Paul Grice, a philosopher of language, made some pretty damn important contributions to linguistics, especially pragmatics. Maybe this can be explained by the fact that linguistics as a field is relatively young.

Many (actually I think most) professional mathematicians agree that the most likely scenario is that Fermat was mistaken and his "proof" had some subtle error.

50C = 122F is pretty useful for those who live in very hot climates.

And no one has old disks lying around with old versions of the compiler from before the server was compromised?

Republican logic too, if you replace "company" by "country". :)

Fine, then my answer changes to "stay at home and donate the money for your plane ticket to charity".

Figure out if any open-source software is widely used in Africa, and contribute to it. A month should be easily enough time to implement a new feature or track down a few bugs.

I don't have any figures to back this up, but I'd be willing to bet that this was also true of Twitter, Gmail, video games, and the Internet itself in the beginning.

(1) That's an exaggeration. (2) The Beijing accent is not standard Mandarin.

René Barjavel's Ravage (Ashes, ashes in English) is pretty spot on, if not about specific customs and technologies, then about modes of life in the future. It's set in the 2050s, but the world has already evolved remarkably toward Barjavel's vision. I recommend it for everyone.

But the 'r' can only be found in a restricted set of syllables (at least in Mandarin, I have no idea about the other languages of China), so Chinese people still substitute 'l' for 'r' when speaking English. Perhaps less often than Japanese people do; I wouldn't know.

I wasn't talking about economic policies. I was talking specifically about telecommunications companies having the state in their pockets, which is a totally separate issue.

I'm certainly not a bright enough economist to pronounce myself one way or another on the content of your post.

I've lived in France for about a year, speak, read, and write French fluently, and keep up with French (and Western European in general) current affairs pretty closely. So I'm not an expert, but I hope I'm not presumptuous in claiming to know more about it than you do by reading Slashdot :)

Again, I maintain that Europe is moving in the wrong direction -- and rather quickly, at that -- but that it's still better off than the United States

The ONE day I don't have mod points....

Really? Ron Paul is the only candidate that is neither democrat nor republican? You must be out of your mind.