Date: Sat, 26 Dec 1998 18:55:19 +0000 From: Mark Ovens <marko@uk.radan.com> To: Jukka Simil <sjuke@saunalahti.fi> Cc: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@zippy.cdrom.com>, Juergen Nickelsen <jnickelsen@acm.org>, Drew Baxter <netmonger@genesis.ispace.com>, Ollivier Robert <roberto@keltia.freenix.fr>, chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Cool, A White Snowy Christmas in Sunnyvale, California 8) Message-ID: <36853117.B3CB6D32@uk.radan.com> References: <199812261727.TAA00687@sjukebox.home>
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Jukka Simil wrote: > > > What I do know is that many European countries have been famous for > > centuries for having some of the best educated populations and for > > fostering some of the greatest periods of intellectual advancement > > (like the Rennaisance) in human history. Now that we've reached the > > information age, it looks like just about everyone except for perhaps > > Finland has completely dropped the ball. What's going on over there, > > indeed, over 50% of finnish people have their (our) own personal mobile phone, > which works anywhere in the country (and in over 60 countrys over the world, > advertises Sonera,a telecommunications company) - thanks to Nokia & Sonera. > And everybody can read, the percentage is something 99+%. > But- taxes may be as high as 60+%, and budget is something 300 000 000 000 FIM > on red - about -60 000 000 000 USD. > > And about phonecalls, local phone charge is about 1$ /hour, > and my internet connection costs that + ~12$ / month. - practically my > net costs are ~ 80$ / 2 months, for 56K modem - that means about 60 hours / 2 > months connected to the internet - differs slightly from fulltime connection, > right? - well and I can't even complain about living costs (i'm 17, i live 'at > home' with my parents). > > > guys? You should have wireless, unmetered usage, IP networks covering > > every major city and federal programs where every able-bodied citizen > > over 10 years old gets a state sponsored laptop and a wireless modem. > > Villages of 40 people or more should qualify for free E1 service or > > even more if some percentage of the population is actively engaged in > > software development. Get Off Your Butts, you EC slackers! :-) > Do you read science fiction? - you should read Isaac Asimov's 'Prelude to > Foundation' - it tells about Universe-wide Empire, that is destroyed because > there is no more research and no knowledge to fix old machines - gosh, > sometimes I hate this , telling something in english, not knowing a half of > the words and only guessing if everything I write sounds weird, funny or > un-understandable. Actually your English is excellent and is perfectly understandable. We English (and Americans, Australians, I guess) are lazy^H^H^H^Hlucky. We don't _need_ to learn another language to get by in the world as everyone else speaks English. I must stress, before I get flamed for being arrogant, that this is not something I'm proud of. If I were to go to another country I would make a effort to communicate with people in their own language, as when we used to go to Greece a lot for holidays (before we had kids). BTW, I get kind of annoyed when people whose native tongue is not English post to the lists (mainly -questions) and then _apologize_ for their bad English. What have they got to apologize for??. No-one on the lists is going to critisize them or correct them, unless the errors completely change the meaning of the problem. So come on people stop apologizing, you don;t need to. I remember when I went to secondary school (late 60's, early 70's) I was really looking forward to learning to speak French but the way it was taught made it almost impossible. We were taught "grammatical French" which means learning the rules of the language, lists and lists of verbs, mainly the irregular ones, and then trying to put together sentences. Apart from being bloody boring it meant that the French you spoke bore little resemblance to the way it is "actually" spoken. I think these days things are better, kids are taught "conversational French/German" - my eldest daughter speaks more and better German after one year than I did French after 5 years. How is English taught in Finnish schools?. > Anyway , a lot of things in 'Prelude to Foundation' matches to Europe. > It's interesting. > > - Jukka S. <sjuke@saunalahti.fi> > > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org > with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message -- Trust the computer industry to shorten Year 2000 to Y2K. It was this thinking that caused the problem in the first place. Mark Ovens, CNC Applications Engineer, Radan Computational Ltd Sheet Metal CAD/CAM Solutions mailto:marko@uk.radan.com http://www.radan.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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