The Off Topic Topic

[Sheilbh]

I've heard that too. I raised it in conversation with a friend who has been there and she said it was too untouched, took just as long to drive through Albania as it did the rest of the Balkans combined
And she is Romanian so....not exactly used to good roads.

I can't imagine it's much worse than Bosnia. There's still no motorways there. The EU cancelled their plan to build one after all the land the road was planned to be built on was bought by the MPs

[Iormlund]

Have you enjoyed any solidarnosc yet Iorm?

I spent pretty much every day there working 12+ hours at the factory. Not much chance of having fun. 

[Admiral Yi]

I spent pretty much every day there working 12+ hours at the factory. Not much chance of having fun. 

Fag.

[Iormlund]

I've heard that too. I raised it in conversation with a friend who has been there and she said it was too untouched, took just as long to drive through Albania as it did the rest of the Balkans combined
And she is Romanian so....not exactly used to good roads.

I can't imagine it's much worse than Bosnia. There's still no motorways there. The EU cancelled their plan to build one after all the land the road was planned to be built on was bought by the MPs

Heh. That didn't stop the EU before. Not in Spain at least. For example, one of the high-speed railway stations in the main route Barcelona-Madrid was inexplicably built far from the local town ... in land owned by the family of then VP Esperanza Aguirre. Mere coincidence, apparently.

[Sheilbh]

Well Bosnia aren't a member. They've even been overtaken by Albania both in terms of their economy and the closeness to EU accession

Apparently the last EU guy there did a powerpoint of where the Western Balkans are at - what they've done and what they need to do. His slide for Bosnia was just a question mark

[The Larch]

Women from the Balkans are unbeliveably hottttttt, and generally quite friendly to approach. Some of them seem to get quite excited just by being with a westerner, but I guess that in Belgrade because of its rising touristic stock or Novi Sad because of the massive EXIT Festival they might be already used to them.

[Sheilbh]

At the risk of being a little bigoted I think it's a fairly common thing in Eastern Europe that the women are gorgeous and the men are interesting*.



*With the possible exception of the Czechs for some reason who are just all very pretty in my experience.

[The Larch]

Also, in the Balkans you will be offered unbeliveably strong spirits almost everywhere to go. When I was in Serbia last summer I once went to visit the grandparents of the friend I was staying with and the served us breakfast. With homemade rakia. Of course you couldn't say no when a venerable 90 something Serbian gentleman offers you moonshine at 9 in the morning.

[Caliga]

Women from the Balkans are unbeliveably hottttttt

I don't have much experience with the Balkans overall, but this is definitely true of Romanians.

[MadImmortalMan]

The Iron Curtain was to hold all the hot girls in.

Lots of places in Europe you see couples where the guy more often outclasses the girl though. England, Germany, Ireland and Austria are where I've primarily noticed that.

[Josquius]

Romanians tend to be very capitalist in their looks. They're either super hot or ugly. Girls who are merely ok are rare.

[celedhring]

So, all these pages discussing the hotness of the Slavic race, and not a single pic to illustrate the issue? I'm disappointed.

[Syt]

Germany still struggles to promote free and open WiFi networks. German law states that if someone uses your WiFi for illegal activities, then you're liable for that. Which means a lot of people and public locations close their WiFi access, because otherwise it's very easy to get, e.g. an expensive cease and desist letter from a lawyer representing a copyrights holder after someone uses your WiFi for an illegal download.

A new law is meant to make it easier to provide open WiFi to people. However, the proposed law requires "effective encryption" for every public WiFi, so that at the very least you have to go through a login.

The copyright shakedown lawyers have already said that this will lead to an extreme increase in illegal behavior on the intarwebs and suggest that every WiFi user should be registered by every hotspot because otherwise anarchy will destroy society (slight exaggeration by me). Meanwhile, the other side says the mandatory encryption will be too big a hurdle for a) casual use on the fly and b) small business owners.

[garbon]

I wonder if that means they'll do something like TheCloud here in the UK, which requires you to log-in to use wifi and has acess points near many businesses.  I think the City of York also has some sort of log-in for its free, city center wifi - but my memory is hazy and you might just have to accept conditions like you do at Starbucks.

[Syt]

Vienna is looking to increase the number of free hotspots. There's ca. 60 provided by the city, with 400 more planned till end of next year throughout the city, with most of them obviously planned for the touristy areas. They require your registration with mobile phone number, though, and they're limited to 1 Mb/s, and it has a blacklist of malware sites, porn etc.

Additionally, there's the private ones provided by bars, cafés, McD etc.