I was going to say BitC but that language evolved away from s-expressions to something more Haskelly.

Cutting fizzy sugar water may make a difference to one's waistline, perhaps.

Pasty Aryans aren't my fancy but whichever corner of the globe one visits there are to be found affluent well educated lonesome frauleins who find English-speakers uncouth.

Pragmatically, learn German? :)

Our former, deposed, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd bignoted himself by declaring himself fluent in Mandarin. Needless to say, as PM he gave a few scripted speeches in the language, appearing prominently on the TV.

But when push came to shove, Beijing told him to get stuffed in terms of foreign policy, so a fat load of good his supposed fluency did him.

You'll hence probably find the average Australian is quite sceptical of the motives for this legislation. Learning languages is a good thing in itself but still... With Rudd still as a member of the government, the policy seems motivated by appeasing his supporters more than simply learning an Asian language for the greater good.

Even so, your average Brazilian child will be taught Spanish as a foreign language in order to participate in trade with neighbouring countries (MERCOSUL).

It's important to the identity of the people of Timor Leste. For nearly 300 years they were under the Portuguese flag until the estado novo collapsed and the Indonesians invaded soon afterwards. Rightly or wrongly, the government has reasserted its Lusophonic identity, making Portuguese again an official language alongside Tetum.

As for not being able to "do it themselves", since independence in 2002 they've relied economically on benefactors such as its neighbour Australia and the UN to provide aid. With Portugal suffering under austerity and Brazil itself an "emerging nation", only the committed from those nations will cross oceans to volunteer their time as native teachers.

I could teach English or I could (after some training) teach both. You might say my dreams of volunteering are fanciful but 'gap year' participation is a more concrete response than just buying their coffee. Is it any more fanciful than Germans (whom I knew) teaching English as volunteers in Peru?

We read and write the Queen's tongue to a high level of mutual intelligibility.

I cringe more that the world is learning "American" as a second language and having to re-educate them that there's a 'u' in colour, an 'i' in aluminium and theatre, kilometre etc.

It's a difficult accent, to be sure. To an untrained ear it sounds little like the language I waded through as a teenager.

During my travels through western europe, I found french canadians to be a darn friendly bunch - compared to other north americans. :) They were fairly accommodating in switching to English in a glorious Canadian accent...

Russian was taught at my school during the 80s. It dropped fairly quickly from the Australian curriculum after Gorby was deposed by Boris and the Berlin wall was torn down.

Arabic is taught downunder but generally to Muslim kids in Islamic schools.

So, I'm semi-fluent in Spanish and I wrote to my federal politician about incentives for learning Portuguese - no response.

Who will teach the people of Timor Leste their own official language? Certainly not interested volunteers from Australia.

We need a secondary battery to 'sleep' a device, so that you can rip out the main battery without powering on and off. :)

I thought the issue was that developers had written asm to extract maximum performance from the CPU. With the inference that shoddy programmers wouldn't cleanly decouple arch specific code.

If it's arm-specific C code then intel just needs to supply the header files and reverse engineer the libraries to link against.

Of course app vendors need to see a financial benefit in porting.

In 'legacy' software, sure.

But isn't that one of the selling points of Win8 apps that they'll run independent of resolution on phones, Win RT tablets and desktops?

Some of us are lazy to do a fresh install.

I'm still using the same HD I ripped out of a dead laptop from 2008, originally running Intrepid.

raring's KDE runs well enough that I don't care to upgrade to vanilla debian testing.

Does the PDF viewer run acceptably fast on a modern machine?

I'm running a 9yo machine and pdf.js takes forever to render. When Okular is embedded (kparts integration), it's snappy.

pdf.js might be a good choice on Windows where you have that Adobe monstrosity updating itself every few days (I have used sumatra in the past) but KDE's viewer runs faster on old Linux desktops. :-)