D'oh, meant to say "a firewall is a good solution to imperfect control over listening ports."

This. A firewall is a good substitute for imperfect control over listening ports. People tend to run them whether they're really needed or not, like putting armor plates over a vehicle which may or may not already be bulletproof. So a firewall may not actually improve anything, if all services with the capability of opening listening ports are configured absolutely correctly (which is only possible if they're all capable of this - which, I admit, would be unusual).

Didn't you read his last link? Reality must be kept off the table at all costs!

Mammon is our god now, and I guess the 1% are his representatives on earth. And if we didn't have a fanatical devotion to them, how could things have become like this?

Disgusting. This attitude will be one of the most baffling aspects of our culture to people in the future. We call our resource-starved overworked population "entitlted" every time we suggest that they deserve something (even if it's something they had in the past but can no longer afford, like their own living space as employed adults) but we never apply that to those reaping all the rewards, living obscenely pampered lifestyles for doing the same, or less, or NO work.

The global economic collapse can't come soon enough for me.

I wonder why they didn't sue earlier.

Also only a landlubber would use such a system, a savvy pirate would use something that plays the looted music he already has! Aarrrrr!

Again, if you fight for an enemy nation in a war expect people are going to be angry at you.

There was no fight for an enemy nation in Odessa. There were anti-Maidan protesters.

Yanokovych employed snipers against massive peaceful protests, they occupied buildings but they also had hundreds of thousands of people. The pro-Russians have never had a tenth as many.

Except that it was not even proven that it was Yanukovich who used the snipers. And he wasn't indiscriminately shelling civilians in western Ukraine either. I have a coworker from Ukraine, his extended family in Donetsk (a young woman with two children) was killed by Ukrainian artillery.

Like I said, Yanukovich was a bloody crook, a common criminal who came to power, but compared to the current Ukrainian government he was almost a saint.

And you can't compare Yanoyovych's actions to a defence from an actual invasion.

What invasion are you talking about? There is a civil war going on. Irregulars on one side, quickly legalized former irregulars on the other side. Ukraine would never stand a chance against an actual invasion from Russia. Compare that to the utterly professional and practically bloodless annexion of Crimea. And this is why Ukrainian army doesn't even try to do anything about that, they know they don't stand a chance. Shelling cities, on the other hand, is easy. Especially these in Eastern Ukraine - Galicians don't consider Eastern Ukrainians to be real Ukrainians, even though they themselves were ousted from Poland when ethnic Poles were thrown out of Western Ukraine after WW2. They don't even speak the same language - a mix of Ukrainian and Polish by the Galicians, Surzhik by Eastern Ukrainian.

There's nothing criminal or fascist about the current rulers.

Svoboda was recognized as a neo-nazi party by basically every European country. And even though this party was in minority in the last elections, they suddenly have received a lot of interesting positions after Maidan because their armed thugs helped the coup. And what followed were banning oppositional parties, censorship of media and other nice things that typically follow after a fascist coup.

Tell me what they should have done in response to an invasion that you wouldn't consider "criminal" or "fascist".

An invasion has to happen first. Then one regular army can fight another regular army.

a) No one knows how the fire started, both sides were throwing molotov cocktails, and the majority of the crowd attempted to help evacuate the building.

You can see in numerous youtube videos that while some of the crowd helped the people out, others happily continued to throw incendiaries into the windows. Majority my arse.

b) Ally yourself with an enemy nation who has just invaded and annexed part of the country, take over buildings by force, then kill some peaceful protesters. You really expect to get a kind response?

Imagine that Yanukovich had done the same to the maidan thugs, what the current national guard does to civilists in Donetsk. For all his faults he was a saint in comparison.

They simply hand over half the country to actual murderous criminals and fascists?

Actual murderous criminals and fascists already own the majority of the country. What difference would it make?

It makes sense, right? From the pov of the natsec people, these things help them secure the nation against potentially catastrophic attacks. From the pov of the LEOs , these represent the natural progression of tools they use to catch some pretty dangerous people, some of whom may also represent a significant danger to the nation, so why should they be deprived of their utility? Both sides can only be expected to strongly advocate for their side. You need 3rd party adjudication in this scenario. In general, we need much more serious 3rd party involvement in all of this spy tech. The FISA court really is nothing but a rubber tamp composed of people who have very narrow real world experience but for whom 'the system' has never given the slightest hiccup on their , largely unearned rise to power. They're political hacks, appointees lifted into place because, well, someone has to be so lifted and they never rendered any offense and they expressed the right political opinions to the right people at the right time. They think the system is just dandy- worked for them! We desperately need the NSA and the FBI to be doing their jobs with all the tech we can give them. Turf and tech wars WILL happen between well intentioned parties. That's a given. What we're missing is real, wise oversight and refereeing such that the public and both parties ultimately have real faith in the reasoning by those overseers. Really, the NSA scandal is scandal of the FISA court process. It's composed of intellectual lightweights and cowards and a few rich little girls whose chief unconscious guiding principle is they want BigMen to protect them so they can go on living their posh lives, feted and paid attention to by the powerful at clinking cocktail parties because, hey, that's what civilization is about. Get judge Richard Posner in there. Get some people who have well considered povs and a well developed sense of statesmanship and what it means to be a nation of people, rights, laws, threats and tradeoffs needed to make it all work. Of course LE grabs for everything it can. If it were your job, so would 99,999 out of 100,000 of you too. The kind of reticence and carefulness to maximizing your own advantage at the cost of some encroachment of an abstraction like civil liberties does not exist in enough people to populate the NSA so that the jobs get done. It's just not many hmans are. Thats why we have to look to oversight. Get some hardcore civil libertarians and hardcore natsec hawks into the process. It will work itself out. The civil libertarians will come to see that the worst form of civil rights violation is everyone is dead, and the natsecs will come to see that a nation that devoles into a version of 1984 is not a goal worth protecting, in fact, just the opposite. As it is, the executive looks for every fakey boo hoo slip of the tongue reason to jail or administratively silence just the people whose pov we need as input in oversight and the civil libertarians are just clueless wrt to the seriouness of the threats we face and conclude , wrongly, that the NSA has gone mad with power and has installed the Constitution as toilet paper in their bathrooms. It's a failure to maintain the necessary diversity of opinions and a failure of wise adjudication of those opinions. That's our problem.

The communist party of Ukraine. 13% of voters have voted for them in the last parliament election - the fourth largest party back then. Banning oppositional parties is something that even that crook Yanukovich did not dare.

Sure about Space X being the cheapest? If I remember correctly, Zenit is yet cheaper.

I do believe you, but Czech republic seems to be different so it was very helpful to learn a bit Czech - especially the part that differes with Russian. That really helps to transform a Russian sentence into a sort of broken Czech that was, in my experience, better understandable for them, than English.

Romanians often speak decent English, and, obviously, French (that is one language I, for one, struggle with). Poles are also fine with English.

And what's your explanation for why the Ukrainians would want to inflict civilian casualties?

Sheer primitive tribalism. The guys who have burned people alive in Odessa had a lot of fun doing it. And they were cheered at by several local politicians.

There was nothing murderous or repressive about the government

Well, shelling civilians and arming neo-faschist thugs surely counts for murderous. And as for repressive, they banned an oppositional party few days ago.

That is what I did. I was actually surprised that many people in their twenties don't speak English, or, if they do, then just barely. But some of them speak Russian - with a funny accent, but pretty well.

I wish they would actually do that. Czech are notoriously bad when it comes to foreign languages. I live in Germany and visit Prague every now and then.When I ask for directions in English, I get something unintelligible as reply. When I try in German, they give me blank stares. When I repeat my question in Russian (yes, I speak Russian as well), they either reply in Russian or they reply in Czech but it is often close enough to understand - Slavic languages are like that.