United Russia is the party of Putin's yes-men, put in parliament to approve anything that Putin proposes. Stupendously corrupt and proud of it. A Just Russia are random leftists who make a show of being in the opposition, but are for the most part too scared to oppose Putin on important matters. Liberal Democrats are assorted wingnuts, clowns, mafiosi, and nationalists who try hard to be more Putinist than Putin himself. Communists are Soviet dinosaurs, supported by old people nostalgic for the USSR and by young people disgusted with the other major parties.

Note quite. Lower level courts, the ones that hand out the final decision for the vast majority of everyday cases, are supposed to be predictable. But the Supreme Court is supposed to only handle appeals for the most difficult and borderline cases where nobody can really tell in advance what the right decision ought to be. Your local traffic court's decisions are supposed to be very predictable, but it's truly disturbing if an algorithm can accurately model SCOTUS.

Well, here are the requirements for a CA's certificate to be included in Mozilla products. In particular, they require an independent audit of the CA's policies and internal operations. Presumably other browser vendors follow similar procedures.

Not quite. The law that you are referring to (passed by the Politburo of the Ukrainian Communist Party, which at the time was led by an ethnic Pole) stated that if a farm failed to meet its quota, the farm could be subject to fines of up to 15 monthly quotas of meat. Even if government agents decided to apply the maximum penalty and to seize the fine immediately, in theory the farm would still be left with grain and vegetables.

Let's make it harder for websites to use cookies for legitimate purposes such as persistent logins, habituate Swedish computer users to clicking on the "yes, allow" button, and make foreign companies face trial in Swedish courts for using standard web technologies, while doing nothing about advertisers' ability to track users without permission!

And to expand on my point: the 1932-1933 Soviet famine wasn't genocide. It was a horrific man-made accidental disaster that affected the entire Soviet grain belt with no regard for ethnicity, and was caused by a combination of poorly thought-out and brutally implemented collectivization, habitual use of fake statistics, and a bureaucratic culture where underlings were afraid to tell their higher-ups that the higher-ups' "wise policies" were rapidly leading to disaster. Thirty years later, the same scenario was played out on an even grander scale, and with even more victims, during China's Great Leap Forward.

Who's "they"? Do you mean Stalin (a Georgian)? Or maybe you are talking about the (ethnic Ukrainian) communist functionaries who sent Stalin fake statistics to try to convince him that his economic policies were working well and that there was no starvation in Ukraine? And who is "us"? Because the entire grain belt of the Soviet Union (covering parts of Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan) was starving in 1932-1933. Millions of ethnic Russians starved to death too, yet today the Ukrainian authorities are cynically trying to appropriate the tragedy for themselves and portraying the event as an Ukrainian genocide by the evil Russians.

Ilya Muromets came from Murom. Murom is and has always been in Russia, not Ukraine. And it's in the solidly Russian part of Russia; the territories where Ukrainians form a major part of the population are hundreds of miles to the south.

Back in the middle ages, when these fairy tales were created, Russians and Ukrainians were one, united ethnic group speaking one language (it took many centuries for the languages and cultures to drift apart, and Ukrainians didn't really start to develop a separate national identity until the 19th century); so claiming that an ancient fairy tale character is exclusively Ukrainian or exclusively Russian is utterly ridiculous. Unless, of course, that character is somehow firmly tied to a particular geographic location. One such example is Ilya Muromets, who (as you can guess from the name) is from the town of Murom, located in Russia, 400 miles north-west of the Ukrainian border. The insane people claiming Ilya Muromets exclusively for Ukrainian folklore have clearly failed both history and geography.

...the people who resort to buying ISK from RMTers are usually those who don't know how to earn ISK legally in the game - i.e. noobs and clueless folk of one form or another. So of course they end up spending all their bought ISK on shiny ships that they have no idea how to fly properly, quickly get themselves blown up, and leave wrecks full of juicy loot for those of us who play by the rules.

who are wondering why healthcare language barrier is such a major issue in America:

• In major US cities, there are a lot of people who were born overseas and don't known English well. They include foreign tourists (whose grasp of English may be limited to a few dozen phrases from a guidebook); recently arrived immigrants who haven't had time to fully learn the language; and residents of ethnic enclaves who don't know much English because they don't need to — 95% of their daily communication is in another language.
• Human biology being what it is, the people who are the most likely to find themselves in need of medical attention are old. And old people universally suck at languages. They have trouble remembering new vocabulary, they have trouble getting the pronunciation right, and when they get stressed (such as when they are in a hospital due to a sudden medical problem), they tend to forget English words and phrases and have to resort to their native language.
• Even foreigners who know English fairly well may have trouble with medical vocabulary (if you don't believe me, here is a quick illustration: if there is a foreign language that you think you know pretty well, try saying "irregular heartbeat" or "intestinal bleeding" in it). Not to mention the prevalence of false cognates (e.g. "angina" means "chest pains" in English and "tonsillitis" in Russian) and the fact that different countries often use completely different names for the same drug.

Oh really? When you are visiting a foreign country, are you sure you can "pick up enough of the dialog" to be able to explain to a local doctor what the symptoms that you have suddenly developed are, what your and your family's medical history is, and what local medicines you are allergic to (remember, the same drugs are typically sold under different brand names in different parts of the world; a foreign doctor may well have no idea what you mean by "Tylenol") — while experiencing fever and pain that would have taxed your ability to coherently express yourself in English?

The Russian people have been exposed to twenty years of Western pop culture telling them that the Soviet Union was evil (despite their own memories telling them that it wasn't) and before that, to seventy years of Soviet propaganda telling them that the West is evil (and then gaining the opportunity to travel to the West and see for themselves that it isn't). They have gotten used to reading between the lines and mistrusting officially accepted accounts of historical events. As a result, when a Russian opens a book and reads that Sauron was 100% utterly evil, his natural suspicion is immediately aroused; he starts to think, well, maybe Sauron really wasn't such a bad guy, and Tolkien's version of the story is just propaganda?

I do not understand the bizarre European obsession about online marketers tracking people. Sure, there are some things that a reasonable person would wish to keep private (for instance, medical history, finances, and for those living in repressive societies, political and religious affiliation), but why would anyone wish to hide what brand of jeans they like to wear? I for one would very much prefer that marketers and ad networks had a good picture of my product preferences so that instead of ads for mortgage refinancing and painfully unfunny t-shirts, I would get advertisements for things that I might actually be interested in.

Here's a hires photo, courtesy of Lenta.ru, Sukhoi and Coral Cache.