Civilian weapons in Russia

You can obtain only some types of weapons in Russia. The all weapons which are permitted civilians by the government are useless self-defense things like pneumatic and traumatic guns, gas pistols, some sprays, some stun guns and so forth; hunters can also possess smoothbore guns and a rifles – the necessary condition of it is five years experience with a smoothbore gun.

Russians can carry weapons for self-defense if they have certificates, except sprays and some devices which are allowed to carry without any official permits – they are lousy things anyway and they can’t do any harm to somebody and stop anti-social individuals from harming you in reality.

Smoothbore gun and rifles cannot be carried for self-defense, only for hunting, although you are allowed to store these kinds of weapons at home and use it to protect your life from an armed attack. If you killed or injured somebody you must prove that the attacker had intended to kill or seriously harm you with deadly weapons. If you can’t do it a prison will wait for you.

Firearms aren’t legal in Russia. Combat knives and all sort of other arms are banned too, but you can carry kitchen knife or survivor knives with special manufacturer certificates. Even button is an illegal device in Russia – if it’s found that a citizen carries it or utilizes it he or she will have a chance to become a prisoner.

The authorities are afraid of citizens with weapons as they can defeat them and clean up the country from the thieves and morally depraved animals. But they are mistaken, Russians wouldn’t fight against the regime, as the people in power live in one world, others live in another. They’re like chalk and cheese, those two.

How to steal money directly from a budget on legal groung?

Prompting: in Russia, from the federal budget.

Oh, it’s a pieace of cake!
The answer: AVTOVAZ.

Where’s Swine Flu from?

I think it’s pretty obvious. The virus was distributed across the world by greediest pharmaceutical concerns to get profit from people’s sorrow. I read an opinion which was given a scientist that was an accident that the virus escaped from a laboratory. Huh, an accident? If it’s true it was a deliberate escape. You spend some money on virus research, then you earn much more on medicine.

Can you recall your past?

I can. When I was a lad things were different. There weren’t so many diseases as now, especially these virus origin diseases. It’s supposed to be right all kinds of diseases must be lowered with success of modern medicine.

But it’s only a theory, in reality the rate of diseases per ordinary man increases and increases. Medicine selling grows as well. Why?

Remember what does the old marketing school says: “taking the focus off what you have to sell, and placing it on what’s in demand”. Yeah, it’s fair, to know what people want to buy and propose it. However all necessity things were practically invented in the world. As World Health Organization declares there are Essential medicines which can cure all diseases. Nothing is needed.

What to do to get more money? Just to let H1N1 be free.

Are search engines impartial?

It may be true, but it doesn’t touch Russian search engines.

Yandex for example.

Some time ago Yandex was, without a shadow of a doubt, the best search engine on the Russian Internet.
In the past I encountered Elena Kolmanovskaya, as it seemed to me the person was a professional, not a politician. She told many interesting things about Yandex, its team, its work and so on. There was ComTek in the time that started up Yandex. I used to be a user of Yandex since.

The world is changing. Things never stay the same. They are already bad and they are getting worse

Yandex was changing as well.

I became aware that my searching results were sometimes irrelevant.
I became to prove the results in other search engines, and other language.
Sometime later I was overall frustrated by the Russian Internet, I hardly use it now.
Finally I dumped Yandex as well; I even don’t have Yandex in my Firefox search engines bar. I use Google and prefer the English Internet.

Anyway, the post isn’t about my preferences, it’s about Yandex.

Do you know last news?

“Yandex Sells ‘Golden Share’ to Sberbank”

Gosh, why on earth they did it?

As president Dmitry Medvedev said the state should control foreign investment in Internet companies.

See the source.

Ha, ha. I think the main purpose of it is to control the Internet companies.
Search engines are very useful instrument in ideological struggle. If you can control search engines you can control the whole Internet.

What the fuck is going on in the country?

Waiting for the Apocalypse

My wife told me an amusing story recently.

Amusing at first glance, gloomy in reality.

She knows a person who has a daughter. The girl had the strongest sense of the future Apocalypse. She thought it must happen in 2000 or in 2004 at least. So she gave up the school and stopped all her activity at all. She just stayed at home doing nothing. She was waiting.

Time kept going forward.

Her peers graduated from high school, found job or start up new companies, got married, gave birth to babies…

She was waiting.

Finally time passed.

For some reason the event didn’t come.

The woman was awakened when all terms ended.

She suddenly realized the situation in which she found herself.
It was horrible. The nice dream stopped abruptly.
The unbearable reality has come true.

How to embed YouTube in WordPress

While I was writing the previous post I encountered a problem. How to embed YouTube in WordPress?

Well, it’s a piece of cake! Click the “Add Video” button on the “Upload/Insert” toolbar, choose the “From URL” tab and place the link, which you should copy from YouTube video description block.

See more detailed information on WP support page.

The fake world

There is a funny advertisement of Barclays bank on YouTube. It’s called “Barclays: fake”.

It’s worth to see it:

Аfter the Deadline start-up

Roughly two weeks ago Automattic, the owner of wordpress.com, run the spell style and grammar checker on all WP.com blogs, which was named After the Deadline.

The author of the programme, Raphael Mudge, is a very interesting man. I happened upon Raphael when I apply for a AtD support. The creator of AtD answers the user’s correspondence. What a wonderful open source world!

He launched a firm called dashnine. The name means… OK, do you know a kill -9 command, huh?
I don’t know what Raphael thought about the name. I dare say this firm is aimed to kill all her rivals or his programme works as perfect as kill -9 managed the targeted process.

Anyway, Atd is a great product of a great person.

Good luck, Raphael!

A way to save YouTube videos to my computer

Of course, YouTube is a very useful service, but sometimes you need the video on your computer, not on the Internet.

I urgently need this feature.

Well, well, well, is there any possibilities of this?

Yes, there is.

Video DownloadHelper

I use it now as a free Firefox extension, the most brilliant thing is you can save the video in different formats, choosing one or another.

One day it will be non-free, I think, but who knows.

Crash report

I’ve never participated in beta testing or user feedback programs, I’ve never sent any crash reports although software on my computer sometimes generates ones.

Because of Window$. What for? I paid my money, had some problems, wrote many letters with the problems to their product support teams and never had any help – only the “You are our valuable and important customer” nonsense. And they want to get a feedback! I would say something about it but it’s better to prevent this act or a good deal of bad language may occur

Anyway, it was, but it has changed since I had a Linux as my main OS.

There are lots of people who help you, wrote FAQ, guidelines, moderate forums, answer your questions and so on. I think good makes good. So I have been eager to do something useful for Open Source Community. I was just waiting the moment.

And it occurred! A crash of OpenOffice.org

Well, “crash” sounds like exaggeration, just a small, rare, I must say extremely rare, accident.

When I launched the Writer the crash window appeared and I was announced a possibility to send the crash report.

Oh, it’s pretty interesting, why not?

I typed openoffice.org in the address bar of my Firefox and started to search any feedback facility. It took much time but without any positive result. Well let’s ask Google, was my crucial thought. OK, it’s not easy but finally I found the Quality Assurance page, registered as a new member and wrote a new issue (# 104950 ) with crash report in it.

I think my first contribution wasn’t important at all, but the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Do you know what it cost me to read all that gobbledygook about issue handling with all these rules, diagrams, algorithm, but, I guess it’s a worth doing.

We all can improve our software.