that's the easiest part -- they'll incorporate in a place that has "liberal" or no privacy laws whatsoever and do all the aggregation there.

Germany has the distinct advantages of being much smaller than the US and of having neighbors with large nuclear and hydro power capacity, so they can trade. If you want to compare US to something, it should be EU rather than Germany.

That's fine on the notebook, but it isn't available on paranoid android yet ;)

It was better when it wasn't Google's -- it worked offline and without the need for a G+ account. I'm glad they didn't buy the better office package for Android, Office Suite Pro.

Yeah, right. You make a rather general allegation about six specific information outlets ("reported government claims as facts") and then, when asked a question, proceed to dismiss it without:

a) bothering to provide reference to the allegation and
b) bothering to provide a reference that confirms your claim

If you do, I'm sure it will look like this: the "home" media did quote the government side, and when facts came up that disputed the gov't claims, it was the home press then reported those as well. Under a state-controlled media regime, you would not get the second part of the story.

As for the part where the POTUS "called my friendly neighborhood dictator", you support fully exactly the point that I'm making. It would be somewhat harder for the POTUS to call Mr. Hollande or Mr. Harper and order them to imprison reporters.

To sum it up, you're severely ignorant about the ways press operates under a dictatorial regime, but you think you know better and you are okay with making shit up to go along your beliefs. Suit yourself if life is easier for you this way.

In the two cases you bring up, how did you (and everyone else) realize that the reported government claims weren't facts?

"They" didn't. They didn't even provide the money for it. The eradication of smallpox was a huge effort which spanned more than a century. The part that WHO played in it happened in the last two decades, and that was more than 50 years ago.

Actually, this is the beginning of the end. If the UN will be in charge of the defense against the evil asteroids from space, I'd bet on the asteroids. Too bad I won't be able to claim my prize.

If you lived in a country with a state-controlled press, there would be no "unverified, unsourced" claims. You would not know from the official media anything about what the NSA counterpart there is doing, except for the official line.

Things like the Iran-Contras affair, Watergate, the Wikileaks and the Snowden leaks are impossible to happen in an environment where media is controlled by the state by definition, as they would simply not have been covered by the press.

When most media is tightly controlled by large financial interests, the outcome may begin to approximate state control, but it is still a far cry from it.

This guy has never seen state-controlled media in operation from his porch. Certainly hasn't followed any in a language he can understand well.

There is no such thing as "objective media", but there is a definite and unsubtle difference between media that are influenced by the government in a democratic state, and media that run errands on behalf of a dictator. I'll let you figure out which is which in this case. It ain't very hard.

You should not interpret random text in the same way a computer interprets a piece of code. In particular, you should pay more attention to the context. The easiest way for you to do so on /. is to refer to TFS and TFA before you dump core on a stupid question.

The only little problem with that is that krivda.ru and the likes are even more tightly controlled by the Russian government and will present whatever information they have in an even more slanted way, probably as a part of a plan to harm you.

It seems a much better idea would be for y'all to get a grip on your government and make it better instead of relying on bunch of foreign crooks to do it for you.

I won't even touch the many Russian conspiracy theories that explain how Putin (whose children live in the West and whose personal money holdings are also in Western banks) is actually on a leash, probably tightly held by the US government ;)

We didn't see much of the building, but someone probably got the names of all people in that video.

Ostap Bender lives!