Sorry, this is not quite correct. The draft law states that any information prohibited for distribution by a Russian court can be blocked, and Russian courts are notorious for banning all sorts of data under the rubric of "anti-extremism" laws. The criteria in the draft law are extremely subjective, and coupled with the near-total absence of recourse (and such recourse as is given is to Russian courts, which does not inspire confidence in many) this is a very dangerous thing indeed.
http://www.minjust.ru/nko/fedspisok
This list contains some URLs that ISPs are supposed to block.
Most of those are either dead or not blocked in practice (it's really hard to force it on ISPs), but it might become reality one day.
ISPs are not required to block this. It's a list of so called extremist materials, mainly some radical religious books, nationalist and racist propaganda and such.
Basically, to break the law you have to publish or distribute them, but I can access every url listed.
Correct. In any case, I would not trust the government and courts of any country with such a huge loophole ("anything that might become banned in the future"), let along those of Russia.
The biggest problem with those lists is that any courthouse from a tiny town in a middle of nowhere has the power to add resource to the federal list. People who do not understand what they are doing.
Thus we have seen the whole lib.ru being added there at some point, along with some parts of Quran declared extremist materials.
And now they want some random NGO to be compiling their own list of paedophile resources. They'll have all the control without much responsibility, hurray.
It will probably not matter in terms of preventing the passage of the law, but this is the sort of thing that has led to the groundswell of support for Pirate Parties elsewhere in Europe. Given the current brewing of civil-society initiatives in Russia, this can well play a non-negligible role.
It's not so much alcohol consumption per se as the culture. In the UK, and in general in much of historically protestant northern Europe, there is a very deeply ingrained culture where Bad Things will happen if you drink; the flip side of that is that if you do drink, it is much more socially acceptable to go out and get in a fight (after all, that's what you do when you're drunk, right?). In many Mediterranean cultures people do not consume significantly less alcohol (normally in the form of wine, of course), but people are generally more relaxed about this, and as a consequence there is less binge drinking and fewer drunken brawls.
I grew up in a Mediterranean country and live in Northern Europe now and I think your observations about the different attitudes towards alcohol are very accurate.
Drinking is very common in Southern Europe, but there feels to be a very negative attitude towards drinking to the point where you lose control and do utterly stupid things. In Northern Europe, I have witnessed young people in many settings openly sharing stories of binge drinking, getting in fights, getting kicked out of bars etc. and laughing about them. When I was back in my hometown and shared some party stories they were generally encountered with shock.
Yeah, I've seen both sides as well; in the Netherlands we have this 'coma drinking' thing going on which is young people drinking until they pass out/fall into a coma. In southern Spain, people on average, during the week/weekend drink far far more than Dutch people drink, however they don't binge. It's just drinking from morning to night a few liquors, beers and bottles of wine, every day. While in NL a lot of people drink nothing all week and then go insane in the weekend. In the UK that's even worse. No idea why. Anyone?
There's also a food culture there and alcohol gtts consumed with a meal, whereas in the UK people scorn having food when it takes up drinking time - "eating is cheating" I've heard from many a folk.
In many Mediterranean cultures people do not consume significantly less alcohol (normally in the form of wine, of course), but people are generally more relaxed about this, and as a consequence there is less binge drinking and fewer drunken brawls.
Unfortunately, that seems to be changing, both here in Portugal and, from what I can tell, also in Spain. Newer generations have changed their drinking patterns from wine to distilled drinks and from the couple of daily glasses to the full bottle on weekends, with all the issues (including health related) that carries.
It's a nice theory, but falls to pieces in say traditionally Catholic Ireland (history of powerful temperance movements also) and a cultural approach to alcohol which is if anything even more damaging than Britain's.
Ireland is a temperance culture as well (not surprisingly). Protestantism is not a necessary factor here, it's just that historically temperance cultures have tended to appear in Protestant countries, along with pietistic movements. I don't know enough about this to say whether religion has played a major role or if it's just a coincidence.
"In the UK, and in general in much of historically protestant northern Europe, there is a very deeply ingrained culture where Bad Things will happen if you drink"
Possibly the most inaccurate statement ever made on HN. :-)
Don't take this the wrong way, but I'm not sure what you mean :). It's not like I'm making this stuff up, social anthropologists have known about "temperance cultures" for a long time. Ever notice how Mediterranean countries don't have a history of mass temperance movements, which have been very strong in Britain, the US and Scandinavia? Do you think it's a freak coincidence?
I'd hardly describe temperance as ever having been the majority view across the UK. Indeed, even when districts were allowed to vote to be "dry" (under the Temperance (Scotland) Act 1913) relatively few did so.
Interestingly enough, one of the villages that did, Findochty, was close to where I grew up - and they only stopped being dry relatively recently.
So I would personally regard "temperance" as being the view of a small, but highly active, minority. We don't have a temperance culture but a drinking culture.
Sure, temperance has never been a majority view. But that is not the issue: the issue is that the culture is conducive to viewing alcohol consumption as something that will inevitably lead to the breakdown of social order. This is something that Mediterranean countries tend not to have.
"This is something that Mediterranean countries tend not to have."
Last time I checked a lot of Mediterranean countries frown upon the consumption of alcohol - even if they tolerate visiting Europeans consuming it in large quantities.
Really? You use an article from an alcohol industry PR group to try to found your assertion that alcohol consumption doesn't impair judgement and raise the likelihood of destructive behavior?
>Really? You use an article from an alcohol industry PR group to try to found your assertion that alcohol consumption doesn't impair judgement and raise the likelihood of destructive behavior?
No, mr knee-jerk-reaction, he used to it show something entirely different, namely different cultural ways to handling the issue.
Your "alcohol-is-the-devil" reaction is part of the problem, and indicative of the American/protestant attitude.
If you \usepackage[utf8x]{inputenc}, a lot of UTF-8 input will just work.
Greek is an exception though; it would always interpret e.g. α as \textalpha, which doesn't exist, instead of \alpha, which does. The only solution I could find was to write a simple package defining each of the \textgreek as \greek.
There are a few other exceptions (⨂ and ↦ come to mind), and I haven't worked out how to add support for a character (instead of just redefining it like I did with the greek). But the situation is mostly okay. I currently have this line in a LaTeX document for example, and it works fine:
Given $R$-modules $M,N$, their tensor product is an $R$-module $M ⊗_R N$ together with an $R$-bilinear map $b: M × N → M ⊗_R N$ satisfying: whenever $φ:M×N→P$ is bilinear, $∃!g:M⊗N→P$ linear such that $φ = g∘b$.
Sure, if you manage to enter the character XeTeX will be happy to typeset it. It's not a LaTeX issue, it's an editor/desktop issue. I don't really know about maths, but I'm guessing keyboard input for many special symbols is hard. I use (Xe)LaTeX to input phonetic symbols, and I hung onto tipa (the LaTeX package that gives you IPA from ASCII) for a long time, until I discovered C-x RET C-\ ipa-x-sampa.
You can also use TeX mode so that typing \phi will give you φ :).
Also, the very first time you use an input mode, you can just type C-\ to choose it. After you choose one C-\ toggles between that and the standard one, which is why you need C-x RET C-\ to choose another one instead.
Actually, xetex-pstricks has been in TeX Live for a long time now. It will not give you all of pstricks in XeLaTeX, but for the simplest needs it's more than sufficient. Microtype is a bigger problem.
I would say you need a somewhat cleaner approach to placing things on the page. For instance, two paragraph breaks in a row are very non-idiomatic: try \vspace{2\baselineskip} instead. Instead of manually putting a hard space after punctuation, you probably want \frenchspacing. Also, using \sloppy as the default option is terrible. The purpose of \sloppy is to save a really bad paragraph that cannot be rewritten.
Visually, I agree that it is way too compressed, especially for a CV where the highlights should jump out at the reader. I understand you're trying to cram it into as few pages as possible, but you end up with horribly long lines. It could also use some vertical whitespace. If you must decrease the number of pages, think about trimming the content.
That's not quite true either. The public figures are tax paid and net worth; the income numbers that you see are reverse-engineered from tax paid and the code, and may be inaccurate.
I agree, though I'm assuming it really can take a long time at some airports; even in Europe there is the infamous Heathrow take-off queue, or the Polderbaan at Schiphol which is like half the country away from the terminal (I don't know how it is with the holding pattern; at least here in Norway the seatbelt sign tends to light up pretty late, and certainly not when the plane is holding).
But from what I understand a big reason for the "taxi, takeoff and landing" routine is that somebody completely absorbed by their iPad is the last thing the crew want when things to pear-shaped, and when this happens, it's at these points rather than on cruising altitude. Now of course you might the same argument for a book (although it's a strong one for music players), but just my $0.02
