This sound a lot like 'communism' we had in the good old Soviet Union. Private usage of things was allowed as long as it was for 'personal use' (it was called personal property). But as soon as you tried to use you personal car to moonlight as a cabbie it became private property which was not allowed. (because private ownership of means of production was a taboo under communism as it was the root cause of exploitation). Now we know of course that 'commercial exploitation' is what gives us all the wonderful variety of things , including software. I am now playing DA:Awakening (which in RMS's terms means I am being horribly enslaved by the game), please wake me up when anything remotely of the same quality emerges from the Free Software developers.
Sure this time it turned out to be a joke but just imagine if it was for instance a US special ops mission. Most of the people in Jordan beyond the capital live in remote mountaneous regions and have never seen anything more sophisticated than a goat so a US helicopter could be mistaken for an alien spacecraft. I've heard stories that during the 1967 war many Jordanian hersmen thought the God came down from the sky in fiery chariot! Most Arabs are also pretty short (about 120 cm) so a Westerner may appear unusually tall to them. Just imagine how uncontacted tribes in Papua feel when scientists hover in helicopters over them and what they think happened after they 'chased' it with arrows.
If female brains are wired differently through biology then why there are female scientists and engineers at all? And why is in our local university (in Russia) close to 40% of math major graduates are women? Are female mathematicians not real women? Are Russian women not real women? Seems more likely that any difference in wiring is due to cultural differences in child upbringing, if in America girls are bought Barbie dolls that say "Math is haaard" then no wonder their brains develop unsuitable for mathematics and IT.
Do you really think I would want to work for companies that have fracking typos in their job descriptions? And yes, I double checked, it is also on the actual web page. Give me a break.
If anything the 20s and 30s showed that forced industrialization can work, at least for a short time. Under Stalin Russia went from an agrarian country that did not produce it's own artillery shells during WWI to an industrial powerhouse that was beginning to outproduce Germany by the the late 30s. If you consider forced labour and starvation of the countryside acceptable of course.
I swear criticizing Apple is akin to criticizing Israel these days, even if you bring up valid point you are still accused of heinous ulterior motives. Apple success is 95% marketing and 5% features. The success of Apple is by itself a sad commentary on the state of Western civilization. I hate to say it and I know it's been said since at least the days of ancient Greeks but I swear people are getting really dumb and mentally lazy. This is like AGW, the problem is not that change is happening, the problem that it is happening too fast for the civilization to adjust.
Since you are maybe not a troll, I'll reply to you then as a Russian who reads both Russian and International news. I am definitely not brain washed, I understand my country is not perfect.
> 2. Their nuclear industry is in disrepair and barely hanging on the guys who are going to retire in the next five years or so.
Not quite sure what is meant by 'nuclear industry' here exactly but the civilian nuclear industry is alive and well. The current plans call for the construction of 20 new nuclear reactors at the pace of 1 or 2 per year. Ten are currently under construction and the first two reactors have been very recently completed. Plus we are building new reactors all over the world, a deal to build 16 new reactors in India has recently been signed.
Skilled factory jobs now pay more than entry level paper shifting 'manager' jobs aka 'office plankton' so there are many more younger people at the factories now.
> For you education, here is a greatest russian engineering project of new century: the missile that never flew
> as expected in like 10 years: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSM-56_Bulava
The missile had 5 successful tests out of 11. It is hardly a complete failure and it's shortcomings will be fixed in the near future. How about Ares-1? Billions over budget and then canceled? This kind of cherry picking negative information and obsessing over it is why most Russians dislike the tiny but vocal (in front of Western cameras) pro Western minority. Why not write about the very successful civilian Sukhoi Superjet project or Sukhoi PAK FA next generation plane, both of which are partially assembled at the Sukhoi factory in my home city.
>Russia does not have resources to maintain their military on functional level. The current doctrine is to rely on nukes as >much as possible since everything else is in disrepair. In fact, they are cutting close to 30% of staff because of lack of >money.
Again you do not know what you are talking about. Russian military doctrine calls for reduction of manpower gradually to allow discharged officers to have dignified existence outside of the army (like providing them with civilian skills and free housing). The amount of new equipment delivered to the military has been increasing every year. The conscription period has been reduced to one year. Russia is well on it's way to have a modern, mobile, well equipped professional army. And we can fight, just recently we totally humiliated in battle superior numbers of trained to NATO level Georgian troops who dumped their western made weapons and ran to Tbilisi like scared girls.
>Oil money go to Putin's private coffers so not much left for anything else.
Even the most basic research would tell you this is also a lie. In the last 10 years Russia has been paying it's foreign debt ahead of schedule, managed a balanced budget (unlike some other country that is well past bankrupt and is sustained by China) and on top of that accumulated nearly a trillion dollars in the stabilization fund and gold reserves which were then partially used to dampen the effects of American initiated world wide recession. I know Russia is not exactly a pillar of democracy and Putin does have authoritarian tendencies but accusing him of being a thief does not do justice to a rational person.
> 4. There is no space _industry_. There are old thirty year old designs on life support.
Russia has a very successfully Soyuz design that is now basically the only way to deliver people and payload to the ISS. And we are a major player in commercial launches. Solar system exploration projects nearly have been restarted with a major project (Phobos-Grunt) being launched soon. What does America have? A space agency in permanent crisis, a canceled Constellation program, and given a new wave of anti-intellectualism in general a very uncertain future.
It was a great platform to get your hands wet with Cell programming for one thing, as it was the most accessible cell platform. Plus I know of organizations that setup PS3 supercomputer clusters. There was eve an article on Slashdot a few months ago about military (air force) setting up a test cluster. I wonder what happens to them now. Stupid decision, IMHO.
Everything on you list is wrong, seriously it is not even funny for a troll. In was going to write a nice rebuttal, but then realized it's not possible to get every point so wrong, either from ignorance or by accident.
This is why there is a huge story every time a cabbie returns a large sum of money to the passenger. Nowdays you are expected by default to be a greedy, thieving bastard only following laws when there is a clear threat of punishment. Perelman has a very strong moral compass, he burned the bridges with the mathematical community, now how can he take money and titles from them now?
Except this is a lie. Or maybe his shrink has uncovered some "suppressed" childhood memories. Me, I do not remember an atmosphere of fear or even any kind of political lessons in Soviet kindergarten where he must have been when he was 6 y/o. After Stalin's death maybe several dozen of the most active dissidents were put away for psychiatric "treatment", so it also very unlikely that he witnessed neighbors disappearing.
As stated by various UN declaration most of the World,at least in theory, believes in certain universal rights, which is a PC way to state that there are moral absolutes above any national laws. We believe the the right to free speech is absolute, hell if you believe that Democracy is an absolute right then you can just says that since PRC government was not democratically elected then all the laws it enacted are illegitimate.
Now I hold no illusions that all the nations that matter will unite to boycott PRC economically. But it is still possible to be a moral man in the immoral world. I have found out that I can often replace household goods from China with EU made ones which are only marginally more expensive.
P.S. The other real problem of course is the apathy of 300-400 million Chinese who profited economically in the last 20 years under the current regime's economic policies. If there will a revolution it will be led by the other 1 billion angry peasants and I doubt that they will demanding democracy, human rights and free market. More like take by force anything valuable from fat city dwellers and redistribute it among the poor.
And this is why free software developers with no managers looming over them create such great, responsive, multi-core aware desktop applications, right? What a joke, and a poor excuse for your laziness.
Right, and thanks to that half the reason many use Firefox is the extensions that DISABLE or severely limit JS and other crap that wants to load itself and render in your browser.
There are retarded people of course. But most likely you are talking about people who have already been working these shit jobs for years. "You are what you do. If you do boring, stupid, monotonous work, chances are you'll end up boring, stupid, and monotonous." - The Abolition of Work
Lenin and later Stalin purged Orthodox clergy because according to them they belonged to the oppressor class, for the same reason they purged many scientists, engineers, teachers, well-of farmers, military officers and other groups who achieved some status under the tsarist regime. Orthodox church actively supported the loser side during the civil war and had nit coming to them just for that.
Their government is doing a wise thing. No one denies now that western intelligence had a hand at Ukrainian "orange" revolution. How well has it worked out for them? Several years of complete incompetence from western sponsored leaders, totally ruined economy, and now they voted back the very man whose victory was taken away the first time with the help of the West. Same thing with the "Rose" revolution in Georgia.
I have very little doubt that the West was/is involved in whipping up the protests in Iran hoping to bring another colored revolution and their government is doing the right thing blocking the avenues of attack.
Slashdot Mirror
This sound a lot like 'communism' we had in the good old Soviet Union. Private usage of things was allowed as long as it was for 'personal use' (it was called personal property). But as soon as you tried to use you personal car to moonlight as a cabbie it became private property which was not allowed. (because private ownership of means of production was a taboo under communism as it was the root cause of exploitation). Now we know of course that 'commercial exploitation' is what gives us all the wonderful variety of things , including software. I am now playing DA:Awakening (which in RMS's terms means I am being horribly enslaved by the game), please wake me up when anything remotely of the same quality emerges from the Free Software developers.
Sure this time it turned out to be a joke but just imagine if it was for instance a US special ops mission. Most of the people in Jordan beyond the capital live in remote mountaneous regions and have never seen anything more sophisticated than a goat so a US helicopter could be mistaken for an alien spacecraft. I've heard stories that during the 1967 war many Jordanian hersmen thought the God came down from the sky in fiery chariot! Most Arabs are also pretty short (about 120 cm) so a Westerner may appear unusually tall to them. Just imagine how uncontacted tribes in Papua feel when scientists hover in helicopters over them and what they think happened after they 'chased' it with arrows.
If female brains are wired differently through biology then why there are female scientists and engineers at all? And why is in our local university (in Russia) close to 40% of math major graduates are women? Are female mathematicians not real women? Are Russian women not real women? Seems more likely that any difference in wiring is due to cultural differences in child upbringing, if in America girls are bought Barbie dolls that say "Math is haaard" then no wonder their brains develop unsuitable for mathematics and IT.
Do you really think I would want to work for companies that have fracking typos in their job descriptions? And yes, I double checked, it is also on the actual web page. Give me a break.
If anything the 20s and 30s showed that forced industrialization can work, at least for a short time. Under Stalin Russia went from an agrarian country that did not produce it's own artillery shells during WWI to an industrial powerhouse that was beginning to outproduce Germany by the the late 30s. If you consider forced labour and starvation of the countryside acceptable of course.
I swear criticizing Apple is akin to criticizing Israel these days, even if you bring up valid point you are still accused of heinous ulterior motives. Apple success is 95% marketing and 5% features. The success of Apple is by itself a sad commentary on the state of Western civilization. I hate to say it and I know it's been said since at least the days of ancient Greeks but I swear people are getting really dumb and mentally lazy. This is like AGW, the problem is not that change is happening, the problem that it is happening too fast for the civilization to adjust.
Your 95 y/o neighbor should provably spend more time praying and worrying about his immortal soul than messing with computers.
I believe the Stalker trilogy is PC exclusive and the recent Metro 2033 is viewed by many as the new performance benchmark.
It was funny , in a B&B sort of way. What, it's not PC to joke about CANCER anymore?
Since you are maybe not a troll, I'll reply to you then as a Russian who reads both Russian and International news. I am definitely not brain washed, I understand my country is not perfect.
> 2. Their nuclear industry is in disrepair and barely hanging on the guys who are going to retire in the next five years or so.
Not quite sure what is meant by 'nuclear industry' here exactly but the civilian nuclear industry is alive and well. The current plans call for the construction of 20 new nuclear reactors at the pace of 1 or 2 per year. Ten are currently under construction and the first two reactors have been very recently completed.
Plus we are building new reactors all over the world, a deal to build 16 new reactors in India has recently been signed.
Skilled factory jobs now pay more than entry level paper shifting 'manager' jobs aka 'office plankton' so there are many more younger people at the factories now.
> For you education, here is a greatest russian engineering project of new century: the missile that never flew
> as expected in like 10 years: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSM-56_Bulava
The missile had 5 successful tests out of 11. It is hardly a complete failure and it's shortcomings will be fixed in the near future. How about Ares-1? Billions over budget and then canceled? This kind of cherry picking negative information and obsessing over it is why most Russians dislike the tiny but vocal (in front of Western cameras) pro Western minority. Why not write about the very successful civilian Sukhoi Superjet project or Sukhoi PAK FA next generation plane, both of which are partially assembled at the Sukhoi factory in my home city.
>Russia does not have resources to maintain their military on functional level. The current doctrine is to rely on nukes as
>much as possible since everything else is in disrepair. In fact, they are cutting close to 30% of staff because of lack of >money.
Again you do not know what you are talking about. Russian military doctrine calls for reduction of manpower gradually to allow discharged officers to have dignified existence outside of the army (like providing them with civilian skills and free housing). The amount of new equipment delivered to the military has been increasing every year. The conscription period has been reduced to one year. Russia is well on it's way to have a modern, mobile, well equipped professional army. And we can fight, just recently we totally humiliated in battle superior numbers of trained to NATO level Georgian troops who dumped their western made weapons and ran to Tbilisi like scared girls.
>Oil money go to Putin's private coffers so not much left for anything else.
Even the most basic research would tell you this is also a lie. In the last 10 years Russia has been paying it's foreign debt ahead of schedule, managed a balanced budget (unlike some other country that is well past bankrupt and is sustained by China) and on top of that accumulated nearly a trillion dollars in the stabilization fund and gold reserves which were then partially used to dampen the effects of American initiated world wide recession. I know Russia is not exactly a pillar of democracy and Putin does have authoritarian tendencies but accusing him of being a thief does not do justice to a rational person.
> 4. There is no space _industry_. There are old thirty year old designs on life support.
Russia has a very successfully Soyuz design that is now basically the only way to deliver people and payload to the ISS. And we are a major player in commercial launches. Solar system exploration projects nearly have been restarted with a major project (Phobos-Grunt) being launched soon. What does America have? A space agency in permanent crisis, a canceled Constellation program, and given a new wave of anti-intellectualism in general a very uncertain future.
To summarize - all what you wrote wa
It was a great platform to get your hands wet with Cell programming for one thing, as it was the most accessible cell platform. Plus I know of organizations that setup PS3 supercomputer clusters. There was eve an article on Slashdot a few months ago about military (air force) setting up a test cluster. I wonder what happens to them now. Stupid decision, IMHO.
Everything on you list is wrong, seriously it is not even funny for a troll. In was going to write a nice rebuttal, but then realized it's not possible to get every point so wrong, either from ignorance or by accident.
He maybe picking the kind of mushrooms that infect tree trunks, quite a few people do mit here in Russia.
This is why there is a huge story every time a cabbie returns a large sum of money to the passenger. Nowdays you are expected by default to be a greedy, thieving bastard only following laws when there is a clear threat of punishment. Perelman has a very strong moral compass, he burned the bridges with the mathematical community, now how can he take money and titles from them now?
Except this is a lie. Or maybe his shrink has uncovered some "suppressed" childhood memories. Me, I do not remember an atmosphere of fear or even any kind of political lessons in Soviet kindergarten where he must have been when he was 6 y/o. After Stalin's death maybe several dozen of the most active dissidents were put away for psychiatric "treatment", so it also very unlikely that he witnessed neighbors disappearing.
China is not unique there. Just try to criticize Israel w/o being accused of being of antisemitism.
As stated by various UN declaration most of the World ,at least in theory, believes in certain universal rights, which is a PC way to state that there are moral absolutes above any national laws. We believe the the right to free speech is absolute, hell if you believe that Democracy is an absolute right then you can just says that since PRC government was not democratically elected then all the laws it enacted are illegitimate.
Now I hold no illusions that all the nations that matter will unite to boycott PRC economically. But it is still possible to be a moral man in the immoral world. I have found out that I can often replace household goods from China with EU made ones which are only marginally more expensive. P.S. The other real problem of course is the apathy of 300-400 million Chinese who profited economically in the last 20 years under the current regime's economic policies. If there will a revolution it will be led by the other 1 billion angry peasants and I doubt that they will demanding democracy, human rights and free market. More like take by force anything valuable from fat city dwellers and redistribute it among the poor.
On the other hand it would be a godsend for American exporters, might actually bring some industry back to the USA.
And this is why free software developers with no managers looming over them create such great, responsive, multi-core aware desktop applications, right? What a joke, and a poor excuse for your laziness.
Does not sound wise to me, what if the town center building is bombed???
Right, and thanks to that half the reason many use Firefox is the extensions that DISABLE or severely limit JS and other crap that wants to load itself and render in your browser.
There are retarded people of course. But most likely you are talking about people who have already been working these shit jobs for years. "You are what you do. If you do boring, stupid, monotonous work, chances are you'll end up boring, stupid, and monotonous." - The Abolition of Work
Mod parent up, this is exaclty what is happening. The blind "invisible hand" is leading us all to ruin.
Lenin and later Stalin purged Orthodox clergy because according to them they belonged to the oppressor class, for the same reason they purged many scientists, engineers, teachers, well-of farmers, military officers and other groups who achieved some status under the tsarist regime. Orthodox church actively supported the loser side during the civil war and had nit coming to them just for that.
Their government is doing a wise thing. No one denies now that western intelligence had a hand at Ukrainian "orange" revolution. How well has it worked out for them? Several years of complete incompetence from western sponsored leaders, totally ruined economy, and now they voted back the very man whose victory was taken away the first time with the help of the West. Same thing with the "Rose" revolution in Georgia.
I have very little doubt that the West was/is involved in whipping up the protests in Iran hoping to bring another colored revolution and their government is doing the right thing blocking the avenues of attack.