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User: Freultwah

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Comments · 247

  1. Re:Troll on Sociologist: Job Insecurity Is the New Normal · · Score: 2

    Something does not add up. Nobody, or at least nobody sober would forget the name of their city of residence and Saint Petersburg was called Leningrad during the Soviet times. Were you there, really? Because if you were, why would you mix up the names and why would you want to repeat the experience?

  2. Re:Does it really count? on Speaking a Second Language May Change How You See the World · · Score: 1

    In short, no. The variations are not that small and the differences between language families are larger than you give them credit for. Swiss German speakers get subtitled on German TV, for example, and that’s within nominally the same language. And then there are the Slavic languages, a whole bunch of them, the Baltic languages, and the three major Finno-Ugric languages, the latter of which are not even Indo-European in origin.

  3. Re:English on Speaking a Second Language May Change How You See the World · · Score: 1

    Euro-translators who are fluent in Russian say that understanding written Bulgarian based on prior knowledge of Russian is a piece of cake. My own spoken Russian is a bit rusty, but even then I’ve had no issues understanding simpler texts in Bulgarian. So, my point is that even Bulgarian falls within the continuum. After all, it’s based on Church Slavonic just like Old Russian, so the two languages cannot be too far apart. Closer than Russian and Polish anyway. By the way, I would recommend Polish over Slovak because of the larger speaker base and the fact that Polish and Czech/Slovak are not really that far apart.

  4. Re:Posting from MacOS.. on Tumblr Co-Founder: Apple's Software Is In a Nosedive · · Score: 1

    Err iOS does all that, syncing to Google and CardDAV/CalDAV (which stock Android surprisingly does not do, you have to buy an app from Google Play store) and iCloud and what not, photos, videos, the lot. Your friend had probably stored all his contacts on the SIM and had neglected to sync them online. But you already knew that. What you apparently did not know about is what the parent was talking about: Continuity / Handoff.

  5. Re:Quebec Language Police on What Language Will the World Speak In 2115? · · Score: 1

    No, the French are not 'simply taking the English terms and making minor spelling adjustments’. If anything, it is or rather was the other way around, hundreds of years ago. The terms are Latin and Greek in origin as pointed out, so both languages got their terms from those. English has borrowed much, much more from French than the other way round.

  6. Re: Tempting on Multi-Process Comes To Firefox Nightly, 64-bit Firefox For Windows 'Soon' · · Score: 1

    Tolerance is a constituent value of the Western society, and is therefore higher up in the value hierarchy than intolerance. So it's not a conundrum – being intolerant towards intolerance is absolutely consistent with the core values of the social system. Otherwise you could never put murderers behind bars.

  7. Re:Just one question... on iOS 8 Review · · Score: 1

    No issues since iOS 6 (which is when I started using the iPhone). Granted, I don't use the builtin app, having instead opted for the Sleep Cycle app that uses the accelerometer while you sleep and allegedly takes your sleep cycles into account when determining the right window for waking you up. (Yea, I bought into it, but it's been working well for me.) It plays any song or playlist I throw at it, background or foreground. So in short, no such limitation has come up.

  8. Re:Just one question... on iOS 8 Review · · Score: 0

    How come the parent post is modded interesting?

  9. Re:Finlandization is moral debasement on 3 Decades Later, Finnair Pilots Report Dramatic Close Encounter With a Missile · · Score: 1

    On 3 September, Tuomioja went on record saying that he opposes creating NATO bases in the Baltic states since supporting it could be perceived as a hostile act towards Russia. ‘[---] It could be justified and is understandable with respect to these countries, but we don’t want our territory to be used for support bases that Russia could see as hostile.’ Source: http://yle.fi/uutiset/fm_tuomi.... So he may have assessed the situation in Ukraine correctly, but it does not mean that he's not one for appeasing the bear.

  10. Re:Is there any point continuing GCC's development on LLVM 3.5 Brings C++1y Improvements, Unified 64-bit ARM Backend · · Score: 1

    No, my point is that there are quite a lot of articles re: GCC vs. Clang on Phoronix, and that the comparisons are quite a bit more thorough and the results more varied than the parent hinted at with his/her implied claim that ‘the’ Phoronix article proves how GCC runtime performance is better. I read another article (at http://www.phoronix.com/scan.p...), and though it’s half a year old, it still shows that the compilers can be neck to neck in one area, and that they beat one another in various tests. So neither can claim absolute superiority.

  11. Re:Finlandization is moral debasement on 3 Decades Later, Finnair Pilots Report Dramatic Close Encounter With a Missile · · Score: 1

    This is still going on. Finland’s foreign minister Tuomioja is strongly of the opinion that Finland should never do or say anything that could even remotely be construed as being antagonistic to Russia.

  12. Re:Is there any point continuing GCC's development on LLVM 3.5 Brings C++1y Improvements, Unified 64-bit ARM Backend · · Score: 0

    Better runtime performance? Have you even read the Phoronix article?

    So there is just one, right? One lone article on Phoronix?

  13. Re:My opinion on the matter. on Choose Your Side On the Linux Divide · · Score: 4, Insightful

    From what I read, I think the point was that if such changes *are* met with such fervent opposition, it is high time to step on the brakes and reevaluate the situation, and perhaps revert the changes.

  14. Re:Have cake, eat cake on Russia Moves From Summer Time To Standard Time · · Score: 1

    Experiment, not experience. Pointy hat to...

  15. Have cake, eat cake on Russia Moves From Summer Time To Standard Time · · Score: 1

    So from now on they’ll have the luxury of seeing a glimpse of the sun when they drive to work, yet they’ll have to resort to pitch black darkness when they get back. In summer, the sun will rise at 4 in the morning and it will be dark before nine in the evening. It won’t be long till there is a popular backlash against it – people will demand their DST back because they want their beauty sleep unimpeded by the overly early sunrise, and they want their evenings to be light longer.

    At least that’s precisely what happened in my country when the government abolished DST for a couple of years. Plus there were ramifications regarding time differences with adjacent countries that had previously been in the same timezone. All in all, the experience that looked nice on paper (and I was initially for it) turned out horribly wrong. Even DST all year round (in effect moving the timezone one zone eastwards) is a saner approach, as long as humans are involved.

  16. Re:Its politics not culture ... on EU May Allow Members Home Rule On GMO Foods · · Score: 1

    According to OECD stats, Italians, Spaniards and particularly the Greeks work much more than the much lauded Germans. How’s that for ‘raw numbers’? The Greeks are among the most hard working OECD nations, statistically speaking, with the other South European nations not far behind. Incidentally, the laziest nation appears to be the Dutch, the second laziest being the Germans. Now, this does not take into account the structure of the economy of those countries. It’s obvious that if you build a car in three hours then you’re viewed as more productive as the other guy who works in his olive grove until sunset.

  17. Re:The report is part of a political gambit on Estonia Urged To Drop Internet Voting Over Security Fears · · Score: 1

    And since I cannot edit my own post, here is the rebuttal of the Estonian National Electoral Committee: http://www.vvk.ee/valimiste-ko...

  18. The report is part of a political gambit on Estonia Urged To Drop Internet Voting Over Security Fears · · Score: 1

    There is really nothing to see here. The report was commissioned by the Estonian Centre Party (ostensibly by the City Council of Tallinn, but they are the same thing) and was strategically scheduled to be published a few days before the European Parliament elections. (The Centre Party has been denouncing e-voting for a long time, mostly because they don't do well at those because of the demographics of their core electorate, and of course their own constant campaigning against it.) The team was handpicked from among well-known e-voting contrarians, so the result was a foregone conclusion. I was only surprised how much demagoguery and outright lies went into it, but then, knowing the Centre Party, I should not have been. Cherry-picking the data, wilfully drawing the wrong conclusions, purposefully deceiving the reader, deliberately ignoring information that disproves what they're out to achieve etc etc. Let's just say that the fact that letting the observers know the SSID and the password of the guests' wireless network segment does not constitute a security breach that would merit annulling all the election results. There were other laughable ‘discoveries’ as well, such as “we took the copy of the system home and logged on as root, we were able to change some stuff in it“. Well, duh. If you're on the clock, you must draw the conclusions that the master demands, and even better if you are predetermined to do that anyway because of your convictions (which indeed were the reason you were hired anyway).

  19. Re:Who would have guessed? on Harvard Study Links Neonicotinoid Pesticide To Colony Collapse Disorder · · Score: 3, Informative

    Organic farming uses natural pesticides, such as specific plants and plant infusions that insects are averse to, and those are not used to spray the crops, they are strategically planted or placed in the field. And they are completely harmless to humans. Where did you get that ‘older pesticides’ nonsense?

  20. Re:How does that sit with you, Snowden? on VK CEO Fired, Says Company Under Kremlin Control · · Score: 1

    It looks like a multi-party system on paper, but the Kremlin has slowly and steadily gained control over all the media (with some exceptions), most notably the television, and as that is what most Russian citizens use for getting their daily dose of information, it’s a good and effective way of keeping one party in the limelight and belittling everybody else. The opposition gets no media time, but they do get politically motivated arrests and jail time on trumped up or made up charges etc. NGOs funded from abroad are labelled as foreign agents, and while this may not sound like a big deal, it effectively closes down all the election monitoring and human rights groups etc. The communists’ resilience is astounding, but it’s also understandable, because nostalgia is king (and also plays a big part in the current events in Crimea). Besides, they serve their purpose: the message from above is that it’s either us or the commies, and you remember how that ended. It’s the Kremlin’s modus operandi – they keep some nutcases on the payroll or at least let them speak in public so that the rulers can look sane in comparison. (See Zhirinovski and Kiselyov et al.) And they can use them to probe the public opinion.

    This, however, is not to say that the entire opposition is necessarily a force for good. While Putin’s derzhava rhetorics worry me, I myself am equally wary of some opposition figures’ nationalistic rhetorics, because even though they tout democratic values, they are also big on Russian nationalism. In some respects, Putin’s derzhava (mighty state) take is more predictable and safer than the nationalist course that would end up much the same way, only worse for the ethnic minorities.

  21. Re:How does that sit with you, Snowden? on VK CEO Fired, Says Company Under Kremlin Control · · Score: 1

    So if the West has problems of its own, it automatically follows that the West is just as bad as Russia? Sorry, me no buy this. If I cross the road with the red light when in a hurry and sometimes bike home after two beers in a pub, it makes me just as bad as a child molester or an axe murderer?

  22. Re:Ukraine's borders were changed by use of force on Is Crimea In Russia? Internet Companies Have Different Answers · · Score: 1

    ...And I have read that the war was over the South giving the North the finger and trading with Europe directly (cotton for thee, machines for me), thus denying the North a huge market for its industrial output – there were reportedly messages passed between the sides with Lincoln proposing the South that they can keep the slaves as long as they stay in the Union and buy the stuff that the North makes, and the South flipping them the bird because the European stuff was so much better. And that the slavery issue was an afterthought, as Lincoln himself had previously said that he had no right nor plans to force the slavery issue upon the Southern states, and that he had proposed sending the freed slaves of the North to some uninhabited Pacific island in order to avoid living with them in the same country.

    So everybody has an opinion about it that they can back up with some documents. There is just so much material to pick from. It’s not unlike Soviet Union where everything could be justified with a citation from Lenin, as the guy had written dozens of tomes of self-contradicting shite.

  23. Re:Modern audiophiles are no different. on Elite Violinists Can't Distinguish Between a Stradivarius and a Modern Violin · · Score: 1

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V... is a good place to start. Bass range is 65 to 392 Hz. OK, so I skr00d up the baritone part, it’s 98 to 440 Hz. Russian octavists go even lower, to the 40 Hz area, but it’s an exception. However, you did not even begin to address my point regarding the very common musical instruments that operate in a way lower register than the magical 100 Hz boundary. The cello goes down to 65.41 Hz. Even the standard tuning for the six string guitar goes down to 82 Hz. Many metal bands tune their guitars down a step or two and a good chunk of the riffing happens on the lower two strings, so effectively almost everything they do (and what makes the moshpit boil) happens under the 100 Hz boundary, adding downtuned basses and thudding drums to the mix. As for the bass, the double bass or (dog forbid) the piano (at 27.5 Hz)...

  24. Re:Modern audiophiles are no different. on Elite Violinists Can't Distinguish Between a Stradivarius and a Modern Violin · · Score: 1

    100 Hz is quite normal for a baritone to pull off regularly, and it’s not even a feat to write home about. My own morning voice can go down to ~80 Hz if I push it (although it does sound more as if I were taking a dump) and I am not even a bass. Classically trained basses spend quite a lot of time in the sub-100 Hz region. As for modern music – the lowest string of the four string bass guitar (standard tuning) is E1 at ~41 Hz, and six string basses that are often used go down to B0 or ~31 Hz. And they are audible. The lower two strings of my regular acoustic guitar (tuned in NST) are tuned at 65.41 and 98.66 Hz, respectively. So where did you get that 100 Hz figure from?

  25. Re:*you* would be surprised on European Parliament Votes For Net Neutrality, Forbids Mobile Roaming Costs · · Score: 1

    There are limits to how large a bill you can run up with data roaming. Right now, the cap is at 50 euros per billing period. http://www.theguardian.com/mon...