So you want to learn another language. Maybe you want to travel, to expand your knowledge, or just prepare yourself for the day when the Feds track you down and you have to flee the country. Learning a new language can be a fun, enlightening and rewarding thing to do, provided you follow one easy step: avoid the languages on this list.

In December of 1975, after a year of piecing together a bunch of new technology in a back lab at the Elmgrove Plant in Rochester, we were ready to try it. “It” being a rather odd-looking collection of digital circuits that we desperately tried to convince ourselves was a portable camera. It had a lens that we took from a used parts bin from the Super 8 movie camera production line downstairs from our little lab on the second floor in Bldg 4. On the side of our portable contraption, we shoehorned in a portable digital cassette instrumentation recorder.

Add to that 16 nickel cadmium batteries, a highly temperamental new type of CCD imaging area array, an a/d converter implementation stolen from a digital voltmeter application, several dozen digital and analog circuits all wired together on approximately half a dozen circuit boards, and you have our interpretation of what a portable all electronic still camera might look like.

Jakarta. Indonesia’s internationally infamous infant, Ardi Rizal, has reportedly kicked his addiction to smoking. Seto Mulyadi, advisory chairman of the National Commission for Child Protection (Komnas Anak), said the two-year-old had fully recovered from his addiction after a month-long rehabilitation program, involving both the commission, pyschologists and doctors.

Ardi, who shocked the world when a video of him smoking a cigarette appeared on the Internet, had been handed over to authorities to authorities in his home province of South Sumatra.

The Christchurch City Council declared a state of emergency in response to what it called “significant damage,” just hours after the 7.0-magnitude earthquake rattled residents.