Russia is definitely, without a doubt or a question, the villain here.

Your statement assumes there is only one villain.

Russia is a villain. The U.S. is a villain. The current fascist-riddled Ukraine government is a villain. The prior authoritarian Ukraine government is a villain. And in the end, the ethnic Russians of Eastern Ukraine are fucked.

Your argument applies to itself. You are accusing people of abdicating judgment: your solution is to not judge Linus! Furthermore, you are confusing criticism of the messenger with criticism of the message; as SuperBanana points out, this is a straw man argument.

Not all opinions are valid and equal: nor are all means of expressing them. We have the right to speak freely; we also have the right to judge such speech as invalid or unacceptable. I suggest this right to judge is in fact an obligation. Silence implies consent. Abusive behavior should be called out. You may argue that Linus was not abusive, but to argue that we should never make such judgments in the first place is to fall prey to the false equivalence you decry.

Holy crap, this AC got modded up +2 already? I notice on this story that the stupidest comments so far are all ACs. There should be a rule that whenever someone says how some leader here or there is screwing up, then the commenter is required to say how they would do it better. As everyone who has made it there seems to have found out once elected President of the USA (or Prime Minister of somewhere else), the problems are a lot more complicated when you actually have to deal with them and then the fallout (maybe literally in this case) from your actions. This parent AC is a troll and should be modded as such.

Do you really think that studios would let their movies stream peer-to-peer, which would involve being stored on home-user's computers encrypted with a known key (aka "effectively not encrypted")? Plus, ISPs are rolling out CGN which makes peer-to-peer very difficult, and most residential connections have very slow upload speeds. Finally, this would just be a way to work around the fact that Verizon is not giving its customers what the customers have paid for: high-speed internet access. When there is a bully, you don't just sneak around behind the bully's back and hope he won't notice you.

No, Netflix (and Youtube and some others large ones) don't buy CDN hosting; they offer it. They offer free CDN servers which large ISPs can put in their datacenters. Doesn't matter how much Netflix offered to pay, I doubt if any existing CDN could handle Netflix's traffic along with their other customers.

Many ISPs take advantage of this, but Verizon would rather degrade Netflix's products so they can push their own products.

The bandwidth disparity argument is bunk. I've love if Netflix or Level 3 would set up some data sinks in their network so I could use my FIOS to send them random data 24/7 and help even the disparity.

So... you're saying that Verizon should be paying me! I mean, they send me ALL THIS DATA (much of it sourced from Netflix), but I hardly send them anything. This makes me both a selfish person and someone who deserves a large monthly Verizon cheque.

Note that if Verizon doesn't want to pay a few grand for a few more 10GE ports and some short cables, they could pay even less and accept the caching servers that Netflix offers to all large ISPs; those cost just a few rack units and watts of power.

But Verizon would rather limit Netflix so that they can push their own video products.

Yes. Almost all my media is streamed ... from my basement. It was a pain to set up, but now the kids can watch whatever they want without the pains of going through DVD or BluRay menus. A plus is that the home videos are easily accessible as well.

Speaking to a medical doctor, there's apparently a belief in the medical field that complications from LASIK procedures are under-reported.

Are there any short term and 5 year followup studies of the procedure?

Care to explain why carbon taxes are bad? Every economist I've read who acknowledges that there are negative externalities with burning carbon based fuels says that the most efficient and non-market distorting way to get the users to pay the cost of the externalities is to impose a carbon tax. Anything else distorts the market for carbon based fuels or you just let the general population bear the cost of the negative externalities irregardless of how the gains from use of the fuels are distributed.

Sounds like my case. Increasing couldn't get wear contacts any more without problems, hated all of the problems of glasses, was scared of the surgery... and it was just nothing. Seriously, how can instantly improved vision not be at the top of your to-do list?

Less of a problem than men killing other men, statistically.

Hey Mods, but not the idiots who already got to the OP, mod the OP back up, it's not Flamebait. As a total fanboy of SpaceX, I don't totally agree, but there are legitimate points for discussion. I'd say that SpaceX innovations so far are manufacturing and management not extension of spacecraft capabilities, yet. They've got lots of good things in the works but most are not yet demonstrated.

You don't have any Left to speak of, there's Right and Even-More-Right.

That's not what everything I've read about the disaster has said. The mountain has gone through cycles - whenever it collapses, the river gets moved away, and the slides stop for a time, but eventually it wears away the footings enough that it falls again. They'd even tried to prevent landslides there by manually shoring up the base back in the 1960s, but it just flowed over their reinforcements.

The waterlogging of the soil is also a necessary factor too, mind you - not saying otherwise. :)

I had paperbark birch seeds, which are also pretty water tolerant (though not as much as river birch), but none sprouted - ironically I think the seeds were too wet when I stratified them (same with my maples). Isn't river birch (B. nigra) a warm-weather birch species? I've got some cuttings of random local birches from a neighbor but I have no clue whether any of them are water tolerant enough to take swampy ground. Also birches don't usually get that tall so I don't know how expansive of a root system they'll put down. The abundant local species B. nana (dwarf birch) grows (nay, volunteers) readily here almost anywhere that sheep don't graze, but it's just a shrub, I doubt it'd do the trick (though it's probably better than just grass). It can take wet soil, although not totally swampy conditions.

For the wetter areas I also have about a dozen or so western redcedar seedlings - they're not as swamp-tolerant as dawn redwood and western recedar, but they're still reportedly quite tolerant of wet or even waterlogged soils, and they should be more cold/wind hardy than those two (wind is actually the big issue, it doesn't really get that cold here). I've also got a number of other pacific northwest trees with varying degrees of standing water tolerance. Oh, and a species or two of tasmanian mountain eucalyptus (don't remember which ones) that tolerate fairly swampy ground and should at least stand a fighting chance against our winds.

Basically, I'm just going to plant a ton of stuff and see what survives. ;)

One plus is that where the ground is persistently wet and at landslide risk, it is slowly flowing water, it's not standing. It's constantly replaced by fresh, cold ground-filtered water, so there's probably not as much risk of root rot as might be common otherwise. But there's still the oxygen issue. That and the damned sheep, but I'm working to fix that issue once and for all...