Otherwise it would have simply said, "Vote B to remain a part of Ukraine".

Well, that's what it meant, except with more autonomy (e.g. with the ability to keep Russian as an official language inside Crimea).
Huffington Post has a pretty one-sided narrative of the events from what I've read in recent months. They also miss a lot of information.

Not that I can do anything about it except yammer on message boards.

Dito... :-/

The benefit is through a partnership with Arizona State University's online studies program. [emphasis added]

Really? Wow. Great, but WTF?
They get free online courses? These are only a google (or itunes U) search away regardless of this partnership.

I.e. " Do you want to be part of russia, or not part of Ukraine".

Huh? The 1992 constitution of Crimea sees it as an autonomous republic of Ukraine. Maybe You, I or both of us are misunderstanding something here.

Regarding the Russian passports, I guess it has something to do with dual citizenships, i.e.:

[...] if [a Ukrainian] citizen acquired citizenship of (was naturalized by) another country, then in legal relations with Ukraine, the person is recognized as a citizen of Ukraine only. Thus, presently, according to the legislation of Ukraine dual citizenship is not prohibited, but also is not recognized [...]

It's also pretty much plausible and conceivable that the passport was used only for ID purposes and they had lists of eligible voters beforehand (at least that's the way it works in Germany: you just have to present a valid ID and be on the list).

And, re: "beating non russian looking voters", regardless of whether it actually happened (source?), there were not too many of those:

where they now form ~ 12% minority

(Crimean Tatars & ethnic groups in Crimea).

I'm not a jingoist. America (and any major power) is going to have black marks on it's record.

Agreed.
What I'm really trying to achieve here, is to cut through the thick fog of propaganda (from all sides) and get at the core of the issue (i.e. discrimination of a large part of the population by a (then) unelected government).
If I put myself in their shoes, I can totally understand the wish to distance themselves from a seemingly oppressive regime (not everyone welcomes their new overlords as we do here on /.), and being a semi-autonomous region (e.g. unlike Kosovo), they made use of their right to do so.

In addition, there were international observers present during the referendum.
And, as a last one, (internal Russian politics notwithstanding,) this is long but raises some interesting points: http://original.antiwar.com/ju...

I dunno, I feel uncomfortable with the whole "invasion" term.
Difficult to put it in US terms, but imagine, if the Canadian government would decide to revoke the official status of the French language (or the other way around); I guess they'd be pretty fucking pissed as well.
Georgia is a whole different story altogether: South Ossetia "declared independence from Georgia in 1990" and Apsny/Abhazia is similar.
The point is that if an ethnic majority of a region wants independence, they should be able to attain it, isn't that what democracy is all about? The right to self-determination? It makes little difference anyway, because eventually we will all be globalized (economically and politically) or perish.

ad 1, possibly. So? (see next point.)

ad 2, the point is that once people started realizing that the newly formed "government" is going to abolish Russian as a language and treat the majority of the people of Crimea as if they were a small minority, the sentiments changed abruptly.

ad 3, a,b: what's your point again?
ad 3 c: Yes, see point 2. The putschist government did exactly that acting illegal and without consent of the people.

ad 4: First, it's Bandera, not banderol. Second, they came to secure their assets and were allowed to do so (i.e. perimeter around their bases and up to 20k soldiers).

ad 5: They do have bulletproof vests, sponsored by EU & US; I don't watch Ukrainian TV, I get my information from the ground; please explain, why so many military units defected. Lugansk and Donetsk are not Crimea.

ad 6: It's just pointing out the hypocrisy of the EU, US and new "government". What Russians do in their own country is their business.

ad 7: It's fine, if they did it 200+ years ago. Why do people keep forgetting that Crimea used to be a part of Russia? Seems convenient.

It's "the Ukraine," simply, because it means "the edge", so call it what you want, I'll stick to what I know.

"NATO has no plans to deploy troops on the territory of Ukraine"

And there are WMDs in Iraq and no one's planning an invasion there. Sure think, Chekov!

Even if that is true (though arguably wrong - you know, there was an election) at least it's not a "flimsy legal pretense" to secure oil reserves (and other geo-political/economical interests) in countries without any substantial population of the actor (like Iraq, Sudan, I'm sure we could do this all day and night...).

[...] the right to voluntarily establish [...]

To put it in your words:
You seem to hold an underlying premise that Ukraine's people will benefit from being a client state of the US and/or EU, where these blocs can dump their surplus products on, buy products for less than they're worth and tap into gas reserves by moving population centers and threatening the eco-system of the surrounding area (e.g. fracking).

I'm also unaware of any historical precedents about an invasion happening without the deaths of large amounts (i.e. measured at least in percent) of local (!!) population. Perhaps you would like to point one out?
Oh, and while we're at it, didn't you just mention "voluntarily" in your previous paragraph? On which grounds do you refuse the right of the residents to decide who they want to belong to again?

there was no "parallel to".

Perhaps you're right, perhaps all of this is a concerted effort.
Let's ask the people of the eastern provinces where they want to rather be? Oh, right, the people are fleeing towards Russia; that's quite a statement answering our question right there.

What I believe, is that people should have the right to decide. Peacefully, and at their own pace.
I also believe that borders are artificial.
I also believe that diversity is good (i.e. multipolar world).
I also believe that we should all work together to get rid of our dependence on Earth's resources and start mining and expanding to other planets.
I am an idealist, pacifist and opposed to any kind of violence and manipulation. From any side.

NATO expanding means NATO troops/infrastructure there. You're thinking just the obvious, but that's what CNN/BBC writers like glossing over, yadda yadda yadda.

I recommend you read this.
Some tidbits:

Node.js is fast!
[...]
V8 has done incredible things to run JavaScript code really fast. How fast? Anywhere from 1x to 5x times slower than Java [...]
Conclusion? Node.js is best suited for CPU-bound regex-heavy workloads.

Node.js is non-blocking! It has super concurrency! It’s evented!
Node.js is in this weird spot where you don’t get the convenience of light-weight threads but you’re manually doing all the work a light-weight threads implementation would do for you. [...] instead of being used to work around recursion growing the stack, it’s used to work around a language without built-in support for concurrency. [...]

Node.js makes concurrency easy!
JavaScript doesn’t have built-in language features for concurrency, Node.js doesn’t provide that magic, and there are no metaprogramming capabilities. You have to manage all of your continuations manually, or with the help of (lots of different) libraries that push JavaScript syntax to its absurd limits. [...] It’s the modern-day equivalent of using GOTO because your language doesn’t have for loops.

Oh yeah...

Due in part in retaliation for economic sanctions that were enacted in parallel to the NATO expansion to the Ukraine, Russia announced that it would no longer sell its own RD-180 rocket engines for American military launches.

FTFY, just so you kids get some context.

The whole model relies on the userbases illiteracy

Totally agree, and now they grew bold enough to troll a nerd site to sway opinion about this shit to look like a legitimate business model.

The author of that article,
"Ben Cousins has spent his 15 years in the games industry at companies like DeNA, [b]DICE[/b], Sony and Lionhead. Since 2006 he's worked on a total of 10 separate free-to-play games across five different platforms, reaching approximately 50 million users. Follow him on Twitter @benjamincousins."

IMHO, he should be ashamed of himself.

They also added the source at the end. Visualize yourself.

That's not how containers work. You're bound to using the kernel of your host.