Put Your Hands Up for the Voiced Uvular Fricative

Currently I am in Sweden, working in Ronneby which is some 30 km distance from Karlskrona, where I’m staying. I can honestly say the Blekingska/Sk�nska dialects (listen) demand quite some getting used to before one can properly make out words and/or have a meaningful conversation, especially if one happens to be a product of the Finnish education system where the emphasis on learning Swedish is on (retrospectively thinking ridiculously clearly articulated) Finlandssvenska.

Armoring WWII Bombers

An anecdote goes as follows: “The Germans shot down too many Allied bombers during the World War II, so the British sent for an American expert. The expert went to Great Britain to take a look at the damaged planes which had made it back. After considering the situation, the expert had extra armor installed to undamaged places of the planes.” Was the expert right, wrong, both, or none?
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A Note on Scandinavian Phishing

At the beginning of this year 2007, there was a major phishing operation directed at the customers of the inter-Scandinavian Nordea bank. The thieves got away with a sum equivalent to about 1 million US dollars. Because of the attack vector used (and of course to save face and for damage control purposes), Nordea was quick to claim that the attack was possible due to social engineering and that their security was not at fault. This is a false claim, and I shall explain why.
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