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apostlion's comments

apostlion | 12 years ago | on: “Dear subscriber, you are registered as a participant in a mass disturbance.”

The pirate station equipment is not so expensive, and in fact, petty phreakers use it pretty frequently to do basic SMS frauds in heavily populated areas. Maidan protesters have found themselves on a receiving end of false-station SMS frauds since November, so we know for a _fact_ that criminals do operate them.

The government could as well, of course, but I'm going by an Occam razor here.

apostlion | 12 years ago | on: “Dear subscriber, you are registered as a participant in a mass disturbance.”

It's amazing people don't understand this is an elaborate mass prank. Pirate base stations have been present in the area since the disturbances began, already being used for nefarious purposes before (SMS/money transfer fraud and so on). Whoever operates these is a petty criminal, not a nefarious government – if I'd have an opportunity to send thousands of protesters anything I want, I'm sure I'd pull a prank like this as well.

apostlion | 12 years ago | on: Mac OS 10.9 – Infinity times your spam

Mail.app has these issues consistently, across versions. Which is a real shame, because UX-wise it is a really fine mail client.

Also, threading algorithm changed slightly in Mavericks, leading to many more mistakes than ever before.

apostlion | 12 years ago | on: List of Open Source Licences in Mercedes Cars [pdf]

Just to clarify – there are 108 distinct licenses used. So apart from Apache, BSD, GPL v2, GPL v3, LGPL, there are 103 _different_ license terms used.

IP law, as currently used, is something really overcomplicated.

apostlion | 12 years ago | on: What happens when a language has no numbers?

I've seen somewhere a test for how many color words are there in the language - only color-words which do not correspond to a specific material or plant which color is emulated are accepted. So “red” or “blue” is fine, as is “piros” or “vörös” - but “sky blue” (color of sky), “ruby” (color of the gemstone) or “scarlet” (color of the Scarlet cloth) are not.

apostlion | 12 years ago | on: What happens when a language has no numbers?

Fuzzy buckets are wonderful for exactly this kind of case. If you're alone, it doesn't matter whether there are 5 or 50 wolves - you're fucked anyway.

On the other hand, if you're a scout for an armed band of hunters, 5 are no longer “a lot”, it is “some” - and 50 is a lot.

apostlion | 12 years ago | on: Sir Trevor Editor

That's lovely. The DSL for defining custom blocks seems unnecessarily verbose, though.

apostlion | 12 years ago | on: What happens when a language has no numbers?

Why would a culture that has no trade need numbers? Approximate buckets are good enough for the hunter-gatherer lifestyle.

After all, it were Sumerian traders and bureaucrats who gave us both figures -and- numbers -and- a way to write them down.

apostlion | 12 years ago | on: Data intelligence complex is the real story

It's obvious — the terrorists that hate your freedoms!

Your skin is brown? DROP A BOMB. You're a Muslim? DROP A BOMB, AND ONE MORE, TO BE SURE. You're a goddamn Ruski commie? BOMB, BOMB, BOMB.

apostlion | 14 years ago | on: Highly Successful Bootstrapped Startups

Given that VC-backed startups are obviously receiving far more press than bootstrapped ones, is there any statistics on how widespread are former and latter, and how successful they are, in consumer Web?
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