This guy is not Russian. First of all, he is using the propaganda points that US is spreading in Russia, the fear that China will take part of their territory. It is one of the talking points. Second, he is making homophone mistakes (doubt -> dough) that only native speakers make or sometimes people who use english for 10-20 years or so and he is not making any of the grammar and preposition mistakes common for foreign speakers. It is sad to see our discussion here on slashdot tainted by spooks.

If we only provide value through synergies resulting from M&A activity, we will eventually end up with one large company spanning the entire state and will have the perfect example of communism :)

It's a third comment picking on the missing word "compiler" in my comment... "C compiler won't optimize"... geese. That seemed like a pretty clear thing... no comment edits on slashdot though :(

The thing is, if you use structures with bit fields, C will not optimize the manipulations with them correctly. So you end up doing a lot of hand-holding in driver development in C. You have to be very much aware of the code being produced. It is not uncommon that you check specific inner loop sections to see exactly how they are being compiled and then based on the result and number of instructions might need to rewrite the C part or even just insert the assembly code directly.

A lot of HW related companies use mostly just C. Any sort of small device development or most appliances (switches, storage, etc.) have software written in C. Any driver development, etc. It is still the language anyone can pretty much agree on.

She will oversee our merger with Canada.

Since US does not exist even those 500 years, let's look at what happened during the 250 that it exists: Continent wide Genocide of Native Americans, Slavery, Apartheid, Kukkluxklan, One major Civil War, Close to 100 covert CIA operations to change regime of other countries, Only country in history that used Nuclear Weapons on civilians. Want something more recent? Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, What about NSA having surveillance system that KGB openly envies? FBI collecting dossier on politicians for blackmail since its inception? Now this gets even better: 25% of world's prisoners or 2.2 million people in prison, that is 0.5 million more than China, which is considered a totalitarian state with repressive regime and has 4 times the population of US. Not just that, but 750,000 of those are usually for low level drug offenses like marihuana, which is safer than alcohol. Prohibition is a matter of policy, not public safety, so you can easily say that those are political prisoners. Still sitting on your high horse?

Well, there is hiring on merit for sure, but you can look at any major tech company chart and see that asian managers hire asians almost exclusively. We had one Indian VP, who made 20 consecutive hiring decisions and all hires were Indian, even if there would be 50% Indian engineers in the valley, the chance of this happening randomly is 1:1,000,000. The Chinese managers often hire Chinese not based on racism though, but the language difficulty. A lot of the brilliant Chinese engineers I worked with had english difficulties, if interviewed in english you'd think they cannot count to 5, but when later interviewed in Mandarin, they looked like genius. So you can see some amount of racism, but its mixed bag.

And yes, we only had one black guy out of about 100, which is very low. But he was hired definitely on merit. One of the two best engineers we ever hired.

France indeed has its hay day in the past, although they made up for it in 16th to 19th century. England ... you should talk to the Irish and Scottish and Welsh citizens. If someone cleans up their act for 50 years, after centuries of horrible repression, I'd say they are not quite reformed yet. US, I think you might check with the immigrants for current situation, check with gays for anything up to 5 years ago and with women and blacks for anything up to 50 years ago. People tend to forget some horrible abuses quite quickly it seems. I should have added Germany, Austria, Japan and China to the mix, but they are sort of obvious.

The point is that you have places like Iceland, Danemark, some countries in Central Europe, like Switzerland and to some extent Poland, Slovakia, Czech Republic, maybe even Hungary, if you ascribe the communists to Russian influence and many others where things like slavery, oppression, wars of conquest, are simply not on the menu for 500 years or so. There are places where people are kinder and peaceful by nature.

Exactly this. So now that you have been critical of US, I would advise against traveling anywhere in middle east, Russia or China or to visit any mosque. If you avoid those things, you should be still fine. Otherwise, welcome to the watchlist. It is a select group of fine individuals. Maybe we should make badges for ourselves.

You see ... that is the thing.. no. Some countries, like US, England, Spain, France, Russia have a much richer history of oppressing both citizens and other countries than others. It seems to be a trait that concentrates into some tight areas of general assholery.

Yes. Every online service should have this option. I would even require it by law. I don't mind to pay for my privacy and my time. This was my main gripe with Hulu for example. There has to be price that will make it worth it for them not to show me ads. I want them to take my money, but no... there is no option of that. So I am not customer. No service without this option would have me as a customer.

If you don't pay, you are the product.

That simply sounds like some journalist does not understand that there could be a world of difference between 1.7% and 1.9% for example and rounds both to 2%.

But this would show either in the way neanderthal DNA fragments in the present day humans. If these fragmentations occurred at different times, the present day DNA would be fragmented differently in different present day samples. Since that is not the case, either it happened in one period or the second case never merged again with the current lines, rendering that irrelevant to present day humans.