Didn't say it was. I just said NASA should abandon it to whomever wants to pay to keep it operating. Prettty sure its past its original end of life anyway which I think was 2010.

If Russia doesn't want to play nice, or pay to run it themselves, I doubt ESA, Canada or Japan will be able to keep it going if the U.S. pulls out.

> so MP3 would fail.

That's correct. So what?

MP3 was never a good compression algorithm. It's an audio format that uses a normalization that cause SOME audio to be lossy. It's a great demonstration on how a negligible loss across a wide range of audio could result in a more useful algorithm for sound (it's quite compact). MP3 is not a good compression algorithm and doesn't see a lot of use outside of commodity audio, where you can afford to throw away data.

It's true that it is unique. Russians themselves say that St. Petersburg is half russian and half european. But I've also got russian friends I talk to, who are from Moscow, from small villages near the Ural mountains and other places within Russia.

You assume I was a tourist. I wasn't.

Russia is a huge country - the biggest on earth, in fact - and of course there are large differences between the various areas. I was in St. Petersburg as I said. It's probably one of the richer areas.

Russians don't care as much as we do. They separate private and business life a lot more strongly, from what I gather. Of course there's a lot of propaganda involved as well.

But you totally ignored that main argument I made. That no matter what you see Russia as today, compared to the very recent past it has improved dramatically, and those improvements started with Putin taking office. Whether its true or not, a lot of people see a connection.

Except for two world wars, a totally changed global economical and political environment and, oh yes, the EU itself.

At the beginning of the 20th century, Europe was a mess of countries all out for blood, with century-old hatreds and politicians just waiting for an opportunity to start a war. Which is kind of exactly what happened just a few years into the 20th century.

Yeah... it would be absolutely the same... keep dreaming.

Yeah, hindsight is fun. Since Zorro is four years (and change) newer than the ISA bus, there was plenty of it to go around when it was created.

No wonder there's so much shitty software being thrown out. People are too stoned or drugged up to have any idea of what they're doing and as a result we get crap such as Windows 8 or the near-monthly Facebook "updates".

But hey, drugs are cool and in no way should the deaths of Philip Seymour Hoffman, Peaches Geldoff, Cory Monteith, Heath Ledger, Dee Dee Ramone and a whole slew of other folks who felt being high was so great that they didn't care if they killed themselves in the process.

Unfortunately we'll have to keep hearing about how poor [insert name] died, how they were a good person and blah, blah, blah.

Fuck that. You think drugs are cool and being high is the thing to do, go for it. Just don't expect the rest of us to give a shit when you're found face down in your home.

Wah wah wah. Oh no, let's not have this rubbed in our faces. As long as a nation is still producing holocaust deniers, it badly needs some face-rubbing. Nobody really cares if you will feel defensive.

NuBus was horrendously expensive and fragile, with orders of magnitude less insertion cycles than a cardedge connector. MCA had configuration floppies. ISA was a great bus for a computer of the day, before users needed more bus bandwidth.

[citation needed]

You're still looking at a higher price tag than just buying a Mikrotik Routerboard used on eBay. If your goal is to get a router it's a goofy thing to buy.

I agree with your main point, btw.

However, both on paper and from real-world experience, I dare to say that the judicative is the least troubled arm.

In most of Europe, the legislative and executive are pretty much identical and that bothers me to no end. Parliament passes laws and parliament elects the executive, and all the executives (ministers, etc.) are also members of parliament. These two arms are not seperated at all. The USA has the better system there, even though it is still imperfect in that the same parties exist in both.

If I were to re-write the political rules, I'd seperate the arms completely and make a law that political parties can be active in either the executive or the legistlative election processes, but not in both and any attempt to do so leads to immediate dissolution of the party in question with all assets seized and distributed to the poor.

Let me repeat that: It is absolutely technically possible to filter based on source IP address country.

Yes, you can also do various trickery to cloak your real source behind another source. That doesn't invalidate the point.

Highly unlikely. Putin is beloved by the majority of russians, because under his government economy and internal security have improved dramatically. Most russians remember the 1990s when people were shot in the streets regularily, the way you only see in some old movies about when the Mafia ruled in some US cities. Compared to that time, they live in paradise now, and many attribute this change to Putin. Don't expect him to be out of power anytime soon. As for the russian elite, a lot of them own their fortune to this change. Never mistake criticism for opposition. Especially among politicians and the rich, it is fairly common to complain loudly about someone and still support them when it matters, because all the complaining and seeming hostility is simply an attempt to move them on certain topics.

You should update your propaganda-driven beliefs. I've got a russian girlfriend and I've been to Russia myself. At least for where I was (St. Petersburg), it looks much like any european city, except more beautiful (but that's a St. Petersburg special, they made very sure to keep all the old palaces and buildings in shape).

Crime was horrible in the 1990s, my girlfriend says, but here's why most russians actually love Putin: Since he became the top dog, things have been continuously improving. Crime is low, economy is good, of course nothing is perfect, but compared to previous times, they're pretty great.

From what I've seen in daily life, I don't see anything that would make them jealous of a random EU member country. Supermarkets are full of basically the same products I can buy here, everyone has a car, public transport is better than in some european cities, the streets are in good condition and clean, I felt safe both at day and at night.

Of course Putin doesn't want Ukraine to join the EU. But that they will all be able to suddenly buy bananas and thus run away from communism is 1990s stuff and long since outdated.