Have you seen Win10 preview, or at least read some reviews and look at the screenshots? Because it is exactly what it is about... I mean, the most obvious change that you see once you install Win10 over Win8 is that the Start menu is back. Other changes include things like Metro apps actually running in resizable windows, and the "charm bar" is gone, and all the actions are integrated into the window title bar. Etc... basically, all things Metro are desktopified.

Not zero, but yes, Russia is kinda lagging behind on these things. Not even just fancy stuff like thermal or NVD, but even just plain optics or red dot and holo sights (just for giggles, look up the battery life on red dot sights that are in service there, and compare to Aimpoint, or even the more expensive Chinese optics).

That's plainly not true. If you have around $5K, you can absolutely buy military grade thermal vision devices online, including eBay. Might not be the kind they put on fighter jets, exactly, but certainly the kind they issue to soldiers in the field.

They'll start slashing welfare to stabilize the budget. That's why the rhetoric about how the evil West is once again trying to destroy Russia is still in full force... so that when they start starving the more vulnerable parts of the populace, there's an established external enemy to blame.

The other option? That would be war, the ultimate excuse.

Of course #1 does not preclude #2. It might just defer it.

It's not meant to be changing minds directly. It's meant to provide a display of purported majority backing the policies, so that people who are easily swayed by the "majority must be right" argument (which are plenty) have more incentive, and to scare the minority in opposition into silence.

I think it's pretty amazing that spacecraft can survive at all out there, given the sort of particles flying around - individual cosmic rays with the energy of fast-pitch baseballs. Thankfully, particles with such high energy have tiny cross sections (they prefer to move through matter rather than interact with it), and when they do hit something and create a shower of particles, most of the progeny is likewise super-high energy and will most likely just move through whatever it's in.

It's more interesting when they strike the atmosphere - each collision creates a new shower of other high energy particles, more and more, spreading out the energy as they descend. In the end, detectors on the surface over an area of dozens of square kilometers simultaneously pick up different pieces of the same cascade kicked off by a single cosmic ray collision.

No, fines for violating export laws.

Being slapped with massive fines is usually pretty good motivation for a company. And given that the US spends nearly half of the world's total military spending, and the EU a good chunk of the rest, simply "hopping overseas" and choosing to serve other markets isn't exactly the smartest of plans, financially.

It's idiodic for a company to wilfully risk sales of hundreds of thousands of units per year to NATO to sell a couple hundred units to Russia. Russia's economy is barely bigger than Canada's. And less than 80% the size of Brazil's.

You could start by reading more than the first paragraph.

1) They don't have "zero" capability, but they have way too little - only a few hundred modern imagers.

2) They have tried to buy them off ebay before. And it led to arrests. It's illegal to export military-grade night vision equipment without a license, and apparently sites like ebay are well monitored for potential violations.

Yeah, but they "cheat" a lot - for example, Belarus has made a mint serving as a reshipping platform for European goods. And for some reason they left Iceland off their list even though we supported the sanctions against them. Still, it's caused major food price inflation (unsurprisingly). Seems kind of a weird way to punish Europe, it seems obvious it's going to have a lot more effect at home than abroad - Russia's trade in food goods with Europe makes up far more of its imports than Europe's trade in food goods with Russia makes up of its exports. But I guess they didn't have a lot of options for "retaliation". I mean, Gazprom is already nearly going broke as it is, turning off the spigots would have rapidly ensured that it did. Oil and gas make up half of their government budget and 2/3rds of their exports - it'd sure punish Europe, but it'd also be economic suicide.

I think they're really hoping that the sanctions will just expire and they'll be able to go back to raking in western capital again. Because if they don't expire, barring some huge unexpected oil price surge, those reserve funds are going to dry up. They expect it to be down to under $40B by the end of this year. What they're going to do when it runs out, I have no clue. They need dollars and euros to buy the goods that their undersized industrial sector can't manufacture. China's a help but not a solution; they don't have the lending power of the US or EU to begin with, and their goal seems to be more exploiting Russia over the situation than offering friendly aid. For example, they got Russia to agree to the cutthroat rates on the proposed "Power Of Siberia" pipeline that they'd been trying to get for years and to let them own greater than 50% stakes on fields inside Russia. They got Russia to sell them their most advanced air defense system despite the objections of the defense industry over concerns that China would do what they always do with new technology - reverse engineer it and then produce it domestically. But who else are they going to turn to? China's basically becoming Russia's "loan shark". And at the end of the day, if it came down to it and China had to chose between the Russian market and the 20-fold larger market of the US and EU? It's not even a contest.

I figured they'd tackle something more ambitious than that with their drone offerings - a drone that (barring instructions to do otherwise) follows you around whatever you're doing and keeps the camera on you, trying to get the most epic shots. E.g., you bungee jump off a bridge, it races you to the bottom, keeping whatever distance and filming style you told it to.

But maybe it's just another remote control drone.

So you mean get rid of wide-character encodings and only use UTF-8 where unicode characters are needed? I agree. :)

But that's the point. If it slams into an immobile object of course. But we're not talking about anything slamming into an immobile object. From the perspective of a molecule in the gas stream, it's going about the same speed as its neighbors. It's quite cool.

As for the boundary region, even at the "pinched" funnel outlet one could be talking dozens of kilometers here. A dozen kilometers between going from zero velocity and 25 kilometers per second is roughly the same as a dozen meters between going from zero velocity and 25 meters per second. Aka, a virtually insignificant gradient.

UTF-8 is an encoding of unicode, so I'm totally not getting your "Actually I think "Unicode strings" should be avoided completely."

I like that idea. You're right, it should be pretty efficient to implement, regardless of the string's backend encoding. And the value represented by the iterator will, by nature of being implemented as a pointer to a certain part in the string, be able to point to a glyph of arbitrary length (unlike a getter function with a fixed-length return type). Being an iterator it'll fit into all standard c++ libraries that take iterators.

It would be nice to have it be a random-access iterator so that you can jump to an arbitrary offset. There's a lot of optimizations they could do internally to help facilitate that. But obviously you still want to let programmers choose - by some means or another - whether they want such unicode optimizations (or unicode iteration, or so forth). Because while the overhead they'd impose wouldn't be huge, there still would be overhead.

We have to have something, though. Not everybody writes in English.