kids have already jumped ship. once their parents started 'fb-ing' they figured it was time to find something else.

they won't last in the spotlight forever. the whole social networking thing is like a swarm and swarms never stay in one place forever. another will pop up and the swarm will go there (or a few places).

the thing that annoys me the most is that webmasters seem to feel compelled to put up those stupid F and T icons and to join in that nonsense. if you are a company, you 'have' to be on both of those mindless services.

I'd like to see some icons that proudly state 'I'm NOT on fb or tw. I have no icons and nothing for you to follow me on'. I'd have more respect for the business if they put THAT on their website.

yes! cool idea.

bring back the coasters and start a new service called silverbook !

yeah, it has 'book' in it, so you can assume the US based corp attorneys will be all over that. "you used OUR word. we own that. stop it!". sigh.

no, it means if you don't have anything smart to say, keep your mouth shut and people won't know if you are smart or dumb.

however, say one dumb thing and everyone now knows.

athiests being 'religious' is like saying "not collecting stamps is a hobby"

I don't think you understand what religion is. athiests simply don't believe in your fairy tales. and not believing in something is NOT anywhere close to being a religion, in itself. it might be a belief system (or better, a non-belief system) but its definitely NOT a religion anymore than not believing in unicorns makes you part of a group.

moreso: if you look at the world's worth of religions and if you are able to remove yourself from your own religion, you should be able to see that each little group of people is asserting things that are quite opposite or in conflict with the other group's views.

we can go around the world and measure where water boils and freezes, and if we keep the altitude constant, the values all agree.

otoh, if you go around the world and ask about creation myths, you get different answers, and the people answering all seem to think THEIR view is correct and others are wrong.

that one thought experiment, alone, was enough to convince me that all relgions are made-up and no one has any clue at all what the true reality is.

some things don't have easy answers. its better (for me, at least) to admit that than to make up synthetic answers.

finally, there is the group control aspect of religion. aside from the 'sleep well at night' concept, there is a lot of the 'do as I tell you or you will be punished, and by a guy with a much bigger stick than I have!'.

none of that is really productive to the modern thinking mind.

I would reply with "it is better to be thought a fool than to speak up and remove all doubt."

I'll do my best, though you probably will refuse to undertake the first part of the exercise: thrust your mind back to December 22, 2005, the day before the patent application was filed, and block out everything you've seen since that date.

To unlock their phones, people do things like entering a code or holding down a physical key, because almost everyone's phone has physical keys. Others have flip phones and merely open their phone to wake it up. There are a few phones out there with resistive touch screens like the Palm line... they too use physical sleep/wake switches.

In a somewhat related field, Micron has had a patent application published for unlocking computers by moving the mouse in a geometric shape, such as a line, square, or triangle. They also talk about doing it for touch screens, like those on kiosks or point of sale terminals.

So, say you want to come up with a new, intuitive way to unlock a phone? What do you invent?

Now, I'm sure you jumped up and yelled "slide to unlock!" But is that really true, if it's really 2005 and you've never heard of that?

Plus, say you did implement a slide to unlock feature... would it be like Micron's or Neonode's: draw a geometric shape on a screen with no indication of success or failure or other response until the figure is complete? Why, that increases security, since an intruder wouldn't know that they failed as soon as they deviate from the required line! That seems like a great idea, right?

Back in 2005, no one had thought of having a dynamic image following the user's finger as they drew a line to unlock the phone. No one wrote anything about it, made a prototype, or even apparently mentioned it in passing.

Now jump forward one year, to December 2006... There are still no capacitive touch screen phones on the market. Slide keyboard phones are really popular and, of course, unlock when you physically slide out the keyboard. There are still plenty of flip phones. Palm has a great color smart phone that you unlock with a button on the top (it also doubles as the IR port). How come no one has implemented a slide-to-unlock system if it had been obvious for a full year?

Now jump forward another year. Apple's iPhone is released to great fanfare and includes a slide-to-unlock system. It's the only one on the market that does - which makes you wonder if it's really been obvious for two whole years?

Jump another 18 months. It's now fall 2008 and Samsung comes out with its first modern smartphone. And it implements slide to unlock. In fact, everyone who has put out a smart phone after the iPhone is using slide to unlock systems, including even Palm, who had smart phones before the iPhone that didn't use it. If it had been obvious for almost four years, why hadn't anyone else done it before the iPhone? Was the iPhone the inspiration for everyone? And therefore, can you really say that, years before the iPhone, it was obvious?

If an idea is relatively trivial to implement, but no one ever even had the inkling of a thought to doing it, is it obvious? Or is it one of those simple, beautiful ideas that change an industry once some inventive person first creates it?

Fact: South Ossetian paramilitaries have carried out a genocide of Georgians after 08.08.08, while Russian "peacekeepers" stationed in the region looked the other way. Not any different from Kosovo, really, except for a higher body count from victors' justice.

Now go suck Vova's khuy.

you are only correct from a *professional* pov.

if you are an amateur and don't intend to publish or make money from the work, you do not need a model release.

its good courtesy but in most countries, you don't need to ask permission if this is your personal collection. in the US, its definitely true that if you are in public, you don't need any release for non-pro image captures.

I'm Russian. I just happen to not be blind to the history of my own country.

Yes, Stalin himself was a Georgian. That did not prevent him from turning the USSR into a Russian nation-empire.

Genocide did happen, it just happened to be a genocide of Georgians by Ossetians, rather than the other way around.

The new Ukrainian government did not try to pull anything like that, it didn't even threaten or gave any hint of such. That's why Russian claims that occupation of Crimea is to "protect the local population" are so obviously full of BS - protect from whom?

Out of 48 officers feloniously killed in 2012, 8 were at traffic stops. That's 16.7%,, surpassing coronary artery disease as a cause of death. Is it unreasonable to worry when you feel chest pain?

Yes, millions of traffic stops happen with no problem, but that's not any comfort when a lone officer's at one that starts to go badly. There's also thousands of things that cause chest pain that aren't heart attacks.

Circa Lenin, it was true - that guy was an aggressive anti-nationalist.

But then, something happened.

"I should like to propose a toast to the health of our Soviet people, and in the first place, the Russian people. I drink in the first place to the health of the Russian people because it is the most outstanding nation of all the nations forming the Soviet Union. I propose a toast to the health of the Russian people because it has won in this war universal recognition as the leading force of the Soviet Union among all the peoples of our country. I propose a toast to the health of the Russian people not only because it is the leading people, but also because it possesses a clear mind, a staunch character, and patience."
- Joseph Stalin

That's definitely a part of it, but Yeltsin was a product of his environment. And so was his entourage.

Really, what the system needed at the time was a complete reboot: any person who held any position of authority in the communist government allowed to hold any government office under the new regime. Many Eastern European countries implemented something like that, and ended up much better off. As Vaclav Havel said, "better five years of mistakes than fifty years of sabotage".