Yet she still does not understand the difference?

I have no idea what you are talking about. If you liked an artist's performance, you can google their site where you can find out where to buy their music (or donate) and subscribe to all the latest news (RSS, email). This is all I was saying. The radio played your song and gave your name, this is all that is needed to the listener to reach you. You can ask the radio station to provide a direct link to your site, but this is as far as common sense goes in terms of shoving your name into listeners' throats.

Valid argument. However, there is absolutely no need for forcing radio station to do this. People will write you mails asking if you will be performing in their town. You can create a form for people interested in your performance on your site asking them to provide their location. You can gather information from your official forum if you set one. If you are too much of a stalker, you can track visitors' IPs on your site and see places where you are popular the most. Heck, there are lots of ways of collecting this data, and none of them involves stalking people who don't care about you and your music and just happened to listen to the radio when your song was playing.

They can look you up if they like your performance on the radio. If they like it, they can look you up and probably subscribe to your RSS feed with all your new updates. If they are not doing so, they don't like you and your songs. Duh.

Perhaps their popularity and content quality are the main reason of their crisis, not the business model?

They don't expect people to give insightful answers while sitting on a couch and holding a gamepad which was used to shoot people's heads off probably just an hour ago, do they? This, and probably just a dash of the good ol' American ignorance.

I want to say that your post was very enlightening to me (I'm a self-learner). Until now I did not know about the pitch accent in Japanese and thought that it was impossible to distinguish words written the same way in Kana if they were taken out of context. Getting the right word from the context doesn't seem to be this hard from the first glance, actually, since most words with the same writing have very different meanings and can be distinguished by analysing n-gram frequencies or using other similar techniques.

Deducing whether the code is safe or not based on the authors' nationality or background is just ridiculous.

Yes, and IMO this is pretty much the reason for such high penalties. Every now and then when someone gets actually caught it makes a sensation in the news.

The question is, how much can the hardware optimize the decoded RISC microcode? Or the optimization does not matter much at this point?

Having a capitalist society, even a corrupted one, does not necesserily mean that pensions and other social payments are not adapted to the cost of living. I don't have exact data, but once in a year or two they give pensions a little nudge to keep up with the prices. You don't want the potential voters die from famine or illnesses. They give a significant (20%? 30%?) increase before major elections. Generally speaking, among the pensioners I know (a rather modest amount, though) more and more of them approve of Putin's reign openly, partially because of biased news and shows, partially because of fear to lose the little privileges they now have. I don't know about other ex-soviet countries, though, but imagine something like this happens in most of them.

I am not familiar with the law, but there are so-called employment/occupation centres (centry zanyatosti) which offer simple work I wrote about earlier, usually as low-grade social or municipal workers, i.e. government-regulated jobs. I have never heard of a case that people cannot find any job at all. To get a well-paying job without a good employment history or connections may be tough, but something that will get you money for rent and bread seems to be offered everywhere.

Nothing is ideal and corruption will alway exist to some degree in any human society, however, the difference between USSR and Russia for the lower/middle class is huge. Just googling "USSR queues" seems to give a good impression of the desperation people were in.

My anecdotal evidence suggests that pensioners have always had tough time. Right now the minimum pension is 290 usd. This is a small sum, but it is enough to pay the rent, water and electricity, simple food and occasional expenses like new clothing or replacing a broken TV set. Medicare is free and medicine (though usually simple and not the most efficient) are also free. This is miserable, but bearable existence. This is pretty much the same that was before, though more monetised.
I have no understaning of the right to work, but the unemployment rate right now is roughly 6%, this is almost two times less than the EU. The unemplyment money is almost nonexistent, but some simple vacations like a caretaker or a social worker are always open and the government is making sure you can get at least _some_ employment. If you are sick and cannot work, you get disability tuition, but it is as small as the pension. Again, this is miserable, but not different from the soviet times.

I was referring to non-governmental affairs. The governement is as secretive as it was before, but it cannot hide important events happening around the country thanks to the modern communication technologies. It can and it does paint it black and white as it finds more fitting in the news, but you do get to hear or read about stuff like strikes, crashes and arrest if you want to. If you don't, you have the option to watch one of the national channels and be brainwashed the same way as you were before. I agree that improvements in the freedom of speech are partially due to technology and not the collapse.

Are you informed about the problem with the centralized goods distribution in USSR? Technology was there, (at least some) people had the money, but the stores were empty since not enough electronics (not only electronics, but books and some food as well) were assigned to the region. This resulted in the notorious day-long queues and people desperately trying to get a job in the said chain just to share the distributed goods to their relatives. This is something that should never happen in a capitalist society.

As an addition to the post, I'll note that I described the situation in cities. The situation with villages and farms may be different (from my alien point of view it didn't change much after the collapse), but by the end of 80s the urban population was the majority (~75%).

You have no idea what you are talking about. The only two kinds of people I know that were in a more profitable condition back then were members of the government machine (an incredible amount of people, to be fair) and some scientists that received more funding for their expensive research (this is the reason in my understanding why many of them, especially the older ones, support the Communist party nowadays). I certainly am not saying that every other person got better after the collapse, but everyone I know in several cities spread around the ex-USSR did (except for Grozny which was reportedly a very prosperous and beautiful city several decades ago, but it seems to be an exception and not directly related to the collapse). Since the collaps people got an ability to move around the globe, people can now hear about all disasters happening in their country without the curtain of secrecy, people can go in a store and buy books, electronics and meat for affordable prices and there is no shortage in their supply. Not saying all this is the merit of the current government, but it indeed appears to be the result of destroying the old system.

Does this mean people in Finland cannot also accept donations for projects they are working on since this is technically the same "giving money for nothing in return" issue?