Latvian citizen here with basic legal knowledge.

There's no EU-wide "fair use" clause for copyright and nothing quite like it in Latvian law. By the way, the law is officially published on www.likumi.lv in HTML form, a sibling post here links to a doc file at another governmental websites, but while other websites may re-post laws for convenience, it's www.likumi.lv that is official.

Section 19(1)(2) of the Copyright Law states that there's no copyright violation if copyrighted material is used for educational purposes in accordance with Section 21. That's where it gets hairy as it mentions publishing works or their fragments in educational textbooks, and so on yadda yadda, if they are specifically created and directly used at educational or research institutions for educational or research purposes. The problem here is that "directly used" almost certainly excludes anything like uploading a textbook on a web server.

The situation is interested. Jurs (the teacher) made a web site that he says is intended to let children freely study if they do not have money. It has some texts and it has audio lectures recorded by Jurs himself, as TFA says. The 4$ tag on the particular book surprises me - while indeed the salary levels are much lower in Latvia, it's actually cheaper than some textbooks were when I went to school, and that was a while ago. Checking online a bit, I see the average price could be in the 8-10$ range. But generally it's a known problem in Latvia with textbooks, poorer families are often unable to buy all the books and materials, while school libraries have very few copies, even though they are actually supposed to have enough.

The problem is, of course, that it only takes one program that can't be replaced to break the whole process. Like a mathematical conjecture can be disproved with only one counterexample.

Most Windows programs have Linux alternatives. I would even say the Linux alternatives are often superior. But then you have that one program that just doesn't have an alternative and won't otherwise run. I've been in a situation where MS Office was the killer for me, as OpenOffice just didn't work with compatibility (that was some years ago and current versions of Libre Office are far better). Or there might be a particular program made by your university, municipality, bank or someone else that is Windows-only and that you just need to use. As another example, I have an electronic ID obtained through my bank. While I can use it (with some hassle) on Linux, the only possibility to get it for the first time is to use Internet Explorer.

For someone wanting to move to Linux, finding alternative for 99 programs out of 100 isn't usually a problem. But that 1 in a 100 might be a deal breaker.

Another curious note - in English, Xerox sort of won. The words photocopier and photocopy are actually used in English now. In Russian, they lost - the verb used in Russian is still "to xerox" and I guess without many even knowing that it's a brand

As a Latvian, I have to say I respect what Estonians have done. They've managed to be the leaders or pioneers in certain things like electric vehicles or electronic voting. Nice social stability there and Estonians are generally doing well. Yes, the average income of ~800 EUR doesn't look too good by most Western country standards, but they're doing the best out of all ex-Soviet countries. Already in Eurozone, and fastest growing EU economy. With their small population and little in terms of natural resources, that is impressive.

Or military jets using a highway as a runway.

The apparent crash site (or maybe one of several, not clear if there were several sizeable fragments) is in a nearby lake, creating a 6 meter hole in ice. Picture at a news site. The site is under control of Russian authorities and a scientific group is due to arrive tomorrow to study the meteorite.

For all the problems of the Russian government, the emergency services are well-prepared, given the not uncommon occurence of various emergencies. The city has its own glass factory even, and they'd be able to replace most of the windows within a couple of days. Emergency repairs should restore much of the heating quickly, and very importantly, the hospitals are not being overwhelmed - the amount of people who need hospitalization is fairly low. The authorities apparently intend to fix windows today where it's most critical.

Just to be clear, it is of course a serious situation, but by no serious damage I mean there is nothing like a need to evacuate hundreds of people to other cities for medical treatment, there are no deaths fortunately, and there are no buildings that have fully collapsed.

As of right now, English-language sources seem to be a bit behind on the injury/damage reports.

The current reports from the city government say that 725 people have received medical attention, with 31 being hospitalized. Infrastructural damage amounts to problems in the centralized building heating system, and blown out windows in about 3000 apartment buildings, 34 hospitals and clinics, and 361 schools/daycares. I should note that, this being Russia, blown out windows are a serious matter because they render the buildings cold, especially coupled with heating system problems. Gas supply has been turned off in parts of the city as a precaution.

Overall, though, there appears to be no serious damage - though emergency repairs and lots of new windows are needed.

Other than letting people complain about religion, it's a leadership change in the world's largest church that encompasses about a billion people, and the particular office of the Pope has existed for about a thousand years.

I also subscribe to this view. A decent understanding of English should be considered as much a requirement for a programmer as the ability to write a string reversing function. At times I get into arguments with Russian programmers on the subject, some of them believe English should not be required or considered the de-facto standard.

Best as I can tell, it's safe to assume programmers will know English if their own language is relatively small. My native language is small, has a few introductory-level programming books and "Windows for dummies" style books, but not a single comprehensive programming book or a must-read computer science book is available in it. And some very small programming-related forums. Certainly nothing like Stackoverflow.

On the other hand, larger languages have almost everything available. I have Russian-language copies of classics like Stroustrup's C++ book, Tanenbaum's OS book, and a whole bunch of books on things from databases to assembly. There's a Slashdot-like site in Russian, and lots of original content worth reading. As such, a Russian-speaking programmer may be under the impression that English is not necessary for the job, and it would indeed be possible to learn a lot without English.

And that can also give you words that are hard to remember. Randomly select a few 3-7 letter words from the dictionary:

$ grep -E '^[a-z]{3,7}$' /usr/share/dict/american-english | perl -n -e 'print if (rand() < 0.0001)'

I get:

deposed enured ibis ironies locates

Now I'm not a native speaker but I consider my English vocabulary to be at least as extensive as the average native speaker's. I remember 'ibis' with some difficulty because of the Egyptian hieroglyph, and I had to look up 'enured' - still not sure if I had ever seen the word before.
Does IbisLocatesDeposedEnuredIronies make for a good passphrase? It's strange enough to be memorable while at the same time weird enough to be able to forget part of it.

Because languages work differently and, inevitably, a language's features allow for methods of expression not found in languages lacking these features.

I agree word gender is arbitrary for most non-living things, and in German the genders can give me nightmares. But most Indo-European languages have gender and I can't really say that English is better off not having it (though it sure is simpler).

Then again, English is a pretty strange Indo-European language. It has a lot of complexity where it doesn't really add anything, like the plethora of irregular verbs, or the many words that end with the letter e for historical reasons, despite it not being pronounced for centuries. And in other areas, the simpler rules of English come at the cost of expressive ability. Almost non-existent verb conjugation makes things simple, but it also requires 3 words to say "we will run" as opposed to a heavily conjugated verb like "correremos".

Only korabl' (ship) is masculine. Yahta (yacht), lodka (boat) and several other words are feminine, and sudno (ship, synonym of kobabl' in common usage though not in nautical terminology) is neuter.

It is related to the case. I'm reading Russian sources, but the English TFA says as much.

Basically, in 2010, the Russian FSKN (a law enforcement organization specifically fighting drugs) initiated criminal proceedings on allegation of drug contraband in poppy seeds. FSKN experts concluded that the shipment does constitute a shipment of drugs. Zelenina, as an expert witness, said that the particular shipment did not have intentionally added narcotic compounds, and that small amounts of those substances were present because it is in fact impossible to eliminate them entirely from poppy seeds. And now she's jailed on charges of being party to a contraband shipment of drugs. Interestingly, I read that a new legal standard adopted in Russia in 2005 specifies that poppy seeds must be completely free of these narcotic traces, which is a technological impossibility and thus poppy is now only imported and not grown.

Fun thing is that there's another section in Russian law that allows people to be charged for making deliberately false expert witness statements - but she was not charged with that. The punishment for false statements is considerably lower than for drug contraband.

This is actually old news (she's been in jail for a month) but is cropping up again because her appeal is being heard.

Guys, please make sure next time that your default controls are at least functional :)

5 minutes after launching the game, I'm in the tutorial mission. After learning to target the other ships, I'm told to bank my Viper to align with the drone - only banking is not assigned to anything in a keyboard/mouse setup and I need to fix that myself. Or maybe this is one of those games that are supposed to be played with another input device.