The whole idea of Intellectual Property comes in to play because companies wanted to assume monopoly over tech/entertainment markets. The current legislation behind patents and copyrights is a result of this effort via lobby, and on the public relation front of it is this crusade for IP.
Is it just me who find it outrageous that councils are using these excuse for a software, like Office suit and all that, and piling up costs to update and maintain them, while a fucking free text editor do the job, on a lower spec pc, with little to no maintenance costs?
I mean, there's a host of reliable, powerful and well supported tool for all the stuff that a normal office person does: emailing, writing documents: plain text editing is at the heart of writing a document, formatting is only a secondary thing and is not needed until the point that you must print it, in which case, you a bloody asciidoc/markdown/whatever formatter and get done with it. Spreadsheets are just a poor excuse for doing something more complicated and confusing way than a simple script language and some elaborate, plain text formatted data. That is all what a simple office minion need to use, in any country, in any council. There are great, free ways to construct digital forms too, without a mess what Word is.
Yes, it requires training. So does Excel Fucking 2007. And then again, Excel Fucking 2010. And then agian... with, or without ribbons. And then, learn "Cloud Services". But once the person got comfortable of doing some basic calculations with plain ascii stored data, that knowledge will be useful for her entire career. These aren't user friendly systems: many spend most of their time to find the right templates, the right bloody styles, fixing their fonts placing and sizing the columns, scrolling back and forth (c'mon, in excell 2010 I can't even tell how that fucking scrolling works in the first place, and eventually every poor fucker must write macros because otherwise useless. Just get a fucking education in a user friendly programming language such as python, or I don't mind what and leave me alone with your digitally useless spreadsheets) instead of actually dealing with the work at hand. And the costs are enormous for basically worse productivity, crippled by updates and fragmentation, incompatibility, linked costs (like that of the operating system and million additional "app" to make it useful to some degree) and pay an army of "Microsoft expert" to locate files in hidden directories. The whole MS Office world is mess crippling public services.
File sharing is what you do with something you own.
No. File sharing is when you make files publicly available. Of course, you need to have permission to read in order to do that. Ownership however is not required.
Piracy is sharing files that you do not own.
No. Piracy is when you force the crew of a ship to hand over the control of a ship. For doing so, the pirate must possess the tools of coercion, arms. According to the United Nation, the piracy is a very serious, violent crime. I don't see any reference to file sharing in the text, do you? In any case, making the connection between the two is an act of exaggeration, association with one of the most violent behaviour, just like calling people who disagree with you, nazis or mass murderers.
Movies are about fiction (virtually always).
That may be true. However the mentioned fictional film is about the actual meaning of the word, piracy, not the fictional content that you just made up above.
Some educator uploading material they do not own is piracy. It may also be civil disobedience.
Again, no. I'm not aware from the story that the said teacher invaded private ships on the seas and forced the crew to hand over the load.
Some 12 year old downloading Katy Perry is piracy. It probably is not civil disobedience.
No, not even by your own definition. As long as the 12 year old takes the publicly available copy and only downloads it, there's no file sharing involved. It is only the case if she or he starts to make her own copy publicly available, being a leach or a seed in a torrent network, or the analogue in some other way. If someone leaves a Kate Perry CD on a bench in a box labelled free to take, and bring the CD for listening, would you still accuse her with hijacking ships, threaten ship crews with murder, and so on?
If the law says that file sharing you do not own is illegal, that is one thing. Using a label "pirate" for those who do so is an other, an act of magnifying of the act what they did. File sharing is not theft, not pirating. It is what it is: sharing files, sharing information. It may be debatable that the information sharing is a not a basic right, yet, it is not by default. One must sign non-disclosure agreements if one is expected to keep some information secret. This always happens before revealing the information. Consumers of digital media aren't restricted by two-side non-disclosure agreements before purchase. If the law is not consistent it can't be applied, and enforcement of laws which aren't consistent with the nature of acts it supposed to regulate can't be, by nature consistent either. Non-consistent law enforcement is the tell tale sign of an oppressive political system. In this case, the source of oppression is the political lobby of different publisher cartels. Civil disobedience is the right of the citizens in such a case, not an option.
You can apply the same idea here as for homosexual acts. For hundreds of years homosexual acts were illegal and inconsistent of the nature of sexual life. The justification was that homosexuality is a crime against nature. Of course, Nature as such, isn't a person, and is and was mostly linked to the idea of God, again, a non-person. But by citing God/Nature in the justification it exceeded the entire framework of the issue, and brought it in to a stage where it doesn't belong. Ditto with piracy and file sharing. This is a question about the way we handle information, and has nothing to do with piracy.
It's not just America. The so-called socialist/communist block also praised labour as the only thing that makes human beings worthy, and if you don't drone all bloody day, you don't deserve your food, shelter, children. At the end of the day, the problem here is the protestant work-ethic that will not hold on the long term.
"Lump of labour" fallacy doesn't apply here. The whole purpose of industrialization and automation is to lower the need of labour in the production. Industrialization made major changes in our society, changing the model of the family. Automation made it possible to employ women and children in factories, automation also enabled to run the house holds without the permanent need of a person labouring at home. It went onward to basically replace majority of the human labour needed in most of the stuff we produce. Even in the not so long term, you see that economies resort to human labour in roles where the human is a servant, rather than a producer. The waiter, the parking guard, the security guard, the cleaner, etc.. The face of labour changes, and that changes do make difference in the social relationships. The politics of increasing industrialization and automation is the really horrifying part, because most of the planet is still place the value of human life on its labour.
Politicians and economists can perform miracles with the statistics of employment, the rate of unemployment however doesn't tell much about the wider social issues. There's a huge population on Earth that was never even close to be employed in the first place. Good part of the lowest social strata, house-wives, struggling agricultural families in Asia, South-America, or Africa isn't even counted in the population, or the work-capable population. My point is, that amount of labour needed is a political issue. At some point, individual profit will not work as a good incentive to create more chance to work, more chance to connect these groups in to the circulation of the world economy. Capitalism has its limits, and that limit is closely linked to the human labour.
According to this, there's 680 million logins per day. I couldn't find an official Facebook word on it, and the latest estimates are from last August, but they say a magnitude lower, 180k. I highly doubt that within 7 months there would be a 10 fold increase in server numbers.
So going by these numbers, there's 680.000k/180k = 3778 user/server/day. For a web server, this is pretty good number, as I can imagine, serving 3778 users is a sort of continuous thing, unlike many other websites. Notifications are polled pretty frequently, and as you scroll requests are made constantly to the servers.
I don't like Facebook, and I think this is a waste of energy and space for storing cat videos and sex-quizzes but the numbers in this case do add up.
Alright, dude, but watch something twice, and you will download exactly the same data again... why? And how on Earth does this make any healthy network ecosystem?
OK, I thought you're one of Those Guys... who think that debuggers encourage bad coding practices. My understanding of a good debugger is sort of the ones that are available today. I don't expect debuggers will expand their feature set anyway, they are good as they are. In fact, MS debuggers are in some aspect are inferior as they can't be scripted AFAIK.
DRM doesn't work. It doesn't work because there's an already working technology, that is, downloading media files over the internet. DRM doesn't add anything to that. Media players, browsers, your display connector, etc. is in your possession, and is yours to use them in a way you like. DRM is a bunch of method to deprive you from that basic right. DRM doesn't add up to your service quality, at best(!) you don't notice. But even then, you need to have an equipment that is able to decode the DRM encryption, which would require better hardware, and more electricity spent. There's no harmless DRM in the world.
Inviting DRM in to standard browser tech is a sort of thing, that directly turn the internet to be more closed information system. For the moment, the reason that not all media provider goes with DRM is that DRM still loomes over the user and exclude a portion of the population, because it can't be done without user interaction. If user interaction won't be required any more we'll soon will see large migration to DRM scheme.
The problem is that if content providers move en mass to DRM schemes, your choice is not simply not discard DRMed providers, but not to consume entertainment at all or install god-knows-what binary blobs on your system, forced to use software which you wouldn't normally buy or even trust, and so on. DRM scheme, along with many "invention" of the tech/entertainment industry is a fraudulent scheme, nothing else.
Your metaphor doesn't work here. It's rather than copy the key with brute force (i'm not sure what would be that IRL), and send the copies out all over the place, without going back to the original lock. Not every user has to brute force it, only a single one. The whole idea of DRM is completely broken.
You can, however, make it enough of a pain in the ass that most people won't bother.
Yet it's enough a single person to decrypt their streams with the necessary means, and distribute the content over p2p networks, where people can easily download and that's it.
None of those would help you out without a good debugger. I use all of those at work, yet the best combination to find bugs is to get the unit tests in to the debugger. TDD isn't a magic cure, it's just a good method to work in certain cases.
I use Qt Creator, it is great for C++ development in general. For everything else, I fire up Eclipse. Eclipse has its own issues, as it is written in Java, you can't expect the same performance as from Qt Creator for example, but it has the best plugin collection and perhaps most supportive community. Virtually all existing language is supported by an Eclipse plugin, and the number of existing ones will let you implement your own.
Also, I'm a great admirer of Emacs, which is my primary environment if I do some work remotely. I love to work with it, for C++, script languages, or just simply text editing.
If you're looking for something more similar to Visual Studio, I suggest you should also give a try to KDevelop. There are plenty of alternatives as you can see.
You must be very unbiased guy in general. No MS partisanship, whatsoever.
While I agree that the MS Visual Studio is a good IDE over all, there are better alternatives out there. The first real problem with it is that it's single-platform. You can't use it anywhere. The extensibility is a bitch in VS. It takes too much time and effort to figure out it's API, and it's quirks. Not to mention the support for these retarded languages that VS supports, apart from C++ and C#. That is the only two that worth even to look at. The debugger is great... except that the whole IDE is based around their own debugger, and you making a debugging interface in VS takes more time than any other IDE out there. Visual Studio also very rigid on your project structure, and if you don't subscribe to their project file model, you are basically screwed. Not to mention, that Visual Studio is a resource hog only running on very beefy configuration. Oh, and don't get me started with the useless packages that installs on your system for no apparent reason. Finally, if you want to do refactoring, you have to purchase an external tools, like VAX.
So, while it has some good features for which MS deserves a candy, overall it isn't that good, no need for jumping up and down like a puppy dog.
I would rather say communist concept rather than just simply Marxist but yeah, I'm very much aware. That's why I find it even funny that people who are the most vicious opponents of the ideas of Marx (or what they perceive as Marxism), endorsing the term capitalism, which implies that they also accept underlying communist concept of society (that society is shaped by the way it reproduces itself, namely, if wage work is the dominant form of production the society is capitalist).
In any case, since terminology is sort of always out of sync, as it is politically loaded, what I meant by being on capitalist basis, that the USSR, especially after Stalin took over, were that of a government forced modernization process to a state managed capitalism. The "Collectivization" was a major agriculture reform, that was aimed industrialize the agriculture, which in turn allowed to re-allocate the population to the emerging industrial sector. This process is comparable to those changes that went through in the previous centuries in many Western European countries but most intensively in the 19th century. My point is, and was that while many refer to the USSR as a fundamentally different economic model from capitalism, yet it clearly wasn't that different, and I even dare to venture the view, that the USSR was a significant stage of the Russian capitalist development. Taking the original meaning of the term, communism is a movement against capitalism, not a settled set of ideas. Especially not the set of the social democrat ideas (state managed economy where everybody is a worker, and a bureaucracy that rules them all).
If you're comfortable in the European and Russian history, then you would know that it did work in many aspects!
1) It modernized the country in the industry and politics. What they performed was a forced shift from an economy based on agriculture to an industrial one. 2) It "freed" the population from the land completely, and first the party managers, and now capitalist oligarch can rule them by wages. 3) The zone of interest of the USSR expanded to reach even other continents, and even our huge satellite, so one has to admit it, that this is no little accomplishment for a country, that was ruled by Father Tzar not even hundred years ago.
This is no small feast for capitalism because after all, by all means, it was explicitly capitalist country since the '20s, and even before the policies were that of a failed war-economic ones. Capitalism doesn't need free market, in fact, it only holds a certain illusion of "free" market anyway. Free markets in capitalism are always deemed to transform in to monopoly playground, which seizes the political system. In the case of the USSR however, it was the inherited bureaucratic structure that produced capitalism where there was little. If you take your time, and look up the ideological genealogy of Bolshevism/The Communist Party, you'll find that in fact, they were no more than a rather extreme version of social democracy, and communist/anarchists/radicals of all sorts were systematically eliminated, imprisoned, forced out of the country. Stalin's re-interpretation of Marxism-Leninism (that this radical social democratic theory, the top-down approach to the working class and communism as a Party led process, instead of a revolutionary movement) were only slight changes, in order to make the Soviet-Russian imperialism "acceptable", as the USSR external image as the agent of internationalism (which is, in many ways, just the same ol' lie creepily similar to the USA's line of bringing about liberty and democracy - both means that expanding the zone of military-political-economical interest).
For all intents and purposes, the USSR produced super-wealthy class, who at some point dissociate themselves from the ideological facade, broke away even from the illusion of managing this wealth in the name of the people. Economy isn't something of being good or bad. It is a tool in the hand of the powerful. In economic crises it is always the most wealthy who survives the transformation, those who actually create policy... economic policy.
One would think, that if they are such a good hackers, they just probably have a few Asian proxy over there, or perhaps even a host of Asian looking shells. Kaspersky has to call Section 9.
You actually did pay $71 for that game? I mean, I used to be a fan of Sim City in the old times, but I would never give that much money for a game that doesn't offer any short of the care that Blizzard put in to its games. Now, I have my beef with Blizzard over other behaviour, and with all software company selling EULs with binary blobs, but that's a completely different matter.
Slashdot Mirror
The whole idea of Intellectual Property comes in to play because companies wanted to assume monopoly over tech/entertainment markets. The current legislation behind patents and copyrights is a result of this effort via lobby, and on the public relation front of it is this crusade for IP.
Isn't it possible to use, I don't know, Suspend to Disk aka. Hibernation feature? That would save awful lot of time.
Is it just me who find it outrageous that councils are using these excuse for a software, like Office suit and all that, and piling up costs to update and maintain them, while a fucking free text editor do the job, on a lower spec pc, with little to no maintenance costs?
I mean, there's a host of reliable, powerful and well supported tool for all the stuff that a normal office person does: emailing, writing documents: plain text editing is at the heart of writing a document, formatting is only a secondary thing and is not needed until the point that you must print it, in which case, you a bloody asciidoc/markdown/whatever formatter and get done with it. Spreadsheets are just a poor excuse for doing something more complicated and confusing way than a simple script language and some elaborate, plain text formatted data. That is all what a simple office minion need to use, in any country, in any council. There are great, free ways to construct digital forms too, without a mess what Word is.
Yes, it requires training. So does Excel Fucking 2007. And then again, Excel Fucking 2010. And then agian... with, or without ribbons. And then, learn "Cloud Services". But once the person got comfortable of doing some basic calculations with plain ascii stored data, that knowledge will be useful for her entire career. These aren't user friendly systems: many spend most of their time to find the right templates, the right bloody styles, fixing their fonts placing and sizing the columns, scrolling back and forth (c'mon, in excell 2010 I can't even tell how that fucking scrolling works in the first place, and eventually every poor fucker must write macros because otherwise useless. Just get a fucking education in a user friendly programming language such as python, or I don't mind what and leave me alone with your digitally useless spreadsheets) instead of actually dealing with the work at hand. And the costs are enormous for basically worse productivity, crippled by updates and fragmentation, incompatibility, linked costs (like that of the operating system and million additional "app" to make it useful to some degree) and pay an army of "Microsoft expert" to locate files in hidden directories. The whole MS Office world is mess crippling public services.
File sharing is what you do with something you own.
No. File sharing is when you make files publicly available. Of course, you need to have permission to read in order to do that. Ownership however is not required.
Piracy is sharing files that you do not own.
No. Piracy is when you force the crew of a ship to hand over the control of a ship. For doing so, the pirate must possess the tools of coercion, arms. According to the United Nation, the piracy is a very serious, violent crime. I don't see any reference to file sharing in the text, do you? In any case, making the connection between the two is an act of exaggeration, association with one of the most violent behaviour, just like calling people who disagree with you, nazis or mass murderers.
Movies are about fiction (virtually always).
That may be true. However the mentioned fictional film is about the actual meaning of the word, piracy, not the fictional content that you just made up above.
Some educator uploading material they do not own is piracy. It may also be civil disobedience.
Again, no. I'm not aware from the story that the said teacher invaded private ships on the seas and forced the crew to hand over the load.
Some 12 year old downloading Katy Perry is piracy. It probably is not civil disobedience.
No, not even by your own definition. As long as the 12 year old takes the publicly available copy and only downloads it, there's no file sharing involved. It is only the case if she or he starts to make her own copy publicly available, being a leach or a seed in a torrent network, or the analogue in some other way. If someone leaves a Kate Perry CD on a bench in a box labelled free to take, and bring the CD for listening, would you still accuse her with hijacking ships, threaten ship crews with murder, and so on?
If the law says that file sharing you do not own is illegal, that is one thing. Using a label "pirate" for those who do so is an other, an act of magnifying of the act what they did. File sharing is not theft, not pirating. It is what it is: sharing files, sharing information. It may be debatable that the information sharing is a not a basic right, yet, it is not by default. One must sign non-disclosure agreements if one is expected to keep some information secret. This always happens before revealing the information. Consumers of digital media aren't restricted by two-side non-disclosure agreements before purchase. If the law is not consistent it can't be applied, and enforcement of laws which aren't consistent with the nature of acts it supposed to regulate can't be, by nature consistent either. Non-consistent law enforcement is the tell tale sign of an oppressive political system. In this case, the source of oppression is the political lobby of different publisher cartels. Civil disobedience is the right of the citizens in such a case, not an option.
You can apply the same idea here as for homosexual acts. For hundreds of years homosexual acts were illegal and inconsistent of the nature of sexual life. The justification was that homosexuality is a crime against nature. Of course, Nature as such, isn't a person, and is and was mostly linked to the idea of God, again, a non-person. But by citing God/Nature in the justification it exceeded the entire framework of the issue, and brought it in to a stage where it doesn't belong. Ditto with piracy and file sharing. This is a question about the way we handle information, and has nothing to do with piracy.
It's not just America. The so-called socialist/communist block also praised labour as the only thing that makes human beings worthy, and if you don't drone all bloody day, you don't deserve your food, shelter, children. At the end of the day, the problem here is the protestant work-ethic that will not hold on the long term.
"Lump of labour" fallacy doesn't apply here. The whole purpose of industrialization and automation is to lower the need of labour in the production. Industrialization made major changes in our society, changing the model of the family. Automation made it possible to employ women and children in factories, automation also enabled to run the house holds without the permanent need of a person labouring at home. It went onward to basically replace majority of the human labour needed in most of the stuff we produce. Even in the not so long term, you see that economies resort to human labour in roles where the human is a servant, rather than a producer. The waiter, the parking guard, the security guard, the cleaner, etc.. The face of labour changes, and that changes do make difference in the social relationships. The politics of increasing industrialization and automation is the really horrifying part, because most of the planet is still place the value of human life on its labour.
Politicians and economists can perform miracles with the statistics of employment, the rate of unemployment however doesn't tell much about the wider social issues. There's a huge population on Earth that was never even close to be employed in the first place. Good part of the lowest social strata, house-wives, struggling agricultural families in Asia, South-America, or Africa isn't even counted in the population, or the work-capable population. My point is, that amount of labour needed is a political issue. At some point, individual profit will not work as a good incentive to create more chance to work, more chance to connect these groups in to the circulation of the world economy. Capitalism has its limits, and that limit is closely linked to the human labour.
According to this, there's 680 million logins per day.
I couldn't find an official Facebook word on it, and the latest estimates are from last August, but they say a magnitude lower, 180k. I highly doubt that within 7 months there would be a 10 fold increase in server numbers.
So going by these numbers, there's 680.000k/180k = 3778 user/server/day. For a web server, this is pretty good number, as I can imagine, serving 3778 users is a sort of continuous thing, unlike many other websites. Notifications are polled pretty frequently, and as you scroll requests are made constantly to the servers.
I don't like Facebook, and I think this is a waste of energy and space for storing cat videos and sex-quizzes but the numbers in this case do add up.
Alright, dude, but watch something twice, and you will download exactly the same data again... why? And how on Earth does this make any healthy network ecosystem?
Did that below in this thread. My personal favourite is Qt Creator for C++, free, and platform independent, plus better productivity IMHO.
No need to encourage me. I don't use DRMed or any other media service. Torrent is doing just fine for me...
OK, I thought you're one of Those Guys... who think that debuggers encourage bad coding practices. My understanding of a good debugger is sort of the ones that are available today. I don't expect debuggers will expand their feature set anyway, they are good as they are. In fact, MS debuggers are in some aspect are inferior as they can't be scripted AFAIK.
DRM doesn't work. It doesn't work because there's an already working technology, that is, downloading media files over the internet. DRM doesn't add anything to that. Media players, browsers, your display connector, etc. is in your possession, and is yours to use them in a way you like. DRM is a bunch of method to deprive you from that basic right. DRM doesn't add up to your service quality, at best(!) you don't notice. But even then, you need to have an equipment that is able to decode the DRM encryption, which would require better hardware, and more electricity spent. There's no harmless DRM in the world.
Inviting DRM in to standard browser tech is a sort of thing, that directly turn the internet to be more closed information system. For the moment, the reason that not all media provider goes with DRM is that DRM still loomes over the user and exclude a portion of the population, because it can't be done without user interaction. If user interaction won't be required any more we'll soon will see large migration to DRM scheme.
The problem is that if content providers move en mass to DRM schemes, your choice is not simply not discard DRMed providers, but not to consume entertainment at all or install god-knows-what binary blobs on your system, forced to use software which you wouldn't normally buy or even trust, and so on. DRM scheme, along with many "invention" of the tech/entertainment industry is a fraudulent scheme, nothing else.
Yep, TBH will feature the same shows in the same time, plus 2 seconds.
Your metaphor doesn't work here. It's rather than copy the key with brute force (i'm not sure what would be that IRL), and send the copies out all over the place, without going back to the original lock. Not every user has to brute force it, only a single one. The whole idea of DRM is completely broken.
You can, however, make it enough of a pain in the ass that most people won't bother.
Yet it's enough a single person to decrypt their streams with the necessary means, and distribute the content over p2p networks, where people can easily download and that's it.
Wow, recently we're swamped with MS spammers.
What are you doing with Access for a work? I don't even know where would be it useful at all.
None of those would help you out without a good debugger. I use all of those at work, yet the best combination to find bugs is to get the unit tests in to the debugger. TDD isn't a magic cure, it's just a good method to work in certain cases.
I use Qt Creator, it is great for C++ development in general. For everything else, I fire up Eclipse. Eclipse has its own issues, as it is written in Java, you can't expect the same performance as from Qt Creator for example, but it has the best plugin collection and perhaps most supportive community. Virtually all existing language is supported by an Eclipse plugin, and the number of existing ones will let you implement your own.
Also, I'm a great admirer of Emacs, which is my primary environment if I do some work remotely. I love to work with it, for C++, script languages, or just simply text editing.
If you're looking for something more similar to Visual Studio, I suggest you should also give a try to KDevelop. There are plenty of alternatives as you can see.
I wonder how would work that code colouring in a multi-thread environment too.
You must be very unbiased guy in general. No MS partisanship, whatsoever.
While I agree that the MS Visual Studio is a good IDE over all, there are better alternatives out there. The first real problem with it is that it's single-platform. You can't use it anywhere.
The extensibility is a bitch in VS. It takes too much time and effort to figure out it's API, and it's quirks. Not to mention the support for these retarded languages that VS supports, apart from C++ and C#. That is the only two that worth even to look at.
The debugger is great... except that the whole IDE is based around their own debugger, and you making a debugging interface in VS takes more time than any other IDE out there.
Visual Studio also very rigid on your project structure, and if you don't subscribe to their project file model, you are basically screwed.
Not to mention, that Visual Studio is a resource hog only running on very beefy configuration. Oh, and don't get me started with the useless packages that installs on your system for no apparent reason. Finally, if you want to do refactoring, you have to purchase an external tools, like VAX.
So, while it has some good features for which MS deserves a candy, overall it isn't that good, no need for jumping up and down like a puppy dog.
I would rather say communist concept rather than just simply Marxist but yeah, I'm very much aware. That's why I find it even funny that people who are the most vicious opponents of the ideas of Marx (or what they perceive as Marxism), endorsing the term capitalism, which implies that they also accept underlying communist concept of society (that society is shaped by the way it reproduces itself, namely, if wage work is the dominant form of production the society is capitalist).
In any case, since terminology is sort of always out of sync, as it is politically loaded, what I meant by being on capitalist basis, that the USSR, especially after Stalin took over, were that of a government forced modernization process to a state managed capitalism. The "Collectivization" was a major agriculture reform, that was aimed industrialize the agriculture, which in turn allowed to re-allocate the population to the emerging industrial sector. This process is comparable to those changes that went through in the previous centuries in many Western European countries but most intensively in the 19th century. My point is, and was that while many refer to the USSR as a fundamentally different economic model from capitalism, yet it clearly wasn't that different, and I even dare to venture the view, that the USSR was a significant stage of the Russian capitalist development.
Taking the original meaning of the term, communism is a movement against capitalism, not a settled set of ideas. Especially not the set of the social democrat ideas (state managed economy where everybody is a worker, and a bureaucracy that rules them all).
If you're comfortable in the European and Russian history, then you would know that it did work in many aspects!
1) It modernized the country in the industry and politics. What they performed was a forced shift from an economy based on agriculture to an industrial one.
2) It "freed" the population from the land completely, and first the party managers, and now capitalist oligarch can rule them by wages.
3) The zone of interest of the USSR expanded to reach even other continents, and even our huge satellite, so one has to admit it, that this is no little accomplishment for a country, that was ruled by Father Tzar not even hundred years ago.
This is no small feast for capitalism because after all, by all means, it was explicitly capitalist country since the '20s, and even before the policies were that of a failed war-economic ones. Capitalism doesn't need free market, in fact, it only holds a certain illusion of "free" market anyway. Free markets in capitalism are always deemed to transform in to monopoly playground, which seizes the political system. In the case of the USSR however, it was the inherited bureaucratic structure that produced capitalism where there was little. If you take your time, and look up the ideological genealogy of Bolshevism/The Communist Party, you'll find that in fact, they were no more than a rather extreme version of social democracy, and communist/anarchists/radicals of all sorts were systematically eliminated, imprisoned, forced out of the country. Stalin's re-interpretation of Marxism-Leninism (that this radical social democratic theory, the top-down approach to the working class and communism as a Party led process, instead of a revolutionary movement) were only slight changes, in order to make the Soviet-Russian imperialism "acceptable", as the USSR external image as the agent of internationalism (which is, in many ways, just the same ol' lie creepily similar to the USA's line of bringing about liberty and democracy - both means that expanding the zone of military-political-economical interest).
For all intents and purposes, the USSR produced super-wealthy class, who at some point dissociate themselves from the ideological facade, broke away even from the illusion of managing this wealth in the name of the people. Economy isn't something of being good or bad. It is a tool in the hand of the powerful. In economic crises it is always the most wealthy who survives the transformation, those who actually create policy... economic policy.
One would think, that if they are such a good hackers, they just probably have a few Asian proxy over there, or perhaps even a host of Asian looking shells. Kaspersky has to call Section 9.
You actually did pay $71 for that game? I mean, I used to be a fan of Sim City in the old times, but I would never give that much money for a game that doesn't offer any short of the care that Blizzard put in to its games. Now, I have my beef with Blizzard over other behaviour, and with all software company selling EULs with binary blobs, but that's a completely different matter.
$71 for this crap is just nuts!