More like 11th century, actually.

I mean, this is Europe we're talking about here. If two states had a common border, you can be pretty sure they had at least one war per century, and often more than that. In case of Russia(/Ukraine/Belarus) and Poland, the only reason why it doesn't go back earlier is because Rus was a proto-state before then, and it wasn't until the end of 10th century that it was fully formed.

I was born there as well, and my parents were not communist activists.

True, but this was mostly in the 80s (and mid-to-late 70s in some regions). Basically, the beginning of the end. Which brings us to...

At the time where there were long lines for toilet paper, that was quite unlikely. Killing on the streets was certainly not the thing, and even political dissidents were usually found insane, so that they could be put into asylums rather than imprisoned (that's when they invented "sluggish schizophrenia") - better from the PR perspective.

Certainly, for an average Soviet citizen to be killed or imprisoned by authorities in the 70s on, would be extremely unlikely.

That part is either bullshit or meaningless (or both). For someone like a teacher, say, the monthly salary was typically between 100 and 200 rubles during that time. Factory workers actually earned more (cuz "proletariat"). I can't think of anyone in full-time job earning less than a 100, in any case. University students got 50 rubles per month.

Now, the official exchange rate was 1 USD = 0.8-0.5 RUB, but that was bullshit in any case, because you couldn't freely exchange them. So the only way to meaningfully compare is in terms of purchasing power. Now, for example, price in rubles for some common foods:

box of 50 matches - 0.01 rub aka 1 kopeika (they used it for change when they ran out of coins)
loaf of wheat bread (400 g) - 0.26 rub
loaf of dark rye bread (700 g) - 0.16 rub
1 liter bottle of milk - 0.46 rub
1 kg of sugar - 0.78 rub
1 kg of cheese - 2.20 rub
1 kg of butter - 3.40 rub
100 g of chocolate - 0.80 rub
ice cream in a waffle cone - 0.20 rub

Some other random stuff:

bus ticket (valid for that one bus for any distance) - 0.05 rub
tram ticket - 0.03 rub
evening movie ticket - 0.25 rub
soap - 0.14 rub
camera - 15 rub
ushanka - 14 rub
vinyl record - 1-3 rub
1 liter of gas - 0.10 rub

Expensive stuff:

motorcycle - 1000-1500 rub
car - 3500-10000 rub

Free stuff:
housing
medicine
education

So it's still not a straightforward comparison. If you take food - say, milk; US average is $3.74/gallon, so almost $1/liter. If you go by the prices in rubles above, it would make the average Soviet salary of 150 rub equivalent to $300. OTOH, in US, most people spend most of their income on rent or mortgage, while Soviet citizens spent most of it on food, clothing etc. Average monthly gross rent in US is ~900$; adding that, you'd end up with $1200 per person, or $2400 per household (since both would typically work and bring roughly the same wage). This is pretty close to the average median income of an African-American household in US today. So, basically, pretty damn poor, but not third world shithole poor.

OTOH, car was a real luxury.

It is, in a way. As harmful and unjust and just plain stupid as it obviously is, it's something nice for Russia to point it and say, "see, these guys are up to no good, too" - which is very efficient for propaganda purposes.

Actually, that's not quite right. RT will make false stories where they can get away with them (e.g. Ukraine). But when they make one about US and Europe, it almost always has some kernel of truth in it... just distorted and embellished to fit their agenda. Nevertheless, if they tell there is a problem, it's a good habit to try to find the original source - oftentimes you will in fact discover some real issue there, that you'd do well to know about (and that mainstream US media, say, won't comment on loudly until much later).

Not at all. Google - like Paypal - actually inserts itself into the midst of the payment flow. Apple does not. They may be getting a couple of points on the backend, but that's a completely different technical and financial relationship than Google and the others have been trying to get.

If by "the ideals expressed by the Founders" you mean "natural rights are this thing that all white males have", then yeah.

Would have been interesting, paying the fine would require disclosure to shareholders? Is that a violation of 'super secret stuff'? Who wins SEC vs. NSA?

Or rather, "Your uncle through rocks at our window 50 years ago, and you and your family were given lifetime bans." Which begins to trend much closer to institutionalized racism than any kind of even theoretically reasonable policy.

Of course, right now with the US not putting any kind of friendly relations on the table, Cuba doesn't really have much of a choice, do they?

The BBC is a good bet. The international site of CNN is fairly solid. And actually, MSNBC - while they're far more left-leaning than Fox - would be considered neutral by most of the rest of the West and fair far better on fact checking than you might expect. The "liberal media" generally leans right (as happens when consolidation allows it to be mostly owned by a few billionaires), so it ends up looking far more "biased" than it actually is.

I ran zfs on freebsd for a few years but gave up on it. at one time, I did a cvsup (like an apt-get update, sort of, on bsd) and it updated zfs code, updated a disk format encoding but you could not revert it! if I had to boot an older version of the o/s (like, before the cvsup) the disk was not readable! that was a showstopper for me and a design style that I object to, VERY MUCH. makes support a nightmare.

I've never seen this in linux with jfs, xfs, ext*fs, even reiser (remember that?) never screwed me like this before.

the system also was very ram hungry and cpu hungry.

I'm still not convinced its good for anything but serious users who have a GOOD backup/restore plan. updating a disk image format and not allowing n-1 version of o/s to read it is a huge design mistake and I'm not sure I understand the reasoning behind it, but until that is changed, I won't run zfs.

Because of my political leanings, I tend to assume the worst about our friends in California but this is fantastic. Hopefully it catches on elsewhere.

LK

Yeah, the syntax was like that.

I think you might be right in that the compiler didn't enforce the types at the point of the call. But I'm still fairly sure that a type mismatch was undefined behavior, and if you somehow got it working, it would not be guaranteed to be working henceforth. It was certainly not just one parameter = one word, since K&R already had long and float and double, and those would normally be wider than a word on most machines of that time

  So basically, types were always there, but type checks weren't.

When they added ANSI-style function declarations, you could actually have parameters listed with their types, and that was checked... but for compatibility they still retained the old-style function calls without seeing the definition, where you had to match the arguments carefully.

obsolete?

if you use drives as shelf-spares or backups, then this is a MAJOR problem!

I have drives that are 10+ yrs old and while I don't spin them up very often, I do expect them to still work years from now as long as I give them a spin-up every so often, to keep them in shape.

a drive that fails just sitting there, unused, is NOT something I want to buy! or own.

Its a very different proposition to have an "always on" proximity-activtated chip (such as those embedded into your credit cards) and one that's only active for a single transaction based on a physical finger-swipe. The whole point is that even when (not if) the communication is intercepted, what you end up with is like sniffing SSL traffic - you could replay the "Please pay Target $20 to fulfill exactly this invoice" conversation, certainly, but that's not particularly useful to a thief. Having the physical TouchID in the middle also ensures that the phone isn't chatting to just anyone at random times.