You shouldn't depend on any local environment (standardised or not). Just implement one simple rule: to accept any code it has to build (and work) correctly on a standardised, external system. Your developers can use whatever tools they want, just provide them with an access to a developer instance of said standardised system (be it either dev server or a simple VM image).

Many people believe in many things regardless of how realistic they are. For example, it appears that many Americans believe that 9/11 was an inside job [1]. In Poland, according to the most recent poll [2] (in Polish), 22% Poles believe in Smolesk conspiracy. Interesting thing is that out of those 22%, some believe it was Russian job while others think that it was perpetrated by the ruling party.

Majority agrees with the official polish report that blames multiple factors (on both the Polish and the Russian side) as it's often the case in aviation accidents. And let's be painfully blunt - neither Russia nor the ruling party did benefit from the accident. Quite the opposite.

And trust me, crashing anyone in a plane is never a solution. I won't even mention the moral and humanitarian aspects as they are (hopefully) obvious. Even from a Machiavellian point of view, it useless - dead leaders will get replaced by their (often more paranoid) associates, some people will believe in conspiracy theories and radicalise themselves and it will be a lot harder to reach any consensus or change anything.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
[2] http://wyborcza.pl/1,75478,177...

Both the nazi germany and soviet union shared many authoritarian ideas. Still, I believe that's irrelevant to the original subject.

I fully agree that the ideas I mentioned earlier, don't make PiS 'pro-Russian' per se. However, because it is widely said that PiS looks up to the Hungarian and Russian governments for inspiration, some people assume that PiS is pro-Russian. It is not. It just reuses the ideas.

Because those ideas stand against EU ideals, Poland might get alienated and drift in the general direction of Russia, just as Hungary did. No, it won't leave EU or anything like that. But this drift might weaken EU and people's rights in Poland.

While Poland has some difficult history with Russia and while our geopolitical interest are often contradictory, Poles don't 'hate' Russians. Don't confuse politics with normal people.

PiS admires the Russian form of a 'strong government'. While it doesn't try to implement a carbon copy of it, PiS borrows some 'bright' ideas from both the Russian and Hungarian systems (nationalism, 'strong leader' with much power, mythical 'they' who are always to blame for the failures, etc.). Recent changes in wire-tapping law, seem to be similar to the ones mentioned in the article.

While at the moment PiS is not pro-Russian, changing political situation might push it in that direction (Hungary already paved the way).

Can't you just push all your photos, movies, etc to the iCloud? Buying the 16GB version will force people to use it. Seems like a well thought out strategy to me...

Debian does have LTS support [1] which means that stable releases are supported for (at least) 5 years. You also don't have to 'guess' anything - EOL dates are also provided at [1] (and in a few other places).

[1] https://wiki.debian.org/LTS

While I haven't experienced this problem myself, I've come across this thread: http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?p=1147506 - it is possible that it can be of some use to you.

I wonder if modding up your comment would make me an accessory to murder... Anyway, good luck and get some sleep :)

/Minor moderation fix/ Sorry, miss-clicked an option in my mod drop-down - just cleaning it.

Mandatory? No. If I want to run WEP or no encryption at all, I have the right to do so. Making WPA turned on by default is another thing - cost doesn't change but you can use your AP the way you like it, not the way someone tells you to do.

If I understand correctly, you are trying to build some kind of a static radar gun. I'm afraid that legal part of this venture is much more tricky than the technical stuff. In most countries I've visited, such a device must be officially approved and regularly calibrated. Have you checked if your device has to pass any tests to be allowed to produce evidence? What you must also consider is the way it will record offenders - it's likely this is also subject to some legal requirements. And then comes the support part - someone has to support it (which can be a pain under working conditions you mentioned) and someone has to take the evidence from it and issue a speeding ticket - in Poland, where I currently live, police was forced to hire new workers just to be able to send tickets to some offenders (plus keep in mind that there must be a way to identify them in a reasonable time frame). A lot of things to consider (and check) before you even start planning the tech part of this idea :)

Solaris VII rules were supposed to be used during "arena" games, not normal multi mech engagements. Mechwarrior series was based on the CBT (Classical BattleTech) board game which allows customizing as well as building new mechs from scratch. While it may lead to creation of some... well... monsters, it's fun and adds to gameplay. Besides, if you simply want to customize a bit, nothing holds you back - you don't have to build a multi PPC behemoth and you can stick to "canon flavors". So what is the point of taking this possibility away (if I recall correctly devs were explaining this as "it's weird to see lasers shooting from LRM racks")?

Ah, and as for small laser firing as often as gauss - keep in mind that in CBT board game 1 turn = 10 seconds. Don't try to imagine 1 turn of small laser fire as a single shot (as a matter of fact, multiple war games use "1 turn of shooting != 1 shot" principle) - it simply means that during one turn small laser will do that much damage and produce some heat, regardless of how many times it really did shoot. The same applies to ammo - 1 ammo round means that a weapon can fire during 1 turn - be it one gauss shell or designers-know-how-many machine gun rounds.
Now that I think about it, I wonder if the fast firing weapons in MW aren't more powerful than in a board game - they fire more often and probably deal the "1 turn damage" during a single shot...

Just keep in mind that while downloading from such a site you are not making any content "available" (which, to my understanding, is the main issue with all those copyright trials). Whether this is enough to protect yourself from any legal problems depends on laws in your country. For example, here (Poland) it is not illegal to download (and posses) copyrighted music/movies/etc. (software excluded!) so it's most likely safer to download from such a site than from p2p.

"Entrepreneur, Nandan Nilekani has been chosen to lead the ambitious project which will be the second largest citizens' database in a democracy, with China being the biggest."

I wonder if they are implying that China is a democracy or just saying that they have the biggest database...