Any chance we can just have a web browser which just does normal browsing, doesn't take hundreds of MB to run, and starts in under a couple of seconds ?

Next you'll be asking it to not leak memory like a sieve.

Do you support unilateral disarmament too?

Smallpox isn't a weapon. Smallpox is a disease. Should someone be stupid enough to re-introduce it to the world, it will circle back and hit them, too. So the only thing destroying live smallpox samples does is reduce the chances of a catastrophic screw-up.

If Communism never actually existed, then what the heck was the deal with USSR, China, E. Germany, Vietnam, North Korea, Cambodia, et al.? There are a lot of nations that insist they are following some Communist ideal, why would the non-practiced version be any more valid than the one these countries actually implemented?

North Korea insists it's "Democratic People's Republic of Korea", does that mean it really is a democracy?

Propaganda and reality rarely have much to do with each other.

I suppose I'm discussing with some ukrainian "patriot".

A Finn who saw the scars your attempt to conquer our country left on innocent people. And now you're doing the exact same thing again - you prop up a puppet regime and have it request help. Only your puppet got ousted, so now you're going with plan B: russian troops posing as rebels.

Uncle Sam wants to fight "bad russkies" and he wants to do this with your hands beacuse it's cheaper.

You're wasting your time. Everyone who has the bad luck to live next to Russia knows the truth about you.

I'm a Pole - that's why I'm freaking out.

And Otto Wille Kuusinen was a Finn and Vidkun Quisling was a Norwegian. Good luck on your chosen career.

I want no part in this madness.

Then stop working for a madman.

I'm so glad to see they can now sit and accomplish nothing under a welfare system that pacifies them by providing their basic needs and no more, while providing a disincentive to actually bettering themselves.

But if they bettered themselves, they would not be picking produce for sub-subsistence wages, now would they? So those poor farmers would still have to ship in exploitable people so you could keep getting produce for below its actual cost of production. Which is what this is really about: you want stuff for below its actual cost, even if this means exploiting desperate people.

In other words, you are against minimum wage because it makes it harder to transfer wealth from poor people to you. Damn looter.

Should Putin want to invade Ukraine, he'd conquer it in a week or two.

Which is what he already did to Crimea, and is now trying to do to East Ukraine. Putin is an evil overlord, not an idiot; he'll gobble up what he can without drawing too much aggro, then wait for the next opportunity.

The problem, of course, is that sooner or later he'll miscalculate the reaction, like Germany did in 1939, and then another world war will start.

1. Who disabled the safety lock, and on what authority?
2. Who fired the missile, and on what authority?

Putin's servants on Putin's authority. The real question is whether this was an intentional revenge for the sanctions, or merely typical Russian lack of concern for human lives. Either way, the poor bastards on the plane are simply collateral damage in Putin's Soviet Empire Rebuilding Project.

Second, given amount of hate western media spewing against Russians and China right now, I see the great war coming.

Dunno what China has to do with any of this, but if you fear a war is coming, maybe you should tell Putin to stop? Because he's the one hell-bent on conquering his neighbours, which is what this is about.

The automation at least gives the benefit of hiring engineers, but far less engineers are hired than the large number of low wage workers who are fired.

You know, we could solve all these problems with unconditional basic income sufficient to live tolerably on. Then we could remove minimum wage entirely and appreciate automation as liberator of humanity from toil rather than fearing it as a threat. At the same time, it would smooth out the boom-bust cycle by guaranteeing a level of economic demand.

Our current model of employment is an artifact of Industrial Era, and is quickly becoming obsolete in our post-Industrial one, which is the ultimate cause of our economic problems.

The jobs lost overseas are just lost. And not only low wage jobs are lost, because as the cost of living increases on the engineers then those jobs start to go away as well.

So basically, if you work for a living, you're screwed.

I dont believe that at all. one should not be paid 20 buck an hour to pick apples, or take an order at mcdonalds, the job is not worth that much, if it were our food would cost double and we would be in the same boat. just because you now make 50 grand instead of 25 sounds good, but if the cost of everything goes up to match that change, whats the point??

Well, for starters, if a McDonald's employee needs food stamps to live, then I'm subsidising McDonald's from my taxes: I'm paying part of the income of their employees. Same goes for apple-pickers, and every other job for that matter.

Allowing a company to pay a lower than living wage results in a massive market failure, and consequently waste of resources. It's much better to force McDonald's and your local apple farm to charge the customers the price of resources - including human resources - it actually takes to deliver their product, and let market decide if it's worth them. An employee must be able to live on his wage alone with a tolerable quality of life, otherwise the employer is simply a parasite upon the economy.

Remember that minimum wage does not just affect minimum wage workers and their employers. It affects everyone who pays for services done by people working minimum wage

And it also affects everyone who sells good and services, since these minimum wage workers can now afford more. That's usually considered a good thing.

It all ripples through the economy. High minimum wages eventually make everything more expensive, not just a McDonald's hamburger.

Higher demand drives up prices, which drives up supply, which drives prices back down. The only thing that actually changes is what level of employment - utilization of production resources - results in the balance.

The bottom line is that if raising minimum wage from $7 to $700 will have a bad effect on the economy, then so will increasing $7 to $7.25.

Which makes just as much sense as saying that if rising price of a product from $7 to $7.25 will increase profits, then so will increasing it to $700.

Economic activity is increased by more people having more money to spend ?

States with the healthiest job situations were the first to increase minimum wage.

Economics: the "science" of fitting the data to whatever theory you happen to favour for ideological reasons.

Sadly, quite easy to conceive.

Without IAPs, what's the correct way to provide a limited playable version without offering the first episode without charge and offering additional episodes as IAPs?

Put the free limited and paid full versions in the store as separate apps.

But if you want some of the nasty shit, you usually know what you're about to get into. Not because school, teachers, priests or other fairy tale godmothers tell you about it. Because you effin' SEE what it does. Few people push their first time themselves. Most have some "help". From people who have been doing it for a while.

Or you mail order it from the Silk Road of the day. You keep on pushing the "dangerous drugs are used by desperate people" angle, but they're also used by people who simply want a thrill. And the fact is, at this point it's next to impossible to know how dangerous any particular substance really is. There's too much misinformation around. So people say "screw this", throw caution to the wind and do it.

And of course that's how it works with everything else, too. How many people still care about nutritional recommendations, which get revised every few years, rather than simply eating what they want?

Just take a moment to ponder how fucked up your life has to be that you consider a slow, agonizing death with a brief, occasional high a pleasant alternative.

And this is another thing: a typical drug-related death is not slow and agonizing, it's overdoze. Tobacco is the only exception I can think of, yet people who's lives are otherwise just fine smoke anyway.

If you are even slightly "high" you can not be pure and one with God.

Isn't it a cliche at this point that ancient prophets were high? Which, a more cynical person might think, is the real reason many drugs are prohibited: one possible effect is "seeing God". Whether such visions are "real" in some sense or not, they tend to prompt re-evaluation of one's life from a different - often larger - perspective. For someone who's life revolves around dominating others, what could be more frightening than for all the little plebs - or "consumers" - to suddenly see that the roles you've assigned them are, in fact, options to be chosen or discarded?

If Joe Sixpack sees God then Joe might start comparing that vision to Uncle Sam or the Invisible Hand and ask himself if these things, for all intents and purposes treated as divinely ordained in our society, are really good matches. He might even start to question whether memorizing answers to trivia questions is a good model for religion, and whether it makes sense to assume that the Creator of the Universe is obsessed with gay sex. And that might lead to some uncomfortable questions about who various religious leaders actually serve.