It's Russia. The Soviet Union was, basically, Russia (even if ruled by a Georgian for a long time). There's too much continuity in the policies. Putin, like Nicholas and Stalin before him, wants to be, functionally, Tsar.

Ukraine is not a member of NATO. So far, Russia hasn't attacked a NATO member, although they've rattled their sabers at Latvia. There's a firm line, but Putin isn't crossing it yet.

Does that mean they're not covered by the Hague and Geneva Conventions, and should be treated as criminals?

Remember the old saying (slightly modified for modern times): If you owe the bank a million dollars, you've got a problem. If you owe the bank a billion dollars, they've got a problem.

I'm just impressed that Putin thinks it worth putting that many astroturfers into Slashdot. You'd think he respected us or something.

I really admire your ability to translate diplomatese.

I believe that Iraq and Ukraine have demonstrated that it's safer for a relatively small (i.e., lots smaller than the US, China, or Russia) country to have nuclear weapons. I don't think that's the message Bush and Putin wanted to send.

The US has occupied Soviet territory. It's not well known over here, but during the Russian Civil War various countries occupied various areas (mostly with easy sea access), and the Russians tend to know it.

Moreover, the Soviet Union strongly supported North Korea, supplying a lot of military materiel, and providing not only aircraft but pilots. The air war over Korea was largely a shooting war between the Soviets and the US. If we were to send air forces to the Ukraine, changing uniforms and plane markings, while providing tanks and other such things, that would be the equivalent.

I think it'd be a good idea to send small numbers of US troops to some of our NATO allies for long-term exercises and knowledge transfer, particularly Latvia.

We can't economically isolate Russia. They're too big, and they have too much stuff people need.

One thing is awfully clear. If you're an Eastern European nation with even a handful of ethnic Russians in your territory, you have a serious problem.

After WWII, the countries to the east of Germany basically expelled their ethnic German population, after seeing Hitler use such ethnic Germans as excuses for invasion and conquest. I've seen estimates of over a million dead from this. (It's not real well covered in most WWII histories, and I've never dug into it.)

Putin seems to be asking for the same treatment of ethnic Russians.

Ah, somebody else who thinks it's a good idea to try to occupy Afghanistan long-term. Did you know that there's an entire academic and popular field devoted to figuring out what happened in the distant to recent past? It's called "history". Try it sometime.

Why an idiot? There's plenty of ways for an iOS app to fail to make money. Having Apple disapprove it is one, and there's lots of reasons why it might not sell on the store.

Also, all the complaints I see about Apple not allowing this app or pulling that one have the apps at least pushing the limits. Develop an app for iOS that is well within the Apple guidelines and they'll let it through. That approach has its limitations, but it is a viable business strategy.

The original BSD advertising clause required that a notice go in all advertisements, which goes beyond trademark law. The license without that clause is compatible with pretty much everything (including the GPL).

Trademark law recognizes trademarks, and controls when they can be used. It doesn't put any restrictions on any activity that doesn't use somebody's trademark, such as legitimately using somebody else's code. The idea is that, when somebody uses FireFox, they can assume that this is something the Mozilla Foundation considers their browser. Stick to FireFox and you can rely on it as much as you can rely on Mozilla. You could regard it as formalized anti-fraud law, in that it prevents somebody from illicitly benefiting from or trashing somebody else's reputation.

The whole IceWeasel affair looked to me very reasonable in itself. Debian wanted a FireFox-based browser, and they got one. Mozilla didn't want to be directly associated with it after Debian did whatever to it, and they weren't. What's wrong with that? Other than all the ranting.

While trademarks are usually considered intellectual property, they are actually good for the general public. They don't stop anybody from doing anything other than misrepresenting the origin of something.

For whatever reason, the laptop connected to the TV hardly ever fails to connect anymore. Nowadays, it seems that, when we turn on the TV and the laptop, it displays properly. Of course, sometimes it still requires being disconnected and reconnected a few times before it figures it out. I guess this Windows stuff still isn't ready for the consumer market.

Interesting thing about Carter - he worked extensively with nuclear reactors while in the Navy, under Rickover. He's got to be one of the prominent politicians most knowledgeable about the subject in my lifetime, and doubtless would be one of the most knowledgeable here if he posted on Slashdot. I assume that there were actual reasons behind his nuclear policies.

All fields adapt words to fit their needs. There is little scientific use for a word that means "proven" in the same meaning mathematics uses, so it gets adapted. (There are deductive theorems of great importance, of course, such as Noether's Theorem, which shows how symmetries imply conservation laws, but those tend to be the exception. Moreover, Noether's Theorem itself says nothing about the state of reality, only that (for example) if the laws of physics are the same from place to place momentum must be conserved.)

Similarly, baseball players will describe pitches in in physically impossible ways (there's no way a pitched ball can take a trajectory like falling off a table), but it partly reflects the foreshortened view of the trajectory and partly is an understandable way of communicating with fellow baseball players.