Or rather, that optimizing compilers can expose bugs in buggy code that weren't revealed by naive translation.

And when it comes to loyalty to their new "allies" after the switch, how would you call shooting at English and American planes trying to help the Warsaw Uprising if they tried to go over Soviet-held territory, not even speaking about refueling there?

Russkies were a third side in the war, their relation to the free world was at most an uneasy truce because of a common enemy.

And what about Russian or Chinese hordes of biased editors paid by their governments? They plague not only comment section of pretty much any mainstream news website, but also Wikipedia as well. Try for example the WWII article -- it's so full of paeans of praise for the Soviet Union that someone who doesn't know better would take them for heroes who almost single-handedly liberated the world.

Uhm no, the patent system works as designed since day one. The purpose of patents was to extract some money for the rulers (the king at first). When money went to someone else, elected parliaments try to fight that, like in 1624, but whenever they receive some of the money they propagate the problem. It was never about "innovation".

Go to ipv6.google.com (obviously, requires IPv6), it doesn't do that annoying geolocation.

No, only a part of USians will assume that. For the rest of us, the message is clear, unless we happen to know details of that particular incident, which is unlikely unless one happens to read US news.

No, "Virginia State" is an US state (with a little-known own name of "Commonwealth of Virginia"), "Virginia State University" is the school. Using bare "Virginia" is not enough to tell what you mean, especially in an international forum.

T-Mobile "not evil"??? They gouged me $150 for 1.5MB data roaming from Bosnia (I'm from Poland), and would take more had I used a contract rather than a prepaid plan. And unlike the guy in TFA, I did not get them to reverse the charges.

There are three kinds of men:
* those who admit to watching porn / ogling women /etc
* those who lie
* those below the age of 12

In other words, people with a smaller brain region are less capable of speaking the truth.

Somehow, Nazis got a press so bad even Wolfenstein won't show a swastika, yet we have hammer&sickle proudly displayed on major government parades, Stalin and Lenin widely worshipped, and so on. It's scary how investing in some propaganda can whitewash even the most murderous ideology in world's history.

Use RequestPolicy. It makes both AdBlock and Ghostery obsolete -- by referencing 3rd party servers on an opt-in rather than opt-out basis. It might be a bit tedious to use the first time you visit a new website, but almost always it's obvious what needs to be unblocked.

Except that since recently you need a C++ compiler to build gcc, which puts a severe block towards reproducibility: you can write a basic C compiler that can handle most programs in a week (with a plain libc, at least), and get all bits needed to let old gcc bootstrap in not much longer. A basic C++ compiler, on the other hand, is a matter of years.

So tux2 was ready in 2000, and it took 14 years to rewrite it to avoid parents? Oh how much patents help innovation!

When Stalin took over, the genocide was already going on full steam. Putin has no Lenin to build on.