In most dictatorships, people can actually vote. They might be thrown into jail for voting for the wrong person (i.e. the opposition) or their vote may have no impact (because wrong votes are corrected later) but they can vote.
Look at Egypt, for example. They did have elections, a parliament, and so on. It was just that for some strange reason, Mubarak's followers won the elections by a large margin.
You are forgetting that some of us smoke because
No.
You talk yourself into believing that you enjoy it because you know it's bad and don't want to accept that you're an addict.
Cell phones won't make car navigation obsolete. They haven't made car stereos obsolete, either.
The real reason, however, is not what the author of the linked article thinks. The real reason is that they are just made for two different types of usages: The cell phone or smartphone is the device you carry with you (absorbing MP3 players and PDAs). The car nav is the device you use in your car. Simple as that.
The two classes of devices do share a lot of common hardware: processors, RAM, flash memory – and yes, some phones do come with GPS and some car navs do come with WWAN radio. But that's not the point. The hardware is not important and its price is neglectible. It's just a container for the functions and usage patterns. In other words, it's not important what the device is but what it does and where it does it.
The smartphone does everything in your pocket; the car nav does navigation in your car. Different devices.
Actually, local solar time instead of a nation-wide time zone was the standard... until the invention of the railway, which cut travel times and brought time tables.
It's not because English is a vernacular language for most people that it is the de facto lingua franca for the rest of the world. Let's not forget that for a very long time, French was the language of diplomacy for a few centuries, and the official language in the European Union, until the UK and Ireland joined in and bullied their way through.
That's b/s. The European Communities did never have a single official language; it used all of the Member States' languages in parallel from the beginning. (Well, some institutions do have a working language, eg the European Court of Justice uses French internally, probably because its located in Luxembourg.)
BTW, when the UK and Ireland joined, there was no European Union.
Please don't confuse lingua franca and a vernacular language.
Please don't confuse modern French and lingua franca, which originally referred to the Frankish language, a West Germanic language only remotely related to Romance languages such as French.
In other words: The rest of the world speaks English because: a/ it's an easy language, b/ most of English speakers are too lazy, or can't be bothered to learn another language.
That's only because English is already useful enough, so there is no need to learn a different language.
The reason for English being such prevalent is, of course, the British Empire spreading it.
Or you could just use "steps" (where one RPG "step" = 1 metre).
Well, they're huge steps... but the real-word "foot" isn't quite the average shoe size, either.
No, timezones are one hour apart and the international date line is the edge between two timezones,...
Dead wrong.
Just look at, no read Wikipedia: Most of the IDL is actually in international waters at the 180th meridian and separates the +12:00 time zone from the -12:00 time zone. The difference is 24:00, which is the usual time span of one calendar day.
However, inhabitated land masses and islands tend to have deviations in their time zones, yielding differences between 21 hours (between Russia and Alaska) and 25 hours (between Tonga and International Waters around it).
Or just use a different punctuation character for ports. If you think about how the design of URLs could have been better, other decisions are not cast in stone. The ':' also clashes with the separator in IPv6 addresses (which is an oversight on part of those who designed IPv6).
http:org/slashdot/tech/story/... (use SRV record)
http:[org.slashdot;8080]/story/... (use hostname and port)
http:[123.45.67.8;8080]/foo/... (use IPv4 address)
http:[2F00:BABA::1;8888]/bar/... (use IPv6 address)
http:[47.0012.3400.0000.006F.7123.8f23.4012.0c80.0000.00]/ha/... (just kidding)
tech.slashdot.org:80/story/09/10/14/1219215/Tim-Berners-Lee-Is-Sorry-About-the-Slashes
Now the browser would think the protocol is tech.slashdot.org and tries to pass it to a responsible program instead of loading it. This means you would now need to actually type in the http: which none of us do now.
Who is typing the '//', then?
Safari 4 on Mac OS actually interprets
I think the lack of female involvement in projects is actually the cause of the sexism, not the other way around. [] So maybe if more women actually bothered to get involved, it wouldn't be considered an all boys club and comments like these wouldn't be made.
Most likely it's a feedback loop: Few women lead to few women.
A few sexist remarks are a much smaller problem than a society that discourages women in subtle ways.
Switherland became part of the Schengen Area on 2008-12-12, which is not exactly âoea few years agoâ. It's less than one year. However, not being a member of the European Union or the European Economic Area, Switzerland is still supposed to check for goods that have to be declared.
The UK is a partial member of the Schengen Agreement.
It's just one of those things car designers learnt from trial and error, like where to put a petrol tank so it doesn't explode...
This one's easy: Put it outside the view-field of a Hollywood film camera.
Does anyone know if the German laws make exceptions based on religious beliefs?.
The law does not ban the use of the swastika per se but the use of the symbols of counter-constitutinal organisations.
If you're using a swastika it in a religious context, you're technically not using a symbol that identifies such an organisation but a symbol identifying religious beliefs. However, you may still get into trouble because nearly everyone will think you're a nazi.
The nazi era has been part of the curriculum for quite a long time in Germany.
Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, there's even stuff following it (the post-war era), so it's not even left out because teachers run out of time. Furthermore, the nazi teachers that did not want to talk about it have retired or died out, too.
"Disney Buys Marvel For $4B" - That's 75 in decimal. But 75 of what?
An authority is a person who can tell you more about something than you really care to know.
