Georgia also has an abundance of English speakers, unlike most of Asia. It has a large population of computer scientists and engineers, unlike Africa.
You are speaking about a country of four million people. The capital has a population of less than 1.5 million, and the regions outside the capital are largely uninteresting for IT investment. The abundance of English speakers and large population of engineers need to be seen in relation to that.
English in Georgia is largely limited to the young generation, people over 35 are more likely to speak Russian than English, even though they probably won't like to. I guess you could find more English speakers in many Asian cities than in Georgia, depending on what constitutes "Asia" for you. India, Bangladesh and Pakistan alone have something like a few hundred times the number of English speakers Georgia does. Knowledge also does not mean good knowledge. People already complain about the English of call centers in Bangalore, but I don't see significantly better English in Georgia on a broad scale.
And it's geographically close to the EU.
This means practically nothing. For IT work the Internet is the medium of choice anyway. For what it's worth, Kosovo is even closer to Europe, yet I don't see European IT outsourcing to Kosovo happening on a large scale. Georgia is also politically unstable. They got into a war with Russia recently where an EU commission later found that it was primarily the Georgians who started it. The Georgians may fly the EU flag outside government buildings on their own initiative and declare it their goal to join the EU and NATO, but both the EU and NATO are growing increasingly skeptical of the country. Politically they're further away from the EU than they ever were.
Political culture can be irrational in Georgia. It's formally a democracy, but changes of government have never resulted from elections. Public culture can be fairly racist; in 1991 the country was founded amindst slogans such as "Georgia for Georgians", which got them into several civil wars and cost them significant territories inhabited by ethnic minorities, which would now rather see themselves annexed by Russia than governed by Georgia (not that those minorities are necessarily much better in terms of interethnic relations). Infrastructure is problematic outside the cities, too. There are entire regions that don't have electricity (or that had them until 1992, when someone dismantled and stole 70km of overland electricity line for the copper).
Personally I actually like the country, make no mistake. I have been there, I have friends there, I can read Georgian if I have to. But it's not a place I'd recommend for major IT investments.
It was no coincidence that the Buran looks exactly like the Space Shuttle. It was a duplicate copy.
Actually it was not. The two looked similar because at the time there were only so many ways to build an orbiter, but on the technical level they are pretty fundamentally different. The most important difference is that the Space Shuttle is basically its own rocket, while Buran only had small engines for maneuvering, while launch was done by an Energia booster. Since it did not have to be built around a big engine, Buran is completely different structurally.
As a result, the Buran had a greater payload capacity (theoretical, as it was never tested with a payload) and a better glide number, but you needed a big rocket (theoretically reusable) every time you wanted to launch it. In other words, two fundamentally different approaches to the same technical problem.
If on Slashdot someone fails to mention what country they're in, you can be almost certain that they're in the US.
Seriously. If someone in Barcelona asks how much an apple costs, you don't ask them in what country.
Similarly, if someone on a US-centric website based out of the US asks a question related to a locality without specifying that locality, anyone with an IQ greater than that of a lawyer should be able to understand that they're referencing the United States.
You're basically repeating the same thing I already wrote, except that you're more abrasive about it.
Your comment directly says his post was not long enough, so to discard the requested length below is a red herring.
No, it doesn't. It says he should have provided some references for his three stories. It's possible to provide references in a short, concise way. You don't do that either, making your post unnecessarily teduous to read.
Section B - Poster's comment #2.
"2. Aspirin was patented well after a similar process for making Salicylic Acid on an industrial scale was. The office decided, with no precidents, that making the same chemical in pure enough form that it was safe for medicinal use was novel. When challenged on it, the USPO said they were going through a bottle a day deciding patent claims and were not about to reject rewarding this claim no matter what the law said."
Your discussion on the chemistry, production and product history of aspirin is very lengthy, but does not constitute a substantial reference either for or against the GP's claim. It says nothing about the patent status of different *production methods*, only that they were different, which in my eyes seems to at least undermine the GP's argument. The rest is basically just a long list of links and pieces of text about aspirin that adds little to the discussion of patent practice at the USPTO, in addition to being largely orthogonal to either the parent or grandparent poster's statements. Also you mingle patents and trademarks in the discussion, which is careless and misleading at best.
In the spirit of Karl Popper's criticism of what he calls the Neo-Dialecticians (the reference for which you can find on Google) you may add a few items to your signature, such as variations of "Cx, Drowns Fellow Human Beings in a Sea of Words, with x one of "1: Correct", "2: Wrong", and "3, Irrelevant to the Subject". Your post looks like a case of C3.
BBC article is here. Unfortunately, the article doesn't discuss whether or not this sort of train would actually be useful for passenger service or if the technology still needed some work. I would wager that the Chinese train is probably the fastest commercial (conventional rail) train.
No, it's not. The Spanish AVE 103 reached 404 kph/251 mph with an unmodified commercial trainset back in 2006.
The technology behind that is the same, though, a variant of the Siemens Velaro that is derived from the German ICE3 and currently used in Spain, Russia and China. So it's safe to say that the Velaro is currently the fastest commercial train in the world.
Pages animate and scroll so smooth you'd swear it was warm honey running down Kiera Knightly's body.
I'm sure your nice metaphor will appeal to the tech crowd here, but if you've ever try running warm honey down anything, body or otherwise, you'll realize it is not the metaphor you want to use if you want to describe smooth rendering behaviour on a computer screen:)
While many of these pieces of malware are fairly lame, I'd expect more and more "professional" variants of those in the future. One factor that shouldn't be overlooked is the generally complacent attitude of non-Windows users towards the security of their own machines (not unlike what you exhibit in your own post). In other words, from a technical point of view, if users download a malware-infested key generator and enter a password to execute it, it's pretty much irrelevant whether it's for OS X or for Windows. Arguably in this scenario, OS X is actually slightly more likely to be infected, since many Windows computers have at least some form of anti-virus software installed, while on other platforms this is still fairly rare.
The step from 0.46 to 0.47 has taken them over a year. They have some major architectural refactoring efforts still in the pipeline ("Separate sections of code into various libraries for use by other programs" for 0.52 -> 0.53). While it's an impressive program that I use daily (with little complaints, apart from stability issues on Windows at work), I get the impression that their roadmap is such that if they follow it, they will never get to 1.0.
Um, you might want to check your history again. The longbow was the weapon that made plate body armor obsolete.
Actually it wasn't. Plate armor was widely used in Europe after the Battle of Agincourt in 1415; arguably it gained in popularity.
It was very difficult to pierce plate with a longbow. The English victory at Agincourt is more due to the terrain than anything else; arguably plalte became even more popular after Agincourt, precisely because it offered reasonable protection against arrows. (Protecting horses etc. was another matter.) The crossbow did a much better job against plate armor. It delivered more kinetic energy, and it took much less time to train a crossbowman than a longbowman. Firearms did the rest in the 15th and 16 century. The single most driving factor, however, was cost - plate armor was too expensive to make and maintain, and if you can hire a whole squad of Landsknechts (arquebusiers, what have you) for the same money it takes to have plate armor made for yourself, the arquebusiers win. At that point, however, longbows had already been obsolete for more than a century.
Luckily, we have politicians who's only education is in English...
By corollary, given that they do seem to have an advantage in that area, a solid grasp of English seems like a good idea if you want to convince them of anything.
Slashdot's web interface is quite embarrassing in this respect. Having a non-Unicode-capable page in 2009 is like having one that is optimized for Netscape 0.9, no matter what amount of JavaScript and Web 2.0 bling they put in there.
If international URLs will finally force Slashdot to implement a triviality such as string parsing, so much the better.
Your argument makes no sense at all. First of all, there are already lots of ways to build iPhone apps without using a Mac, like Unity 3D or MonoTouch. So you don't need a Mac, even without a JVM or Flash player.
What is MonoTouch? MonoTouch is a software development kit for Mac OS X that lets you use.NET programming languages to create native applications for Apple iPhone and Apple iPod Touch devices. [...]
Do I need a Mac to use MonoTouch? MonoTouch requires a Mac and Apple's iPhone SDK to test on the emulator and deploy on the device.
So no, those aren't ways to build OS X apps without a Mac. For someone who asks his parent poster to rant all he wants, but at least to make sense while doing so, you might check your facts a little better.
you obviously can't kill all the Muslims, or convert them to something else, or change the nature of a world religion. At least IMHO you can't have much hope for
Actually in over a dozen countries, muslims have demonstrated the falsity of your statements. [...]
If by "falsity of his statements" you mean that yes, you can kill them all, then you're of course technically correct, because it's possible to kill everybody. This statement however is utterly useless, because if we start from the premise that we can kill everybody, our policy decisions aren't going to be good. At best they will create more terrorists because a lot more people will feel threatened that otherwise wouldn't. Great job.
The rest of your post doesn't warrant much discussion IMHO. You say terror has always been bound to ideologies - that's true, but it's a statement of the obvious, just like the AC's statement that it's also always been bound to particular political and economic situations. He maybe presents his point in a slightly less bigoted fashion. You say the US shouldn't question its own role in today's emergence of terrorism because terrorism existed already in ancient Egypt. Why don't say you shouldn't question Islam's role in genocide because genocide existed before Islam ever emerged then? From that point of view nobody should ever question themselves, because there's always somebody else who did the same thing.
I don't think you've read that document. There's even an English version. While it's not improbable that Skype does have a backdoor of some sorts, the document doesn't prove anything about that.
They talk about two pieces of software. Their "Skype Capture Unit" is a trojan installed on the computer of the person under surveillance. If you have a trojan on your target machine, you can listen to anything, Skype or otherwise. The point of the name is probably to be able to sell the police other "Foo Capture Units" in the future. The other piece of software is a generic MITM attack on SSL-encrypted connection, nothing specific to Skype.
Since people usually slow down anyway when they enter a parking lot, it makes more sense to convert the kinetic energy into something useful than have everybody just brake and convert it into heat.
I would bet that while you can't print, view YouTube videos or change your privacy settings yet, the core functionality of aggregating data about the user's browsing behaviour and sending it to Google with a uniquely identifiable ID is firmly in place.
Slashdot Mirror
Georgia also has an abundance of English speakers, unlike most of Asia. It has a large population of computer scientists and engineers, unlike Africa.
You are speaking about a country of four million people. The capital has a population of less than 1.5 million, and the regions outside the capital are largely uninteresting for IT investment. The abundance of English speakers and large population of engineers need to be seen in relation to that.
English in Georgia is largely limited to the young generation, people over 35 are more likely to speak Russian than English, even though they probably won't like to. I guess you could find more English speakers in many Asian cities than in Georgia, depending on what constitutes "Asia" for you. India, Bangladesh and Pakistan alone have something like a few hundred times the number of English speakers Georgia does. Knowledge also does not mean good knowledge. People already complain about the English of call centers in Bangalore, but I don't see significantly better English in Georgia on a broad scale.
And it's geographically close to the EU.
This means practically nothing. For IT work the Internet is the medium of choice anyway. For what it's worth, Kosovo is even closer to Europe, yet I don't see European IT outsourcing to Kosovo happening on a large scale. Georgia is also politically unstable. They got into a war with Russia recently where an EU commission later found that it was primarily the Georgians who started it. The Georgians may fly the EU flag outside government buildings on their own initiative and declare it their goal to join the EU and NATO, but both the EU and NATO are growing increasingly skeptical of the country. Politically they're further away from the EU than they ever were.
Political culture can be irrational in Georgia. It's formally a democracy, but changes of government have never resulted from elections. Public culture can be fairly racist; in 1991 the country was founded amindst slogans such as "Georgia for Georgians", which got them into several civil wars and cost them significant territories inhabited by ethnic minorities, which would now rather see themselves annexed by Russia than governed by Georgia (not that those minorities are necessarily much better in terms of interethnic relations). Infrastructure is problematic outside the cities, too. There are entire regions that don't have electricity (or that had them until 1992, when someone dismantled and stole 70km of overland electricity line for the copper).
Personally I actually like the country, make no mistake. I have been there, I have friends there, I can read Georgian if I have to. But it's not a place I'd recommend for major IT investments.
And why can't I run an open hotspot if I want to?
You can, but if you do, you better have some solid proof pointing away from you when someone else breaks the law through your connection.
You can also leave your car for anyone to use, but it will be you who gets the parking tickets. (Yay for car analogies!)
It was no coincidence that the Buran looks exactly like the Space Shuttle. It was a duplicate copy.
Actually it was not. The two looked similar because at the time there were only so many ways to build an orbiter, but on the technical level they are pretty fundamentally different. The most important difference is that the Space Shuttle is basically its own rocket, while Buran only had small engines for maneuvering, while launch was done by an Energia booster. Since it did not have to be built around a big engine, Buran is completely different structurally.
As a result, the Buran had a greater payload capacity (theoretical, as it was never tested with a payload) and a better glide number, but you needed a big rocket (theoretically reusable) every time you wanted to launch it. In other words, two fundamentally different approaches to the same technical problem.
Seriously. If someone in Barcelona asks how much an apple costs, you don't ask them in what country.
Similarly, if someone on a US-centric website based out of the US asks a question related to a locality without specifying that locality, anyone with an IQ greater than that of a lawyer should be able to understand that they're referencing the United States.
You're basically repeating the same thing I already wrote, except that you're more abrasive about it.
When you ask legal questions, it's polite to mention which country you're in.
If on Slashdot someone fails to mention what country they're in, you can be almost certain that they're in the US.
Your comment directly says his post was not long enough, so to discard the requested length below is a red herring.
No, it doesn't. It says he should have provided some references for his three stories. It's possible to provide references in a short, concise way. You don't do that either, making your post unnecessarily teduous to read.
Section B - Poster's comment #2.
"2. Aspirin was patented well after a similar process for making Salicylic Acid on an industrial scale was. The office decided, with no precidents, that making the same chemical in pure enough form that it was safe for medicinal use was novel. When challenged on it, the USPO said they were going through a bottle a day deciding patent claims and were not about to reject rewarding this claim no matter what the law said."
Your discussion on the chemistry, production and product history of aspirin is very lengthy, but does not constitute a substantial reference either for or against the GP's claim. It says nothing about the patent status of different *production methods*, only that they were different, which in my eyes seems to at least undermine the GP's argument. The rest is basically just a long list of links and pieces of text about aspirin that adds little to the discussion of patent practice at the USPTO, in addition to being largely orthogonal to either the parent or grandparent poster's statements. Also you mingle patents and trademarks in the discussion, which is careless and misleading at best.
In the spirit of Karl Popper's criticism of what he calls the Neo-Dialecticians (the reference for which you can find on Google) you may add a few items to your signature, such as variations of "Cx, Drowns Fellow Human Beings in a Sea of Words, with x one of "1: Correct", "2: Wrong", and "3, Irrelevant to the Subject". Your post looks like a case of C3.
BBC article is here. Unfortunately, the article doesn't discuss whether or not this sort of train would actually be useful for passenger service or if the technology still needed some work. I would wager that the Chinese train is probably the fastest commercial (conventional rail) train.
No, it's not. The Spanish AVE 103 reached 404 kph/251 mph with an unmodified commercial trainset back in 2006.
The technology behind that is the same, though, a variant of the Siemens Velaro that is derived from the German ICE3 and currently used in Spain, Russia and China. So it's safe to say that the Velaro is currently the fastest commercial train in the world.
Come on guys. Nokia != Notion Ink. It's in the title of the article. Is it that difficult to even look at the stuff you post?
Pages animate and scroll so smooth you'd swear it was warm honey running down Kiera Knightly's body.
I'm sure your nice metaphor will appeal to the tech crowd here, but if you've ever try running warm honey down anything, body or otherwise, you'll realize it is not the metaphor you want to use if you want to describe smooth rendering behaviour on a computer screen :)
What's "Go Natalie Portman yourself" supposed to mean?
My guess would be somewhere in the region of all of them.
Make that "most of them". OS X botnets have been appearing for a while, and other forms of OS X malware have been known for quite some time.
While many of these pieces of malware are fairly lame, I'd expect more and more "professional" variants of those in the future. One factor that shouldn't be overlooked is the generally complacent attitude of non-Windows users towards the security of their own machines (not unlike what you exhibit in your own post). In other words, from a technical point of view, if users download a malware-infested key generator and enter a password to execute it, it's pretty much irrelevant whether it's for OS X or for Windows. Arguably in this scenario, OS X is actually slightly more likely to be infected, since many Windows computers have at least some form of anti-virus software installed, while on other platforms this is still fairly rare.
The step from 0.46 to 0.47 has taken them over a year. They have some major architectural refactoring efforts still in the pipeline ("Separate sections of code into various libraries for use by other programs" for 0.52 -> 0.53). While it's an impressive program that I use daily (with little complaints, apart from stability issues on Windows at work), I get the impression that their roadmap is such that if they follow it, they will never get to 1.0.
Um, you might want to check your history again. The longbow was the weapon that made plate body armor obsolete.
Actually it wasn't. Plate armor was widely used in Europe after the Battle of Agincourt in 1415; arguably it gained in popularity.
It was very difficult to pierce plate with a longbow. The English victory at Agincourt is more due to the terrain than anything else; arguably plalte became even more popular after Agincourt, precisely because it offered reasonable protection against arrows. (Protecting horses etc. was another matter.) The crossbow did a much better job against plate armor. It delivered more kinetic energy, and it took much less time to train a crossbowman than a longbowman. Firearms did the rest in the 15th and 16 century. The single most driving factor, however, was cost - plate armor was too expensive to make and maintain, and if you can hire a whole squad of Landsknechts (arquebusiers, what have you) for the same money it takes to have plate armor made for yourself, the arquebusiers win. At that point, however, longbows had already been obsolete for more than a century.
Luckily, we have politicians who's only education is in English...
By corollary, given that they do seem to have an advantage in that area, a solid grasp of English seems like a good idea if you want to convince them of anything.
Just because the characters don't show up in the edited text doesn't mean that they won't be handled in anchor tags or Slashdot's URL tag.
Well, Slashdot mangles them anyway. The URL should end in .com.
Slashdot's web interface is quite embarrassing in this respect. Having a non-Unicode-capable page in 2009 is like having one that is optimized for Netscape 0.9, no matter what amount of JavaScript and Web 2.0 bling they put in there.
If international URLs will finally force Slashdot to implement a triviality such as string parsing, so much the better.
Your argument makes no sense at all. First of all, there are already lots of ways to build iPhone apps without using a Mac, like Unity 3D or MonoTouch. So you don't need a Mac, even without a JVM or Flash player.
Regarding Unity3D, see the Unity for iPhone Requirements page:
In order to license and use Unity iPhone Publishing, developers must meet the following requirements:
And regarding MonoTouch, see the MonoTouch FAQ:
What is MonoTouch? .NET programming languages to create native applications for Apple iPhone and Apple iPod Touch devices. [...]
MonoTouch is a software development kit for Mac OS X that lets you use
Do I need a Mac to use MonoTouch?
MonoTouch requires a Mac and Apple's iPhone SDK to test on the emulator and deploy on the device.
So no, those aren't ways to build OS X apps without a Mac. For someone who asks his parent poster to rant all he wants, but at least to make sense while doing so, you might check your facts a little better.
And up until 2006 the S.A.S. were in Afghanistan, and rumoured to have done over the border trips into Iraq.
Afghanistan has no border with Iraq.
That is, unless you assume that as true New Zealanders the SAS are descended from birds.
That's only ten.
Well yes, there's always the other solution:
Adanishpressclippingcompany couldbeviolatingcopyrightbyprintingout elevenwordsnippetsofnewsarticles theeuropeancourtofjusticeruled theluxembourgbasedcourt remandedtheissuetodenmark foradeterminationonwhetherthesnippets compriseintellectualproperty.
Eight words. You could do it in even less, but the Slashdot lameness filter is apparently in league with the copyright mafia.
From TFA:
A Danish pressclipping company could be violating copyright by printing
Expecting to be sued for copyright violation in 3...2...1...
Since the second basically states the first is obviously wrong
Why shouldn't it? You're quoting two different people.
I just visited an exhibition about the Tuareg, a now extinct north-African black culture
Are those the same where there's population of 5.2 million? What's wrong with you?
you obviously can't kill all the Muslims, or convert them to something else, or change the nature of a world religion. At least IMHO you can't have much hope for
Actually in over a dozen countries, muslims have demonstrated the falsity of your statements. [...]
If by "falsity of his statements" you mean that yes, you can kill them all, then you're of course technically correct, because it's possible to kill everybody. This statement however is utterly useless, because if we start from the premise that we can kill everybody, our policy decisions aren't going to be good. At best they will create more terrorists because a lot more people will feel threatened that otherwise wouldn't. Great job.
The rest of your post doesn't warrant much discussion IMHO. You say terror has always been bound to ideologies - that's true, but it's a statement of the obvious, just like the AC's statement that it's also always been bound to particular political and economic situations. He maybe presents his point in a slightly less bigoted fashion. You say the US shouldn't question its own role in today's emergence of terrorism because terrorism existed already in ancient Egypt. Why don't say you shouldn't question Islam's role in genocide because genocide existed before Islam ever emerged then? From that point of view nobody should ever question themselves, because there's always somebody else who did the same thing.
German police let that one slip, so did a few other arrests.
http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Skype_and_SSL_Interception_letters_-_Bavaria_-_Digitask
I don't think you've read that document. There's even an English version. While it's not improbable that Skype does have a backdoor of some sorts, the document doesn't prove anything about that.
They talk about two pieces of software. Their "Skype Capture Unit" is a trojan installed on the computer of the person under surveillance. If you have a trojan on your target machine, you can listen to anything, Skype or otherwise. The point of the name is probably to be able to sell the police other "Foo Capture Units" in the future. The other piece of software is a generic MITM attack on SSL-encrypted connection, nothing specific to Skype.
You hippie!
Since people usually slow down anyway when they enter a parking lot, it makes more sense to convert the kinetic energy into something useful than have everybody just brake and convert it into heat.
I would bet that while you can't print, view YouTube videos or change your privacy settings yet, the core functionality of aggregating data about the user's browsing behaviour and sending it to Google with a uniquely identifiable ID is firmly in place.