Taiwan had various degrees of local democratic reform culminating in the first presidential election in 1996, but it wasnt until 2000 that the Kuomintang party actually lost power in an election.

It depends what they are vetting - the security of a third party service is probably something they care little about.

Every country has make-work projects, some of them even have additional benefits - the EU is currently reviewing a energy savings plan where one of the main points is "costs will be offset by the jobs created to implement this directive". Make-work.

In reality, the Chinese project is definitely not make-work if they plan to do actual research. The "ghost cities" you talk about are actually gradually filling up as more population moves from rural settings into the cities - this has been a long term goal of the Chinese government, but their "long terms" are a fair longer than the "around next election time" terms that westerners tend to think in.

If you want to see some real "ghost cities" there are plenty in Spain, entire towns and cities, with airports, which were built to sustain the Spanish building industry during the 2008-2013 period, and the properties have never been put on the market.

Welcome to the party, except you are many years behind the 'crowd' - a lot of people (but fairly insignificant in the grand scheme of things) abandoned Firefox over the "Awesome Bar" debacle, where you couldn't even go back to the old functionality at all (yeah yeah, loads of people posted "fixes" which did nothing more than change the skin, while doing nothing to revert the underlying behaviour), so the current situation is nothing new.

The way the Awesome Bar was dumped on us pushed Firefox way down on my list of browsers to use, and even today I only fire it up to check website functionality when I'm developing.

Transmission over anything further than a few dozen metres.

Your privacy is indeed worthless if you aren't doing anything to protect it yourself - if you are expecting everyone else to protect your privacy for you when you don't take even basic steps to protect it yourself then I have no sympathy.

At some point you need to take some responsibility for your own privacy.

How does this differ from a typical search warrant for a premises? While you can get a search warrant to search "room X at property Y", more often than not the search warrant is for "property Y", which is exactly the same as a gmail account in entirety.

Actually most get a token from their payment provider and store that for future use - only the very large sites which have their own merchant accounts and card provider systems will store the card details.

In the UK, most card providers require you to enrol into something called "3D Authentication", which sets up a password for your card - when you make a payment online, you put in your card details, billing address etc, and then you are asked for three digits from your 3D Authentication password. The way in which this works is its handled directly by the bank, not the payment provider or the vendor website - the payment provider returns a response saying "3D Auth required, go here to complete..." and you redirect your user to that website, they do the additional authentication, the bank then sends a result back to you, and you send that on to your payment provider.

If you are pointing out how clear Ukrainian airspace is, try looking at the same map from two weeks ago, or even earlier on the day of the shoot down - Ukrainian airspace was being used by most airlines on that route, it was only afterward that airlines started avoiding it as a matter of course.

Which democracy is that, the one before or after the overthrow of the democratically elected government?

Of course there are things to dispute, because both your assertions have bias in them - the Ukrainian air defence system was on a higher state of alert because they had accused the Russians of shooting down a Ukrainian air force jet earlier that day, and the Ukrainians have the missiles that are alleged to have shot down the 777 (but we have no proof at all of the type of missile, just assertions coming from the Ukrainian side). So its well within the realms of possibility that the Ukrainians shot down the jet thinking it was a Russian air force incursion.

As for who claimed the shoot down in the immediate moments afterward, remember how many groups claimed 9/11 before it was finally pinned down to Bin Laden.

If you look at this from a neutral point of view, then nothing has been confirmed or proven yet - other than the 777 crashed of course.

There is a fuckton more content on the internet today than in 1998, so what worked before doesn't necessarily work today and vice versa. To take the YouTube example of the story author, we have two sides to it - those who post the content without having to worry about being hit by a massive bandwidth bill, and those who view the content without having to whip out a credit card to pay for it. In between those sides, we have Google who is paying the infrastructure bill and funding the means to pay that bill by showing ads.

People on here and other open forums regularly bitch about paywalls, so there are only really two other alternatives - find another way to pay the bill, or offer the content completely for free. Offering the content completely for free doesn't work for a lot of companies, because they are there to make money....

Rebels that come from the Ukrainian military.

A goal for all those zero sized models and weight loss fanatics to aim for!

Damn right an Apple monopoly was the worse situation - I can read my Kindle books on Android, iOS, Windows Phone, Windows and a whole load of other platforms. Where can I read my Apple iBooks? Uhm... iOS.