I don't suppose you're European, as your statement on conscription in Europe is blatantly false. Most European countries have abolished conscription. Austria has military service that lasts less than a year, Albania is in the process of abolishing conscription, Finnish service is 6-12 months. Norwegian service is a year and German service is 6 months. Oh yeah and Greeks have a 9 month draft. Hell, Ukraine is schedules to end its mandatory military service program.
I probably forgot a couple countries but certainly most do not have mandatory military service, and I'm not sure if there's any country remaining with a mandatory 2 year service. Which is certainly a good thing in my understanding.
Thanks for taking the time to post this. While the attempted proof paper and most discussion surrounding it is way too difficult for me to comprehend, your post does actually parse.
Yes, DNF is part of the Duke Nukem series, and Duke Nukem 3D was released 14 years ago. There's also the 2002 Manhattan Project but it's not really the same genre. If the game is good, being a sequel to an old game won't hurt it. Fallout 3 looks to be a good example. Released in 2008 to much acclaim from critics and players but it was a sequel, the first two Fallouts came out in 1997 and 1998. So technologically, it's a huge jump and I bet Fallout 3 had plenty of younger players who never played the first two parts. Which didn't hurt the perception of Fallout 3 any.
Likewise, DNF would not be hurt directly by being a sequel in the Duke Nukem series. It will do just fine if it's ever released and is a good game. Although if it really is released within the next year, I wouldn't expect the game to be much good - the development history seems too screwed up to produce a good end result.
Thank you! Same here. I identify myself as a "non-ideological Linux user". I do believe that free software is often better but for purely practical reasons. I use Linux because I find it a very solid OS, because I like the control that it gives me, I like how quickly certain command-line utilities get their respective tasks done, and because I really like KDE. That's it. I'm not using it because of some ideological or philosophical reasons, I have no problem with also using Windows 7, which I find to be a pretty good OS too. I certainly have no problem with using closed-source drivers on Linux or running the occasional proprietary application through Wine.
I used to like Stallman and the FSF when I thought they're basically Linux advocacy. I don't like them now because they're essentially about philosophy and politics, not about the practical side of software. And because of how their actions are indeed often similar to a hardliner religious group.
I'd mod you up if I had mod points now. Wanted to say the same thing. First offense should be several years of license suspension and a considerable fine, second offense should mean you're never allowed to drive again. I'm not American so I don't have experience in that car-based society but I don't buy the argument that sometimes you just have to drive. There are other transport options or driver options. If you feel like you must drive, don't drink.
I looked up some stats recently and was surprised. Over a million people worldwide die yearly in car accidents. Various sources give estimates that drunk driving causes from 30% to 65% of traffic deaths. Apparently in the USA, some 11 thousand people died from drunk driving accidents in 2008. Hell, that's more than the amount of Americans who died on 9/11 plus American deaths in Afghanistan and in Iraq up until now. Drunk drivers are responsible for tens, if not hundreds, of thousands deaths worldwide every year. Those are unnecessary, preventable deaths - they only happen because some fucker decides it's okay to drive after drinking. Why is it that society generally doesn't call for harsher treatment? And this includes USA, where sentencing for many offenses is quite strict (too strict I'd say).
Pretty mind boggling indeed. Sure I've seen my share of kids really bad at maths but this is hard to believe. 90% of what I know about American schools is from reading Slashdot but this sounds like a problem with teachers to me. Seriously, I'd expect everyone who does not border on metal retardation to be able to understand the equal sign. Hell, if the students add the numbers on the left side and write that in the parenthesis, it shows they're capable of some thinking.
And out of curiosity, do your schools really offer tasks written as 4+3+2 = ( )+2 past the first 2-3 grades? TFA mentions "middle grades", which in my country would typically refer to grades 5-9, therefore ages 12-16 approximately, I assume US isn't much different. I remember that in the second grade, equations were presented with an empty box for the unknown variable, so it'd be like 5+3 = [ ] + 6. But already in the third grade they were introducing the concept of letters in equations, so they'd offer it in the form of 5+3 = x+6.
In the 90ies, Russian pirates would translate the games themselves (the quality of these translations being horrible to the point of being legendary). Also, there are poor countries in Europe but people, especially young ones (the likely gamers) tend to speak English well. Places like Romania and Moldova are fairly poor by Western standards, ditto Baltic countries, even if the economies may be rapidly growing, or were at least until the recession. With average monthly wages being under 600$, games are really costly to people in these regions but they do tend speak English, certainly well enough to play the pirated version comfortably.
has anybody else ever wondered what would happen if one were to crop-dust a heavily populated area with a suitably light-stabilized LSD solution
Someone certainly has wondered. Read up on CIA project MKULTRA. Included exposing unsuspecting people to LSD and forcibly creating morphine addictions in people. Really, some of the stuff done under that project would make the Nazis proud.
Forget charity - if he doesn't want the award, he could give it to his mother. Perelman isn't just great at math, he's also a weird guy and a hermit. In his case, he's living with his elderly mother whose main source of income is her pension, which is not a lot in Russia. He's being offered more than enough money to cover his mother's living and medicine costs, it would be a very prudent thing to do.
I enjoy tobacco and don't mind dying younger. They're not doing anything wrong by supplying what I ask of them. They might be abusing dimlows but that does not mean they're abusing me. What they are doing _is_ right.
This is something I wonder about. I do consider tobacco companies an evil force in some sense. They're useful to governments because of taxes so governments certainly don't want to fight them. Let's see, tobacco isn't something that's probably harmful - it has been well proven scientifically that there's tobacco causes health problems. It is also known that it's not causing some minor problems but causes significant problems like cancer, with a statistically significant reduction in life extensiveness. Plus, it's known that tobacco is, because of nicotine, addictive.
It seems like a major part of this is that smoking/tobacco use has been around for a while before modern medicine and before definitive proof of its ill effects. Imagine this - I invent a device that, when used, gives you huge, orgasmic physical pleasure. That would be addictive enough psychologically. Now imagine this device also has slight physically addictive effects and, most importantly, gives you an above-normal dose of gamma radiation, high enough so that a significant amount of device users would eventually succumb to cancer or radiation sickness caused by it. Would I really be allowed to market and sell the device? I'm pretty sure I wouldn't, certainly not unless the government would stand to gain very serious revenue from taxes on that, and even then I'm doubtful.
"More capable" is, I would say, the most appropriate way of describing how the Net affected me. I became a fluent English speaker because of it. Before constant Internet access, my English was passable. I could understand texts of average complexity, I could express myself, albeit in pretty badly botched sentences. The Internet gave me a lot of reading and writing experience, allowing me to become a fluent speaker over the years.
Same goes for some other areas. I became interested in programming before I had Internet access, so back then I was limited to a few books as learning material and whatever experimentation I conducted myself. The Internet now provides me access with more information on programming than I could have ever imagined. Including stuff like design patterns or extensive writeups on optimization - stuff I didn't know even existed back when I started.
This is one the Internet's greatest strengths. If you do X, there are other people doing X and posting about it online, letting you become more capable at X, for almost any given value of X. Rule 34 being a subset of this hypothesis;)
I've had lucid dreams even before reading about the concept. I didn't realize initially that it's a phenomenon unknown too many people, I really thought it's common. Anecdotally, yes, I'd agree that I tend to experience more lucid dreams in periods when I'm playing some first-person games.
Something I want to ask though is, are nightmares that common in most people? I see lucid dreaming being mentioned as "nightmare relief" and whatnot. That stuff is rare for me. I have a "bad dream" - which is when I have a vague unpleasant feeling after waking up - maybe once a month. I have actual nightmares, where I'm aware of being in danger, being chased or whatever, only once in a few months on average. Even those don't really cause me sleep problems, if a nightmare awakens me, I just keep myself awake for a minute while reality settles in and go back to sleep easily. I think I've only had one nightmare where I actually had trouble falling asleep later.
I really like having dreams becaue most of my detailed dreams are sort of like interesting stories. Something cool happens, I do or experience interesting things in those dreams. So it's a positive experience. I also rarely have non-real (more precisely, dream-only) people feature prominently in my dreams. The dreams include people I actually know, sometimes rather surprisingly, like a person that I hadn't seen for years, but mostly it's people that I'm close to and/or interact a lot with. Fictional characters from some of my favorite fiction do make appearances, but these are still people I "know" a lot about, even if they're fictional.
It's also fascinating to read about common recurring dream themes / elements and see which ones apply to you. For instance, flying is common in dreams and the effect of "slow-mo running" is common for bad dreams - those I've had. Wikipedia says anxiety is the most common emotion in dreams, with negative emotions generally being more prevalent - that definitely doesn't apply to me.
Also, does anyone else experience an "active character switch" during dreams? Happens often with fictional characters in dreams. Goes like this - one moment there's another character in the dream, and there's me. The other character is doing something, I watch him, perhaps interact with him through conversation or otherwise. And then at some point suddenly I become that character and start seeing things from his point of view. When that happens, I am simultaneously aware of having that character's identity and of having my own identity. This feeling that I am someone else - while still being myself - is one of the weirdest, but in a way most fun, dream experiences for me.
"and other data to third parties"
You agree to this when you clicked through their EULA (which is your fault).
This is something I've been wondering about for a while, I'd love if anyone can enlighten me.
My country has a constitutional provision saying everyone has the right to know their rights. I don't believe the US constitution has such a provision but I'm sure there's something similar in the legal system. Anyway, I'm wondering about the highly complex legal language used in EULAs and the like. Does that not, essentially, violate one's right to know your rights? Understanding such texts is pretty much impossible without legal training because of how certain words have meanings that differ from their meanings in daily life, and how certain phrases actually refer to something that's defined in another law, etc. Why is it legal to give people agreements they can't reasonably understand?
To use an analogy. Let's say I have a shop and for an item that costs 50$, I choose to post a visible price tag that doesn't say 50$ but says integral(0, 10) xdx. It's the same thing largely. People who have taken calculus will recognize that as amounting to 50, people who haven't will recognize the numbers and letters but won't understand what it means, similar to how people without legal training sort of understand the words in the contract but not actually their meaning.
I suppose my question also applies to the language laws are written in. Over here, they're written (largely due to the country' short history, I assume) in fairly simple language. Of course you need to be a lawyer to understand all the details, but a simple understanding of the language is enough to understand most provisions. This is unlike US law - I've read a few sections from the US Code and the language there definitely seems unlike everyday English, with very complex and unnatural sentences, to the point where understanding the law is really hard.
Do not be surprised at the popularity of authoritarian leaders in Russia. That's one of the weird things about the country. Someone who's pretty much a dictator or at least an autocrat can still be popular enough to win in a genuine election. Heck, Medvedev was elected because Putin said Medvedev is his preferred candidate. While Russian elections do apparently have vote-fixing in certain areas/demographics (not deliberate miscounts of votes, but people being forced to vote for a candidate), there's no doubt that the majority really did vote for Medvedev. Or that Putin easily had enough support for his second term.
Seems like in smaller regions of Russia, many people are happy about having a local authoritarian-style leader. I think it's one of the worst legacies of the Soviet Union in this part of the world, and a legacy that's going to be tough to get rid of. I mean the people's contentedness (contentment? not sure of the English word) to have a guy in charge that makes the calls. A "strong ruler".
This is one of the things I like about how Americans view their society. Americans and mostly happy and proud to vote, from what I've seen. They certainly would hate being in a situation where they don't have the opportunity to do so.
Firefox 3.6.3 opens the Arabic-charset link just fine but displays that messed up xn-- thing in the location bar. Ditto Chrome. IE6 in a virtual machine (Win7's XP mode) leaves the URL bar in Arabic but doesn't display the page. Opera, in the same VM, works best, as much as I dislike the browser. It opens the site just fine and the URL bar remains in Arabic, though the Arabic address is followed by/ar/default.aspx
While he was appointed for his current term as Head of Kalmykia, he was previously its President without any appointment, simply by being elected. Despite the occasional controversy, he's quite popular, I believe, not in the least due to his position in FIDE. Also, the story itself is nothing extraordinary. Ilyumzhinov has been known for years as an eccentric person, and he had already mentioned being taken to alien ships on a few occasions.
At the same time, SC2 seems to be less micro-heavy. Which I like to a degree. SC1 had a bunch of micro features that even "average" players knew and that would let them wipe the floor with anyone who doesn't. Like moving shot (having units fire while continuing to move without any deceleration). It would let, for instance, Corsairs totally destroy Mutalisks. Starcraft 2 has smart casting, a better UI with much larger amounts of stuff being selectable at once, rally points you can set on resources and the like, so it's probably going to be easier to become of average skill in SC2. I realize the high-level play will still be very micro intense, but it sure feels like the required micro levels for mid-level play are going to be lower. As a side-note, the beta matchmaking system sucks, it's calibrated to find games quickly, which means you get matched too often against people that roll over you effortlessly, or vice versa.
And as another side-note, I don't envy the Blizzard employees that have to deal with beta tester feedback. The beta community forums are horrible which is why I don't feel like I can effectively provide any feedback or criticism. It's an immature forum full of players whining, where most arguments include some form of "you're retarded" remarks and where a bunch of platinum-level players acts like anyone from a lower league is automatically wrong about any issue. Gah.
The "images" were created using the BESM-4 computer. The much more widely used BESM-6 used 48 bit words and you can see its character encoding table here:
The BESM-4 had 45-bit words and I'm not sure what encoding it used, but it's likely to be the same or similar to the above. Note how that character table has math operators like logical conjucntion/disjunction even but lacks an exclamation mark and even two letters of the Russian alphabet. Wasn't exactly meant for word processing;)
The BBC article doesn't entirely reflect the situation. I live in Latvia and do know better;)
The main thing they're not mentioning is the origin of that data. It wasn't just "downloaded" from the State Revenue Service via a hack or somesuch. This part has made headlines here - it turned out that the Revenue Service's internal system that contains information on all tax payers had no security, at all. You could view the confidential info by accessing an unsecured URL. And just by changing the entry id parameter in the URL, you could get to information about different tax payers, as the parent says. Any moron could get that data and apparently the "hackers"/whistleblowers in question downloaded it over the course of a couple months.
Latvia is no US and of course the organizations here don't have the same kind of security experience that organizations from big countries. Still, this is an important governmental organization we're talking about and the security hole in question is blatant and obvious. As such, many here have doubts that it was accidental, it's quite possible that the Revenue Service was sabotaged.
This Neo guy and his organization are apparently planning now to release information about the financial activities of a bunch of organizations, including governmental ones, as allegedly they believe it will help the society here, create more responsibility, etc. They have, banks aside, so far released information about the salaries of police and public transportation employees. The bank is a separate story really, it got bailed out when the recession hit hard here, and this bailout has in itself been a subject of much contention.
Absolutely. Frankly, I'm surprised at Kindle's popularity given the Reader's existence. For my Sony Reader, I used to just copy the books over in txt format by mounting its drive, now I use calibre to manage my books, including conversion to Sony's LRF format if I feel like it. Calibre is open source, available for both Windows and Linux, and it's really a better piece of software than Sony's bundled library management tool.
I have the discontinued PRS-505 and am very satisfied with it, seems like newer models have made significant improvements, too. We're really seeing very rapid improvement for e-book readers, I think. The 505 is just over 2 years old, already discontinued and replaced with faster, touch-interface, higher capacity devices. Give them 5 years and we'll have an excellent selection of readers available.
And anyone saying that a laptop does everything a reader does is missing the point. Readers have e-ink, but that's not their only advantage. Readers are lighter and thinner than most books and so are a great way to carry some reading material for transport, waiting halls, etc. Plus the battery lasts far longer than that of any computer. Reading in bed is a pleasure with e-book readers.
So what about false positives? Typical homework assignments in CS courses are pretty simple. Take an input file containing one integer per line, output a file with those numbers in ascending order, using bubblesort/quicksort/mergesort. It would seem that the code structure for such assignments would be fairly similar, if they're done correctly.
KDE 4 doesn't seem bad to me anymore. I tried 4.0 and it was a fairly miserable experience. UI issues I could forgive, but not coupled with the constant crashes. I still think the devs should be ashamed for labeling that a release version. 4.1. was slightly better. Lacking configuration options and a bunch of UI stuff, but generally more stable. KDE 4.2. was, finally, something usable and the dev team also said that it's an okay choice for "end users" and not just "enthusiasts". I've been happily using 4.3. since its release and that's a very nice desktop environment, though I do hate the changes to Amarok.
Kubuntu is a separate issue. The Ubuntu project has always been very Gnome-centric, which is one of the things I dislike about the approach to Ubuntu. The K versions have always felt like an afterthought, including the ones that predate KDE4. I wouldn't really say that Kubuntu sucks but it sure seems to implement KDE worse than numerous other distros do.
Speaking of Japanese game music composers, I have to mention Akira Yamaoka. His music fits the games very well, and music from Silent Hill 2 can also be appreciated outside of the game, it's among the tracks I really like listening to.
One great track by him and another here
I have to mention this game, hasn't been mentioned so far in the thread. Project Reality is a team-based, teamwork-oriented, fairly realistic game. It absolutely craps on AA. I used to play AA for my "realism" fix, haven't even thought about AA since trying PR. Yes, PR has re-spawns, but it's more realistic. Also, it's a game where teamwork is actually present. People typically use VOIP and coordination within a single squad is usually good. On the better servers, the entire team will often work together in a coordinated fashion.
PR is actually a mod for Battlefield 2, so it's free if you own BF2. If not, I guess you can easily grab a copy of BF2 for under 10 USD these days.
A word of warning: PR is rather hardcore and fairly demanding, in terms of patience, willingness to work together and willingness to learn - there are numerous aspects of the game you won't immediately grok. But if you're looking for teamwork, tactics and realism, look PR up, it may well be what you want.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't suppose you're European, as your statement on conscription in Europe is blatantly false. Most European countries have abolished conscription. Austria has military service that lasts less than a year, Albania is in the process of abolishing conscription, Finnish service is 6-12 months. Norwegian service is a year and German service is 6 months. Oh yeah and Greeks have a 9 month draft. Hell, Ukraine is schedules to end its mandatory military service program.
I probably forgot a couple countries but certainly most do not have mandatory military service, and I'm not sure if there's any country remaining with a mandatory 2 year service. Which is certainly a good thing in my understanding.
Thanks for taking the time to post this. While the attempted proof paper and most discussion surrounding it is way too difficult for me to comprehend, your post does actually parse.
Yes, DNF is part of the Duke Nukem series, and Duke Nukem 3D was released 14 years ago. There's also the 2002 Manhattan Project but it's not really the same genre. If the game is good, being a sequel to an old game won't hurt it. Fallout 3 looks to be a good example. Released in 2008 to much acclaim from critics and players but it was a sequel, the first two Fallouts came out in 1997 and 1998. So technologically, it's a huge jump and I bet Fallout 3 had plenty of younger players who never played the first two parts. Which didn't hurt the perception of Fallout 3 any.
Likewise, DNF would not be hurt directly by being a sequel in the Duke Nukem series. It will do just fine if it's ever released and is a good game. Although if it really is released within the next year, I wouldn't expect the game to be much good - the development history seems too screwed up to produce a good end result.
Thank you! Same here. I identify myself as a "non-ideological Linux user". I do believe that free software is often better but for purely practical reasons. I use Linux because I find it a very solid OS, because I like the control that it gives me, I like how quickly certain command-line utilities get their respective tasks done, and because I really like KDE. That's it. I'm not using it because of some ideological or philosophical reasons, I have no problem with also using Windows 7, which I find to be a pretty good OS too. I certainly have no problem with using closed-source drivers on Linux or running the occasional proprietary application through Wine.
I used to like Stallman and the FSF when I thought they're basically Linux advocacy. I don't like them now because they're essentially about philosophy and politics, not about the practical side of software. And because of how their actions are indeed often similar to a hardliner religious group.
I'd mod you up if I had mod points now. Wanted to say the same thing. First offense should be several years of license suspension and a considerable fine, second offense should mean you're never allowed to drive again. I'm not American so I don't have experience in that car-based society but I don't buy the argument that sometimes you just have to drive. There are other transport options or driver options. If you feel like you must drive, don't drink.
I looked up some stats recently and was surprised. Over a million people worldwide die yearly in car accidents. Various sources give estimates that drunk driving causes from 30% to 65% of traffic deaths. Apparently in the USA, some 11 thousand people died from drunk driving accidents in 2008. Hell, that's more than the amount of Americans who died on 9/11 plus American deaths in Afghanistan and in Iraq up until now. Drunk drivers are responsible for tens, if not hundreds, of thousands deaths worldwide every year. Those are unnecessary, preventable deaths - they only happen because some fucker decides it's okay to drive after drinking. Why is it that society generally doesn't call for harsher treatment? And this includes USA, where sentencing for many offenses is quite strict (too strict I'd say).
Pretty mind boggling indeed. Sure I've seen my share of kids really bad at maths but this is hard to believe. 90% of what I know about American schools is from reading Slashdot but this sounds like a problem with teachers to me. Seriously, I'd expect everyone who does not border on metal retardation to be able to understand the equal sign. Hell, if the students add the numbers on the left side and write that in the parenthesis, it shows they're capable of some thinking.
And out of curiosity, do your schools really offer tasks written as 4+3+2 = ( )+2 past the first 2-3 grades? TFA mentions "middle grades", which in my country would typically refer to grades 5-9, therefore ages 12-16 approximately, I assume US isn't much different. I remember that in the second grade, equations were presented with an empty box for the unknown variable, so it'd be like 5+3 = [ ] + 6. But already in the third grade they were introducing the concept of letters in equations, so they'd offer it in the form of 5+3 = x+6.
In the 90ies, Russian pirates would translate the games themselves (the quality of these translations being horrible to the point of being legendary). Also, there are poor countries in Europe but people, especially young ones (the likely gamers) tend to speak English well. Places like Romania and Moldova are fairly poor by Western standards, ditto Baltic countries, even if the economies may be rapidly growing, or were at least until the recession. With average monthly wages being under 600$, games are really costly to people in these regions but they do tend speak English, certainly well enough to play the pirated version comfortably.
Someone certainly has wondered. Read up on CIA project MKULTRA. Included exposing unsuspecting people to LSD and forcibly creating morphine addictions in people. Really, some of the stuff done under that project would make the Nazis proud.
Forget charity - if he doesn't want the award, he could give it to his mother. Perelman isn't just great at math, he's also a weird guy and a hermit. In his case, he's living with his elderly mother whose main source of income is her pension, which is not a lot in Russia. He's being offered more than enough money to cover his mother's living and medicine costs, it would be a very prudent thing to do.
This is something I wonder about. I do consider tobacco companies an evil force in some sense. They're useful to governments because of taxes so governments certainly don't want to fight them. Let's see, tobacco isn't something that's probably harmful - it has been well proven scientifically that there's tobacco causes health problems. It is also known that it's not causing some minor problems but causes significant problems like cancer, with a statistically significant reduction in life extensiveness. Plus, it's known that tobacco is, because of nicotine, addictive.
It seems like a major part of this is that smoking/tobacco use has been around for a while before modern medicine and before definitive proof of its ill effects. Imagine this - I invent a device that, when used, gives you huge, orgasmic physical pleasure. That would be addictive enough psychologically. Now imagine this device also has slight physically addictive effects and, most importantly, gives you an above-normal dose of gamma radiation, high enough so that a significant amount of device users would eventually succumb to cancer or radiation sickness caused by it. Would I really be allowed to market and sell the device? I'm pretty sure I wouldn't, certainly not unless the government would stand to gain very serious revenue from taxes on that, and even then I'm doubtful.
"More capable" is, I would say, the most appropriate way of describing how the Net affected me. I became a fluent English speaker because of it. Before constant Internet access, my English was passable. I could understand texts of average complexity, I could express myself, albeit in pretty badly botched sentences. The Internet gave me a lot of reading and writing experience, allowing me to become a fluent speaker over the years.
Same goes for some other areas. I became interested in programming before I had Internet access, so back then I was limited to a few books as learning material and whatever experimentation I conducted myself. The Internet now provides me access with more information on programming than I could have ever imagined. Including stuff like design patterns or extensive writeups on optimization - stuff I didn't know even existed back when I started.
This is one the Internet's greatest strengths. If you do X, there are other people doing X and posting about it online, letting you become more capable at X, for almost any given value of X. Rule 34 being a subset of this hypothesis ;)
I've had lucid dreams even before reading about the concept. I didn't realize initially that it's a phenomenon unknown too many people, I really thought it's common. Anecdotally, yes, I'd agree that I tend to experience more lucid dreams in periods when I'm playing some first-person games.
Something I want to ask though is, are nightmares that common in most people? I see lucid dreaming being mentioned as "nightmare relief" and whatnot. That stuff is rare for me. I have a "bad dream" - which is when I have a vague unpleasant feeling after waking up - maybe once a month. I have actual nightmares, where I'm aware of being in danger, being chased or whatever, only once in a few months on average. Even those don't really cause me sleep problems, if a nightmare awakens me, I just keep myself awake for a minute while reality settles in and go back to sleep easily. I think I've only had one nightmare where I actually had trouble falling asleep later.
I really like having dreams becaue most of my detailed dreams are sort of like interesting stories. Something cool happens, I do or experience interesting things in those dreams. So it's a positive experience. I also rarely have non-real (more precisely, dream-only) people feature prominently in my dreams. The dreams include people I actually know, sometimes rather surprisingly, like a person that I hadn't seen for years, but mostly it's people that I'm close to and/or interact a lot with. Fictional characters from some of my favorite fiction do make appearances, but these are still people I "know" a lot about, even if they're fictional.
It's also fascinating to read about common recurring dream themes / elements and see which ones apply to you. For instance, flying is common in dreams and the effect of "slow-mo running" is common for bad dreams - those I've had. Wikipedia says anxiety is the most common emotion in dreams, with negative emotions generally being more prevalent - that definitely doesn't apply to me.
Also, does anyone else experience an "active character switch" during dreams? Happens often with fictional characters in dreams. Goes like this - one moment there's another character in the dream, and there's me. The other character is doing something, I watch him, perhaps interact with him through conversation or otherwise. And then at some point suddenly I become that character and start seeing things from his point of view. When that happens, I am simultaneously aware of having that character's identity and of having my own identity. This feeling that I am someone else - while still being myself - is one of the weirdest, but in a way most fun, dream experiences for me.
Fascinating topic overall, those dreams.
This is something I've been wondering about for a while, I'd love if anyone can enlighten me.
My country has a constitutional provision saying everyone has the right to know their rights. I don't believe the US constitution has such a provision but I'm sure there's something similar in the legal system. Anyway, I'm wondering about the highly complex legal language used in EULAs and the like. Does that not, essentially, violate one's right to know your rights? Understanding such texts is pretty much impossible without legal training because of how certain words have meanings that differ from their meanings in daily life, and how certain phrases actually refer to something that's defined in another law, etc. Why is it legal to give people agreements they can't reasonably understand?
To use an analogy. Let's say I have a shop and for an item that costs 50$, I choose to post a visible price tag that doesn't say 50$ but says integral(0, 10) xdx. It's the same thing largely. People who have taken calculus will recognize that as amounting to 50, people who haven't will recognize the numbers and letters but won't understand what it means, similar to how people without legal training sort of understand the words in the contract but not actually their meaning.
I suppose my question also applies to the language laws are written in. Over here, they're written (largely due to the country' short history, I assume) in fairly simple language. Of course you need to be a lawyer to understand all the details, but a simple understanding of the language is enough to understand most provisions. This is unlike US law - I've read a few sections from the US Code and the language there definitely seems unlike everyday English, with very complex and unnatural sentences, to the point where understanding the law is really hard.
Do not be surprised at the popularity of authoritarian leaders in Russia. That's one of the weird things about the country. Someone who's pretty much a dictator or at least an autocrat can still be popular enough to win in a genuine election. Heck, Medvedev was elected because Putin said Medvedev is his preferred candidate. While Russian elections do apparently have vote-fixing in certain areas/demographics (not deliberate miscounts of votes, but people being forced to vote for a candidate), there's no doubt that the majority really did vote for Medvedev. Or that Putin easily had enough support for his second term.
Seems like in smaller regions of Russia, many people are happy about having a local authoritarian-style leader. I think it's one of the worst legacies of the Soviet Union in this part of the world, and a legacy that's going to be tough to get rid of. I mean the people's contentedness (contentment? not sure of the English word) to have a guy in charge that makes the calls. A "strong ruler".
This is one of the things I like about how Americans view their society. Americans and mostly happy and proud to vote, from what I've seen. They certainly would hate being in a situation where they don't have the opportunity to do so.
Firefox 3.6.3 opens the Arabic-charset link just fine but displays that messed up xn-- thing in the location bar. Ditto Chrome. IE6 in a virtual machine (Win7's XP mode) leaves the URL bar in Arabic but doesn't display the page. Opera, in the same VM, works best, as much as I dislike the browser. It opens the site just fine and the URL bar remains in Arabic, though the Arabic address is followed by /ar/default.aspx
While he was appointed for his current term as Head of Kalmykia, he was previously its President without any appointment, simply by being elected. Despite the occasional controversy, he's quite popular, I believe, not in the least due to his position in FIDE. Also, the story itself is nothing extraordinary. Ilyumzhinov has been known for years as an eccentric person, and he had already mentioned being taken to alien ships on a few occasions.
At the same time, SC2 seems to be less micro-heavy. Which I like to a degree. SC1 had a bunch of micro features that even "average" players knew and that would let them wipe the floor with anyone who doesn't. Like moving shot (having units fire while continuing to move without any deceleration). It would let, for instance, Corsairs totally destroy Mutalisks. Starcraft 2 has smart casting, a better UI with much larger amounts of stuff being selectable at once, rally points you can set on resources and the like, so it's probably going to be easier to become of average skill in SC2. I realize the high-level play will still be very micro intense, but it sure feels like the required micro levels for mid-level play are going to be lower. As a side-note, the beta matchmaking system sucks, it's calibrated to find games quickly, which means you get matched too often against people that roll over you effortlessly, or vice versa.
And as another side-note, I don't envy the Blizzard employees that have to deal with beta tester feedback. The beta community forums are horrible which is why I don't feel like I can effectively provide any feedback or criticism. It's an immature forum full of players whining, where most arguments include some form of "you're retarded" remarks and where a bunch of platinum-level players acts like anyone from a lower league is automatically wrong about any issue. Gah.
The "images" were created using the BESM-4 computer. The much more widely used BESM-6 used 48 bit words and you can see its character encoding table here:
http://www.mailcom.com/besm6/encoding_ru.html
The BESM-4 had 45-bit words and I'm not sure what encoding it used, but it's likely to be the same or similar to the above. Note how that character table has math operators like logical conjucntion/disjunction even but lacks an exclamation mark and even two letters of the Russian alphabet. Wasn't exactly meant for word processing ;)
The BBC article doesn't entirely reflect the situation. I live in Latvia and do know better ;)
The main thing they're not mentioning is the origin of that data. It wasn't just "downloaded" from the State Revenue Service via a hack or somesuch. This part has made headlines here - it turned out that the Revenue Service's internal system that contains information on all tax payers had no security, at all. You could view the confidential info by accessing an unsecured URL. And just by changing the entry id parameter in the URL, you could get to information about different tax payers, as the parent says. Any moron could get that data and apparently the "hackers"/whistleblowers in question downloaded it over the course of a couple months.
Latvia is no US and of course the organizations here don't have the same kind of security experience that organizations from big countries. Still, this is an important governmental organization we're talking about and the security hole in question is blatant and obvious. As such, many here have doubts that it was accidental, it's quite possible that the Revenue Service was sabotaged.
This Neo guy and his organization are apparently planning now to release information about the financial activities of a bunch of organizations, including governmental ones, as allegedly they believe it will help the society here, create more responsibility, etc. They have, banks aside, so far released information about the salaries of police and public transportation employees. The bank is a separate story really, it got bailed out when the recession hit hard here, and this bailout has in itself been a subject of much contention.
Absolutely. Frankly, I'm surprised at Kindle's popularity given the Reader's existence. For my Sony Reader, I used to just copy the books over in txt format by mounting its drive, now I use calibre to manage my books, including conversion to Sony's LRF format if I feel like it. Calibre is open source, available for both Windows and Linux, and it's really a better piece of software than Sony's bundled library management tool.
I have the discontinued PRS-505 and am very satisfied with it, seems like newer models have made significant improvements, too. We're really seeing very rapid improvement for e-book readers, I think. The 505 is just over 2 years old, already discontinued and replaced with faster, touch-interface, higher capacity devices. Give them 5 years and we'll have an excellent selection of readers available.
And anyone saying that a laptop does everything a reader does is missing the point. Readers have e-ink, but that's not their only advantage. Readers are lighter and thinner than most books and so are a great way to carry some reading material for transport, waiting halls, etc. Plus the battery lasts far longer than that of any computer. Reading in bed is a pleasure with e-book readers.
So what about false positives? Typical homework assignments in CS courses are pretty simple. Take an input file containing one integer per line, output a file with those numbers in ascending order, using bubblesort/quicksort/mergesort. It would seem that the code structure for such assignments would be fairly similar, if they're done correctly.
KDE 4 doesn't seem bad to me anymore. I tried 4.0 and it was a fairly miserable experience. UI issues I could forgive, but not coupled with the constant crashes. I still think the devs should be ashamed for labeling that a release version. 4.1. was slightly better. Lacking configuration options and a bunch of UI stuff, but generally more stable. KDE 4.2. was, finally, something usable and the dev team also said that it's an okay choice for "end users" and not just "enthusiasts". I've been happily using 4.3. since its release and that's a very nice desktop environment, though I do hate the changes to Amarok.
Kubuntu is a separate issue. The Ubuntu project has always been very Gnome-centric, which is one of the things I dislike about the approach to Ubuntu. The K versions have always felt like an afterthought, including the ones that predate KDE4. I wouldn't really say that Kubuntu sucks but it sure seems to implement KDE worse than numerous other distros do.
In Soviet Britain, the government has access you YOUR information!
Speaking of Japanese game music composers, I have to mention Akira Yamaoka. His music fits the games very well, and music from Silent Hill 2 can also be appreciated outside of the game, it's among the tracks I really like listening to. One great track by him and another here
I have to mention this game, hasn't been mentioned so far in the thread. Project Reality is a team-based, teamwork-oriented, fairly realistic game. It absolutely craps on AA. I used to play AA for my "realism" fix, haven't even thought about AA since trying PR. Yes, PR has re-spawns, but it's more realistic. Also, it's a game where teamwork is actually present. People typically use VOIP and coordination within a single squad is usually good. On the better servers, the entire team will often work together in a coordinated fashion.
PR is actually a mod for Battlefield 2, so it's free if you own BF2. If not, I guess you can easily grab a copy of BF2 for under 10 USD these days.
A word of warning: PR is rather hardcore and fairly demanding, in terms of patience, willingness to work together and willingness to learn - there are numerous aspects of the game you won't immediately grok. But if you're looking for teamwork, tactics and realism, look PR up, it may well be what you want.