Akihito's coronation in January 1989 marked the beginning of the Heisei era, and the end of the Shwa era that preceded him
Actually it's not the Shwa era, but the Showa era, with a bar on top of the o. The character in question (U+014D) is used in transliterating Japanese in Latin script to indicate pronunciation. It has been part of Unicode since 1991.
It's interesting to see in the summary a discussion of Unicode 12.1 vs. 12.0, when Slashdot itself doesn't support the Unicode 1.0 characters necessary to write the summary:)
how come some low id Slashdot accounts are pushing the Kremlin line recently? Is it anything to do with a comment on the 20 year anniversary story saying these accounts are worth money or has the Slashdot database been hacked?
may be "low id slashdot accounts" prefer openness, individual freedom, and critical thinking, over secrecy, "security"(as defined by deep state), and propaganda.
If you prefer openness, individual freedom, and critical thinking, then Russia is not where you should be looking.
In fact, "secrecy, "security"(as defined by deep state), and propaganda" is at least as characteristic of Russia than of pretty much all Western countries. (I'm saying this as a non-Russian who speaks Russian fluently and has spent the last ten years working in 11 out of 15 CIS states.) Russia is also at least as much driven by capitalism and corporate greed and has greater social inequality. If you're disappointed with what's going on in your country, fix your own country instead of getting your inspiration from one that is even worse.
The coprocessor was not the issue. The 486 had a floating-point coprocessor built in - except a few uncommon versions ("486SX" and clones). In fact when you had a 486SX and bought a 487 coprocessor, the 487 was actually a full-blown 486DX internally that simply disabled your original 486SX.
Quake was using a lot of processor power at the time, but it was fine on a 486 (in my case a DX2, later DX4/133 clocked at 160). Of course once you had played it in high resolution on a Pentium, you didn't want to go back to the 486, but that doesn't mean that it "wouldn't even boot".
You do realize that Germany has no speed limits except 'safe and reasonable'. In fact, driving slower than the existing traffic is what causes many of the crashes on the Autobahn. They have places where it is illegal to stop
You are about 30 years behind the times. While Germany has no universal speed limit and stopping is illegal everywhere on the Autobahn, they have speed restrictions on a growing number of sections. Currently about 35% of the Autobahn system has speed limits, which in practice means that you have unregulated sections interrupted by short stretches limited to 100 or 120 kph. If you care about speed limits, the times when you could dial in cruise control at 170 kph are mostly over. In many places where the highway is damaged, instead of repairing it, they stick an 80 or 100 kph sign on it and call it a day.
In fact accident rates in Germany are now higher than in the neighbouring countries which have universal speed limits, precisely because speed limits in Germany come in short stretches and you end up accelerating and decelerating a lot. A universal speed limit at 130 kph would probably lead to better traffic flow.
Actually the paper states the opposite. From page 4: "3) Depth Buffer Access: ViZDoom provides access to the renderer’s depth buffer (see Fig. 3), which may help an agent to understand the received visual information. This feature gives an opportunity to test whether the learning algorithms can autonomously learn the whereabouts of the objects in the environment. The depth information can also be used to simulate the distance sensors common in mobile robots."
There is however strict laws about the women involved in this... [...] For example, they cannot have vaginal sex with 2 different men within a week of each other... After all, they must grieve one husband before the next.
Actually the mandatory intermediary period is usually more than 1 week (usually at least a month), and the reason is very pragmatic: if a child is born, it needs to be clear who is the father.
As you've already discovered, among various Islamic schools of theology there is vigorous disagreement about whether mut'ah is permitted or not. The most prominent distinction is that among Shiites it's mostly permitted and among Sunnis mostly forbidden, but there are Sunni communities there are some who practice mut'ah as well. Like with most details of Islamic law, people will have strong normative opinions. Instead of looking at the wide variety of things that Muslims are actually practicing in the world, they will claim that their opinion represents the whole of Islam and that everybody else is wrong. Since every side can draw on 1400 years' of theological debate to show that they are right and you aren't, and at the base of it there are texts that can be interpreted in different wys, but are considered sacred and must not be questioned, this kind of debate tends to degenerate very quickly.
The security issue seems to be fixed as of KeePass 2.3.4 and it looks like the discussion about HTTPS and ads is missing the point.
From the website (http://keepass.info/help/kb/sec_issues.html#updsig):
"There have been some articles about automatic KeePass updates being vulnerable. This section clarifies the situation and its resolution.
First of all, we would like to note that KeePass cannot update itself. KeePass does support checking for updates (optional; by downloading a version information file, comparing the available with the installed version number, and displaying a notification if necessary). However, it neither downloads nor installs any new version automatically. Users have to do this manually.
KeePass can be downloaded from many servers (SourceForge with its many mirror servers, FossHub, etc.). In order to make sure that the downloaded file is official, users should check whether the file is digitally signed (Authenticode; all KeePass binaries are signed, including the installer, KeePass.exe and all other EXE and DLL files). The digital signature can be checked using Windows Explorer by right-clicking the file -> 'Properties' -> tab 'Digital Signatures'. When running the installer, the UAC dialog displays the digital signature information, i.e. users who carefully read the UAC dialog do not have to inspect the file properties separately. This is recommended for all users, independent of where you download KeePass from.
The KeePass website links to SourceForge for downloading KeePass. However, even if SourceForge (or the KeePass website) is compromised and serves a malicious download, users who check the digital signature will notice the attack and will not run the malware. Note that HTTPS cannot prevent a compromise of the download server; checking the digital signature does.
The version information file is downloaded from the KeePass website over HTTP. Thus a man in the middle (someone who can intercept your connection to the KeePass website) could have returned an incorrect version information file, possibly making KeePass display a notification that a new KeePass version is available. However, the next steps (downloading and installing the new version) must be carried out by the user manually, and here users who check the digital signature will notice the attack.
Resolution. In order to prevent a man in the middle from making KeePass display incorrect version information (even though this does not imply a successful attack, see above), the version information file is now digitally signed (using RSA-2048 and SHA-512). KeePass 2.34 and higher only accept such a digitally signed version information file. This solution is more secure than just using HTTPS, because it guarantees version information safety even when the webserver is compromised (the private key for signing the version information is not stored on the webserver)."
If you wonder why Facebook suddenly cracks down on unkind posts about immigrants, here is the reason:
- during new year celebrations hordes of immigrants sexually assaulted German women in Cologne and other cities
- media kept it quiet for about a week. Hard to say if it was case of self-censorship or pressure from federal government
- after a week coverup finally failed due to increasing discussion of the events of Facebook. At that time German government have not managed to get Facebook to remove any mentions of cologne attacks
- apparently Facebook finally caved and will participate in future media blackouts when hordes of immigrants get violent next time. Merkel bet her career on 'success' of immigration plan and since she cannot actually prevent immigrants from assaulting, robbing and raping, the only way forward is to cover up everything. This could not work without compliance of social media
Let's put some of that right:
the main problem on New Year's Eve in Cologne was (a) inadequate policing near the cathedral where the assaults happened, and (b) that the police tried to cover this up in their initial report. Cologne police already has a bad reputation for cover-ups and various incidents, there have been calls for police reform in Cologne for a while now.
as for the "media being silent for a week": New Year's Eve was a Thursday; Friday January 1 was a public holiday, followed by a weekend, so that most media outlets were severely understaffed and initially relied on the police reports. Cologne itself has two local newspapers: Kölner Express and Kölner Stadtanzeiger. "Express" is a tabloid and initially copied the police report. "Stadtanzeiger" had detailed coverage on the events in their first issue after the events, on Saturday January 2. As soon as it became clear that the police report was untrustworthy, other media got up to speed, and their issues of Monday and Tuesday January 4-5 (three to four days after the facts) were full of reports. Now that is still a long time, but not "silent for a week" and clearly not silenced from above.
after that, mainstream media were full of op-eds and detailed pieces analyzing how it could happen that this was reported so late (again, 3-4 days), with lots of self-criticism (that you seem to to have read, chosen to ignore, or chosen not to believe).
there are a lot of conspiracy theorists around who believe that the media "are controlled from above", are "silenced" etc.. These people have a strangely linear, vertical, and antiquated understanding of how German redactions work. These people are also stuck in the 1990s in that they completely ignore the boom of media outlets that has happened with the appearance of social media in general. It is now next to impossible to completely silence the media on any issue, because iany single person who were to be silenced and disagrees about it, immediately has lots of other outlets. The price for that is that on those outlets there is a bad signal/noise ratio and a lot of shit floating around (so reputation does matter).
we are in a situation in Germany now where right-wing hate crimes (physical attacks up to murder and arson) are on the rise and are outnumbering other ideologically motivated crime, including left-wing and religious extremists, by a wide margin. This is in spite of the tendency of police and conservative politicians to be "blind on the right eye" - left-wing crime historically gets persecuted more extensively in Germany because of the history of left-wing terrorism of the 1970s. We have a major neo-Nazi problem in Germany now that is coming from below, and mostly (but not exclusively) from the east.
as an expresson of this trend towards the right, German Facebook in particular has become full a lot of right-wing sentiment that sometimes takes very ugly expressions. It's not only "concerned citizens", some of these people are actually stating
Actually no. This is just the English words "online" and "site" (not "sale") transliterated into the Cyrillic script. A lot of languages that are written in the Cyrillic alphabet use "online" and "site" as loan words from English, the new TLDs will fit all of them.
It's not carpet, they're styrofoam plates to imitate embossed plaster. You see that quite often in flats in Soviet-era prefab apartment blocks.
People used that sort of thing as part of low-to-medium-end remodels to individualize their flats a little bit, in particular in the 1990s, together with closing their balconies with masonry to get a little bit of extra (super-small) floor space, partly removing the inner wall sections to get a more individual layout, and moving the kitchens to the balcony to use the former kitchen as an extra room.
Coincidentally, in German it's called "Dachhase" and the origin is probably the siege of Vienna by the Turks in 1683, so I guess you got the term from the Germans.
If we look at the basic pattern behind your arguments, we find the following:
Plant X is a very old design - with modern designs that couldn't happen
The number of deaths is exaggerated anyway
Other death sources are much more prominent, but are ignored
You use them for wind power (Altamont Pass is old anyway, there aren't really that many bird deaths anyway, more birds get killed by cars than by windmills). However, interestingly enough they're exactly the same kinds of arguments a nuke defender would use (Fukushima is old anyway, not that many human deaths can be directly attributed to it anyway, more humans get killed by cars than by nuke plants).
I'm not saying either is right or wrong, but it's just very interesting to note just how similar the line of argument gets as soon as people are on the defensive.
My friend descended from a Siberian tribe. His grandmother died in Siberia because she happened to go out wearing just two or three layers less than you "should". See, it's cold enough over there in my friend's ancestral village that the windows are plastic. Glass would shatter.
I think your friend never lived in his "ancestral Siberian village" or is making a joke at your expense. I've been to Siberia, and I work in Central Asia. We regularly get -40 C in the winter and +40 in the summer. Glass doesn't shatter from cold temperatures, it shatters from rapid changes in temperature gradients. You don't get that from the weather. Glass does just fine in the cold. Ask your friend whether in his ancestral Siberia they use special trucks, train cars and helicopters with all-plastic windshields. Hint: they don't.
People do use plastic on their windows, but they don't replace windowpanes with it. They just tape an extra layer of plastic foil on the existing glass window, the idea being that it creates an air pocket which provides extra thermal insulation. Throughout the winter, a roll of Scotch tape is one of the more important household implements to have around.
I've never heard of Siberian microtornadoes either all the time I spent in the region. You can freeze to death in the cold. At -40 or so it happens quite easily but it doesn't take a microtornado to do it. You can also be assured that people in Siberia have had a practical enough attitude towards the weather for a few hundred years that if people actually died from microtornadoes, as opposed to plain old hypothermia, "research grant award futures versus college loan payment rates" (assuming such a thing even made sense in the Soviet or post-Soviet Russian system) would be of little concern.
Apple has always been one of the driving forces behind Unicode.
For selected values of "always". Apple has supported Unicode well since OS X, that is since 2001 or so, or in other words, ten years after the Unicode standard was published. Even Windows was earlier - Unicode support in Windows NT 3.x was there on the API level, in NT 4 it would work well if your programmers had been halfway diligent, and in Windows 2000 it would work well out of the box. With Apple systems before 2001, it was a pain to get Unicode working properly on MacOS 9 - it was technically supported in 9.x, but it didn't really work all that well.
With OS X, Apple finally had the opportunity (that Plan 9 had had something like a decade earlier) to design a new API that used Unicode for all strings. Prior to OS X, the Apple device that supported Unicode best was the Newton, and even there you didn't have proper input methods and rather limited font support.
I developed major wrist problems when writing my PhD dissertation, which involved coding (some 20,000 lines of Python) and writing lots of text. I had started off on an IBM Thinkpad X60 keyboard, which while good as laptop keyboards go, is not ideal for coding.
What made the problem go away for me was four things:
A Fujitsu-Siemens KBPC-E USB split keyboard. an adjustable keyboard that can be raised in the middle and has built-in adjustable wrist rests. The keyboard is a rebranded version of the Kinesis Maxim, with different keycaps. Normally they sell for somewhere between 60 and 100 EUR over here, I got lucky that there was an eBay seller who sold a bulk lot of them for 10 EUR each. I bought four.
In addition I used a keyboard remapper to assign extra functions to the Windows keys (there is an extra set of Windows keys in the key column left of the keyboard). I remapped them into extra Enter and Backspace keys to be used with the left hand.
A small traveller's mouse, with the pointer set to high acceleration. I can rest my hand on the table and push it around with small movements.
A set of Rehband Manu ComforT wrist guards with built-in carbon fiber support (now made and sold by Otto Bock Healthcare. Not cheap at about 100 EUR each, but they did a good job.
Taking care of overall ergonomics of the workplace. Sitting with a straight back, getting a low table so my elbows would remain at a 90 angle, that sort of thing. It's worth talking it over with an orthopedist, some of the tips you get may seem counterintuitive but it works.
With the combination of the four, I went from having constant pain in the wrist to writing 140,000 words within six months without major issues, Your mileage may vary, but in my case it has definitely worked.
Bing Crosby deserves recognition for his place in history as the investor that stepped in with a $50,000 investment in Ampex Corporation for development of the reel to reel tape recorder. Ampex was a small company with six employees prior to that. During WWII Germany developed wire recorders with improved quality as a result of a high frequency (above audio range) signal added to the record current. That overcame non-linear magnetic behavior greatly reducing distortion. Ampex used the same A.C. bias current technique with magnetic tape, and Bing Crosby was a major influence in the quick adoption by broadcasters.
Actually the Germans had been using magnetic tape recorders since about 1935. The AC bias technique you mentioned was developed for the AEG Magnetophon, which was a series of tape recorders, not wire recorders.
Towards 1943 or so it was pretty much a high-end system, with stereo and everything. There are a few surviving recordings that were later reissued in LP and CD form.
3.99 for sheet music to song.... 0.99 for mp3 of song...
hrmm
Well, what are you actually trying to say?
If you can take the $0.99 MP3 and use that to perform a song yourself, go ahead. I'm sure the composer won't mind.
As for the price difference, the target market for sheet music is much smaller than that for MP3s, so it's not really surprising that the price is higher, as there are fewer buyers to offset whatever initial investment there was.
Then again, I'm not sure if a $3 price difference between completely different products entitles anyone to anything. But that's already a question of ethics, not one of "simple math".
When I was in a similar situation I simply got a used Symbian phone (in my case a Nokia E60 for some 50 EUR, the most important thing is there to get one with the S60 operating system.). You should be able to use that with Skype for Symbian, or alternatively with fring if your phone is not supported directly. Works well.
The E-series Nokias had the advantage is that they also included a SIP client out of the box so you weren't limited to Skype. Also there is a Python programming environment if you're into that sort of thing.
Unlike the iPod Touch it also has the advantage that it works as a phone when you're somewhere where there actually is cellular reception, or when you go abroad.
If you're talking about the former, I don't actually use the file and print sharing features on the Airport, it could be complete garbage for all I know.
Then again, I'm the type that wants a router to "route" and a file server to share files. Any printer in 2010 that can't share itself over the network via a built in print server is also not worth my time.
Well, seeing how your requirements and usage patterns are apparently completely different from those of the person you're replying to, and also from those of the story submitter who wanted "dual band, great range, USB print server and storage", it's not really a surprise that you don't experience the issues those persons are having with your hardware, is it?
The other question is, if you are the type that rejects file sharing functionality in a router on principle, why spend the extra premium for this functionality?
I guess you could find more English speakers in many Asian cities than in Georgia, depending on what constitutes "Asia" for you.
That's silly. It's not about the number, it's about the percentage.
Actually it's about both. China probably has a lower percentage of English speakers than Georgia, but if you have more people enrolled into universities than Georgia has citizens, the raw number probably does make a difference.
Not to mention that there is a fair number of countries in Asia where the percentage is higher, too.
If you walk into a store, what's the chance that the guy behind the counter speaks English?
In Georgia, somewhat OK if you look at banks and tech stores, not great if you look at grocery stores or bus drivers.
If you hire a programmer without specifying a specific language to speak, what's the chance they speak English?
Better than the guy in the store, and probably better than in Turkmenistan or so, but not higher than in India, for example.
By your statement, New Zealand is a bad place for English speakers to do business because the whole country has less than 5 million English speakers, and you'll find more than that in France.
I was answering to a statement that there is an "abundance of English speakers", compared to other nations in Asia. There, the raw numbers do play a role. It's much easier to find a qualified English-speaking Indian than a Georgian.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually it's not the Shwa era, but the Showa era, with a bar on top of the o. The character in question (U+014D) is used in transliterating Japanese in Latin script to indicate pronunciation. It has been part of Unicode since 1991.
It's interesting to see in the summary a discussion of Unicode 12.1 vs. 12.0, when Slashdot itself doesn't support the Unicode 1.0 characters necessary to write the summary :)
how come some low id Slashdot accounts are pushing the Kremlin line recently? Is it anything to do with a comment on the 20 year anniversary story saying these accounts are worth money or has the Slashdot database been hacked?
may be "low id slashdot accounts" prefer openness, individual freedom, and critical thinking, over secrecy, "security"(as defined by deep state), and propaganda.
If you prefer openness, individual freedom, and critical thinking, then Russia is not where you should be looking.
In fact, "secrecy, "security"(as defined by deep state), and propaganda" is at least as characteristic of Russia than of pretty much all Western countries. (I'm saying this as a non-Russian who speaks Russian fluently and has spent the last ten years working in 11 out of 15 CIS states.) Russia is also at least as much driven by capitalism and corporate greed and has greater social inequality. If you're disappointed with what's going on in your country, fix your own country instead of getting your inspiration from one that is even worse.
The coprocessor was not the issue. The 486 had a floating-point coprocessor built in - except a few uncommon versions ("486SX" and clones). In fact when you had a 486SX and bought a 487 coprocessor, the 487 was actually a full-blown 486DX internally that simply disabled your original 486SX. Quake was using a lot of processor power at the time, but it was fine on a 486 (in my case a DX2, later DX4/133 clocked at 160). Of course once you had played it in high resolution on a Pentium, you didn't want to go back to the 486, but that doesn't mean that it "wouldn't even boot".
You do realize that Germany has no speed limits except 'safe and reasonable'. In fact, driving slower than the existing traffic is what causes many of the crashes on the Autobahn. They have places where it is illegal to stop
You are about 30 years behind the times. While Germany has no universal speed limit and stopping is illegal everywhere on the Autobahn, they have speed restrictions on a growing number of sections. Currently about 35% of the Autobahn system has speed limits, which in practice means that you have unregulated sections interrupted by short stretches limited to 100 or 120 kph. If you care about speed limits, the times when you could dial in cruise control at 170 kph are mostly over. In many places where the highway is damaged, instead of repairing it, they stick an 80 or 100 kph sign on it and call it a day.
In fact accident rates in Germany are now higher than in the neighbouring countries which have universal speed limits, precisely because speed limits in Germany come in short stretches and you end up accelerating and decelerating a lot. A universal speed limit at 130 kph would probably lead to better traffic flow.
Don't forget to vot!
Actually the paper states the opposite. From page 4: "3) Depth Buffer Access: ViZDoom provides access to the renderer’s depth buffer (see Fig. 3), which may help an agent to understand the received visual information. This feature gives an opportunity to test whether the learning algorithms can autonomously learn the whereabouts of the objects in the environment. The depth information can also be used to simulate the distance sensors common in mobile robots."
That was the design stage, now they've actually built it.
There is however strict laws about the women involved in this... [...] For example, they cannot have vaginal sex with 2 different men within a week of each other... After all, they must grieve one husband before the next.
Actually the mandatory intermediary period is usually more than 1 week (usually at least a month), and the reason is very pragmatic: if a child is born, it needs to be clear who is the father.
As you've already discovered, among various Islamic schools of theology there is vigorous disagreement about whether mut'ah is permitted or not. The most prominent distinction is that among Shiites it's mostly permitted and among Sunnis mostly forbidden, but there are Sunni communities there are some who practice mut'ah as well. Like with most details of Islamic law, people will have strong normative opinions. Instead of looking at the wide variety of things that Muslims are actually practicing in the world, they will claim that their opinion represents the whole of Islam and that everybody else is wrong. Since every side can draw on 1400 years' of theological debate to show that they are right and you aren't, and at the base of it there are texts that can be interpreted in different wys, but are considered sacred and must not be questioned, this kind of debate tends to degenerate very quickly.
"There have been some articles about automatic KeePass updates being vulnerable. This section clarifies the situation and its resolution.
First of all, we would like to note that KeePass cannot update itself. KeePass does support checking for updates (optional; by downloading a version information file, comparing the available with the installed version number, and displaying a notification if necessary). However, it neither downloads nor installs any new version automatically. Users have to do this manually.
KeePass can be downloaded from many servers (SourceForge with its many mirror servers, FossHub, etc.). In order to make sure that the downloaded file is official, users should check whether the file is digitally signed (Authenticode; all KeePass binaries are signed, including the installer, KeePass.exe and all other EXE and DLL files). The digital signature can be checked using Windows Explorer by right-clicking the file -> 'Properties' -> tab 'Digital Signatures'. When running the installer, the UAC dialog displays the digital signature information, i.e. users who carefully read the UAC dialog do not have to inspect the file properties separately. This is recommended for all users, independent of where you download KeePass from.
The KeePass website links to SourceForge for downloading KeePass. However, even if SourceForge (or the KeePass website) is compromised and serves a malicious download, users who check the digital signature will notice the attack and will not run the malware. Note that HTTPS cannot prevent a compromise of the download server; checking the digital signature does.
The version information file is downloaded from the KeePass website over HTTP. Thus a man in the middle (someone who can intercept your connection to the KeePass website) could have returned an incorrect version information file, possibly making KeePass display a notification that a new KeePass version is available. However, the next steps (downloading and installing the new version) must be carried out by the user manually, and here users who check the digital signature will notice the attack.
Resolution. In order to prevent a man in the middle from making KeePass display incorrect version information (even though this does not imply a successful attack, see above), the version information file is now digitally signed (using RSA-2048 and SHA-512). KeePass 2.34 and higher only accept such a digitally signed version information file. This solution is more secure than just using HTTPS, because it guarantees version information safety even when the webserver is compromised (the private key for signing the version information is not stored on the webserver)."
If you wonder why Facebook suddenly cracks down on unkind posts about immigrants, here is the reason: - during new year celebrations hordes of immigrants sexually assaulted German women in Cologne and other cities - media kept it quiet for about a week. Hard to say if it was case of self-censorship or pressure from federal government - after a week coverup finally failed due to increasing discussion of the events of Facebook. At that time German government have not managed to get Facebook to remove any mentions of cologne attacks - apparently Facebook finally caved and will participate in future media blackouts when hordes of immigrants get violent next time. Merkel bet her career on 'success' of immigration plan and since she cannot actually prevent immigrants from assaulting, robbing and raping, the only way forward is to cover up everything. This could not work without compliance of social media
Let's put some of that right:
Replying to undo accidental "Offtopic" moderation.
Actually no. This is just the English words "online" and "site" (not "sale") transliterated into the Cyrillic script. A lot of languages that are written in the Cyrillic alphabet use "online" and "site" as loan words from English, the new TLDs will fit all of them.
It's not carpet, they're styrofoam plates to imitate embossed plaster. You see that quite often in flats in Soviet-era prefab apartment blocks.
People used that sort of thing as part of low-to-medium-end remodels to individualize their flats a little bit, in particular in the 1990s, together with closing their balconies with masonry to get a little bit of extra (super-small) floor space, partly removing the inner wall sections to get a more individual layout, and moving the kitchens to the balcony to use the former kitchen as an extra room.
Coincidentally, in German it's called "Dachhase" and the origin is probably the siege of Vienna by the Turks in 1683, so I guess you got the term from the Germans.
Please, finally enable Unicode in comments.
It's 2011 and Unicode is used everywhere and allowed even in URLs, but Slashdot is still firmly stuck in 8-bit dark ages.
The military. You really don't want to live in a country with lots of tanks around that are loyal to the highest bidder.
If we look at the basic pattern behind your arguments, we find the following:
You use them for wind power (Altamont Pass is old anyway, there aren't really that many bird deaths anyway, more birds get killed by cars than by windmills). However, interestingly enough they're exactly the same kinds of arguments a nuke defender would use (Fukushima is old anyway, not that many human deaths can be directly attributed to it anyway, more humans get killed by cars than by nuke plants).
I'm not saying either is right or wrong, but it's just very interesting to note just how similar the line of argument gets as soon as people are on the defensive.
My friend descended from a Siberian tribe. His grandmother died in Siberia because she happened to go out wearing just two or three layers less than you "should". See, it's cold enough over there in my friend's ancestral village that the windows are plastic. Glass would shatter.
I think your friend never lived in his "ancestral Siberian village" or is making a joke at your expense. I've been to Siberia, and I work in Central Asia. We regularly get -40 C in the winter and +40 in the summer. Glass doesn't shatter from cold temperatures, it shatters from rapid changes in temperature gradients. You don't get that from the weather. Glass does just fine in the cold. Ask your friend whether in his ancestral Siberia they use special trucks, train cars and helicopters with all-plastic windshields. Hint: they don't.
People do use plastic on their windows, but they don't replace windowpanes with it. They just tape an extra layer of plastic foil on the existing glass window, the idea being that it creates an air pocket which provides extra thermal insulation. Throughout the winter, a roll of Scotch tape is one of the more important household implements to have around.
I've never heard of Siberian microtornadoes either all the time I spent in the region. You can freeze to death in the cold. At -40 or so it happens quite easily but it doesn't take a microtornado to do it. You can also be assured that people in Siberia have had a practical enough attitude towards the weather for a few hundred years that if people actually died from microtornadoes, as opposed to plain old hypothermia, "research grant award futures versus college loan payment rates" (assuming such a thing even made sense in the Soviet or post-Soviet Russian system) would be of little concern.
Apple has always been one of the driving forces behind Unicode.
For selected values of "always". Apple has supported Unicode well since OS X, that is since 2001 or so, or in other words, ten years after the Unicode standard was published. Even Windows was earlier - Unicode support in Windows NT 3.x was there on the API level, in NT 4 it would work well if your programmers had been halfway diligent, and in Windows 2000 it would work well out of the box. With Apple systems before 2001, it was a pain to get Unicode working properly on MacOS 9 - it was technically supported in 9.x, but it didn't really work all that well.
With OS X, Apple finally had the opportunity (that Plan 9 had had something like a decade earlier) to design a new API that used Unicode for all strings. Prior to OS X, the Apple device that supported Unicode best was the Newton, and even there you didn't have proper input methods and rather limited font support.
I developed major wrist problems when writing my PhD dissertation, which involved coding (some 20,000 lines of Python) and writing lots of text. I had started off on an IBM Thinkpad X60 keyboard, which while good as laptop keyboards go, is not ideal for coding.
What made the problem go away for me was four things:
In addition I used a keyboard remapper to assign extra functions to the Windows keys (there is an extra set of Windows keys in the key column left of the keyboard). I remapped them into extra Enter and Backspace keys to be used with the left hand.
With the combination of the four, I went from having constant pain in the wrist to writing 140,000 words within six months without major issues, Your mileage may vary, but in my case it has definitely worked.
Bing Crosby deserves recognition for his place in history as the investor that stepped in with a $50,000 investment in Ampex Corporation for development of the reel to reel tape recorder. Ampex was a small company with six employees prior to that. During WWII Germany developed wire recorders with improved quality as a result of a high frequency (above audio range) signal added to the record current. That overcame non-linear magnetic behavior greatly reducing distortion.
Ampex used the same A.C. bias current technique with magnetic tape, and Bing Crosby was a major influence in the quick adoption by broadcasters.
Actually the Germans had been using magnetic tape recorders since about 1935. The AC bias technique you mentioned was developed for the AEG Magnetophon, which was a series of tape recorders, not wire recorders.
Towards 1943 or so it was pretty much a high-end system, with stereo and everything. There are a few surviving recordings that were later reissued in LP and CD form.
3.99 for sheet music to song....
0.99 for mp3 of song...
hrmm
Well, what are you actually trying to say?
If you can take the $0.99 MP3 and use that to perform a song yourself, go ahead. I'm sure the composer won't mind.
As for the price difference, the target market for sheet music is much smaller than that for MP3s, so it's not really surprising that the price is higher, as there are fewer buyers to offset whatever initial investment there was.
Then again, I'm not sure if a $3 price difference between completely different products entitles anyone to anything. But that's already a question of ethics, not one of "simple math".
When I was in a similar situation I simply got a used Symbian phone (in my case a Nokia E60 for some 50 EUR, the most important thing is there to get one with the S60 operating system.). You should be able to use that with Skype for Symbian, or alternatively with fring if your phone is not supported directly. Works well.
The E-series Nokias had the advantage is that they also included a SIP client out of the box so you weren't limited to Skype. Also there is a Python programming environment if you're into that sort of thing.
Unlike the iPod Touch it also has the advantage that it works as a phone when you're somewhere where there actually is cellular reception, or when you go abroad.
If you're talking about the former, I don't actually use the file and print sharing features on the Airport, it could be complete garbage for all I know.
Then again, I'm the type that wants a router to "route" and a file server to share files. Any printer in 2010 that can't share itself over the network via a built in print server is also not worth my time.
Well, seeing how your requirements and usage patterns are apparently completely different from those of the person you're replying to, and also from those of the story submitter who wanted "dual band, great range, USB print server and storage", it's not really a surprise that you don't experience the issues those persons are having with your hardware, is it?
The other question is, if you are the type that rejects file sharing functionality in a router on principle, why spend the extra premium for this functionality?
I guess you could find more English speakers in many Asian cities than in Georgia, depending on what constitutes "Asia" for you.
That's silly. It's not about the number, it's about the percentage.
Actually it's about both. China probably has a lower percentage of English speakers than Georgia, but if you have more people enrolled into universities than Georgia has citizens, the raw number probably does make a difference.
Not to mention that there is a fair number of countries in Asia where the percentage is higher, too.
If you walk into a store, what's the chance that the guy behind the counter speaks English?
In Georgia, somewhat OK if you look at banks and tech stores, not great if you look at grocery stores or bus drivers.
If you hire a programmer without specifying a specific language to speak, what's the chance they speak English?
Better than the guy in the store, and probably better than in Turkmenistan or so, but not higher than in India, for example.
By your statement, New Zealand is a bad place for English speakers to do business because the whole country has less than 5 million English speakers, and you'll find more than that in France.
I was answering to a statement that there is an "abundance of English speakers", compared to other nations in Asia. There, the raw numbers do play a role. It's much easier to find a qualified English-speaking Indian than a Georgian.