Even the manpads that can't reach that altitude aren't the sort of thing you can buy easily on the black market. If it was then we wouldn't be hearing about people dying to barrel bombs in Syria because the helicopters chucking them out would be easy pickings.

Similarly, we'd likely have had terrorist incidents of terrorists shooting down airliners on landing or take off with them.

The fact we haven't speaks volumes as to how obviously supplied by Russia this kit is. The closest we've seen of even manpads used after black market sales is a few stinger launches in Afghanistan against NATO aircraft and even these are likely just the one or two stingers given to the Mujahideen in the 80s to fight the soviets whose batteries still just about worked.

A large part the reason this kit doesn't appear on the black market more prominently is because it has a shelf life, the missiles and batteries have to be maintained/replaced, so even if you do leak one it's only good for a short while. Hence why the Ukrainian military helos shot down by manpads were almost certainly shot down by manpads given to the separatists directly from the Russian government, because there were a number of them and they were all obviously in perfect working order. You just don't get that kind of haul of manpads anywhere other than from a nation state - again, if you did, then the Taliban and Al Qaeda would've been having a field day against NATO aircraft in Iraq/Afghanistan, against Syrian aircraft in Syria, and against Gaddaffi's forces in the Libyan civil war.

He was also democratically removed. Whilst a majority of 75% is needed under Ukrainian law to pass the actual impeachment, before that can be done there must be an investigation into whether he has committed an impeachable offence. A majority (73%) of elected representatives voted to start impeachment procedures - i.e. investigation into whether he has done something that makes him liable for impeachment. Rather than face that investigation he decided to resign, flee to Russia, then once in Russia, try and "un-resign" which isn't a thing you can do.

"Are you so sure that his pro-EU replacement was democratically elected?"

Yes, because there were international monitors in every region that the rebels weren't blocking elections, and where the rebels were blocking elections the number of people who could vote wasn't high enough to change the outcome anyway. These were actual international monitors who provide transparency so that their work can be properly verified, as opposed to the far-right monitors Putin used to rubber stamp the Crimean referendum for which there was no verifiability too.

The problem isn't that Yanukovych was democratically elected, most Ukrainians accept he was. The problem is that he was democratically elected after years of his opposition being destroyed by Russia to make sure he was the only viable candidate. Effectively he was elected because they'd been left with no other choice - elimination of other candidates ranges from poisoning, to Russia screwing the previous leader, Yulia Tymoschenko on gas deals leaving her no choice but to either sign or face more cutoffs then when she was kicked out of office, they used this to jail her claiming she overpaid wasting state funds as if she had some kind of choice.

So the issue isn't that Yanukovych was democratically elected, we all know he was, he was just elected in the face of no serious opposition due to a decade of Russian interference ranging from assassination attempts to defamation. The issue is that the majority of the public got absolutely fed up after only a few years of him because he was exactly as they expected - a corrupt puppet of Putin and as a result, he decided to resign in the face of protests that triggered the start of the impeachment process against him by a massive majority of elected representatives.

There was nothing undemocratic about Yanukovych's ousting whatever Putin might tell you. The ability to oust incompetent or corrupt leaders is as much part of the democratic process as election of them in the first place - when you're elected you're not guaranteed immunity for an entire term, you still have responsibilities and can still be held accountable, and he was, which is why he legged it.

I don't think black box data will be much use, they were shipped out to Russia within hours of the crash, Alexander Borodai, a Russian national, normally a resident of Moscow and political leader of the "rebels" claims he has them and is waiting for the ICAO to turn up so he can hand them over, except the ICAO can't turn up because his soldiers are blocking them from doing so. The Russians/Rebels are very clearly stalling the handover (they've also been caught removing bits of aircraft and a number of the dead who showed evidence of damage/wounds that would be caused by Buk missile fragmentation FWIW so the whole crash site has become a forensic nightmare in that regard).

So the chain of custody of flight recorders now makes them utterly useless for determining anything worthwhile. To be useful they'd have had to have been left in the exact spot they fell until international investigators showed up to properly document their locations and to set up a proper chain of custody.

Speculation is that Russia would easily enough be able to remove some flight data to make it look like the last location pings from the aircraft came further back to the west than where the aircraft was actually shot down so that they can try and pin it on the Ukrainian military.

I'm intrigued after MH370 whether MH17 was relaying it's satellite locations though given that the company that handles that said they'd offer it for free. I expect an interesting blame game and arguments about tampering to come up if the temporary Russian held black box data mysteriously does end earlier than the satellite data held by Inmarsat in the UK. I'm sure Putin and his cronies will be accusing Inmarsat of making up data when the reverse is true - that if Putin and his soldiers in Ukraine had nothing to hide they wouldn't be fiddling with evidence, removing bodies, running off with the black boxes, and blockading international investigators.

Nonsense. For example, if you voted for Ross Perot, you're directly responsible for the Republicans losing the White House.

That's silly - exit polls showed more Perot voters would have otherwise voted for Clinton than for Bush.

Either go back to your government as intended; that is to say, without political parties, or accept the fact that there are, in fact, political parties, and change your government setup to work with that.

That right there, though, is some good stuff.

ICANN always argued that regulation / enforcement / policing of the registrars was not their job in response to complaints about many registrar's activities

Even if the activities are illegal (statute or Common Law)? If not ICANN, than who else? This is one of the problems with giving ICANN a monopoly.

"60 day hold/no registrar transfer period" after you renew your domain or change the name of any of your WHOIS contacts

Is that not disclosed in their Terms of Service or is it more like, "big boobs on TV so I didn't bother to read the agreement"?

Not saying it's not scummy, but scummy and fraud are different. If it's not in their ToS but they do it anyway, it's probably illegal as unlawful holding of property (some courts in some jurisdictions have recognized domains as property). Regardless, experienced ski instructors usually advise you're gonna have a bad time if you register with GoDaddy.

Also, for those that don't know, they've been doing this for ten years and ICANN bothered to do something about it a decade or so after their peak.

Up to you whether you think this is good governance or not.

Great generation defeated Nazis, landed on the moon; Baby Boomer generation built Internet and tackled racial and gender issues. What are we doing other that building surveillance state and wealth inequality?

We're trying to deal with the surveillance state and the wealth inequality that was produced by the system the "Greatest" generation created. Likely several generations will be required to dig out from under it.

I don't have hard data yet, but I'm finding that EL7 is much much faster than EL6 on the same hardware for the workloads I've tried so far.

I don't know that tuned is most responsible, but I can see that it's running and that's what it's supposed to do.

I realize that the kernel is better and perhaps XFS helps, but those alone seem insufficient to realize the difference.

Anyway, it's somewhat along the direction people are talking about, even if only minimally.

It might cause a few deaths but it also sustains the multi billion dollar prison industry and employs well over 1 million people in the US alone

None of those jobs help the economy. Why should people be employed in occupations that have no benefit to society whatever and are in fact detrimental to society?

The government profits from illegal drugs even more than drug cartels do.

Colorado's pot legalization and the multi-billion dollar alcohol industry shows that governments profit a lot more from legal, regulated drugs than outlawing them.

I've known drug addicts, and the WHO is also right about compulsory addiction treatment; compulsory treatment flat out doesn't work. The addict has to want to stop, and it's very hard even when they want to. Alcoholics and other drug addicts relapse more often than not after treatment.

However, should they ever invent the fictional drug in the novel I'm writing (see my journal, the first crude draft is being posted there) I sure hope it's not legal!

No, this is the old "Reefer Madness" mentality, meant to make happy both the Puritans and the prison profiteers while keeping the politicians in an elevated state of power.

What actually happens, and Portugal ran this experiment with a sample size of over 8 million people during the past decade, is that when drug use is decriminalized, the usage rate quickly falls to about half.

Most of those are people who are no longer afraid to seek treatment. Some are folks who wind up court-ordered to get treatment, and a few were drug users who were only doing it because drugs seemed cool because they were illegal.

At the end, though, the incontrovertible fact is that the community has half the number of drug users as it did under Prohibition. Prohibitionists are responsible for a doubling of the drug usage rate in the community. Does that seem counter-intuitive? So what? The data is in.

I don't know exactly how these identification systems work, but I presume they have to be pre-loaded with known radar/electronic signatures to be able to offer any form of reasonable identification.

This launcher is likely older than the Boeing 777 (as it's a 70s/80s design, whilst the 777 didn't fly until the 90s) and so if it's not been kept uptodate it's possible also that not knowing what the fuck a Boeing 777 was it assumed it was something like an AN24.

That is basically the impression it gave, but Churchill was also competent enough to not make it publicly clear when addressing people about grave events.