The scientist and his lawyer suspect foul play by anonymous person(s) who allegedly defamed him by posting ad hominem attacks in their pubpeer comments and then distributed those comment pages to both universities associated with him.
Any criticism of his work should be valid and fact based and that should be enforced by the site's moderators.
I am reading through the comments related to his papers on pubpeer. I haven't found any personal attacks. May be there are some in the comments I have not read yet. However, what I find is a number of papers with blatantly manipulated images, use of the same image to represent different experiments in different papers and even a combination of the two. His defamation lawsuit has no legs and the university has every right to rescind its offer. In fact they would have been complicit if they did not do so. I predict that Dr. Sarkar's next discovery will be the Streisand effect.
Actually, the biggest impact of sanctions has been European farmers.
They tried to bypass sanction by selling to Austria, who would then sell on to Russia. The Russians spotting the scam denied entry (Austria is not known for producing oranges).
The farmers were compensated by the EU. But rather than give the food to some needy Greeks, the food was destroyed.
Quick geography lesson. Austria is in Europe (smack in the middle of it) and is part of the European Union. So your statement that somebody tried to go around the Russian food import ban by going through Austria is highly suspect. The way it is actually done is to go through Belarus. Russia is now importing beef from Belarus, which coincidentally is importing cattle from EU (technically the beef is produced in Belarus, as this is the place the cattle gets chopped up). Somewhat more absurd is the sudden appearance in Russian stores of shrimps originating from Belarus (Belarus is a land locked country). So yeah, if there is a ban there will always be somebody to make money by going around them. The thing is that the Russians will be the ones paying the bill.
Ammonia as a fuel checklist:
For those of you not familiar with ammonia synthesis, we make it by reacting nitrogen with hydrogen under high pressure and temperature. The predominant sources of hydrogen these days are natural gas and oil. So, why do we need to go trough all this trouble if we can burn the natural gas in the existing car engines? Have we really run out of stupid fuel sources so we have to consider ammonia?
In terms of economic impact on US it is pretty toothless. ULA has already stated that they have two year supply of RD-180 engines and that they are perfectly capable of manufacturing the engines themselves. The reasons for buying these engines from Russia are mostly political - US supports Russian engineers so they don't go and build rockets in Iran. On the other hand Elon Musk must be laughing out loud. The Russians just created the perfect political environment for the congress to act and allow SpaceX to compete with ULA for military satellite launches, something that only few days back was made impossible by a court decision. Good job Ruskies, you just open the door for your most aggressive competitor.
As far as the shutting down GPS ground stations in Russia goes, this will only impact the accuracy of the system on Russian territory. So the only way somebody in US may feel pain is if they fall off their chairs laughing.
What's worse is that many of those same CEOs rarely focused/productive themselves.
There, fixed that for you.
Instead I want to set up one test machine for users to try it and ask THEM if they like it.
This experiment will have a predetermined outcome: the users will not going to like it (if they even bother to try it) because its is different. Don't do it unless you realy need an excuse not to transition to linux.
If I were you I would do a gradual change:
As far as distro's come, the obvious choice is to do it with the distro that you are most familiar with. Alternatively use a distro that will be supported for years to come, even if you are no longer with the company.
Business is a good game -- lots of competition and minimum of rules. You keep score with money. -- Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari