I feel like some of these suggestions would defeat Apple's minimality. Amalgamating Windows and Android's complex features with Apple would completely damage the benefits of iOS. Stripping things like personalization, information display and unnecessary configuration options is what makes Apple what it is. If you want/require Windows and Android's tech customizability, you wouldn't own an Apple device. If Apple implemented those features, it would be like Facebook reverting to MySpace's overabundance of ugly profiles and teenboppy usernames.
The idea that any 'habit' manifesting itself socially/mentally are malleable and subject to the waning nature of societal confines. We, as members of the 21st century, may reprove of homosexuality as a disease because we are tolerant of love on a same-sex basis and believe that homosexuality cannot be cured but the same could be applied to many mental disorders. People who have aspergers or social anxiety are labelled as mentally ill because they do not conform to what we deem 'socially acceptable' - a coveted title that we cannot all claim to inherit. Our entire concept of what's a 'bad habit' or what's a 'disorder' is all a matter of social convention, leading us to label and shun people who do not fit the convention.
We live in a world where extroversion and all-roundedness are redeemable qualities, just as stoicism and reservedness was valued in Ancient China. The problem lies in the fact that society - the sole determinant of economical value - sees certain values as appropriate to the state of world and beneficial to its continued function. Human beings are biologically wired to adapt to social changes, and despite our wishes for society to adapt to accommodate us, there are instances where we need to make ourselves viable assets to an ever-evolving society. We obviously cannot change our personalities completely, but every course of action we take - from putting on deodorant to forcing ourselves to pass niceties to people we detest - are testament to the fact that we conform to what society demands of us.
For Mandarin (not sure about Japanese), the plugin would definitely benefit from pin yin supplementation at the 'novice' level. Non-latin characters are difficult for people whose primary language is a language of Latin derivatives. But implement this, they would have to take Google's pre-existing translation tools and translate the translated text into pinyin using something like the Ruby on Chinese Pinyin tool (http://www.kawa.net/works/cantonese/canton.html).
But at the moment, the plugin seems to expect people to have prior knowledge of the language and its so-called immersion revolves around reading and literacy uptake. Pin yin is more for speaking/oral purposes so translating articles into phonetic characters is unconventional for languages that are not meant to be read in such a way.
I'm pretty sure that Google Translate already supports Pinyin since it shows the pinyin on the dedicated translate.google.com page (click the pronunciation guide button after you translate something to Mandarin - it's the capital A with an umlaut).
Yeah, the fact that they named it 'immersion' makes it pretty misleading. My idea of immersion has always been using that language and only that language. The official definition of immersion is 'a method of teaching in a foreign language that involves exclusive use of the language'. The plugin's implementation is more like the opposite of immersion.
I'm still skeptical of people without prior knowledge of the language using this plugin because learning via computational translations is unnatural and detrimental to beginners who don't know any better. Beginners don't know when something has been translated wrongly or if that phrase is how a native would express it. This makes the plugin a little redundant, since their market would have to be people who are neither beginners nor completely fluent (since someone that is fluent can engage in actual immersion). The only instance where the plugin would be useful is for people with prior knowledge of the language (can read and write it to a certain extent) but would like to expand their vocabulary bank.
This is an interesting idea but awkward to use. I am semi-literate in Chinese so I selected intermediate Chinese immersion. I like that the words can be reverted to the original language, but having these Chinese words littered amongst a sea of English words is odd and difficult to process. If you go through an article and you're met with a Chinese word, your brain can't immediately process the new language. The constant switching between languages when it comes to reading is quite cumbersome, even if it is for the sake of learning. This is particularly so for languages of different forms like English and Chinese. Words/phrases that are slang cannot be directly translatable, which is detrimental to beginners who do not know that it has been incorrectly translated. I think it is mildly useful for intermediate leaners trying to increase their vocabulary set but not for language immersion or introduction to a new language.
But would you need to use the tool if you could read an entire passage in that language? If you were literate in that language, you could just go to a native newspaper website and read those articles (something which I cannot do). And I think a mildly fluent person would find translated passages hard to read, which is why I don't translate Chinese websites into English (aka Engrish). The only advantage the language immersion plugin has is the ability to hover over the passage if you don't understand what it means, but it's annoying to do if you just don't understand an individual word/phrase and the whole passage gets reverted to the original language.
Didn't they try to block porn sites last year? David Cameron ostensibly proclaimed that 'porn sites corrupt the British nation' or something in that vein. The UK is beginning to get a tad too draconian for the 21st century.
He of course didn't mind the support of Murdoch's media empire, including the UKs most popular newspaper (The Sun) which carries naked women on page 3 everyday
There is an on-going tabloid newspaper campaign where they are trying to force the ISPs and politicians (especially the opposition) to adopt or commit to an "opt-in" for porn on Internet connections. That is, the default would be required that ISPs take on the cost and legal culpability to block porn.
It's the same as what my mobile network (O2) do as well, I tried to read a news article to do with poker, and I got a "This content is rated as over-18. Please call us to have it unblocked" (paraphrased - as I can't remember precisely what it said)
If it's the same as what Vodafone does with their content control, then let me assure you it's completely broken. With the filter turned on, I can access any porn site I tried, but some articles - I couldn't.
