"Sure it was a coup and the vote for impeachment happened after the coup."

That doesn't even make sense, how can you have a coup if the leadership is not yet deposed? Changing will of parliament is not a coup, not under any circumstances. That's democracy in action. If the leader is still in power then by definition, no coup can have happened. To follow the constitutional process a committee to investigate the offence had to be formed, but Yanukovych resigned before that happened (then rescinded his resignation when he got to Russia which IS unconstitutional). Let's be clear - Yanukovych ran before he was pushed because he saw the tide had turned against him, there was a 73% majority in favour of impeachment which was enough to trigger the required investigation which he resigned before could happen.

"But if you consider what happened as a coup, then it all starts making sense."

Yes, I suspect if you view most things with a predetermined bias then they make sense to you, but that's no reflection on what actually happened.

The only changes that have occurred other than preparing for elections and acting in a security capacity are those to revert the constitution and a couple of other things that were already agreed by Yanukovych and the existing parliament before the interim leadership came into play. You seem to be implying this interim government plans to stay permanently but where is your evidence for this? the election date is set and there's not the slightest shred of evidence they're going to cancel this - in fact, despite the fact Russia has started now to send Spetsnatz units into Eastern Ukraine the leadership has explicitly not called a state of emergency because by law that would mean they would have to cancel the elections.

"I am not saying that the situation on Crimea wasn't a sham. There was no need to rig that vote really, the majority would have voted for an annexation anyway."

This doesn't make sense, if they would've voted for it anyway (polls prior to the Russian invasion suggest they wouldn't) then why go through such extraordinary effort to rig the vote including all the things I mentioned previously on top of installing an unelected puppet leadership in Crimea that called the referendum (again, things that most definitely were unconstitutional).

"Yes it was a coup d'etat. A coup does not have to be a military one. Every illegal usurpation of the government is a coup."

Yes you're right, but there was nothing illegal here. The democratically elected parliament voted for early elections and to impeach the president after deciding to support the will of their constituents (the Ukrainian people). That's not illegal by any measure, therefore, it wasn't a coup.

It was more akin to the parliament voting to impeach the president and then resigning themselves. Unless you're saying parliaments shouldn't be able to bring down a president that has lost popular support, or unless you're saying parliamentarians shouldn't be able to resign and force early elections, then there's no reasonable way this can possibly be described as a coup.

"No. Even in the most fraudulent vote outcome (Rostov region) Putin has received 58.99% of the votes."

I think his comment was largely hyperbole, but really, he's right. Putin has a long history of rigged polls. If there was anything legitimate about the view of the Crimean people in the referendum then why did Putin have to deny international observers, limit all propaganda to pro-Russian propaganda, shut down all communication in and out of Crimea prior to the referendum? Surely if it's what the people wanted then a verifiably free and fair referendum would've been far easier and far easier for him to claim victory for a more legitimate annexation? It's hard to see how an election can ever be called fair when the ballot counting isn't independently verified by objective observers and when it takes place under the barrel of the guns of only one side of the debate. That's before you consider the ballot options - independence and closer ties to Russia, or join Russia. Where was the "Fuck off Russia" option? Surely you can't honestly believe that was a legitimate referendum even putting aside arguments about what the people supposedly did or didn't want?

Scotland is holding an independence referendum later this year, would you believe it legitimate if English soldiers turned up outside every polling station with guns, tore down all the independence campaign posters and replaced them with "Alex Salmond and the SNP are Nazis", took over the television and radio airwaves to broadcast pro-union propaganda, shut down the cell phone towers to lock down communications, and took away all the ballots to be counted at David Cameron's house? That's what Putin did in Crimea.

"The legitimately elected pro-Russia government in Ukraine was overthrown in a coup."

Where do you get this shit from? The legitimately elected government wasn't just pulled out of office physically or anything. They are the ones who voted with a majority of 73% to oust Yanukovych, and allow a new round of elections. If responding to your constituents is a coup then I hope the fuck you permanently stay away from politics as I don't like the sound of your type of dictatorship where democracy is defined as doing what another nation (Russia) wants and ignoring the demands of your constituents. The healthier the democracy, the easier it is to recall representatives who no longer have popular support - the very fact the Ukraine did it this way is a sign of a healthy democratic action. Far better than the likes of Gordon Brown taking power and sitting there for over a year after his approval rating had sunk as low as 15%.

You're parroting Putins propaganda and ignoring that Yanukovych's ousting was a wholly democratic impeachment by an elected parliament. There was no coup in the Ukraine, that's just Putin's line, a coup is, by definition, a violent, illegal, seizure of power. The only violence was from Yanukovych's pro-Russian Berkut puppets who shot police and protesters alike to try and stir violent confrontation between the two. It was entirely a legitimate democratic action.

If you don't understand what happened it's probably best not to comment, parroting Putin's line is the worst form of idiocy and is akin to the muppets who were parroting Blair's 45 minute WMD claim to justify their support for the war in Iraq. Don't do it, you're better than that.

"I'm not saying I agree completely with all that, but people seem to forget that there was a coup and the people of Crimea asked for Russian assistance."

The majority of Ukrainians are pro-Western, that's why this happened in the first place. The pro-Russians are a minority. Given that the pro-Western grouping have asked for NATO assistance is your view then that we should send British, America, and other NATO troops into the Ukraine to kill the Russians that annexed Crimea? That's the logical conclusion of your thought process - that if a group of people ask for support then the nation(s) being asked have an obligation to give that support.

"Even the most cynical adjustment of the numbers still shows a majority."

Your fault is assuming the numbers were in any way legitimate in the first place, which given objective polls from only a few weeks before gave only 41% support for joining Russia there's a pretty strong suggestion it is not the case.

I just held a poll of all Crimeans and they actually said 100% that they don't want to be part of Russia, even if you adjust for a bit of normal statistical error there you can't manipulate it far enough to say I'm wrong.

See how that works? That's basically what Putin did in reverse, so congratulations on being one of his useful idiots. The simple fact is that there was supposedly an 82% turn out, despite the fact that at least 30% weren't even ethnic Russian and had no interest in Russia. The results Russia spat out just were not credible in the slightest, and that's before you factor in the 120%+ election turnout in Sevastapol where Russian troops who weren't even Ukrainian nationals voted. Yes, you read that right.

"There was no evidence that the people of Iraq or Afghanistan wanted to be liberated, yet the world is just peachy with that."

Amusingly, whilst I disagree with the Iraq war, that's simply not true. The people were extremely grateful for liberation in the aftermath, it was the failure to plan to build a working nation state that resulted in all the case. There was actually massive popular support for Saddam's rival, the UK/US just completely failed to fill the vacuum left by his departure leading to a brutal power struggle, that's what went wrong there. The same has happened in Libya and Egypt - the vast majority wanted liberation from their respective dictators, the problem is they also didn't want the chaos that followed but eventually did because they didn't plan for what happens afterwards.

Look, the whole Iraq war was wrong, and that's fine, I get it, you hate America and the UK and whoever else for what they did. But that doesn't magically make Russia not as bad, Russia is still just as bad, arguably worse - at least the UK and US always planned to pull out and eventually did, Russia just annexed the place and declared it there own. You cannot honestly criticise the West for what they did and then defence Russia's actions, that just makes you the worst kind of hypocrit. That just tells us you've no interest in the truth, or the facts, you just want an excuse to slag off the West and big up Russia and if that's what you want then fine, just at least have the fucking courage to say what you mean and believe - that you're pro-Russian, agree with Putin and hate the West. At least have the courtesy to cut the bullshit.

Cards on the table, I'm embarrassed by what my country did, I'm disgusted by what the US did, but I'm also appalled by what Russia is doing. The UK and US' stupidity doesn't make Russia an angel, it just makes it another asshole nation as well in carrying out actions equally as unacceptable as the 2003 Iraq invasion and subsequent occupation.

If you mount it on a sliding rail running parallel to and pointing at an infinite length horizontal board with an infinite belt of ammo and set it moving with a correctly calibrated exponentially increasing speed then you can use it to reproduce, using a measurement of the distance from the start, the Fibonacci sequence.

Useful if you're in a zombie apocalypse and you need to remember it.

Do I get my own Slashdot article now?

The Register, on climate change, really?

You might as well just have posted "TEA PARTY, FUCK YEAH, CLIMATE CHANGE IS BULLSHIT".

It would've had the same impact.

No, it boils down to:

PCs follow a standardise open architecture, you can verify one and that verification follows comfortably onto others

Most phones follow a black box architecture, you can verify an open phone but it tells you nothing about the hardware or software on the majority of other phones that people are using.

Apparently you can't grasp this simple argument though in your desperation to pursue the nonsense idea that phones are somehow as safe and as well understood from a security standpoint as PCs.

"My point is that you can generalise. I.e. that green1's statment was correct."

Then you are talking shit, you are actually saying that murder of someone who wants to die anyway is worse for the victim than being gang raped repeatedly for many years or some other extreme scenario. If you're saying what you're saying you're saying then the extremity of any example I provide is not irrelevant in proving what utter nonsense you are talking, any such example if realistic (it is, both these things have happened and will continue to happen somewhere in this world) is proof by counter-example that your argument is incorrect. I'm sorry if you find that inconvenient to your desperate attempts to continue to be an argumentative tit for the sake of being an argumentative tit.

"No, but stating that rape is as bad as murder will make some victims feel that way."

Again this shows your utter disconnect between what victims actually feel and what you think they should feel and highlights how far from reality your understanding of this topic is. If you tell a victim what happened to them can indeed leave them feeling like they'd rather have just been killed then you're showing empathy with their situation - you're highlighting that you understand how they feel. Telling them well it's not as bad as being murdered so they can be thankful of that does not show empathy, it shows a complete lack of it.

But I get it, I really do, many people on Slashdot do not have that property of empathy, and that's fine, not everyone is or need be empathetic, it's just the way they are, but let's not pretend that's representative of the population at large, or that we should be putting non-empathetic people like you in any kind of position that involves trying to help victims of crimes like rape. There is a very long way to go, but thankfully there is a massive amount of money, time and effort going towards training in police stations and hospitals across the globe in general to help train people in the need to be empathetic in the face of such issues. Thankfully your non-empathetic view of dealing with victims is a dying one, so it really doesn't matter that you think your non-empathetic view is the correct way to deal with the matter regardless of how much you may disagree.

I don't disagree with anything you're saying here for what it's worth, but I don't think your original post came off well - it has the implication that rape is always more trivial than murder, but some victims will always feel that is not the case, and in my opinion, understandably so.

"You're comparing rape with a killing someone on their death bed. Sure, people have been killed right before they would have died, but that does not make rape worse than murder. By that logic you can say that bullying and teasing is as bad as murder, because there are people that would rather die than be bullied. "

You're taking my example and implying I'm claiming some kind of generalisation, which is complete nonsense - you're building an argument against a point I never even made. My point was simply that you can't generalise and say that murder is always worse than rape, which is nonsense.

My point is simply that these things occur on a spectrum - there are murders that are brutal and unwanted like the killing of a young boy for some sick thrill, and there are murders where the victim was on the edge of suicide anyway so would barely even care that their life was about to end.

Similarly there are rapes, that are questionable to even classify as rape at one end, and brutal ones involving gangs, and possible death at the end of it to boot.

These spectrums overlap - there are some rapes that are worse for the victims than some murders, hence why I do not believe we can make the blanket claim that murder is always worse than rape.

"I think you're misunderstanding me. I'm not saying that one should blame the victim of rape or not talk about it. Saying murder is worse than rape is not victim blaming."

No, but it does trivialise it for some victims - i.e. those who would rather just be dead as a result of it anyway, try telling them "Oh well, at least you weren't murdered", don't be surprised if they tell you they wish they had been and genuinely mean it.

"Rape isn't trivial, but implying that people should just as well be dead because they were raped pisses me off."

I don't know where you even got that from, it's not even close to anything I said. Stating that some victims will feel that way is not the same as stating that victims should feel that way.

Yes, I was probably being a bit unfairly facetious there :)

For what it's worth I suspect it's a debate we'll be having in the UK soon, there have been a string of high profile prosecutions of historic abuse against high profile celebrities that have failed because it's so hard to prove such an event so long after the fact.

Ultimately this long after the only evidence you can get is circumstantial, and this is why the cases are persistently failing. Despite the fact it's hard to reconcile how multiple victims who have never met can provide non-conflicting accounts of intimate personal details with innocence it's trivial for the defence to simply argue that as a high profile celebrity they're just a victim of money grabbers at which point the jury simply can't possibly accept that the beyond reasonable doubt test has been achieved, hence the innocence ruling. Normally, DNA evidence would swing it in favour of a guilty verdict but in the absence of that 20, 30, 40, in some cases even 50 or more years after the fact what can they do? There seems a reasonable chance at least some of these people are still guilty but how do you prove it beyond reasonable doubt so long after the fact?

Of course then the flip side is that the beyond reasonable doubt test is extremely important, so what do you do? What options are being suggested in Sweden for getting the balance right?

"A rather contrived scenario. I too know without a doubt which victim I'd rather be. And that's alive, thank you very much, don't pick for me."

So no one old has ever been murdered shortly before they'd have died anyway? No one has ever been a victim of abuse? It's called an example, the example bit of the sentence in question would be a giveaway to most people, it highlights the fallacy of the argument that it'd always be better to be raped than murdered. It's quite normal for a proof by counter-example to provide an obvious counter-example, that's kind of the fucking point. Your complete lack of understanding of the trauma of something like rape highlights how utterly out of touch you are with modern understanding of mental health issues. Again, if you're so tortured by such an event that you kill yourself, then for many such victims it's not a choice between being killed, and being alive, it's a choice between being killed, and being so mentally tortured by the event that you end up killing yourself anyway. If you really think that being killed is better than being tortured before dying anyway then you really have lost all touch with reality.

"No it's utterly right. In fact, attitudes like these causes trauma in rape victims. Believing themselves to be damaged goods and worthless."

This statement alone says that you're so far out of your depth here that you shouldn't even be bothering to try and play armchair internet devils advocate on this subject. If you think all there is to deal with rape trauma is to pretend that everything's fine then you really do have absolutely no clue.

Feelings of worthlessness are simply related to depression and something that affects people who are both victims of rape, and non victims alike. Dealing with that has really no impact on dealing with the memories of being assaulted and the inherent fears of various things ranging widely from loneliness, to other people depending on the victim and the crime in question. Those problems are going to persist - you can't just make them go away with kind words, you can't simply pretend that everyone will be able to live a normal life after such an event - that just builds a society where we don't talk about it and blame the victim if they're acting a bit weird for a day. If they're feeling down one day it's obviously their own fault because I mean, they're just living a normal life now like everyone else right? Obviously it can't possibly be to do with what happened to them, I mean, they're over that we told them it'll all be fine and they'll live normally like everyone else!

As a society we're past this, you're living in the past, with a now thankfully terribly outdated view of what impact rape has on victims, and how we should deal with it. Your trivialisation of the impacts on victims belong in the past, please leave them there.

For what it's worth, some of us both think the US (and my government at the time, the UK) were completely wrong and that soldiers don't deserve the saint hood they're granted.

My grandfather and his generation deserved the privileged view veterans of his generation were given because he was forced into a war fighting for his life and the very survival of his country as a Royal Marine Commando fighting against Nazi Germany, but the guys who sign up today? No, they're almost all doing it because they're fuck ups and failed at school, and it's the easy way out of bucking up, growing up and doing something useful like everyone else.

I'd have respect for soldiers fighting in a war of survival, or conscripts who were forced into a war against their will, but volunteers for the military of a nation not under direct threat? Nope. I don't respect them anymore than I respect people going into any other profession.

I understand in America brainwashing is more prevalent and some people genuinely do believe that patriotic duty bullshit, but certainly here it's nonsense, no one believes that, they always claim it to demand they be afforded otherwise undeserved respect, but they don't believe it. They do it because they left themselves no other career path through their own stupidity, or because they just want to dick around with tanks, guns, and planes. That's fine to be like that, or to want that, but don't pretend it's something you deserve respect for. Military populism as peddled by the likes of The Sun and Murdoch and co's other offerings are populist poison in society creating saints of people who are otherwise failures by their own hand.

Out of interest though, how do you determine that the Iraq war was worth it? I personally can't see how anything positive came out of it, the region lost an important counter balance to Iran, and Iran gained an ally. More people died, the country is less stable, and it cost the US economy trillions of dollars of debt. What possible benefits arose from it? I just can't see a metric that made it worthwhile. At least with Afghanistan I can see there is some argument for increased stabilisation, and less brutal militancy, at least with Afghanistan I can respect that there is certainly some progress.

For what it's worth I do agree it's actually a really shitty reward :)

In the UK you can renew for as little as about £29 quite often. I'd think of that as a kick in the teeth if I was given it as a reward, even with the games as well.

"You do realise that many devices are available which provide root out of the box?"

It doesn't matter, most phones people are using don't, whilst all PCs follow a standard open architecture.