Backup Mirror (US)

Die Luft ist zum Schneiden, den ganzen Tag brennen die Lichter.

Eine dicke Smogglocke hängt über der nordmährischen Stadt.

Schuld sind die Stahl- und Hüttenwerke, aber auch Privathaushalte mit der noch weit verbreiteten Ofenheizung.

Vzduch je střih, světlo hořet po celý den.

Tlustý Smogglocke visí nad městem severu Moravy.

Dluh je z oceli a železa práce, ale i domácnosti sohřívací pece, které i nadále velmi rozšířená.

Video: http://mediathek.daserste.de/sendungena-z/342024europamagazin/8736980_tschechien-dicke-luft-ueber-ostrava

My own view is that the Santa “myth”, rationally speaking, is a lie. 

A lie (also called prevarication, falsehood) is a type of deception in the form of an untruthful statement, especially with the intention to deceive others.

To lie is to state something with disregard to the truth with the intention that people will accept the statement as truth.

Lies imposed over years to your own children, promoted by commercial misuse in the name of an artificial material gratitude, as in, the lie is amplified by junk products that are barely useful, and would barely sell in a normal situation.

And as any lie, it diminishes the trust between parties, in this case your own children.

A diminish in trust puts one in the lookout for signs of betrayal; in this case one got lied by the parents in the past, one might find him/herself in a suspicious position wondering when the parents will betray again.

It normally happens at the age of 7/8, right before the start of puberty and teenagehood, 

When children first learn how lying works, they lack the moral understanding of when to refrain from doing it. This takes years of watching people tell lies, and the results of these lies, to develop a proper understanding. Propensity to lie varies greatly between children, some doing so habitually and others being habitually honest. Habits in this regard are likely to change in early adulthood.

A parent’s guide to surviving the teen years

When you consider that the teen years are a period of intense growth, not only physically but morally and intellectually, it’s understandable that it’s a time of confusion and upheaval for many families.

Can’t be good or of any help to anyone involved, can it ?

And it skins you pocket in the process; how many people do fall in debt after Christmas ?

Four in 10 will be saddled with debt after Christmas splurge

Four out of 10 adults expect to end up in debt to fund the Christmas celebrations.

And it will take some people up to seven months to pay back what they have borrowed to buy presents, food and drink, a new survey shows.

Women are more likely to run up debts than men.

The average spend per adult is set to be €562. Irish people are also set to top the spending league in Europe.

Most people will be forced to dip into their savings to fund the seasonal splurge, with one in 10 set to use their credit cards, a new survey commissioned by the Irish League of Credit Unions indicates.

Others are set to borrow from credit unions and from moneylenders.

I think if a holiday of the sort is to be celebrated, it is a family holiday, where the family is meant to gather together for a couple days in the year, talk, enjoy, catch up and get to know each other better.

But even like that, family does not necessarily means that everybody get well along, or have something in common at all, so it is a personal decision to do it or not, not something that has to be done every single year at the exact same date.

Lot de 10 affiches (40x60cm) promotionnelles de la manifestation pour la langue et la culture Occitane du 31 Mars 2012 a Toulouse (0.01 euros).

http://www.macarel.org/Mac​arel/macarel-occitanie?pag​e=shop.product_details&fly​page=eny_fly_default.tpl&p​roduct_id=1091&category_id​=30

Strach prodává.

Angst vertreibt.

Fear sells.

Medo vende.

Steve Jobs, of Apple Inc.

Steven Paul “Steve” Jobs (February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011) was an American computer entrepreneur and inventor. He was co-founder, chairman, and chief executive officer of Apple Inc. Jobs also previously served as chief executive of Pixar Animation Studios; he became a member of the board of directors of The Walt Disney Company in 2006, following the acquisition of Pixar by Disney. He was credited in Toy Story (1995) as an executive producer.

What annoys me the most is the corporative media glorifying the corporative reality and lifestyle above it all and elevating the man to a holy person, a hero or a Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, and the countless number of people now saying something similar to,

RIP Steve, you were a hero, a visionary and an inspiration.

The man was a capitalist servant, and all they have new is an elaborate capitalistic plan of selling millions of something unworthy, with the promise that the next will be better, to sell that same something unworthy in its millions all over again, with the promise all over again that the next will be better.

Technically speaking, I was recently working with Apple’s iOS,

iOS (known as iPhone OS before June 2010) is Apple’s mobile operating system. Originally developed for the iPhone, it has since been extended to support other Apple, Inc. devices such as the iPod touch, iPad and Apple TV. Apple, Inc. does not license iOS for installation on third-party hardware. As of May 31, 2011, Apple, Inc.’s App Store contains more than 500,000 iOS applications,[1] which have collectively been downloaded more than 15 billion times. In the last quarter of 2010, it had a 26% share of the smartphone operating system market in terms of units sold, behind Google’s Android and Nokia’s Symbian.[2] As of May 2010, it accounted for 59% of mobile web consumption—including both the iPod Touch and the iPad—in North America.

And it still have no garbage collection,

In computer science, garbage collection (GC) is a form of automatic memory management. The garbage collector, or just collector, attempts to reclaim garbage, or memory occupied by objects that are no longer in use by the program. Garbage collection was invented by John McCarthy around 1959 to solve problems in Lisp.

Nor exception handling,

Exception handling is a programming language construct or computer hardware mechanism designed to handle the occurrence of exceptions, special conditions that change the normal flow of program execution.

I have also asked this on Apple DevForums. According to Quinn “The Eskimo!” (author of the MVCNetworking sample in question) it is a matter of coding style and his personal preference:

I use lots of asserts because I hate debugging. (…)

Keep in mind that I grew up with traditional Mac OS, where a single rogue pointer could bring down your entire machine (similarly to kernel programming on current systems). In that world it was important to find your bugs sooner rather than later. And lots of asserts help you do that.

(This is for Mac development, I’m not sure whether you can even turn exception handling support on for iOS, considering you also can’t turn on garbage collection for iOS.)

It is basics that any other device, including Java enabled phones, have since at least 1995; Something basic today, that is around since 1959.

So, the man is (was) selling a technically outdated device (iPad/iPhone) with lots, lots of code for buttons glowing and jumping on the screen for eye candy, and little, very little code doing anything useful at all – it is a toy.

The mouse and graphical interface technology he robbed off Xerox,

It’s true that Jobs visited Xerox Parc, and wound up incorporating the Xerox Alto’s features into the Lisa, the first Apple product with a mouse and a graphical user interface.

When Jobs accused Bill Gates of ripping off the Macintosh’s graphical user interface for the Windows operating system, Gates reminded Jobs of the Xerox Alto.

And that Mac OS X is BSD Unix with a fancy glowing X-Windows to it.

Mac OS X is a series of Unix-based operating systems and graphical user interfaces developed, marketed, and sold by Apple Inc. Since 2002, Mac OS X has been included with all new Macintosh computer systems. It is the successor to Mac OS 9, released in 1999, the final release of the “classic” Mac OS, which had been Apple’s primary operating system since 1984.

Mac OS X, whose X is the Roman numeral for 10 and is a prominent part of its brand identity, is a Unix-based graphical operating system, built on technologies developed at NeXT between the second half of the 1980s and Apple’s purchase of the company in late 1996. From its sixth release, Mac OS X v10.5 “Leopard” and onward, every release of Mac OS X gained UNIX 03 certification while running on Intel processors.

Berkeley Software Design Inc. (BSDI or, later, BSDi) was a corporation which developed, sold licenses for, and supported BSD/OS (originally known as BSD/386), a commercial and partially proprietary variant of the BSD Unix operating system for PC compatible (and later, other) computer systems. The name was chosen for its similarity to “Berkeley Software Distribution” the source of its primary product (specifically 4.3BSD Networking Release 2).

BSDI was founded by Rick Adams and members of the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California, Berkeley, including Keith Bostic, Kirk McKusick, Mike Karels, Bill Jolitz and Donn Seeley. Jolitz, Seeley and Trent Hein were the company’s first employees, temporarily working for Rick Adam’s UUNET until BSDI started operations in 1991.[1] In December 1991, Rob Kolstad was hired (at the time he was secretary of USENIX), and he would take over company operations just two years later.

BSD/386 was released in January 1992. The full system, including source code retailed at $995, which was much cheaper than the equivalent source code license for the rival UNIX System V from AT&T (which cost more than $20,000 in the late 1980s.)

The X window system (commonly X Window System or X11, based on its current major version being 11) is a computer software system and network protocol that provides a basis for graphical user interfaces (GUIs) and rich input device capability for networked computers. It creates a hardware abstraction layer where software is written to use a generalized set of commands, allowing for device independence and reuse of programs on any computer that implements X.

X originated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1984. The current protocol version, X11, appeared in September 1987. The X.Org Foundation leads the X project, with the current reference implementation, X.Org Server, available as free and open source software under the MIT License and similar permissive licenses.

Anything at all, the man was good at marketing and robbing technology and ideas off other people and selling them, version by version, as his own; and that is not all. Thus a capitalist/corporatocrat “hero” giving a big middle finger to anyone that is not himself.

Marketing, simple and pure – eye candy, buttons glowing and jumping around the screen. A whole market slice selling toys for adults; There is nothing like the hero, visionary and inspiration man of Apple Inc.

If that is a visionary and an inspiration, I don’t know what is the world about anymore at all.

A hint on the ruthless nature of this predatory system promoted by the gambling politicians of democracy; the same politicians that have undoubtedly succeeded in provoking an unpredictable catastrophe, for the sake of a corporatocrat system with an artificial superiority complex, sustained by the gambling, lobbying and bullying of a self-interested minority elite.

Capitalism is the immoral distribution of capital, a corporatocrat tyranny.

Corporatocracy, in social theories that focus on conflicts and opposing interests within society, denotes a system of government that serves the interest of, and may be run by, corporations and involves ties between government and business. Where corporations, conglomerates, and/or government entities with private components, control the direction and governance of a country, including carrying out economic planning (notwithstanding the “free market” label).

If you don’t understand what are the practical social results of Corporatocracy and unfair distribution of capital, or even go as far as not acknowledging that there is a huge social problem in your Democrat Capitalist country, because it simply does not affects you, you are probably rich, and part of the said 1% “elite” that control the country and does everything for themselves while drinking champagne and sticking a big middle finger at the other 99%; which are basically the skint wage slaves, the people being ripped off by the banks, the people suffering from lack of infrastructure, the unemployed, and the, plainly said, people in misery.

A country has to be run for the country’s own people (99%), not in the name of every self-interested, dubious needs and demands of corporations, institutions and the elite (1%).

The fact that people are allowed to live in misery, alone, is a violation of articles 22 and 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,

Everyone, as a member of society, has the right to social security and is entitled to realization, through national effort and international co-operation and in accordance with the organization and resources of each State, of the economic, social and cultural rights indispensable for his dignity and the free development of his personality.

Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.

The first policy of any given country should be to guarantee fair distribution of capital, as in guarantee basic services and lifestyle to all of its people, guarantee a fair level of education and completely ban unemployment, as in redefining its system and structure to meet the most basic needs of its own people.

Capitalism: “Miss another payment and we take the blanket.”