It's JAPAN, for crying out loud; they *have* no oil industry. Not on the American scale, at least. Instead, they have the giant nuclear-generated electricity industry. The political calculus is a bit different.

They only solve the easy problems. Automatic page turning they leave to some mechanical engineer (poor sods).

Are you kidding? Us Jews have a nice little story about how proud G-d was when we finally out-argued him on the fine points of His law. (look up the Oven of Akhnai if you're interested in the pretty hilarious details).

It's not okay to give one because of all sorts of prohibitions on mutilating your own body - no tattoos, no piercings aside from ear and nose (just cartilage), etc. The saving a life thing applies to *anyone's* life; the more shut-in Israeli orthodox types tend to disregard that commandment in favor of being batshit nuts.

Actually, ever since the Lisbon Treaty came into effect on January 1 of this year, the Parliament has to agree in order for ACTA to come into force. The way it looks now, it would fail by a very large margin, and ACTA would be null and void in the world's largest economy.

Or maybe just more people.

What ever happened to a programmer's pride in the craft? Or (on a more self-interested level) checking what your interns do to make sure they don't learn bad coding practices?

A browser selection screen has a lot of money behind it (remember the billions of dollars of euros Microsoft got fined for lack of something like this?) If this non-random behavior slightly changes the proportions so that IE is (on average) favored by customers, their competitors lose out. If IE is on average selected less often than it would be with a really random shuffle, then that's money Microsoft is losing. Whichever way, it matters.

Are you running Firefox? One of the things that the article points out is that the specific type of non-randomness that sort gives in this case is implementation-dependent (meaning browser-dependent). IE being pushed to the end is what happens in the Internet Explorer implementation of Javascript; the version of Firefox that he tested disproportionately pushes IE to the front, and presumably other browsers would give a different distribution.

The big thing is the second part: popular voluntarily-installed P2P software can't share, say, My Documents by default without explicitly notifying the user. Probably a big motivation here is to prevent the kind of embarassing government leak that happens when some employee gets Limewire to download music and ends up accidentally sharing documents from work, like spreadsheets of social security numbers and addresses, or some politically embarrassing policy they're working on.

It didn't corrupt to T/D in Romance languages; it was (and is) already pronounced as T in German.

Algorithms/data structures are solid grounding for whatever you want to do; from that point, it pretty much depends what kind of programming you want to do. If you're planning on doing graphical applications, try to learn about GUI programming (if you're definitely sticking with Java, learn its swing/awt graphics API). If you want to make a web-based Java applet, learn the workings of HTTP and setting up Java to interact with a browser. Basically, from this point (after the algorithms and stuff) learn project-specific concepts, and perhaps a broader range of languages (once you know one, it's a lot easier to learn others - the concepts are pretty much the same).

"lumbering, static" doesn't mean poor, it means unchanging. Unchanging is the one thing a fast-growing poor country like India or China or Turkey is not. 10 years of 7% income growth, and that hypothetical person wandering the streets pulling in a dollar a day will instead be making two; and when you're poor, that's a BIG difference.

I've been counting the votes: The Socialists and Democrats [left-wing] (184 votes), the Greens/Free Alliance [basically, Greens and stateless minorities] (55 votes), the ALDE [think MUCH less radical libertarians] (84 votes), and the EUL-NGL [hard-left, and Scandinavian Greens] (35 votes) have come out against the treaty. These parties have cohesion rates (according to VoteWatch) in the mid-90 percent range, and put together are just 10 votes shy of a majority. The UKIP (a British eurosceptic party with 13 seats) seems from the blogospheres to be against the treaty on general principles (we ain't lettin' the EU give away anythin'!), and of the non-inscrits [independents], of whom there are 22, about half are far-left and will thus probably vote against the treaty, bringing opposition slightly into the majority, even without taking into account the rather fuzzy positions of the less extremely eurosceptic parties. Taking into account that, only the EPP (admittedly the largest single party, but still with only 265 votes out of 736) has actually made a clear public statement for the treaty. I don't think the final vote will be much more strongly against the TFTP treaty than the committee's 29-23, but I'm still fairly confident that it will be a thumbs-down.

I believe those are called "invasions", not "coups". (yes, for places like Ukraine and the South Caucasus too. The Soviet expansion into those areas generally involved the Red Army going in and overthrowing whatever short-lived government and army had been established in those areas in the meantime). In those invasions there were some other actions taken that just may have been a bit more important than taking over the media: killing off the existing governments, martial law, etc. Yes, they took over the media, but first they took the government and armed control of the territory.