rett12

It is there another alternative to Skype that is peer-to-peer, has encryption and works on Linux?

Native speakers seem to do fine. Learning a language while growing up, having the Hiragana as a helper, while all your media is written in Japanese makes everything easier. When they finish school they know enough Japanese to go by. It's obviously different for non-native people.

Also, it's not like you stop learning even after school. For example English has according to the Oxford dictionary 171,476 words in current use excluding inflections, and several technical and regional vocabularies. Does all English university students know these words?

Korean didn't work at all under the imported Chinese system. Japanese also had problems but they solved inventing the Hiragana, a syllabary system. Both languages chose different systems and both languages work fine.

Also Korean avoids many homophones thanks to it's 10 vowels. Japanese has 5.

Sometimes I wonder if all these people that criticize or that think that a Latin alphabet can be adapted seamlessly to all languages have tried to study past a beginner level any logographic language.

It doesn't work due to the insane amount of homophones. When you are speaking with someone you have context and you can discern the meaning of what it's said. But random words or texts can change it's meaning depending of what character is used. And the tone system doesn't help as it can be seen in Chinese pinyin.

For example, how many kanji can be read as 'shuu'/しゅう: http://jisho.org/search/%E3%81%97%E3%82%85%E3%81%86%20%23kan...

Try to do that with tones.

Seems nice but is only for Mac OS X. Is there an alternative for Linux or Windows?

I suppose everyone here is already on a list anyway. Everyone who leaves a criticism for the NSA. Everyone who up votes this conversation and other similar ones. Everyone who contributes to OSS Privacy. Everyone who misspells Thor. How useful can this really be when there's so much noise?

The rating methodology is absurd. Just looked at the Science and Technology ranking:

- Rating includes noble prizes which span more than a hundred years.

- Ukraine, Bulgaria and Bosnia are above the US. Don't have anything against those countries at all but it seems strange.

- Belarus is at 36 and Egypt at 45 while JAPAN is at 46! It seems the number of international students skews the data way too much(and doesn't seem that relevant for a science and tech rating)

That could be considered as discrimination against big tall men(not overweight). Another thing is luggage.

Beware of those who would control your access to information, for in their hearts they dream themselves your master.

The problem is that by the end of 2015 the situation in Spain could improve(I really don't see that happening and if it happens is because the improvement in Europe is dragging Spain). Also in the elections of 2011 the main parties lost almost 4 million votes (from 21.5 to 17.8 million). http://resultados.elpais.com/elecciones/generales.html But it's true that the projections seem to show that trend, still both parties get +60% votes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_next_S...

> TV is still the main source of information for people and it's taken completely by main parties. However in social networks we are already winning, in just 1 years we already have more fans than main parties and people talks about us.

Social networks are used mainly by young people, and Spain is an old society.

>(...) because we are organized in network without leaders.

I have yet to see a country without leaders and a large well organized group of anything without leaders. It's really naive.

Nonetheless Spain needs people that starts changing things (like your group), and everything can change by Dec 2015 but I'm not optimistic.

I really don't understand the electorate in Spain. Just looking at how the two main parties took 75% of the vote in 2011 (down from 83%). And it doesn't look like it's going to change. Compare that to Greece (Pasok went from 40% to 8%, Syriza nonexistent 8 years ago almost won) or Italy (with the rise of Grillo's Movimiento 5 Stelle). Does Spain need a new party with a powerful personality at the helm or after all it has become a de facto two party democracy?

The book called "Amusing ourselves to death" by Stuart McMillen addresses this question. Really recommend it.

http://zorzap.files.wordpress.com/2010/01/huxley-orwell.gif

China debt(According to CIA): 31.7

US: 72.5

Japan: 214.3

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_public_de...

" Anonymous social networks have been (thus far, anyway) in the category of services that get worse as they get bigger--unlike services like Facebook or Twitter that get better as they get bigger"