Finally some insightful comment about Soviet Union economy.

But world has moved on long time ago - investigations happened, and they indicated what exactly went wrong. World has learnt from this incindent. And still does.

So, how dangerous it is? Because world still can't get their shit together about dangers of coal and fossil in overall.

Also it's still sorted out in 2012 because Soviet Union collapse happened. In Western sphere cleanup would have happened long time ago.

You know how it's defined - when it decide to kill you on his own, knowing that you are not a valid target.

There's no such AI around. But of course humanity is much better at spending time not to thinking about themselves as liabilities. Because hey, it requires change. Humans sucks at change.

"What's wrong with you libertarians is that you cannot accept that government is the people joined together to protect ourselves, at a great scale economy. You're obsessed with authoritarian private corporations that demonstrate daily the vast waste they layer atop most widespread services, especially those that are equally available to all. You reduce actual life experiences demonstrated everywhere to inane sloganeering like "heading down the path of communism, and history has already told us how well that works". No, you have merely cherrypicked history and called things names without regard to their meaning.

There's more to economics than economics 101. There's more to reality than the libertarian mayor of Sim City bothers to carp about."

Completely seconded these lines. I see most of libertarians as another "it would be very good life if things wouldn't be so damn complex" crowd (other being leftie populists and nativists at right side). State and goverment is there for a reason - much older one than libertarian fantasies. Also fact that most libertarians come from places with heavy corportion monopoly power doesn't surprise.

Microsoft does it too. Recently in my country someone pointed out that while goverment pays huge sums for software to Microsoft, most of this money doesn't get even taxed.

For US corporations profit is only sane thing for them. Being good and responsible corporative subject of the country - naaah.

Not exactly, NFC is just RFID v. 2 in disguise :) Technology in basics is the same.

One name: paranoia.

My expierence tells me that there is posibility to have "good enough" system for voting trough eletronic means - if elections are organised trough centralised means and trust. Problem is, it won't be "good enough" for geeks. And we have trust problem here, as both Dems and Reps lawyers already sharpening pencils for possible legal fallouts if vote will be very close.

It's nothing to do with tools and systems. It's everything to do with humans. If there will be a trust, e-voting will be good enough to have it as good *alternative*. Paper ballot still should be mandatory as primary method.

While for logical reasons Greece must go bankrupt, there's simply no way out of it, I don't support that notion and I agree that IMF and EU must help. However, evil as always is in details. I disagree strongly with several of so called "reforms" and think that with strong performance in several key ones would be enough.

However, problem of course is that Greece is very slow of implementing exactly those, because those problems runs deep within their society. Country officially going under and they still enjoy not paying taxes? Maybe there's reason why Greece is a birth place of modern anarchy. Maybe they really need a lesson here, real taste of their own medicine. This is very sad, as lot of people suffer of lack of any serious politician (trust me, there's such rare breed), one group of parties are just oligarchy, other part - just plain stupid populists. There's not even serious left center. This is price of populism and nation who aren't aware that's not enough to throw cash around and call themselves a "socialist" to have effective, self-sustained country. I'm leftie leaning center and I'm saddened by that ignorance of living within means. You can support poor, eldery, unemployed in many other ways, actually helping them. You can follow budget and your income and see if there's trouble. If greeks have paid their taxes, they wouldn't be in such trouble.

As for journalist, it simply doesn't register why they made this stupid decision to bring him criminal charges which won't withstand scrutiny for 5 minutes in a court room - only revenge as reason makes sense. For *breaching privacy*? First, what that good old "oy protect richies from public" law do in their criminal codex in first place? I think modern consensus in such cases is civil case.

I think at one point in very relatively soon future Germany will simply require to bring justice upon all tax evaders or there won't be any support.

*Your* country? Or a country you thought you can terrorize and isolate from the rest of the world? If it was your country, then people wouldn't wait for foreign army with open arms.

You claim a country when you run it properly, when people of it supports you. If support is relative, then you are just one of the forces who fights for power. And in a case you have harbored terrorist who have brought war to Americans at home - well, though luck. Karma sure is a bitch - for them and for you.

And in what case blowing up market places with no Americans around become part of "opposing military conquest"?

No matter what law says, this is wrong. OSCE election observers has never been accused in pushing agenda by visited country, they are really neutral as much as human beings can be. They just observe. So no matter what intend is here it just feels like they are unwelcome because ugly things can happen.

That's also stuff that worries me with US - while two party system, unlimited money-speech, etc. stuff is very problematic (I won't call it dead end, but there's little ray of hope), if someone starts to tamper with election process itself - and all those voter fraud laws and creative ways to block so called "Dem vote" from happening indicates that desire is there, there are violations from other side of the fence, but enough evidence indicates that they are exceptions rather than rule - then whole (not perfect, but stable) system can unravel very quickly enough.

I just don't get it why part of super rich people in US are so found of radicalism (After all, Tea Party in essence is their business project). Gives them crowd easy to manipulate? Is it really all they want?

If we look more practically it has never left, it just returns to desktop environment. Tons of very useful Java applications are made and used by millions of users. Main sales point - yes, one binary works (with tweaks and testing) on at least 10 different platforms. For example, OpenStreetMap has an excellent editor for advanced mappers JOSM - while Linux for example has their native editors for OSM, JOSM wins hands down in portability and universality. That means a developer can hack together a plugin for JOSM using Linux desktop, and after one good testing and bug hunting phase, it just works everywhere. Also user experience is much easier to share.

Of course using JVM have drawbacks and we all know them, and you won't use it for resource sensitive cases. But in many cases positives outweigh them.

Sick, but that would be civil case.

Care to reference URL for this claim? Would like to read about it.

Monsanto is clearly bully here, because in any scenario, farmer didn't violate the contract, so they just showing their power.

However, this is more like contract dispute. Seems like company understood that they chances of going after farmer contract is close to null, so they decided to punish him by betting on their golden egg. That neatly opened unforseen posibility to challange seed (and any DNA, nano, etc.) patents in SCOTUS. Farmer didn't care about patents, he just wants not to pay for stuff he didn't violate. As usual, side effect of the rulling will be so much interesting for rest of us.

As for Obama administration - I still treat him as best option (not a US citizen, yeah I know all his weakneses), however, I'm really getting tired of carde blanche to IPR industry from all goverments. No matter who is elected all I hear that IPR must be protected at any cost. Without any critical analysis or thinking. IPR industry doesn't even have a third of exports or economy. Still, I think we need to fight this political way - informing, educating those politicans who we can reach (no, not everyone is deeply corrupt).