Your comment will be down-voted into oblivion after a few hours.

Try 20 minutes. It went up to +5 Interesting almost immediately. Now it's at zero. What's hilarious is the stream of comments on these stories claiming that Russia is manipulating online forums. All I see is that right now anyone questioning the western party line is immediately zerod out so nobody sees it. I don't think that's because of cunning governmental manipulation though. I think people are just desperate for the old days when they could feel like they were the good guys in a fight of "good vs evil". Whacking Muslims in the desert just doesn't feel as awesome as a good old fashioned America vs Russia showdown.

It seems all governments do that at the moment. The USA even does so publicly.

Regardless, if you believe anyone who merely questions the obvious propaganda being bandied about by both sides is a paid employee of The Other Side then you're delusional. I'm hardly anonymous on this forum and my account dates back I'd guess about 13-14 years. The Guardian comment made claims that made me curious and is, at minimum, merely repeating claims made in other news outlets, which is worthy of exploration by itself.

Not sure why you think it's the "other side of the story”. It has nothing to do with the story. Some elements of the Ukraine military may be defecting AND Russia may be invading. These are not mutually exclusive claims.

That's absolutely correct, but if it's true that the Ukrainian army is so shaky then Poroshenko has every incentive to claim that his country is being invaded because he would desperately want western intervention to tip the balance.

The BBC and many other outlets have published NATO confirmations

And NATO is a guaranteed source of truth, because? Western militaries never ever have faulty intelligence? This is a military organisation that has always been in opposition to Russia. I'm not sure that's a "confirmation" any more than something announced by the separatists is. I don't trust either of them and neither should you. Perhaps Russia is invading. If it's a real invasion then we'll see soon enough.

Anyway, my "ludicrous claim" is simply what western media are reporting, including the BBC. Here's their story. It leads with "Ukraine's President Petro Poroshenko has accused Russia of deploying its troops in the east of his country" ... which is exactly what I said the Slashdot story wasn't claiming but should.

Arming Afghanistan wasn't the problem. Arming them in secret (so most of the population had no idea that the USA was spending half a billion dollars a year on helping them fight the USSR and felt abandoned) and then cutting off the money as soon as the USSR pulled out and leaving the country a mess, rather than helping to rebuild schools and so on was the problem.

Wat?

I assume from your absurd statement that you consider invading Afghanistan and Iraq, then replacing their governments, is not "conquering"? Because ..... ? Because they installed a new government and then left, sorta, except they still routinely fly drones and air-strike anyone in those countries they see fit, which no truly independent country would tolerate.

Even if you use such a stupid definition of "conquer", you're attacking a straw man. I said invade, not conquer. It's indisputable that America has routinely invaded countries far away from their own borders over and over again. Any regime that boils down to "those who use military force against others gets sanctioned" would result in America being entirely cut off from the world economy for years. That clearly won't happen so this is just another case of American (and to some extent European) hypocrisy at work. Either do it consistently or don't do it at all. Preferably not at all - sanctions are based on the idea that punishing huge swathes of ordinary citizens on both sides will somehow bring about political change. How many people really believe the people are in charge of their governments foreign policies in countries like the USA?

If they wish to engage to aggression against other country's sovereignty, they should do it without the rest of the world helping fund them.

Better be careful what you wish for. If the rest of the world applied that standard to the USA and UK they'd have nobody to buy their bonds at all. You don't want China deciding to flex their economic muscles by playing with the bond market next time America invades some random country, do you?

Cutting off the flow of gas would hurt Europe a lot more than it would hurt Russia at this point. Entering the winter with your largest gas supplier no longer providing you with the gas that you use for heating would suck. And as gas is fungible, it doesn't matter to Russia if we stop buying it from them, unless everyone else stops buying it from them - if China doesn't join in with the boycott then it just means that they'll be buying more has from Russia because the price of everyone else's gas will go up.

Given that all our leaders in both the west and Russia are pathological liars, I'm always interested to find the other side of the story. Not that our media makes it easy.

This slashdot story reports what's happening as fact. But as far as I can tell what we have is actually only quotes from Kiev, the same people who have been claiming that Russia was invading for weeks. The same people who claimed that a convoy of aid was actually full of soldiers and military equipment, even after it was repeatedly spot checked by journalists and found to contain exactly what Russia claimed it did (food and aid). This is coming just days after Poroshenko dissolved his Parliament, there were apparently rising protests against conscription into the Ukrainian army, and the separatists were able to make progress.

Just to make things even more complicated: simultaneous with the claim that Russian troops are crossing into Ukraine, RT is claiming that Ukrainian troops crossed into Russia, in order to defect, and the Ukranian government admits this.

This comment on the Guardian story (which incidentally is much less biased than this Slashdot article and presents this as an accusation by Kiev) is what got me to look for these stories and I think interesting enough to quote in full:

Nothing really to explain. Ukraine troops, left without leadership and provisions, have been deserting and losing ground all week. Now that people are demonstrating in Kiev calling for Poroshenko's resignation, he's calling invasion.

- Close to 2,000 Ukraine combatants have put down their guns and asked for asylum in Russia.
- In the last 4 or 5 days, the DPR army has encircled and captured more than 7,000 troops, and all the hardware they possessed.
- On the 24th we all saw thousands of these defeated troops marched through Donesk city centre.

Now they have close to 80 tanks, and various other armored vehicles, all acquired from defeated Ukraine troops, and are sweeping over eastern Ukraine.

Poroshenko was given billions of dollars, and some how failed to pay pensions, salaries, or to send adequate supplies to the forces. He's losing this war, that's all.

I'm not that old, but I work with quite a lot of people who are older than you at various big companies. They're all exceedingly competent. I suspect that's part of the problem for the grandparent: the older you are, the greater the expectations. If you're as competent at 45 as someone else at 25, then people start to wonder how you've managed to work for 20 without gaining more insight. If you hire a competent 25 year old, then there's a good chance that they'll mature and improve over the next 5-10 years. If you hire someone who has only achieved the same level of competence by the time that they're 45, then they don't look like such a good investment.

Indeed, which is why, when I talk to kids about math in school, one of the things I like to point out is that while statistics are, in general, rather boring, it's really important to learn enough to have at least a chance of recognizing when they're being used to lie to you. This argument gets through to a suprising number of them.

I understand why 64 bit can improve performance on x86 platforms because the 64-bit transition also rolled in other improvements like more registers.

I understand why 64 bit can improve the performance of security mitigations by making guessed addresses more likely to result in a controlled crash rather than arbitrary memory scribbling.

I cannot think of any reason why switching to 64 bit builds should halve the crash rate, unless this is just a side effect of 64 bit hardware being newer and less crappy overall. Can anyone else explain this to me?

What high-level language does not depend on the C standard library and so would be suitable for implementing the C standard library?

It is possible, but for good performance it needs hardware support. We've implemented hardware-enforced bounds checking for C code using our processor. If you only care about accidental bugs and not about a malicious attacker, and don't use threads (or are happy to bound every pointer store with a transactional region), and don't mind that the semantics of C are subtly broken in the kinds of permitted pointer operations, then Intel's Memory Protection Extensions will do the same thing.

The OpenBSD philosophy says that the difference between a bug and a vulnerability is the intelligence of the attacker. There are lots of categories of bugs (null pointer dereferences, integer overflows) that were thought to be unexploitable, right up until someone exploited them. It's the same as with cryptosystems: the fact that you can't break your encryption algorithm doesn't mean that it's secure.