qdbus org.kde.amarok /Player Play looks like it will do the former (note: I'm running trunk here, so YMMV), but I don't know if they have a dbus interface for the latter yet. Also, you might need to set up the right environment variables for that to work.

For some reason unknown to mere mortals, my keyboard only has a LeftWin key, and no RightWin key, so I have LeftWin mapped to Super_L, and the Menu key as Multi_Key (Compose).

I don't know what the problem is. Something happens almost every 200 pages.

Proper spanish translation is "Estadounidense".

They use it in Ecuador as well. I lived and worked there for most of 1998, Spanish being my working language. With no alternative languages to use my Spanish got quite good in the end, to the point that people from Spain could easily identify where I learnt it (Ecuador o Peru). They used "estadounidense" as an adjective for people from the U.S., and generally inferred that you meant something/someone from South America if you said "americano/a". Using "americano" about someone from the U.S. was plain wrong, they didn't get annoyed, most just didn't understand what you meant.

By the way, the Argentinian dialect of Spanish is by far the coolest one I've heard. It's to Spanish what the Scottish accent is to English :)

I doubt that. Usually DATA statements were read in a for loop that assumed a length of the data, so deleting anything would result in

?OUT OF DATA ERROR AT line#

You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means.

Even better: that "import" statement just tells the compiler how to resolve names: All names in the output .class file are fully qualified, and only the classes actually referenced by the code need be loaded. If you have an import statement that isn't used, or that pulls too much; it becomes irrelevant at runtime. Also, you don't actually have to import any classes; you may refer to them by their fully qualified names, and the exact same .class file is output either way.

The good news is that most of those strings also have numeric equivalents, so you can still (try) to get things to work - just as long as the variable names you chose do not conflict with reserved words in that language. For instance, in English, you would normally say:

setMode("GRAPH","FUNCTION")

but you could instead use

setMode("1","1")

to do the same thing in every language. Unfortunately, that doesn't work for every option.

In the United States, just about everyone uses "US Letter" (8.5 in. × 11 in., or 216 × 279 mm), and not "A4" (210 × 297 mm), which means that oftentimes on Linux, you have to remember to switch from A4 to Letter. In other words, there isn't really a sensible default for everyone.

More like the District of Colombia, which is why the other name everyone calls it is "the District".

Washington, DC - everyone around here just calls it "DC". I've lived in DC's suburbs all my life, and never heard anyone call it "the city".

The site's running MediaWiki, so the image description page, by necessity, is at http://theinfosphere.org/Image:Molten_Boron.jpg (also, a full size version of the image is at http://theinfosphere.org/images/7/78/Molten_Boron.jpg, but you will get another 403 if you just try clicking that link)

It's actually udev that sets the permissions on that device, and you can edit udev's configuration to change the permissions and/or ownership of the device file: add the line

KERNEL=="raw1394", MODE="0666"

to /etc/udev/rules.d/99-local.conf (create the file if it doesn't exist). Please note that there are 2 "=" after KERNEL, and 1 "=" after MODE (the first compares, the second sets). Also note that you almost definitely want 0666 instead of 0777 - you don't need to "execute" the device, only read from and write to it.