Yea I remember that too - I just came back from shop where I bought my lunch and I had to stand in the line too - terrible!

Other than that - there is more media than back then but there is no more freedom of press now than it used to be - there is no state censorship but corporate one instead. Modern media are abused more than they server democracy and human rights.

What else - ah torture and extrajudicial killings by 'Securitate' - I recall the guys in the freedom movements were seriously pissed off by that - guess what - we still have that - progress has been made as people do not die accidentally during water boarding anymore, I have to give you that.

Och and overwhelming surveillance - yea communists did not do it right, did they? Incompetent idiots!

I can sue the government this much is true and I did and I won. Still when I went to a lawyer to get back the house that communists took from my grandpa he (the lawyer) said - I want your money but your case has no chance as your grandpa was of wrong nationality - so this much about rule of law and all this other shit in EU. It is still more than we had before. Elections albeit not rigged now can be seen for what they are - exercise in futility as govs do what they want anyway.

The real progress and there is no 'but' this time is in pr0n - I can watch as much as I want to albeit it is admittedly of bad quality. Still where we had to run a bit embarrassed to get video now we can just watch it directly.

This epidemic problem is mostly one of education and capabilities. People in affected regions of Africa do not trust doctors and hospitals (for a good reason I think) and have traditions that help the virus spread like touching dead friends and family members to say good bye or eating the animals that tend to have the virus - these are exactly the wrong things to do. Belief in healers and lack of trust in helpers from the West makes things double problematic. The good thing that the virus is less lethal is problematic too as now instead of being killing almost directly ill people wander around and spread the virus. Lack of sanitation and basic medical supplies but also basic stuff like washing hands, means that virus is spread further and further. This all is tragic because the virus is very fragile and its transmission is easy to deal with by washing hands already. One may think that unless US army does not want to make experiments with it, then the transportation of this poor person back home is actually a good thing for this person and does not change anything for the rest of us. The reason for this are as listed already. If a scenario like from Dustin Hoffman movie, as unlikely as it may be, were to happen that this one transport makes no difference - we would all die as nobody can stop pandemic with a bomb like in the movie etc. If instead people see that we take good care of those that took great risks to help others than there is bigger chance of containing the disease where it is now. In other words - this is actually a good way to decrease chance of having ill people traveling to US or Europe. Me thinks.

I think, US authorities by coming to MS to get data from servers in Ireland, demand data not from individuals who own them (alleged criminals), but from organisation that owns the servers on which it is stored. The very reason why the bloody serves are in Ireland is to avoid such warrantless (in context of EU law) search yet that is exactly what US authorities demand. It may even be that because the legal system in US is so broken as to execute random people in extremely cruel and lengthy manner or put people in prison for life w/o parole for smoking a joint 3 times and this in prisons that are known for their violence and inhumane treatment of some prisoners, for all these reason it may be that courts in EU would be reluctant to let any data go. I am not saying that this would be the case of course - NSA may have enough on judges and politicians to make it happen anyway but it would be a cumbersome process that would let the world think that US authorities respect legal systems of other countries. This of course is not going to happen as US authorities do not have all too much respect for own legal system, for justice and some such abstract concepts so why they should show respect for legal systems or perception of justice in other countries? We know that US lawmakers and authorities think they have jurisdiction over all of the word (FATCA is one good example) and where that is not the case a silent drone can do the job too.

Quite frankly I am really surprised that MS is fighting it. It seems to me that either they are afraid of the financial consequences of bending over or EU for all its incompetence, overreaching and bureaucracy has some uses after all. Or as far reaching speculation that may be, MS is not all evil. I guess I stick with first two arguments as they are good enough.

it may just be that the only purpose F35 serves is to cause other gullible nations into arms race trying to build stuff that has no practical value but is expensive like hell. Sort of the way Reagan's star wars were for Russkis.

you must be either a communist or (even worse) a liberal or possibly Putin's shill insisting on wasting valuable resources that could be more appropriately used for production of 3rd generation helmets for f35. Come to think of it you are probably all three and me too....

yes indeed Iraq used chemical weapons against Kurds and earlier against Iran. There is some evidence that Iraq used smallpox i.e. biological agents against Iran during the war too. Yet the search for WMD after the second Iraq-US war did not yield any evidence and that is what we are talking about. The way the whole operation was started is already a pattern in US approach to military interventions - try to misinform as much as possible, make impossible claims and then say that because requests were not satisfactory fulfilled sends the marines. Outright lies to UN security council however are rare. Besides WMD there were also these claims that Iraq helps Al Qaida for which eventually there was no evidence either - FF to today and we see ISIS that seems to be more radical that al qaida that US tried to remove from Iraq.

If US did use fabricated 'evidence' and lied to UN few years back maybe this time I would believe. I think it was Klausewitz that used term 'fog of war' I think today media are as valid weapon as they were before but this time we all swim in digital informational garbage. I wonder only what is the reason: incompetence, not having a hot conflict at the moment, need to think about European customers of shell gas from Murica, compassion for democratic and human rights loving government in Kiev??? Who knows.

I do not trust the autocrat in Moscow. I do not trust his military and I have a good reason for that. Yet I find it odd that our support for Kiev is so strong and without any conditions. Last time this happened in Europe - the results was a civil war in Yugoslavia and besides all the piles of corpses in Bosnia an ethnic cleansing of Krajina - something that nobody seems to remember anymore.

you must admit that this military conflict is somewhat different from previous ones in that many sides to the conflict resort to media campaigns using interwebs etc that is the scale that I personally have not seen before. If not for any other reason it is interesting to have it on /. and run statistics on he bitching from each side....

Global companies dealing with muricans have to complie with many requirements that muricans put on them that affect their business globally not only on US market.

I read a book once. It is a long story about rambling on trough country side. One of the ramblers stole a caw from a farmer. Asked by other why did he do it , he answered that when he steals all is well, only when somebody steals from him, it is then very bad and requires punishment. One cannot expect too much from Muricans so go on with your rambling.

I do not think US is a democracy. It is more like an oligarchy. Even if it was not an oligarchy and democracy system was working to advantage of all voters, in US there are plenty of people that are excluded from voting whether because their rights have been limited by court order or because their right were limited by virtue of being in a citizen of a wrong 'district'.

I am also not convinced that US was meant to be democracy.

Come to think of it democracy is a terribly difficult system to implement and I know no country but Switzerland that is even remotely approaching the ideal. The best the others do is an illusion called representative democracy which works good unless it does not.

"Terrorist thugs" like in this case? You see I happen to understand the fact that flying trough war zones is dangerous and when one has a chance one should avoid them so that whoever could become guilty of shooting at innocent person just flying by, should not have the chance at it. Ukrainian gov knows what is going on there, Russian too, with all lambasting about terrorists in there, having long range weaponry they still allowed aircraft in.

This is a common pattern. Thugs that 'we' support can go enjoy a rout of ethnic cleansing and nobody does anything against it, nobody wants to remember. You can ask Serbs from Krajina - but they were guilty right? Maybe that is better in some bigger picture. I hope that it is because all these senseless killing is in one way or the other supported by us in the West even if we have no say in those matters.

Where exactly did I blame the victims? Are traffic controllers or airline bosses victims? The passangers had no choice as they did not even know what danger looms on the route. It was captain duty to get informed, traffic controllers duty to divert and airlines management to give advice and tell crews to avoid dangerous areas. This has not been done and people with guns made terrible decision with terrible consequences. In which part is this view blaming the victims?

had my Mum losing sight to this shit so I know haw dangerous it is. Keep up good spirits. I hope your sport regimen makes some fun at least.

Nice distortion field you have there. That is actually the main reason I observe this conflict. It is the first time I can see shills from two sites in action and affecting even third party systems like the one from Angela M. that was abused by somebody this week. It is almost funny if it were not so tragic at the same time - all these shit storms on TE forums every time an article mentioning Russia or Ukraine is published. Even regular media are affected which may indicate that they lost credibility. I switched to al-Jazeera of late for at least I know they have skewed perception. It is almost funny to watch experts excluding reasonable options to fit into their perception of reality. Propaganda at its best. I never thought we would go this far but that is of course only a logical development of the pipes.