When you ask "one of whom" many would assume "at least one of whom" not "one of randomly selected".
This didn't make much sense. Sorry, English is not my native language but it also showed me the inapplicability of the original problem which was:
I have two children, one of whom is a son born on a Tuesday. What is the probability that I have two boys?
We don't know the motivation of the original asker. What causes one to ask such a question in the first place. For all I know all such persons could be liars and don't have a child. There is no statistics and any probability is only a wild guess.
It is the same black swan problem as described by Nassim Taleb. Suppose you have a fair coin (meaning that tossing it you can get equal chances of tails or heads). You toss it 99 times and each time you have heads. What is the chances of getting tails when you toss the coin the 100th time? Mathematicians will answer that it is 50% because each toss is an independent event and not influenced by previous cases. The more erudite person would answer that only a totally gullible or naive person would still believe that it is a fair coin. But if it is not, you cannot be sure how it is manipulated. You can't even bet that the 100th it will be heads because it may be controlled remotely to entice you this kind of betting.
The randomness works only if you control everything, from the tossing to the coin environment. Most exemplary is the financial system that still tries to act as if they have a fair coin when it is not because everybody tries to control the economy in one way or other.
It simply means that there is a 50% chance that Peter has a brother. Peter's sex is not given and it has 50% chance that it may be a girl.:) From a perspective of parents they didn't mean that they have Peter, they said that they have a boy and it could be the other Boy in your calculations. So, you would have another combination like Girl, Boy which you excluded but the parents would not.
Assuming that all families have exactly 2 children with random sex distribution:
1. Is at least one of your children a boy? - Yes, it is. Then the possibility that your other child is a son is 1/3.
Because 75% of families have at least one boy and 25% have two boys.
2. Think of one of your children (supposedly randomly selected) and tell me if it is a boy or a girl? It is a boy. Then the possibility that your other child is a son is 1/2.
When you by chance randomly selected a girl you simply excluded 50% of children. The sex of the remaining 50% are still random, so for each selected boy there is a 50% chance that he has a brother.
The problem with the original question lies in ambiguity of the English language. When you ask "one of whom" many would assume "at least one of whom" not "one of randomly selected".
Is it really required to illuminate the area? Maybe it would work better as short pulses of strobing light with the interval of about 1 sec. Would such flickering be easily noticeable during bright daylight?
It seems that audible sirens would work better for tsunami warnings in either case but the idea is so cool that it would a shame to let waste it. Could it be used for more local emergencies gas leaks or big fires? Let say, if there is a big crash on the highway that blocks the traffic for several hours all drivers in the vicinity could be warned to seek detour or at least turn on the radio to listen for emergency warnings.
The summary is completely wrong. The actual history in short is as follows: Latvian Neo claims that the anonymous group 4ATA has downloaded about 7.4 million tax statements from the Latvian tax authority website that is used by businesses to submit their tax declarations electronically. It was done over 3 months period before the IT department realized that something is wrong. The stolen data includes practically full information about salaries and payments received by employees of all Latvian public and private enterprises.
4ATA is now periodically releasing the detailed pay information of certain public companies one at a time. He is careful to remove actual names of employees and for many this data seems trivial. But with this he is trying to prove that the claimed austerity measures undertaken by the government to fight the economic crisis is a big lie. However, the periodic release is annoying politicians who can't find a way to stop this leak.
As for Neo walking the fine line, he downloaded the data without circumventing any security measures as he claims that the website was open to everyone. The hole was one specific URL normally used by an authorized user to review his own statements. Each document in the total database is assigned an ID number and by sequentially changing the ID number in the said URL, everyone could download the whole database as no authorization was checked by the script on the server. After some time the tax department notice irregularities and noticed the developer of the system but they were rather slow to fix the breach. When they finally managed to get the act together, Neo had already downloaded about 98% of the database.
It is easy to get a Russian visa but I have paid bribes to Russian borders guards and police upon leaving on several occasions. Usually it was because Russia requires registration for all visiting foreigners and unless you stayed in a hotel (I usually stayed with friends) it was simply impossible to get the registration as the paperwork required was simply insurmountable. In two cases I had to pay a fine to police because I hadn't registered in Moscow where I only changed the trains and had stayed merely for a few hours. The bribes requested were really low, usually no more than $20. In a way it was actually cheaper to pay the bribe than to get an official registration. On the other hand even the terrorists without proper IDs could bribe the airport officials and blow up two airplanes.
I hear that the things have been improved now but I am sure that Russian border is still in a mess. Recently a Latvian participant to Eurovision was detained for several hours at the Russian border because the border guards were too stupid to figure out that his visa in his old (expired) passport and a new passport is a valid combination for travel. Or maybe they were just waiting for the bribe...
In comparison entering and leaving the USA has always been quite eventless. Just fill the form, scan the fingers and look in the camera and that's it. More bureaucratic but not a big deal compared to airport security lines, long flights with transfers and jet lag sensation.
Exactly! Even if people have much less income comparing to the US or Western Europe, they still have some disposable money. Otherwise, how they are able to browse the Internet that certainly costs something.
The content providers probably don't even realize that most people in third word countries don't have credit cards or bank accounts, so they are often simply unable to buy things online even if they want to. Micro-payments by cell phone are very popular, but they usually work only locally as they required agreements with local phone companies.
At present machines are not capable to perform even simple technical translations except in strictly controlled setting and only where highly repetitive texts are involved. Book translation by machine today is pure fantasy.
And copyright law acknowledges translation as a derivative creative work. Both the original author and the translator have rights to the translated work.
English is not my native language but isn't comma missing here? There is a difference between DRM increases, not decreases consumer value and DRM increases not, decreases consumer value.
Even if I was offered to become a first man to set foot on Mars, I would refuse. I don't understand the attraction. It is the same as when the USA decades ago sent some men to the Moon just for propaganda purposes. Mars is just a barren place and nothing interesting to see their. All the science can be done 10 times better and cheaper by remote technology. So, although for humans reaching the space was great achievement, it is time to also acknowledge that it is not a place for humans yet.
It happened to my wife too. She bought some books from ebay. It was sent by media mail and showed as delivered on USPS website but she never received it. It was the first and only time when the USPS lost our package. Our complaints were never answered and we lost money on this. I guess that apparently there is some loophole that is exploited by dishonest postmen.
I live in Chicago and there are many free Wi-fi access points around the city. First of them are Public libraries. You can go at any time to the library with you laptop and use internet as long as you wish. The signal is week outside the building but it is working. There are some municipalities who provide free Wi-fi as well. One day I was driving through Highland Park and checked my e-mail with my Palmtop device. I had to click to accept the rules for using it though (promising to do no illegal things on the net).
So, the questions is, if I come accross another free Wi-fi, how do I know that it is illegal to use it? Besides many devices connect automatically to the strongest signal if it is open. I might be thinking that I am still using public library's connection and may not realize that this connection has been dropped and have been reconnected to the nearest cofee shop instead.
Furthermore, how much is the loss in monetary terms if someone uses Wi-fi without buying anything? Unless he was downloading continuously at high speed, thus congesting their connection, I doubt that other shop customers who were using the wi-fi at the same time, noticed any difference in speed. It could be annoying that someone is buying anything but can it really be called theft, i.e., depriving the owner of something valuable?
Cricket Communications is nothing like Mafia. Who cannot open a bank account nowadays? I see the ads everywhere (in Spanish) that even illegal immigrants with only a foreign id can get a free checking account with zero balance and no monthly fees whatsoever. If you get paid under the table and do not pay taxes then you have a reason to avoid banks.
As for paper bills these things cost money and ultimately the costs are put on customers anyway. Since I don't need any piece of paper to pay my bill as I can pay it on the web and I would prefer not to subsidize those who are still stuck with the old way of doing things if it means that I can save money in this way.
I actually had a Cricket phone for a few months but then I had to move and there was no service at the new place. I simply called Cricket and canceled the service without any penalty whereas with any other cell phone contract I would had to pay at least $200 penalty for prematurely breaking the contract.
For $29.98, you get the phone and the right to buy pay-as-you-go phone services.
But can I buy it from Walmart for $30 and use on T-mobile network? The article lacks details - is it GSM phone and which frequencies are covered? Is it locked for to specific operator. Otherwise exchanging SIM card should not be problem and if it is even locked, I guess there are services that can provide unlocking for a small fee. My current phone batery is failing and I don't want to enter in another yearly contact with T-mobile or other company. I just want to buy a cheap but good quality phone, without extras, even color screen is unnecessary. Just calling and receiving calls and occasional SMS.
To say that Ukrainian Holodomor was "merely famine" is a very loaded statement. What kind of widespread draughts or plagues were there at this time? The answer is none. It is hard to evaluate how much it was caused by inept but well-wishing policies and what part was deliberate revenge against so-called kulaks but in either way the blame solely lies to Soviet officials who seized the crops and restricted the movement of people out of affected areas. What to speak of trying to help those people with providing food by apealing for help in their own country or internationally.
any other web based mail service? You could have accomplished the same thing with, say,.Mac or the built-in POP email service most ISPs provide.
I could, however, no one provided this until Gmail came along. Gmail has not done anything revolutionary but only put all the features together and done them right. I don't need gmail.com address but I would pay them to host my own domain with their "web mail access". So far they are doing it for free, except that I still need to set email forwarding from my current hosting provider to the gmail address.
Just add some other extention like.xxx to your exe files and it will go through. People may not use gmail so widely because you need invitation (it is still beta) to sign up but I see that more and more people who require reliable email service use it more and more often. To have yahoo or hotmail as your primary email for business dealing was considered as a sign of incompetency or computer illiteracy and thus not bringing any trust. Today you can proudly announce your gmail address and be regarded as the power user and as an expert in your own field.
At least for me and my small scale private business Gmail has been very useful. I could say that it revolutioned my email use without actually introducing any previously unknown features. I migrated between several desktop clients -- Eudora, Outlook, The Bat, Mozilla Mail, during several years gathering incompatible archives of old mail while trying to balance webmail and POP3 client synchronization. Regardless how much I tried I lost my mail with system upgrades, while traveling, etc.
While still in beta Gmail has been more useful for me than all other systems together. Now I just forward my mail from the personal domain to my gmail account where it archives everything. It is the best interface I have ever used - quick searching, keyboard shortcuts, superb spam filtering. Now more problems with synchronizing data with laptop, just use it online always, whether at home, at office or travelling in another country.
I even use it to backup important files I work on by emailing myself. Once it got stuck and did not accepted.exe attachment -- no problem, just added the extension.xxx in 3 seconds and it went through. Threading is another option that is so useful. Anyway, the only worries I have is what will happen when I exceed my 2.5 GB quota, and judging by the rate I fill it up it will take slightly more than 1 year. I hope that by that time it will be increased or google will offer commercial versions for those who need more resources.
When I was in India like 10 years ago I bought eye drops against conjunctivitis called Itone or something. They worked so well that I bought like 20 bottles for my friends with similar problems. I was a little perplexed why some bottles were marked with red letters "Physician sample". I returned to Europe and after 3 years I saw a poster in a local pharmacy which advertised a new, revolutionary drug that was just released, the same Itone I had been using for several years.
My wife developed some stomach problems in India. She visited a doctor who gave her some medicine that took away all problems in one day. In Europe the same stomach problem returned but the doctors were horrified when she told what kind of medicine she was taking in India. They prescribed some other treatment but that was not very effective and it took 2 months to completely cure her illness. I guess the European doctors were not so experienced in tropical diseases.
I know of another person who was treated by some Indian fakir who gave him ash from yagyas (sacrificial fire). Supposedly harmless thing that was simply blessed by his mantras and yantras. Nevertheless it was very effective and made the person very peaceful. Before this person was suffering from the bipolar disorder but he didn't want to take drugs because they made him dull. But simple ash worked so good for him. Long story short, after several years it turned out that the fakir was mixing very powerful psychotropic drug with ash and giving to him. Well, in the West it would be considered cheating but in India who cares if it did well to the patient. And if someone dies in the process that is not a big problem, there are already so many people in India that one person more or less doesn't make any difference.
I bought a laptop recently, that one cheapy Walmart thing for $500 something. So far it works great. I am using it for web browsing, e-mailing, studying English language, updating my webpage and making cheap VoIP calls to Europe. I often go the nearest library to use the free wireless conectivity. But my 2 concerns about this laptop is 1) the quality issue -- it looks fragile and I am afraid that it may break soon from constant carrying in my backpack and tear. 2) The batery life is not great. But all in all it is a good deal considering the price. It has only 256 MB and I bought another SO DIMM module but have not installed it yet because I yet to figure it out and not void my varanty. So far I have not experienced any problems with memory shortage.
I guess that $100 laptop (or $200 for product cost) will be as much useful. But the crucial factor will be available conectivity. I think the talks about ad-hoc mesh networks are fantacy. It won't work because from where that one person will get the internet living hudreds of kilometers from real civilization? There is no infrastruction in place. Maybe cell phone towers will be there offering wireless data connections like slow GPRS channel that will be completely saturated by one user alone.
Thus this gadget will not be a saver and the local governments will have to think about supporting the local infrastructure like providing the internet through WiMax etc. On the other hand even though some may call such laptop a gadget it may become very cool thing to have. As much as today teenagers can spend hours on cell phone features, trying out SMSs, logos, ringtones etc.
You're kidding right? Does a drunk driver get to keep his license because the bus doesn't come right to his house?
That's the wrong comparison. It is more closely that if you drove a car to the bank and commited a robbery there, after serving your sentence, you were forbidden to drive a car, including use of public transportation and even ride a bike on public roads. After all, you know, the roads lead to many banks and you already misused your privilege to use them. And don't say that is not fair, he still can walk everywhere.[/sarcasm]
Drunk drivers often are addicted to drinking, it is difficult for them to stop drinking, thus I can understand the harsh measures taken. But is hacking addictive? I think that 11 months in juvenile facility will send the message more than enough.
I think that $500 million could easily buy a textbooks for each schoolchild in China. The prices there are much lower, also authors in China don't get paid obscene royalties, maybe only a few cents per book. The cost of printing on a large scale could be $1 or $2 per book which would give about 300 million books in total. I don't know statistics but I guess that there are not as much students in China.
Though organizing 2008 Olympics could result in much higher economic boost than subsidizing a few textbooks.
The comparison with Hare Krishnas (the spelling in the article is wrong) is lame. First of all Hare Krishnas are not hippies in all aspects but very conservative Hindu cult. And second, they definitely are not against paid work, although encouraging donations to their church in the form of money or labor. It is not any different from other religious organizations.
However, the comparison could be partially true. Nowadays people are becoming more distrustful towards organized religions, yet retaining the urge to work for attainment of lofty ideas for the general good. Often this is done as a charity work and if you can make the difference then why not. Why developers should be excluded from this aspect of human endeavors? There are a lot of things the money can't buy and inner fulfilment is one of them.
By the same token how can you vouch that your antivirus/antispyware is a genuine one and not some trojanized version that is giving you false sense of security?
Once you get pristine Knoppix disk from authorized source or burn it on cd there is no possibility it can be altered. The files on your hard disk, however, are very vulnerable to different attacks and every Windows installation from "holographic cd" has proved to be insecure.
Security holes can be found in Knoppix as well, thus it is not absolutely secure but it has good security measures as restrictions that protects from user stupidities like turning firewall off and not applying latest patches (PITA).
Parex is actually known as "rogues' bank" here in Latvia. They used to allow anonymous accounts back in 90s when Latvia had already parted from the USSR. These account were mainly used to launder money out of Russia and since then Latvia is notorious as the capital of banking fraud. That attracted a lot of criminals who could open account in Parex bank online even from another continent in 10 minutes.
Now the laws are stronger but the control is insufficient due to frequent government changes and widespread corruption.
Ironically, Parex online banking is much more secure and uses only "code calculators" with a separately calculated password to authorize a online transaction. Their website is www.parex.lv
Slashdot Mirror
This didn't make much sense. Sorry, English is not my native language but it also showed me the inapplicability of the original problem which was:
I have two children, one of whom is a son born on a Tuesday. What is the probability that I have two boys?
We don't know the motivation of the original asker. What causes one to ask such a question in the first place. For all I know all such persons could be liars and don't have a child. There is no statistics and any probability is only a wild guess.
It is the same black swan problem as described by Nassim Taleb. Suppose you have a fair coin (meaning that tossing it you can get equal chances of tails or heads). You toss it 99 times and each time you have heads. What is the chances of getting tails when you toss the coin the 100th time? Mathematicians will answer that it is 50% because each toss is an independent event and not influenced by previous cases. The more erudite person would answer that only a totally gullible or naive person would still believe that it is a fair coin. But if it is not, you cannot be sure how it is manipulated. You can't even bet that the 100th it will be heads because it may be controlled remotely to entice you this kind of betting.
The randomness works only if you control everything, from the tossing to the coin environment. Most exemplary is the financial system that still tries to act as if they have a fair coin when it is not because everybody tries to control the economy in one way or other.
It simply means that there is a 50% chance that Peter has a brother. Peter's sex is not given and it has 50% chance that it may be a girl. :) From a perspective of parents they didn't mean that they have Peter, they said that they have a boy and it could be the other Boy in your calculations. So, you would have another combination like Girl, Boy which you excluded but the parents would not.
Assuming that all families have exactly 2 children with random sex distribution:
1. Is at least one of your children a boy? - Yes, it is. Then the possibility that your other child is a son is 1/3.
Because 75% of families have at least one boy and 25% have two boys.
2. Think of one of your children (supposedly randomly selected) and tell me if it is a boy or a girl? It is a boy. Then the possibility that your other child is a son is 1/2.
When you by chance randomly selected a girl you simply excluded 50% of children. The sex of the remaining 50% are still random, so for each selected boy there is a 50% chance that he has a brother.
The problem with the original question lies in ambiguity of the English language. When you ask "one of whom" many would assume "at least one of whom" not "one of randomly selected".
Is it really required to illuminate the area? Maybe it would work better as short pulses of strobing light with the interval of about 1 sec. Would such flickering be easily noticeable during bright daylight?
It seems that audible sirens would work better for tsunami warnings in either case but the idea is so cool that it would a shame to let waste it. Could it be used for more local emergencies gas leaks or big fires? Let say, if there is a big crash on the highway that blocks the traffic for several hours all drivers in the vicinity could be warned to seek detour or at least turn on the radio to listen for emergency warnings.
The summary is completely wrong. The actual history in short is as follows: Latvian Neo claims that the anonymous group 4ATA has downloaded about 7.4 million tax statements from the Latvian tax authority website that is used by businesses to submit their tax declarations electronically. It was done over 3 months period before the IT department realized that something is wrong. The stolen data includes practically full information about salaries and payments received by employees of all Latvian public and private enterprises.
4ATA is now periodically releasing the detailed pay information of certain public companies one at a time. He is careful to remove actual names of employees and for many this data seems trivial. But with this he is trying to prove that the claimed austerity measures undertaken by the government to fight the economic crisis is a big lie. However, the periodic release is annoying politicians who can't find a way to stop this leak.
As for Neo walking the fine line, he downloaded the data without circumventing any security measures as he claims that the website was open to everyone. The hole was one specific URL normally used by an authorized user to review his own statements. Each document in the total database is assigned an ID number and by sequentially changing the ID number in the said URL, everyone could download the whole database as no authorization was checked by the script on the server. After some time the tax department notice irregularities and noticed the developer of the system but they were rather slow to fix the breach. When they finally managed to get the act together, Neo had already downloaded about 98% of the database.
I hear that the things have been improved now but I am sure that Russian border is still in a mess. Recently a Latvian participant to Eurovision was detained for several hours at the Russian border because the border guards were too stupid to figure out that his visa in his old (expired) passport and a new passport is a valid combination for travel. Or maybe they were just waiting for the bribe...
In comparison entering and leaving the USA has always been quite eventless. Just fill the form, scan the fingers and look in the camera and that's it. More bureaucratic but not a big deal compared to airport security lines, long flights with transfers and jet lag sensation.
Exactly! Even if people have much less income comparing to the US or Western Europe, they still have some disposable money. Otherwise, how they are able to browse the Internet that certainly costs something. The content providers probably don't even realize that most people in third word countries don't have credit cards or bank accounts, so they are often simply unable to buy things online even if they want to. Micro-payments by cell phone are very popular, but they usually work only locally as they required agreements with local phone companies.
At present machines are not capable to perform even simple technical translations except in strictly controlled setting and only where highly repetitive texts are involved. Book translation by machine today is pure fantasy. And copyright law acknowledges translation as a derivative creative work. Both the original author and the translator have rights to the translated work.
> DRM increases not decreases consumer value
English is not my native language but isn't comma missing here? There is a difference between DRM increases, not decreases consumer value and DRM increases not, decreases consumer value.
Even if I was offered to become a first man to set foot on Mars, I would refuse. I don't understand the attraction. It is the same as when the USA decades ago sent some men to the Moon just for propaganda purposes. Mars is just a barren place and nothing interesting to see their. All the science can be done 10 times better and cheaper by remote technology. So, although for humans reaching the space was great achievement, it is time to also acknowledge that it is not a place for humans yet.
It happened to my wife too. She bought some books from ebay. It was sent by media mail and showed as delivered on USPS website but she never received it. It was the first and only time when the USPS lost our package. Our complaints were never answered and we lost money on this. I guess that apparently there is some loophole that is exploited by dishonest postmen.
I live in Chicago and there are many free Wi-fi access points around the city. First of them are Public libraries. You can go at any time to the library with you laptop and use internet as long as you wish. The signal is week outside the building but it is working. There are some municipalities who provide free Wi-fi as well. One day I was driving through Highland Park and checked my e-mail with my Palmtop device. I had to click to accept the rules for using it though (promising to do no illegal things on the net).
So, the questions is, if I come accross another free Wi-fi, how do I know that it is illegal to use it? Besides many devices connect automatically to the strongest signal if it is open. I might be thinking that I am still using public library's connection and may not realize that this connection has been dropped and have been reconnected to the nearest cofee shop instead.
Furthermore, how much is the loss in monetary terms if someone uses Wi-fi without buying anything? Unless he was downloading continuously at high speed, thus congesting their connection, I doubt that other shop customers who were using the wi-fi at the same time, noticed any difference in speed. It could be annoying that someone is buying anything but can it really be called theft, i.e., depriving the owner of something valuable?
Cricket Communications is nothing like Mafia. Who cannot open a bank account nowadays? I see the ads everywhere (in Spanish) that even illegal immigrants with only a foreign id can get a free checking account with zero balance and no monthly fees whatsoever. If you get paid under the table and do not pay taxes then you have a reason to avoid banks.
As for paper bills these things cost money and ultimately the costs are put on customers anyway. Since I don't need any piece of paper to pay my bill as I can pay it on the web and I would prefer not to subsidize those who are still stuck with the old way of doing things if it means that I can save money in this way.
I actually had a Cricket phone for a few months but then I had to move and there was no service at the new place. I simply called Cricket and canceled the service without any penalty whereas with any other cell phone contract I would had to pay at least $200 penalty for prematurely breaking the contract.
For $29.98, you get the phone and the right to buy pay-as-you-go phone services.
But can I buy it from Walmart for $30 and use on T-mobile network? The article lacks details - is it GSM phone and which frequencies are covered? Is it locked for to specific operator. Otherwise exchanging SIM card should not be problem and if it is even locked, I guess there are services that can provide unlocking for a small fee. My current phone batery is failing and I don't want to enter in another yearly contact with T-mobile or other company. I just want to buy a cheap but good quality phone, without extras, even color screen is unnecessary. Just calling and receiving calls and occasional SMS.
To say that Ukrainian Holodomor was "merely famine" is a very loaded statement. What kind of widespread draughts or plagues were there at this time? The answer is none. It is hard to evaluate how much it was caused by inept but well-wishing policies and what part was deliberate revenge against so-called kulaks but in either way the blame solely lies to Soviet officials who seized the crops and restricted the movement of people out of affected areas. What to speak of trying to help those people with providing food by apealing for help in their own country or internationally.
any other web based mail service? You could have accomplished the same thing with, say, .Mac or the built-in POP email service most ISPs provide.
I could, however, no one provided this until Gmail came along. Gmail has not done anything revolutionary but only put all the features together and done them right. I don't need gmail.com address but I would pay them to host my own domain with their "web mail access". So far they are doing it for free, except that I still need to set email forwarding from my current hosting provider to the gmail address.
Just add some other extention like .xxx to your exe files and it will go through. People may not use gmail so widely because you need invitation (it is still beta) to sign up but I see that more and more people who require reliable email service use it more and more often. To have yahoo or hotmail as your primary email for business dealing was considered as a sign of incompetency or computer illiteracy and thus not bringing any trust. Today you can proudly announce your gmail address and be regarded as the power user and as an expert in your own field.
At least for me and my small scale private business Gmail has been very useful. I could say that it revolutioned my email use without actually introducing any previously unknown features. I migrated between several desktop clients -- Eudora, Outlook, The Bat, Mozilla Mail, during several years gathering incompatible archives of old mail while trying to balance webmail and POP3 client synchronization. Regardless how much I tried I lost my mail with system upgrades, while traveling, etc.
.exe attachment -- no problem, just added the extension .xxx in 3 seconds and it went through. Threading is another option that is so useful. Anyway, the only worries I have is what will happen when I exceed my 2.5 GB quota, and judging by the rate I fill it up it will take slightly more than 1 year. I hope that by that time it will be increased or google will offer commercial versions for those who need more resources.
While still in beta Gmail has been more useful for me than all other systems together. Now I just forward my mail from the personal domain to my gmail account where it archives everything. It is the best interface I have ever used - quick searching, keyboard shortcuts, superb spam filtering. Now more problems with synchronizing data with laptop, just use it online always, whether at home, at office or travelling in another country.
I even use it to backup important files I work on by emailing myself. Once it got stuck and did not accepted
I have funny experience with Indian medicines.
When I was in India like 10 years ago I bought eye drops against conjunctivitis called Itone or something. They worked so well that I bought like 20 bottles for my friends with similar problems. I was a little perplexed why some bottles were marked with red letters "Physician sample". I returned to Europe and after 3 years I saw a poster in a local pharmacy which advertised a new, revolutionary drug that was just released, the same Itone I had been using for several years.
My wife developed some stomach problems in India. She visited a doctor who gave her some medicine that took away all problems in one day. In Europe the same stomach problem returned but the doctors were horrified when she told what kind of medicine she was taking in India. They prescribed some other treatment but that was not very effective and it took 2 months to completely cure her illness. I guess the European doctors were not so experienced in tropical diseases.
I know of another person who was treated by some Indian fakir who gave him ash from yagyas (sacrificial fire). Supposedly harmless thing that was simply blessed by his mantras and yantras. Nevertheless it was very effective and made the person very peaceful. Before this person was suffering from the bipolar disorder but he didn't want to take drugs because they made him dull. But simple ash worked so good for him. Long story short, after several years it turned out that the fakir was mixing very powerful psychotropic drug with ash and giving to him. Well, in the West it would be considered cheating but in India who cares if it did well to the patient. And if someone dies in the process that is not a big problem, there are already so many people in India that one person more or less doesn't make any difference.
I bought a laptop recently, that one cheapy Walmart thing for $500 something. So far it works great. I am using it for web browsing, e-mailing, studying English language, updating my webpage and making cheap VoIP calls to Europe. I often go the nearest library to use the free wireless conectivity. But my 2 concerns about this laptop is 1) the quality issue -- it looks fragile and I am afraid that it may break soon from constant carrying in my backpack and tear. 2) The batery life is not great. But all in all it is a good deal considering the price. It has only 256 MB and I bought another SO DIMM module but have not installed it yet because I yet to figure it out and not void my varanty. So far I have not experienced any problems with memory shortage.
I guess that $100 laptop (or $200 for product cost) will be as much useful. But the crucial factor will be available conectivity. I think the talks about ad-hoc mesh networks are fantacy. It won't work because from where that one person will get the internet living hudreds of kilometers from real civilization? There is no infrastruction in place. Maybe cell phone towers will be there offering wireless data connections like slow GPRS channel that will be completely saturated by one user alone.
Thus this gadget will not be a saver and the local governments will have to think about supporting the local infrastructure like providing the internet through WiMax etc. On the other hand even though some may call such laptop a gadget it may become very cool thing to have. As much as today teenagers can spend hours on cell phone features, trying out SMSs, logos, ringtones etc.
You're kidding right? Does a drunk driver get to keep his license because the bus doesn't come right to his house?
That's the wrong comparison. It is more closely that if you drove a car to the bank and commited a robbery there, after serving your sentence, you were forbidden to drive a car, including use of public transportation and even ride a bike on public roads. After all, you know, the roads lead to many banks and you already misused your privilege to use them. And don't say that is not fair, he still can walk everywhere.[/sarcasm]
Drunk drivers often are addicted to drinking, it is difficult for them to stop drinking, thus I can understand the harsh measures taken. But is hacking addictive? I think that 11 months in juvenile facility will send the message more than enough.
I think that $500 million could easily buy a textbooks for each schoolchild in China. The prices there are much lower, also authors in China don't get paid obscene royalties, maybe only a few cents per book. The cost of printing on a large scale could be $1 or $2 per book which would give about 300 million books in total. I don't know statistics but I guess that there are not as much students in China.
Though organizing 2008 Olympics could result in much higher economic boost than subsidizing a few textbooks.
The comparison with Hare Krishnas (the spelling in the article is wrong) is lame. First of all Hare Krishnas are not hippies in all aspects but very conservative Hindu cult. And second, they definitely are not against paid work, although encouraging donations to their church in the form of money or labor. It is not any different from other religious organizations.
However, the comparison could be partially true. Nowadays people are becoming more distrustful towards organized religions, yet retaining the urge to work for attainment of lofty ideas for the general good. Often this is done as a charity work and if you can make the difference then why not. Why developers should be excluded from this aspect of human endeavors? There are a lot of things the money can't buy and inner fulfilment is one of them.
By the same token how can you vouch that your antivirus/antispyware is a genuine one and not some trojanized version that is giving you false sense of security?
Once you get pristine Knoppix disk from authorized source or burn it on cd there is no possibility it can be altered. The files on your hard disk, however, are very vulnerable to different attacks and every Windows installation from "holographic cd" has proved to be insecure.
Security holes can be found in Knoppix as well, thus it is not absolutely secure but it has good security measures as restrictions that protects from user stupidities like turning firewall off and not applying latest patches (PITA).
Parex online banking in English.
Parex is actually known as "rogues' bank" here in Latvia. They used to allow anonymous accounts back in 90s when Latvia had already parted from the USSR. These account were mainly used to launder money out of Russia and since then Latvia is notorious as the capital of banking fraud. That attracted a lot of criminals who could open account in Parex bank online even from another continent in 10 minutes.
Now the laws are stronger but the control is insufficient due to frequent government changes and widespread corruption.
Ironically, Parex online banking is much more secure and uses only "code calculators" with a separately calculated password to authorize a online transaction. Their website is www.parex.lv