It depends on how US would represent it. If it's official like Vietnam, then no, it wouldn't be Ukrainian forces, it would be American troops.

Then I get back to my previous point: in "political reality", there are no Russian troops in Ukraine. You can't order to attack what's not there.

I can't tell about Vietnam and Americans, but I can assure you that e.g. fighter pilots on both the UN (Americans) and the North Korean (Soviets) side knew full well who they were aiming to. And in Vietnam, it was most certainly presented as an American puppet regime with direct involvement in the USSR, so any Soviet troop fighting there would also know full well that he was killing Americans, not just South Vietnamese (indeed, to him, South Vietnamese would be the people that he came to save from American imperialism).

It's a bullshit argument, sorry. Not every piece of entertainment is supposed to be a full-fledged women studies teaching material.

Different games draw the lines differently here. There are some where dying of old age is a possibility, say, and racing games do include oil changes sometimes. With respect to physics, many games are actually trying to make it as real as possible.

Ultimately, the value of this particular bit of realism as a whole is drawing attention to the problem. You can complain that it's not sufficient, but it's way better than nothing.

Geographically, yes. Politically speaking, it has been under Russia for too long, and Russia itself isn't considered a European country politically, either (even though its most developed parts and most of the population are geographically in Europe).

Er, what even made you believe that I was making an argument along those lines? What I wrote is pretty much the opposite... the separatists were getting crushed precisely because of what you say - that not even most Russian and russophone Ukrainian population in the areas they claim supports it. Russia actually had step up and send in its own troops, and not just weapons and advisors as they did before, to reverse the tide.

The problem is that fighting spirit and dedication are not enough; you still need artillery and tanks and planes to win a war, and people who know how to strategically apply all this. That's where Ukraine is lagging far behind, especially after the significant build-up that Russia had since 2008. And Russian troops are not exactly lacking in motivation, either - they've been fed propaganda about fascists burning people alive and crucifying children, on one hand, and about the "Russian World" on the other hand, and are itching for a fight.

So, regardless of where the sympathies of the majority of Ukrainians lie, if Putin does give the order, Ukraine will fall with no outside help. And I don't know whether it'll get that help. A few months ago I thought that it would be a given, but then we saw basically nothing done over the annexation of Crimea, and very little done over all the affronts since then... and even today Western newspapers are still mulling over maybe more sanctions (?!!).

It would actually be easier than Georgia, I suspect. The big problem that Ukraine has is that, like most other ex-Soviet states, it let its military deteriorate in the 90s to the point of utter inefficiency (did you see the photos a govt guy just posted of what their BTR reserves look like, in response to a Facebook question as to why volunteers aren't getting vehicles?), but unlike them, it didn't get a wake-up call until now, like Russia itself got in Chechnya, or Georgia got in Ossetia and Abkhazia. So now they have to recover and learn very quickly. There's a lot of enthusiasm on the troop level, but logistics is in shambles, their officers seem to have a poor grasp of tactics (like e.g. ordering an artillery unit to stay in one place while firing... needless to say, they get fucked by counter-battery fire, and the reason why we know about this story is because there were survivors), and their generals don't understand that grand plans they make bear little in common with reality. This, again, is a lot like Russia was during the first conflict in Chechnya, but that was an easier opponent, and consequences of defeat were not as far reaching.

What's going for Ukraine is that their population reserves are bigger, and they retained a larger arsenal as part of the Soviet legacy. Also, the fact that a significant part of Soviet military industry was in Ukraine, so they have experience manufacturing the things they need.

Either way, I think that the only reason why they can still fight effectively, even with large casualties, is because Russian involvement is still undercover. It became noticeably less so over the last week, what with armored columns openly crossing the border (but still with removed flags) etc, and notice how the situation that was so dire for the rebels suddenly became so dire for the Ukrainian troops. If Russia were to go all in, openly, throwing all units that it already converged at the border, I don't think Ukraine stands a chance without outside help.

How long can Russia occupy Ukraine, now, is a different question. That area has a long history of guerrilla warfare against occupiers of all kinds, including Soviets back in WW2 days. And there's a strong resolve to resist among the populace today. An occupying force might win in the field, but find itself facing bullets from every window in the cities at night.

iconv lets you convert things, but what are you going to convert it to? UTF-8? Sure, and how many libraries (including core PHP ones) are UTF-8 aware? Most won't use mbstring, they'll just treat strings as arrays of bytes, and you're really lucky if they don't assume byte = char anywhere.

Treating strings as 8-bit clean works well in some cases, but fails pathetically in so many others. Yet that is the game that PHP is trying to play.

But they wouldn't be killing Russian soldiers, that's the point. They'd be killing the "militia of the Donetsk People's Republic" etc. For Russia to start fanning up the public opinion, they would first need to admit that their regular soldiers are in Ukraine in the first place, and they seem to be very averse to that. Just look at how they immediately disowned their own captured soldiers (a disgusting thing, by the way, regardless of one's position in the conflict).

Specifically, the term "colorably different" means:

"The phrase “colorable differ-ences” refers to alterations that do not essentially change the nature of the device, and are made only to evade the permanent injunction.17 Language enjoining adjudged infringers from producing products that are “only colorably different” from the infringing devices is typical in patent injunctions."

Nathan Ingham, Recording over Old Standards: TiVo’s “More Than Colorably Different” Standard for Patent Injunction Contempt Proceedings, 53 B.C.L. Rev. E. Supp. 47 (2012), http://lawdigitalcommons.bc.ed...

So, the injunction is very narrow. Basically for the phones specifically listed and minor variants that doesn't change the nature of the device and only made to evade a permanent injunction (i.e. a slightly modified model with a minor workaround).

Apple's specific argument was: "Samsung's claim that it has discontinued selling the particular models found to infringe or design around Apple's patents in no way diminishes Apple's need for injunctive relief... Because Samsung frequently brings new products to market, an injunction is important to providing Apple the relief it needs to combat any future infringement by Samsung through products not more than colorably different from those already found to infringe."

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/...

However, even here, the argument is pretty darn weak. Apple only requested a number of devices plus any variants of those devices that are practically the same as those devices.

Essentially, they're asking an injunction against, say, a Galaxy S or a Galaxy S2 and any minor variants on them. But nobody sells them anymore except for a few ebay sellers. Samsung is not going to start reselling Galaxy S or S2 phones.

I don't understand the request for injunction against the Samsung phones in question. At this point, the Samsung phones are several years old and absolutely nobody short of a few ebay sellers are still selling them. What do they get out of asking for an injunction? They're spending millions of dollars in attorney fees and, for what, a meaningless "moral victory"?