It depends on why Microland has such low rates of arrests and prosecutions. Is it because it has a much more permissive legal climate, or is it rather because it's more oppressive and people know it - and have been conditioned to behave?

Let's add another country to our hypothetical situation; call it Nanoland. It has the second lowest crime rate index. It also canes people for vandalism, and executes them for possession. It allows police officers to search any premise without a warrant if they reasonably suspect there are drugs. Would you consider it less oppressive than Microland, or more?

You have some valid points, and some confused points.

First of all, .NET very much still exists. WinRT did not replace it at all. WinRT is an ABI for all the new Windows platform APIs, and .NET supports interop with that new ABI (much like it supported COM Interop since 1.0 - but better, because WinRT was specifically designed to be seamlessly projected to modern programming languages). But .NET runtime is still the same as it has always been, it runs managed code, and all the standard .NET libraries are still managed, too. The implementations of the standard WinRT libraries, OTOH, are all native (though you can author managed WinRT components if you want to), so a C++ app using WinRT won't have .NET runtime loaded in its process.

WinRT is actually not "more like COM" - it literally is COM, complete with IUnknown, AddRef/Release/QI, interface marshaling etc. It adds a bunch of other stuff such as a (new) metadata format and a way to obtain it from any random object, a new optimized opaque string type, composition-based inheritance, and a bunch of other things. Mostly it adds enough to be convenient to project to your typical class-based OOP language such as C#. I have worked on a project where we did WinRT projection for Python, and that worked pretty well, too.

WRL is not so much an API as a bunch of helper wrappers that take care of things such as refcounting or properly implementing a WinRT class for you. It's to WinRT what ATL is to COM. You don't really need it to call WinRT from C++, but it reduces the amount of boilerplate that you have to write.

In Russia, it's actually possible to be fined for paying too much taxes - I have personally witnessed that (naturally, they didn't return anything, either - the fine was on top of that).

This isn't all just about globals. It is also about the hilariously stupid rules for scoping locals (where you can put "var" inside a block, but for some mysterious reason it will always be scoped in the outermost function body - contrary to both common sense and every other language with the same syntax for blocks).

And for extra giggles, there's the mess that is the overlap of closures and foreach loops.

The funny part is, MS is no longer trying to pretend that the world ends at its bubble - .NET is nice, but not all people like it, and it's not perfect for everything; and that's okay. So, for example, you can do Python using Microsoft tools and on Microsoft platforms (and yes, it is all open source under sane licenses like AL 2.0). At the same time, a Microsoft employee is one of the core CPython maintainers, and is basically responsible for the official Win32 releases. Expect more of that kind of thing in the future.

(full disclosure: I am a developer on the PTVS team)

Given that it's all open source, fork it?

WinRT (which covers both phones and everything else) is not .NET-only. You get a choice of .NET, C++ (with some language extensions, think of it as Microsoft's Obj-C) or HTML5/JS. In theory, it's possible to add similar support to other languages, since it's an ABI that is explicitly designed for cross-language consumption.

All true, and I do not dispute that. NATO are not knights in shining armor. It's just sometimes they are a less bad option. And sometimes it's not clear which is which, at least not right away. E.g. Serbian government was deliberately massacring and driving out Albanians in Kosovo, and refused to back down despite repeated attempts to solve the problem diplomatically - I feel that armed involvement on humanitarian grounds was justified there.

But the way it was actually done, bombing civilian or dual use targets with significant collateral damage (esp. that bridge bombing that got the train, and pretty much all the bombs dropped on Belgrade), was not good at all. And, of course, once Serbian military and paramilitary withdrew from Kosovo, KLA and sympathetic locals have simply turned the tables and started burning down Orthodox churches and attacking Serbs - and that was simply ignored.

OTOH, if NATO didn't intervene, how many civilian Albanians would have died? I don't know, but I suspect it would have been even worse (even just looking at it from a cold hard numbers perspective, as Kosovo has more Albanians than Serbs).

Are you aware of the events of that day immediately leading to the massacre? There is a lot of mythology surrounding that whole thing, Unlike many people who get the picture mainly from Russian agitprop imagine it, it wasn't just a spontaneous "hey, let's go kill some separatists" kind of thing.

To remind, the event started with a demonstration/rally of anti-separatists through the city - that one was peaceful (i.e. they didn't intentionally seek out anyone to attack), but had some people armed, mostly with sticks, baseball bats and such, on the basis that they wanted something to defend themselves if attacked. The local Antimaidan has decided that they want to counter that show of force with their own, and prepared another column that was deliberately sent on an intercept route, and started attacking the demonstration when they met.

So it began as a stones-and-sticks fight that was initiated by Antimaidan, and then gradually escalated from there. If you watch some of the videos from earlier that day, you can see Antimaidan fighters using firearms, and being covered by the riot police using their shields while doing so (i.e. the police was seemingly aligned with them without going all the way in). Here are two videos capturing the same event from two different angles - you can clearly see a fat guy with an AK (or, more likely, Saiga) firing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

You can tell that this is filmed from the Antimaidan side because they're all wearing red armbands without any black, and some of them are wearing striped orange/black ribbons.

Consequently, the first dead body of that day (with a bullet wound) was one of the pro-Maidan demonstrators. Several more followed. From there it escalated as pro-Maidan activists have called for more support, and that has arrived with firearms as well.

Obviously, nothing quite like being shot at and seeing people die around you to wind up a mob. So when their numerical superiority forced the Antimaidan guys to disperse, the crowd decided to "teach them a lesson", and headed to the Antimaidan tent camp at the Trade Union Building to dismantle it. The camp got a warning well in advance, and, for the most part, dispersed, but some people decided to make a stand in the building. More fire was exchanged from both sides:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Several more people died in that firefight. The crowd, meanwhile, started lobbing molotov cocktails at the building, mostly at the lower levels where they could actually reach. As windows and main doors on the ground floor were barricaded with wood and tires, they quickly caught fire, and soon the entire ground floor was engulfed, cutting off access, though some people inside managed to escape from the back windows. Then the fire started to overtake higher floors one by one, and those still inside were trapped - some jumping out of the windows, others choking to death.

On the pro-Maidan side, the ugly part was that some of those who jumped were beaten up as they were lying on the ground. Though that was by no means universal - some people wanted blood, others rushed in to give aid. Either way, by the time it came to this, it was mostly too late, because there was no way to escape other than jumping, and it was too high to be safe to jump.

So all in all, the events in Odessa, while tragic, don't really have much in common with a premeditated massacre. It was a very unfortunate sequence of events, that escalated largely thanks to Antimaidan (and possibly even more because of police assistance to them), and resulted in two enraged mobs clashing, and the larger one "winning" - but that was not treated as common or routine by anyone involved, and nothing like that has repeated since then.

I'm also well aware that some Ukrainian troops are committing war crimes while fighting separatists. Of course, separatists themselves are also routinely committing war crimes (have you seen the video of the mass grave they excavated after the liberation of Slavyansk?). I'm not particularly fond of the neo-Nazi National Guard batallions like "Azov", and think that their formation was a mistake - and convict batallions like "Shakhtarsk" were an even bigger mistake (but they found that out pretty fast when it was showered with complaints about looting, and consequently disbanded).

To remind, though, Azov is less than a thousand troops out of 30,000 (if I remember correctly) fighting, and most of the rest aren't hardline nationalists or convicts, nor have they been observed to be engaging in inappropriate conduct.

OTOH, on the separatist side, there's plenty of stomach-turning personalities and units, as well. Milchakov and his "Rusich", for example, or the now-dead "Batman". I have also directly communicated with some people who fought there on separatist side, and who espouse national socialist or other extreme nationalist ideologies. Then there are the Antratsit cossacks, who are their own brand of batshit crazy (not dissimilar to the extreme right-wing in USA, actually).

The problem is that separatists seem to be elevating some bits of this stuff to the level of their official ideology - most notably, this entire "Russian World" business, militant Orthodoxy, and disdain towards democracy and liberalism in general. OTOH, on the Ukrainian side, it is relegated to "Azov", "Right Sector" etc, who are neither the majority nor have a strong voice in the government, and who got quite a spanking from the populace during the elections. So, as a flaming liberal, I feel like betting on Ukraine is more appropriate - while noting that they're still far from perfect in that regard.

Frankly, this is mostly there for the purpose of trolling my compatriots. I don't think that either most Ukrainians who use the phrase, or most Russians who hear it, actually make any connection to its original use by OUN/UPA, and the relevance of the Volyn massacre. For Ukrainians, the "heroes" in question are first and foremost those on Maidan; I know quite a few people who treat it that way, and are not at all fond of Bandera, Shukhevich or Melnik.

As it happens, I am a middle-class Russian :) By the time the purges happened in the USSR, most small businesses were already dead. They were going after people primarily based on their espoused ideology (if public - religion also falls under this), or else ancestry. Basically, if you were nobility by birth, or your daddy was a factory owner, tough shit. Of course, by 30s it all devolved into a random free-for-all - tag a man and they would find a reason. My grandmother's first husband perished like that.

And yes, the "business is evil" popular attitude is alive and well even today, and is applied pretty broadly. My mother used to be a small business owner in Russia, and she got sick and tired of it and sold everything off partly because of that, and partly because of bureaucrats soliciting bribes (though in many cases it would overlap - a bureaucrat would, for example, justify the bribe as "wealth transfer from you greedy leeches" on one occasion).

I think part of it was because of the association between business, capitalism and democracy that happened in the 90s. Basically, from 1994 onwards, there was a lot of hate directed at Yeltsin's government because of how shitty the economy grew, and how low the quality of life sank. Yet that very same government consistently emphasized its commitment to democracy and capitalism as part of its official propaganda. As a result, both concepts were tainted by association, and even today, for many, "democracy" is a swear word.

Yeah, yeah. We've heard this before. Back in the day, people were saying the same things about those new-fangled "for" and "while" loops. After all, we want our code to be comprehensible! A loop doesn't do anything for me that I can't do with a goto, and at least I can see instantly, "yep, that's a control flow transfer!".

Meanwhile, people have embraced the new tools (which are the majority outside of the Java land - even the C++ guys have and use lambdas now), and they became idiomatic, and standard libraries were upgraded to rely on them - making them both more powerful and easier to read. As it happens, I use both C# and C++, and it's a rare day at work that I don't use a lambda anywhere. Looking at other people's [quality] code, it's mostly similar. And guess what? It's all still perfectly readable, so long as you take some time and learn how it works. In most cases, in fact, it's more readable than the code that it replaced, and more maintainable to boot (because DRY).

I was referring mostly to type erasure, obviously. How does getting read of that negatively impact maintainability?

In the meantime, Java now has this beauty. Because they can't just say Func<T>, and have it work well for primitive types.

If you don't have first-class functions in a language, you'll be doing a lot of of DRY for that reason alone (yes, you can use anon classes instead, but no-one actually does because it's so verbose it defeats the point). If I have to explain how and why that works, then you should probably go read some FP tutorial.

You think wrong, and you didn't bother to investigate enough to make such a conclusion. This was kinda sorta true 14 years ago. It's not true now. Things that C# has that Java does not include e.g. dynamic and async/await, neither of which are "very minor ways".

It's kinda like the iOS app store. Sure, it has 3 million apps, but in practice you need maybe 30 for any particular case, and 300 across everything. I won't dispute that Java has more libraries, but pretty much any mainstream language/platform these days, including .NET, has all the libraries that matter, for the simple reason that all of them have a fairly large community that will write or wrap one if they need it. I don't recall ever running into a situation where I couldn't find a library to do something that I needed to do, in any popular language.

I don't know when was the last time you went to Microsoft, but practically anything that Microsoft puts on the web for the past ten years is written in ASP.NET, or, lately, ASP.NET MVC.

When USA helped Albanians secede, said "democratic government" wasn't exactly democratic, and it was actively killing those very Albanians.

Meanwhile, nothing of a kind happened in Ukraine.

But, in any case, I think that the way Kosovo was handled was a mistake.

Sorry, that was my fault for confusing the threads. Obviously Ukraine is not a NATO country.

So far as I know, though, NATO is not involved there in any official way. All the "boots on the ground" are American, and represent US directly, sidestepping NATO.

How is deploying NATO troops to NATO countries overstepping the NATO mandate?

I assume you're talking about the modern incarnation of VB here (i.e. the managed one, what used to be called VB.NET), since the other kind is now ancient history and has been for a long time.

It can scale just as well as any other statically typed .NET language. Like, say, C#

Not true. All the VS IDE bits that are specifically related to VB are written in VB. There are fewer of them now that it's all based on Roslyn, but it's still there. A lot of generic WinForms-related stuff is also in VB.