It's very clear that you didn't read the article, don't understand the arguments involved, but SOMEHOW feel entitled to spout your opinion.

Why?? Why not just read the article and become smarter? You don't need to show your ignorance off to the world, you can easily read the article, become non-ignorant and say something informed.

I'm actually responding to the AC above you. He is arguing that the attack wouldn't make any sense for either country to make, based on *national* interest. I'm pointing out that's not the only framework in which *regimes* make decisions.

People who complain about the US dollar and oil are people who've never taken an economics class.

If you're too lazy to learn economics, then do a simple search to find out the world's oil production compared to the number of dollars in the world, and that should give you an idea of how much influence it actually has.

As somebody who has had to deal with a lot of bureaucracy recently, I sure hope some organisations revise their insistance on sending you a paper document to physically sign and send back to them.

Better question is if you can drop a letter-shaped parcel to some post but not actually post-office and have it delivered to someone (ideally still to the post box, but it'll be the letter-shaped-parcels box I guess). And if you can how's that different from a regular letter, except that it's handled by that company.

This is much cheaper than actually going through the labor intensive process of psychoanalysis, so insurance companies like it.

I wonder when we'll see the Ritalin lawsuits.

Actually that's the proper way to design these, of course with some kind of backup way in (usually via a PIN). Only emergency exits and similar should "fall open" in case of outages and even there of course great care should be taken so this can't be easily exploited.

You might have gotten rid of your managers, but I'll bet somebody is still doing all these tasks.

Right...new managers have been spawned from within existing employees - think agents in The Matrix - that's why the productivity increase was limited to 3x :-)

Meetings with more than two people are susceptible to ego games - definitely not productive.

yeah, the last 'innovation' in movie going was Stadium Seating.

Last thing I saw in theaters was The Force Awakens Star Wars reboot. Star Wars was the only thing I felt would be better viewed on the big screen.

Vividly remember sitting through 45 MINUTES of previews. Not again.

I'm not even a manager and there are, at present count, 30 hours of meetings on my calendar. I go to less than half, I just let the meetings sandbag my calendar so that new meetings are difficult to schedule. Either you know me and we have a reason to meet, or fuck you.

The actual managers are much worse off. Corporate life is stupid.

I've only ever had one COBOL class, and that was in the late 1990s. I was sure I was going to hate the language before ever setting foot into the classroom. After setting foot into the classroom for a couple days, my concerns turned out to be unfounded. COBOL was much worse than I could have anticipated.

That aside, isn't COBOL's ability to process vast amounts of data quickly due to the massive I/O abilities of the mainframes it tends to run on? I have been told over the decades that a mainframe's I/O abilities dwarf those of even high-end Intel/AMD server. If that's true, then COBOL isn't fast due to any inherent strength of the language, but rather is fast because of the I/O abilities of the hardware.

Just put it in context: Today Russia struck the Pechenihy Reservoir dam in Kharkiv.
Russia launched the war because they thought it would be a quick and easy win, a step towards reestablishing a Russian empire and sphere of influence, because Putin thinks in 19th century terms. Russia is continuing the war, not because it's good for Russia. I'd argue that winning and then having to rebuild and pacify Ukraine would be a catastrophe. Russia is continuing the war because *losing* the war would be catastrophic for the *regime*. It's not that they want to win a smoldering ruin, it's that winning a smoldering ruin is more favorable to them and losing an intact country.

And the trailers before the movie starts will be replaced by ads, and not (only) ads for other movies.

You know, like what's been happening in theaters for years.