_nedR

Related (Although it is a project to preserve a record of the world's languages and not archaeological knowledge) : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_Project

"The Rosetta Project is a global collaboration of language specialists and native speakers working to develop a contemporary version of the historic Rosetta Stone to last from 2000 to 12,000 AD; it is run by the Long Now Foundation. Its goal is a meaningful survey and near permanent archive of 1,500 languages."

>that it was both a moral good and a strategic necessity for America to replace those dictatorships with democracy

Oh bollocks.. America (including and especially neocon govts) has routinely and consistently undermined democratic movements around the world whenever they knew the outcome would not be favourable to their interests - Syria in 1949, Iran in 1953, Guatemala 1954, Chile in 1973, Palestine in 2007, Egypt in 2013 ( I will get flak for claiming the last two but they are true).

The gaming industry is replete with examples of original creative studios with blockbuster IPs being bought up by the likes of EA and Ubisoft and being shutdown a year later. Or worse they buy a studio and milk its franchise dry without taking any of the same risks and innovations that made the original franchise a success in the first place. In many cases the original staff of the studio are laid off or are merged in to the larger sweatshops which the gaming industry is notorious for. In fact here's a list of studios axed by EA. https://kotaku.com/an-updated-list-of-studios-ea-has-bought-...

So if you were wondering why you dont see a new Command and Conqueror or Wing commander game, now you know why.

Chrome has a good permissions model that i don't think can be much improved on. An ad-blocker needs access to data on every page you visit in order to do its job. I don't really see a way around it; Thats just how the web is constructed.. You can disable 3rd party scripts on your side (Firefox has Noscript addon for that; chrome should have something similar) but that may break the website you 're visiting

Workarounds : Disable add-ons in incognito mode, and conduct your important business there..

Or use a second chrome profile with no extensions for confidential stuff..

Nice.. Though one small niggle: I wanted to bookmark this for later reference, but the git page has no screenshots, and the screenshot has no title or link to the gitpage..

In meantime, i will just bookmark your comment :)

At least he is kind-of-honest about his motives.

>"I don't see a single use for Bitcoin other than illegal activities."

A decentralised currency for world trade that doesn't allow an arbitrarily chosen country to profit by simply printing notes and skimming off the top?

A payment system that doesn't pick an arbitrary corporation to rake in all the profits by nickel-and-diming every transaction in an economy?

By that logic all fiat currencies and even some commodities like diamond and gold(whose usefulness from an industrial perspective doesn't match their market value) would fit the bill.

>they had to rent coolness from Internet cool kid Alex Tew.

They drank the Cool-Aid, so to speak.

The same and possibly much more could be said about Syria and Russia. Remember in the early days of the civil war when ISIL had just entered the Syrian theatre and was capturing territory? Back then ISIL seemed to target anti-Assad areas more than Assad.. Rebels would complain that the Syrian air force would soften rebel targets prior to ISIL assaults. In fact, look at who has benefited the most from the rise of ISIL, i would argue it is Assad. The west and Turkey have almost completely abandoned their mission of deposing him because of ISIL. Also Russia has hardly done much against ISIL (much less than Turkey it could be argued). But nobody talks about Syria (and by extension Russia) supporting ISIL.

I see where you're coming from and i admit there seems to have been murky dealings on some level between the two, but I think whatever connection may have existed between Turkey and ISIL is overstated. Undoubtedly Turkey's past open border policy had been used by ISIL, buts it had also been used by the other rebels and even the Kurds and western govts like the Americans. Also Turkey has other better client groups to do their bidding; in fact groups like Nusra front and Ahrar al sham have long been giving the Kurds a hard time. And unlike ISIL, none of these other groups have ever attacked Turkey.

>the past couple decades.

Well, Islam has forbidden alcoholic drinks from the very beginning so that means you are off by at least 1400 years.

General consensus of the west on the internet? Yeah , probably (https://www.reddit.com/search?q=turkey+coup)- because thats what they want to believe.

Remember when the general consensus among the same group was that Turkey was secretly funding ISIL and it was all about getting their hands on the measly dozen or so barrels that was being smuggled across the border? It was certainly the narrative the Russians were pushing and the Internet happily swallowed it.. Then suddenly Turkey became the only actual foreign country apart from Iran and Russia with boots on the ground actually fighting ISIL (although how much an effort Iranians and Russians actually put to fighting ISIL is arguable).. And the internet including you promptly forgot their conensus and moved.

Then the coup happened and we got to hear the tired rationalisations - "the military coup is to uphold democracy not to usurp it" (what absurd logic), "Democracy is not really that important, secularism is what matters", "Turkey is a special exception wrt to coups" and so on. Then the coup failed And now the west has latched on to a new conspiracy theory, with all the facts gone out the window.

How does this compare with the competition? Like Signal, for example?

Where were the protests, blackouts, outrage and calls for action from these companies (Google, Amazon, Netflix) when the Internet privacy bill was being repealed? I'll tell you where they were - In line outside Comcast and Verizon, eagerly waiting to buy our browsing histories.

We had their back the last time net neutrality issue came around (lets be honest, their business depends on a neutral net). But they didn't do the same for us. Screw them.

I am still trying to wrap my head around the idea of a Roman Catholic Pakistani-born Canadian named Rodrigues.

I have to (respectfully) disagree. These pictures are good, but imo they are still arguably war porn- lots of concrete rubble and men in the heat of battle (videogame stuff essentially). They don't really capture the true consequences or horrors of war. Pictures like the Napalm girl in Vietnam or more recently the picture of the drowned refugee boy on the beach[1] and that picture of that Syrian boy covered in blood and dust[2] . Those pictures are painful to look at (but not too graphic to be nonpunishable) but still tug at the heartstrings and inspire people to action or make them reconsider their actions.

[1] ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Alan_Kurdi)

[2](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/aug/18/boy-in-the-amb...)

It works great for reliance too. All your browsing habits are now linked to your Aadhar, and can be freely sold to pretty much anyone and shared with government since i have never heard of any real privacy protection laws in India.

This is incorrect. Only 10% of Qatari muslims are Shia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_in_Qatar#Shia_Islam

I was referring to agricultural use which is banned worldwide except India and North Korea.

WHO recommends poor countries to use DDT for malaria probably because people there are dying anyway from malaria. Would rich countries use it? Do you use it in your home? Again why India uses it in Agriculture when other alternatives exist?

America doesn't have this. EU doesn't have this. AFAIK only UAE has such a comprehensive system. What countries are you talking about that takes mandatory 10-finger + retina scans of its citizens and compiles it into a single database?

India hasn't banned DDT which has been banned for decades in every other country. We have crippled infrastructure, severe poverty. Yet India has time and money to implement one of the most ambitious Universal ID systems in the world.

>I get subsidies from the government, one uniform identity that I can use to get important things.

Yes the government is holding your benifits hostage in order to force you to register for aadhar. This is not an inherit advantage of aadhar.

Explain how Aadhar can reduce corruption? I still encounter government officials who take bribes in order to do the basic duty they were supposed to do. Neither Aadhar nor even demonetization has affected this in my experience.

I can understand how Aadhar reduces the corruption of common people (like in the case of tax evasion). And the government loves to reduce corruption of the common man. However it is very unwilling to lower its own corruption.

My folks also loved aadhar because of the cheap gas. Not because of bribes ( i guess its not an issue in Kerala) but because the government would give subsidy to those who had aadhar cards. So people sold their privacy to the govt, in exchange for cheap gas.

Lately, I have been noticing the "increasing automation, use of artificial intelligence " line being touted by Indian offshoring companies whenever they talk about laying off or reduced recruitment. What exactly is the automation or artificial intelligence being used? I never hear any details.

Are they doing something radically new involving machine learning which allows them to be much more productive?

Or have they refined or streamlined their scripting environments and automated build\deploy tools? Perhaps they have built a suitably large and mature framework of components from previous projects which allows greater code re-use? In these cases, using words like "Automation" and "AI" is just putting a new sticker on an old product.

Or are companies just using these buzzwords to give a positive spin to an event whose real reasons are actually more mundane and financial(weak market conditions, reducing bloat in workforce ). Maybe they are attempting to mask something more ominous like significant shift in the market away from offshoring?

Just spitballing, but could the serial port of the Optiplex act as a substitute for GPIO pins?

> Donations processing expenses 3,604,682 2,484,765

Might be payment-processing fees like credit cards and paypal?

> Professional service expenses 6,033,172 7,645,105

Lawyers, Auditors, Consulting?

From the little of "How i met your mother" I have seen, the show didn't take a harsh tone about their weed-smoking in college. In fact there is a light-hearted scene where Marshall tells some character's sister "Don't do drugs except weed".

But yeah i am yet to see a drug-themed kids show or cartoon.

I am sorry to say you haven't assuaged my scepticism.

The watch in question made in 1989 is valued at 6 million dollars (according to wikipedia). OK fine, that might be an extreme example. Lets take a typical Patek watch which costs tens of thousands of dollars.

I can't believe that the price reflects the materials, the complexity and labour that went into the watch. I admit i know next to nothing about horology but as a software engineer i have trouble believing it has more complexity than a similarly priced family saloon or even a mobile phone, or a microprocessor.

My point with the Chinese sweatshop example was its really about the image that they want to be associated with. There seems to be a typical formula: An aristocratic sounding family name of the founder, a founding date sometime in the 1800s and a founding place in Geneva or some town or village with a quaint name in France. A making-off video which features men with Germanic features, wire-frame glasses and who is never smiling(we're portraying gravitas here), delicately assembling the watch components. Oh yeah and make sure you get celebrities, powerful politiciansand pro athletes to be photographed wearing the watch (the fact that some of these people couldn't reasonably afford such watches seems to suggest they were given the watch for free or even paid to wear them).

edit: I know there are examples of watch manufacturers like Richard Mille who break the mould (at least with the historical legacy aspect), but it seems to be an unclear path to convince the gatekeepers of this clique that you're not just another poser trying to pry hundreds of thousands of dollars from the wealthy.

If a Chinese sweatshop in Hangzhou, was able to make a perfect replica of a F1 race car or a jet engine (that performed to the same standards as their contemporaries) i would be in complete awe and give total respect.

If a similar Chinese sweatshop were to make a perfect functional replica of this Patek Philippe watch (without having had physical access to it) at 1/100th the cost would you express similar appreciation? Would you wear it with the same level of pride as you would a Patek Philippe watch?