For the record, the only ones "doubting legitimacy" of United Russia are people abroad who really want to doubt it. When you ask people on the street, you essentially have two tiers: those who support it, and those who think that progress has stalled in last few years and they want to shake it up (i.e. protest movement).
Putin will still get elected, legitimately. According to Gallup he still has ~50-60% popular support in adult population (which is slowly dwindling). His main competition are communists (who are mainly supported by old people who want to go back to the familiar old system) and ultra nationalists (who are something of a joke, but a funny one). The West-supported folks we see on news here basically command support of those they pay off and no one else.
The main complaint seems to be with United Russia basically taking its power for granted and having stopped reforming, fighting corruption and raising standard of living. This is a very valid concern, but there are simply no alternatives, so it seems that disenfranchised voters see that there is no alternative and simply don't show up to vote. This resulted in low turnout and lower amount of votes for United Russia, so relatively small amount of fraud "corrected" the numbers to allow them to maintain majority.
P.S. I'm not russian, but I speak the language fluently and pick on quite a bit from reading news in russian.
You do? Are you sure? You have a two-party system, completely rigged in favor of corporate elite. The only choice you have is who's lobby will be more powerful for next few years.
That would actually be funny, just imagine this preached in your neightbourhood ultra right wing church: "Scientist admits that his unholy work on particle science is damned by God!"
I can vouch for intentions still "aligning" with users. Namely if they can get ads that are unintrusive actually in, I wouldn't mind them. I am well aware of problems that many smaller sites have with adblock, and I would very much like a way for them to stay afloat while not pissing me off with blinking crap plastered all over my screen. Adblock's actions make sense to me.
Stasi was capable actively monitoring every SEVENTH citizen of GDDR. This number was derived directly from their archives, and can be found in a number of currently in-print history books, along with proper sourcing. KGB was significantly weaker in this, in no small part due to the fact that much of USSR didn't even have telephone lines and proper roads until late 70s. The country was just so damn big and sparsely populated. Finally, there was the major problem of management - even if you gathered information like Stasi did, you ended up fucked by the fact that you didn't have resources to process it.
There are multiple cases of people from companies like Palantir (use google to find citations that haven't been pulled yet due to DMCA or other ways they use to pull them off public websites) stating that not only do US/UK currently monitor EVERY SINGLE CITIZEN, they are officially marketing themselves as companies that have tools that can turn this huge influx of informational mess into useful datasets. In other words they've seen the data, and know that it's a mess due to sheer amounts of it. Which is the main reason why Stasi could only dream of having systems like this in place. Computers powerful enough, networking powerful enough and social incentives for people to put their daily lives into recordable, automatically sortable format simply weren't there in their times.
I can't find it any more, but I have seen a really nice presentation from Palantir specifically stating all above points that I saw either on wired or ars (or linked from one of their articles on the topic). I'm not sure they still have it though, as it may have gotten pulled on copyright grounds.
Notably, both Stalin's regime and entire Stasi organisation have been significantly less successful at monitoring people. We long past the point where even those comparisons in terms of monitoring would be appropriate. To try to whine about Putin, who actually failed at any significant monitoring of his people (as in comparison to both above) shows extreme depth of ignorance in the subject. As it stands now, top countries in terms of monitoring their citizens are located in the West, and the gap between them and others is more of a huge chasm.
Websites like wikipedia, who have to beg for donations on every page for quite a while in spite of being one of the biggest and most used web sites in the world. And... no one else.
Personally I find myself more annoyed by wikipedia's begging (which is a huge ass banner on top of every page not blocked by adblock), then by small banners on my whitelisted sites.
Former entered "mobile device" market around 1980s or so. Latter ended up having to buy motorola's mobile phone division after outsourcing all actual manufacturing still got it assraped in courts.
Entertainment system works perfectly fine. Just the background lighting (which is also responsible for things like lighting the AC controls" lamp is out.
This is patent MAD at work. Funnily, or sadly even insanity like this will not diminish support from big companies to tightening patent rules and laws even further.
Why? Because as long as patents can be enforced like this even against big names, no one small or new will ever be able to even try to enter the same business to compete.
Except that laptop's chips are designed from get go to work in tandem, and communicate with each other to work as one whole. Car's computers are separated from each other, and generally control one system or even one aspect of the system independently from others.
I not generally disagree with your assessment, I just feel that this correction is necessary.
For the record, I'm a lifelong cyclist (learned at 5, never stopped), but I don't live in US. I live in Finland, and we have cyclist safety quite well thought of. We usually have a cyclist lane on any major road that does have a separate one, and when there isn't one we can legally drive within one meter of right end of pavement.
Reality is, it's about attitudes. Those of cyclist him/herself, AND those of car drivers. Here, most cars will let me pass, and follow the rules, and I give them the same courtesy. As a result, I've never been in an accident, and only one "close call" where it was driver's fault.
As a result, I would argue that the biggest problem on the road is not the level of lethality of each moving object, or difference between them, but the attitudes of people driving those.
My father still drives his 1997 opel vectra. That car has gone through serious punishment, including several Eastern European countries, and he drives around 1000 km on it every week during last two years or so. He's also a very cautious driver, the car has been maintained constantly, and is yet to have a single failure of any significant kind beyond things like motors on door locks freezing occasionally and some entertainment system button lighting going out about a year ago because he can be bothered to pay mechanic to remove entire front panel to replace the lamps.
It hasn't had any engine problems so far, but it did need a pre-emptive replacement of small two drive train parts. As guy maintaining the car pointed out, if my father bought the car a couple of years earlier he probably wouldn't have to replace those, but apparently they now make some components out of plastic in hope that they fail in about 10 years of use and people buy a new car instead replacing the parts.
In a nutshell: barring manufacturing defects, most modern cars will last you well over a decade and around 400.000km without any significant failures provided you treat them well and maintain them appropriately.
I assume you drive a car that is at least 25 years old then.
And if you are driving a relatively modern one, like one bought in last 5 years, you can be sure that everything from power steering to ignition is either fully controlled, or at least monitored by a computer.
I don't know, but what stops you from installing it even if it's a windows machine? I believe drivers for pretty much everything that netbook has on board are available and microsoft tax on it is very small as it's sold with w7 starter.
Considering that one of the major incentives to move is... government subsidies, cheap price of living usually at least in part organised by local government, various tax breaks managed by government and other similar perks, your selective definition of "free market" is akin to average politician's selective memory.
From a large sum of things, most prominently human need to progress or fail. We have seen this in history as various empires dominated others from stone age, to various metal ages, to age of sailing, firearms and colonialism, and now at technological age where progress keeps on speeding up.
"Free market" as a general concept plays a small part in this. Free market as portrayed in libertarian dogma has no part at all.
You're confusing "influence of free market" with "influence of technological progress". Former had little to nothing to do with prices of medium going down as technological progress made better technologies and processes available for use.
Speed and performance are the same thing, and reliability is pointing towards HDDs in terms of controller reliability, media reliability and amount of bugs due to technology being still in infancy.
And of course, let's not forget price per amount of storage.
Slashdot Mirror
For the record, the only ones "doubting legitimacy" of United Russia are people abroad who really want to doubt it. When you ask people on the street, you essentially have two tiers: those who support it, and those who think that progress has stalled in last few years and they want to shake it up (i.e. protest movement).
Putin will still get elected, legitimately. According to Gallup he still has ~50-60% popular support in adult population (which is slowly dwindling). His main competition are communists (who are mainly supported by old people who want to go back to the familiar old system) and ultra nationalists (who are something of a joke, but a funny one). The West-supported folks we see on news here basically command support of those they pay off and no one else.
The main complaint seems to be with United Russia basically taking its power for granted and having stopped reforming, fighting corruption and raising standard of living. This is a very valid concern, but there are simply no alternatives, so it seems that disenfranchised voters see that there is no alternative and simply don't show up to vote. This resulted in low turnout and lower amount of votes for United Russia, so relatively small amount of fraud "corrected" the numbers to allow them to maintain majority.
P.S. I'm not russian, but I speak the language fluently and pick on quite a bit from reading news in russian.
North Korea is the only Korea.
(According to Democratic People's Republic of Korea).
You do? Are you sure? You have a two-party system, completely rigged in favor of corporate elite. The only choice you have is who's lobby will be more powerful for next few years.
Please, we all know that Higgs is buddhist, with all the particle reincarnation as other particles and energy.
That would actually be funny, just imagine this preached in your neightbourhood ultra right wing church: "Scientist admits that his unholy work on particle science is damned by God!"
I can vouch for intentions still "aligning" with users. Namely if they can get ads that are unintrusive actually in, I wouldn't mind them. I am well aware of problems that many smaller sites have with adblock, and I would very much like a way for them to stay afloat while not pissing me off with blinking crap plastered all over my screen. Adblock's actions make sense to me.
Stasi was capable actively monitoring every SEVENTH citizen of GDDR. This number was derived directly from their archives, and can be found in a number of currently in-print history books, along with proper sourcing. KGB was significantly weaker in this, in no small part due to the fact that much of USSR didn't even have telephone lines and proper roads until late 70s. The country was just so damn big and sparsely populated. Finally, there was the major problem of management - even if you gathered information like Stasi did, you ended up fucked by the fact that you didn't have resources to process it.
There are multiple cases of people from companies like Palantir (use google to find citations that haven't been pulled yet due to DMCA or other ways they use to pull them off public websites) stating that not only do US/UK currently monitor EVERY SINGLE CITIZEN, they are officially marketing themselves as companies that have tools that can turn this huge influx of informational mess into useful datasets. In other words they've seen the data, and know that it's a mess due to sheer amounts of it. Which is the main reason why Stasi could only dream of having systems like this in place. Computers powerful enough, networking powerful enough and social incentives for people to put their daily lives into recordable, automatically sortable format simply weren't there in their times.
I can't find it any more, but I have seen a really nice presentation from Palantir specifically stating all above points that I saw either on wired or ars (or linked from one of their articles on the topic). I'm not sure they still have it though, as it may have gotten pulled on copyright grounds.
Notably, both Stalin's regime and entire Stasi organisation have been significantly less successful at monitoring people. We long past the point where even those comparisons in terms of monitoring would be appropriate. To try to whine about Putin, who actually failed at any significant monitoring of his people (as in comparison to both above) shows extreme depth of ignorance in the subject. As it stands now, top countries in terms of monitoring their citizens are located in the West, and the gap between them and others is more of a huge chasm.
Websites like wikipedia, who have to beg for donations on every page for quite a while in spite of being one of the biggest and most used web sites in the world. And... no one else.
Personally I find myself more annoyed by wikipedia's begging (which is a huge ass banner on top of every page not blocked by adblock), then by small banners on my whitelisted sites.
Correct, that has been what I was saying the entire time. Now, introducing: dictionary. Work specifically aimed to clarify exact meanings of words.
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/computer
"one that computes; specifically : a programmable usually electronic device that can store, retrieve, and process data".
Former entered "mobile device" market around 1980s or so. Latter ended up having to buy motorola's mobile phone division after outsourcing all actual manufacturing still got it assraped in courts.
Entertainment system works perfectly fine. Just the background lighting (which is also responsible for things like lighting the AC controls" lamp is out.
This is patent MAD at work. Funnily, or sadly even insanity like this will not diminish support from big companies to tightening patent rules and laws even further.
Why? Because as long as patents can be enforced like this even against big names, no one small or new will ever be able to even try to enter the same business to compete.
Except that laptop's chips are designed from get go to work in tandem, and communicate with each other to work as one whole. Car's computers are separated from each other, and generally control one system or even one aspect of the system independently from others.
I not generally disagree with your assessment, I just feel that this correction is necessary.
A computer is a programmable machine designed to sequentially and automatically carry out a sequence of arithmetic or logical operations.
Hence "compute-er", a machine that computes.
Then you are inventing words. Computer is a word with a defined meaning, not a fictional term to which you can assign new meaning at will.
So, speed limits are bad, and everyone not driving ferrari enzo is dangerous to REAL drivers. Gotcha.
I was talking about egos just above in this very same thread. Thanks for showing exactly what I was talking about.
For the record, I'm a lifelong cyclist (learned at 5, never stopped), but I don't live in US. I live in Finland, and we have cyclist safety quite well thought of. We usually have a cyclist lane on any major road that does have a separate one, and when there isn't one we can legally drive within one meter of right end of pavement.
Reality is, it's about attitudes. Those of cyclist him/herself, AND those of car drivers. Here, most cars will let me pass, and follow the rules, and I give them the same courtesy. As a result, I've never been in an accident, and only one "close call" where it was driver's fault.
As a result, I would argue that the biggest problem on the road is not the level of lethality of each moving object, or difference between them, but the attitudes of people driving those.
My father still drives his 1997 opel vectra. That car has gone through serious punishment, including several Eastern European countries, and he drives around 1000 km on it every week during last two years or so. He's also a very cautious driver, the car has been maintained constantly, and is yet to have a single failure of any significant kind beyond things like motors on door locks freezing occasionally and some entertainment system button lighting going out about a year ago because he can be bothered to pay mechanic to remove entire front panel to replace the lamps.
It hasn't had any engine problems so far, but it did need a pre-emptive replacement of small two drive train parts. As guy maintaining the car pointed out, if my father bought the car a couple of years earlier he probably wouldn't have to replace those, but apparently they now make some components out of plastic in hope that they fail in about 10 years of use and people buy a new car instead replacing the parts.
In a nutshell: barring manufacturing defects, most modern cars will last you well over a decade and around 400.000km without any significant failures provided you treat them well and maintain them appropriately.
I assume you drive a car that is at least 25 years old then.
And if you are driving a relatively modern one, like one bought in last 5 years, you can be sure that everything from power steering to ignition is either fully controlled, or at least monitored by a computer.
I don't know, but what stops you from installing it even if it's a windows machine? I believe drivers for pretty much everything that netbook has on board are available and microsoft tax on it is very small as it's sold with w7 starter.
Considering that one of the major incentives to move is... government subsidies, cheap price of living usually at least in part organised by local government, various tax breaks managed by government and other similar perks, your selective definition of "free market" is akin to average politician's selective memory.
From a large sum of things, most prominently human need to progress or fail. We have seen this in history as various empires dominated others from stone age, to various metal ages, to age of sailing, firearms and colonialism, and now at technological age where progress keeps on speeding up.
"Free market" as a general concept plays a small part in this. Free market as portrayed in libertarian dogma has no part at all.
You're confusing "influence of free market" with "influence of technological progress". Former had little to nothing to do with prices of medium going down as technological progress made better technologies and processes available for use.
Speed and performance are the same thing, and reliability is pointing towards HDDs in terms of controller reliability, media reliability and amount of bugs due to technology being still in infancy.
And of course, let's not forget price per amount of storage.