Unless they magically had specific training on the Buk weapons system, their chances of even launching a missile would be slim to none.

And, since you mention Nazis, I'll point out that it is, in fact, the Russians who are acting like Nazis.

* Annexing neighbors under the guise of protecting people of the same ethnicity? Check.

Radar is not needed.

Air-to-Air missiles use different warheads than the Buk. The shrapnel damage is not compatible with the former but is compatible with the latter.

Anything else is Russian propaganda.

They probably are, on the ground. Not on aircraft, but since you're static on the ground anyway, the wire isn't much of a drawback and makes the whole thing much cheaper.

You have no point. You're just spewing useless facts. The origin of Ukraine's material is not in dispute and is utterly irrelevant. The origin of Daesh/ISIS/whatever's material is not in dispute - they were financed by Qataris, looted the incompetent Iraqi forces, charged local populations protection money and bought weapons on the black market - and is absolutely irrelevant to the current discussion.

The DSB determined that the plane was destroyed by a SAM, directly contradicting the Kremlin's fantasy story.

Now, let's look at more facts:

* Several Ukrainian aircraft had been shot down in the previous month, with Little Green Men ("separatists") boasting about it.
* The Ukrainians say they had no SAMs in the area. This is believable, because they had literally no aerial targets whatsoever. There is no military reason to have a SAM launcher in the area, much less to operate one.
* The Russian Little Green Men were very quick to boast of having downed a supposed Ukrainian transport aircraft.
* There is no Ukrainian aircraft missing that could be attributed to such an event.
* The Russian Little Green Men were even quicker to try to eliminate the aforementioned boasts from the internet.
* A Russian Buk was spotted hastily leaving the area with one conspicuously-absent missile
* Instead of cooperating with a transparent investigation, as is required by international law, the Little Green Men stonewalled every attempt at investigation on-site for months. They tampered with the scene (at least by virtue of being there, probably beyond that).
* The Kremlin's theory is pure bullshit - the damage is not consistent with Air-to-Air missiles or cannon fire, the supposedly responsible fighter doesn't even have enough performance to get to the same flight level as a 777 in cruise (except for a possible upgraded variant - which only Russia has!)

The only logical conclusion:

The self-titled separatists or their Russian Little Green Men handlers shot down MH17 with a Buk. Most likely the latter, since a Buk is not something you can just train a random troublemaking hired gun on in a haste. They intended to hit another Ukrainian aircraft but misidentified their target or didn't even bother to try. They fucked up and were extracted in a hurry.

Odd loose ends:

Why did the stonewalling proceed for so long? Clearly, they could've put on the show for a week to do a cleanup to remove any traces of the Buk. And the Russians (who were illegally sent the black boxes, since they were not involved in the investigation - the DSB, representing the majority of the victims and the flight's origin; the US NTSB, representing the state of manufacture; or the Malaysian counterpart as the state of the operator were the only logical choices) did not evidently tamper with the black boxes (if they did, they were incompetent), since their data is 100% consistent with the debris.

Why claim it was a SU-25? Surely the Kremlin's Guy in Charge of Soviet Bullshit has enough resources to choose an appropriate plane to claim that the Ukrainians used.

Additional comments:

"Little Green Men" and "separatists" are used interchangeably. Technically, there are a few groups (in an approximate order of significance at the time): Russian troublemakers sent by the Kremlin; Russian troops operating without identification (which, I'd like to remind everyone, is a war crime) - these include specialized units handling Russian equipment that requires training; real Ukrainian citizens who do want to be Russian and, finally, a tiny portion of Russian volunteers swayed by propaganda.

RT is an incredibly biased source located in a country known for its love of bullshit stories that are meant to cover-up its mistakes. It is not to be taken seriously. A Daesh twitter account will probably have fewer lies than RT.

Some final, personal comments:

The whole treatment of the issue is frankly disgusting. Putin is a very small person (he's also shorter than he'd like to show, judging by his presentation, but that's irrelevant) - he didn't even have to take the blame. He didn't even have to stop his war crime-filled campaign in Ukraine. He just had to let the heads of those responsible figuratively roll. Nobody would've believed the inevitable bullshit story of how a Russian investigation found the guy who fired the missile, stolen from the Ukrainian army and brought him forward to be tried in the Netherlands or whatever - but nobody believes his current story, anyway, and this new fantasy is better for internal consumption.

I'll bite.

None whatsoever. They're drunk morons. They fucked up, thought the 777 was an Ukrainian military cargo plane and proceeded to tweet about it.

Then they arrived at the crash site and had an "Oh shit" moment and immediately proceeded to try a hasty cover-up.

*Especially* encrypted data. Or compressed, really.

Let's go through it...

Magical? Definitely a valid interpretation.

Sky? Yup, checks out.

Fairy? Well, it depends, but don't let pop culture depictions narrow your view of the many forms fairies take in various myths.

So yeah, it's an accurate description.

Yeah, the sooner we move away from coal and its nasty, deadly byproducts and carbon dioxide emissions the better...

Oh, you were talking about nuclear waste? The easily-contained low-volume stuff that can be safely buried away until we have the technology to deal with it? Well, then, you're an ignorant fool!

You're a moron if you confuse the definition of "being detained by" with the definition of "seeking refuge in a tiny embassy and refusing to leave".

His being an asshole, as well as the validity of the charges aside, he is not detained, by the very definition of "to be detained". Therefore the ruling is the stupidest thing an international organization has said recently (which is saying a lot).

Well, that defeats the purpose of the security measures.

Or just do whatever they are doing now, but don't accept fingerprint input from compromised readers - instead of bricking the whole phone.

Sure, but bricking the phone instead of just disabling the sensor is quite evil.

I must disagree.

There are two distinct scenarios: upgrades and repairs.

If you end up replacing every component in your PC over time, it's legitimate to say that it's a new computer. In practice, it's tied to the motherboard.

On the other hand, if you just replace the motherboard with an identical model (or similar, they don't care about those details), you can speak to a support person and they'll activate the new board for you in a minute.

To be fair, many entries boil down to precompiler shenanigans. Impressive, but not particularly interesting.

The underhanded C contest is, in my opinion, more interesting. Obfuscating something into a mess that is impossible to understand is relatively easy. Writing code that passes a decent examination of the source but is actually designed to fail in a very specific way is much harder.