Soviet doctrine (and the broader Marxist doctrine) distinguishes between "personal property" and "private property". Things like furniture or car would be considered personal property, and hence okay. Land, means of (large-scale) production like workshops and factories etc, would be considered private property if owned, and that was banned. Houses and other things that straddled the line could be treated differently depending on the country and the era.

After the first revolution in February, 1917 (the one that saw the tsar abdicate), Russia became a capitalist republic. That lasted for 8 months.

After the second revolution in October, 1917, the power was in the hands of the soviets (councils) of workers and peasants, most of which were under Bolshevik control already.

In 1918, the power was very briefly (and largely nominally) exercised by the Constituent Assembly. It lasted for 13 hours before the Bolsheviks dissolved it.

By the end of 1918, Bolsheviks have purged the only remaining minority party that shared the power with them in the soviets, the left esers.

So, where do the "few years after the Russian revolution" come from?

They didn't call themselves communist. They had communist parties, which were ostensibly dedicated to the goal of achieving communism - eventually, sometime in the future.

As Soviet joke went, a party lecturer holding a class on dialectic materialism in a remote village said to the audience: "Cheer up, comrades! Communism is on the horizon!"

One of the peasants in the audience raises his hand and asks a question, "Comrade, what is a horizon?"

The lecturer answered, "A horizon is an imaginary line where the sky and the earth seems to meet, which always remains the same distance from us as we walk towards it."

None of those countries actually called themselves "communist", they were all "socialist". Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, for example. Communism, just as you say, was a label for a hypothetical future society that was just around the corner, kinda like fusion.

The one place where you'd see actual communist countries mentioned was in Soviet sci-fi. E.g. in Strugatsky brothers' Noon Universe, its early stages see an economic and scientific competition before the remainder of the Western world, headed by the USA, and the USCR - Union of Soviet Communist Republics - a result of the merger of all socialist states, with USSR and China as two cores, once communism was achieved in them.

Yup. The supreme irony is that capitalism did create the conditions for its own demise, as Marx predicted. Where he was wrong is the conditions themselves - he thought that communism would come first, and post-scarcity would only become feasible later. Turned out it's the other way around. Wait and see.

I have the world's slowest blu-ray player, an original Sony. BDP-S300, I think. It lacks both ethernet and performance. Sadly, the Raspberry Pi lacks SATA, which is what the unit uses to connect to the optical drive. That gives it hack value, though not with R-Pi. I'd probably have to shoehorn something Micro-ITX in there, or use a laptop motherboard, as the optical drive is smack in the center.

I've bought just one Blu-Ray movie because the player is so godawful slow and I have to use a crappy remote with it. Ideally I'd be able to run XBMC on Windows (XP or 7) on whatever I stuffed into the case, and then I could use the android remote app. Right now my entertainment system is a mk908 running Finless 1.4 or so and it leaves a lot to be desired. Playing discs is one of those things.

If you aren't already working on this, or don't already have a pretty good idea with at least a fair chance of succeeding, then you're probably not too smart if you decide to take this challenge on. So what? There are those who are working on solving this problem already. If they have the means to produce a product, they're already doing that. If not, then this will give them some money for production of prototypes for larger systems, and probably attract some investment dollars from Google.

These guys don't need smallpox, because they're doing just fine with plain old JDAMs and Tomahawks.

OTOH, when you're equally insane but don't have billions of dollars to piss off on making things go boom, you might start considering extreme but cheap options.

The company's H1B quota in 2009 was significantly affected by the layoffs. It will likely happen again next year.

It will also affect the ability to sponsor green cards.

There's no shortage of people who are literally insane in politics. Consider what happens if the "Caliphate" gets their hands on some samples.

I've re-read the article, and I couldn't find the part where she's talking about anything like that. Can you cite the relevant part?

Then you can't afford not to have a backup server and a development server. This point needs expansion :p

It can be disabled, but can you trust that they won't "accidentally" turn it back on with an update? If you must use Chrome, use Chromium instead. The only practical difference besides that it doesn't spy on you for Google is that you need to install a Flash player (if desired) manually.

Stupid objection the first: "This is worth a lot more than a million dollars."
Response:

Does Google own the intellectual property created during the competition?

No. Google is not requiring any IP or licenses be granted except a non-exclusive license to be used only for the purpose of testing the inverter and publicizing the prize. [...] However, in the spirit of advancing this power electronics community, Google may choose to make public some or all of the teamsâ(TM) high-level technical approach documents

Stupid objection the second: (something stupid about 12 volts)
Response:

Will be taking in 450 V DC power in series with a 10 Ω resistor
Must output 240 V, 60 Hz AC single phase power

I know that slashdotters don't RTFA, but seriously, all of you jaw-jacking about 12 volts or about how a million is chump change are a bunch of Useless McToolbags. STFU already.

It was a good place to hang a scanner, of course.

If your goal is to play games, the obvious answer is a better disk interface with some non-resetting RAM on it that you could use for a RRAD:. That's a lovely thing to have in your system.