"That terminator is out there. It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead."

Horse? Not even close.

Simple logic of a typical sociopath: make more armed drones on your shiny automated factories and blow all these pesky demanding peons to bits! And there's always a fresh list of (potential) dissenters thanks to NSA and other similar structures. It's a cost effective, permanent solution, and it's really fun to watch with your family!

Or even more simple solution - provide them with cheap weapons and ammo and spend a small fraction of your fortune to let them kill each other for the scarce remaining resources. Of course, you'll have to make sure that their inferior weapons present no danger to your automated and absolutely loyal forces, but it's a trivial task, truly.

There's an old Soviet joke:

"A man from some small town comes to Moscow for the holidays. When he gets back, neighbors and family are asking him about his trip to the capital. The man answers:

- Oh, I loved Moscow, such a big and beautiful city! I've seen a May Day celebration, and some big placards, saying "All for the Man! All in the name of the Man!". And I've even briefly saw the Man himself!"

So in theory you are right, but in practice the denominator of your equation raises serious doubts.

Its ingrained for sure!

So if we, say, point a Hubble telescope at it, will it collapse into one of these states?

Witty retort with a thinly veiled strawman.

But think how much it would cost to try to create and implement such system? It's a logical step - if Google can't do it, let's find some contractor company who will do it for us. Oh, the owner of this company is a nephew of a said MP? Well, it's a strange coincidence, of course!

And, after all, we can always change law back after several years of abusing this broken system.

I actually do on my workstation - starting from KDE 3.10. In times of godawful 4.0-4.1 I considered changing DE, but starting with 4.2 it was somewhat usable, so I finally upgraded to 4.3, and starting from 4.5 I rarely encounter any problems. Of course, many of KDE components are disabled on my system, and DE is customized to my needs pretty hard (plus I am one lazy guy, and much of my work tools are scripts of some sort, so I don't use many of KDE's native programs). But once in a while I like to rearrange my desktop - it doesn't affect my workflow, but brings some sense of refreshment. So, long story short, it's usable and fast enough for my needs - when I tried to work in Gnome (version 2 at the time) and XFCE I was somewhat disappointed by lack of customization in them.

Still, I like that diversity - some of my friends use Gnome or Unity and are pretty happy with them, some are Mac users, some are still using Windows 7 (I use it at home for gaming). I don't personally know anyone who would like Windows 8, but I don't mind this system too. Anyone can find something to their tastes, and I can only approve of that.

Sorry, maybe my selection of words was incorrect - "40-50 years old" should mean "40-50 years ago old".

Bingo! Most of these "poor oppressed academicians" are quite rich people, even by European/USA standards. Of course they don't want to lose their income.

Hahahaha... no.

Please, read something about sharaga's, and think about reconsidering your statement.

Really biased summary and somewhat biased article. RAS is simply afraid of losing their luxurous "recreational complexes" - private villas of said academicians and "research institutes", which are mostly just "cheap offices for rent" right now. Our science is going down the drain for the last... 30-40 years, or even more, and all these old soviet-era "academicians" are much more old-school bureaucrats than scientists. Truly clever and talented people all left Russia in 90-s, leaving mostly conservative old-timers and not-so-bright yesterday students. One of the vice-presidents of RAS is known to support some absolutely fraudulent projects, like "Petrik's water filters" - and these people are saying something about liquidation of science?

I am not a supporter of Putin and his little auto-/pluto-cratic system of government, but this reform is something long-needed, almost essential for our science. With the 40-50 years old mindset you cannot innovate, you cannot truly create something new, perform some cutting-edge experiments and achieve true breakthroughs. Only with adaptation of new policies, with adequate pay and real prospects of work for the young scientists we can hope to see our science pull itself out of its current horrible state. And this time, as preposterous as it sounds, Putin is on the side of progress. Of course there is no clearly defined "good guy" in this whole situation, but RAS in its modern form is much worse than almost anything that can replace it.

"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity". Maybe Google just sucks at being evil?

Obligatory SMBC.

That's just common problem with humans as we are. No matter how would you name political or economical system, someone somewhere would always find some ways to game it. It's the problem with all utopias, from Plato's "State" to Ayn Rand's "Atlas" - they all require different species to work, not humans. In real world stupidity, negligence, corruption and outright malice will always find its way. That's why every successful system had some sort of checks and balances from the start... and that's why all of them failed eventually. We just have to understand that this cycle is natural, and do what we can to help these systems evolve and not come down crashing, as long as we can.