Blog posts tagged "rant" – Posts 1..5 of 15 posts found:

Enough time has now passed that I can write this without endangering somebody. A while ago, I met somebody who'd fled to the Netherlands. This man had to leave everything behind... his home, family and friends, everything that he ever knew. Why? Because he's not straight. And where he comes from that means not just being discriminated against, but experiencing physical violence, with police looking the other way. So, this person took what little he could fit in a small backpack, left everything else behind, and came to the Netherlands. That's how I met this young man: his few remaining worldly possessions in the tiny backpack and, heart-wrenchingly, the scars on his arms betraying he had tried to find "another way" out of his living nightmare... yet there was a sheepish grin on his face, hoping he'd finally be free here.
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It's been less than two days since horrific terrorist attacks took place in the heart of Paris. Just a day before that, IS also killed 40 people in Beirut in a particularly vicious attack. The entire world is in an uproar about Paris. Few people care about Beirut. How come? Why do the events in France overshadow those in Lebanon?
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NVIDIA have just released their new GeForce GTX 750 Ti card, based on the Maxwell chipset. It seems like a great card at a pleasant price point and I downloaded NVIDIA's whitepaper. One thing that caught my eye is a graph comparing the GTX 750 Ti's performance to the GTX 480, the flagship card four years ago. It is terribly misleading. This is what it looks like:
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Apparently, today, the Russian Foreign Ministry published a report on its website about human rights in the European Union, calling the EU's system "ineffective and flawed" and this 153 page document also devotes 9 pages to my home country of The Netherlands. Although 2013 was a year in which we supposedly celebrated 400 years of diplomatic relations between the Dutch and Russian peoples, that celebration had more than a few hiccups along the way. The timing of this report is convenient, as Russia is under a deluge of criticism about its human rights situation, particularly its recent anti-gay laws. With much of this criticism being directed towards Russia's hosting of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, there is no doubt that this report being published now is not a coincidence. How should we react?
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Spam accounts for the vast majority of e-mail traffic. Figures I've read range from 60% to 97% and something in between does not seem unreasonable. Unfortunately, there is no real penalty for spamming and many unwitting people's malware-infested PC's do it, so with the low risk of the real culprits getting caught, it is worth the tiny risk for them to try to scam you out of some cash. The typical spam message most people receive is stuff about drugs (especially Cialis, Viagra or Canadian pharmacies), Nigerian 419 scams, penile enlargement, fake degrees, stock hot market "tips" and stuff like that. When you have a website or at least own a domain name, you will likely receive some other insideous stuff too. Here's some examples.
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