I doubt GP is Russian. It's far more likely that he's far right or far left American. These guys have been fapping on foreign oppressive regimes for a long time now, though Russia is the first one where both are fapping on it at the same time (left, because it's anti-US; right, because it's strongly conservative).
Really? I suppose someone should tell all the history books and teachers of that so they can rewrite Russian history starting with the Bolsheviks which later became the communist party of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and was the only political party allowed in Russia until somewhere in the 1990s.
You missed the point. Yes, USSR had a communist party, so called because it was supposedly dedicated to building communism. But at no point did the party claim that it actually succeeded in doing so. The socioeconomic formation in the USSR was officially referred to as "socialism" by the regime, and it was deemed a temporary arrangement "until the complete transition to communism" - hence why it was called Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, rather than Communist Republics. The latter was always something to be achieved in the near future (usually in 10-20 years, depending on the boastfulness of the particular leader), but somehow it never actually materialized.
It's actually worse than that. It's devolving to the state of affairs of USSR on politics in general, and economics will likely tank to similar levels and below due to sanctions, but at the same time the things that were actually helpful to the citizens (and there were some, esp. given the other limitations... e.g. right to a job) are not coming back.
This is way more than just defamation. For example, among many laws passed in the last 6 years or so, one criminalizes "public incitement to perform actions that violate the territorial integrity of Russia". In a twist of irony, given the recent events, a person was convicted under that law back in 2010 for distributing leaflets in his community which asked people whether they would be interested in holding a referendum on the independence of Karelia from Russia, and on its incorporation into Finland. For that, he was fined 100,000 rubles, or ~$3000.
Since then - in a twist of even more irony, it was done at the end of 2013, just before that whole Ukraine thing blew up, and Russia itself ended up arguing the separatist cause in Crimea and Donbass - that law was strengthened further, and the penalty right now is up to 5 years in prison. Based on the Karelian precedent, when I'm writing something like "Crimea is Ukrainian and is illegally occupied by Russia" - given that Russia itself considers Crimea one of its regions, and given that I am still a Russian citizen - I have just broken that law, and could, in theory, be facing the penalty. Note that this applies to anyone, not just "bloggers" under the new law.
However, given that bloggers are now required to register and provide identification, in their case violation of such laws would in fact be likely to trigger an immediate and harsh response.
Russia is not threatening to cut itself off the entire world, though, but only the West (in lieu of China, and other BRICS countries in general).
How about the fact that not even USSR itself called what it had "communism"?
Once you have established the rule, "IT rules", most people will cower before you and try to get their work done without offending you or getting on the wrong side of you. That means you can celebrate "Mission Accomplished". Your company will have a few that know how networks work and know a smattering of knowledge about Unix or Linux. They might have even served as root of some lab or the other in the grad school. Find them, stop them completely on their tracks. Thwart every one of their moves. Either they leave you alone, or the leave the company. I T should have unquestioned authority over the corporate infrastructure, and ideally there should be no one in the company capable of questioning you.
So the rules for IT is "IT Rules".
Probably not many. There's not many spots on the Skytrain track where you can see the track "about a mile up", especially coming into stations. The design of the track is recessed, which doesn't help either. Additionally, if I recall correctly most of the suicides have been of the "throw yourself in front of the train as it enters the station" variety. There are closed circuit cameras monitoring the stations (not to mention transit police some of the time), and they DO stop the trains if something goes amiss on the tracks. But if there's no time to stop, there's no time to stop.
Either way, MAX and Skytrain are two rather different systems - MAX is at-grade light rail, Skytrain is elevated / subway with an , etc. Pretty hard to draw safety conclusions based on one factor (driver vs. driverless) when there's so many other variables at play. Most of the "experts" that I've heard/read on the topic of Skytrain safety have been much more interested in changing station design to avoid accidental falls onto the tracks, and much less concerned about placing a driver on the trains.
It's a place to put enemy combatants to whom you don't want to allow the status of POWs (which they are not under international law) but at the same time you don't want to give them access to the US court system by charging them as common criminals (which realistically they also are not as they are waging war on the US). Not really a bad idea.
Realistically, no. Russia is a capitalist country dependent on global capital and trade. It cannot afford to cut itself off like it thought it could when it was USSR and had a lot of satellite countries to buy its crappy goods.
An Ada exception is when a routine gets in trouble and says 'Beam me up, Scotty'.
