It would be very short sighted too only look at the USA when it comes to history, even a relatively recent one.

We had this "better world" 130ish years ago. It was not better, addicts were becoming a huge problem for the society - the actual reason drugs became illegal. And yes, there still was a war in Afghanistan.

I can understand where you are coming from when you talk about Assange, but Kim Schmitz? That fraudster? Seriously? That guy started as a script kiddie taking the credit for work of real hackers and later stock fraud and other investment scams. And all the time he's been an attention whore of the worst kind.

Mod parent +1 "Manly".

Yes, and it is basically one of the very few examples where prices actually went down over time. The other example would be air fares but I can't really think of anything else that actually became cheaper.

Because it works fine and is a comfortable operating system. Because a huge amount of applications and games are written for Windows. Because some people genuinely feel the same about alternative operating systems.

Apparently you are the one who doesn't understand economics. Prices are whatever the market can bear. If the costs can be lowered, it does not mean that the prices go down because they are already at whatever the market can bear. Prices will stay the same, corporate profits will raise.

Life prison sentences work very well. They keep a person too dangerous to be released from harming society any further without resorting to what amounts to an institutionalised murder.

Not quite. Progress has a different upper stage and that is what failed.

What part of "The shelf has existed for roughly 10,000 years" is so difficult to understand?

Not killing people is the default state of a civilised country. Thus your question is kind of stupid.

Division Bell is a hit and miss for me personally. Half of it is awesome, the other half boring. On DSOTM every song is excellent.

Works exactly as stated for Germany. The past 10 years I've seen snowfall on maybe three days during the whole winter and the snow won't stay for long. If I want to go for XC ski, I need to ascend to >800m AMSL and even then snow is hit and miss. I had +14 C in mid December and mid February this winter FFS!

Do you want to tell that to a volunteer firefighter?

Right, but there's a difference between nationalists whose nationalism tends towards wanting Ukraine to be a sovereign independent state, and neo-Nazis. Puting is claiming the latter, tarring them with the same brush, but the reality is that neo-Nazism in Ukraine is lower than levels in even much of Western Europe and the US, and far far lower than in Russia.

Like I said, I've been there. I've seen the national guard volunteers in Kiev. The sight was downright scary. This were the same kind of people you'd find on the yearly neo-Nazi marches in Dortmund (I used to study in Dortmund so I know them first hand). As a German, I am somewhat sensitive to this and trust me, over here these thugs would never be accepted by Bundeswehr. Over there they are welcomed with open arms and are the core of the national guard.

Yes exactly, the aspirations of Ukrainians was to get away from corruption and Russian influence. Yuschenko gave them the latter, but not the former, and so their break from Russia faltered as they felt they had little choice but to tend towards Yanukovych, of course, Yanukovych also continued with the corruption AND tended back towards Russia meaning it was even worse again, hence, we are where we are.

Actually Yanukovich, even being a bandit with a previous conviction, was the lesser of two evils there. He realised that it is very difficult for Ukraine to get away from Russia's influence (it has been a part of Russia for centuries and almost 40% of the population speaks Russian as their primary language) and in many ways counterproductive because, frankly, Russia brings much more money in Ukraine's economy.

It's really splitting hairs, regardless of whether it was formerly part of the USSR or not, it's stupid to pretend it wasn't under the exact same regime of defacto Russian control that Russia is trying to force Ukraine under. No one in the Warsaw pact did anything without Russia's say so.

No, it wasn't really the same. I was born on the other side of Germany and I've been to USSR in the late 1980ies (I actually still speak Russian fluently, although I can't write anymore and have quite an accent). It was really quite different. And Poland was different still.

Complete codswallop, both of these countries have perfectly functioning economies of their own that exist regardless of EU payments

They really haven't. I've been in both countries several times. Everywhere you see, everything is paid with EU money. Estonia might kinda sorta survive on their own, although I doubt it, but Lithuania and Latvia have been depopulated. People flee from there to work and live abroad. The best and brightest don't see any future in their homelands.

Ukraine has it's work cut out, we all know that, but Russia is preventing it from even making a start at moving on as punishment for daring to step away from Russia to a more progressive Western economy and Russia is the one that's further courting and funding neo-Nazis and their groups across Europe, not Ukraine.

Seriously? Several Ukrainian governments were built on one single premise: "We just need to cut all ties to Russia and then we'll immediately be rich". Unfortunately, this was just opium for the masses because in reality the same politicians just tried to steal whatever was left from the Soviet times and sell it abroad. Maidan started as a popular uprising but was quickly seized by neo-Nazis on one side and business interests on other side - the interests of those whom Yanukovich didn't let steal, preferring his own cronies instead.

What Russia does in Donbass, is, obviously, asshatery. But, to be honest, after visiting the country I can sort of understand the Crimean attorney general when she says that she was ashamed to live in the country where bandits freely walk about the streets". The neo-Nazis in the national guard are very real and one of the Maidan commanders was known for fighting in Chechnya for the islamists because he enjoyed killing Russians. And every day government troops continues to shell civilians the separatists will get more volunteers. Don't get it wrong, this is a real civil war happening there and there are several sides involved who put more fuel into fire.