Nord Stream is complete we can supply gas directly to Germany now, nobody cares about these transit countries anymore. And tanks crossing russian western border is quite apocalyptic scenario, it will mean WW3 and never happens.

Georgia attacked peacekeeping forces in separatist region with ethnic minority (and one of the first explosions got watchers from European ommission ) and got punished?

What? You can say about Putin whatever you want, nobody cares. If you are referring to those poor crazy PRiot girls they get bitten because of religious reasons, when they had group sex in museum, or throw molotov cocktails on police cars (Yeah they've said things about putin and then current president too) they got only minor punishment if at all.

Yeah government somewhat controls TV and opposition movement is covered on TV in very specific way, but here there is nothing like 1984. Internet is basically free and out of control.

Is there something on a scale of SciPy for Ruby ? I am not even begin talking about something like BLAS or LAPACK. I see some python jobs for academia, ruby jobs almost all belong to rails jobs in "new social media startup" space. Yes there is some mysterious oriental island in the Pacific where ruby may be used in academia. Somewhere else? I don't think so. But I would like to be proved wrong, however.

Again we had the tech. You didn't. There where projects of american space station. It where orders of magnitude more expensive than collaboration with Russia. So it was economic decision for you too. I don't think you would have had your own station, your strategy was focused on shuttles. And we probably would have had Mir 2 or even 3 by now. It would be much smaller of course.

And don't even begin on "saving our space program". ESA and Japan made a lot more for that than NASA.

And yes we are poor country, but with rockets. You know how much money got worker on facility which makes electronics for satellites just three years ago ? 500$ per month.

As far as I know, previous space tourists had no access to American part of ISS, only russian one. NASA controls only part of station.

> Without us they would also no longer have a space program Big talk. We couldn't have ISS station without USA that's true. But at some point of time there were ISS and Mir station out there. And US have nothing to do with Mir. US is nowhere near sponsoring our space flight program. You can see we spent money on ISS, it's nothing like NASA budget was used to build our GPS analog GLONASS, why they would do that in the first place.

You seem to forgot that USA never has orbital stations. USSR has several and has technology and experience. We forgo our Mir station to focus on ISS.

I like the idea but I would prefer some external vat to grow my replacement organs.

Who knows. But it's better then it was before him. And quite normal. So he has benefit of doubt.

Yes. If it's not Putin then it will be communists. Liberals never get close enough.

> But word gets around, be it in the "main stream media", the blogs, or whatever In Russia we have several opposition radio stations, blog activity concentrated at livejournal.com and this site is in the hands of opposition if it is in anybody hands. Television is whole another story, but who watch TV's nowadays. The level of discussion sometimes quite low, I can get banned by people who says that there is no free speech in Russia, only for comment where I say that I voted for Putin. We don't have any kind of Great Firewall and my 30Mb/s for $20/m is quite good on global scale and I am not even in Moscow. There are several sites access to which are blocked, but this list is public, and sites go there after court decision, and most of them are child pornography, or sites calling for coup d'état and organization of new shariat law state on part territory of Russia and several nearby countries. Freedom of speech is not so bad in Russia as it's portrayed in some western media.

USB keyboards are cheap. USB OTG adapters are dirt cheap. And tablets under $50 that can be used as usb hosts for exist. What's the problem again?

Keyboard could be replaced by thing that translates muscle electric signals to keystokes. Microsoft tried to do something similar. And feedback could be different vibration types on fingertips by some kind of glove. Real gaming of future would be outside of buildings. Vuzix already sells see through augmented reality glasses.

There will be no big monitor - augmented reality glasses. Check vuzix they already selling see through glasses.

Post PC 1. See Through augmented reality glasses (Vuzix selling them now $5000 apiece) 2. Small box that transfers image from Cloud to glasses. OnLive showed it's possible (hardcore gamers sorry) 3. Some analog of virtual keyboard. For casuals kinect like recognition of hand would be enough, and programmers would buy keyboards that read signals from hand muscles and translates into keystrokes.

Because if something could absorb light of particular wavelength it can radiate light of particular wavelength. So hotter body radiates more energy than it absorbs from colder body and energy flow from hotter body to colder one. Second law of thermodynamics yeah. There is quantum magic during absorption and conversion of photons to electric current but it did n't violate energy conserving.