Are you retarded or something, you think I'm a Russian apologist? Seriously?

Here's the problem with your theory- some of those approval polls for Putin have been done by Western organisations, we're not talking state produced propaganda here, you may want to tell yourself he's not popular but he currently is, the Russian people are part the problem.

The current status quo in Russia isn't like Libya was where the vast majority of the population were happy to see Gaddaffi fall, it's more akin to Nazi Germany in the mid to late 30s where the populace were eating out the hand of a leader that had fed them a bunch of far right populist rhetoric and brutal nationalism. What do you think the whole Crimea annexation was about exactly if not populist nationalism? Crimea is a massive financial drag on Russia - it certainly wasn't about the economic benefits of hijacking an underfunded region dependent on the mainland for water and electricity that it's now been completely cut off from.

I know for the simple minded like yourself it's easier to console yourself with the idea that a large body of people couldn't possibly fall for such twatishness again like they did in the 30s, and that evil can only come in the form of specific individual hate figures and it's no one elses fault, but Putin isn't doing what he's doing and clinging on like he's clinging on without popular support. Absolutely there's a vocal and organised opposition to him that he's tried to crush and that keeps popping back up, but those people are still a minority in Russia - the intellectual few amongst the poor and undereducated many who live and breathe for whatever populist bones are thrown to them.

No that's not according to the Ukrainian army, maximum altitudes on MANPADs are well known. Any defence evaluation organisation can tell you what they are.

How would NATO release radar records? It has no fucking bases in Ukraine nor any radar aircraft operating over it. Why would Ukraine fly aircraft that don't need to fly low enough to be hit by MANPADs low enough to be hit by MANPADs? It's not like your nonsense theory even makes the slightest bit of sense, it's about as stupid a theory as you can get - I mean, you're seriously claiming the Ukrainian military was intentionally flying aircraft at dangerously low altitudes when there was no reason to?

Are you Putin apologists always this retarded? Even just a split second of rational thought will explain why your pro-Russian apologist theory is complete fucking nonsense, but apparently you can't even afford yourself that split second.

Oh wait, you're also the guy that lives in Russia now and guzzles off soviet glory fed to you by RT aren't you? You're the guy who tried to tell me a plastic doll was a child slaughtered by the Ukrainian military. Nevermind then. How are you enjoying your increased food prices and your increased political isolation? Hasn't per chance made you stop and think that maybe you should consider becoming a decent human being yet and stop supporting Putin's fascist slaughters?

Go check the opinion polls, support for Putin is at an all time high. Have there been numerous cases of corruption in Russian elections? Sure, but it turns out that this kind of populist militancy is something the Russian people fall hook line and sinker for such that he now has genuine support.

But so what if those people have guns? Just about every country in the world has had to see it's civilians face of militant dictatorships at one point in history or another- that applies to Britain, the US, as much as it does the arab spring nations or Russia.

You can't sit idly by and let that shit happen and then whine if it somehow comes back and effects you.

What exactly defines good quality vs. bad quality cocoa?

Different species of cocoa plant? or does the way it's grown and dried have some kind of impact on it?

The Russian people largely support Putin and hence this and so why shouldn't they be punished also?

If they have a problem with it maybe they should vote Putin out next time and rise up if he refuses to go?

This is the Russian people's problem as much as it is the Russian elite's. They're as much to blame.

I sympathise with the argument you've made in many cases, especially when targeted at action against dictators. But Putin has popular support, so the Russian people for the most part are ultimately just getting exactly what they've asked for - international isolation.

More to the point this argument is so intellectually bankrupt anyone making it has to be beyond any degree of sanity.

The argument is that the missile can't have been a ground to air BUK because there is no missile trail images so it must've been an air to air missile.

Where the fuck is the requirement for the air to air missile trail images? I haven't seen any of those either.

No they weren't, some were shot down at altitudes that were way too high for MANPADs to be effective.

You have an odd definition of low resolution. A quick Google image search shows as one of the first results a 2000x1345 resolution image at time.com where you'd have to actually be officially blind to not be able to see the shrapnel damage.

Yes you only have to look at where the aircraft was hit by shrapnel (lower-mid front right of cockpit), the aircraft's location and speed in the sky when it was hit, and the type of damage (shrapnel not cannon fire):

1) The original Ukrainian jet claim spoke of a jet following MH17 from behind, but the jet was hit from the front, so this is clearly false.

2) The new claim talks of Ukrainian jet cannon fire from the front, but there is only missile shrapnel damage not cannon damage (nor any other evidence of cannon damage), so this is also clearly false.

3) MH17 was shot down at a location in the sky such that for a missile to be fired from the air at the front of the aircraft the attacking jet and missile would've had to have come from Russian airspace.

So whilst the possibility remains that this was shot down by a jet however unlikely Russia still needs to explain why given the fact it had been shooting down Ukrainian jets in Ukrainian airspace from Russian territory for weeks it managed to acquire any radar data, video of images of this one particular jet. Ukraine has no stealth aircraft.

There seems to be argument that there were no images of a BUK missile trail, but there are also no images of an air to air missile trail either yet this aircraft was definitely hit by a missile launched either from Russian rebel (aka regular) forces on the ground, or from Russian airspace.

If the Ukrainians did this we still need to know how the hell they got deep into Russian held territory, or Russian territory proper undetected and leaving no evidence. That hasn't been provided yet, this evidence is either false (talks of cannon fire, zero evidence of) or makes propositions that require the preposterous (a Ukrainian jet launching a missile from Russian airspace undetected).

I'm half expecting the next bit of Russian propaganda to state this was done by an America F-22 launched from Turkey hence why the Russians failed to detect it as they weren't looking in that direction and don't have any radar data because the F-22 is too stealthy...

I don't know why we're even having this debate in the first place. The Evidence of a Russian rebel/Russian regular manned BUK is pretty solid now, it's far and away the most plausible and most well evidenced explanation (especially given the one missile short BUK scurrying back across the Russian border in the immediate aftermath). The news headline might as well be "Russia still trying to avert blame for it's massive fuck-up" to which we could all reply "no shit!" but I guess that doesn't get page hits.

Since when have weather reports been 100% accurate for the next 24 hours, let alone the next 7 days, month or year?

Have you ever followed weather reports? Wait, you don't need to answer that, I know the answer is "no" or you wouldn't say something as incredibly stupid as you have. Predicting the weather is far from a solved problem.

Plant life is one area where CITES can often be counter-productive.

The problem is that many rare plants that are found smuggled and seized by customs just end up getting burnt under the principle that they want to avoid anyone using customs itself as a back door route for bringing stuff into the country - i.e. bring it in, let customs seize it, then buy it back through a third party.

Ideally these specimens would instead be sent to botanical institutes and nurseries to cultivate for commercial sales which would remove pressure on in-habitat populations.

A friend who is a botanist in South America and has several newly discovered species to his name actually has to go through the process of distributing seeds for such species to such people he knows worldwide before he's named and described the plant, because stupidly it's legal to do so due to the fact it has not yet been described and hence cannot by definition be given a CITES rating that is used to prohibit movement in the first place. By distributing them legally as he does it ensures that nurserymen can start providing these new species commercially after he has formally described the species and after it has received a CITES certification meaning that there is little to no pressure on illegal collection of the species in the wild because people can just obtain them legally from the nurseries.

It's all very backwards, but the focus should be on better enabling ex-situ conservation such that those with the facilities to breed a new and/or endangered species can do so hence greatly reducing and often even removing the threat of habitat extinction.

For what it's worth though, for this particular photographer in question looking at her pictures I believe pretty much all the specimens on her site are widely known and well policed - I've seen some myself and for others I've known people who have visited. The locations of I think all these things are I believe neither secret nor hard to find so I don't think she's putting much at risk here. Whether there are more in her book whose locations are secret I've no idea though.

I don't think you have basic economic literacy as you seem to think these costs occur in a vacuum which isn't even close to reality.

You're paying one way or the other regardless, either you pay 50 euros for 1 MWh + 100 extra euros for your healthcare (through insurance, or taxes depending on the healthcare system of your country) or you pay 100 euros for 1 MWh of electricity and no extra for associated healthcare costs. This means you're 150 euros out of pocket for 1 MWh of electricity with coal but only 100 euros out of pocket for 1 MWh of electricity with renewables like wind, unless of course you abandon healthcare costs altogether and leave large swathes of your population too ill to work effectively (or at all) which in itself has it's own costs and risk of economic collapse.

Couple this with the fact that your population is healthier (i.e. less cases of coal burning induced debilitating cancer) and hence more productive and the fact that you have more money left over (because total costs of wind vs. coal + effects of coal) are cheaper and your economy will actually be able to grow more as there is more scope for investment and consumer purchases.

There's no sensible metric by which total costs of coal being more expensive are a benefit. The only reason it remains that way is because of politicians fear of upsetting vested interests and corporate lobbying by the fossil fuel industries.

I disagree, look at counter-examples such as Battlefield 4. It wasn't even beta quality on release, it was alpha quality with glaring bugs such as saves regularly failing forcing you to start from scratch, regular crashes - some even braindead and unmissable like pressing "A" to toggle between autospawn and manual spawn after dying resulting in a crash back to the dashboard after one of the patches designed to "fix" the initial release.

Yet it went on to win "multiplayer game of the year" award even though to this day it still has launch day bugs and for about 6 months of it's life multiplayer didn't even really work for most people. It's still made excellent sales, and with a followup in the franchise now being extremely hyped with seemingly already high preorders looking at preorder ranking charts on various retailer sites.

I also think some of your examples are just down to franchise burnout too, regardless of game quality CoD hit it's plateau a good few years ago with Black Ops 1 and it's been stuck at that plateau and trending towards downward sales for a while.

The gamers are as much to blame - go try and criticise people for preordering on a gaming site and watch the barrage of insults you get for daring to point out that they're silly for paying more money than ever for games that are less finished than ever.

When they know they can get away with this crap why would they change? Ubisoft has done this because it saw EA got away with it.

I think if they all start doing it we will see a crash in the market but right now? there's no way gamers are punishing for bad releases even remotely enough to discourage it.

Microsoft got a lot of praise from developers for dropping their charge for patches this generation (after they realised it was good to allow continuous updates to games like Minecraft and Diablo 3 receive) but I think it's part the problem. Now there's no financial cost to fixing their games Ubisoft, EA etc. have realised they can release paid-for alpha tests and fix them later under a flurry of half-arsed regular patches with no financial penalty. Microsoft needs to start charging these guys $50k per patch again, and only make exemptions on a case by case basis like they did Minecraft on the 360. If they're left with a choice of releasing a game that will be perpetually alpha quality, or paying hundreds of thousands to fix it, then they'll be more inclined to get it right for release in the first place, just like they used to in the PS3/360 era.

It's not me that hasn't looked at actual facts, it's you that doesn't grasp what the real costs of coal are.

Yes, the amount you pay directly for coal appears cheaper than wind, but unlike wind the amount you pay directly isn't anything close to the real actual costs of coal. This article explains some of the increased costs of coal that are buried into your taxes, medical insurance and so forth such that you don't realise what the real cost of coal you're paying actually is:

http://www.sourcewatch.org/ind...

There are countless studies that research the real costs of coal and the estimates vary, but all show coal as consistently more expensive than pretty much any other power source.

Nuclear would be far cheaper than coal if you could just dump the waste in someone's back garden and let them pick up the bill for their cancer, but for some reason coal is one of the few power sources allowed to get away with doing basically exactly this.

So when I say actual costs, I mean actual costs, not the up front direct costs on paper you've quoted- those have no relevance to the actual in practice cost of using coal as an energy source.

Why would electricity bills be higher? Wind is cheaper than coal when you account for full costs. No coal burning means healthier people which means less healthcare cost which means lower taxes.

The total cost of coal is incredibly expensive so moving away from it offers a decent net cost saving.