International Women’s Day
8th March 2008
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16th February 2008
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4th February 2008
Found this one very informative: 6 steps to stop content theft.
Also: 5 content theft myths, and why they are false.
And more links:
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16th October 2007
My expectations were half-satisfied: Socialists didn’t make it into the parliament! Great lesson for them, and a new example of political death in Ukraine. (Though I do think that Socialists have resources to return in 5 years, when new elections are due.)
On the other hand, Lytvyn’s block did jump the 3% barrier. By the way, if we take the absolute number of votes Lytvyn had in 2006 elections (619 905 votes), and the number he had at the 2007 snap elections (924 538), the difference is only 304633 votes. When multiplied by 20$, it gives 6 million USD – which isn’t too high a price for getting into the parliament, isn’t it?
Overall, I’m satisfied with these elections. Politicians this time were wise enough to avoid prolonged court trials over the miserable, non-differentiating numbers of votes in distinct voting districts. It saved both time and money. It’s also good to hear that immediately after the official results announcement, the Our Ukraine – Self Defence block and the Block of Yulia Tymoshenko agreed upon the coalition treaty. It’s not yet evident if the treaty will hold, or if it won’t be beaten by the PR – Lytvyn – Communists probable political block – but that is still a good sign of political agility, unseen since the end of 2004 between the two political forces.
I’m also glad that society intelligently handled these elections, which were unfavoured by many. Everything went overall smooth and with no troubles.
The only thing, which is not directly elections-related, is the fighting over the status and interpretation of the OUN-URA (Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists – Ukrainian Rebel Army) during the World War II. But I hope that in part with the help and actions by the President, this issue will be settled and finally resolved as soon as possible (I expect this to happen within 10 years from now).
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30th September 2007
Today was the voting day in the snap parliament elections-2007 in Ukraine.
Early in the morning, I heard from my wife’s sister that some of her friends were offered 100 UAH (20 USD) for promising to vote for the Lytvyn’s political block (based on his People’s party – “Narodna partiya“, in Ukrainian only). I said “that’s ugly, and they could just take the money and vote for whomever they want, as it’s impossible to enforce them to vote exactly for Lytvyn”. But that was it as for my reaction in the morning.
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29th August 2007
Found this video via BlindSpot:
At the end of the video, when future supercomputers are described, it hinted me at two distinct long-living ideas: that of singularity (in the sense of a breakthrough leading to the immediate exponential growth and even probable abrupt mankind transformation), and that of Artificial Intelligence. The video suggests that this will happen somewhere between 2013 and 2049, which is hard to believe.
Information overload is definitely a feature of the modern world. There’s still space for further overload, but what will be the result? Psychotic workers, or super-intelligent and hyper-efficient “infohumans”?
China, India and their bordering states (sorry, no offence here – just to shorten the list) were long known to constitute the largest mono-national parts of world population. It’s clear that after fairly recent joining of the Asian states into a superstate cooperation commonwealth, half of the world’s population already resides in that commonwealth. This projection for the future seems the strongest of all shown in the movie.
I would strongly doubt the “largest English-speaking country in 10 years” to be China. Imagine: you live in a 1+ billion people country, and you are financially stable (we all know that China is the fastest growing world’s economy); why would you need to learn English, which is so different from your native language? Chinese language is the way – so start learning it as soon as you can (BTW, seen somewhere that the number of Japanese blogs, as expected, became larger than the number of English blogs. Now waiting for Chinese blogs? )
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28th August 2007
Watch this:
If it’s convenient and well-designed, I wouldn’t mind visiting such a fast food once in a while. Though it’s hard to imagine having breakfast there every day: too dull, I suspect. But have to try first to be sure.
Some more videos of delivery and disposal:
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