IIRC, AOL didn't offer actual internet access until pretty late in the game.

Do you realize Indians (from South Asia, not those mistakenly named Indians by Columbus) are Caucasians?

In fact when the Chinese Exclusion Act stripped Indian Americans of their property rights in the early 20th century, they argued the Act did not apply to them because they were Caucasians. It went all the way to the SCOTUS where Chief Justice Sutherland ruled, "yeah yeah Indians are Caucasians, but the law still applied to them because when the Congress said Caucasians they meant White, and the Indians are not White, so off you along with the Chinese."

Yeah, these places have laws friendlier to the employers than the employees. So all the employees with skills in demand have moved to places where they can name their prices. People left behind in those places are usually low skilled. When things like fracking or oil well drilling requires skilled labor they get imported from other places at premium prices. I know quite a few oil rig/fracking rig operators living in places like Naperville Il, and work on 4 weeks on 2 weeks off rotations.

Free market is a bitch. You skew the laws favoring employers, employees with skills leave, creating a vicious cycle.

... I think such a large office space needs some sort of transport for people to go from one end to another. Should not be emitting gases and ideally be very silent. Wonder who has the know-how to conjure up such a vehicle ;-)

The cuts this time round looked much less random than those in 2008-9. I don't actually know anyone (who is still working) who is actually scared of losing their job.

Before you grade his performance first decide what his job is. Whether he is going to be graded as a doctor trying to save a dying patient? Or a doctor doing terminal care, pain management etc to ease the passage? Or transplant surgeon who should harvest usable organs for transplant? or is he just an undertaker brought in to dress up the corpse for one last ride in the Cadillac?

[The car analogy is left to the astute reader].

Apparently there is a registry of known images, with hashes. All google was looking was for matched hashes, not running picasa en masse over all the images of all the people.

So this is the next frontier in social networking? Farmville is so human, the next killer app is cow clicker.

Actually yes, it did just that. The law requires all Russian ISPs to block sites based on the centralized blacklist maintained by the government. It is already in heavy use, though the blacklist is not nearly as pervasive as the Chinese one.

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).

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).