Apparently, dashcams are as popular as GPS devices in Russia, and you can get a basic model for an equivalent of about 40 euros, and an advanced model is as pricey as an advanced GPS is (with nice features). And the reason to get one can be seen in Youtube, if you are pretty much run into by a car with government plates you better have some hard evidence that you were not the culprit. As the traffic is often worse than in southern Europe (where there is a lot of honking and hand-waving, even "pushing it through" but people are used to minor dents in cars in cities and they don't often care) compared to the fact that there is a lot of high-priced cars in Russia and insurance money is big factor, plus as an added bonus police can be corrupt and the one with biggest handout on the scene gets the money from the insurance because of the police report.

I live near a pretty busy skiing resort in Finland where there are a lot of Russian tourists this time of year. Most of them do drive responsibly. And I urge you to do so here abroad (we have a pretty decent police who can write accurate reports if there is an accident and are not for sale) as well as home. There is no rush here, just relax on the Sunday-traffic off the resort. Don't be a jerk in traffic, really.

WRT54G was a nice piece of hardware - in the sense that the early models (and later the GL) had DD-WRT / OpenWRT option, which brought many very nice features to a consumer-priced box. And good for you that you could get yours stable - for me the best feature of custom fw was the nightly reboot feature. After my ADSL was upgraded from 8/1 to 24/2 the box would just choke when using bittorrent after a day or two of use, and my friends have had similar experience with the box. Good if you have a slow internet connection - bad on high-speed connections and especially with torrents and other protocols with many connections.

A Finn here, hi. Wikipedia has a chart on that. Switzerland is above the "half" mark, Finland is below. This is of course just a statistic and they are just one way of putting it, and here in Finland the vast majority of guns are hunting weapons, and laws on owning handguns have been made more strict in the last few years (we have had our school shootings, sadly).

This is actually quite...funny, because it's got truth in it.

But the real beef is the axing of a grunt soldier because he has voiced an opinion not necessarily accepted in the mainstream party line. And that is what is sad, and this is happening everywhere, but it does not get in to headlines that often. Staffers are shown the door all the time if they happen to write proposals that are not on the accepted agenda. Career in politics as a non-elected staffer is very windy one, even more than elected ones (at least they have their seat until the next election). Seen that, not been there but followed closely. It is quite sad really, because only the very strong ones can voice fresh, conflicting views, and to get to that position (as a non-elected official) usually requires years of ass-kissing and selling yourself out before you have strong enough position to speak freely.

It is completely in-house project. We have various parts that are off the self components in the product like OCR and a few other pieces but the filesystem stuff is 100% our code.

Well, the company I work for does just that (I won't mention the name but it is easy enough to find...) minus the realtime filtering (we kind of have that on some properties but not the way Everything does it, at least not yet) - you have to click the search button to get filtered results (it searches metadata and file contents, quick search) or you can build your own search down to the very finest specification and these can be saved as views, and everything (including permissions!) are driven by the metadata. We have "traditional folder" support built on top of that for scenarios where a program expects a traditional folder structure (several CAD / CAM software do require this).

To the application this is completely transparent, it just sees a drive letter and saving and opening works nicely, our filesystem driver provides paths to files so that applications don't need to be aware that they are not working with a traditional filesystem. It is actually pretty neat and allows modeling of real-world structures intuitively, not just files. For an example if your document is related to a customer you soon end up modeling the customers as separate objects, and bam, there you got yourself a lightweight CRM system out of the box...

Are you looking to contribute in the actual development of the database software or just looking at what database to use? I see lots of comments seem to imply the latter and focus on what is wrong with database x from a user viewpoint (a DBA is a user, an application developer is a user) - if you want to make your hands dirty you should really look into the community and how to get involved. MySQL has not been that great on Oracle days on external community so you might be better off looking at some of the numerous forks and how they treat their developers.

If you are looking for a way to get employed through knowing the insides of a database engine in the Open Source world I would suggest SQLite (it is really used everywhere nowadays) or as a little bit more niche product, Firebird - Firebird is a really nice database which can be used on embedded projects easily + has robust set of features and has a permissive license (I am a bit biased because the company I work for uses it as a core database engine...).

That is super cool (you releasing your data).

I see you have made a lot of $1-5 pledges, are you pledging just because you are interested in a project and pledging gives you notifications about updates or do you believe that micro-pledging can actually work (get a hundred thousand people pledging $1 instead of 5000 pledging $20)? As I see it you have two categories (correct if I'm wrong) - you have those that you "chip in" in a spirit of support and those you actually want the end-result (pledge is high enough to get at least digital download). I ask because among my friends I see those two categories, there are those who understand that pledging is just a way to support something (and amount spent varies, there are those who pledge $1-5 just to show support and those who pledge $150 just to get a t-shirt) and then there are those who view their pledge as a "pre-order" and the latter group is the one that worries me if in a year or so we see major projects fail and/or expectations on smaller ones are not met. This could really hurt Kickstarter and that's why I seriously hope projects study the pitfalls beforehand and maybe ask advice from people like you...

Show me a working breeding reactor and I call this problem solved - yes, it is nice in theory, but not in practical use anywhere, yet. I sure hope that will help in solving the problem but until actual implementations are in production it is vaporware.

Instead in the real world countries around the world are building long-term storage facilities in bed rock...

Yes, as I said I agree - but the waste *is* a problem so nuclear is not without pollution. And the waste issue *must* be solved somehow. The fact that coal is more polluting is irrelevant, we can't just hope that the nuclear waste problem goes away (well, some suggest that it is ok to leave that to our (grand) children to deal with, as have suggested in the past regarding cleaning acid rain causing pollution from coal powerplants etc.).

And yes, there are solutions, you named the two most obvious ones, reprocessing is not feasible yet (due the lack of reactors capable of doing that, reasons for *that* are too numerous to list...) and long-term storage has not been widely used so far - in my country (Finland) we are just now starting to store used fuel permanently, although nuclear power has been used here since 1977 - and our bed rock is stable, and *still* it has taken 30 years to even start thinking about the long-term storage (this also tells that the amount of wast is not that big, but on the other hand also that it is a non-trivial issue).

I mostly agree with you, but the big elephant in the room you are missing is used fuel - the quantities are not huge, but it remains dangerous for very long time and the most common method of dealing with it has been "put it in the backyard in a storage facility and we will think of something in the future".

RFID passports have been demonstrated to be read from meters away, in 2004 someone I trust on this one gave a number of 20 meters.. The tag in question seems to include personal information embedded so it is not just an electronic key and given that even passport RFID security has been show to have weaknesses, even so much that US now includes built-in shielding in passports I would not automatically trust my personal info on $randomcompany's RFID implementation.

I have not watched the original series as a kid (I was born in 1979) so I can't really say if the original Daleks would have frightened me as a kid, probably yes. On the other hand, the angels in new series still at this age give me the creeps.

One thing TFA mentioned (one of the few points the long ramble gets right) besides the M&M colored Daleks which bugs me is that while the Daleks do kill people on the new series and experiment with them, they play the classic "oh we won't kill you just yet, instead we will have a nice debate" with The Doctor. So they respect, even fear the hero and unsurprisingly Doctor gets away every time. The same is true for about every other enemy Doctor encounters, which the article refers as "The God Complex"; referring not just to that episode. The writers almost blew it with the angels when making them talk in "The Time of Angels" / "Flesh and Stone", but they seem to be the only baddies who really do not care about The Doctor and go on doing their business and don't shit their pants because The Doctor arrives.

Completely agreed. The angels in "Blink" were actually scary. If you can call them "lame" (silent, deadly, but still a bit vulnerable with cunning planning) I don't know what makes a good monster (well, if by "lame" the GP meant that they lack big lasers then yes, they are lame sci-fi monsters). I actually also liked the concept of "that which holds the image of an angel becomes itself an angel" - maybe the part that looking at an angel through monitor is dangerous was a bit overblown, especially when mixed with the classic cliches of self-locking doors etc. but it added their bad-assness. The episode was ruined though by bringing in them by the thousands.

Daleks are comedy, angels are true monsters.

And yes, "The Power of Three" was worth...umm...I don't know, I want to forget that. And bringing in relatives - the father of Donna Noble did some scenes and added to the story but on "Dinosaurs on a spaceship" Rory's dad...oh please, please let me forget that episode. The whole thing with River Song and Amy was nice (I did not see that coming up until a few minutes before the scheme was revealed but then again, maybe I'm easy to fool), and I can forgive the faults of Amy as a character, but bringing in Rory and then even his dad, uh, nothing good came out of it.

Not actually true if you go through your own list - XCOM and CoD black ops 2 work fine on DX9. XCOM requires Vista for some reason, CoD doesn't.

-ka