Well, that's proof of a highly dysfunctional society atleast.

However, given the two alternatives using truecrypt with a hidden volume or leaving all sensitive data at home, the former is still strictly better. If they suspect you have a hidden volume you will get shit for both options, and if they don't you won't. The only difference is that in the former you will actually have access to your data.

If this was correct, it wouldn't actually be that bad. You could atleast start bombing and force the two sides into talking to eachother Balkan style..

What you do have is Assad on one side, Al Nusra (batshit crazy muslim fundamentalist officialy al-qaeda affiliated) with some strongholds in south, you have various fundementalist groups roaming the less populated (north) east and the so called Free Syrian Army which try really hard to present itself as being "the opposition", while in reality the FSA are made up of many groups who barely talk to eachother. As seen from the number of fighters who have recently changed from FSA to Al Nusra it is also clear the FSA has strong fundamentalist ties.. although they are playing to "get in a position of power when the west goes in and wins the war"-game rather expertly. Syria was fragmented before this war, with several major groups with different religious and ethnic/political ties. Damascus and the south was always closer to Libanon and the it was the rest of Syria, and Aleppo was always close to Turkey and the Kurds.

In short, the entire situation is a fucking nightmare. I can't see any solution to this conflict, and getting involved in it will fuck us over too. I honestly see Assad winning as the least horrible solution to this conflict now... and that's one pretty horrible alternative.

I would have been more comfortable if that sentence was at the end of your post, rather than at the start.. it now leads to two possible conclusions:
1. You don't know what literal means, or
2. You now smell funny.

.. a japanese company, not so much.

R is a statistical programming language. It has lots of neat methods and functions implemented, and is rules the world of statistical analysis.. which is kinda cool, since it's also open source.

It sits pretty much halfway between Matlab and Python.. It's pretty usuable and convenient because of the huge library, but as a programming language it just, well, sucks ball. Building up the objects some of the methods there need, if you get data from an unexpected source, is just an utter pain in the bottomhole.

Oh, and I wouldn't have it any other way.. damn proud of it in fact.

I live in Norway, in this certainly hasn't hit the news here.. and if it did, you can be damn sure there would be hell to pay for somebody. Our authorities are so fucking nice that even after Breivik blew up our government headquarters and shot around 80 kids.. one by one.. we still hadn't scrambled the military or even gotten choppers in the air. I honestly suspect if our police (who don't have guns) tried to take a 9 year old girls laptop they would comply when she kicked them and told them go away :)

As far as machines and how stuff is done now, check out minewolf. They're the de-facto producer of mine-clearing equipment. Basically, you have three sorts of methods for clearning an area. Machine, manual with detectors or dogs. As often as you can, you use a machine to do it quicly, and then use dogs/manual for verification. Dogs are not considering good enough for primary search, only verification.. and some organisations have trouble pulling that off even. Dogs are difficult, but a lot cheaper and faster than humans.

As far as using mice goes, they need to be very good. The UN does accredition for most humanitarion demining, so the mice will need to find all the mines in a training field before they're allowed to do real work. I really don't see that happening anytime soon.

As a low-cost solution for the army, or if you need something quick-n-dirty in a disaster zone I'm sure they have their uses though.. but with humanitarion demining, you kinda need to be able to tell people that they will not blow up if they start farming the land you just cleared.. which makes it a very slow process which takes a lot of effort, a whole different beast than military demining.

Also, on that note: fuck the US for dropping shitloads of cluster munitions on Laos, when you weren't even at war (Laos is the country next to Vietnam) and then having the fucking balls to not even attempt to help clean it up afterwards. FYI Canada and Europe are there now cleaning your mess.. some people consider less innocent children being blown up in pieces a good thing. Some people are, as a collective, not fucking assholes.

If you had any sort of decency you'd sign the Ottawa Treaty.

Personally I think Monopoly is the root cause of all the financial problems we're having for the past years.

2.5% unemployment, 520$ billion dollars stashed away in a goverment fund for later spending, universil healthcare and ridicilously good unemployment benefits (80% of your last salary, available for 100 weeks as long as you're looking for a job). Apart from the odd massacre and a holier-than-thou-attitude we're fine thank you.

His manifesto actually (readily available in english) makes a big deal out of how pretending to have a gaming addiction is really usefull for hiding nefarious activities. He wasn't a gaming addict, he was using it as a cover.

Also, if your media is one of those who kept harping on about this being muslims long after it was clear he was Norwegian you're probably better off without them either (I'm looking at you NY Times). The american coverage of this incident has been pretty much abysmal, and I'm sorry for being able to read english. I wish I couldn't.

However, while his gaming certainly didn't affect him, it's pretty clear that the fact that he was taking a coctail of anabolic steroids did. He even described it himself in his manifesto. To which extent we won't know until later, but we'll figure it out. There's plenty of time, and we have to grieve a bit of first.

Signed
A Norwegian
(Also; Glenn Beck; May you burn in hell)

Well, being Amercan you're missing half the web :)

All the different native language sites out there are hiding under .no, .sp, .de etc, and there really is quite a lot of them. About half the websites I visit are from .no, so I think it's more a matter of saying what language they use and where they do business. Basically, I think the American companies messed up, while the rest are behaving themselves... but given your view of the world that's hardly surprising (ever considered inviting other countries to the world series of baseball?)

I work as teacher, mostly for fun, and got suckered into supposedly being admin for the school network. In reality I'm a general janitor / IT-support though. I have next to no time to spend on actually setting infrastructure. If anybody gives me a simple solution for printing any document, from any operating system on any computer easily to our public printers I'd give them a big, wet kiss. I certainly don't know any easy way of doing it now, because adding printers to students laptops is a f***king bother, and there's always some weird problem.

I'm certainly sure there's lots of other uses for this, aswell as lots of places it won't be usefull.