I can relate. I lived in Latvia until a year ago, and while that's a Western country by now, it's also one with much lower income levels than the "proper" Western countries, besides, the whole free market thing is kinda new there.
Thinking about the previous 10 years or so, I think I had seen people with Macs something like 3 or 4 times total. Most people I talked to didn't even know Macs existed, although starting in 2005-2006 I met a fair amount of people who had heard of Linux as an alternative option. After moving to Sweden, I literally saw more Macs being used on my first day than I had seen in Latvia, ever.
Also puts me in an interesting position where I'm a knowledgable computer geek and have used many OSes, but not OS X. The last time I used a Mac was with Mac OS 8, and even that was brief. I think I should just install a Hackintosh at home one weekend because I am curious to play with OS X, to see how it works and whether I'll find it as easy as it's supposed to be.
Oh, and if anyone is curious to the reason why Macs are essentially non-existent in Latvia, it's simple - prices. Macs there cost as much as anywhere else, which in terms of Latvian incomes places them firmly in the luxury item category (especially until a few years ago). Together with the essentially ubiquitous piracy among privately owned computers, it makes the idea of buying a Mac very strange. Case in point, with iPads. Having just checked the prices, an iPad 3 with 16 GB Wi-Fi only in Latvia costs 339 lats, the same with 4G costs 425 lats (not including data plan). MacBooks start at 895 lats. The average monthly income in 2011 after taxes for those employed in Latvia was 330 lats (about 600 USD at today's rate). Puts things into perspective.
That is completely against the Russian approach, which is fairly direct in style. If the opposition figures running those sites reside in Russia, then the regular Russian police and FSB will be dealing with them - arrests, searches, the usual deal, like you can see with the recent treatment of opposition figures. Skipping an opportunity to go after the authors while using SVR to disturb the sites with propaganda doesn't really fit into the modus operandi of the Russian authorities.
Yep, as an European, I don't get why I should pay such a tax. I pay for my own broadband connection, and while I agree that everyone should have access to the Internet, it's already available for free at libraries that are funded by my taxes anyway. So I don't get the point of a general "broadband tax".
Interesting moments are as follows. There are three projects for which software has been requested. One is for "researching the methods of intelligence in Internet centers and regional segments of social networks", another is for "researching the unofficial methods of management on the Internet", and finally work on "methods for advancing special information in social networks". So essentially, it's figuring out how to make certain information popular on social networks, and figuring out the dynamics and largely emergent social structures within these networks. These are designed to work together, ultimately with the bots capable of "massive dissemination of information in specified social networks using existing user accounts, with the goal of forming the public opinion".
Given that the SVR is behind this, it's likely that the intent, at least originally, is to use this abroad, not within Russia. The article says so and quotes a source saying ex-USSR countries would be the first target. That bit certainly looks realistic given the geopolitical situation there, with Russia essentially being in a state of low-key information warfare versus some former Soviet states.
Being born in the USSR and growing up in ex-USSR, and being exposed to US-centric culture through the Internet, I've seen a fair amount of both. And it saddens me to see how Yuri Gagarin is mostly hailed as a Soviet/Russian hero and achievement, with Neil Armstrong being hailed as an American hero. Space travel is the single most spectacular thing achieved by mankind. Gagarin and Armstrong, as the first to fly in space and to walk on another celestial body, are heroes for all of humanity and should be remembered as such. What they did was - figuratively and literally - above countries and national borders. And the next person to join their league will be whoever first walks on Mars.
With Armstrong's death now, there's a sad feeling of manned space exploration being essentially over. I'm not alone among the geeky population to be fascinated and captivated by space travel, but I've recognized for a while now that the romantic visions are not going to come true anytime soon. 8 years from the first human in space to the first human on the Moon (with space programs that were competing, not cooperating), and nothing for the last 40 years. Just as the development of some areas, computers first and foremost, exceeded everyone's wildest dreams, space travel turned out to be far less impressive. The best we can expect for the next 2-3 decades at least is a Mars landing (largely by a country wanting to signal its might), and a small research outpost on the Moon.
So that's going on a rant, but Armstrong's death is sad in more ways than one.
Because what you say is fucking bullshit. The KDE team only had the balls around 4.3 to state that it's not for the general public. With 4.0, they used the "for developers" excuse in some blogs, like Aaron Siego's, mailing lists as a response to complaints, but never in the most visible places.
The 4.0 release announcement mentions nowhere that it's for developers. It reads just like the announcement of any major version. The main page of kde.org featured a prominent link to downloading the latest 4.0. It was handled in exactly the same way as major version releases are handled. 4.1. did better, explicitly mentioning early adopters in the announcement. 4.2. said it's okay for the "majority of end users"
It was a complete fuck-up. The quality of KDE 4.0 was in no way RC-like, it was like an early beta. The team did not admit this in the high-profile pages and announcements, and they tried to pull some stupid shit by messing with widely adopted conventions of version numbering.
And their idiotic "KDE 4.0 is not KDE4".
Of course it didn't help that several distributions essentially bought into this being a complete product, and offered KDE 4 as a normal (or default) end-user option with 4.2 or even 4.1.
I have a Sony reader and find that e-ink is far superior for books. A tablet has the same screen as the computer does. I've never liked reading large amount of text from the screen. A tablet display feels like a computer screen, an e-ink display feels like a book.
I would definitely recommend an e-reader for anything except technical literature. If you have PDFs with equations, flowcharts, illustrations and the like, they should be read on a tablet or proper computer. For fiction, e-ink is far superior.
More recent official statement from the Ecuadorian embassy in London:
"We are deeply shocked by British governmentâ(TM)s threats against the sovereignty of the Ecuadorian Embassy and their suggestion that they may forcibly enter the embassy.
This is a clear breach of international law and the protocols set out in the Vienna Convention.
Throughout out the last 56 days Mr. Julian Assange has been in the Embassy, the Ecuadorian Government has acted honourably in all our attempts to seek a resolution to the situation. This stands in stark contrast to the escalation of the British Government today with their threats to breakdown the door of the Ecuadorian Embassy.
Instead of threatening violence against the Ecuadorian Embassy the British Government should use its energy to find a peaceful resolution to this situation which we are aiming to achieve."
Wikileaks isn't popular in the USA, but summaries of opinion polls say that in Australia 59% support Wikileaks, and in the UK where this is happening, 42% supported the diplomatic cable release and 44% believe the sexual charges are intended to get him extradited to the USA eventually. Those numbers are significant on the PR-meter.
No, they haven't announced that decision. Apparently they decided a day or so ago (as indeed reported by multiple sources), but there's been no official statement from the government, despite journalists finding out off the record. In a situation as delicate as this, the distinction is important.
There are a few misconceptions that crop up repeatedly. Keep mind though that IANAL.
The diplomat's vehicle isn't sovereign land of the sending country. In fact, neither is the embassy. The Ecuadorian embassy in the UK is still sovereign land of the UK, however, it is inviolable (Article 22 of the Vienna convention). Same article specifies that the vehicles can not be searched. But it's precisely this status of embassies - as opposed to them being sovereign land of the sending state as it's often believed - is, in my reading, what the UK uses to give itself the right to revoke unilaterally that status, under the act cited in the summary.
If the embassy has diplomatic vehicles parked within the premises and not across the street or elsewhere, Assange can get into one of those vehicles, with a diplomat, and drive somewhere, with the police not having the right to detain him. Problem for him is he'd have to get out at the airport or somewhere.
Another comment I saw repeated several times elsewhere is that Ecuador could grant Assange citizenship and diplomat status, making him immune. This is not so - the receiving nation must explicitly agree to acknowledge each member of the mission. Obviously Assange would never be acknowledged as a diplomat by the UK. From my understanding of international law, even if Assange was to become the President of Ecuador, he would still not be enjoying immunity as that applies on official visits of the head of state.
Anyway, his is getting interesting and rapidly heading somewhere. Ecuador is set to announce its decision on asylum in about 12 hours, the UK might be determined to act before then. If they do not, there might be drama around Assange trying to leave the UK. Unless, of course, he just stays holed up there indefinitely.
Oh, and reminds me. Just recently we had the discussion here about the most underappreciated sci-fi writer. When talking about all-time sci-fi greats with Harrison, he mentioned Clifford Simak among them and said he deserved more recognition than he got.
Truly sad, yet another of the sci-fi greats dying. I've had the pleasure of dining with Harry Harrison a few years ago, and in person he was every bit as funny as his works. Impressive how his very strong moral convictions come through in his books.
Simak is great. Made it to the other side of the Iron Curtain, too.I started reading sci-fi from my father's collection which he built up in Soviet times, and several of Simak's works were there. I really like some of his short stories (Limiting Factor stands out even now), really liked All Flesh Is Grass but of course City is the best thing he ever wrote. An excellent novel that spans ten thousand years.
I was hoping in fact just today there'd be an appropriate reason for me to post this on Slashdot.
Lem is relatively well known in the USA, from what I can judge. The couple of English translations I've encountered weren't particularly good. Lem's Solaris is brilliant, and several other works are well worth reading.
But whom I really want to point out to sci-fi fans in the USA are the Strugatsky brothers (Arkady Strugatsky and Boris Strugatsky). Soviet sci-fi authors with legendary status in post-Soviet space among anyone who reads sci-fi. As an avid sci-fi fan, I put them on the very top tier of authors, along with the better known English-language greats like Clarke, Asimov or Bradbury.
English translations are not too numerous, but I discovered last month that one of their best books, Roadside Picnic, has been re-released in the USA with a new translation. Amazon link. Give it a try. I really hope that new edition will help in getting them to be better known in the English-speaking world, and greatly hope that this post will get at least a couple of Slashdotters to look into it.
I particularly find your assertion that violence is likely even if you surrender your property to the robber. Over here, generally people would assume the opposite, as far as I am aware. That is, that complying with the robber's demand will almost surely result in an end to the confrontation unless it happens to be a genuine sociopath and not just a common criminal following the path of least resistance.
If I had to speculate, I would assume that criminals know it's actually less risky to leave the victim alone afterwards. If they're caught for robbery, they'll do a few years in jail, if they get caught for murdering a robbery victim, they're looking at a 20 year or a life sentence. Plus, the authorities are more serious about investigating more violent crimes.
I can not exactly find a statistic like the one you quote from the FBI, but I did find statistics for 2011 about crimes registered by section of the criminal code (link only useful to Latvian speakers so mostly for my own future reference - http://data.opendata.lv/lindaaustere/kriminala-statistika/kriminala-statistika-2011-gads). In those stats, I see 91 homicide in the country in 2011 (that is combined number for murder, aggravated murder and especially aggravated murder, to roughly translate). Out of those, there is only 1 that falls under "murder related to a robbery". Can not say if it was an instance of street crime or breaking into some place.
Looking at robberies in that data, there's 1061 total, of them 66 fall under the most serious category, meaning that someone was seriously harmed or that the criminals were armed with firearms. AFAIK, so much as firing a shot in the air gets the robbery classified under that category, so it should be less than 66 cases where people actually got seriously harmed.
I come from essentially a no-gun area, so of course I have cultural bias, but to me there is a moral element that is really hard to understand.
I carry a phone worth some 400$. Other than that, I carry little that is valuable. I sometimes carry a netbook but overall I can't think of myself carrying items worth more than some 800$ total. Now, if there's a mugging attempt and I draw a handgun that I carry, that means all bets are off. The thug either backs off and runs or I have to be ready to shoot. Even having never so much as touched a firearm, I know you don't draw one without being ready to use it. So all in all, it means I have to be prepared for the possibility of killing the thug.
And that is something I find very hard to imagine being prepared for. Common thugs like that are pretty far down the list of people I have sympathy for, but I still can't see myself killing a human being when all I stand to lose otherwise is a few hundred dollars. I understand willingness to use lethal force to prevent serious injury at the hands of a criminal, but not in a situation like mugging for some electronics. I'd like to hear the perspective on this of someone from an area where people do have guns.
Sounds to me like a figure from shortly after Latvia joined the EU. 2004-2005 maybe.
I just looked up the official figures - salary statistics can be filtered by occupation type. So salaries, after tax, for those whose employment officially falls under "computer programming, consulting and related work" are 700$ in 2005 and 1166$ last year, with a peak in 2009 at 1228$ (converted using the current exchange rate for USD). Which is actually good growth for the 2005-2009 period, of course before the huge crisis hit the country. Skilled developers that I know are making no less than some 1400$, which counts as a very comfortable salary there.
No, that sounds like a horribly outdated figure. 790$ (assuming before taxes) is below the average salary nationwide, the figure being now around 865$ before taxes. Programmers, consistently with the rest of the world, get good pay by local standards, a decent one should certainly have no less than 1300$ before taxes.
I come from Latvia, lived in Riga until recently. It's true that it is one of the poorest countries in the EU, and income levels are low by the standards of more developed Western countries, but telecom is cheap there. 100 megabit connections are very common and I had one. About 40USD together with TV and a landline, and that's not the cheapest that was available, it's a particular service provider I like. The prices are consistently affordable even by local standards.
Availability and price of high-speed broadband in Riga is excellent, and Latvia is near the top of country rankings by Internet speed. This is not surprising for those who remember the situation in Riga just over a decade ago. Very limited availability of DSL/ISDN lines that give reasonable speeds, mostly 56k dialup instead, which was very expensive from the ISP bill plus the phone company charges. Real broadband came to the area later, but then it was good.
As a side-note, I have only on very, very rare occasions seen people with Macs in Latvia. Until iPods/iPhones I could go for months without seeing an Apple product, and that certainly has to do with pricing. The price difference between Macbooks and other laptops looks absolutely ridiculous in Latvia.
I'm not a linguist but am a hobbyist, I've done a fair bit of reading on languages, and I'm somewhat of a polyglot, currently fluent in five languages. It certainly appears to me that linguistic diversity is good to have.
A language really is more than a particular way of storing and expressing information. A language is a worldview. I would go as far as to say that you can't fully understand the worldview of some culture without having a fair knowledge of their language. Way too often, you can't just translate stuff into another language and retain the original meaning. Yes, most things can be translated with a high degree of accuracy, but there are nuances and subtle meanings that are lost. Likewise, losing a language completely means you lose all the accumulated knowledge and culture of the group that used to speak that language.
It's also a fascinating proposition that language affects cognition. I hope we can eventually get research that figures out the particulars of this. In some languages you have large numbers of homonyms and the word order matters a lot, in other languages homonyms are rare and word order is largely free. These things seem to affect how people think. And then there's the East Asian language bunch, where even the basics are very different from Indo-European languages and where concepts are formed differently.
I certainly would like to see a situation where everybody knows some language that can be used to communicate with everybody else. For that reason, I strongly support the use of English. I don't really care which particular language is the worldwide lingua franca, but English is currently as close as it gets, so that's fine by me. But I see a global lingua franca as a communication tool and a supplement to individual languages.
It's not like this is going to be anything new in principle. Cyberattacks like Stuxnet are just another tool that governments will use in secret ops. This happens all the time. Nations send spies to other nations that try to get classified info, in some cases there are special forces soldiers operating on secret missions in foreign countries - missions that may involve killing - and all of that is stuff that typically gets denied on the official level for many years.
Powerful malware will be used in much the same way as spy plane flyovers in the old days, or special forces insertions. You do it to an unfriendly country, you do not admit it, and you realize that the other country won't launch an outright attack over it as long as you have more conventional fighting capability.
I think I just realized one of the few advantages of coming from a Soviet country - I was surprised by a remote control as a luxurious item in around 1995;)
/rant mode on
GP is probably Russian - quit pointing out unimportant grammar errors as if they diminish his actual point. His English is likely better than your Russian, or whatever GP's first language is.
/rant mode off
While I'm the anti-Unity GP, I still recommend you try it, if you're half-way proficient with Linux and know how to easily switch back and forth. I mean, sometimes you end up liking something that most people don't, and with a desktop environment there's little to lose. It's not like it takes time to install or to switch back to another one later.
Case in point - I happen to like the MS Office ribbon and think that, except for the Office button (fixed in 2010), it's considerably superior to the old menus, but most people here on/. disagree.
Slashdot Mirror
I can relate. I lived in Latvia until a year ago, and while that's a Western country by now, it's also one with much lower income levels than the "proper" Western countries, besides, the whole free market thing is kinda new there.
Thinking about the previous 10 years or so, I think I had seen people with Macs something like 3 or 4 times total. Most people I talked to didn't even know Macs existed, although starting in 2005-2006 I met a fair amount of people who had heard of Linux as an alternative option. After moving to Sweden, I literally saw more Macs being used on my first day than I had seen in Latvia, ever.
Also puts me in an interesting position where I'm a knowledgable computer geek and have used many OSes, but not OS X. The last time I used a Mac was with Mac OS 8, and even that was brief. I think I should just install a Hackintosh at home one weekend because I am curious to play with OS X, to see how it works and whether I'll find it as easy as it's supposed to be.
Oh, and if anyone is curious to the reason why Macs are essentially non-existent in Latvia, it's simple - prices. Macs there cost as much as anywhere else, which in terms of Latvian incomes places them firmly in the luxury item category (especially until a few years ago). Together with the essentially ubiquitous piracy among privately owned computers, it makes the idea of buying a Mac very strange. Case in point, with iPads. Having just checked the prices, an iPad 3 with 16 GB Wi-Fi only in Latvia costs 339 lats, the same with 4G costs 425 lats (not including data plan). MacBooks start at 895 lats. The average monthly income in 2011 after taxes for those employed in Latvia was 330 lats (about 600 USD at today's rate). Puts things into perspective.
That is completely against the Russian approach, which is fairly direct in style. If the opposition figures running those sites reside in Russia, then the regular Russian police and FSB will be dealing with them - arrests, searches, the usual deal, like you can see with the recent treatment of opposition figures. Skipping an opportunity to go after the authors while using SVR to disturb the sites with propaganda doesn't really fit into the modus operandi of the Russian authorities.
Yep, as an European, I don't get why I should pay such a tax. I pay for my own broadband connection, and while I agree that everyone should have access to the Internet, it's already available for free at libraries that are funded by my taxes anyway. So I don't get the point of a general "broadband tax".
Link to story: http://www.kommersant.ru/doc/2009256
Interesting moments are as follows. There are three projects for which software has been requested. One is for "researching the methods of intelligence in Internet centers and regional segments of social networks", another is for "researching the unofficial methods of management on the Internet", and finally work on "methods for advancing special information in social networks". So essentially, it's figuring out how to make certain information popular on social networks, and figuring out the dynamics and largely emergent social structures within these networks. These are designed to work together, ultimately with the bots capable of "massive dissemination of information in specified social networks using existing user accounts, with the goal of forming the public opinion".
Given that the SVR is behind this, it's likely that the intent, at least originally, is to use this abroad, not within Russia. The article says so and quotes a source saying ex-USSR countries would be the first target. That bit certainly looks realistic given the geopolitical situation there, with Russia essentially being in a state of low-key information warfare versus some former Soviet states.
Yep, on that note.
Being born in the USSR and growing up in ex-USSR, and being exposed to US-centric culture through the Internet, I've seen a fair amount of both. And it saddens me to see how Yuri Gagarin is mostly hailed as a Soviet/Russian hero and achievement, with Neil Armstrong being hailed as an American hero. Space travel is the single most spectacular thing achieved by mankind. Gagarin and Armstrong, as the first to fly in space and to walk on another celestial body, are heroes for all of humanity and should be remembered as such. What they did was - figuratively and literally - above countries and national borders. And the next person to join their league will be whoever first walks on Mars.
With Armstrong's death now, there's a sad feeling of manned space exploration being essentially over. I'm not alone among the geeky population to be fascinated and captivated by space travel, but I've recognized for a while now that the romantic visions are not going to come true anytime soon. 8 years from the first human in space to the first human on the Moon (with space programs that were competing, not cooperating), and nothing for the last 40 years. Just as the development of some areas, computers first and foremost, exceeded everyone's wildest dreams, space travel turned out to be far less impressive. The best we can expect for the next 2-3 decades at least is a Mars landing (largely by a country wanting to signal its might), and a small research outpost on the Moon.
So that's going on a rant, but Armstrong's death is sad in more ways than one.
Because what you say is fucking bullshit. The KDE team only had the balls around 4.3 to state that it's not for the general public. With 4.0, they used the "for developers" excuse in some blogs, like Aaron Siego's, mailing lists as a response to complaints, but never in the most visible places.
The 4.0 release announcement mentions nowhere that it's for developers. It reads just like the announcement of any major version. The main page of kde.org featured a prominent link to downloading the latest 4.0. It was handled in exactly the same way as major version releases are handled. 4.1. did better, explicitly mentioning early adopters in the announcement. 4.2. said it's okay for the "majority of end users"
It was a complete fuck-up. The quality of KDE 4.0 was in no way RC-like, it was like an early beta. The team did not admit this in the high-profile pages and announcements, and they tried to pull some stupid shit by messing with widely adopted conventions of version numbering.
And their idiotic "KDE 4.0 is not KDE4". Of course it didn't help that several distributions essentially bought into this being a complete product, and offered KDE 4 as a normal (or default) end-user option with 4.2 or even 4.1.
I have a Sony reader and find that e-ink is far superior for books. A tablet has the same screen as the computer does. I've never liked reading large amount of text from the screen. A tablet display feels like a computer screen, an e-ink display feels like a book.
I would definitely recommend an e-reader for anything except technical literature. If you have PDFs with equations, flowcharts, illustrations and the like, they should be read on a tablet or proper computer. For fiction, e-ink is far superior.
More recent official statement from the Ecuadorian embassy in London:
"We are deeply shocked by British governmentâ(TM)s threats against the sovereignty of the Ecuadorian Embassy and their suggestion that they may forcibly enter the embassy.
This is a clear breach of international law and the protocols set out in the Vienna Convention.
Throughout out the last 56 days Mr. Julian Assange has been in the Embassy, the Ecuadorian Government has acted honourably in all our attempts to seek a resolution to the situation. This stands in stark contrast to the escalation of the British Government today with their threats to breakdown the door of the Ecuadorian Embassy.
Instead of threatening violence against the Ecuadorian Embassy the British Government should use its energy to find a peaceful resolution to this situation which we are aiming to achieve."
http://www.ecuadorembassyuk.org.uk/announcements/ecuador-shock-at-threats-from-british-government
Wikileaks isn't popular in the USA, but summaries of opinion polls say that in Australia 59% support Wikileaks, and in the UK where this is happening, 42% supported the diplomatic cable release and 44% believe the sexual charges are intended to get him extradited to the USA eventually. Those numbers are significant on the PR-meter.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reception_of_WikiLeaks#Public_opinion
No, they haven't announced that decision. Apparently they decided a day or so ago (as indeed reported by multiple sources), but there's been no official statement from the government, despite journalists finding out off the record. In a situation as delicate as this, the distinction is important.
There are a few misconceptions that crop up repeatedly. Keep mind though that IANAL.
The diplomat's vehicle isn't sovereign land of the sending country. In fact, neither is the embassy. The Ecuadorian embassy in the UK is still sovereign land of the UK, however, it is inviolable (Article 22 of the Vienna convention). Same article specifies that the vehicles can not be searched. But it's precisely this status of embassies - as opposed to them being sovereign land of the sending state as it's often believed - is, in my reading, what the UK uses to give itself the right to revoke unilaterally that status, under the act cited in the summary.
If the embassy has diplomatic vehicles parked within the premises and not across the street or elsewhere, Assange can get into one of those vehicles, with a diplomat, and drive somewhere, with the police not having the right to detain him. Problem for him is he'd have to get out at the airport or somewhere.
Another comment I saw repeated several times elsewhere is that Ecuador could grant Assange citizenship and diplomat status, making him immune. This is not so - the receiving nation must explicitly agree to acknowledge each member of the mission. Obviously Assange would never be acknowledged as a diplomat by the UK. From my understanding of international law, even if Assange was to become the President of Ecuador, he would still not be enjoying immunity as that applies on official visits of the head of state.
Anyway, his is getting interesting and rapidly heading somewhere. Ecuador is set to announce its decision on asylum in about 12 hours, the UK might be determined to act before then. If they do not, there might be drama around Assange trying to leave the UK. Unless, of course, he just stays holed up there indefinitely.
Oh, and reminds me. Just recently we had the discussion here about the most underappreciated sci-fi writer. When talking about all-time sci-fi greats with Harrison, he mentioned Clifford Simak among them and said he deserved more recognition than he got.
Most fitting username for a first post on this.
Truly sad, yet another of the sci-fi greats dying. I've had the pleasure of dining with Harry Harrison a few years ago, and in person he was every bit as funny as his works. Impressive how his very strong moral convictions come through in his books.
Simak is great. Made it to the other side of the Iron Curtain, too.I started reading sci-fi from my father's collection which he built up in Soviet times, and several of Simak's works were there. I really like some of his short stories (Limiting Factor stands out even now), really liked All Flesh Is Grass but of course City is the best thing he ever wrote. An excellent novel that spans ten thousand years.
I was hoping in fact just today there'd be an appropriate reason for me to post this on Slashdot.
Lem is relatively well known in the USA, from what I can judge. The couple of English translations I've encountered weren't particularly good. Lem's Solaris is brilliant, and several other works are well worth reading.
But whom I really want to point out to sci-fi fans in the USA are the Strugatsky brothers (Arkady Strugatsky and Boris Strugatsky). Soviet sci-fi authors with legendary status in post-Soviet space among anyone who reads sci-fi. As an avid sci-fi fan, I put them on the very top tier of authors, along with the better known English-language greats like Clarke, Asimov or Bradbury.
English translations are not too numerous, but I discovered last month that one of their best books, Roadside Picnic, has been re-released in the USA with a new translation. Amazon link. Give it a try. I really hope that new edition will help in getting them to be better known in the English-speaking world, and greatly hope that this post will get at least a couple of Slashdotters to look into it.
Interesting, thank you.
I particularly find your assertion that violence is likely even if you surrender your property to the robber. Over here, generally people would assume the opposite, as far as I am aware. That is, that complying with the robber's demand will almost surely result in an end to the confrontation unless it happens to be a genuine sociopath and not just a common criminal following the path of least resistance.
If I had to speculate, I would assume that criminals know it's actually less risky to leave the victim alone afterwards. If they're caught for robbery, they'll do a few years in jail, if they get caught for murdering a robbery victim, they're looking at a 20 year or a life sentence. Plus, the authorities are more serious about investigating more violent crimes.
I can not exactly find a statistic like the one you quote from the FBI, but I did find statistics for 2011 about crimes registered by section of the criminal code (link only useful to Latvian speakers so mostly for my own future reference - http://data.opendata.lv/lindaaustere/kriminala-statistika/kriminala-statistika-2011-gads). In those stats, I see 91 homicide in the country in 2011 (that is combined number for murder, aggravated murder and especially aggravated murder, to roughly translate). Out of those, there is only 1 that falls under "murder related to a robbery". Can not say if it was an instance of street crime or breaking into some place.
Looking at robberies in that data, there's 1061 total, of them 66 fall under the most serious category, meaning that someone was seriously harmed or that the criminals were armed with firearms. AFAIK, so much as firing a shot in the air gets the robbery classified under that category, so it should be less than 66 cases where people actually got seriously harmed.
I come from essentially a no-gun area, so of course I have cultural bias, but to me there is a moral element that is really hard to understand.
I carry a phone worth some 400$. Other than that, I carry little that is valuable. I sometimes carry a netbook but overall I can't think of myself carrying items worth more than some 800$ total. Now, if there's a mugging attempt and I draw a handgun that I carry, that means all bets are off. The thug either backs off and runs or I have to be ready to shoot. Even having never so much as touched a firearm, I know you don't draw one without being ready to use it. So all in all, it means I have to be prepared for the possibility of killing the thug.
And that is something I find very hard to imagine being prepared for. Common thugs like that are pretty far down the list of people I have sympathy for, but I still can't see myself killing a human being when all I stand to lose otherwise is a few hundred dollars. I understand willingness to use lethal force to prevent serious injury at the hands of a criminal, but not in a situation like mugging for some electronics. I'd like to hear the perspective on this of someone from an area where people do have guns.
Sounds to me like a figure from shortly after Latvia joined the EU. 2004-2005 maybe.
I just looked up the official figures - salary statistics can be filtered by occupation type. So salaries, after tax, for those whose employment officially falls under "computer programming, consulting and related work" are 700$ in 2005 and 1166$ last year, with a peak in 2009 at 1228$ (converted using the current exchange rate for USD). Which is actually good growth for the 2005-2009 period, of course before the huge crisis hit the country. Skilled developers that I know are making no less than some 1400$, which counts as a very comfortable salary there.
No, that sounds like a horribly outdated figure. 790$ (assuming before taxes) is below the average salary nationwide, the figure being now around 865$ before taxes. Programmers, consistently with the rest of the world, get good pay by local standards, a decent one should certainly have no less than 1300$ before taxes.
I come from Latvia, lived in Riga until recently. It's true that it is one of the poorest countries in the EU, and income levels are low by the standards of more developed Western countries, but telecom is cheap there. 100 megabit connections are very common and I had one. About 40USD together with TV and a landline, and that's not the cheapest that was available, it's a particular service provider I like. The prices are consistently affordable even by local standards.
Availability and price of high-speed broadband in Riga is excellent, and Latvia is near the top of country rankings by Internet speed. This is not surprising for those who remember the situation in Riga just over a decade ago. Very limited availability of DSL/ISDN lines that give reasonable speeds, mostly 56k dialup instead, which was very expensive from the ISP bill plus the phone company charges. Real broadband came to the area later, but then it was good.
As a side-note, I have only on very, very rare occasions seen people with Macs in Latvia. Until iPods/iPhones I could go for months without seeing an Apple product, and that certainly has to do with pricing. The price difference between Macbooks and other laptops looks absolutely ridiculous in Latvia.
I'm not a linguist but am a hobbyist, I've done a fair bit of reading on languages, and I'm somewhat of a polyglot, currently fluent in five languages. It certainly appears to me that linguistic diversity is good to have.
A language really is more than a particular way of storing and expressing information. A language is a worldview. I would go as far as to say that you can't fully understand the worldview of some culture without having a fair knowledge of their language. Way too often, you can't just translate stuff into another language and retain the original meaning. Yes, most things can be translated with a high degree of accuracy, but there are nuances and subtle meanings that are lost. Likewise, losing a language completely means you lose all the accumulated knowledge and culture of the group that used to speak that language.
It's also a fascinating proposition that language affects cognition. I hope we can eventually get research that figures out the particulars of this. In some languages you have large numbers of homonyms and the word order matters a lot, in other languages homonyms are rare and word order is largely free. These things seem to affect how people think. And then there's the East Asian language bunch, where even the basics are very different from Indo-European languages and where concepts are formed differently.
I certainly would like to see a situation where everybody knows some language that can be used to communicate with everybody else. For that reason, I strongly support the use of English. I don't really care which particular language is the worldwide lingua franca, but English is currently as close as it gets, so that's fine by me. But I see a global lingua franca as a communication tool and a supplement to individual languages.
It's not like this is going to be anything new in principle. Cyberattacks like Stuxnet are just another tool that governments will use in secret ops. This happens all the time. Nations send spies to other nations that try to get classified info, in some cases there are special forces soldiers operating on secret missions in foreign countries - missions that may involve killing - and all of that is stuff that typically gets denied on the official level for many years.
Powerful malware will be used in much the same way as spy plane flyovers in the old days, or special forces insertions. You do it to an unfriendly country, you do not admit it, and you realize that the other country won't launch an outright attack over it as long as you have more conventional fighting capability.
I think I just realized one of the few advantages of coming from a Soviet country - I was surprised by a remote control as a luxurious item in around 1995 ;)
/rant mode on
/rant mode off
GP is probably Russian - quit pointing out unimportant grammar errors as if they diminish his actual point. His English is likely better than your Russian, or whatever GP's first language is.
While I'm the anti-Unity GP, I still recommend you try it, if you're half-way proficient with Linux and know how to easily switch back and forth. I mean, sometimes you end up liking something that most people don't, and with a desktop environment there's little to lose. It's not like it takes time to install or to switch back to another one later.
Case in point - I happen to like the MS Office ribbon and think that, except for the Office button (fixed in 2010), it's considerably superior to the old menus, but most people here on /. disagree.