I think, but am not certain, that all the MFM were full height. I remember half-height floppies, though.

hawk

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.

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.

They don't do space tourism yet, but once they got the Dragon man-rated I don't see why not. The seven people who've been space tourists so far have in total paid $170 million, while SpaceX has quoted $140 million for a crewed Falcon 9 launch so they're at a price at least some is willing to pay. If they can make the rockets reusable it could significantly increase their launch volume even if only a few hundred super rich want to go. It would be real space flight in LEO and make you a genuine astronaut, not just "pop your head in" suborbital flight. Maybe they could even use the cargo room of the Dragon to hold some kind of deployable/inflatable mini-hotel for the stay. 100 mile high club anyone? ;)

By the time you were five, we had been (384 400 kilometers) / (4.2421 light years) = 9.57827017 x 10^-9 = ~0.000001% of the way to the closest star. Eight years later they launched the Voyager 1 which is now about (127.98 Astronomical Units) / (4.2421 light years) = ~0.05% of the way. And it's probably uninhabited. What chance did we miss to go visit aliens? Do you think if we just put enough money in it we'd invent the warp drive? Chemical rockets can't do it, it'd be like trying to ride a horse to the moon. The ban on nukes in space kills fission, we still haven't got a working fusion reactor here on earth and antimatter only exists in extreme lab experiments.

True, we don't care much about developing the propulsion technology but we sure as hell would like the energy generation technology so to pretend we're not working on it is false. It just doesn't make a whole lot of sense to try building the applied technology before we got the basics working, if we can make a fusion reactor here on earth then maybe we can turn it into a fusion drive. Trying to skip that step earns us nothing, it doesn't bypass any of the problems we already have and creates a whole set of new ones which makes it that much less likely to succeed. The only tech that's pretty much ready to go is fission, but good luck selling a rocket that'll nuke its way through space.

Actually, it already happened, with gnu moving first.

RMS *already* demanded that Linux be called "lignux", and changed the code of EMACS at one point to make that, rather than "linux", the target.

hawk

>I don't mind static image ads (although I hate it
>when I purchase something on Amazon and then
>get served Amazon ads for the thing I purchased).
>But if it is not static then I despise it.

It's not just ads; it's *anything* that blinks & runs around while I"m trying to read. In fact, I've never blocked *anything* just for being an ad, and I block much of what sites fancy to be "content."

Stay still, damnit, I'm trying to read!

hawk

the two drive bays were typically side by side in the era of MFM drives. And if they were stacked, and you managed to find a double height drive, you would have had no space for your 5.25" floppy.

And the drives I see listed are something like 41mm, or about a inch and a half--half-height or less..

Full height in this parlance is the old 3.5 or 4" tall, nearly the full height of the PC/XT case.

hawk

Well, if you want to put it that way the plane would never have been shot down if Russia had supplied a professional crew instead of teaching the separatists how to aim and pull the trigger. At least with the Russian military firing they probably know what they're aiming at.

Except in this case there's no signs that anyone was being particularly reckless, lazy or disregarding the rules, it was a fairly complex interaction between debug settings, ASM optimizations and dependency management. This is more like when the Space Shuttle blew up and nobody cares about the 9999 parts that didn't fail because the O-ring did and as a result it's now small chunks of scrap metal with dead astronauts. You don't get points for effort, style or the parts that work it's the end result that counts and in this case GCC poops on the floor because the final output is shit.

I think it's a good attitude for a kernel manager, because when he gets shit code from driver or subsystem maintainers that goes into a release kernel and starts corrupting data and throwing panics the shit is going to land on him. You can't just shuffle that responsibility downwards and say no, the kernel is 99% fine but that driver is crap because as far as the end users are concerned the kernel is crap and the internal bickering about whose fault that is doesn't matter one bit to them. It's your project and your job to get it fixed. And that might require some harsh words about the O-ring and the people who made it, because it's making them all look bad which is totally unfair to everybody else.