The charter for Stora, a Swedish mining company, was granted in 1347. It's probably the oldest limited-liability corporation in the world. Yes, it's still around today.

Then you're going to be disappointed.

The speed of light in optical fibre is about 200km per millisecond. So a round-trip ping of 10ms, ignoring all other sources of latency, limits you to a range of 1000km (call it 600 miles). And that's never going to change.

Yes.

Perhaps the simplest thing would be to point out that while America might be building walls to keep unwelcome visitors out, the Soviet Union built walls to keep its people in. A state that needs to imprison its entire population is not a state that has any right to exist.

I'm really not sure why we even need to discuss this. Assuming people are too young to personally remember this, were they also asleep during their history classes?

Communism is an economic theory that can't work in theory - it centralises economic planning leading to an insoluble information processing scaling problem, while at the same time destroying precisely the information (prices) that are needed to make sensible decisions - and has been proven not to work in practice. There have been plenty of Communist states. They all failed spectacularly, generally displaying massive corruption and brutal oppression as they did so.

They may not have looked like you imagine Communism should look, but that's because Communism cannot function at the scale of a nation-state, not in the real world, not with real people. And an economic theory that doesn't work unless people stop acting like people is not a very good theory.

Yes. The Soviet Union was a nightmare state.

Tell that to Poland, Hungary, the Czech and Slovak republics, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. Not to mention North Korea and Vietnam. I'm sure they enjoyed doing their "own thing".

What? Seriously, what? How old are you? Do you actually remember the Cold War?

The fact that America is a flawed nation is no excuse for false equivalencies with brutal totalitarian regimes like the Soviet Union under Stalin or China under Mao. Those countries, under those leaders, deliberately killed tens of millions of their own people. We never want to see anything like that again.

I agree with that for the most part (and history bears you out with regards to Communism). However, Fascism doesn't tie itself to a specific, unworkable, economic theory; it accepts capitalism so long as the state maintains control. Which is is a very prominent factor in Russia of late, possibly even more than in China.

Fascism is far more apt for Russia's state of government under Putin than Communism.

£5.5M for a year's support for hundreds of thousands of of XP systems is extremely good value, and far cheaper than any other option.

Of course, they'll still be in the same position a year from now. But in government, if you pass the buck for long enough, it becomes someone else's problem.

I tried Beta. Fuck Beta.

I bet they got comprehensive access to beta and ran away screaming!

Lighting. Multi camera shoots.

Then things like props and costumes, makeup, etc, all need to be on set.

It was banned decades ago, aside from a tiny number of old cars.

And no Beta!

And that plays when I drop the stick into my bluray player?

Japan's per capita energy use is similar to that of Europe, and about half that of the USA, but twice that of china, and 4 times that of India, Indonesia, etc.

That ignores externalised energy though - manufactured goods consumed in the west are made in the east which skews the energy usage levels to mean the west is lower than it should be based on consumption.

It's bad regardless, even if the u.s. dropped down to Japan or France levels, and china, India, Indonesia, brazl, and Africa were brought up to Japan levels.