Suppose someone was trying to invade Finland and NATO just wasn't able to send immediate help.
We've never wanted to count on NATO being willing to send help - even if we were a member country. During the cold war the U.S. put a lot of pressure (behind the scenes) on Finland to join because the distance for nukes to Moscow launched from here would be pretty short and because the Finnish army did gather intelligence on Soviet troops across the border (an operation called "Stella Polaris", which is still quite hush hush). However, the reasoning here was that in case of a full-scale nuclear war a country with five million people wouldn't matter much regardless of it being a NATO member and thus the only thing we'd get from NATO membership is a place on the Soviet target list so a strategy of neutrality and making occupying hard enough not to be worth the cost was chosen. Therefore the Finnish army practices guerilla warfare tactics and the Soviet union was made well aware of Finland not being very hard to invade (because no matter what we did we wouldn't be able to stop it) but an occupation would be costly.
I noticed that the questionnaire isn't available in all languages spoken in the EU (yet) - if you intend to use it, please do translate it into your language because that makes it appear much more important to your MEP.
They also state that the cause of the accident had nothing to do with the state of Soviet technology "because the reactor was brand new."
I agree, a while ago I saw an interesting documentary (or reconstruction) about the disaster on the Discovery Channel. In addition to the numerous mistakes made in the control room (since the most senior engineer ignored the concerns of the others - and they all had incentive to carry on with the experiment) the very construction was filled with errors. The project manager was only concerned about meeting the deadline (since he got a bonus that way) and didn't care much about the materials used. The roof should've been fire-proof but because the material wasn't available they used some combustible material instead. Furthermore, the design had some fundamental flaws and the engineers in the control room weren't fully informed about the functioning of the reactor. I left out the bias from my summary but assuming that you're Swedish you probably noticed the final sentence in the article: "Allt medan Barsebäck reser sin stolta siluett mot Köpenhamn och folkpartiet vill få oss att glömma allt om Tjernobyl." So he most definitely states an opinion as well but I assume that the facts are correct and I think that those are of greater interest to Slashdot readers than Swedish politics... (To those who are, the sentence means: "All of this whilst Barsebäck [A Swedish nuclear plant close to Denmark] raises its proud siluette towards Copenhagen and Folkpartiet [a center-right political party] wants to make us forget all about Chernobyl").
- it's been 18 years since reactor 4 exploded and that lead to the greatest ecological disaster man has accomplished - so far - the reason for the disaster was human error - some irrelevant stuff about what opinions Swedish politicians have about prolonging the use of atomic energy in this country (not stated in the article: a decision has been made to eventually dismantle it) - a quite respectable (not stated in the article, but that's the opinion of most people here), Swedish newspaper, Dagens Nyheter, has published the images from Elena's site - the story is fantastic but a hoax - Elena's father is not a nuclear scientist and she doesn't drive around in the dead zone - she and her husband, Igor, have taken the pictures during one visit with the supervision of the zone administration - the page has had millions of visitors - an Ukrainian friend of the reporter tells from Kiev that the zone administration has gotten many inquiries from motorcyclists interested in riding in the dead zone so in that sense the page is a commercial grip on the disaster
It works VERY VERY well. Better than running on Windows actually.
I have to disagree - I tried the previous version (2.0) and at least with that cut'n paste between excel and word didn't work in any useful way and in addition to that my mouse began to behave very strangely if I switched between the two apps. Running one at a time worked but that wasn't convenient. In addition to that I had difficulties with entering decimal number in excel since in my country (well, countries since I switch frequently between Sweden and Finland) decimal numbers are separated with a comma (",") and not a period (".") (and this is common in many other countries as well) and excel can be configured to work that way but no matter what I did my numpad comma was entered as "." into excel, which with that configuration made excel interpret numbers as text. Entering comma using the keyboard worked otherwise but IMO it's so much more convenient to use the numpad when you enter many figures with decimal numbers so I ended up entering them in OpenOffice Calc and then exporting as xls and then use that file with excel.
IANAL and IANAUS (US citizen) but a well-informed EU citizen and at least where EU legislation applies that make that completely impossible (and feel free to tell me what the case is in the US). Most of this comes from an EU consumer rights brochure I obtained from the consumer rights authorities (in Finland, similar exist in other EU countries) - strangely I haven't found it online:
The brochure points out that EULA:s especially are completely invalid due to two reasons: 1. All terms entered once a purchase has been made are invalid (and you've already paid for the product when you see the EULA). 2. All click-through agreements, which require you to click "Yes" in order to access some service (such as a website and so on) are illegal if they prevent you from accessing when you click "No" (I have yet to see this enforced, though, but obviously such "agreements" are invalid even though you might click "Yes". As far as enforcement is concerned I've heard about a few cases where it might soon be enforced - sites which require you to accept advertising to your cellphone, if you wish to use the service). So as far as software is concerned, only normal copyright applies (i.e. do not make illegal copies). So even though an EULA might forbid reverse-engineering you can reverse-engineer software day in and day out until you get sick of it.
In addition to that it is illegal to make consumers to buy product A if they buy product B. So consequently requiring that consumers buy Windows if they want to use Office is illegal (so as long as they can run Office using wine there's no problem).
An additional note regarding this (even though you didn't bring it up): Claiming that something is "free" if it requires you to buy something else is illegal - so if a store advertises "buy X get Y for free" you're legally entitled to get Y without buying X (and thus a store being stupid enough to advertise that way is soon screwed). This and EULA:s (requiring that you own Windows) being invalid actually makes MS "free" Internet Explorer download useful for me. I no longer have Windows anywhere but IE runs well enough under wine to test websites and thus it is not only cost-saving (since in this case it actually is _free_ since I pay nothing for it) but also very convenient - running tomcat on linux and testing the localhost site with IE is very nice:)
Well, that's not the case in all countries. I wonder if the wine project could continue as an EU only project (but obviously still be legal to use in the US) since in most countries here the suing party* is obliged to pay all the fees of the party being sued if that party wins - thus suing someone out of existance isn't possible. Consequently in a case where Microsoft is actually the underdog lawyers would line up to defend wine knowing how much money they could get out of MS pocket if they win and thus it would be very hard for MS to prove that wine has done any IP infringement.
*) Sorry, English is not my native language but what I mean with suing party is the entity suing another one. If the party being sued wins the suing party is obliged to pay all the legal fees of the party that was sued (in that case the winner). However, if the suing party wins the party being sued (and in that case the loser) isn't automatically obliged to pay the legal fees of the winner (in that case the party suing) since otherwise the party suing would be tempted to use excessive resources (ie. knowing that the loser will pay) in a case where they know that the outcome is obvious.
Wine is good but I feel sorry for Codeweavers
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WineConf 2004 Wrapup
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· Score: 1
I've heard quite a few times how wine is bad because it makes native versions less likely - IMNSHO quite the opposite is true since when/if most windows applications become usable in Linux using wine companies making those apps are quite likely to port them as well. Why? Because wine can prove that there's a market for the application among Linux users (presuming that the company does its market research properly and the users are clever enough to tell the company that they are running it using wine) and consequently the reasoning will be like this if two companies have similar applications that run with wine: Company A: Both our and competitor B's apps run in Linux using wine but they don't run quite as well as they do in Windows but people use them anyway, the emulation makes it slower. Maybe we should make a native port and thus get all Linux users, who need this kind of app, to use ours since the market obviously exists and a native version is always better. Yep, we should do that. Company B: Same reasoning. Result: Two native apps for Linux.
This, however, makes wine a project which can only be successful as a not-for-profit open source project, why? Because wine's success excludes wine's success.That is, if Linux achieves greater desktop market share thanks to wine making Windows apps available and thus native applications will become more common and finally wine will no longer be needed. So consequently Codeweavers are in the business of putting themselves out of business. Transgaming might do a little bit better since they're calling it "portability technology" and make Linux ports, for which the demand is likely to increase if/when Linux' market share grows. But their success depends on whether they can do the porting of a game cheaper and better than the original game creator.
Re:The only feature which is better in Windows...
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Review: KDE 3.2
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· Score: 1
If I ask my computer to open two windows of the same folder then it should do it! Windows assumes what I want and tries to second guess me (oh, you don't really want to open that folder again, do you?). KDE does what I tell it to do, which IMHO is what a computer should do. It is not the computers job to read my thoughts and try to figure out what I "really" mean.
I guess it depends on what you and I want to "tell" the computer to do; I want to tell it to simply give me the window with that folder open or create one if it doesn't exist (for me multiple copies are a hazzle since when I have 10+ windows open the paths can no longer be seen when they're minimized to Kicker). Konqueror has the "Duplicate Window" (Ctrl+D) feature in the Location menu. I don't remember if Windows has a similar feature or not (it's been a while since I last used it) but in my opinion one good solution might be to bring the same window to front if you already have it open but open a duplicate through the menu. Ideally, it would of course be configurable so that both of us would be happy:)
The only feature which is better in Windows...
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Review: KDE 3.2
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· Score: 1
I've used KDE since 2.0 and consider it miles ahead of the Windows GUI. All the configurability allows me to make it work just the way I want but there is one thing that Windows does better: When you're browsing directories and open a folder that you've already opened but minimized (or hid behind another window) Windows brings that to front instead of opening the same folder again in a new window - Konqueror opens the same folder again in a new window. I've been looking through all configuration possibilities I can find (in 3.14, I'm anxiously waiting for 3.2 ebuilds) and haven't found a solution - does anybody know if this either can be configured somewhere or if 3.2 behaves differently?
Nope. If Hasa has had spy satellite photo analyses performed on images taken over the spot where polar lander was supposed to land and are unsure whether it can be seen there's no chance of seeing Beagle 2 since it's a fraction of the size of polar lander.
Not a chance. I followed the rover web pages long before the launch and they spent years deciding where to land them and the final locations were decided six months before the launch. It was a tricky balance between on the one hand finding spots of maximum research value and on the other hand being reasonably safe to land on. So they won't change it just like that. In addition to that - the speed with which the rovers move is so slow that even if they sent it to land at the same spot where Beagle 2 was supposed to the precision would be so bad that they could spend their entire 90 day mission searching the area without ever finding the probe. And even though it might be interesting to find out what happended to Beagle 2 there isn't much scientific value in trying to investigate what happened to an object sent from earth compared to surveying the planet itself. And the only investigation the rover could do is to take pictures since it's equipped to drill holes in rocks and analyse them. Not pick up pieces of a probe.
Mineral water. IMHO that's the perfect substitute for coffee - especially in the morning. It gives the perfect wake-up effect even faster since it's carbonated and thus "feels" even more refreshing than just water. But if you're addicted to the taste of coffee you can try decaf but especially if you're used to drinking coffee black it won't taste very good (it tastes better with a lot of milk but then the taste is nowhere near that of black coffee, of course).
I don't think it has anything to do with the way words are written, when speaking we say "one thousand five hundred and twenty one", and write the figures down in the same order -- it's natural to give the most important, biggest, part first.
So actually Arabic scripts are the exception, as not the origin, if you look at the sequence of writing.
I don't quite understand what you mean with "natural" and "first" since for a person writing or reading a language right to left the rightmost part of a word (or number) naturally comes first. As far as speaking is concerned, I don't know whether they say the biggest figures first or in the order they come when read right to left - any Arabic (or other RTL-language) speakers around to comment? And as far as saying the biggest figures first not all western languages are like that, eg. in German the numbers are spoken like 55="five and fifty".
No, they were luckier. If you've looked at the pictures they took one of them (I don't remember if it was 1 or 2) landed right next to a rock which was big enough to break the probe if it had landed on it. I remember seeing an interview with an engineer involved in the mission - he explained that all they could do was pick the safest looking area but the images taken from orbit were nowhere near good enough to spot such rocks (not to mention that they didn't have the precision to avoid them either).
The War is illegal because it was never declared. In a legal sence, the United States of America has only been at war with Iraq one time. 1991. Since then we've bombed a soverign state for shits and giggles, but haven't really declared war. War has fairly cristiline properties in international law.
You're wrong. Yes, the war was illegal but not because of the reason you give. International law is complicated but as far as war is concerned it's very simple:
1. War is illegal except in two cases:
2. It's legal as defense against an immediate attack.
3. It's legal if it has a UN mandate.
Thus the war was illegal but declaring or not declaring it has nothing to do with that.
You're quite right about that. I'm a Swedish and Finnish native speaker (grew up in Sweden, Finnish parents) - at present living in Finland and among programmers we always use the Swedish or Finnish word for window(s) when we refer to the GUI item (or the things made of glass...) but Windows (in English) only when we refer to the operating system. However, when the stuff gets more technical we only use English terminology since the translations are rarely consistent (and usually very awkward) and thus it's easier to avoid confusions that way. The case is of course obvious when speaking about code with words like "for-loop" etc.
Ps. The language you're referring to as "Lapp" is Sami and it's spoken by the Sami population living in northern Norway, Sweden and Finland (i.e. above the polar circle...).
In Swedish it's "fonster" with two dots over the o but slashdot won't allow me two write that letter and lunch is written "lunch" in Swedish and means the same thing. In Norway, however, there are two official languages, which are quite similar though (one of them, bokmal, is a heritage from the Danish era and the other, nynorsk, meaning "new-norwegian" is made up from different dialects when some norwegians wanted their "own" language instead of the Danish heritage)
and IIRC the word for window is "vindu" in at least one of them. FYI: I grew up in Sweden (a total of 15 years), spent one year in Norway and now live in Finland...
That might be the case in the US - I've asked before and gotten different answers; mostly that they aren't so I'm not sure whether you're right (but the moderator(s) seem to think so by modding you as informative). In the EU consumer rights explicitly state all EULAs as invalid - so you can tell companies to take their EULA and shove it. A co-worker of mine has a habit of (whenever possible) reporting click-through EULAs as bugs: "I tried to install this software and was given some sort of pointless agreement and Yes/No buttons to click - I clicked No since I didn't agree and the installer stopped. However, I noticed a work-around; the installer works if you click Yes"
It itsn't uncommon here to resell software that has come bundled with your computer and that you don't need - copyright applies as usual but you don't need to give a damn about what the EULA forbids you from doing.
Well, if your language uses a different character set - how can you tell someone (in your language) the name of a website? In Swedish I can say the name and people are clever enough to figure out to turn a:s and o:s with dots over them and a:s with rings over them into simple a:s,o:s and a:s (the meaning changes at times, though, as I've pointed out in another post, examples: municipality names Horby and Monsteras - without the dots and rings: www.horby.se and www.monsteras.se mean www.hookervillage.se and www.monstercarcass.se).
But what do Japanese/Chinese/Arabic/Hebrew/Korean/... (a long list) speakers do? Try to tell people to spell it using English letters? That's impossible since there is no simple "pronounced like this in my language"="write like this in English" conversion.
My post should be understandable anyway but slashdot left out the non-English characters o with two dots over it and a with a ring over it in the names Monsteras and Horby.
Slashdot Mirror
Suppose someone was trying to invade Finland and NATO just wasn't able to send immediate help.
We've never wanted to count on NATO being willing to send help - even if we were a member country. During the cold war the U.S. put a lot of pressure (behind the scenes) on Finland to join because the distance for nukes to Moscow launched from here would be pretty short and because the Finnish army did gather intelligence on Soviet troops across the border (an operation called "Stella Polaris", which is still quite hush hush). However, the reasoning here was that in case of a full-scale nuclear war a country with five million people wouldn't matter much regardless of it being a NATO member and thus the only thing we'd get from NATO membership is a place on the Soviet target list so a strategy of neutrality and making occupying hard enough not to be worth the cost was chosen. Therefore the Finnish army practices guerilla warfare tactics and the Soviet union was made well aware of Finland not being very hard to invade (because no matter what we did we wouldn't be able to stop it) but an occupation would be costly.
I noticed that the questionnaire isn't available in all languages spoken in the EU (yet) - if you intend to use it, please do translate it into your language because that makes it appear much more important to your MEP.
They also state that the cause of the accident had nothing to do with the state of Soviet technology "because the reactor was brand new."
I agree, a while ago I saw an interesting documentary (or reconstruction) about the disaster on the Discovery Channel. In addition to the numerous mistakes made in the control room (since the most senior engineer ignored the concerns of the others - and they all had incentive to carry on with the experiment) the very construction was filled with errors. The project manager was only concerned about meeting the deadline (since he got a bonus that way) and didn't care much about the materials used. The roof should've been fire-proof but because the material wasn't available they used some combustible material instead. Furthermore, the design had some fundamental flaws and the engineers in the control room weren't fully informed about the functioning of the reactor.
I left out the bias from my summary but assuming that you're Swedish you probably noticed the final sentence in the article: "Allt medan Barsebäck reser sin stolta siluett mot Köpenhamn och folkpartiet vill få oss att glömma allt om Tjernobyl." So he most definitely states an opinion as well but I assume that the facts are correct and I think that those are of greater interest to Slashdot readers than Swedish politics... (To those who are, the sentence means: "All of this whilst Barsebäck [A Swedish nuclear plant close to Denmark] raises its proud siluette towards Copenhagen and Folkpartiet [a center-right political party] wants to make us forget all about Chernobyl").
A very brief summary in English:
- it's been 18 years since reactor 4 exploded and that lead to the greatest ecological disaster man has accomplished - so far
- the reason for the disaster was human error
- some irrelevant stuff about what opinions Swedish politicians have about prolonging the use of atomic energy in this country (not stated in the article: a decision has been made to eventually dismantle it)
- a quite respectable (not stated in the article, but that's the opinion of most people here), Swedish newspaper, Dagens Nyheter, has published the images from Elena's site
- the story is fantastic but a hoax
- Elena's father is not a nuclear scientist and she doesn't drive around in the dead zone
- she and her husband, Igor, have taken the pictures during one visit with the supervision of the zone administration
- the page has had millions of visitors
- an Ukrainian friend of the reporter tells from Kiev that the zone administration has gotten many inquiries from motorcyclists interested in riding in the dead zone so in that sense the page is a commercial grip on the disaster
Legislators are telling us what is or isn't a monopoly rather than hordes of economists telling otherwise. And who do you think understands market forces better?
Would you mind giving me some examples? I'm a business student and of the books I've read at least the following use Microsoft as an example or case study of how a company in a monopoly position acts differently than other companies (these are just the ones I remember, there are plenty of others as well):
Michael A. Hitt, R. Duane Ireland, Robert E. Hoskisson: Strategic Management: Competitiveness and Globalization, Concepts and Cases (this is the 6th edition, I read the 3rd)
Michael Parkin: Economics (this is a later edition than the one I read)
Carl Shapiro, Hal R. Varian: Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy
It works VERY VERY well. Better than running on Windows actually.
I have to disagree - I tried the previous version (2.0) and at least with that cut'n paste between excel and word didn't work in any useful way and in addition to that my mouse began to behave very strangely if I switched between the two apps. Running one at a time worked but that wasn't convenient. In addition to that I had difficulties with entering decimal number in excel since in my country (well, countries since I switch frequently between Sweden and Finland) decimal numbers are separated with a comma (",") and not a period (".") (and this is common in many other countries as well) and excel can be configured to work that way but no matter what I did my numpad comma was entered as "." into excel, which with that configuration made excel interpret numbers as text. Entering comma using the keyboard worked otherwise but IMO it's so much more convenient to use the numpad when you enter many figures with decimal numbers so I ended up entering them in OpenOffice Calc and then exporting as xls and then use that file with excel.
IANAL and IANAUS (US citizen) but a well-informed EU citizen and at least where EU legislation applies that make that completely impossible (and feel free to tell me what the case is in the US). Most of this comes from an EU consumer rights brochure I obtained from the consumer rights authorities (in Finland, similar exist in other EU countries) - strangely I haven't found it online: :)
The brochure points out that EULA:s especially are completely invalid due to two reasons: 1. All terms entered once a purchase has been made are invalid (and you've already paid for the product when you see the EULA). 2. All click-through agreements, which require you to click "Yes" in order to access some service (such as a website and so on) are illegal if they prevent you from accessing when you click "No" (I have yet to see this enforced, though, but obviously such "agreements" are invalid even though you might click "Yes". As far as enforcement is concerned I've heard about a few cases where it might soon be enforced - sites which require you to accept advertising to your cellphone, if you wish to use the service). So as far as software is concerned, only normal copyright applies (i.e. do not make illegal copies). So even though an EULA might forbid reverse-engineering you can reverse-engineer software day in and day out until you get sick of it.
In addition to that it is illegal to make consumers to buy product A if they buy product B. So consequently requiring that consumers buy Windows if they want to use Office is illegal (so as long as they can run Office using wine there's no problem).
An additional note regarding this (even though you didn't bring it up): Claiming that something is "free" if it requires you to buy something else is illegal - so if a store advertises "buy X get Y for free" you're legally entitled to get Y without buying X (and thus a store being stupid enough to advertise that way is soon screwed). This and EULA:s (requiring that you own Windows) being invalid actually makes MS "free" Internet Explorer download useful for me. I no longer have Windows anywhere but IE runs well enough under wine to test websites and thus it is not only cost-saving (since in this case it actually is _free_ since I pay nothing for it) but also very convenient - running tomcat on linux and testing the localhost site with IE is very nice
Hmm, I think you just explained why mozilla keeps changing its name so often... ;)
You still have to have the cash to begin with.
The lawyers send a bill once the case is over. No cash needed at first.
Well, that's not the case in all countries. I wonder if the wine project could continue as an EU only project (but obviously still be legal to use in the US) since in most countries here the suing party* is obliged to pay all the fees of the party being sued if that party wins - thus suing someone out of existance isn't possible. Consequently in a case where Microsoft is actually the underdog lawyers would line up to defend wine knowing how much money they could get out of MS pocket if they win and thus it would be very hard for MS to prove that wine has done any IP infringement.
*) Sorry, English is not my native language but what I mean with suing party is the entity suing another one. If the party being sued wins the suing party is obliged to pay all the legal fees of the party that was sued (in that case the winner). However, if the suing party wins the party being sued (and in that case the loser) isn't automatically obliged to pay the legal fees of the winner (in that case the party suing) since otherwise the party suing would be tempted to use excessive resources (ie. knowing that the loser will pay) in a case where they know that the outcome is obvious.
I've heard quite a few times how wine is bad because it makes native versions less likely - IMNSHO quite the opposite is true since when/if most windows applications become usable in Linux using wine companies making those apps are quite likely to port them as well. Why? Because wine can prove that there's a market for the application among Linux users (presuming that the company does its market research properly and the users are clever enough to tell the company that they are running it using wine) and consequently the reasoning will be like this if two companies have similar applications that run with wine:
Company A: Both our and competitor B's apps run in Linux using wine but they don't run quite as well as they do in Windows but people use them anyway, the emulation makes it slower. Maybe we should make a native port and thus get all Linux users, who need this kind of app, to use ours since the market obviously exists and a native version is always better. Yep, we should do that.
Company B: Same reasoning.
Result: Two native apps for Linux.
This, however, makes wine a project which can only be successful as a not-for-profit open source project, why? Because wine's success excludes wine's success.That is, if Linux achieves greater desktop market share thanks to wine making Windows apps available and thus native applications will become more common and finally wine will no longer be needed. So consequently Codeweavers are in the business of putting themselves out of business. Transgaming might do a little bit better since they're calling it "portability technology" and make Linux ports, for which the demand is likely to increase if/when Linux' market share grows. But their success depends on whether they can do the porting of a game cheaper and better than the original game creator.
If I ask my computer to open two windows of the same folder then it should do it! Windows assumes what I want and tries to second guess me (oh, you don't really want to open that folder again, do you?). KDE does what I tell it to do, which IMHO is what a computer should do. It is not the computers job to read my thoughts and try to figure out what I "really" mean.
:)
I guess it depends on what you and I want to "tell" the computer to do; I want to tell it to simply give me the window with that folder open or create one if it doesn't exist (for me multiple copies are a hazzle since when I have 10+ windows open the paths can no longer be seen when they're minimized to Kicker). Konqueror has the "Duplicate Window" (Ctrl+D) feature in the Location menu. I don't remember if Windows has a similar feature or not (it's been a while since I last used it) but in my opinion one good solution might be to bring the same window to front if you already have it open but open a duplicate through the menu. Ideally, it would of course be configurable so that both of us would be happy
I've used KDE since 2.0 and consider it miles ahead of the Windows GUI. All the configurability allows me to make it work just the way I want but there is one thing that Windows does better: When you're browsing directories and open a folder that you've already opened but minimized (or hid behind another window) Windows brings that to front instead of opening the same folder again in a new window - Konqueror opens the same folder again in a new window. I've been looking through all configuration possibilities I can find (in 3.14, I'm anxiously waiting for 3.2 ebuilds) and haven't found a solution - does anybody know if this either can be configured somewhere or if 3.2 behaves differently?
Nope. If Hasa has had spy satellite photo analyses performed on images taken over the spot where polar lander was supposed to land and are unsure whether it can be seen there's no chance of seeing Beagle 2 since it's a fraction of the size of polar lander.
Not a chance. I followed the rover web pages long before the launch and they spent years deciding where to land them and the final locations were decided six months before the launch. It was a tricky balance between on the one hand finding spots of maximum research value and on the other hand being reasonably safe to land on. So they won't change it just like that. In addition to that - the speed with which the rovers move is so slow that even if they sent it to land at the same spot where Beagle 2 was supposed to the precision would be so bad that they could spend their entire 90 day mission searching the area without ever finding the probe. And even though it might be interesting to find out what happended to Beagle 2 there isn't much scientific value in trying to investigate what happened to an object sent from earth compared to surveying the planet itself. And the only investigation the rover could do is to take pictures since it's equipped to drill holes in rocks and analyse them. Not pick up pieces of a probe.
Mineral water. IMHO that's the perfect substitute for coffee - especially in the morning. It gives the perfect wake-up effect even faster since it's carbonated and thus "feels" even more refreshing than just water. But if you're addicted to the taste of coffee you can try decaf but especially if you're used to drinking coffee black it won't taste very good (it tastes better with a lot of milk but then the taste is nowhere near that of black coffee, of course).
Yes, I should've elaborated more - I have studied German for a few years. I didn't know about Dutch, though.
I don't think it has anything to do with the way words are written, when speaking we say "one thousand five hundred and twenty one", and write the figures down in the same order -- it's natural to give the most important, biggest, part first.
So actually Arabic scripts are the exception, as not the origin, if you look at the sequence of writing.
I don't quite understand what you mean with "natural" and "first" since for a person writing or reading a language right to left the rightmost part of a word (or number) naturally comes first. As far as speaking is concerned, I don't know whether they say the biggest figures first or in the order they come when read right to left - any Arabic (or other RTL-language) speakers around to comment? And as far as saying the biggest figures first not all western languages are like that, eg. in German the numbers are spoken like 55="five and fifty".
No, they were luckier. If you've looked at the pictures they took one of them (I don't remember if it was 1 or 2) landed right next to a rock which was big enough to break the probe if it had landed on it. I remember seeing an interview with an engineer involved in the mission - he explained that all they could do was pick the safest looking area but the images taken from orbit were nowhere near good enough to spot such rocks (not to mention that they didn't have the precision to avoid them either).
The War is illegal because it was never declared. In a legal sence, the United States of America has only been at war with Iraq one time. 1991. Since then we've bombed a soverign state for shits and giggles, but haven't really declared war. War has fairly cristiline properties in international law.
You're wrong. Yes, the war was illegal but not because of the reason you give. International law is complicated but as far as war is concerned it's very simple:
1. War is illegal except in two cases:
2. It's legal as defense against an immediate attack.
3. It's legal if it has a UN mandate.
Thus the war was illegal but declaring or not declaring it has nothing to do with that.
You're quite right about that. I'm a Swedish and Finnish native speaker (grew up in Sweden, Finnish parents) - at present living in Finland and among programmers we always use the Swedish or Finnish word for window(s) when we refer to the GUI item (or the things made of glass...) but Windows (in English) only when we refer to the operating system. However, when the stuff gets more technical we only use English terminology since the translations are rarely consistent (and usually very awkward) and thus it's easier to avoid confusions that way. The case is of course obvious when speaking about code with words like "for-loop" etc.
Ps. The language you're referring to as "Lapp" is Sami and it's spoken by the Sami population living in northern Norway, Sweden and Finland (i.e. above the polar circle...).
In Swedish it's "fonster" with two dots over the o but slashdot won't allow me two write that letter and lunch is written "lunch" in Swedish and means the same thing. In Norway, however, there are two official languages, which are quite similar though (one of them, bokmal, is a heritage from the Danish era and the other, nynorsk, meaning "new-norwegian" is made up from different dialects when some norwegians wanted their "own" language instead of the Danish heritage) and IIRC the word for window is "vindu" in at least one of them. FYI: I grew up in Sweden (a total of 15 years), spent one year in Norway and now live in Finland...
That might be the case in the US - I've asked before and gotten different answers; mostly that they aren't so I'm not sure whether you're right (but the moderator(s) seem to think so by modding you as informative). In the EU consumer rights explicitly state all EULAs as invalid - so you can tell companies to take their EULA and shove it. A co-worker of mine has a habit of (whenever possible) reporting click-through EULAs as bugs: "I tried to install this software and was given some sort of pointless agreement and Yes/No buttons to click - I clicked No since I didn't agree and the installer stopped. However, I noticed a work-around; the installer works if you click Yes"
It itsn't uncommon here to resell software that has come bundled with your computer and that you don't need - copyright applies as usual but you don't need to give a damn about what the EULA forbids you from doing.
Well, if your language uses a different character set - how can you tell someone (in your language) the name of a website? In Swedish I can say the name and people are clever enough to figure out to turn a:s and o:s with dots over them and a:s with rings over them into simple a:s,o:s and a:s (the meaning changes at times, though, as I've pointed out in another post, examples: municipality names Horby and Monsteras - without the dots and rings: www.horby.se and www.monsteras.se mean www.hookervillage.se and www.monstercarcass.se).
But what do Japanese/Chinese/Arabic/Hebrew/Korean/... (a long list) speakers do? Try to tell people to spell it using English letters? That's impossible since there is no simple "pronounced like this in my language"="write like this in English" conversion.
My post should be understandable anyway but slashdot left out the non-English characters o with two dots over it and a with a ring over it in the names Monsteras and Horby.