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Comment Re:Recommendation for a good browser? (Score 1) 237

Yandex.Browser is what I use. It is Chromium based, but has some features from Opera. If you go to the Extensions tab you already find a good Adblocker which you just need to activate and you can configure it to block plugins (like Flash). You can then activate Flash selectively (either on a one-off basis or permanently for a domain).

Comment Re: I am SHOCKED! (Score 3, Informative) 323

I am a native Italian speaker, but speak Russian, German and English daily. German is by no means the best language when it comes to being both precise and concise. The cup for that goes to Russian hands down. Both Germans and Russians express themselves very clearly and unambiguously (well, when they need to) but Russian sentences are shorter on average. Italian, on the other hand, is either ambiguous (relies on context a lot) or very verbose if you cannot allow yourself to be misunderstood.

Regarding how it sounds, German is terrible but at least is generally easier to understand than English for a foreigner (some Americans seem to have a damn frog in their throat). Unless you made the mistake to speak to an old Bayern, then you might as well pretend to be deaf. Italian is generally pleasant (even the dialects) and Russian can be very pleasant, if spoken by a well educated person, or extremely rude and unpleasant if spoken by a gopnik.

Comment Re:The cloud (Score 4, Interesting) 387

But since the topic at hand has nothing to do with rape, let's get stop with unfitting analogies. A company that is offering HOSTING must take have a solid backup plan and security policies in place. Otherwise, even if the criminal who attacked them is solely responsible for the act, the attacked company is 100% responsible in front of their clients, just as it should be.

In the business world being totally incompetent to offer the service you want to offer is not justified. It has nothing to do with rape, burglary or anything else, really.

Comment Repercussion on SmartCards? (Score 3, Interesting) 114

SmartCards actually mostly rely on symmetric algorithms for most applications. The only commonly used public key algorithm is RSA, which is not based on discrete logarithm. This leaves DSA, among the relatively common algorithms, but that is rarely used on SmartCards. What would be interesting to know, is how EC-DSA is affected, since it is slowly replacing RSA because of the reduced key size.

Comment Re:Happy to see it. (Score 5, Insightful) 149

In principle, yes. But $32m? This means ruining this person's life forever, and all because he uploaded some sport shows. Sorry no, murderers have it easier, fraudsters (especially very big ones) have it much much easier, etc. Uploading shows, well it is somehow wrong, but it shouldn't cost you your life.

Submission + - A look at Apple R&D Expenditures 1995-2013 (tuaw.com)

An anonymous reader writes: For a company that makes as much money as Apple, you might be surprised to learn that it spends far less on Research and Development (R&D) than many of its competitors, including bigwigs like Google, Microsoft and Samsung.

With Apple's 2013 books officially closed, I took a comprehensive look at Apple's Form-K filings with the SEC in order to get a crisper picture as to how Apple's R&D expenditures have changed over the last 19 years.

One interesting data point is that Apple's R&D expenditures from 2011-2013 alone account for nearly 50 percent (48.7 percent, to be exact) of Apple's total R&D costs since 1995.

Comment Re:Does the glasses pose any danger to the eyes ? (Score 1) 124

You know what emits a lot of infrared light? The sun. Nobody ever complained (if ever, we can "complain" about the emitted UV light).

Actually try this: take welder googles (not mask), remove the lenses and replace them with stacked sheets of red and blue light filter (Rosco was the brand I used). This will block almost all visible light but let near-infrared come through. Wear these glasses in bright daylight, just never ever stare at the sun, really just don't. However, the result is, that you will see in the near-IR spectrum. Your rods/cones are not very sensible to this frequencies, so it must be a bright sunny day, but it works.

Just don't look at the sun directly, while your pupils are completely open, you would burn your retina pretty quickly.

Comment Re:The continuing saga. . . (Score 1) 177

For Mac it is quite unlikely, since all the standard directories are english only. They just happen to have file named ".localized" in them, and the Finder (but not "ls") will show their localized name. I find this to be actually a pretty good approach since you can change language at any moment and system-created folders will also magically get a localized name. To have the application fail if the locale is not english under Mac OS X you really need to go out of your way and do something contrived and stupid I guess. May DRM?

Comment Re:Does it do custom folders? (Score 1) 193

Back in the early days at mobileread.com Kovid was asked to to include an file management opt-out feature like iTunes, and he was 'meh, code it yourself'.

That's not a bad response at all, calibre is open source. "Code it yourself" does not meant he would not accept the patch, it just means he does not feel like doing it himself, which is reasonable

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