naa42

Czech Republic is just a registration place. JetBrains is based in St Petersburg, Russia. Until recently all the developers were in St Petersburg, then some people moved to Germany. JetBrains was started as a small startup and then absorbed people from St Petersburg office of Borland.

You've inspired me to publish my own version of 2048 for PalmOS, that I've written several weeks ago. It is also in Scheme. https://github.com/naa/2048-palm

I support your opinion, but have to mention that pre-Bush US was not any better. US was starting unnecessary wars for more than 200 years now, nothing has changed. Note though, that the same is true for almost any other country.

Definitely try Emacs. Preview LaTeX is nice, Rope is also here. Also I find it easier to set the system to do all text editing in Emacs than in Vim. I mean that one can use Emacs to write mails, chats, edit all types of code, write and post blog posts, web pages and so on.

Have you ever tried to write math/physics paper using MS Word? It is completely broken comparing to LaTeX+decent text editor (vim, emacs, kyle, whatever). Writing equations in Word is pain, inserting bibliography is pain, inserting figures is pain. Printed results do not match screen version, if you need to collaborate with someone you have problems with diffs and different versions of Word. Another use for LaTeX is making slides for presentations. Word or Markdown can't be used for this. And if you use PowerPoint for slides you are in trouble. Most probably your Greek letters in formulas will be invisible or software will crash in process.

Exactly the same thing is happening in Russia. They started with "child porn" and "suicide propaganda", then added anime, politics and copyright enforcement.

Alcohol advertisement is banned for decades =)

I used iRedMail to setup department mail server and it just worked. I had no problems with configuration: IMAP, SSL, SMTP - everything works out of the box. Spam protection is also adequate, at least for a relatively low-volume usage.

You know, there was that 'labor movement' and typical working hours decreased in 200 years from 16 hours a day, 7 days a week to 8 hours a day, 5 days a week + vacations. It is a good reason for the lack of mass unemployment, isn't it?

> Where would the money come from to give someone a retirement at 50?

Well, it looks completely different if we take out the money from this situation.

Consider this: we have big unemployment, a lot of part-time workers, a lot of people not working because of disabilities, there are also millions of college and university students who are obviously not working full time. But the economy keeps going, it has no shortage of workforce, number of workplaces is limited and less than total number of people.

Then you propose to increase retirement age.

The number of workers will increase, but the number of workplaces is the same. Wages are decreasing, tax revenue is decreasing and we again have no money to pay welfare, pensions etc. So we don't need more workforce.

Redundant workers rely on disability pensions, unemployment payments, food stamps etc. All these welfare programs have obvious deficiencies, but we need to feed the people anyway. If these people were working it would be much better. But there is simple way to increase number of working people without extra resources.

We just need to limit working hours. And it is possible, because it was possible to introduce 40 hour work week. Now cut it to 35, and you get 12% increase of number of working people and unemployment completely disappears.

Tests are a disaster for math education: http://www.maa.org/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf The very essense of math is killed by tests (true for history/literature/physics etc as well).

We already have model for future journals: http://www.emis.de/journals/SIGMA/ SIGMA is just an overlay over arXiv with added peer review. Also it has non-zero impact factor.

This popular phrase often strikes me as untrue. For example, at the end of WWI number of religious soldiers in Russian army reduced drastically. Church in Russia collapsed after First World War/Russian Civil War.

Well, carriers' policy regarding apps in US held mobile market back for years comparing with Europe. For example, here in Russia once there was enormous number of free and paid J2ME apps (usually paid by sending sms to short number). My friends at university read ebooks on <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siemens_S55>Siemens S55</a> (I used Palm). I know of several companies that were started at this market and later moved to Win Mobile/Android/iPhone etc.

All these economic points can be applied to public transportatipon (i.e. trams, trolleys, subway). They also have much higher utilisation of equipment and number of drivers is negligible comparing with the number of passengers. So the problem is the same as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp... Well, maybe Google can introduce public transportation once again.

With DOS emulator. There is no problem to run DOS app from 80s on Linux/MacOS/whatever with dosbox. By the way, dosbox is far better for some apps than DOS emulator from Windows XP/Vista/7.

Theoretical/mathematical physics: Not Even Wrong http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/

The reference frame http://motls.blogspot.com/ (not only physics, but also climate change)

Collective blog on mathematics and mathematical physics: n-Category cafe http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/

iTunes?

Well, I can say that they've copied older version of facebook and it seems more convenient for some people. Also do not forget audio and video sharing applications. It is like Napster since it allows users to exchange their collections.

Well, you need to have population growth for that. It is not the case for many countries (e.g. Europe).

Take a look at Philips Henium 9@9 series. http://www.asia.philips.com/promos/xenium/en/phone_other.htm...

Another interesting idea is to compare modern satelite view on google maps with aero photographs from WWII. Here is Leningrad/Saint-Petersburg, which is depicted on many Sergey Larenkov's photographs: http://wwii.sasgis.ru/en/?lat=59.945749&lon=30.331364...

The photographer has started with the photographs of Saint-Petersburg/Leningrad, where he lives. The siege of Leningrad [1] was one of the most atrocious events of the WWII in Europe.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leningrad_Blockade

Be the way, can the company be the creator? The work of art is created by people. So why the current Disney's directors or shareholders do control the creation of the company's founder who has passed decades ago?

Well, we've got a facebook clone here (vk.com) where the profile is open by default and the growth rate is not worse than of the Facebook. (Taking into account the language of the network). So I think that the growth of the Facebook has nothing to do with the privacy settings.

Well, there are several levels of answer to your question. First of all, there are no currency exchange there and people are not allowed to have a foreign currency (USD). So this "equivalence" is established with black market exchange rate which represents not the parity of prices of commodities but the (high) value of USD for the back market participants. It is normal since the black market participants are involved into contraband and they need foreign currency badly. So for $ 40 in black market exchange rate you can get a lot of food there. The second level of the problem is that the food/goods market there is government-controlled and for some goods there is no market at all - they are centrally distributed by the executives. So the amount of savings is not directly connected with the consumption level. And the next point is that the person who have a job and a regular paycheck doesn't need to have a lot of savings in order not to starve. As I can understand the social contract of the socialists' states is the lack of unemployment, so anyone is employed even if his work is not needed.

There are quite a few smartphones and PDA's which are programmable. I own an old (circa 2000) Palm Pilot and have a C compiler and a Lisp(Scheme) interpreter there. (Also there exists Forth compiler). Nokia 770/N800/N810/N900 series is as powerful as the development platform as your Linux machine. There exist on-board development environments for Windows CE/Pocket PC/Windows Mobile (even Common Lisp and Emacs) and Symbian (including Python). So in this respect the iPhone/Android platforms are a step back from truly open mobile development environments. This step back is the result of the backwardness of operator-controlled American mobile market. The main problem of the onboard development is the lack of convenient input. So I think the main task is to improve projector technology and ergonomics of projection keyboards (use more natural hand movements?).

http://emacswiki.org is a great source of emacs snippets, and it has really active community.

There is also external completion for Emacs with rope library (http://rope.sourceforge.net/), which also provides some refactorings. It is very useful, but not always stable.