You realize, don't you, that you're suggesting that coal seams have been laid down within the past 100 years? Thinking about it rationally would suggest to you that these items were dropped in the coal mine by miners, not laid down along with the coal. Or how do you propose they got there, to be found many meters below ground?
I'm sorry, but these units don't properly convert. The Library of Congress isn't a measure of area, but of data storage. 1 Library of Congress = about 10 terabytes. (Oddly, this is easy to discover by googling "1 Library of Congress in megabytes". Google itself doesn't do the conversion, but the equivalence is in the top search results.)
This is hardly Ahnold's doing, and California is far from the only state that claims, and has claimed for a long time, copyright on its laws.
Federal laws are public domain because federal copyright law specifically releases work done by federal employees in the performance of their jobs. It says nothing about state laws, and by a naive reading of the rest of the copyright code they appear to be copyrightable.
I'm not sure why you think it's impossible to quote from a copyrighted state law, since that's a relatively clear example of fair use even if the copyright is valid. (As clear as fair use ever gets, anyway.)
I still don't see how it is nonsense. Notice that there was an *if* in my statement... that is, *if* the individual is worth the extra pay.
What you don't get is that the individual has nothing at all to do with it.
The average developer, quite simply, is not worth what he is being paid, relative to the cost of developers overseas. It's economic reality, and as long as people are unwilling to accept it, they will continue to be left jobless when their role is offshored.
More nonsense. An American developer cannot work for what an overseas worker is being paid and still support himself or a family, not given the realities of the American economy and not have a second or third job. You do realize we're talking about an annual salary of less than $10,000, right? In the US, no one can work for that kind of money no matter what they do.
There's a lot to disagree with here. Americans don't have a choice in the matter? That's ridiculous. There are other fields, other professions. No one is forcing them to develop code for a lviing at gunpoint. There does not have to be adequate compensation to make the investment worthwhile. I would say that anyone in the US who goes to college to learn to code is making a bad investment. There is no guarantee that an educational investment will be worthwhile.
You can't be this obtuse naturally. No one goes to college to learn to code. The subject almost doesn't matter. A bachelor degree (in whatever major; often not computer science) is a requirement. You can't demand that cost of entry, as virtually all employers do, and then pay someone less than $10,000 a year in the US.
In short, what is "fair" is not the economic reality we face. So it is better to adapt to the reality, than to keep hoping that some mystical force will keep the US's inflated wages in place.
If the wages of US software developers are inflated, then the entire US economy is. Which may well be the case, but it's absurd on any kind of scale to say that a software developer is worth less than, say, a bagger at a grocery store. But that's exactly what you're saying.
This is nonsense. Jobs do not move overseas on an individual basis that would allow a single developer to demonstrate anything to his employer that would change anything.
Because you're not just competing with foreign labor. You're competing with foreign economies. Indian programmers don't work for less because they're more industrious or less greedy. They do it because they can maintain a relatively high standard of living for far less than an American developer can.
It's not as if the American has a choice in the matter either. The qualifications demanded by employers here just to get your foot in the door include a college degree that costs $40,000 to acquire, and that's on the cheap side, plus at least four years of time; probably longer. There has to be adequate compensation to make the investment worthwhile. If they even make a comparable demand on their foreign outsourcing, it's far cheaper.
You mean like right now? It proves your point, but also the other side of the coin: Americans know fuck-all about religion too. Creationists can argue against evolution, and atheists against religion, only on a kindergarten level. Cogent arguments against either are rare. So are cogent arguments for.
Heinlein once suggested making prospective voters solve a quadratic equation before being allowed into the voting booth, to set some minimal capability for rational thought. His idea would make it the only criterion, and disregard factors like age.
A bit more workable than your suggestion, which requires some objective way to judge the merits of various arguments. This is only sometimes possible.
I suggest you check the Patriot Act carefully -- certainly some commentators believe that The Continuity of Government plan in conjunction with The Patriot Act gives Bush precisely that legal power. I am not a lawyer (and even if I were, I bet there would be a lot of disagreement amongst lawyers on this one), and I don't know whether that power, if it existed, was preserved in Patriot 2, so I'm not sure.
Then find out before you spout out this paranoid nonsense. Some commentators believe almost anything. On the Internet, you can probably even find commentators who believe that 9/11 was a government conspiracy hatched by Dick Cheney and space aliens as part of a plan to conceal the fact that Rush Limbaugh is Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher's illegitimate love child. Even if you're right, without knowing who the commentators are and on what they base their conclusions, and whether the specific provisions were included in Patriot 2, this is a totally useless thing to say.
Tell you what. Why don't you check the Patriot Act carefully and tell us exactly what you're referring to here?
What the hell's embarrassing about that? Most kids are nowhere near curious enough about anything to bother either experimenting with it or learning about it. You were 12 years old and writing in assembly. That's reason to be proud, not embarrassed.
One of my own complaints about modern home PCs and how programming is taught is that kids never get a chance to work so close to the machine anymore. A Java programmer can consider himself fully educated and never have the faintest clue about what the underlying hardware is doing. I suppose for web applications it doesn't matter so much, but I reflexively cringe when I see wasted resources.
I didn't learn assembly programming until I worked on the DEC-10 in college. It had a number of unique features, not least of which was a 36-bit word and 6-bit character set, which meant you naturally worked in octal instead of hex. Never had the opportunity to work on an M68k family processor, unfortunately.
And not very much in the way of personal observation at that. It was Feynman himself who made the comparison to best-practice software engineering. All TFA was really doing was pointing out that we already know what best-practices are for critical applications and that we generally don't use them. To anyone who develops software, who was interested enough in either the Challenger explosion or Feynman himself to have read it already, it's not news.
You still don't get my point. I don't know how I can make it any more clearly, so forget it. And no, Dean was never an FBI agent! "Apparently"!?! How old are you? He was the White House Counsel! His role was to assist in the cover-up until he came clean. His testimony was instrumental in bringing the details of the incident to light. Sorry, but your sense of history and civics fails to impress.
Oh, come on now. It's not the anti-abortion position per se that's a problem, it's that Huckabee is promoting it on strictly religious grounds. It's true that Republicans routinely pander to the so-called "Christian right", but this is no mere pandering. The man's a Southern Baptist minister, for crying out loud! He means what he says, and his Southern Baptist audiences know it.
As long as we have our current Constitution, we won't have a theocracy in name. But we may well have one in effect by making into law not just moral positions informed by religion, but religious principles themselves. Will the USSC always stand in the way of such things? I hope so, but it's possible they may not. Sorry, but when you start thinking "it can't happen here" you've fallen asleep at the switch when it comes to your responsibilities as a citizen of a democratic republic. It can happen here. It can happen anywhere.
If you really think the present administration hasn't done violence to the Constitution, then your really need to read Dean's books. Note that the man is far from a screaming liberal; as a member of the Nixon administration he has strong conservative bona fides. I'm not going to reproduce a book-length (actually three books) argument and presentation of evidence, but it has a lot to do with the expansion of Executive authority at the expense of the Legislative branch which, as long as Republicans were in charge of it, went absolutely unchecked. One veto in six years!? That was absolutely unprecedented. No matter what's happening in the world, there is no excuse whatsoever for Congress to rubber-stamp everything the President wants. That's not their job. Quite the opposite. Read the Federalist Papers if you want to understand how it's supposed to work.
It's also a well-known bit of historical legislative foolishness often cited to demonstrate the kind of bad decisions possible in a representative system of government. In an election year, it's a valuable reminder of how we need to keep a close eye on these people.
Considering the repeated movements to introduce other bits of absurdity into school curricula (ID, anyone?) it's well worth talking about.
What's such a big deal about that? First, who'd want it? And second, what's to stop someone rich enough who wants it from having it right now? Stereolithography costs as little as five figures USD. People buy more expensive cars.
Well, that's clever reasoning but in this case you know it isn't true. "Right-to-life" is a codeword for anti-abortion. If the phrase really meant what it said it would suggest opposition to the death penalty as well, but the "Christian right" tends to support it. They believe life begins at conception because they do think God said so.
You really need to look up what Huckabee's been saying in these matters. It's hardly limited to that one speech to that one group. He's been running on his religion, and asking his co-religionists to vote for him for that reason. He's free to do so of course, but I think anyone not sharing his views would be right to be disturbed.
Any genuinely religious person is going to work within the moral framework that religion provides. That's only to be expected. Running on a platform of pushing a set of your religious views into law is a different matter entirely.
I'm well aware of the dangers of putting the Godless in charge. I'm Eastern Orthodox, and most of the persecution I mentioned was at the hands of the Soviet government. Commemoration of the martyrs of that regime don't even mention it by name; it's called the "Godless Authority". On the other hand, a specifically religious regime may be no better. Modern theocracies don't often have a diverse enough population to show us what kind of atrocities might result -- perhaps Sudan is a good indication though. That's not to say all religious regimes would do this any more than all godless regimes would imitate the atrocities of the Stalin era. But it's no guarantee of safety. A Constitutional policy of tolerance comes much closer. We need to guard very carefully against any erosion of it.
Again, it's not necessarily what he's actually going to be able to do, although if as president (unlikely now) he ever gets a Congress as compliant as the one Bush had to work with for 6 years the sky's the limit. That was frankly disastrous. I suggest you give John Dean's books a read if you don't yet appreciate just how disastrous it was. To use your metaphor, Bush did "walk through walls" in several areas, although the way had been well-prepared for him. A theocratic political disaster is no more savory than one that's power-hungry for merely power's sake.
You need a laywer, sir. And have the lawyer do what? His company owns the code, no question about it. He wrote it on employer's time according to requirements he was handed, and under his management's supervision. The decision to release it is entirely the company's, and isn't primarily legal but commercial. A lawyer can't help with that. If they decide to release it then there will be some legal work, but it'll be for the company to cover their asses and will be up to their lawyers, not his.
What a candidate would do, given his druthers, is to me nearly as important as what he will actually be able to do. It demonstrates his goals and illuminates the kind of policies he will work toward.
In Huckabee's case, the goal of his kooky idea is clearly in the direction of supporting actions that conform to a Christian agenda. In this case not only the idea, but the goal itself is objectionable. I'm a Christian myself, but as a member of a church severely persecuted throughout the 20th century (thoughtlessly in the US, with clear malicious intent elsewhere) I value the separation of church and state highly and do not want to see any one religion in the ascendancy.
In Paul's case, his kooky idea is intended to work toward fiscal soundness, a laudable goal regardless of political affiliation.
By contrast, Huckabee is a 100% certifiable religious lunatic. And not just on theological grounds, even though I happen to think Mormonism is ridiculous. The man is on record as wanting to turn this country into a theocracy. In context this was about right-to-life and anti-gay marriage Constitutional amendments he wants to push. But even for those who think these would be good things: How far exactly does this philosophy go? Why should he stop there? Has he said anything to make us think he would stop there?
The man's a crackpot, but because he's well-funded he gets more attention than a man who's craziest idea, which even he says he'd be unable to accomplish, is to put us on the gold standard. And Slashdot is helping. Thanks, guys.
Links.net was the first site with pages of link collections that I used regularly. It was actually the personal site of Justin Hall -- still is, I think -- who was also the first one I recall seeing chronicle events of his life on his site regularly. The earliest capture at the Wayback Machine is an example of what he used to post, but at this point the site was more blog and less link collection.
I suppose if you want to see what's hosted at that domain now you have to know what you're looking for.
"Own" as in the one they use natively, not "own" as in exclusively theirs. Most Americans think of English as their "own" language, although it's used in a number of other countries and we didn't invent it. The word doesn't imply exclusivity in this context.
Ah, yes. Wikipedia is the ultimate authority on such matters. Sorry, but I can't take any reference seriously where "basically" is used to introduce an assertion of fact. Yes, the letters all have a "Greek/Semitic ancestry". So do nearly all alphabets in the world other than Korean.
That doesn't mean you can grab any two similar looking letters and say they're the same historically. Latin P and Cyrillic P are not. Latin P is descended from Greek pi as transmuted through Etruscan and ultimately derives from the Phoenician pe; Cyrillic P (er) is from Greek rho, which is from Phoenician resh. In some typefaces they look the same. In other typefaces, and most certainly in handwriting, they do not. (In the above, Cyrillic P is represented with Latin P, since if I type the Cyrillic letter, stupid/. changes it to a numerical entity and then won't display it. Idiocy. Note to Slashcode maintainers: How about we gallop into the 21st century and support UTF-8 encoding?)
Cyrillic U has the same origin as Latin Y only by a roundabout route. Greek upsilon had already been borrowed into Latin as V to represent the sound now written with U in most European languages. Y was a re-borrowing of the same letter to spell Greek loanwords after the pronunciation of upsilon changed. Upsilon is from Phoenecian waw, which also gave us F. (F through Greek digamma, which is a secondary Greek borrowing from waw to represent the sound of our W, which later disappeared from the language. It survives only as a numeral.) Cyrillic U is short for an archaic digraph, uk -- in many fonts this is shown using the modern form of the letters; it was originally o-izhitsa with a ligature -- from the Greek digraph omicron-upsilon which has the same sound. (Izhitsa, which had been borrowed directly from upsilon, is no longer used in Russian.) So to the extent that the form of Cyrillic U is based on that of izhitsa, yes, it's from upsilon. Typographically, uppercase Cyrillic U isn't identical to the Latin Y in any font I know of, including Arial, and they are again dissimilar handwritten in both capitals and small letters. (Lowercase Cyrillic u is identical to y in most fonts -- but not Courier New, as it happens, since it exaggerates the serifs and knows perfectly well the lower one doesn't belong on the Cyrillic letter.) From a data processing perspective, even when they look identical they're a mismatch in a string comparison. So if there's any situation where it's a mistake to use one for the other, it's on a computer.
The editorial addition to the post is needlessly alarmist. Whether they're going to heavily filter web traffic or not, it's perfectly reasonable for a nation of 140 million people to prefer their own alphabet to a foreign one. Ditto for China's 1.3 billion.
Except this now has little to do with it being a Christie's auction. You'd have the same expectations of any auction house where the props came directly from the studio, and the sole source on their authenticity is still the studio. The Christie's name may lend a certain cachet, but there's no reason to expect they'd be able to get any more information from a studio on a prop than any other house.
Slashdot Mirror
You realize, don't you, that you're suggesting that coal seams have been laid down within the past 100 years? Thinking about it rationally would suggest to you that these items were dropped in the coal mine by miners, not laid down along with the coal. Or how do you propose they got there, to be found many meters below ground?
I'm sorry, but these units don't properly convert. The Library of Congress isn't a measure of area, but of data storage. 1 Library of Congress = about 10 terabytes. (Oddly, this is easy to discover by googling "1 Library of Congress in megabytes". Google itself doesn't do the conversion, but the equivalence is in the top search results.)
This is hardly Ahnold's doing, and California is far from the only state that claims, and has claimed for a long time, copyright on its laws. Federal laws are public domain because federal copyright law specifically releases work done by federal employees in the performance of their jobs. It says nothing about state laws, and by a naive reading of the rest of the copyright code they appear to be copyrightable. I'm not sure why you think it's impossible to quote from a copyrighted state law, since that's a relatively clear example of fair use even if the copyright is valid. (As clear as fair use ever gets, anyway.)
I still don't see how it is nonsense. Notice that there was an *if* in my statement... that is, *if* the individual is worth the extra pay.
What you don't get is that the individual has nothing at all to do with it.
The average developer, quite simply, is not worth what he is being paid, relative to the cost of developers overseas. It's economic reality, and as long as people are unwilling to accept it, they will continue to be left jobless when their role is offshored.
More nonsense. An American developer cannot work for what an overseas worker is being paid and still support himself or a family, not given the realities of the American economy and not have a second or third job. You do realize we're talking about an annual salary of less than $10,000, right? In the US, no one can work for that kind of money no matter what they do.
There's a lot to disagree with here. Americans don't have a choice in the matter? That's ridiculous. There are other fields, other professions. No one is forcing them to develop code for a lviing at gunpoint. There does not have to be adequate compensation to make the investment worthwhile. I would say that anyone in the US who goes to college to learn to code is making a bad investment. There is no guarantee that an educational investment will be worthwhile.
You can't be this obtuse naturally. No one goes to college to learn to code. The subject almost doesn't matter. A bachelor degree (in whatever major; often not computer science) is a requirement. You can't demand that cost of entry, as virtually all employers do, and then pay someone less than $10,000 a year in the US.
In short, what is "fair" is not the economic reality we face. So it is better to adapt to the reality, than to keep hoping that some mystical force will keep the US's inflated wages in place.
If the wages of US software developers are inflated, then the entire US economy is. Which may well be the case, but it's absurd on any kind of scale to say that a software developer is worth less than, say, a bagger at a grocery store. But that's exactly what you're saying.
This is nonsense. Jobs do not move overseas on an individual basis that would allow a single developer to demonstrate anything to his employer that would change anything.
Because you're not just competing with foreign labor. You're competing with foreign economies. Indian programmers don't work for less because they're more industrious or less greedy. They do it because they can maintain a relatively high standard of living for far less than an American developer can.
It's not as if the American has a choice in the matter either. The qualifications demanded by employers here just to get your foot in the door include a college degree that costs $40,000 to acquire, and that's on the cheap side, plus at least four years of time; probably longer. There has to be adequate compensation to make the investment worthwhile. If they even make a comparable demand on their foreign outsourcing, it's far cheaper.
You mean like right now? It proves your point, but also the other side of the coin: Americans know fuck-all about religion too. Creationists can argue against evolution, and atheists against religion, only on a kindergarten level. Cogent arguments against either are rare. So are cogent arguments for.
Heinlein once suggested making prospective voters solve a quadratic equation before being allowed into the voting booth, to set some minimal capability for rational thought. His idea would make it the only criterion, and disregard factors like age.
A bit more workable than your suggestion, which requires some objective way to judge the merits of various arguments. This is only sometimes possible.
Then find out before you spout out this paranoid nonsense. Some commentators believe almost anything. On the Internet, you can probably even find commentators who believe that 9/11 was a government conspiracy hatched by Dick Cheney and space aliens as part of a plan to conceal the fact that Rush Limbaugh is Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher's illegitimate love child. Even if you're right, without knowing who the commentators are and on what they base their conclusions, and whether the specific provisions were included in Patriot 2, this is a totally useless thing to say.
Tell you what. Why don't you check the Patriot Act carefully and tell us exactly what you're referring to here?Looks like your sig was prophetic. Nobody wants to hear this stuff. The Dalai Lama has too effective a PR machine.
What the hell's embarrassing about that? Most kids are nowhere near curious enough about anything to bother either experimenting with it or learning about it. You were 12 years old and writing in assembly. That's reason to be proud, not embarrassed.
One of my own complaints about modern home PCs and how programming is taught is that kids never get a chance to work so close to the machine anymore. A Java programmer can consider himself fully educated and never have the faintest clue about what the underlying hardware is doing. I suppose for web applications it doesn't matter so much, but I reflexively cringe when I see wasted resources.
I didn't learn assembly programming until I worked on the DEC-10 in college. It had a number of unique features, not least of which was a 36-bit word and 6-bit character set, which meant you naturally worked in octal instead of hex. Never had the opportunity to work on an M68k family processor, unfortunately.
And not very much in the way of personal observation at that. It was Feynman himself who made the comparison to best-practice software engineering. All TFA was really doing was pointing out that we already know what best-practices are for critical applications and that we generally don't use them. To anyone who develops software, who was interested enough in either the Challenger explosion or Feynman himself to have read it already, it's not news.
You still don't get my point. I don't know how I can make it any more clearly, so forget it. And no, Dean was never an FBI agent! "Apparently"!?! How old are you? He was the White House Counsel! His role was to assist in the cover-up until he came clean. His testimony was instrumental in bringing the details of the incident to light. Sorry, but your sense of history and civics fails to impress.
Oh, come on now. It's not the anti-abortion position per se that's a problem, it's that Huckabee is promoting it on strictly religious grounds. It's true that Republicans routinely pander to the so-called "Christian right", but this is no mere pandering. The man's a Southern Baptist minister, for crying out loud! He means what he says, and his Southern Baptist audiences know it.
As long as we have our current Constitution, we won't have a theocracy in name. But we may well have one in effect by making into law not just moral positions informed by religion, but religious principles themselves. Will the USSC always stand in the way of such things? I hope so, but it's possible they may not. Sorry, but when you start thinking "it can't happen here" you've fallen asleep at the switch when it comes to your responsibilities as a citizen of a democratic republic. It can happen here. It can happen anywhere.
If you really think the present administration hasn't done violence to the Constitution, then your really need to read Dean's books. Note that the man is far from a screaming liberal; as a member of the Nixon administration he has strong conservative bona fides. I'm not going to reproduce a book-length (actually three books) argument and presentation of evidence, but it has a lot to do with the expansion of Executive authority at the expense of the Legislative branch which, as long as Republicans were in charge of it, went absolutely unchecked. One veto in six years!? That was absolutely unprecedented. No matter what's happening in the world, there is no excuse whatsoever for Congress to rubber-stamp everything the President wants. That's not their job. Quite the opposite. Read the Federalist Papers if you want to understand how it's supposed to work.
It's also a well-known bit of historical legislative foolishness often cited to demonstrate the kind of bad decisions possible in a representative system of government. In an election year, it's a valuable reminder of how we need to keep a close eye on these people.
Considering the repeated movements to introduce other bits of absurdity into school curricula (ID, anyone?) it's well worth talking about.
What's such a big deal about that? First, who'd want it? And second, what's to stop someone rich enough who wants it from having it right now? Stereolithography costs as little as five figures USD. People buy more expensive cars.
Well, that's clever reasoning but in this case you know it isn't true. "Right-to-life" is a codeword for anti-abortion. If the phrase really meant what it said it would suggest opposition to the death penalty as well, but the "Christian right" tends to support it. They believe life begins at conception because they do think God said so.
You really need to look up what Huckabee's been saying in these matters. It's hardly limited to that one speech to that one group. He's been running on his religion, and asking his co-religionists to vote for him for that reason. He's free to do so of course, but I think anyone not sharing his views would be right to be disturbed.
Any genuinely religious person is going to work within the moral framework that religion provides. That's only to be expected. Running on a platform of pushing a set of your religious views into law is a different matter entirely.
I'm well aware of the dangers of putting the Godless in charge. I'm Eastern Orthodox, and most of the persecution I mentioned was at the hands of the Soviet government. Commemoration of the martyrs of that regime don't even mention it by name; it's called the "Godless Authority". On the other hand, a specifically religious regime may be no better. Modern theocracies don't often have a diverse enough population to show us what kind of atrocities might result -- perhaps Sudan is a good indication though. That's not to say all religious regimes would do this any more than all godless regimes would imitate the atrocities of the Stalin era. But it's no guarantee of safety. A Constitutional policy of tolerance comes much closer. We need to guard very carefully against any erosion of it.
Again, it's not necessarily what he's actually going to be able to do, although if as president (unlikely now) he ever gets a Congress as compliant as the one Bush had to work with for 6 years the sky's the limit. That was frankly disastrous. I suggest you give John Dean's books a read if you don't yet appreciate just how disastrous it was. To use your metaphor, Bush did "walk through walls" in several areas, although the way had been well-prepared for him. A theocratic political disaster is no more savory than one that's power-hungry for merely power's sake.
What a candidate would do, given his druthers, is to me nearly as important as what he will actually be able to do. It demonstrates his goals and illuminates the kind of policies he will work toward.
In Huckabee's case, the goal of his kooky idea is clearly in the direction of supporting actions that conform to a Christian agenda. In this case not only the idea, but the goal itself is objectionable. I'm a Christian myself, but as a member of a church severely persecuted throughout the 20th century (thoughtlessly in the US, with clear malicious intent elsewhere) I value the separation of church and state highly and do not want to see any one religion in the ascendancy.
In Paul's case, his kooky idea is intended to work toward fiscal soundness, a laudable goal regardless of political affiliation.
How embarrassing. I mixed up Huckabee and Romney on which one's a Mormon. Ignore that bit.
By contrast, Huckabee is a 100% certifiable religious lunatic. And not just on theological grounds, even though I happen to think Mormonism is ridiculous. The man is on record as wanting to turn this country into a theocracy. In context this was about right-to-life and anti-gay marriage Constitutional amendments he wants to push. But even for those who think these would be good things: How far exactly does this philosophy go? Why should he stop there? Has he said anything to make us think he would stop there?
The man's a crackpot, but because he's well-funded he gets more attention than a man who's craziest idea, which even he says he'd be unable to accomplish, is to put us on the gold standard. And Slashdot is helping. Thanks, guys.
Links.net was the first site with pages of link collections that I used regularly. It was actually the personal site of Justin Hall -- still is, I think -- who was also the first one I recall seeing chronicle events of his life on his site regularly. The earliest capture at the Wayback Machine is an example of what he used to post, but at this point the site was more blog and less link collection.
I suppose if you want to see what's hosted at that domain now you have to know what you're looking for.
He means stupid. The damn things are unreadable.
"Own" as in the one they use natively, not "own" as in exclusively theirs. Most Americans think of English as their "own" language, although it's used in a number of other countries and we didn't invent it. The word doesn't imply exclusivity in this context.
Ah, yes. Wikipedia is the ultimate authority on such matters. Sorry, but I can't take any reference seriously where "basically" is used to introduce an assertion of fact. Yes, the letters all have a "Greek/Semitic ancestry". So do nearly all alphabets in the world other than Korean.
That doesn't mean you can grab any two similar looking letters and say they're the same historically. Latin P and Cyrillic P are not. Latin P is descended from Greek pi as transmuted through Etruscan and ultimately derives from the Phoenician pe; Cyrillic P (er) is from Greek rho, which is from Phoenician resh. In some typefaces they look the same. In other typefaces, and most certainly in handwriting, they do not. (In the above, Cyrillic P is represented with Latin P, since if I type the Cyrillic letter, stupid /. changes it to a numerical entity and then won't display it. Idiocy. Note to Slashcode maintainers: How about we gallop into the 21st century and support UTF-8 encoding?)
Cyrillic U has the same origin as Latin Y only by a roundabout route. Greek upsilon had already been borrowed into Latin as V to represent the sound now written with U in most European languages. Y was a re-borrowing of the same letter to spell Greek loanwords after the pronunciation of upsilon changed. Upsilon is from Phoenecian waw, which also gave us F. (F through Greek digamma, which is a secondary Greek borrowing from waw to represent the sound of our W, which later disappeared from the language. It survives only as a numeral.) Cyrillic U is short for an archaic digraph, uk -- in many fonts this is shown using the modern form of the letters; it was originally o-izhitsa with a ligature -- from the Greek digraph omicron-upsilon which has the same sound. (Izhitsa, which had been borrowed directly from upsilon, is no longer used in Russian.) So to the extent that the form of Cyrillic U is based on that of izhitsa, yes, it's from upsilon. Typographically, uppercase Cyrillic U isn't identical to the Latin Y in any font I know of, including Arial, and they are again dissimilar handwritten in both capitals and small letters. (Lowercase Cyrillic u is identical to y in most fonts -- but not Courier New, as it happens, since it exaggerates the serifs and knows perfectly well the lower one doesn't belong on the Cyrillic letter.) From a data processing perspective, even when they look identical they're a mismatch in a string comparison. So if there's any situation where it's a mistake to use one for the other, it's on a computer.
The editorial addition to the post is needlessly alarmist. Whether they're going to heavily filter web traffic or not, it's perfectly reasonable for a nation of 140 million people to prefer their own alphabet to a foreign one. Ditto for China's 1.3 billion.
Except this now has little to do with it being a Christie's auction. You'd have the same expectations of any auction house where the props came directly from the studio, and the sole source on their authenticity is still the studio. The Christie's name may lend a certain cachet, but there's no reason to expect they'd be able to get any more information from a studio on a prop than any other house.