I don't agree with the downvotes, and you have a point in that statistics cannot prove fraud. But these numbers do provide strong evidence for irregularities.
> - rregions with large number of milinary men
Huh? Does that include Moscow with what was it, 47% for UR? Can you name ONE region where concerted (fair) voting by the military can have a significant impact on the outcome?
In any case, your suggestions do not explain the spikes on "nice" numbers, nor the fact that weighting for precinct size does not make UR voting a bell curve, nor the huge differences in the UR vote across precincts sometimes located in the same building.
Another explanation is that people working in government bodies in Russia (including state-funded education, healthcare and military institutions) make up some 30 million, so United Russia gets a huge number of votes just from them. Moscow has a large army of bureaucrats, you know.
No, that's ballot stuffing. The grandparent seemed to mean that real people who work in the government actually voted for UR, either of genuine conviction or under duress from their superiors. It would be very hard to give out filled-in paper at the voting station in full view of the monitors. The people who received filled-in ballots were hired to go round and stuff the ballot boxes at multiple locations.
Perhaps I phrased it wrong. People in the army were apparently issued with their ballot papers already filled in. This is clearly a case of "under duress from their superiors" to vote for a particular party. I can't a Russian soldier asking for a clean ballot and voting for someone else.
Because bureaucracy has grown a lot under Putin, and those people might as well lose jobs if some other party comes to power. Also think about increases in salaries and pensions, before the elections, etc. But these do not count as direct vote-rigging.
But that's a non sequitur. Sure, there was some pressure to actually vote UR (and that is not a sign of a free and fair election either), but what the statistics seems to show is that the final result consisted of a certain number of genuine UR votes (some of them coerced), most likely somewhere in the 30-35% region, plus the anomalous component, which we know, thanks to the election monitors, to have included (a) multiple voting; (b) ballot stuffing; (c) outright rewriting of protocols. Realistically, there is no way genuine behavioural differences could account for the multiple-of-five spikes, or to the huge variation across results in the same neighbourhood that you find so often in Moscow. And all those precincts in downtown Moscow with 80% UR and five votes for Yabloko? Puh-leez.
Do you mean the head of the election commission's ridiculous claim that all the videos of ballot stuffing, multiple voting etc. were filmed in advance by the opposition? The only thing that the Russian internets do with this claim widely is ridicule.
Yes, that's basically what my repo does. It started out as an attempt to build 'arc using macros atop Common Lisp' like the original critics claimed could be done. I pretty much succeeded (and I've been told it's very readable) except that I ended up with a lisp-2. (Lately I've been building it in naked C to get out of that constraint: http://github.com/akkartik/wart/tree/unstable)
I wasn't aware of no-applicable-method; thanks for that pointer.
Actually, as a non-EU national living in Norway but currently looking for (academic) jobs everywhere, continental European immigration policies are not that bad. I came to Norway as a highly skilled migrant, and the process was more or less painless; after three years, I got my permanent residence, also with very little ado. I did have to take a language test, but only for the permanent residence, whereas in the UK I have to demonstrate proficiency in English before I can apply for a temporary work permit, even under Tier 2 (skilled migration).
Europe does not have a great track for entrepreneurs (though hopefully that will change with the blue card program), but at least my experience with ordinary skilled migration is overwhelmingly positive. And anybody who thinks there is less bureaucracy in the developing world is highly likely to be living in a dream. At least in Russia the corruption comes on top of the ridiculous red tape.
Um, for about any other reason that you would want to use document editing software on a tablet? For instance, I use LibreOffice and its ilk only for the most throwaway documents (and open others' files). Having an iPad means I don't need to lug my laptop around to work on my thesis (I run Emacs on a VPS via SSH to do it, and while personally I don't particularly care about the aesthetics, I'd say the use case is certainly there).
I use a ZaggMate which doubles as protection, weighs about the same as any other case and is not bulky at all. It works quite well.
> Maybe you just need a smaller laptop ..
No, I don't want to have a small laptop as my main computer. I had an Eee before the iPad, but the difference in the writing experience is not too different in the end and the other advantages of the iPad are greater. In any case, you can hardly call me a person who unreasonably hangs on to Apple stuff: I'm writing this under Linux which I installed on the MBP my university gave me. I hardly ever boot into OS X here.
> Also, terminals are great, but writing anything serious without X is a pain.
Why? Emacs doesn't really need X, and I don't need to re-typeset my work every five minutes.
Guess this depends on how you work. I often find myself starting many instances of the editor[1] which is a pain if you have to create a new ssh connection for each (or use ctrl-z etc).
"the writing experience is not too different [..] the other advantages of the iPad are greater."
Guess the real difference between us is that you see something great in the iPad, so you are willing to live with its obvious shortcomings[2] compared to a laptop.
I have yet to discover why it's so amazing, and only see a small, but pretty much useless gadget. It could be used for reading I guess..
[1] yes, it has tabs.. still
[2] low resolution, can't run what I want to run, can't type on it without a keyboard, and at that point you could just as easily carry a small laptop (not an Eee ffs, a real laptop).
Oh, absolutely. If I were a actual road warrior, the iPad wouldn't work at all for me. However, between my laptops at home and at work I don't really need a third one, and since I already have the iPad I'd rather make as much I can with it for short trips where I am not going have too much time and/or wifi to pull sustained work sessions.
> It could be used for reading I guess..
That too. For an academic, GoodReader is a blessing. I have finally stopped printing out loads of articles and/or finding that I printed out this same article a couple of years ago. Not to mention Kindle etc. Again, if I were spending significant amounts of time away from either home or the office, I'd consider investing in a proper portable laptop; but I'm not, and for my use case the iPad is ideal.
> can't run what I want to run
Yep, I agree that it's frustrating.
> (not an Eee ffs, a real laptop).
No everybody can afford another proper laptop that's as easy to carry around as an iPad, y'know.
Anyway, YMMV, of course. I was just pointing out that solutions are available.
I've got a dell mini running Ubuntu. I wouldn't recommend it due to a bug in the graphics drivers that causes a crash on resume from hibernate, but, it is a great machine and works perfectly for LaTeX.
What do you mean when you say "scandinavians in Norway"? If "Scandinavia is a region that includes the three kingdoms of Denmark, Norway and Sweden" that doesn't make sense...
This is Statistics Norway's overview of immigrants by country of origin. So this means that people from Scandinavian, or rather Nordic, countries other than Norway (i.e. Denmark incl. the Faroes and Greenland, Sweden, Finland and Iceland). I can't find a more detailed breakdown right now.
Well, I suppose I fall into this category: I'm a grad student in the humanities, with a fair bit of math background which I don't actively use in my work (apart from some simple statistics), and I mostly program to automate away things that take too much time otherwise. I was taught Pascal in college, but in a "monkey see monkey do" way (for instance, we did implement linked lists, but nobody really explained pointers to us, it was just "put a star there and it'll work"); later I picked up Python and also did a Django project. However, via a friend I discovered Common Lisp and I have never looked back; I just find it comes very naturally to me.
Still, I agree that something like Python is a very suitable language for somebody who just needs to simplify their lives. (At my old school they've switched from Pascal to C# now... why?)
I'm not sure why you are being downvoted, but this is at best only partially correct. Yiddish was supported along with pretty much all minority languages in the 1920s and early 1930s, but this support also ceased when the minority support policy was reversed (with token remnants such as the Yiddish being an official language in the Jewish "homeland" in the Far East). Following WWII and postwar persecutions of Jews Yiddish all but stopped being transferred from parents to children in the USSR. I remember how happy my grandfather (born 1928) was when it became possible to embrace one's Yiddish heritage again in the late 1980s); but he did not teach the language to his children.
FWIW, here in Norway, the share of young people from a Pakistani background who are currently pursuing a degree is higher than among their Norwegian peers.
Again, it varies by publisher. For instance, CUP (at least for the type of journals that I read) allows the author to put up a preprint (before peer review) or a postprint (after review but before editing) on a personal page or the institutional repository immediately on acceptance; once the final version is available on their website (I think), you can also put it up on your own page; and once a year has passed after publication, you can also upload it to the repository. It's not optimal, but it's much better than nothing.
> - rregions with large number of milinary men
Huh? Does that include Moscow with what was it, 47% for UR? Can you name ONE region where concerted (fair) voting by the military can have a significant impact on the outcome?
In any case, your suggestions do not explain the spikes on "nice" numbers, nor the fact that weighting for precinct size does not make UR voting a bell curve, nor the huge differences in the UR vote across precincts sometimes located in the same building.