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Comment Re:Do I need a million examples instead of just on (Score 2) 206

Dude, I am Russian. There's no "nationalism" or "jingoism" angle in what I wrote, you're arguing with a strawman.

And yes, I would vastly prefer for my emails to be hosted in the US, for personal safety reasons. Not my own anymore - I'm already safely in US so I can wave a middle finger at the assholes in charge of ruining my home country - but my parents are still there, and they hold some, shall we say, unpopular political views. Which they don't blabber about in public, but now apparently it's not a good idea to do so in private email communications, as well.

Comment Re:Not all that new, but what is personal? (Score 4, Interesting) 206

This is completely different from EU directives. Those pertain to EU companies storing data. This one is about all companies storing data of Russian citizens. I am a Russian citizen residing abroad; by the letter of this law, if I create a GMail account, Google must host my inbox data on a server in Russia, even though neither of us two is there. If they do not comply, their servers will be blocked inside Russia.

This is not a privacy provision like EU directives are. It's about having the data on Russian soil, where it can be easily examined without a warrant, or even a notification that it is happening (see also: SORM-2).

Comment Re:Well, of course (Score 1) 361

They did believe it. My mother says that when she was in her 20s, she very much believed that she was living in the best country in the world. It took five years of Komsomol career to begin to notice the discrepancies in the message, and that largely because she got acquainted with some of the elite party kids and saw how they lived.

Comment Re:I call BS (Score 1) 185

The problem in this case is it was starting to go outside of the realms of fantasy. This guy was starting to buy torture devices off the internet, building restraining devices, using police databases in order to track the movements of his intended victims, and even hired himself out as a hit man to a third party.

But therein lies the rub - he claimed to have build all those devices, but none were actually found (definitely not where he said he built them). He claimed to have gotten a recipe for chloroform and used it to prepare some, but again, none was found and no signs of preparing it, either. He claimed to have a secluded place to torture his victims in, but it doesn't seem to exist. He hired himself out to kill one of the targets to another guy... except that nothing happened on the supposedly scheduled day of the first hit. Nor the second hit. Nor the third one - they have already moved on to another "target" by then.

So, really, it all does seem like an elaborate fantasy, albeit one fueled by his contact with real world people. The information that he gathered - which was really the only part where he acted on all this - seems to have been for the purpose of fueling the fantasy further; he didn't share any of it with his "accomplices", nor worked it into the "plans" that he made and posted.

Comment Re:Would be different (Score 1) 185

It's "very easy" to get your hands on a cache of firearms large enough to conduct a Mumbai style attack? Where exactly is it "easy" to do that? You can't go the legal route as a non-citizen.

What do you mean by "can't go the legal route"? I'm not a citizen - not even a green card holder, in fact - yet I possess over a dozen firearms, four of which are "assault weapons", all legally obtained and owned. It's actually pretty easy. This despite the fact that my state has extra licensing requirements for aliens above and beyond what the feds mandate.

Comment Re: Bullshit. (Score 1) 170

They are amendments because they amend the text of the Constitution. That is all. There's no magical effect associated with the word "amendment" otherwise. They override the previous meaning if their text says that they do.

An amendment that would say "Articles of Amendment 1 through 27 to the Constitution of the United States are hereby repealed" is perfectly valid, for example (provided that you can pass it, that is...).

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