That is stuff Tolkien actually talked about at more length in the LotR appendices and in material published after his death. It seems reasonable to include it, since this is really intended as an LotR prequel rather than just The Hobbit on its own. I'm not entirely crazy about the way they wrote it, but it's not something they invented out of whole cloth.

I'd have liked to have seen more of Saruman, in fact, but that was limited by Christopher Lee's health. It ties in to the continuation of the Gandalf plot line from the second film.

Using a high percentage of your credit limit is definitely a negative.

I haven't heard the one about carrying a balance. I'm suspicious about that line because it is self-serving.

They already have to include non-Slavs, though. Remember that Russia is like 10-15% Muslim (depending on who you ask), and most of these are non-Slavs. Then of course you have a bunch of other guys like Yakuts or Buryats.

The overarching ideology is actually Eurasianism; Russians are seen as the "core nation" in that model, the one that binds everyone else together around it. Not dissimilar to how Stalin described USSR after WW2.

How does the "or later" clause hinder use? Licensing under GPLv3 might have (I'm not going to argue that either way), but what does the "or later" clause matter?

Because you cannot mix v2-only code with v3/v3+ code. It's actually incompatible - v3 puts additional "restrictions" (from v2's perspective) on the code, making it incompatible (e.g., anti-TiVoization, etc).

So this means all code in that kernel must be either v2 or v2+ (which means the "+" disappears).

For an embedded systems, they typically want GPLv2 or v2+, avoiding v3 as much as possible. "or later" can hinder since if you're not careful, you might accidentally include v3 code (especially if you pull from an upstream source) when you don't want to. v2-only makes that a license violation, while v2+ turns into v3/v3+. One should be careful when pulling patches to make sure the codebase doesn't unexpectedly turn into v3.

I really don't know much about that; can you amplify a bit? I mean, economics said that it should happen some day, as all that money washing into China should eventually translate into demands for higher pay, but there were plenty of places to squirrel that money away rather than pay workers. And there were a LOT of potential workers.

So what finally caused the labor rate to rise enough? I gather that the goal was to establish dominance in some kinds of manufacturing so that we'd have to re-establish the industry from scratch, raising the threshold for bringing manufacturing projects back here. Did the achieve that, or what?

What utter crap. Who would destroy them?

Egypt is now a puppet state of the US, that is why the army threw the Muslim brotherhood out of power. Syria is too fucked to have a go at anyone, and most other countries nearby like Jordan would not want to do anything to upset the US. The only country that would consider attacking Israel now is Iran and they do not actually have a border with them.

The only people who still have a grievance with Israel are Gaza and Palestine, and they would never be in a position to use military force to take Israel back for the Arabs. The truth is that the only problem with Israel giving up its huge armed forces that the US subsidises is that they would have to stop expanding.

Not everyone in Israel agrees with this. The hardcore Zionists consider it part of the promised land that was given to the Israelites by god.

You still missed the point, sorry :)

What I was saying is that your premise - "if he crashes the economy his country is no longer a threat to the world" - is incorrect. For one thing, it's always tempting to "fix" the crashed economy by going to war. But even if it doesn't actually fix it, it can be that last "okay, if we're going down, you're going down with us" sort of gesture. Yes, a country with a ruined economy won't be able to wage a protracted war, but it doesn't need to do so to make others hurt, and the bombs and the missiles won't magically disappear. Nor will the manpower - and said manpower is only going to be more desperate and therefore (with the right coaching) more angry.

Now, as to why I believe that such a war would work to bolster inner popularity. The trick, of course, is to present it in such a manner that the war is declared on you. Russian TV has already been quite successful at spinning things that way about Ukraine - a recent poll showed that 94% of Russians get their news primarily from TV channels (all of which are now state-run or indirectly state-controlled), and 75% believe that its coverage is truthful and objective. Only 25% believe that "propaganda" is an apt description for what they're seeing.

So, really, all Putin needs to do to escalate to war is to keep provoking the West, and then blowing up any responses as something big. And heck, there are tried and proven methods to get a decent casus belli when the time comes - see Mainila incident for an example. After all the crazy conspiracy theories that are eagerly accepted for granted in Russia (by the population, not by politicians!) just to be able to preserve the "we are the good guys" mentality... something like that would be swallowed very easily.

And yes, the "patriotic" fervor in Russia today is such that, with the right sugar-coating, the population will happily swallow the war pill. If they are explained that all economic woes are due to Western shenanigans (and the occasional spy/saboteur - for the sake of some public circus).

Hell, they are already clamoring for war, seemingly more so than the government itself. Did you see #PutinVvediVoiska ("Putin, move the armed forces in!" [to Ukraine]) Twitter hashtag? It's only growing in popularity as more sanctions come in. Then there's another thing where people are mocking the sanctions themselves - that is also going pretty strong.

Is it MARVELous this SHIELD?

I had been wondering about this. A FOAF was a curator at a museum on the West Coast, and when I talked to him about the idea of online displays, he was completely dismissive -- it seemed like anything other than "Maximum Lockdown" didn't even register with him. Then again, this was probably 15 years ago. Was Maximum Lockdown the usual stance before the Internet explosion, or do all three approaches have a well-established history?

I think all three approaches are common. It really depends on the museum. If they have some prized artifact the world knows about (Mona Lisa, David, etc) then it's likely to be "maximum lockdown" because well, they want you to see that item in their collection.

Then there are museums that make money off being exclusive dealers so they tend to put some stuff up.

Finally, there are public museums that have full openness. and intentionally want to spread the collection aroun.

I think it relates to how the museum is funded, as well as how notable its collection is - the lesser known, the more they need to advertise. After all, if you're the Louvre, you don't need to do anything - people come to you so you can lock it down and force people to come in. But if you're a museum on your rapidly dying culture, well, putting it online could mean dying as a footnote or leaving a legacy.

No matter how stupid Apple was to fall for this, and how much they disregarded good practice, this is still definitely fraud.

Why wouldn't they call the police?

No kidding, any system which comes down to "I have a number, trust me" is pretty flawed.

Obviously, Apple was doing something wrong since they're on the hook for it, but you'd really think there would have to be some validation inherent to this.

This sounds like it boiled down to "declined, declined, declined, OK, go ahead". That's crazy.

But that's the problem with this system: as long as the number of digits is correct, the override code itself doesn't matter.

Who the hell came up with that idea?

That's no security in any meaningful sense of the word.

I'm betting some lobbyist made it so that the banks didn't really need to do anything concrete, just look like they were.

If that's all that's required, the banks deserve to be getting ripped off.

Property Rights? Trespass to Chattels? No abuse of state powers for private gain? How easily the mask slips when a few cold pounds are involved.

But the people I feel really sorry for are the victims of crime in London, whose cases go unsolved due to precious police resources being wasted on internet nonsense like this.

Do the DHS seriously believe they have any credibility in this area?

At this point, I assume if they find any exploits they'll keep them secret and use them themselves.

Sorry guys, but once you became the enforcement arm for copyright, you lost all credibility.