Did you see the stats for the growth of their middle class over the past 15 years or so?

I'm not disputing that the country is ardently capitalist and has tightly guarded elite circles. But for most people in there, that's not where they are aiming for. What they want is basically just comfortable living, and their standard for it is getting pretty close to what the West enjoys. And with every new generation, there are millions more actually enjoying it - even though there's still hundreds of millions locked out. But for now, the trend is good.

Was it, though? China circa 1960s/70s was a totalitarian dictatorship where Tiananmen square was an impossibility simply because any dissent would be crushed long before it would get to mass protest stage, and the yearly number of victims was far greater, too. Compared to China after Tiananmen, the latter is far more liberal. It's even more liberal today.

I did not suggest doing such a thing. The best thing you can do is just trade (and yes, this doesn't preclude e.g. tariffs to even out the price of labor differences, environmental concerns etc).

As Chinese economy grows, so does its middle class. As its middle class grows, it demands more democratic reforms and more government responsibility - ultimately, a way to better China, for both its people and its neighbors.

So if you want a better China, you should do the exact opposite of what you're doing.

If you read the news headlines less and statistical data more, you'd know that the chances of that happening are far, far lower than your kid being hit by a school bus, or drowning in your pool. You might as well worry about him dying in the next 9/11.

Elizabeth II is the Queen of Canada. That she also happens to be a Queen of some other realms is completely immaterial to her position as the monarch of Canada - her royal prerogatives in Canada are defined by the Canadian political system, not the British one, and her duties and responsibilities are also before the Canadian nation.

Well, except for the part where Linus isn't just writing code for the kernel - he's actually using Linux on his desktop to write said code. That's why he had such hard opinions on, say, Gnome 3.

Maybe they did predict an increase of sea ice (which this is), but you just conveniently ignore that part of it? Or perhaps you never even heard of it, because your favorite climate denial blog didn't bother mentioning that part?

And that's exactly what 9 is all about fixing.

The real irony here is that, in the meantime, Microsoft has open sourced the entirety of C# and VB.NET compilers.

Rust does not have similar goals at all. Rust aims to be the 21st century C++, with a sane design that ditches back-compat with C and adds safety-by-default. Swift is Obj-C redone Java-style.

The cameras like that already exist - all that's needed is adding an accelerometer to one to detect the shot being fired.

Of course not. But you give the right answer immediately.

Exactly. Embargo is a convenient scapegoat - it lets the government to explain away harsh life and crackdowns by an ongoing conflict, "us vs them", "everything for the victory". Remove it, and it makes that much harder for them to maintain that. Long term, it will accelerate the inevitable collapse of the dictatorship and the transition to something saner. If Castros are smart, they will do what Chinese and Vietnamese elites did, and head the transition rather than trying to resist it, so as to reap the maximum benefits. If not, there will be another revolution.

Either way, all that embargo does is delay that process. So it hurts the people of Cuba, not its government.

The embargo started before the Cuban missile crisis (in fact, many historians believe that it was the extreme hostility of US towards Cuba after the revolution that pushed the latter towards Soviets). In any case, the notion that if the embargo is lifted, Cuba would rebuild the missile bases, just defies any common sense. It was not their bases to begin with, and if someone else would want to rebuild them today, the embargo makes it easier not harder (because it takes that much less to pay to Cuba for them).

If you seriously consider the Black Book of Communism to be the "best estimates for communist regimes killing people", you're either deluded or retarded. Heck, even if you take the book at its face value, even then it counts "victims of communism" - and by this they mean anyone who has died due to e.g. starvation during a famine, regardless of whether said famine was artificially induced or not (and Soviet Russia had plenty natural ones in the aftermath of its Civil War). For the actual killing estimates, they tend to take the highest figures from the sources that are basically pure guesswork, like Solzhenitsyn's books.

The embargo is by US on Cuba. If US truly wanted to lift it, it could just do that. The fact that it is not lifted because "Cuba does something" means that US doesn't really want to lift it, either.

Which is stupid, because Cuba is as communist as it is only because of that embargo. Hell, look at Vietnam: a country that US actually went to wage war in, with numerous civilian casualties, and now? They're rapidly catching up with China on that whole capitalism business, and you can actually talk to a Vietnamese guy on the Internet and ask him what he thinks (and tell him what you think).