Interesting. The linked Wikipedia article talks about speaking and reading, and the later is indeed way harder to learn in asian languages. It would be interesting to see how this list turned out if you ignore the reading/writing. In Japanese, you can also write everything in Hiragana, for example; that's easy to learn but not as exact due to homonyms, words that are pronounced the same but have different meaning. These words usually have different Kanji, so you can distinguish them when using Kanji but not when using Hiragana. My experience is this: I'm German, have learned English and French at school (though I can't talk the later now) and have learned Japanese in an evening school (though I can't speak that one either now). I found that while Japanese has a totally different grammar than the others, it was easier to learn due to the grammar being not as complex and not having so many exceptions like european languages usually do (irregular verbs and the like). But it seems I'm the exception here.

You didn't read the posting at all, only the title, didn't you?

I second this. There's going to be a huge demand for Westerners who can talk and even write Chinese. The market is large and growing fast. An alternative to that would be Russian. But beware, although it's easier to learn the cyrillic alphabet than chinese characters, the language itself seems to actually be harder to learn from what I've heard so far: it seems to have lots of irregularities. A former colleague, who's Russian, said that after living a few years in Germany and speaking almost no Russian during that time had him forget a few of those irregularities in the Russian language and his Russian friends immediately noticed when he visited them. My father wanted to learn Russian and gave up because there are words that have flections that don't seem to be related to the original word at all and you need to learn a lot of vocabulary due to the grammar. By contrast, AFAIK the chinese grammar is "odd" for westerners but not hard to learn.

I find it a bit strange that these trading systems don't seem to use some kind of identification (like signed certificates). How is it possible that some system did these things and the stock exchange doesn't immediately know whose system this was? This sounds like a disaster waiting to happen.

The law-blogger Florian Müller has a more in-depth explanation of this issue. He especially explains how this is not an US court interfering with a German court's decision. The US court merely prevents Motorola from enforcing the injunction, should it win it.

s/unfair disadvantage/unfair advantage/

In Germany, if the court grants you an injunction it is not automatically enforced immediately. The winning party needs to explicitly enforce it.

Now a US court decided that the company Motorola may not enforce this injunction should it win it, since there are ongoing actions that have not been decided (like, whether the patent in question is actually invalid). So if Motorola were to enforce this injunction it would have an unfair disadvantage.

So the US court has not interfered with German courts: it only ruled what the company Motorola may do should it win this battle in Germany.

From the fine blog post (emphasize mine):

While you quote from the blog (even from an older entry), you seemed to didn't really read his other blog entry about Android. And BTW, their opinion is important because their apps are successful and of high quality.

I don't think Bill was threatened by the patents since, as Steve himself said, Apple wouldn't have had the endurance to fight this war. But during this time (1997) was already eyed for abusing its almost-monopoly, and losing the only "serious" competitor (which, compared to MS at that time, was still tiny) wouldn't have helped Microsoft on that front. So I guess it was more valuable for MS to avoid additional antitrust trouble. Also, despite their competition, Bill respected Steve (but the other way round I'm not so sure; Steve said he respected Bill, but while reading the bio I'm sure he lied).

For Apple, it really was an act of desperation that in hindsight payed off. But at the Macworld Expo, there was this famous presentation where Apple announced the deal, that MS would do Office for Mac and made a kind of teleconference with Bill. Bill appeared super-big on the screen, with a grin. The audience booed, which Bill didn't hear. Steve later described this as his biggest failure on stage: it made Steve look little and weak, at the mercy of the Evil Overlord Bill.

Yeah, we liked it :-) I learned a lot from these listing and find the lack of programming related topics in todays computer magazines very sad.

But back to discs: you know the saying Never underestimate the bandwidth of truck full of backup tapes, and there still are a lot of people without fast internet connection, and without flatrate. To them, it might be cheaper to get for example OpenOffice.org by magazine disc than getting it online. Plus, since you already have it one mouse click away, you might get tempted to try out stuff that you wouldn't usually waste your bandwidth for. URLs, "download codes" (kind of URL shorteners) or QR codes are cheaper (no physical medium to prepare and ship) for the magazine and you could even keep them up-to-date. But there still is a audience for these discs.