anghyflawn

I don't agree with the downvotes, and you have a point in that statistics cannot prove fraud. But these numbers do provide strong evidence for irregularities.

> - rregions with large number of milinary men

Huh? Does that include Moscow with what was it, 47% for UR? Can you name ONE region where concerted (fair) voting by the military can have a significant impact on the outcome?

In any case, your suggestions do not explain the spikes on "nice" numbers, nor the fact that weighting for precinct size does not make UR voting a bell curve, nor the huge differences in the UR vote across precincts sometimes located in the same building.

Do you mean the head of the election commission's ridiculous claim that all the videos of ballot stuffing, multiple voting etc. were filmed in advance by the opposition? The only thing that the Russian internets do with this claim widely is ridicule.

What's wrong with Common Lisp's keyword arguments? I'm not being snarky, just asking. I'd say CL works at least as well as Python in this respect.

Actually, as a non-EU national living in Norway but currently looking for (academic) jobs everywhere, continental European immigration policies are not that bad. I came to Norway as a highly skilled migrant, and the process was more or less painless; after three years, I got my permanent residence, also with very little ado. I did have to take a language test, but only for the permanent residence, whereas in the UK I have to demonstrate proficiency in English before I can apply for a temporary work permit, even under Tier 2 (skilled migration).

Europe does not have a great track for entrepreneurs (though hopefully that will change with the blue card program), but at least my experience with ordinary skilled migration is overwhelmingly positive. And anybody who thinks there is less bureaucracy in the developing world is highly likely to be living in a dream. At least in Russia the corruption comes on top of the ridiculous red tape.

> Guess this depends on how you work.

Oh, absolutely. If I were a actual road warrior, the iPad wouldn't work at all for me. However, between my laptops at home and at work I don't really need a third one, and since I already have the iPad I'd rather make as much I can with it for short trips where I am not going have too much time and/or wifi to pull sustained work sessions.

> It could be used for reading I guess..

That too. For an academic, GoodReader is a blessing. I have finally stopped printing out loads of articles and/or finding that I printed out this same article a couple of years ago. Not to mention Kindle etc. Again, if I were spending significant amounts of time away from either home or the office, I'd consider investing in a proper portable laptop; but I'm not, and for my use case the iPad is ideal.

> can't run what I want to run

Yep, I agree that it's frustrating.

> (not an Eee ffs, a real laptop).

No everybody can afford another proper laptop that's as easy to carry around as an iPad, y'know.

Anyway, YMMV, of course. I was just pointing out that solutions are available.

I use a ZaggMate which doubles as protection, weighs about the same as any other case and is not bulky at all. It works quite well.

> Maybe you just need a smaller laptop ..

No, I don't want to have a small laptop as my main computer. I had an Eee before the iPad, but the difference in the writing experience is not too different in the end and the other advantages of the iPad are greater. In any case, you can hardly call me a person who unreasonably hangs on to Apple stuff: I'm writing this under Linux which I installed on the MBP my university gave me. I hardly ever boot into OS X here.

> Also, terminals are great, but writing anything serious without X is a pain.

Why? Emacs doesn't really need X, and I don't need to re-typeset my work every five minutes.

Um, for about any other reason that you would want to use document editing software on a tablet? For instance, I use LibreOffice and its ilk only for the most throwaway documents (and open others' files). Having an iPad means I don't need to lug my laptop around to work on my thesis (I run Emacs on a VPS via SSH to do it, and while personally I don't particularly care about the aesthetics, I'd say the use case is certainly there).

This is Statistics Norway's overview of immigrants by country of origin. So this means that people from Scandinavian, or rather Nordic, countries other than Norway (i.e. Denmark incl. the Faroes and Greenland, Sweden, Finland and Iceland). I can't find a more detailed breakdown right now.

Yep, 200K sounds a bit too many: Statistics Norway shows under 70K Scandinavians (not just Swedes) as of 01/01/11 http://ssb.no/emner/02/01/10/innvbef/tab-2011-04-28-08.html

You probably have to add some commuters, but they will hardly change the big picture.

Well, I suppose I fall into this category: I'm a grad student in the humanities, with a fair bit of math background which I don't actively use in my work (apart from some simple statistics), and I mostly program to automate away things that take too much time otherwise. I was taught Pascal in college, but in a "monkey see monkey do" way (for instance, we did implement linked lists, but nobody really explained pointers to us, it was just "put a star there and it'll work"); later I picked up Python and also did a Django project. However, via a friend I discovered Common Lisp and I have never looked back; I just find it comes very naturally to me.

Still, I agree that something like Python is a very suitable language for somebody who just needs to simplify their lives. (At my old school they've switched from Pascal to C# now... why?)

I'm not sure why you are being downvoted, but this is at best only partially correct. Yiddish was supported along with pretty much all minority languages in the 1920s and early 1930s, but this support also ceased when the minority support policy was reversed (with token remnants such as the Yiddish being an official language in the Jewish "homeland" in the Far East). Following WWII and postwar persecutions of Jews Yiddish all but stopped being transferred from parents to children in the USSR. I remember how happy my grandfather (born 1928) was when it became possible to embrace one's Yiddish heritage again in the late 1980s); but he did not teach the language to his children.

FWIW, here in Norway, the share of young people from a Pakistani background who are currently pursuing a degree is higher than among their Norwegian peers.

Again, it varies by publisher. For instance, CUP (at least for the type of journals that I read) allows the author to put up a preprint (before peer review) or a postprint (after review but before editing) on a personal page or the institutional repository immediately on acceptance; once the final version is available on their website (I think), you can also put it up on your own page; and once a year has passed after publication, you can also upload it to the repository. It's not optimal, but it's much better than nothing.

Data roaming is expensive (for now), but there are EU-wide caps on roaming charges for voice, so it's not all bad.

How many European operators have regional pricing? There is certainly no regional pricing in Norway, where half the population lives in about 15% of the land area and the rest is pretty much empty space (a lot of empty space)

True, of course. Still, any such automated system would have to have massive redundancy and sophisticated heuristics just to get certified.

It's a fine line. There are cases where we actually know that pilots listening to the computer would have saved lives (as in the Überlingen crash)

Pitot tubes, even when jammed, are not the only instrumentation a plane has. In this particular case, whatever gyroscope device is available would probably signal that the angle of attack is completely wrong, tubes or no tubes.

No, it was not a Low German dialect. It was what is called an Ingvaeonic dialect, most closely related to Old Saxon and Old Frisian. Old High German is what is sometimes called Istvaeonic (and the Franconian dialects that were to become Dutch is also part of that group). There is a bunch of important differences between Ingvaeonic and Istvaeonic, and both are quite, quite different from North Germanic.

Uh, really?

Japanese: topic instead of subject marking, deference forms, completely different morphological categories?

Chinese: productive verb serialization, very different syntax?

That's just off the top of my head

But that's not the point really. Learning any language well is mind-bending for any speaker of another language. It does help if the languages are different (I remember very vividly the click that went in my head in high school when I was taking English, Chinese and Hebrew simultaneously... that's how I ended up in linguistics grad school), but different people have their minds bent by completely different things. I mean, root-and-pattern morphology is really cool when it's that regular, but if you think of it it's not horribly different from Germanic strong verbs (write-wrote-written). Weird agreement patterns? Well, Welsh only uses the 3pl verb forms with a pronominal subject, so "they they-went" but "people he-went" (as, for that matter, do some varieties of English). And so on.

I mean, sure, whatever floats your boat, and it's awesome that studying Arabic can be so fulfilling; I've had the same experience with Welsh. But at the end of the day all languages bend your mind, and I don't think there can be an objective metric. They are just hard.

Also speculating, but I would hazard a guess that a lot of that was due to the fact that the library ecosystem was much smaller then, which means people would be implementing things that you don't have to think too hard about now.

As far as I understand you have more surcharges to fear from European authorities than from Amazon.

Signed - unhappy person living in Norway, where the government is enforcing VAT (which is 25%) on all digital services bought abroad, including ebooks and Apple Store apps. Which is especially lame given that actual books are exempt from VAT (I love actual books, but why the unequal treatment?)

Would I be far off the mark if I thought this is something like org-mode without the Emacs? (And yes, you should get the title right.)

My impression is that a lot of the Python in such a book would be highly non-idiomatic and/or too clever to be considered "good Python practice", which is not a very good idea in a pedagogical setting

Your point is plain to see, and it is correct in principle, but there are plenty of bindings for Lisps too. As far as I understand, making CL talk to Oracle is a battery included in the commercial implementations, or available through CLSQL (and therefore through higher-level libraries built on top of it such as Elephant). Sure, CL may not have all of the latest and greatest, but plenty of languages don't either. While I cannot pretend to approach any sort of "hacker-level" competence in Lisp (I'm not even a programmer really), I have yet to find a relatively trivial task (where my definition of trivial is "included in Python's standard library or a very widely used / de facto standard module", since I'm coming from Python) for which there isn't a usable (and often excellent) Lisp tool. YMMV, of course.

Have you looked at "The Joy of Clojure"? I thought the authors did a very good job of showing why exactly they're so excited to be working with the language.

In any case, this is very much a question of discourse. For historical reasons Lisp (at least Common Lisp) seems to have this reputation of being associated with deadly serious people, or alternatively smug lisp weenies, while Ruby people talk about how happy it makes them feel all the time, even though there are plenty of people who clearly have fun with Lisp (even "crufty" "old" CL), and I'm sure many people would regard working with Ruby a chore. I mean, to each his own, I honestly can't imagine there's an objective scale on which CL (much less exciting new languages like Clojure) is "less fun" than Ruby. Things like homoiconicity, on the other, are objective criteria for comparing languages. There are plenty of reasons to like (say) Python better than (say) CL, but to say that homoiconicity or restarts or MOP are no big deal because if you try hard enough you can replicate 95% of that functionality in (say) Perl is a different question entirely.

I think that Zach Beane is doing a stupendous job with quicklisp. Of course it's nowhere near CPAN at this stage, but it's a tremendous step forward compared to, say, plain asdf-install.

Re your case in point 1, it is precisely this thinking that they want to exploit. "They wouldn't be suing us if they didn't have a case, so let's just settle". Except that if it actually comes to court, chances are it'll be thrown out within a minute.

Percent is not the same as percentage points, you know. Growing from 6% to 10% is actually a growth of 66% percent, which sounds much more impressive. Fair point about the margins, but the fact is that Apple's entire business model is built on ensuring their margin stays high by charging large premiums for products that are clearly better than the competition. This is not guaranteed to last forever. The other companies on the other hand are used to living in commoditized markets with razor thin margins. I'm not saying Apple are doomed, but they clearly cannot just write the whole competition off, and they obviously aren't.

Um, no. He pointed out that as the smartphone market grows (at the expense of feature phones, probably), HTC and Samsung are riding that wave much better. It's not horribly surprising, since Apple's product is not likely to be immediately affordable to many of those switching from feature phones, but as the smartphone (and eventually tablet) market becomes commoditized it is not a given that Apple will be able to successfully uphold their profit margin by charging relatively high premiums for their value proposition. Of course they might do just that, but that is not something we can take for granted.