I also always say this to others. It doesn't matter if it works 99.9% of the time. It took them maybe 10 years to get the software to this point. But it will take 50 years to solve the rest. And nobody is going to use the systems before that.
Just a side-note, Channel 4 is an entirely separate wholly commercial public-service broadcaster, whereas the BBC is publicly funded via a license that's required to watch live TV
>Channel 4 is an entirely separate wholly commercial public-service broadcaster […]
For completeness, from [1]:
>Although largely commercially self-funded, it is ultimately publicly owned; originally a subsidiary of the Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA),the station is now owned and operated by Channel Four Television Corporation, a public corporation of the Department for Culture, Media & Sport […]
Esperanto has many many more speakers! (People joke about Klingon having more but it's not true.) Really accurate numbers are hard to come by but even based on estimates, it's no contest:
"Arika Okrent guessed in her book In the Land of Invented Languages that there might be 20–30 fluent [Klingon] speakers."[1]
"In 2009 Lu Wunsch-Rolshoven used 2001 year census data from Hungary and Lithuania as a base for an estimate, resulting in approximately 160,000 to 300,000 to speak [Esperanto] actively or fluently throughout the world, with about 80,000 to 150,000 of these being in the European Union."[2]
In fact, Klingon has fewer total speakers than Esperanto has native
speakers:
"As of 1996, there were 350 or so attested cases of families with native Esperanto speakers. Estimates from associations indicate that there are currently around 1,000 Esperanto-speaking families, involving perhaps 2,000 children. In all known cases, speakers are natively bilingual, or multilingual, raised in both Esperanto and either the local national language or the native language of their parents."[3]
(Also Esperanto is much easier than Klingon, has much more material to read, and is spoken by a wider variety of people than just science fiction fans, though there are plenty of those too.)
EDIT: The "160,000 to 300,000" quote was from an older version of the Wikipedia page (I based this comment on an old comment of mine). The current version has various estimates, including Lindstedt's ballpark figures of "10,000 speak it fluently" and "100,000 can use it actively".
Prof. Sidney Culbert of the University of Washington estimated 1 million to 2 million fluent Esperanto speakers about a decade ago. He is the only person I've heard of who has done actual research (he produced the number-of-speakers figures for some 100 languages for the World Almanac). Some methodology at http://www.panix.com/~dwolff/docs/culbert-methods.html.
Personal attacks break the site guidelines. So does using HN for ideological battle. The combo of the two is particularly ban-worthy. Please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and please don't post like this again, regardless of which ideology you favor or how wrong the other one is.
I don’t see how your insult adds any value to the conversation. I can equally argue about you narrow-mindedness while bluntly stating the opposite argument.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cockta