coolestuk

http://jaredforsyth.com/blog/2010/jun/17/clevercss-reloaded/

Even the much-hated Lotus Notes was encrypting databases back in the 1980s.

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/lotus/library/ls-NDHistory...

It seems like it is going to take some monumental cock-up before governments prosecute people for not encrypting data. Mind you, since no-one lost their job after the monumental cock-up that was 9/11, maybe I'm just naive.

You try to use the narrative of colonialism, imperialism and racism, to obscure the fact that the islamic empire used weaponry and war to take control of almost every part of the world that is islamic (certainly all areas of africa, the middle east, europe and the indian subcontinent). And then it imposed its own forms of racism and colonialism on the subjugated people. Let's not even talk about the jews. Here's two books documenting the history of islamic slave-trading in Africa: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Legacy-Arab-Islam-Africa-Inter-relig... http://www.amazon.co.uk/Islams-Black-Slaves-History-Diaspora...

It seems it was every bit as bad as the racism and colonialism of the atlantic slave-trade. Even the UN expert panel on slavery in 1951 said that 1:20 people in Arabia was a slave. That was 1951. Three years after the establishment of the state of Israel.

Let's have some consistency here. At least the jews did not go into Palestine with weaponry and enslave the Arabs living there.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Zionism

The state of Israel arose from two factors. 1. The zionist movement which provided a narrative framework (historical, geographical, political, religious). 2. 70 years later, the attempt by the Nazis (and muslims like the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem) to wipe out jews. The Nazis wasnted the jews out of europe; fanatical muslims like the Mufti wanted them out of the middle east. (Some fanatical Nazis and some fanatical muslims wanted the jews wiped out. Some fanatical muslims still want the jews wiped out in toto). If you haven't read the Life of Mohammed (the first and most orthodox interpretation of Mohammed's life) you can read a condensed version here. http://www.scribd.com/doc/27156626/The-Earliest-Biography-of... You will see that already in the 7th century, Mohammed was exterminating jews.

The markings that the Nazis used for jews, originated in muslim countries in the middle ages, where jews (and christians) were made to wear special symbols to make them aware of their sub-human status in the eyes of muslims (dhimmitude). Later, christians in Spain (having pushed out the invading armies of islam after several hundred years of violent domination) also made jews wear stars, and that was adopted again by the Nazis. But the idea originated with the muslim concept of dhimmitude.

After what the Nazis did to jews in Europe, no wonder many jews embraced the idea of Israel as a safe(r) place for them to live (although millions of jews who went to Israel were actually kicked out of muslim north africa and Iraq, and all their wealth confiscated). If jews were going to face potential extermination in the future, then it made sense to defend themselves in their historical homeland (go on the Tunnel Tour in Jerusalem, and see the historical evidence for their great civilisation before the time of Herod).

Since you are Dutch, what do you make of the best film ever made by Dutch director Paul Verhoeven? I'm talking about Black Book, the film most Dutch people will not watch, because it shows the extent of the collaboration between Dutch people and the Nazis in the persecution of Dutch jews. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0389557/

And since the media goes on and on about "the Palestinian refugees", I suggest you read this, and see how the UN manages to manufacture a refugee crisis unlike no other in history: http://www.danielpipes.org/10695/unrwa-palestine-refugees

It seems to me that jews have suffered so much prejudice and hostility over the centuries, they have adopted far thicker skins than the rest of us. And I think that many of us non-jews are too ready to channel the history of jew-hatred from our the past of our cultures. And sadly, I think I was one of those people.

Already in 1929 in Hebron "Palestinian" Arabs were massacring jews in Hebron. Jews who had live in Hebron for some thousands of years. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1929_Hebron_massacre The way the media presents this story, the jews arrived in Palestine after WW2. There's never any mention of the Muslim Brotherhood joining forces with the principle muslim leader of the area and with the Nazis in the 1930s. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haj_Amin_al-Husseini#In_Nazi-oc...

The media bear a terrible responsibility for their failure to provide any kind of historical context to the problems in Israel/Palestine.

I just went through a month with a 90 year old friend whose life ended almost exactly like the story in that story. He had one lucid 30 mins when I was there and his family was there (he had been a general physician for almost 50 years). In his brief period when he had the energy to try and communicate whilst almost totally paralysed, it was clear he was telling the attending doctor that he wanted them to stop all medication and let him die. His own family could not face that fact, and said they'd ask him again the following day (unfortunately the cowardly doctor backed them up on this). He was never again lucid or strong enough to insist that treatment be stopped. He lived for another 10 days, struggling to breathe, almost totally paralysed, unable to control his bowels.

This was a man who when I last went on holiday with him at the age of 85, he insisted on carrying his own suitcase and refused a wheelchair, even though he had trouble walking and had blood pressure and angina problems.

I don't blame his family not being able to make that decision (it's so hard to let go of someone one loves). But his last weeks were undoubtedly torture, and they know they refused to follow his wishes. It was just terribly sad and an awful dilemma.

I was really glad of something else I read on HN about 6 months ago, where a doctor had a brain tumouur (or something like that) and instead of treatment, he lived out the remainder of his life doing the things he loved. I think that idea was what meant I could come to terms with the need to respect my friend's last wishes. I just could not convince his family.

It's obvious that there need to be over-sized seats for over-sized people. I don't particularly care if they pay more or I pay less. Flying cattle-class is painful enough without being sandwiched between people who are much, much wider than the average person. It can't be comfortable for those fat people either to be crammed into a small seat. But at least they book flights knowing what they will endure (and they could book the more appropriately sized seats in business class). The rest of us don't have any determination in these events.

As for it being unenforceable, people get removed from planes for many reasons. I was recently on a plane where a man was removed from a 5 hour flight; he stank so badly that no-one could sit within 3 rows of him.

'African-American student leaders from a variety of historically black colleges and universities took out full page ads in numerous American college newspapers Thursday, displaying an “Open Letter to Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP),” to convey that they were offended by SJP’s use of the term “apartheid” at recent Israel Apartheid Week events at campuses across the country.'

http://www.jpost.com/International/Article.aspx?id=215811

Ever wonder where a millenium of European anti-semtism disappeared to following 1945? It transmogrified itself into prejudice against Israel.

There are countries that truly are comparable to apartheid (e.g. Saudi Arabia, where non-muslims are not permitted to enter Mecca). But it is always democratic Israel that gets equated with apartheid, not undemocratic, discriminatory Saudi Arabia.

But for the past 10 years I've been in pain every day. Even that is bearable (though most painkillers have no effect on my pain). The thing that has got me down though, is the pain that comes all through the night. Not being able to sleep night after night and the exhaustion that comes from it is the most depressing thing in my life.

Even then, I know things could be worse. I could be disfigured. I could have lost my sight.

Of course, those rationalisations are of little comfort when I'm being woken up for the 20th time, and bed feels like an implement of torture.

Most things in life are "fixable" if one changes one's attitudes and behaviour. But uncontrollable pain is depressing.

Maybe Jobs will also be included in this account of famous people with Asperger's syndrome.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC539373/

37,100 I'm ashamed I didn't do better. I'm considerably older than the average HN reader. I did degrees in 4 different subjects (mind you, I was classed officially as retarded at my high school - in the same classes as the arsonists).

So no-one should feel the score is that important. I'm a very mediocre programmer. I'd much rather halve my vocab score to double my maths ability.

We all do that in our own way (even if we can't do it in our day jobs). In my case I'm solving far more trivial problems than Antirez.

Redis is a very significant technology for me. The great thing about Antirez is that he has provided this extremely useful tool whilst maintaining a very modest online presence.

Maybe he's a prima donna at home :-)

Yet only one muslim country (Kuwait) figures (low down) in the accounts of top 25 donor countries for the IFRC for recent years. But 10 of the top 25 beneficiary countries are muslim. Thus the many of the donations from christian countries to an ostensibly christian emergency relief charity actually end up going to help muslims and are branded as aid from a muslim charity. (Either most of those oil-rich muslim countries aren't giving to charities, or they're only giving to charities that aid other muslims -- and it's probably the latter.)

I have no objection to people receiving aid whatever their religion (or lack of). But it disgusts me that that aid given to a "christian" charity uses the religious imagery of the donating country to raise money and ends up deceiving the recipients into believing it came from a muslim charity.

Donor and recipient end up being deceived by this duplicitous organization. Most people I've talked to about this have no idea that the IFRC is branded as the "Red Crescent" in muslim countries.

I prefer to support Médecins Sans Frontières. They seem far more honest about what they are doing.

The American Red Cross looks like it is not part of this IFRC duplicity.

Google has chosen to position itself as an ethical company. Google's motto is "do no evil". They want us to think they enshrine all that is good.

Discriminating in favour of irrational and violent religious fundamentalists is evil.

So, you're saying terrorism works. It's ok to offend groups who don't resort to terrorism to destroy freedom of speech.

That Google operates censorship in China and India is bad enough. Now you're saying the number 1 search engine in the west is right to censor.

The threat to US/Western Europe/Australasia is coming from muslims. They are by far the biggest terrorist threat to these areas. So we should have a 'no-fly' rule for muslims. A minority of current flyers would suffer inconvenience. As it is, the majority of flyers suffer both inconvenience and the possibility of being murdered.

I hardly fly any more because it is such an awful experience. It is only a matter of time before another plane comes down - in September Abdullah Asieri stuck a bomb up his ass and passed through 2 sets of airport security AND the Saudi security services, which shows us that there is no way to stop someone getting a bomb on board. Dealing with suicide bombers is the most difficult thing to do. They have no fear of any punishment, and they can take their deathly payload anywhere.

People should start reading sites like www.jihadwatch.org or www.thereligionofpeace.com instead of believing the politically correct media. Islam is the oldest form of totalitarianism.

I'm no racist (I don't believe there are races). For 15 years I have lived in the heart of the most muslim area of London. I've seen most non-muslims leave the area, and watched as the muslims have become more and more radical. I'm married to an asian, and I've had two muslim boyfriends in the past.

Sadly most of philosophy is unknown outside those walls. Ludwig may not have found that so sad - he saw philosophy as a kind of mental disability, and himself as the doctor.

Probably the best introduction to Wittgenstein is Janik and Toulmin's "Wittgenstein's Vienna". Even if one decides that philosophy is a fly in a bottle, there's fascinating stuff in that book on forgotten greats like Karl Kraus.

I hadn't used Mandriva for many years (although I'd used Fedora, CentOS, Suse, Ubuntu in those years). I've been very impressed by Mandriva laptop in the last 3 months or so.

And to buy an Apple laptop with the same screen size and ram would have cost as much as 6 of these el cheapo laptops.

I can't think of anything I've missed from my powerbook in the last few months. And I could always install OS X inside a VM if I really needed it.

Can't see myself ever going back to Apple now (although I've still got 4 macs around the house, it's just that I don't use them any more).

I'm in continuing disputes about the local government's wastefulness, laziness and lack of care. We had no drains outside our house for years, and it took almost 4 years and 17 complaints to get it sorted - despite them having an office that overlooked the street that flooded when it rained heavily!

They charge us about $1500 for additional services - principally cleaning the area between the house and the street - which they spend no more than 20 minutes a week cleaning. I've taken to photographing the dirt and refuse, as I'm refusing to pay for these poor quality and very costly services.

If everyone else refused to pay for these services, they would not have the money to waste on over-heating the library.

I then tried a public museum with a study centre, only to be told after a few weeks that I couldn't plug my laptop into their mains supply! (I believe that really they just wanted to get rid of me, since the rest of the study centre was always empty, and it was clear that I was programming not studying their collection.)

Finally, the best option of all is a museum that has a private members' room. I'm often the only person there. Not only that, but there is a cafe in the members room', and toilets just outside. And all for about $100 a year. I don't think the Members Room has wifi, but that's not a problem for me. I avoid microsoft whenever possible, but my Windows Mobile phone allows me to share its internet connection (and the sharing works with os x, windows, and linux).

When I want some relief from work, I go for a stroll round the museum. I love libraries, but I find the visual stimulus of thousands of different artifacts a fine contrast after staring at words on a screen for a couple of hours.

I originally graduated from one of the better known universities in 1983, and returned to post-graduate study and teaching in 1989. I experienced an even worse scenario then he - teaching as a part-time temporary lecturer at several of the 3rd tier universities (polytechnics).

Even when students turned in work that was totally incoherent (unfinished sentences and half the size of the minimum word count), I wasn't allowed to fail them. This was on modular degree courses, were most (if not all) of the assessment was of such submitted work.

For years I witnessed half the students turn up to class with no recriminations against the non-attendees, and with only half of the actual attendees having read the 1 or 2 articles which were required reading for that class (photocopies of which they had been given previously, so they didn't have to find the original journals themselves).

The overall level of education and comprehension was appalling. I realised that pursuing such a career was a path to frustration.

In 1997 I decided I couldn't be part of this sham any more. I have friends who had gone through the same experiences as I, and they too decided to quit and find new careers. The story of one of them was even written up in a national newspaper ten years ago.

I have other friends who teach only at post-graduate level. They are shocked by the lack of basic maths, basic grammar and basic essay-writing skills of the graduates they teach. And in their institutions they too provide the students with all the reading matter, so that these post-graduate students don't have to find their way round a library or find out anything for themselves.

Degrees from UK universities were now meaningless, and it was only a matter of time before the wider world found out. What will probably happen is that employers and/or students will realise that in the majority of work-related degrees the degree itself doesn't indicate anything in terms of skills or competencies.

Several of my neices and nephews have gone to university. Whilst I went there to study, their principal purpose is to party.

My partner is Thai, and I know several of his family and friends who graduated from Thai universities. Some have completed post-graduate qualifications. Yet they would never read a book that was more complex than Harry Potter (even in Thai). Nor would they ever go to a museum or art gallery.

Degrees have just become something that most people do either as a way to move out of home safely and/or a stepping stone to a job. For most graduates there is no sense of education being important in itself.

After all, the mac UI concept (and hence Windows) could be traced back to him. He invented OO, and Smalltalk is still in use and his free IDE Squeak has produced one of the most amazing web technologies (Seaside). (One can even argue that Java is an attempt to combine Smalltalk with C++. )

Kay is also one of the principal leads of the Croquet project (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croquet_Project), pushing the concept of networking into a new dimension. Oh, and we could also trace the whole concept of laptops/netbooks to Kay's dynabook.

I think most of the people in that list should be embarrassed that Kay was not listed way above them.

There are a ton of other good features in Notes (and a few bad ones too).

Technically we had an inflation rate below 3%, but only because house prices were excluded from the inflation figures. Mortgage payments were probably most working people's single biggest payment, yet the huge rises in those costs (as house prices increased) didn't go into the inflation figures. If they had, then inflation would have been well above 3% and interest rates would have had to rise, dampening the housing market. I can't help but believe that governments were happy to exploit the electorate's belief that they were doing well financially, when in fact it was an illusion.

House prices will have to fall by about 50% (the figures for the UK look pretty similar to that USAToday presentation). People were prepared to take on ridiculous loans when the bubble was being inflated, because they thought they would be unable to afford property if they waited.

In fact, the situation in the UK sounds like it might have been worse than in the US. There were significant numbers of 110% mortgages available in the UK until a couple of years ago.

The BBC did an expose in 2003 showing that major banks were encouraging customers to lie about their income in order to be able to buy property. Yet this expose has been buried, never to be mentioned. The government and the financial regulators did not want to know.

The median salary for a graduate in London is £24,000; the median price for property is £335,000.

I have friends who came from working-class families who were still able to buy houses when they were students back in the 1970s.

There are the very odd time when I suddenly realize I need something from my school maths education (which was before 1978), and then I have to search out that stuff (e.g. geometry and trigonometry) and finally find a use for it.

I know I would be a better programmer if I understood maths better, but then I believe almost everyone would be improved by a better understanding of maths. I'm sure that studying programming will actually make some areas of maths more relevant for you.

It all depends on the kind of programming you want to do - in some areas I guess not being a mathalete might be a great hindrance.

I'm pretty sure it will be frowned upon to mention any particular language here, but Hypertalk really doesn't feel much like programming. Maybe it's because my speech patterns have actually started to resemble Hypertalk. Hypertalk lives on in http://www.runrev.com/ . (I have no connection with them other than as a user of their software.)

I wish I was in your place. I'd take every opportunity to learn maths, but I wouldn't let my maths ability/disability get in the way of my enjoyment of programming. It's a fantastic buzz, and I never grow tired of it (well, sometimes I do get a little frustrated).

I'm not sure how many people have listed any books for you, but this is the maths book I used when I followed a 1 year course in computing: http://www.amazon.com/Schaums-Outline-Discrete-Mathematics-O...