They actually correspond reasonably well to past polls in the area, and the well-known attitudes of the locals.

He did. Your problem is that you're confusing atheism (the lack of belief) with militant anti-theism (the belief in the lack of).

NFC payment cards in Australia/Europe cryptographically sign a challenge from the terminal, using basically standard crypto. It's EMV all the way. In-person magstripe payments are carefully controlled and risk analysed to ensure they only occur if, for example, the card is broken - or outright banned.

NFC payments in the USA involve the phone sending regular magstripe data to the terminal, with only the CVC code being some kind of cryptographic derivative - a three digit number (less than 1000). The reason for this crazy setup is so merchants don't have to update their backend/PoS systems that still expect magstripe data. There is no plan to perform a complete upgrade thus old style transactions cannot be phased out. It's a dramatically less secure system.

Your card was declined because they're totally different and incompatible technologies. NFC payment cards from outside the USA aren't the same as "NFC payments" inside the USA (which require mobile phones as far as I can tell).

More importantly, the underlying technology is totally different. VISA Europe is not at all the same as VISA USA. VISA in Europe is a coalition of banks, VISA USA is a private company. America has never rolled out EMV, making its banking industry a ridiculous joke compared to, well, everywhere else. You don't get reports of major European supermarket chains getting their PoS systems hacked and magstripes skimmed like you do in the US, because EMV is a much more secure system.

The NFC payment cards that are rolling out around the world (outside USA) now are basically a variant of EMV/Chip and PIN. The underlying crypto is the same. The card signs a challenge from the terminal. They're upgrading to elliptic curve crypto at the moment actually, not sure if all NFC cards do that or not but it would not surprise me. NFC as tried by Google in America is actually a very minor variant on just sending your magstripe data via radio. I believe the CVC code rotates (three digits of entropy lol) and the tech is based on a Secure Element hard-wired to the NFC radio. But the phone has minimal control over the actual payment transaction, thus doesn't add much value beyond being a big battery, and that's why the tech largely stalled. Also they screwed up the compatibility testing and the terminals were full of bugs that meant transactions just sort of randomly failed.

So don't be fooled. The "NFC payments" that we know outside of North America is totally different to what they call "NFC payments", which is an unfortunate piece of linguistic confusion.

Iran also by and large left the 8th century a long time ago. Under Shah, say, it wasn't really any different from other authoritarian European regimes from a decade before.

It's almost like Islam is some kind of religion... oh wait.

It's a bit more complicated.

Ukrainian military right now basically consists of three distinct parts. One is the regular army - those are reasonably well equipped (all the usual stuff, artillery, tanks, air etc - if somewhat outdated), but poorly motivated. The other is the National Guard, which was basically recreated and stuffed with mostly ex-MVD and internal troops - these are neither well equipped nor well motivated (many of them were on the "wrong" side of Maidan).

Then there is that part of the National Guard that consists of the volunteer batallions - Azov, Dniepr, Donbas, Aidar etc. These consist mostly from people who were on Maidan and wanted to keep the fight going, but also from the newly reinvigorated far right groups like Right Sector (in particular, Azov is almost 100% neo-Nazi, and they aren't even hiding that fact - take a look at their insignia, and if you're not familiar with the symbolism, look up Schwarzezonne and Wolfsangel). Now these guys are very motivated, and they are one of the few units which sometimes even refuse to retreat against direct orders to do so, and are generally very battle efficient. However, they are not well equipped - in many cases the state didn't even issue a proper uniform, so they're wearing the stuff that was crowdsourced for them, and they have very little heavy armor or artillery.

Czechoslovakia and Hungary were subdued in an open invasion - the Soviet troops that were rolling in on the tanks did not disguise their allegiance or which state sent them. And comparison doesn't work on many other levels. In Czechoslovakia, in particular, there was pretty much no open resistance. In Hungary, resistance was fierce, but poorly organized and very poorly equipped - basically, they had small arms, but little else, and definitely no artillery or armor. In Ukraine, the undercover Russian troops are facing the Ukrainian military, complete with UAVs, artillery, tanks and air support. It's not a "pacification" operation, it's modern warfare, almost at a full scale (the only thing that's missing is air support on the separatist/Russian side - though they already use UAVs for recog).

Guess what the official state anthem of the Federal Republic of Germany is?..

I'm not GP, but the two tell-tale signs that I'm seeing are the spelling of "Abhasia" (direct transliteration of Russian "x" into "h" - it doesn't make sense for an English speaker, because the sounds are very different, which is why normal transliteration is "kh") and "08.08.08" (date format with dots and leading zeroes that is normally used in Russia, and it's also one of the few countries that refers to that conflict by the date alone, much like 9/11 in US).

Not all Russians live in Russia. And even in Russia, there's still mostly unfiltered Internet, you know.

85% of the citizens may be sucking Vova's dick and enjoying it, but the rest of us are not so enthused, thank you very much. So don't dismiss a point just because of the person's native language. Dismiss it based on the validity or lack thereof of his arguments.

"Liberate" is a funny word here. The previous leader of separatists, Alexandr Borodai, said in an interview that he does not consider himself a separatist - rather, Ukrainians are the separatists from the "Russian World", and his fight against them will only be over with the militia's tanks on the streets of Lviv.

They haven't shown any clear evidence that they do have the support of the majority of local people. Unlike the referendum in Crimea, the ones in DNR and LNR were so ad-hoc that their results are basically meaningless.

Here's a tip, my Russian friend: if you want to pretend to be a neutral observer on the Ukrainian conflict in an internet forum, then you'd do better to proofread your post again and again until you manage to remove the little telltale signs that your native language is Russian. No informed reader of your post above is going to be convinced you don't have a significant dog in this fight.

You know, maybe some of us should complain to Slashdot about the Obama/Poroshenko-bots that reliably and consistently troll every single story about this conflict? You know, the ones who imply that anyone who even slightly skeptical about the propaganda we're all being fed, must be Russian or a paid Kremlin propagandist?

Suck on this. I'm a native English speaker from the UK, I have never been to Russia, I have been reading Slashdot for about 14-15 years, posting for most of that time too. And the Anonymous Coward tells it like it is. Poroshenko has claimed Ukraine was invaded like ten times already. He claimed he was being "invaded" by a fucking aid convoy, including after Putin's honesty about it's contents had been verified by international journalists and the Red Cross. In fact he asserted he'd shell said convoy, so the Red Cross chickened out, but the crazy Russians just drove right in there and delivered that aid anyway.

So as a native speaker, please heed my call - let's all stop abusing the English language shall we? We know what an invasion looks like. It looks like what the USA did to Iraq. It looks like Russian flags flying above Kiev and Russian tanks rolling down the streets to the parliament building. It does not look like journalists scrabbling around presenting the testimony of a milkmaid in a farcical attempt to find an army, as the Guardian did only a few days ago. Now condemn Putin for militarily supporting the rebels if you like (though the proof of this is wafer thin as well), just be aware that this is something many countries do, including the ones that are currently being most shrill about Ukraine. So such an argument doesn't have much impact, unfortunately, though I wish we lived in a world where it did.

Just as Christianity, Islam often adapted to the circumstances. However, the original restrictions on dhimmi did include armed service and bearing arms in general, and this was enforced in the original Caliphate.