Since Sony isn't a part of the government, it can't really demand destruction of those documents. It can merely request, which is basically the same as 'politely ask to'. It can also note that disseminating parties may be liable for any damages to Sony that could arise. They need to prove damages though, and there's a lot of news sources involved. Will they do a reverse class-action suit or something? :P

Vast amount of regular Chechens don't care about independence. They just do what armed clans of fanatics tell them to. And those fanatics just changed their mind, switched to become 'federals' now, because it's more advantageous for them.

You mean those guys are a conspiracy theory?

Actually, Chechen fighters were the most active part of Russian forces in Georgia conflict. They just like war. They just changed their commanders from Arab to Russian ones.

C is relevant because it's lowest level language that isn't architecture specific. Nuff said. All new CPU architectures get C support ASAP because it offers enormous amount of software already written in C and supporting countless other architectures. And compiler for other languages tend to be written in C too. So C is kinda defacto mother language at the moment.

No. There definitely exists double standard. US didn't call out Saudi Arabia and other Muslim countries for anti-apostasy laws for example, not sanctions for this or anything. All human rights issues are pressed only if it serves US's geopolitical interests, otherwise they tend to get ignored. So now Russia protects interests of minorities in other countries too, so yeah, US parrot.

There definitely must be some approval mechanism because otherwise cops will query personal details to track their wives' lovers and what-not, but their current mechanism sounds way too unwieldy, so not only cops were lazy but also bureaucrats.

You're just wrong and being obstinate about it. Why should I buy into artificial Russia - West conflict when it's already long obsolete? There's one humanity and there's no reason for any national states to exist. We can be one unified Humanity now, thanks to Internet that largely abolishes barriers to communication. There may be different viewpoints on governance, but it doesn't map to nationalities. But pretty much all what Putin's government does would be ignored if he was, say, French president. And such double-standard is what I abhor. PR efforts like demonization of Putin are part of political infighting between national states and are harmful for humanity as the whole let alone for poor sods that happened to be citizens of Russia.

Western countries constantly stir confrontations with each other. So Russia is no difference. In fact if you look closely there's no such thing as unified west, only some groupthink Putin attempts to became part of.

Where do you see apologism? I called him a western parrot without own vision. No apologism of Putin here. He's just a figurehead of various business elites. Which are prone to infighting like above article demonstrates.

But practice shows that they're making enough money to make games that have multi-million budgets and less play value than average Tetris clone. So I'd say they get more than they deserve, even with piracy..

Emotional nonsense like this is exactly the thing I'm tired of. Way to put out fire with gasoline, bro!

They already got rewarded with their salaries, duh.

All those 'businessmen' tend to dump all results of their incompetence and infighting on government. Always government at fault in Russia, even for things it's not remotely involved in. Local cultural flavor. Pretty much everyone has proven and detailed theory that the government is after him personally! It's easier to pretend to be Sakharov than getting actual work done.

Also Dunning - Kruger effect applies to selection of government officials too, especially elected ones. Anyone remotely skilled would stay out of government and procrastinate. Putin is a lot better than he could be(at least he's not near senile like Yeltsin), but mostly parroting western ideas of governance.

Hundred of thousands dollars for mere right to operate a taxi car is nonsense. Anyone who has such money has better things to do, like lending it to others. Such lenders are rentier and don't contribute useful work to society. It DOES make sense to test possible taxi drivers wrt safety concerns but medallion system doesn't achieve this goal. You can lend them to anyone and they can be inherited. Thus absolutely anyone can end up having one.