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Comment Re:Multiculturalism (Score 5, Interesting) 221

I wasn't biligual as a child, but I am now at least.

For me, from the moment on I was able to not only communicate, but also think in both languages, a lot changed.
Certain concepts click together easily in one language, but if I had to use the other language to grasp them, I'd get stuck. And it's not always my first language which is superior, as you might expect.

Each language brings with it a different way of thinking, the cultural aspect, that's coded into it.

It's very helpful to switch between languages for different tasks. Kind of like using mutiple virtual desktops.

Comment Re:There is no problem (Score 5, Insightful) 183

You are approaching it from a legal standpoint.

But sometimes things that are legal can still be problematic. This here is part of such a problem.

With the big U.S. internet companies providing world wide services, they tend to impose american moral standards on everyone of their customers.
Companies like Facebook have rules concerning profanity and 'adult' content, that abide american standards, Google filters what an American would consider morally wrong and so on. Even in countries that don't care much, when someone shows a boob on TV, these same rules are applied.

Why is this a problem?
Because it is shaping public opinion. A former more liberal community will get used to these puritanian concepts when exposed to them all the time and it will change that community.

If you have a hard time understanding this problem, because you are from the U.S. yourself, imagine if all the big internet companies were from Iran instead. Imagine how that would start shaping your daily life, if you had to abide to Iranian moral standards when doing pretty much anything online.

Comment Re:Only smart phones? (Score 1) 196

It depends on who 'you' are in this case.

If 'you' are the service provider, then you know the RSSI of the phone as seen from it's connected cell. You would still like to know other cell RSSIs as seen from the phone, to be able to do a triangulation for a more precise positioning. You need a databank on cell IDs/locations to do this. Google for example has a very good one, that you can gain access to under certain contracts. I'd assume service providers have them anyway. There are also some open databases out there for this purpose.
I don't know if the connected cell is authorized to request such information from a phone. It would make sense, as this might be useful information for some use cases.

If 'you' are someone else, who is just running software on the phone, ie the phone vendor, you will need to make the phone report this data to you first, in order to use it.

Comment Re:Only smart phones? (Score 4, Informative) 196

The most basic tracking function is achieved by monitoring the RSSI and cell ID of surrounding signal masts. Possible on any phone.
Uploading this data can be done over GSM or even SMS, which any old phone can do too. They too have some personal information about you to link with this, but of course not as much as smartphones.

People often forget that the phone is an autonomous device that can do things on it's own and without showing any of that activity on it's UI side. They only see it do things when they push buttons, so they assume that pushing buttons is a required part for the phone to be able to do things.

Comment Re:You can't call that biology (Score 1) 111

It is flawed, because it does not make any sense.

If two foods share a certain molecule, then that is the same as one food having the molecule and one lacking it.
You have the molecule in your mouth from food 1 alone already. You will not be able to taste, which food the molecule you're tasting came from. So it does not matter at all, if food 2 also has this molecule. That would only increase the total amount of that molecule in your mouth, which you would also get by eating twice as much of food 1 at once.

And we all know, that two pieces of sugar don't really taste any different than one piece of sugar.

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