the pipe? Would that cause the pipe to rupture or something? Or try to reroute the oil by attaching a big to the pipe that's spewing oil?

Guess what officer Hardass,

You may be the one who flunked Driver's Ed. You might wanna do a Google search to confirm your assertation. Granted this kind of thing could vary by municipality, but the info I found seemed to be generally in opposition to your statement.

Not only that, but by having a less intuitive law, these types of policies could result in larger numbers of traffic injuries and deaths.

Is it convenience? or is it actually going to hurt China more? In some sense, if businesses and people have come to rely to a great degree on google, then to pull out would certainly hurt China as a whole and possibly encourage an opening up from within. On the other hand, they might just figure that the Chinese market is a lost cause in the long term since policy can block out foreign competition, ala renren vs facebook. This is mostly speculation on my part and I may have no clue what I'm talking about, but just some thoughts that occured to me.

If google really wanted to make an anti censorship statement, maybe they could provide free vpn service. I imagine some heads might roll (quite literally) over that.

Owners may have suspected as much, but it seems our own human babies have found ways to manipulate their owners. Researchers have discovered that human babies use crying, begging, laughing, acting cute and sad eyes in order to overpower their owners and garner attention and food.

Had the movers lost his stuff and it wasn't insured, then i guarantee it would be more than $99 to replace it. As for me, I have a prepaid plan and a razr, which costs me on the order of $150 per year. Contrast that with about $70 per month over a 2 year period, The total cost is about $1816 (phone, voice plan, data plan, activation) over the life of the contract. Versus, $360 (used razr, prepaid minutes, activation) for me. Granted, for your $1816, you get a better plan and a better phone, but i bet that at least $300 is paying for your phone. The whole reason the carriers want to bind you to these contracts is that it makes it so much harder for a consumer to get an apples to apples comparison needed to make an informed decision, and thus reducing competition in the marketplace

Do people really buy in to the BS about an Iphone being $99? IT's only $99 if you sign your soul away for 2 years. The mobile carriers here are so fortunate to have an ignorant populace that is eager to go through the mental gymnastics required to truly believe that their iphone only costed $99.