yaakov34

The woman in the photo is his second wife, Natalia née Svetlova.

Since South Korea's birth rate has been very low for many years (e.g. there are about half as many people in the 5 to 9 age group as in the 45 to 49 group), what exactly did they think was going to happen?

Why are you playing dumb? Rejecting things as "too white", "too black" or "too Asian" is racist.

I didn't downvote it (and I very rarely downvote anything other than spam), but your comment is precisely the sort of ad hominem dismissal that this thread is complaining about. A glance at the blogs on cato.org shows a pro-business editorial line which is perfectly well aligned with the chamber of commerce wing in both parties. It is very anti-Trumpian and somewhat anti-Biden. I am not a huge follower of the Cato Institute, but in my recollection, this is the same type of stuff that could be found there 20 years ago.

Sometimes Cato has useful studies or data, and then it's worth reading. It's a moderate, academic, economics-colored point of view on the world. I wouldn't call it exciting, but this kind of complete dismissal in a thread about dismissal and silencing of moderate voices apparently looks silly to some people.

And the other side attacked actual Jews with rocks and bottles recently. What, that's not "your side"? Neither are those guys "their side".

There are much more significant instances of Soviet retrenchment and retreat during this period. Probably the most notable is the withdrawal from Austria. The USSR held a significant amount of territory in Austria at the end of the war, with the US holding the rest, and quickly agreed splitting the country into 4 allied sectors of control, and doing the same in Vienna. Shortly afterwards, the USSR withdrew from Austria completely. Why? Well, Stalin was not one to share his strategic thinking with the public, so we can only guess. Probably he did not want to deal with a "West Vienna" along the lines of "West Berlin". But who knows.

As for Bornholm, I really don't see why people think it would have some great significance. The Soviets already had many bases in the Baltic which were contiguous with their territory. What would an island add? The Soviets did not have a good record of supplying their forces by sea. During WW2, i.e. immediately before the time in question, they suffered a number of disasters when their forces were cut off from supplies by land and had to be supplied, and then evacuated, by ships. There was the disastrous evacuation of Tallinn at the beginning of the war, the battle (and evacuation) of Odessa, the loss of Crimea, and the Leningrad front with immense civilian and military losses. Bornholm would have looked like a death trap to the Soviet commanders of the time, rather than some great asset. No wonder they agreed to return Porkkala to Finland 40 years early, and never placed naval assets of any significance there.

I remember hearing a joke around that time - "Who is the happiest man in America right now? - Gary Condit." Condit was being tossed and gored in the media for his supposed role in the disappearance of the intern with whom he had an affair. It was all forgotten pretty quickly that September. Apparently he had nothing to do with the intern's disappearance and murder, but it took years for that to be established.

It means that you can produce the same design (IP or intellectual property) on both processes. The denser process should then result in a better frequency or power performance without a redesign. Many processes do require a redesign because of different latency or more redundancy/error checking required and so on.

I wasn't there, but from what I understand, the whole place looked like a concept drawing from a magazine, and there was nothing as convenient or comfortable as a couch with actual cushions. So that's one problem solved. As for the bathroom, maybe an infrared volume sensor of some sort?

Yeah, the whole thing was pretty dumb.

I have a story on point. My brother is a manager at a company which installs electrical and HVAC systems, working mostly with very high-end private homes. They had this couple as clients, both very fancy architects, who designed their new home to be completely computer-controlled, from window shutters to air conditioners to lights, without any physical switches (I guess there was a remote and sensors or something). The architects had this theory that physical switches completely ruin the aesthetics of a room, and wouldn't abide having those horrible things in their dwelling. My brother says that he practically begged them to let him install backup physical switches - his proposal was that they would have a large panel in a closet somewhere with switches for everything in the house, which would still leave the switches hidden, but would at least make the house usable, if not very convenient, if the computer failed. But the clients insisted on no switches at all and the vendor of the computer system was willing to work with that, so that's what got built.

Anyway, about a month after the project got handed over, my brother gets a call: the computer had somehow worked itself into the state of "beyond fucked", the new computer brought by the vendor was refusing to talk to the controllers, parts were backordered, long story short, the house had been unlivable for a week with no end in sight, and could my brother come over and save it somehow. I think he was able to turn on a few of the most critical things on in manual mode, but obviously he couldn't wire up the hundreds of electrical devices in the house. Not sure what happened later.

Given that he is at the peak of his popularity and his coalition is expected to win reelection in a landslide - I doubt that the people you've been talking to are a representative sample.

A slowly developing putsch by the Israeli bureacracy against the elected politicians. Welcomed by those who want those politicians gone, not welcomed by the rest.

I would instead think ahead and decide how much I like the idea of rule by bureacracy vs. elections.

The fact that dollars are widely used in international markets, e.g. in oil trading, is what enables the US to borrow money abroad in its own currency. Which is a pretty big deal, since owing money in currency you don't control (which of course is what most nations have to do) leaves you vulnerable if there is a downturn in your economy and your currency weakens. Keeping the status of the dollar as a major reserve and trade currency is important to the USA.

Because it's below the $800 minimum on which import duty is required for a parcel imported by a single person on a single day. So Amazon would have to pay the duty on whatever they import, and you wouldn't.

It does become a loophole if the duty is much higher than the price of shipping.

These early SGI machines did not have good support for printing. Even if you did have a printer, the only way to print was to take a screenshot, which had much lower resolution than laser printers and did not look good.

My first paid job - this was after the 10th grade in high school - was writing a kind of printer driver for one of these machines. One of the researchers at a local university had the same problem you did, and heard about this kid who was supposed to be good with computers :)

The SGI GL manuals (this was before it became OpenGL) included all the mathematical formulas they used to display the graphics - the rotation and perspective matrices to transform the coordinates, the vector cross products to calculate shading, and so on. I took these and implemented a subset of GL which outputted PostScript commands to a text file. This was then sent straight to a laser printer (Apple, I think). I didn't implement everything that SGI did, of course - no smooth shading and I think I could handle only the simplest types of occlusion. But it was good enough to handle the models that the researchers needed to print.

I still remember the SGI manuals in big 3 ring binders. This is what I learned linear algebra from - thanks guys.

This is all completely irrelevant, and has been discussed to death. The price of the lithium in the Tesla battery is on the order of $150. If it goes up to $1500 because we run out of easily extractable resources, it's going to be economical to extract it from seawater, where there is 230 trillion kilograms of it. Also, it might be economical to recycle the lithium from old batteries (currently it's just not worth it).

Sorry, you are the one with the wrong math. The building is out 14 inches at the top. You divide that by the height to get the angle. What you calculated is the lean for a building which sank 14 inches on one side. That would be way worse - an excursion of [edit] 6 feet at the top.

> I don't think a successful crew capsule abort would be likely past a couple of hundred miles per hour. If that.

That's not true at all. Every manned space launcher has provisions for bringing the crew down safely on a suborbital trajectory if orbit can't be reached. You would hardly give up on your astronauts just because, say, some stage failed to light. It's not like with an unmanned satellite, where it either gets to orbit or crashes/burns up.

Apollo certainly had provisions for crew abort all the way to orbit, which are discussed here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_abort_modes

Here's the paper link (kudos to the journalists for at least giving us the title of the paper, if not a link we could follow; sometimes the article in the popular press looks nothing like what the scientists published). http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/roybiolett/13...

If I read this correctly, the discovery is not that the early whales were predators, but that filter-feeding evolved separately from their teeth; that is, the baleen - which is not homologous to teeth - is the first filter mechanism that the whales acquired, while previously, some people thought that the whales developed filter-feeding with their teeth before developing the baleen.

This is an exciting discovery, I suppose, for scientists studying whale evolution, but probably for nobody else. The popular press treatment turned it into "they discovered that whales were predators", which makes little sense, since a) everybody knew the whales did not have baleen when they were land-dwelling, I mean, how would that work; and b) all whales obviously had teeth at some point in their evolution, before the baleen whales lost them.

People are commenting here without reading or understanding the ruling [edit: I should say that headlines like the one techdirt gave their article are also misleading; they are playing up the "banned from the internet" angle]. What happened is that North Carolina passed a law making it a crime for someone previously convicted of a sex crime to access social media sites (unless the site completely prohibits access except by adults, which most sites do not do). The court ruled that this law is unconstitutional on First Amendment grounds.

The court did not rule that "no one may be banned from the internet" an so on. A specific person can still have conditions attached by the courts to his release; for example, it's common for judges to impose conditions like "no use of computers" on convicted malicious hackers as part of their probation. This hasn't been made illegal. Restricting internet access of current prisoners certainly hasn't been held illegal. What's been held unconstitutional is criminalizing a priori certain modes of speech by a broad class of people.

EDIT2: Since this is apparently attracting a little bit of controversy, I want to add that I did not express any opinion about whether it's good to ban people from using computers or whatever; I just wanted to describe what the ruling says. I am actually not a fan of the general concept of not restoring people's rights after they serve their punishment, although I think it's justified in specific cases.

Well, it's like Bernie Madoff said - "there is no innocent explanation". They hiked the price from $130 to $500 while matching Mylan every step of the way; they fixed prices. Their lawyers may be good enough so that they never get charged with it, but it's clear that they did it, and they and Mylan are both exactly the same and just as guilty. And now this lawsuit seeks to cast them as some kind of underdog and victim.

My point about "good guys" was because of the whole tone of the article. A romantic story of two brothers, one of whom became a doctor, and another an engineer, so that they could invent their dream automatic injector. Except that autoinjectors are a 1950s technology, used by most militaries to deliver antidotes to chemical weapons - here's a film from 1963 which demonstrates a device that I have a hard time telling from an EpiPen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeyW8aoP8mE.

So what the hell was there to even invent, why are these devices covered by any patents at all, why is the FDA allowing just two companies to dominate the market (I am sure plenty of people would like to charge $100 for devices which cost a few dollars to manufacture), and why doesn't a lockstep price hike from $130 to $500 attract the attention of antitrust prosecutors? Because healthcare in the USA is an insane fever swamp...

Sorry, still not seeing the good-and-evil story here. Look at the graph here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewherper/2016/10/26/epipen... (possibly what you meant by prices in line with EpiPen) - Sanofi was matching the price increases of EpiPen dollar for dollar for years, and was always a little bit more expensive. Then it went away from the market for some kind of quality control problem, and returned as a $4500 device manufactured by another company (but with a weird pricing scheme which supposedly lets anyone who needs it to buy it for low out-of-pocket costs). Honestly that graph looks like both companies conspiring to corner the market together, if anything; but who knows with the insane prices and regulations of healthcare.

So Mylan is more evil than Satan's pet vulture for hiking the price of EpiPen to $600, and the good guys just released a new version of their device for $4500? Or am I reading TFA wrong?

OCS is not as completely foreign to Russian speakers as Old English is to English speakers; I would compare it more to Chaucer than to Beowulf, although whether you can understand a specific text depends very much on the subject and the context. Since Biblical quotes and expressions are so common, OCS terms may be familiar to even secular Russians.

Note, however, that OCS does not have an ancestral relationship to Russian - it is a Southern Slavic language, most similar to ancestors of today's Bulgarian. Old Russian texts (such as The Tale of Igor) are written in a different language - Old Russian (which existed long before the split into Russian, Ukrainian and so on, so the name "Old East Slavic" is sometimes used).

They did do exactly that in many cases - the ES systems were not transistor-by-transistor copies of the IBM systems. The original article (PDF link) has a letter from Andrei Gagarin which mentions that the ES1065 had entirely original hardware design and architecture (while presumably being ISA-compatible with the IBM systems). Also, not all ES systems were IBM 360 compatible - the ES project was an overall scheme for improving and modernizing the computer industry of the Socialist block (the name ES was in fact created when Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and other countries joined the project, which grew out of a USSR-only project called "Ryad"), and although the IBM 360 architecture was central to ES, there were completely incompatible systems in the ES line.

You underestimate them. They've created a web of vaguely worded, overbroad laws which everybody is violating all the time without even trying. It allows the government to demand any user's data at any time, to have all Russian ISPs block access to any site by administrative fiat, and to bring up on charges anyone they choose. It's been working quite well - not in hermetically blocking access to some stupid image, but in reducing traffic to opposition sites by 90% (I believe that this is what they boasted about when they first blocked access to Navalny's blog) and in distracting a number of people from their work with endless legal trouble. Not much of a LOL.

I am not sure I follow you - you can't have Be6 since your bishops are all on dark squares. Anyway, I am not that interested in this particular position - there are better examples of horizon effects and so on. There is a great collection here: http://timkr.home.xs4all.nl/chess2/honor.htm, although it's likely that the advancements in chess engines have obsoleted some of these positions since they were played.

Yeah, that's a great enhancement to the original - having the queen around lets the computer avoid mate for longer than its horizon, so it prefers keeping the queen. Then again, I am not sure the computer will lose in even this scenario - it has so many queen checks that my evaluation of this position after 10 minutes of playing with it is "screw it", although I feel there has to be some way of punishing it.

It's not really a position you can force from further away than one move, since it would require complete cooperation between the players to create such a position.

But yes, given a chance to get into this position, sure it will - e.g. given https://en.lichess.org/analysis/8/p7/kpP5/qrp1b3/rpP2b2/p5b1..., it will correctly play b3 and force the original position, since everything else results in a mate that it can see. All it needs for correct play is to rank the alternatives in the right order, and mate ranks below playing on with a material disadvantage.

True, but the engine does see that a pawn move by white results in checkmate in a few moves, so it would actually play this position correctly and get a draw, despite the huge negative evaluation.