Tolerance is a constituent value of the Western society, and is therefore higher up in the value hierarchy than intolerance. So it's not a conundrum – being intolerant towards intolerance is absolutely consistent with the core values of the social system. Otherwise you could never put murderers behind bars.

No issues since iOS 6 (which is when I started using the iPhone). Granted, I don't use the builtin app, having instead opted for the Sleep Cycle app that uses the accelerometer while you sleep and allegedly takes your sleep cycles into account when determining the right window for waking you up. (Yea, I bought into it, but it's been working well for me.) It plays any song or playlist I throw at it, background or foreground. So in short, no such limitation has come up.

How come the parent post is modded interesting?

On 3 September, Tuomioja went on record saying that he opposes creating NATO bases in the Baltic states since supporting it could be perceived as a hostile act towards Russia. ‘[---] It could be justified and is understandable with respect to these countries, but we don’t want our territory to be used for support bases that Russia could see as hostile.’ Source: http://yle.fi/uutiset/fm_tuomi.... So he may have assessed the situation in Ukraine correctly, but it does not mean that he's not one for appeasing the bear.

No, my point is that there are quite a lot of articles re: GCC vs. Clang on Phoronix, and that the comparisons are quite a bit more thorough and the results more varied than the parent hinted at with his/her implied claim that ‘the’ Phoronix article proves how GCC runtime performance is better. I read another article (at http://www.phoronix.com/scan.p...), and though it’s half a year old, it still shows that the compilers can be neck to neck in one area, and that they beat one another in various tests. So neither can claim absolute superiority.

This is still going on. Finland’s foreign minister Tuomioja is strongly of the opinion that Finland should never do or say anything that could even remotely be construed as being antagonistic to Russia.

So there is just one, right? One lone article on Phoronix?

From what I read, I think the point was that if such changes *are* met with such fervent opposition, it is high time to step on the brakes and reevaluate the situation, and perhaps revert the changes.

Experiment, not experience. Pointy hat to...

So from now on they’ll have the luxury of seeing a glimpse of the sun when they drive to work, yet they’ll have to resort to pitch black darkness when they get back. In summer, the sun will rise at 4 in the morning and it will be dark before nine in the evening. It won’t be long till there is a popular backlash against it – people will demand their DST back because they want their beauty sleep unimpeded by the overly early sunrise, and they want their evenings to be light longer.

At least that’s precisely what happened in my country when the government abolished DST for a couple of years. Plus there were ramifications regarding time differences with adjacent countries that had previously been in the same timezone. All in all, the experience that looked nice on paper (and I was initially for it) turned out horribly wrong. Even DST all year round (in effect moving the timezone one zone eastwards) is a saner approach, as long as humans are involved.

According to OECD stats, Italians, Spaniards and particularly the Greeks work much more than the much lauded Germans. How’s that for ‘raw numbers’? The Greeks are among the most hard working OECD nations, statistically speaking, with the other South European nations not far behind. Incidentally, the laziest nation appears to be the Dutch, the second laziest being the Germans. Now, this does not take into account the structure of the economy of those countries. It’s obvious that if you build a car in three hours then you’re viewed as more productive as the other guy who works in his olive grove until sunset.

And since I cannot edit my own post, here is the rebuttal of the Estonian National Electoral Committee: http://www.vvk.ee/valimiste-ko...

There is really nothing to see here. The report was commissioned by the Estonian Centre Party (ostensibly by the City Council of Tallinn, but they are the same thing) and was strategically scheduled to be published a few days before the European Parliament elections. (The Centre Party has been denouncing e-voting for a long time, mostly because they don't do well at those because of the demographics of their core electorate, and of course their own constant campaigning against it.) The team was handpicked from among well-known e-voting contrarians, so the result was a foregone conclusion. I was only surprised how much demagoguery and outright lies went into it, but then, knowing the Centre Party, I should not have been. Cherry-picking the data, wilfully drawing the wrong conclusions, purposefully deceiving the reader, deliberately ignoring information that disproves what they're out to achieve etc etc. Let's just say that the fact that letting the observers know the SSID and the password of the guests' wireless network segment does not constitute a security breach that would merit annulling all the election results. There were other laughable ‘discoveries’ as well, such as “we took the copy of the system home and logged on as root, we were able to change some stuff in it“. Well, duh. If you're on the clock, you must draw the conclusions that the master demands, and even better if you are predetermined to do that anyway because of your convictions (which indeed were the reason you were hired anyway).

Organic farming uses natural pesticides, such as specific plants and plant infusions that insects are averse to, and those are not used to spray the crops, they are strategically planted or placed in the field. And they are completely harmless to humans. Where did you get that ‘older pesticides’ nonsense?

It looks like a multi-party system on paper, but the Kremlin has slowly and steadily gained control over all the media (with some exceptions), most notably the television, and as that is what most Russian citizens use for getting their daily dose of information, it’s a good and effective way of keeping one party in the limelight and belittling everybody else. The opposition gets no media time, but they do get politically motivated arrests and jail time on trumped up or made up charges etc. NGOs funded from abroad are labelled as foreign agents, and while this may not sound like a big deal, it effectively closes down all the election monitoring and human rights groups etc. The communists’ resilience is astounding, but it’s also understandable, because nostalgia is king (and also plays a big part in the current events in Crimea). Besides, they serve their purpose: the message from above is that it’s either us or the commies, and you remember how that ended. It’s the Kremlin’s modus operandi – they keep some nutcases on the payroll or at least let them speak in public so that the rulers can look sane in comparison. (See Zhirinovski and Kiselyov et al.) And they can use them to probe the public opinion.

This, however, is not to say that the entire opposition is necessarily a force for good. While Putin’s derzhava rhetorics worry me, I myself am equally wary of some opposition figures’ nationalistic rhetorics, because even though they tout democratic values, they are also big on Russian nationalism. In some respects, Putin’s derzhava (mighty state) take is more predictable and safer than the nationalist course that would end up much the same way, only worse for the ethnic minorities.