Right, but there's a difference between nationalists whose nationalism tends towards wanting Ukraine to be a sovereign independent state, and neo-Nazis. Puting is claiming the latter, tarring them with the same brush, but the reality is that neo-Nazism in Ukraine is lower than levels in even much of Western Europe and the US, and far far lower than in Russia.

"Yushenko, whom you have mentioned, was raised to power basically by a paid mob. And then after one term he has received just 5.45% of votes because he sucked so much and a bandit was elected instead."

Yes exactly, the aspirations of Ukrainians was to get away from corruption and Russian influence. Yuschenko gave them the latter, but not the former, and so their break from Russia faltered as they felt they had little choice but to tend towards Yanukovych, of course, Yanukovych also continued with the corruption AND tended back towards Russia meaning it was even worse again, hence, we are where we are.

"Poland never was a soviet state"

It's really splitting hairs, regardless of whether it was formerly part of the USSR or not, it's stupid to pretend it wasn't under the exact same regime of defacto Russian control that Russia is trying to force Ukraine under. No one in the Warsaw pact did anything without Russia's say so.

"Baltic countries were deindustrialised after USSR broke up and their economy basically consists of EU payments, which is, in case of Ukraine, totally unrealistic."

Complete codswallop, both of these countries have perfectly functioning economies of their own that exist regardless of EU payments (even Britain receives EU payments but it doesn't mean we're fucking dependent on them). We have a large team of developers in Lithuania for example, whom we use for more run of the mill development.

I don't really know what your rant about Ukraine's economy is all about though, I don't think that's in debate, I think we all know the Ukrainian economy is fucked, and of course Russia isn't the source of all Ukraine's problems. Russia is however the current key factor preventing Ukraine from solving those problems though by continuing to send troops and equipment to destabilise it's industrial heartland. Russia doesn't get a free pass because Ukraine's economy would be weak without Russia - you don't get to invade a country and say "Oh well, they were fucked anyway, what's creating a civil war and backing one side of it with modern Russian equipment and troops going to hurt?"

Ukraine has it's work cut out, we all know that, but Russia is preventing it from even making a start at moving on as punishment for daring to step away from Russia to a more progressive Western economy and Russia is the one that's further courting and funding neo-Nazis and their groups across Europe, not Ukraine.

Because you opted into it and have no idea how to administer Windows systems? -

https://technet.microsoft.com/...

I think you fundamentally misunderstand the point of consoles.

The point of a console is to save developers from all the headaches of PC development - you don't face a combinatorial explosion of hardware, OS and driver combinations to optimise for. You have a fixed piece of hardware, that works in a fixed way. This drastically reduces the amount of testing you have to do and drastically reduces the amount of necessary optimisation - you're only optimising for one single fixed hardware target where it's safe to make assumptions.

If you expect games to be cross compatible you're saying to developers that they have to expend more effort and cost developing which means they may not even bother attempting some of the more ambitious projects out there. It's better to leave it to developers to decide if they want to port because if they're going to support the billion PC hardware combinations out there anyway then porting from console isn't much of a headache. If they're not going to support PCs though, they can chuck games out much more quickly and to a much higher standard due to less variation meaning less platform combination specific bugs.

That's before you consider that consoles closed ecosystem makes cheating harder - even if people hack the platform you can shut down their Xbox Live or PSN accounts or the associated hardware blocking them from multiplayer altogether on a hacked box.

Consoles aren't just PCs with more restrictions for no reason- there's good reason for the restrictions. The PC is a different platform that's used for different reasons.

So yes there is good reason the next XBox can't be a PC, because if it was a PC it wouldn't be a console, and if it wasn't a console then Microsoft would be dropping out of the console market, which would be stupid, because it wants to be in the console market.

Being a nationalist requires that you view yourself and people of your group to be superior to other groups, else there would be no point in it because the national identity being defended would cease to be meaningful.

This probably explains why you think the Ukrainian people are incapable of seeing other ex-soviet states like Estonia, Lithuania, Poland and so forth look west after the collapse of the USSR and see how much they've gained in terms of wealth and freedom then decide they want that for themselves. It explains why you view Ukrainians as some kind of inferior human that couldn't possibly want the things that most people want by themselves like increased wealth or greater freedom, without CIA interference.

I find it rather odd however that you describe yourself as an American nationalist whilst serving the propaganda goals of Russia and hence necessarily damaging American interests and ideals. You talk of the far right in Ukraine, but the people who have the most to fear from that viewpoint recognise what an absolute lie that idea is:

http://www.jta.org/2014/06/02/...

Meanwhile, we have Russia hosting the far right, and involving British neo-Nazis like Nick Griffin in his election whitewashing:

http://www.themoscowtimes.com/...

We have Putin pouring money into France's far right:

http://www.independent.co.uk/n...

And in fact, just supporting the far right right across Europe in general:

http://www.themoscowtimes.com/...

But it's not just support of course, it's the way Putin acts against minorities, using gay people as a hate target just as Hitler and King Edward I did with the Jews:

https://www.truthwinsout.org/p...

Or simply silencing anyone who hates having their territory illegally annexed resulting in concerned 3rd party nations who are typically Russian allies like India to report on the fact that Turkey is having to send in monitors to make sure it doesn't escalate further than the level of ethnic cleansing that Putin has already carried out:

http://zeenews.india.com/news/...

http://www.aljazeera.com/indep...

Of course, I don't expect any of this to matter to you. I've seen you post here before and I know you're normally incapable of consideration of alternative viewpoints, I know that you have your CIA/Koch brothers conspiracy theories and wont believe anything else. But I've made a point here, a point of linking to news sources in Europe, Russia, India, the Middle East to show you that the things I've pointed out aren't controversial, that the only people that wont accept them are Putin and his supporters. So if you do as you normally do, and refuse to believe what is evidenced in front of you, you at very least must stop pretending you're not just parroting the pro-Putin viewpoint - because as the Moscow Times articles show, even moderate Russians themselves disagree with you - this isn't about Russians vs. non-Russians, this is about Putin apologists as you have been in this conversation so far, against reality.

So you've really a choice, you can wake up and stop parroting long discredited RT propaganda word for word, or you need to stop pretending you're anything other than a Putin apologist. When even Russia's allies and moderate Russian's themselves disagree with you you surely have to realise you're not arguing from a point of fact.

Like it or not, the majority of the Ukrainian people like their ex-soviet neighbours before them have grown tired of Russian style authoritarianism, of Russian style corruption, and they just want to move more towards European ideals and further away from Russian ideals. They've decided this themselves, it didn't take any influence, they just don't want to be poor and disenfranchised any more, and so they did something about it. The fact Putin has been trying for over a decade to stop it since he poisoned Viktor Yushchenko in 2004 isn't evidence of CIA or Koch brother interference. It's evidence of FSB interference in trying to prevent the inevitable, much as America's attempts to stop Cuba tending towards the USSR all those years ago was another example of fighting the inevitable.

The only thing American nationalist about you is that you're letting it create a belief that only America is capable of carrying out shadow wars, and that only Americans are capable of deciding for themselves whether they want more wealth and/or freedom. You obviously hate the Koch brothers for their interference in your nation's politics and that's understandable, but at least they are themselves Americans meddling in American politics. Given that that pisses you off though, why would you think a Ukrainian person just like you would be any less pissed off about a foreign actor like Putin interfering in their country? poisoning their presidential candidates and so forth? -

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V...

FWIW I live up North, and it's really not as rosie as you suggest. London has something like £127 per head of population spent on it's public transport infrastructure, here it's £12 per head so we get an incredibly raw deal.

By population for example, Leeds and Sheffield are the 3rd and 4th biggest cities in the UK, and yet the rail link connecting them takes at it's fastest 40 minutes, with most trains taking about an hour. Yet, they're only about 30 miles apart, so a 30 minute drive down the M1.

This is because the lines round here aren't even electrified yet, so whilst the government talks about HS2 the local inter-city rail infrastructure is ancient, relying on slow diesel trains on quite a lot of routes that are 40 years old, and regularly break down. The new rail tender for the North is up currently, and bidders have been told they must get rid of the old 1982 trains by 2020. The bidders answer to that? Using 1978 London underground trains. The tracks wont be electrified until the 2019 - 2024 investment period at the absolute earliest.

HS2 is coming up this way, but it's less than useless. It takes 1hr 50mins to go from Sheffield to St Pancras currently. HS2 will take 1hr 20mins, but it stops at Meadowhall (an out of town shopping centre), from there you need a connection to the centre and it'll take you 30 mins waiting for that connection and riding on it (tram, bus, train), so not only do you need to prat around finding and paying for a connection, but you get no time saving as a result either.

I understand why you have such a positive view of our rail services because they are indeed excellent in the London area. Whenever I travel to London I always go by train and leave the car at home, but up here? It's not worth the hassle for the majority of journeys - there's the odd route that works well, for example, if it happens to sit on the East Coast Mainline or similar, but you must understand that rail in much of the UK is an awful joke and whilst the government is on about spending £50bn on a new HSR line that kinda makes sense to Birmingham but seems a pointless waste of money beyond that there are other vast high traffic parts of the network between the other largest cities in the UK after Birmingham and London that are stuck using lines and trains that are technologically well over 50 years old.

That's why there's so much opposition up here to HS2 - it's hard to understand why we'd want to get from a shopping centre to London 25% faster for £50bn destroying a number of really nice nature reserves in the process, when there's no money to let us get between the two or three major cities here 50% faster for a mere couple of hundred million along existing routes whilst also leaving enough change for new trains and additional carriages to alleviate what are, currently, dangerous levels of overcrowding that leave people stuck on the platform.

I don't even really begrudge the amount that's spent on transport in London, it is our economic powerhouse, it's also a key tourism destination, and it makes sense therefore for it to have a fantastic transport system. However, if money is going to be spent up here it'd be nice if it was spent sensibly on something actually useful. As such, there is some truth in what the GP says to be fair - once you step outside of one or two key areas in the UK at least, the rail system rapidly becomes a bad joke.

I think you're confusing "oldest" with "oldest active". Those are different things, in the context of merely the oldest, oldest and first most definitely are the same thing.

Going back way before these there were plenty of professional gaming competitions for things like Mario. Fuck, this is basically the plot of the 1989 film The Wizard, whose premise isn't exactly based wholly in fiction.

Even in the FPS world, Quake 1 also had a number fairly large scale professional multiplayer leagues and that was released in 1995. Thresh (Dennis Fong, the guy that went on to found Xfire) was part of a pretty high profile event in 1997 where he won Carmack's Ferrari.

Thus, talk of CounterStrike and Quake III Arena are laughable. They're not even close to the beginning of professional competitive gaming, which is surely what eSport actually means.

Obligatory Wikipedia reference says that eSports may well go back to at least 1972:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...

The summary's claim of Counterstrike as the first eSport reminds me of the time some kid posted here a few years back saying he was part of anonymous and he was proud that him and his friends were part of the internet's first counter-culture as if the whole of the fucking 80s with cDc, Mitnick, LoD et. al. never happened. Even then I'm not convinced that even they were the first, but they sure as hell long pre-date anonymous!

Counterstrike as earliest E-Sport is stupid. Let me guess, whoever came up with that one also thinks George Bush was the first president, 9/11 was the first ever terrorist attack and Afghanistan was the first ever war?

I'd say get off my lawn, I'd say I must be getting old, but this is Slashdot, and I know that someone even older than me is going to come along and tell me about competitive gaming events on some ancient long forgotten computer somewhere in California in the 60s, and even older Manhattan internet counter-cultures in the 70s or something. So er, over to you grey beards :)

What an obscure description of Borland.

They wrote compilers for Windows shareware developers? Really? just Windows shareware developers?

It was the number one Microsoft platform C/C++ compiler through the 80s into the mid-90s. It had nothing to do with Windows, or Shareware through most of it's life, and the company still exists even if it is a shadow of it's former self.

I don't recall Borland C++ or Turbo C++ ever forcing use of .hpp files or similar though, I always stuck to .h. I've seen .hpp in various projects, not compiler specific. It seems to be entirely a concious choice by developers whatever the platform from what I've seen.

Let's be clear, it's not even about $39 devices from dodgy Chinese manufacturers on ancient Android 2.3.

My official Google Galaxy Nexus stopped receiving updates in less than 18 months and was a $350 device and is stuck on an old vulnerable version of 4.

When even Google themselves can't be fucked to keep their first party devices secure, using some lame excuse about an unsupported chipset (even though 3rd parties like Cyanogen have had no problem updating it) then how can they expect anyone else to?

Make no mistake, in this case, Google is the problem. When Google wont even lead on the issue with their own OS, how can anyone else with less resources, less freedom to change the OS, and less profit per handset be expected to follow?

If Google was competent on the issue and actually took the lead by guaranteeing 3 - 5 years of updates on all their first party devices, you might find everyone else pressured into doing the same simply to compete, but when Google barely even breaks 1 year no one else is likely to do any better either - 1 year is such a short time in the world of updates, that I can see why most companies just see that as the standard and equate it to "no need to do updates at all".

The fact you think you suck already means you have drastically higher potential than a large number (perhaps even a majority) of developers

Far better to think you suck and know that you can improve than to think you're awesome and stay shit forever.

Humility is the number one most important defining trait shared by the world's genuinely great developers. I've met plenty of developers who think they're great, claim they're great, but repeatedly prove their development ignorance when they start talking about the subject. In contrast, I've never met a humble programmer that isn't either awesome, or well on their way to being awesome.

Well I'm glad we have you here to arbitrarily define intelligence. It's about time, the human race has been struggling to define it precisely for hundreds of years.

Where have you been all this time of self-declared definer of terms?

But just to clarify, basically, what you're saying, is that intelligence is a form of magic that we have inside us? Where inside us does this magic exist? Where does it come from? Are you saying it's a special undetectable thing? Your comment seems to imply it disappears in adults, but we can't detect it in babies either.

We can't do any of the things you suggest because we don't have computers even remotely as powerful and capable of rapid complex processing as the human brain. I also can't teach a dog to do any of the things you suggest, so are you declaring dogs as being unintelligent? Your examples seem to suggest that intelligence is unique to human beings and nothing else has the capacity for intelligence.

Based on launch trajectories calculated via a macro in an Excel 95 spreadsheet that is sent from personal Hotmail addresses?

Probably more worrying is the fact that much of our military are still using IE6.

That sounds like something a leftist loon would say if you ask me.

Still no facts, still no evidence that all of Sky's blocking is part of the legal ruling.

It's not so much redefining STEM as redefining societal good. Much of the things they mention are certainly forms of engineering and so fit firmly under STEM, but the problem is they're a tiny subset of engineering, and similarly a tiny subset of useful engineering that the world needs.

The premise of the argument in the summary seems to be that medicine, healthcare and so forth are all in this arbitrary societal good category, but things like building houses, power grids, bridges, phones, video games, operating systems and so on and so forth are not.

So the argument seems to be that if we give disproportionate focus to certain areas of engineering application we can increase the number of female engineers. I'm not terribly sure that that helps though as it means the majority of engineering areas are still woefully underfilled, and still have a woeful lack of gender balance.

So what if we have an increase in the number of female engineers figuring out how to do large scale deployments of some new technology like low power computing devices and methods of charging them and connecting them into poor communities if we've done nothing to solve the electronic engineering shortage which is required to develop the low powered devices in the first place? Both things are necessary, but the summary seems to imply only the former does societal good even though the former necessarily depends on the latter. It's ill conceived nonsense.

So yes you could do something like that and pretend you've fixed it, but all you've really done is fix it in a very contrived and niche circumstance without addressing any of the underlying reasons for trying to fix it in the first place, like trying to fix gender imbalance across all aspects of the field, trying to fix pay imbalance, or solve the STEM shortage in general. A bunch of females doing low paid engineering work for charities in Africa, isn't going to sort out the pay or gender imbalance when back in Silicon Valley you have a male dominated engineering industry holding all the money. So they've fudged the engineering graduate numbers to look slightly more fair, great, then what? what about the actual problems we're trying to solve in doing that in the first place? Do they not matter providing we've pulled off an adequate fudging of numbers to whitewash the problem?