Russians of Crimea have never lost their Russian identity. They always viewed Russia as their mothership and most didn't want to have anything with the government in Kiev. Russia has a big military presence there because of the Black Sea Fleet. I think it's possible some Russians would prefer to stay with Ukraine, but at the same time it's entirely possible that some ethnic Ukrainians would have preferred to be transferred to Russia. The benefits are obvious: much more stable politics, and a better economy. I think the explanation for the 97% pro-Russian vote is quite simple. Those who didn't want to transfer Crimea to Russia simply stayed home because they thought they'd lose anyways.

Also Russian take over of the Ukrainian base happened after weeks of begging Ukrainians from all bases to switch sides or at least surrender. They were offered citizenship and jobs with Russian military. The problem is with the government in Kiev. Why didn't they just give the order to evacuate Ukrainian troops? Cheap populist politics. No politician in Kiev want to give the order to surrender or evacuate because that would mean formally surrendering Crimea. But they also didn't give anyone the orders to defend with force, because that would mean a war.

Yes, under duress Russians rarely do any of that pinpoint smart bomb stuff.

Another, even more important history lesson lies in Weimar Germany.

After the WWI, Germany was made a scapegoat, at the insistence of French. The conditions where the following:

huge reparations
ban of German submarines and airplanes
ban on German troops west of Rhine
ban on unification with Austria
ban on annexing Sudetenland
big swaths of land transferred to other countries (Poland, Austria, etc)

All of this imposed upon Germany even though Germans were lured to the negotiation table by the Americans promising there "would no losers". All of this led to rapid impoverishment of Germany and the rise of lunatic Hitler.

More recently, the historians labeled the 1990s Russia as a Weimar Russia. Even though Russia withdrew from East Europe unilaterally, the west has done nothing to help Russians deal with the turmoil following the transition to market economy and democratic institutions. When it came to loans, the west simply fleeced Russians. NATO also didn't waste time and move into Poland, and then former Soviet republics in the Baltics. NATO started the war in Yugoslavia and separated Kosovo from Serrbia despite Russian protests. All of this created great conditions for people to accept the autocratic Putin who nonetheless brought stability into Russians economy and politics, at the expense of rolling back the democracy and setting up a new police state.

At the same time comparing Putin with Hitler because of Sudetenland and Crimea is quite primitive. Hitler also advocated racial hatred and never made it a secret that he want to push the German nation to conquer Poland and Ukraine. With all its current problems, Russia is an multi-ethnic multi-cultural country with ethnic Russians constituting about 80% of overall populations. Even though, Putin used the nationalist rhetoric of helping Russians from abroad, the annexation of Crimea has broader goals. First, it's a demonstration of power, and a clear punishment of Ukraine for stepping out of line. Second, Putin just got another frozen conflict at the border, which means its unlikely Ukraine could join NATO any time soon.

AT&T doesn't want to charge Netflix extra for the same connectivity they get right now. What AT&T and other telecoms want to be able to do is to offer Netflix a higher priority (higher bandwidth and lower latency) service than what the rest of internet traffic gets for an additional fee. Netflix always refused this idea, and just hoped that telecoms upgrade their infrastructure which would benefit everyone at once.

I don't see a problem with telecoms charging Netflix extra for a higher priority service, but there is one big conflict of interest here. AT&T not only provides the pipes, they also provide the TV content with the U-Verse service. So AT&T is in direct competition with Netflix. Without net neutrality, AT&T is now in prime position to make sure that Netflix doesn't hurt their TV cable business. Either they charge Netflix so much that it stays uncompetitive, or perhaps Netflix stays competitive but AT&T will skim its profits through the fees anyways. Huge conflict of interest. FTC should look into this.

By this logic, every exchange that trades in international currencies should be closed down.

Maybe that's why we don't see many PCs with Iris Pro graphics. The OEMs know that comparable dedicated GPUs cost less.

By far not the most significant one though, in single threaded tests the i7-4770K beats the FX-8350 by 62% in Cinebench R11.5, 73% in Cinebench R10 and 47% in POV-Ray 3.7RC6 and that's when the AMD core is not competing for resources with its sibling. With turbo the picture is a bit more complex than that but 4 Intel cores already equals 6-7 AMD cores. Then you add in cache contention, shared FPU, overhead of more threads for the last 1-2 cores of difference as in the most ideal benchmarks for AMD they're roughly equal

I believe though, the cache design was also blamed for the poor performance of AMD CPUs even in single threaded loads. I heard this could be because, the L2 cache is something like 8-way associative on Intel CPUs but on AMD, it's only 2 or 3 way associative, increasing the possibility that the data you need in cache is constantly overwritten by something else.

Certainly, I think the poor single-thread performance is that at the core of AMD's problems. AMD CPUs actually do well in benchmarks and applications that are heavily multithreaded, such as handbrake (e.g. the 8-core FX 8350 can slaughter the latest Haswell Core i5s). So sharing some devices between the cores is not as much of the issue as is the poor single threaded performance.

Nonetheless, benchmarks show that there are new games that will take advantage of say 8-core CPU. I think it's measurable when you look at 6-core AMD FX vs 8-core AMD FX of the same generation. Nonetheless, a lot of people and magazines do not recommend buying anything more expensive than an unlocked quad-core Haswell i5 ($220-240). Anything faster gets too expensive.

There are plenty of specialized applications that use that many cores. Media encoding comes to mind. An average desktop doesn't need these chips, but there are some users more than willing to pay a premium price for this.

I believe cache is shared, and is believed to be one of the bottlenecks of the current AMD CPUs.

Yeah, but slashdot is not coindesk. I still appreciate this gets posted on /.

If Russia gets away with this, it will essentially mean that anywhere in Europe where there is an ethnic Russian population of any note, the country in question will be forced to either tow Moscow's line, or risk a Russian invasion to "liberate" the ethnic Russians.

But, there are only two European countries who are not NATO members with significant Russian population, Belarus and Ukraine, and Belarus is already a Russian satellite.There is certainly a possibility that Russia will try to stir up more trouble in eastern Ukraine. There is a question though about whether Eastern part of a poor and chaotic country is worth risking to create a second Cold War.

Another comical note:

6. America is the only country in the world to have used nuclear bombs while sweeping under the rug the issue that indiscriminately killing thousands of civilians as long with a nearby military-industrial personnel may have constituted a war crime.

If the US gets missile defense systems into the Ukraine they could theoretically win a nuclear war with a first strike. This is what has Putin's panties in a bunch. This is also why Russia was so upset with the US considering putting their missile defense systems in Poland.

Wouldn't the missile defense systems in Europe just protect Europe? It's also no clear if the missile defense actually works, and if it works, how hard/easy it would be to wipe out with a strike by conventional weapons as Poland is a stone throw away from Belarus.