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Comment Re:Commie Critter On The Lam? (Score 1) 130

Correction: Fatherland is Germany and putin's empire is called Mother Russia.

Correction to your Correction:

The Order "For Merit to the Fatherland" (Russian: ) is a state decoration of the Russian Federation. It was instituted on March 2, 1994 by Presidential Decree 442.[1] Until the re-establishment of the Order of St. Andrew in 1998, it was the highest Order of the Russian Federation, though it is still the highest Civilian decoration of the state.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O...

Comment Re:What's the Kremlin really after, then? (Score 1) 130

As far as protest leaders go, they meant the people on the maidan from a year or so ago - i.e. Ukranians protesting against Putin's puppet Yanukovich. As for why they prefer VKontakte to Facebook? No idea as I don't use either, but I'm sure there are "reasons".

Durov just has the potential to raise all sorts of hell if he should like to - I don't personally think he has that information, and it this point, the accounts in question have probably long since been deleted. It's more of political in nature than actual hard data that can be gleaned from him. The original article in summary goes into a little more detail on that aspect.

Comment Re:Commie Critter On The Lam? (Score 4, Informative) 130

http://dealbook.nytimes.com/20...

The Russian Internet giant Mail.ru said on Tuesday that it had bought the remaining stake in Vkontakte, the country’s largest social network, that it did not already own for $1.47 billion.

Mail.ru is owned by Alisher B. Usmanov.

From http://qz.com/268023/this-puti... :

Usmanov is one of Russian president Vladimir Putin’s “oligarchs,” a group of businessmen with close ties to the Kremlin, and last year Putin awarded him Russia’s highest civilian award, the Order for Service to the Fatherland.

That ought to clear up who is running/owns VKontakte.

Submission + - How Quickly Will The Latest Arms Race Accelerate

tranquilidad writes: Russia was concerned enough about the U.S. development of a Prompt Global Strike (PGS) capability in 2010 that they included restrictions in the the new Start treaty (previously discussed on Slashdot). It now appears that China has entered the game with their "Ultra-High Speed Missile Vehicle." While some in the Russian press may question whether fears of the PGS are "rational" it appears that the race is on to develop the fastest weapons delivery system. The hypersonic arms race is focused on "precise targeting, very rapid delivery of weapons, and greater survivability against missile and space defenses" with delivery systems traveling between Mach 5 and Mach 10 after being launched from "near space".

Submission + - If I Had A Hammer

Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: Tom Friedman begins his latest op-ed in the NYT with an anecdote about Dutch chess grandmaster Jan Hein Donner who when asked how he’d prepare for a chess match against a computer like IBM.’s Deep Blue replied: “I would bring a hammer.” Donner isn’t alone in fantasizing that he’d like to smash some recent advances in software and automation like self-driving cars, robotic factories and artificially intelligent reservationists says Friedman because they are "not only replacing blue-collar jobs at a faster rate, but now also white-collar skills, even grandmasters!" In the First Machine Age (The Industrial Revolution) each successive invention delivered more and more power but they all required humans to make decisions about them. Therefore, the inventions of this era actually made human control and labor “more valuable and important.” Labor and machines were complementary. Friedman says that we are now entering the "Second Machine Age" where we are beginning to automate cognitive tasks because in many cases today artificially intelligent machines can make better decisions than humans. "We’re having the automation and the job destruction," says MIT’s Erik Brynjolfsson. "We’re not having the creation at the same pace. There’s no guarantee that we’ll be able to find these new jobs. It may be that machines are better than that." Put all the recent advances together says Friedman, and you can see that our generation will have more power to improve (or destroy) the world than any before, relying on fewer people and more technology. "But it also means that we need to rethink deeply our social contracts, because labor is so important to a person’s identity and dignity and to societal stability." "We’ve got a lot of rethinking to do," concludes Friedman, "because we’re not only in a recession-induced employment slump. We’re in technological hurricane reshaping the workplace."

Submission + - Windows 9 Already? Apparently, Yes. (slashdot.org)

Nerval's Lobster writes: A little over a year after Microsoft released Windows 8, and a mere three months after it pushed out a major update with Windows 8.1, rumors abound that Windows 9 is already on its way. According to Paul Thurrott’s Supersite for Windows, Microsoft will begin discussing the next version of Windows (codenamed “Threshold,” at least for the moment) at April’s BUILD conference. “Threshold is more important than any specific updates,” he wrote. “Windows 8 is tanking harder than Microsoft is comfortable discussing in public, and the latest release, Windows 8.1, which is a substantial and free upgrade with major improvements over the original release, is in use on less than 25 million PCs at the moment.” Microsoft intends Threshold to clean up at least a portion of Windows 8’s mess. Development on the latest operating system will supposedly begin in late April, which means developers who attend BUILD won’t have access to an early alpha release—in fact, it could be quite some time before Microsoft locks down any new features, although it might double down on Windows 8’s controversial “Modern” (previously known as “Metro”) design interface. Yet if Thurrott’s reporting proves correct, Microsoft isn’t abandoning the new Windows interface that earned such a lackluster response—it’s betting that the format, once tweaked, will somehow revive the operating system’s fortunes. With Ballmer leaving the company and a major reorganization underway, it’ll be the next Microsoft CEO’s task to make sure that Windows 9 is a hit; in fact, considering that rumored 2015 release date, shepherding the OS could become that executive’s first major test.

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