And get uncensored news from buzzfeed

Don't get me wrong, Tor is a great enabler for countering censorship, etc... but advocating that these people need access to facebook and twitter? Honestly. Nobody needs that.

Has it ever occurred to you that of that many people living in Donetsk, your friendly propaganda machine could only handpick a few videos of this discontent as in comparison to far wider support that was shown in thousands upon thousands actively participating in setting up the original independence polls? Not voting for it mind you, SETTING THE THING UP.

Has it ever occurred to you that sheer mathematics of this dictate that reality is the exact opposite as your propaganda suggests, and that quoting a small minority, similar to quoting Tatar minority in Crimea is not dissimilar to quoting, for example, native Indian population quotes about US and Canada?

Has it ever occurred to you that if the reality in Eastern Ukraine was anything like what your propaganda machine is telling you, then judging by your infamous communist leader, Ukraine is massively against current leadership?

Welcome to slashdot. Where we are generally not as bad as average citizenry in terms of applied mathematics.

Entire middle scene. Start to finish. The elderly people that come for the food and water. The woman accusing everyone around. Everyone looking scared that someone will act. Old man lashing out and instantly getting subdued at Ukrainians soldier making a thinly veiled threat about "lives lost to capture your city".

That is how Vietnamese villagers behaved when US troops entered them. How people behaved when Nazi German SS troops came to look for Jews. And so on.

I'll just give it a rest. It's fairly obvious that you will not be bothered to even consider that world may not be fully evil and criminal on Russian side, and fully good and righteous on yours. You are in good company. Quite a few invested pundits in Europe and a whole lot more of the militaristic people in US share your world view. It's an easy view to take, it doesn't require you to think about reality and makes it really easy to feel superior.

In the same way it was really easy for nazis to feel superior. Ideology of inherent superiority does indeed make one completely insensitive to both suffering of demonized population (compare: gulags, concentration camps) as well as inherently supportive of the most insane suggestions and propaganda, as long as they feature the demonized population and leader in proper evil position (examples: Iraq invasion).

One other thing - appropriate training for flying a drone is not the same as for flying a plane. There is no need to have a class 2 medical to fly a drone, or a regular pilot's license. Being able to demonstrate stick-and-rudder skills is pointless when you're flying something with a keyboard and a mouse. Really the appropriate training would probably be about procedures and maintenance more than anything else, and there is no need for it to be expensive.

Requiring a conventional pilot's license to fly a drone is like the FBI requiring people investigating computer crimes to first prove themselves by apprehending drug dealers on the streets.

You're equating flying a $500 drone with a camera with being a professional engineer.

Did you know that if you hit a baseball and it goes the wrong way you could land it on the face of a driver going 70mph in a convertible and kill them? Does that mean that we should require $15k worth of training to operate a baseball bat? Heck, we allow people to buy guns which are outright designed with the primary purpose of killing people, and you don't need any training to legally operate one, or even to legally kill somebody with it in some circumstances.

Why not just have some common-sense rules to keep drones at low altitudes and away from airports, and allow for higher-altitude use with appropriate training and equipment. Heck, the FAA can't even get people to put ADS-B in their planes because they can't figure out how to regulate them in a way that doesn't make them cost a fortune, despite every giveaway cell phone in the country being more sophisticated (even feature phones).

The problem is that the FAA hasn't figured out how to regulate anything other than airliners, so they just try to turn everything into an airliner.

You're confusing compliance with safety.

Many FAA regulations could be argued as making the sky less safe.

Making $1000 worth of avionics cost $50k means that small airplanes don't use them, which means that pilots have less situational awareness. Why don't small planes have CatIII-capable ILS? We're talking about 1980s technology in many cases, and it is only expensive because of regulation. (And yes, I know there is more to Cat III than the hardware.)

There is no reason to restrict the operation of light drones below 1000 feet and away from major airports. They're about as capable of causing damage as baseballs are, and we don't require a private pilots's license to join the little league.

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!

Did GCHQ run out of ability to create new sock puppet accounts on slashdot or something?

Sounds to me like you're a victim of the attack that you claim Russians are target of, considering that I don't live in Russia, and haven't had any recent contact with anyone from the country (discounting occasionally reading some of their sites), and I have a very good understanding of the fact that most Ukrainians today live in a complete and tightly sealed propaganda construct. All it takes is to read some of the messages on Twitter as well as Ukrainian government's official statements to understand this simple fact.

Even here in the West, where we have always been a subject to fairly tight propaganda and self-sensorship of the media in interests of media owners, we have recently started to apply some serious critique to anything that comes from mouths of those who are pro-current Kiev government. Because they are so off the rails insane in their rhetoric, that no matter how our media would try to spin it, it wouldn't be believable to Western audience.

As a result, I can understand why your Russian relatives are more aware of the situation that you. You live in a propaganda bubble similar to that of propaganda bubble of wartime WW2 states in Europe, i.e. Great Britain, Germany and USSR. You are completely polarised, and pushed to be so invested in your view that you dismiss reality.

Such as the video noted earlier. To someone watching from the sidelines such as myself, the emotion on faces of those "liberated" people is obvious. It's fear. All encompassing, crippling fear. That's why you have reactions like woman going off the rocker to accuse everyone around her. That's what people who were deathly afraid of Stalin's commissars did in their villages during Holodomor in Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan for example.

To you, living in the complete propaganda bubble it was "happiness of being liberated". You are that disconnected from reality.

How many of us have tried to do something and wished we had (at least) a third hand?

I would pay a *lot* for a third hand, as I do a lot of my own construction work (building an interior into an old church we now live in.)

I can't even guess at the number of times I've had to wait until I had someone at my side to hold, turn, twist, drill, cut, brace, etc.

This stuff is great to hear. Love the idea of extra fingers.

Although it does put me strangely in mind of that scene in Heavy Metal where a robot, after having "done" a very sexy human female, spins his fingers around with a "whiiizzz", while commenting something on the order of "human woman love sex with mechanical assistance" lol

For most programmers, recursion seems to be a tool to completely -- but unpredictably -- blow out the stack. Cynical, I know, but that's been my experience.

Although I gotta tell ya, one of my favorite recursive things is a particular area fill routine for rectangular pixels. Simple and beautiful. Just elegant as all get out. Once I understood how it does what it does, it was like someone washed my mental windshield with Windex. That was a great day. :)

Yep. One of the things you discovered is that your school was one of the (many, many) schools that are horrible at teaching things, and in particular, math. Welcome to the real world. :)

So... how's your luck been in convincing employers (if you go that way) that your Coursera work is worthy of qualifying you for jobs?

I'm going to go with this:

The vast majority of programming is fairly simple manipulation of states and symbols, which are themselves a small subset of numbers. yes and no are 1 and 0, etc.

The way those manipulations work together quickly becomes very complex.

You can do a boatload of things with just that knowledge. Entire video games. Many types of process control and dedicated controllers. Most reasonable scripting jobs, most "webby" stuff, database stuff, etc.

But then adding some knowledge of math, in the purely technical sense, gives us more symbols to manipulate, and more ways to manipulate them, and this, like any major skills enhancement, definitely makes you a better programmer. Some mid-level math concepts -- very simple in nature, actually -- amplify what you can do so much it's just amazing.

I suspect -- I can't actually tell you because my math is only mediocre to fairly good, nor have I ever knowingly come in contact such a person -- that *really* advanced math skills combined with *really* advanced programming skills (which I can lay claim to) would combine to create a true monster programmer.

But...

I think there's something about the essentially concrete nature of programming, and the incredibly abstract nature of higher math, that makes these dual-facet powerhouses the rarest of the rare. In my experience -- admittedly, just one person's career -- serious math heads tend to be pretty lousy programmers. Lots of bugs, poor structure, little to no sensitivity to shortcuts and loading. Then really great programmers seem to be only sorta capable with math (although what they can do with what they have tends to be quite surprising.) Just an IMHO based on my experience. Something I've found interesting enough to contemplate many times. Having said that, I sure would like to meet Mr. or Ms. combination-o-both. :)