No, but if there is any rule with technology that all devices almost always follows is that the more advanced something is the higher probability that it will break, fail or malfunction.
According to this rule, your computer should break down every few milliseconds, since the old-time computers blew a lamp or a fuse every day, even sometimes every few hours...
I lived once for three month near a thermo- power plant... the firemen had every few days (like two or three times a week) dill sessions... I can tell you, the sirens were more than slightly unpleasant. Also, having the fear of them boilers blowing up drilled into my bones regularly did not help much with my enthusiasm for the place.
"Sodium mist fills the air" and "The mist gets deeper" -- the camera was out of focus and it was quite dark in there; no "sodium" mist; a second after they filmed the "sodium mist", the "mist" dissapeared. There was not enough light, and the operator had to use a large aperture, so the range at which the objects were in focus was short: move the camera from the back of the shining suit in front to the wall that's 3m away and you get "mist".
"Footsteps on white sodium" -- not sodium but sodium carbonate, which was used some 40 years ago for washing clothes by hand (prolonged use caused sores on skin, but by prolonged use I mean keeping your hands in warm water with 4-5 hours a day), and still is used in detergents, and sodium hydroxide, which you can buy in some shops, and is used for some household tasks, such as unclogging pipes. Ever bought those small bags with colored granules which are supposed to be miracle pipe uncloggers ? There is sodium hydroxide in that. Yes, it will damage your skin.
and a comment to "To make the most of Nishimura-san's death, all we who live in Japan must think of what needs to be done": how about toning down the obsession with saving face, this is what killed Nishimura-san, and it also prevented his bosses from being completely open about the accident.
The video is useless. It says nothing about the gravity of the accident, but instead can be misconstrued in many creative ways: in it you see people in shiny protective suits (which, btw, were not hermetically sealed) going through some rooms in a nuclear (oh, nuclear... that must be dangerous) power plant in a bad light and everything is shot with a low quality black and white camera. With the help of the subtitles it has become "Blair reactor project".
You're saying that our only choices are either cheap gasoline, or unaffordable food, housing, and transportation. There is no reason to believe that there aren't a huge number of possibilities in between as well.
You are right, there are lots of possibilities in between, such as malnutrition, diseases caused by exposure (to cold, not to the blazing sun), lack of economic competitiveness etc. When I have to work twice as hard to get the same stuff I got before just because some punks believed we have an unfair advantage because we don't need to buy oil from the OPEC and produce most of the electricity with hidro- (which is not green at all, fyi) and nuclear power and threaten with sanctions unless we jack up the prices, and then the same punks attempt force us to cut the carbon dioxide emissions quota by 20%, emissions which are already at about half of what is due according to the Kyoto treaty, just because they got the Green bug and/or want some more cheap guestarbeiters, yes, I am angry and I start hating the whole Green/Global Warming alarmism that's pushed on my throat (and yours too) by organizations that spend more on propaganda than my country spends on education or on the army - I mean the crooks from GreenPeace.
Last time I checked New Zeeland wasn't faring very well: people live for Australia and GDP isn't stellar. Maybe the price of gasoline has something to do with that.
yep, in my country too, the cost of gasoline is twice what they pay in US, even if all the oil we use is taken from... our, for the lack of a better word... underground. The rest is taxes. I know what you talk about. Anyway, the price of gasoline is four times than it was 15 years ago, mostly due to new taxes, so you had your with fulfilled. Happy ? I am not, considering that besides gasoline I have to pay for heating and electricity too, and here its no New Zeeland, it gets to minus 20 degrees Celsius in the winter, and in the valleys it gets to -30 quite often. And please, don't tell me to put another coat on instead of turning the heat up....
However, I do believe that a significant percentage of people could have a standard of living at least as good, if they just changed their habits, even if they did have to pay 2x as much for everything.
I hope you considered food when you wrote that.
if they just changed their habits
Such as the habit of eating, and sleeping in a warm room, and not walking 6 miles to work ?
Besides, having "everything" cost "2x as much" won't help: it would be the same, except you'll have to carry bigger wallets.
people could have a standard of living at least as good
I heard Ceaushescu said the same... funny enough, nobody believed him even when they saw the concrete and cold evidence.
OK, you used plural, so name two of Putin atrocities.
...
fine, I'll be generous today: name one, I'll name the other. Still, I bet you're just improvising.
Growing up across the fence (for those not in the know, there were and still are fences - double fences + barbed wire + plowed ground so the tracks will be seen if somebody crosses - on the borders between the communist countries) from SU, I am as Russophobic as the next man, but get a grip of yourself. If you want your allegations to stick, make sure you provide arguments, and unfortunately I am afraid you have not much arguments.
The language, however, is the bulk of the identity. If somebody from the outside of the ethnic community learns it, he or she is automatically highly regarded unless his/her actions prove otherwise. (See Dmitri Klenski.) I think it is comprehensible why Estonians so eagerly demand that every citizen be able to speak their language. Estonian culture's position in the globalising world is not overly strong, so the people cling to it.
I have no bone with Estonia wanting it's citizens to speak Estonian. The issue is what is reasonably to expect from those that were trapped in Estonia when SU broke down: damned if the left (become homeless and be rejected by the other Russians as "Estonians", the way it happens with the Transylvanian Hungarians in Hungary, or with Moldavians in Rumania), damned if the remained in Estonia (become second-class citizens at best, with their loyalty permanently questioned). All over Europe minorities (still not sent packing or sent digging their own graves) are used that way: when there is some sacrifice to ask, they are fine citizens, when there are benefits to distribute, they are foreigners who have to prove their loyalty.
What ticked me off was the knee-jerk reaction: D.G. has a Slavic name, so he must be Russian, so he must be used by KGB in their attempt to... do what ? Seriously annoy Estonia ? I have not found any details about what kind of DDOS attack Estonia was subjected to. Was is syn flooding ? Were there attempts to gain access? Were they simply bombarding the servers with ping requests ? Or maybe what really happened was the "Slashdot effect" when the whole world became interested in the fate of the poor small Estonia in it's conflict with it's big and bad neighbor and servers that did well servicing less than 2 mil. people buckled under the curiosity of 20 millions ?
The Baltic states are perfectly justified to regard Soviet Union as a conqueror and the occupation as illegitimate, but I think the rest of the former SU subjects, including the Russians, can raise the same claims: that they were enslaved by the Communists against their will and against their fierce resistance. After all, the Russians provided the bulk of the resistance against the Communists during the Civil War of the 1918-1921, and suffered the most because of Communism. Maybe it would be more appropriate for the Estonians to blame France and England for their suffering: had not the Antante insist on Russia staying in the war, Lenin and it's pals might have been known only to historians interested in the Socialist movement of the early XXth century, since most of the people that at first volunteered for the Bolshevik armies only wanted to get away from the meaningless slaughter of the Eastern front.
When will Croatia pay the Austro-Hungarian empire's foreign debt?
If I am not mistaken, it got discounted from the war reparations owed to Serbia:-P.
Enter Soviet times and Soviet factories being built, but not in Finland. Finland is arguably better off these days. Military factories were installed in all SU, their workers came from Russia and the products went back there.
The products went not only to Russia, but also to the Korean war, the Vietnam war and the Afghanistan war... when I see the Americans weeping their eyes off because they lost the Vietnam war, I can only think about the resources our countries wasted there and smile... bitterly, since in fact the Communist camp might have won one battle, but it lost the Cold War: the Communists built mostly military industry because they were permanently supporting one war or another, and in doing so wasted resources they could not really afford to waste.
mmm... right now I doubt there is a "national" language in USA, and it's residents are not forced to learn English and the citizenship exam does not require 6 months of learning.
About Texas and Mexico: if that would ever happen, and if the Anglo-Texans would be forced to learn Spanish, have their history rewritten and the San Jacinto monument scrapped, I would not think evil of them if they would be less than polite about the whole issue, but I hope the people in charge would be wiser than that, and realize that self-interest would achieve the assimilation much faster than persecution, and that the San Jacinto monument might draw in tourists from all over Grand Canada:-P.
Seems they do like it after all, if they have the chance to go back but choose not to. Mustn't be too bad here then!
Yeah, I heard that argument a lot in my life when I did not agree with the common opinion: if you don't like it, why don't you leave to your country, whichever that is (the oldest mention of my surname, which is quite rare, is in a marriage contract in Sweden in 1840, then some places in Austria, then Austrian Poland, then...).
So, 200 people chose to part with their friends, with their homes and jobs, to go to a place they have not yet seen or seen 30 years before... yeah, that's relevant. Did Putin promise them jobs and new homes in place of those they left ?
The Baltic states are expecting their Russian-speaking minority to give them positive proof of their loyalty (yes, the language and history exam is requiring positive proof, since I don't think they can choose interpretations, and my guess is they would fail the exam if they would quote from Ernst Gellner or Eric Hobsbawm or Georg Iggers) instead of letting them prove disloyal first, and this makes it evil. If the system was not much different from what happened in my country, those "Russians" that ended in Estonia did not choose to go there, but were given the choice to take that job there or starve. I wonder, did Estonia take it's share of the Soviet Union foreign debt? Since it did not dismantle the factories built there during the SU time and did not burn the railway wagons built in other parts of the Soviet Union and did not invalidate the diplomas the true Estonians got in SU universities, I wonder why would they question the right of Russian speaking people that lived in Estonia in 1990 to be considered true Estonians by default.
The 'messing' with the soldier meant, that Estonia identified the bodies (since Russians weren't sure who were actually buried there) and buried them to soldiers' cemetery where I honestly feel they belong. And the statute was moved there, to the cemetery, where it belonged to guard over them. I don't see error in that.
Did they announce it in time, ask for opinion and input, even for a mixed team to do the job and perform the ceremonies ? Or just cordoned the place, started digging and bagging/tagging the bones etc. ?
(Their kids who were born after Estonia became independent have citizenship by default)
Should I understand that the kids that were born in Estonia and of Russian speaking parents before Estonia became independent did not receive citizenship by default ?
You kinda missed my point: how about all those famous Estonians that have German or Swedish names ? Are they less Estonian ? If a woman called Nadia or Ekaterina would have been arrested instead of this guy, would you have said it was not Estonian ?
Unless you're living in a ethnically cleansed world, you might have known that people do name their children in more than the government approved manner, and in most countries in Europe there is no list of preferred spellings for names, so Dimitri/Dmitri might be used. Also for your information, there are Russian speaking minorities in Rumania too (mostly religious refugees from the late XIX-th century), and Dimitri/Dmitri is used.
Last time I checked, which was during the early '90s, getting Estonian citizenship depended on passing some sort of language test, and that despite the fact that there are Russians on the territory currently controlled by Estonia ever since the Swedes lost it to Russia 200 years ago.
"this 'proving they're loyal' crap" is exactly what is happening now: you raise up some hell, then have your subjects choose sides. There is no other way anybody can "prove" loyalty to anything. Unfortunately for the Estonians that speak Russian at home even if their family lived in what is now Estonia for 12 generations, and for those whose families lived there only for four generations, too, there is no human being on God's Earth that has only one set of loyalties, and by messing up with the monument for the army that pretty much prevented them from being exterminated as "untermensch" the Estonian government demands of them to renounce a part of their identity and choose sides. Only somebody who does not understand at all, or somebody who understands it perfectly, what did the WWII mean for any Russian (Veliko-, Malo- or Bielo-, or living in any other part of the Europe that was occupied by the Nazi), would mess with a symbol of their survival.
The Estonian government it very lucky indeed not to have faced French-style rioting and mass migration of Russians out of Estonia: that would shoot down the "Baltic tiger" sooner than the currency pegged to the Euro or the export oriented economy would. Right now, I guess Russia would be extremely grateful for an influx of skilled laborers that already speak Russian and have legitimate reasons to have a grudge against their previous homeland.
Most of the people in Eastern Europe and FSU are quite indifferent to national/ethnic issues (except when directly asked "Are you a good [insert official nationality here]") and given a chance would gladly help US re-anglicize the southern states by emigrating there and spicing a little a "melting pot" that lately looks like it's cooking only taco. The only chance the bureaucracies in the little states of the Eastern and Central Europe have to keep their jobs on long term is to raise hell and mobilize their subjects against whatever imaginary enemies they can find. Even Russia is doing it right now by getting mighty righteous about the missile interceptors US talks about putting in Poland, even if those anti-balistic-missile rockets did not work in tests. China gets its own subjects worked up by reminding them of the Nanking Massacre, even if the Chinese warlords did worse things to their own people during the same period. EU bureaucracy is attempting to divert some loyalty from the nation states by playing the Greenie card even if by doing that it's blowing holes into it's own economy.
I would look into what would the local government gain by having Russian Estonians stigmatized: my guess is there is some economic trouble brewing, and it's better to keep the good people of Estonia entertained by lynching "Russians" than asking questions about inflation and jobs.
Estonia's inflation rate rose in December to a nine-year high, led by food and housing costs. But we can already see that producer prices (lead by export producer prices which have been falling since the summer) have started to ease in October and November. This could be read as a first indicator for what is to come, since if there is a hard landing inflation will not be sustained.
GDP growth, which was of course strong, is now slowing, and unemployment, which has been trending steadily downwards, should really start to increase at some point. This will mean, basically, that the days when Estonia urgently needed to import migrant workers to try and avoid the huge spike in wages and prices which we have seen is now largely passed.
Some contributors to this thread mentioned IP addresses belonging to Kremlin being used in the attack against Estonian sites. If KGB is that stupid, then nobody should worry about them.
BTW a number of Russians in Baltic states (especially in Latvia and Estonia), even when they have local citizenship, they are not loyal to local governments, they are true "fifth column"
"not loyal" as in being denied civil rigths in the country where they were born unless they positively prove they are "loyal" ?
Most of the attacks on my network come from network addresses registered in US, then comes Poland, then Korea and China. When I send notifications, only the Poles care to answer and say "thank you for letting us know we have a bot in our network". What should I do about the rest ? Declare war ?
"Dmitri Galushkevich is not an Estonian name (just in case anyone wonders)." He might be Pole, Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, Chech, Slovenian, Slovakian, Rumanian or Bulgarian. Oh, he lives in Estonia, he's not called Habermann, Hippius, Peterson or Lepikson, so he must be Russian...
so *you* fixed the critical bug Richardson wasted three weeks attempting to reproduce before I fired him ?... way to go, Mr. Layne... now would you please step into my office ? You can take your personal items with you, you won't come back to your cubicle. . . . . . . .
[joke alarm, just in case Richardson got fired and you began to think about going into hiding]
I feel your pain... I would rant about articles published before 1990 not being indexed, but my 10 years stint in the "not currently available on the shelf" hell was over when I decided I'm not going to lose more time chasing after books, begging for access to sources and pretending to be a hot-shot research historian.
TFA whines about the "new generation" not having patience to go through the dumb procedures set up 100 years ago, when a research library might have bought a maximum of a couple of hundreds of books each month, had a collection of about 2000 to 5000 books and journal volumes, and serviced under 20 people, most of whom could afford to buy most of those books or the journals themselves. Now a librarian has to deal with hosts of full time researchers, research assistants, graduate students, undergrads and amateurs with enough connections to get them access to the library. Now librarians has to get info on thousands of titles each month, so they won't upset some of the "elders" with an oversight when they submit the list of books to the acquisition committee (books that the acquisition committee won't approve, since they are the scientists and they know better, but you have to show you tried), then negotiate budgets for paper clips to RAID arrays, deal with evaluation committees and inventories, prepare reports for the beancounters, prepare reports for the administrative management, prepare reports for the various departments, track down and negotiate with the privileged lenders (those permitted to take books home), meet and appease donors, socialize with donors, socialize with the management etc. It used to be that the librarian in a research or university library had to be a scholar: now it must be in the same time a scholar, an accountant, a debt recovery officer and a PR agent. Large libraries hire different people for these jobs. Small research libraries (~ 100k items), such as the one I worked for for a few month before being promoted to a more glamorous "research" position for administrative merits, have only a couple librarians, since that's what was mentioned in the charter drawn a gazillion of years back, and there are no money to spare for folks that just "sit at the desk the whole day".
The result is that the trouble of getting an item from the "block X storage area" which is a few hours away by trolley cart speed discourages the "new generation", which has to prove itself fast. Oh, they don't want to take the pains of tracking down the last extant copy of "Labor force composition report", published in 1899 ? It certainly means they are no-good-spoiled-brats. It definitely does not mean that they are under pressure to deliver a paper tomorrow, so they choose to write about whatever they can find with the help of Google Scholar and the free access shelves in the library.
The mystical "good library nearby" so many people talk about probably refers to some Ivy League university library, and "nearby" means within a circle with the radius of 5000 miles. 95% of the public or research libraries are dumpsters for Harry-Potter-style of (scientific) literature, since there is so much relevant stuff published that they cannot even get informed about it, and even less buy it. What gets bought is general stuff and the spillover from the latest fad with the accidental gem for which there were enough votes in the acquisition committee.
Oh, the youth these days... they want to have it easy... during the good old days you had to dig for clay, prepare the tablets, sharpen the sticks, bake the written tablets, QA the baked tablets, chop the trees, fashion the shelves etc. Those were times fit for scholarship. Nowadays its all about these papyri and scrolls and texts where the words are marked by spaces and punctuation that we hear about but would not get into since they are cold and dehumanizing... these spoiled brats are to lazy to find time to sit down and meditate while the tablets bake in the oven.
It's not about jobs and kids and fame and glory. It's about controlling the high ground, and right now the higher ground that matters is in low Earth orbit. 60 years ago US was the only country in the world that was not wrecked by WWII, and it could afford to be complacent. In 2008 that's not longer true, and if you want to keep your "jobbies" and vacation in [insert your favorite second or third world country here] without fear of local government abuse, US must control the high ground, and make sure that any upstart (such as China, Russia or even EU) know that they have to play fair.
Right now it's US that bans toys made in China and not China the one that bans toys made in US only because the folks in Beijing know that they do not afford to piss off your government, and that, the way the things are now, they can be sent back to the 1850 technology quite fast (or have the flow of know-how cut short, for lesser "transgressions"), in case they get uppity.
These days LEO is as important as Gibraltar was a hundred years ago, as Suez was up to 1947, as Malta was during WWII, as Iceland during the Cold War, and even more important than the Panama canal is right now.
This is the precise reason nobody talks about this side of the story: if any government would issue declarations about the importance of having control over LEO, it would be the equivalent of a war declaration on the other pretenders to supremacy.
The day China would announce it can put 20000 pounds object in orbit with only a couple of days preparations, and if US would not be able to do the same, that day you'll do better to start growing a queue and learning the Han characters.
In my experience, Soviet Union devices used to be functional, made to work within a temperature range between -40 and +50 degrees Celsius, quite heavy, and most of the time quite ugly, but no corners were cut. If you imagine they matched US in military technology by cutting corners, you need a refresher course in industrial management. After all, is not Russia the only state that has the gear needed to supply the ISS ?
If any microbe can survive a few months in space (searing heat alternating with deep cold, gamma radiation etc.), it is quite probably it will survive even the most careful sterilization procedures.
The purpose of going to a technical college is to give you the skills to go out and be a competent cog in the machine. The purpose of going to university is primarily to teach you how to play the machine to your advantage.
Well, in Southern and South-Eastern Europe you just have to pick a random spot, and if it was not disturbed by a river, you will almost certainly find some ancient (medieval, ancient proper, iron age etc.) settlement within a 500 m. radius of the chosen place. The only reason the whole area is not covered with tourist-trap ruins is that the people of old had the common sense of recycling old structures to build new ones. The Coliseum still stands only because in Rome there was such a great store of old ruins to be mined for better stone that it did not make sense to tear it apart.
No need for Google Earth: it might help you find large structures, but those are already easy to spot for a trained eye.
Aerial photography works better: it provides better resolution and you can adjust the angle or the moment of the day you take the pictures (hint: the ground above large stone structures will dry faster after rain; if the structures are close to the topsoil, the vegetation will be poorer; if you take the pictures at a low angle, you will see the mounds better: after 3000 years, even the most ambitious tumuli will have only 10 to 30 cm of height).
Slashdot Mirror
According to this rule, your computer should break down every few milliseconds, since the old-time computers blew a lamp or a fuse every day, even sometimes every few hours ...
I lived once for three month near a thermo- power plant ... the firemen had every few days (like two or three times a week) dill sessions ... I can tell you, the sirens were more than slightly unpleasant. Also, having the fear of them boilers blowing up drilled into my bones regularly did not help much with my enthusiasm for the place.
the subtitles are misleading:
... that must be dangerous) power plant in a bad light and everything is shot with a low quality black and white camera. With the help of the subtitles it has become "Blair reactor project".
"Sodium mist fills the air" and "The mist gets deeper" -- the camera was out of focus and it was quite dark in there; no "sodium" mist; a second after they filmed the "sodium mist", the "mist" dissapeared. There was not enough light, and the operator had to use a large aperture, so the range at which the objects were in focus was short: move the camera from the back of the shining suit in front to the wall that's 3m away and you get "mist".
"Footsteps on white sodium" -- not sodium but sodium carbonate, which was used some 40 years ago for washing clothes by hand (prolonged use caused sores on skin, but by prolonged use I mean keeping your hands in warm water with 4-5 hours a day), and still is used in detergents, and sodium hydroxide, which you can buy in some shops, and is used for some household tasks, such as unclogging pipes. Ever bought those small bags with colored granules which are supposed to be miracle pipe uncloggers ? There is sodium hydroxide in that. Yes, it will damage your skin.
and a comment to "To make the most of Nishimura-san's death, all we who live in Japan must think of what needs to be done": how about toning down the obsession with saving face, this is what killed Nishimura-san, and it also prevented his bosses from being completely open about the accident.
The video is useless. It says nothing about the gravity of the accident, but instead can be misconstrued in many creative ways: in it you see people in shiny protective suits (which, btw, were not hermetically sealed) going through some rooms in a nuclear (oh, nuclear
You are right, there are lots of possibilities in between, such as malnutrition, diseases caused by exposure (to cold, not to the blazing sun), lack of economic competitiveness etc. When I have to work twice as hard to get the same stuff I got before just because some punks believed we have an unfair advantage because we don't need to buy oil from the OPEC and produce most of the electricity with hidro- (which is not green at all, fyi) and nuclear power and threaten with sanctions unless we jack up the prices, and then the same punks attempt force us to cut the carbon dioxide emissions quota by 20%, emissions which are already at about half of what is due according to the Kyoto treaty, just because they got the Green bug and/or want some more cheap guestarbeiters, yes, I am angry and I start hating the whole Green /Global Warming alarmism that's pushed on my throat (and yours too) by organizations that spend more on propaganda than my country spends on education or on the army - I mean the crooks from GreenPeace.
Last time I checked New Zeeland wasn't faring very well: people live for Australia and GDP isn't stellar. Maybe the price of gasoline has something to do with that.
yep, in my country too, the cost of gasoline is twice what they pay in US, even if all the oil we use is taken from ... our, for the lack of a better word... underground. The rest is taxes. I know what you talk about. Anyway, the price of gasoline is four times than it was 15 years ago, mostly due to new taxes, so you had your with fulfilled. Happy ? I am not, considering that besides gasoline I have to pay for heating and electricity too, and here its no New Zeeland, it gets to minus 20 degrees Celsius in the winter, and in the valleys it gets to -30 quite often. And please, don't tell me to put another coat on instead of turning the heat up ....
I hope you considered food when you wrote that.
if they just changed their habitsSuch as the habit of eating, and sleeping in a warm room, and not walking 6 miles to work ?
Besides, having "everything" cost "2x as much" won't help: it would be the same, except you'll have to carry bigger wallets.
people could have a standard of living at least as goodI heard Ceaushescu said the same ... funny enough, nobody believed him even when they saw the concrete and cold evidence.
OK, you used plural, so name two of Putin atrocities.
fine, I'll be generous today: name one, I'll name the other. Still, I bet you're just improvising.
Growing up across the fence (for those not in the know, there were and still are fences - double fences + barbed wire + plowed ground so the tracks will be seen if somebody crosses - on the borders between the communist countries) from SU, I am as Russophobic as the next man, but get a grip of yourself. If you want your allegations to stick, make sure you provide arguments, and unfortunately I am afraid you have not much arguments.
I have no bone with Estonia wanting it's citizens to speak Estonian. The issue is what is reasonably to expect from those that were trapped in Estonia when SU broke down: damned if the left (become homeless and be rejected by the other Russians as "Estonians", the way it happens with the Transylvanian Hungarians in Hungary, or with Moldavians in Rumania), damned if the remained in Estonia (become second-class citizens at best, with their loyalty permanently questioned). All over Europe minorities (still not sent packing or sent digging their own graves) are used that way: when there is some sacrifice to ask, they are fine citizens, when there are benefits to distribute, they are foreigners who have to prove their loyalty.
What ticked me off was the knee-jerk reaction: D.G. has a Slavic name, so he must be Russian, so he must be used by KGB in their attempt to ... do what ? Seriously annoy Estonia ? I have not found any details about what kind of DDOS attack Estonia was subjected to. Was is syn flooding ? Were there attempts to gain access? Were they simply bombarding the servers with ping requests ? Or maybe what really happened was the "Slashdot effect" when the whole world became interested in the fate of the poor small Estonia in it's conflict with it's big and bad neighbor and servers that did well servicing less than 2 mil. people buckled under the curiosity of 20 millions ?
The Baltic states are perfectly justified to regard Soviet Union as a conqueror and the occupation as illegitimate, but I think the rest of the former SU subjects, including the Russians, can raise the same claims: that they were enslaved by the Communists against their will and against their fierce resistance. After all, the Russians provided the bulk of the resistance against the Communists during the Civil War of the 1918-1921, and suffered the most because of Communism. Maybe it would be more appropriate for the Estonians to blame France and England for their suffering: had not the Antante insist on Russia staying in the war, Lenin and it's pals might have been known only to historians interested in the Socialist movement of the early XXth century, since most of the people that at first volunteered for the Bolshevik armies only wanted to get away from the meaningless slaughter of the Eastern front.
When will Croatia pay the Austro-Hungarian empire's foreign debt?If I am not mistaken, it got discounted from the war reparations owed to Serbia :-P.
Enter Soviet times and Soviet factories being built, but not in Finland. Finland is arguably better off these days. Military factories were installed in all SU, their workers came from Russia and the products went back there.The products went not only to Russia, but also to the Korean war, the Vietnam war and the Afghanistan war ... when I see the Americans weeping their eyes off because they lost the Vietnam war, I can only think about the resources our countries wasted there and smile ... bitterly, since in fact the Communist camp might have won one battle, but it lost the Cold War: the Communists built mostly military industry because they were permanently supporting one war or another, and in doing so wasted resources they could not really afford to waste.
mmm ... right now I doubt there is a "national" language in USA, and it's residents are not forced to learn English and the citizenship exam does not require 6 months of learning.
:-P.
About Texas and Mexico: if that would ever happen, and if the Anglo-Texans would be forced to learn Spanish, have their history rewritten and the San Jacinto monument scrapped, I would not think evil of them if they would be less than polite about the whole issue, but I hope the people in charge would be wiser than that, and realize that self-interest would achieve the assimilation much faster than persecution, and that the San Jacinto monument might draw in tourists from all over Grand Canada
Yeah, I heard that argument a lot in my life when I did not agree with the common opinion: if you don't like it, why don't you leave to your country, whichever that is (the oldest mention of my surname, which is quite rare, is in a marriage contract in Sweden in 1840, then some places in Austria, then Austrian Poland, then ...).
So, 200 people chose to part with their friends, with their homes and jobs, to go to a place they have not yet seen or seen 30 years before ... yeah, that's relevant. Did Putin promise them jobs and new homes in place of those they left ?
The Baltic states are expecting their Russian-speaking minority to give them positive proof of their loyalty (yes, the language and history exam is requiring positive proof, since I don't think they can choose interpretations, and my guess is they would fail the exam if they would quote from Ernst Gellner or Eric Hobsbawm or Georg Iggers) instead of letting them prove disloyal first, and this makes it evil. If the system was not much different from what happened in my country, those "Russians" that ended in Estonia did not choose to go there, but were given the choice to take that job there or starve. I wonder, did Estonia take it's share of the Soviet Union foreign debt? Since it did not dismantle the factories built there during the SU time and did not burn the railway wagons built in other parts of the Soviet Union and did not invalidate the diplomas the true Estonians got in SU universities, I wonder why would they question the right of Russian speaking people that lived in Estonia in 1990 to be considered true Estonians by default.
The 'messing' with the soldier meant, that Estonia identified the bodies (since Russians weren't sure who were actually buried there) and buried them to soldiers' cemetery where I honestly feel they belong. And the statute was moved there, to the cemetery, where it belonged to guard over them. I don't see error in that.Did they announce it in time, ask for opinion and input, even for a mixed team to do the job and perform the ceremonies ? Or just cordoned the place, started digging and bagging/tagging the bones etc. ?
(Their kids who were born after Estonia became independent have citizenship by default)Should I understand that the kids that were born in Estonia and of Russian speaking parents before Estonia became independent did not receive citizenship by default ?
You kinda missed my point: how about all those famous Estonians that have German or Swedish names ? Are they less Estonian ? If a woman called Nadia or Ekaterina would have been arrested instead of this guy, would you have said it was not Estonian ?
Unless you're living in a ethnically cleansed world, you might have known that people do name their children in more than the government approved manner, and in most countries in Europe there is no list of preferred spellings for names, so Dimitri/Dmitri might be used. Also for your information, there are Russian speaking minorities in Rumania too (mostly religious refugees from the late XIX-th century), and Dimitri/Dmitri is used.
Last time I checked, which was during the early '90s, getting Estonian citizenship depended on passing some sort of language test, and that despite the fact that there are Russians on the territory currently controlled by Estonia ever since the Swedes lost it to Russia 200 years ago.
"this 'proving they're loyal' crap" is exactly what is happening now: you raise up some hell, then have your subjects choose sides. There is no other way anybody can "prove" loyalty to anything. Unfortunately for the Estonians that speak Russian at home even if their family lived in what is now Estonia for 12 generations, and for those whose families lived there only for four generations, too, there is no human being on God's Earth that has only one set of loyalties, and by messing up with the monument for the army that pretty much prevented them from being exterminated as "untermensch" the Estonian government demands of them to renounce a part of their identity and choose sides. Only somebody who does not understand at all, or somebody who understands it perfectly, what did the WWII mean for any Russian (Veliko-, Malo- or Bielo-, or living in any other part of the Europe that was occupied by the Nazi), would mess with a symbol of their survival.
The Estonian government it very lucky indeed not to have faced French-style rioting and mass migration of Russians out of Estonia: that would shoot down the "Baltic tiger" sooner than the currency pegged to the Euro or the export oriented economy would. Right now, I guess Russia would be extremely grateful for an influx of skilled laborers that already speak Russian and have legitimate reasons to have a grudge against their previous homeland.
My guess it's just "nation building".
Most of the people in Eastern Europe and FSU are quite indifferent to national/ethnic issues (except when directly asked "Are you a good [insert official nationality here]") and given a chance would gladly help US re-anglicize the southern states by emigrating there and spicing a little a "melting pot" that lately looks like it's cooking only taco. The only chance the bureaucracies in the little states of the Eastern and Central Europe have to keep their jobs on long term is to raise hell and mobilize their subjects against whatever imaginary enemies they can find. Even Russia is doing it right now by getting mighty righteous about the missile interceptors US talks about putting in Poland, even if those anti-balistic-missile rockets did not work in tests. China gets its own subjects worked up by reminding them of the Nanking Massacre, even if the Chinese warlords did worse things to their own people during the same period. EU bureaucracy is attempting to divert some loyalty from the nation states by playing the Greenie card even if by doing that it's blowing holes into it's own economy.
I would look into what would the local government gain by having Russian Estonians stigmatized: my guess is there is some economic trouble brewing, and it's better to keep the good people of Estonia entertained by lynching "Russians" than asking questions about inflation and jobs.
From some banker's blog:
Estonia's inflation rate rose in December to a nine-year high, led by food and housing costs. But we can already see that producer prices (lead by export producer prices which have been falling since the summer) have started to ease in October and November. This could be read as a first indicator for what is to come, since if there is a hard landing inflation will not be sustained.
GDP growth, which was of course strong, is now slowing, and unemployment, which has been trending steadily downwards, should really start to increase at some point. This will mean, basically, that the days when Estonia urgently needed to import migrant workers to try and avoid the huge spike in wages and prices which we have seen is now largely passed.
Some contributors to this thread mentioned IP addresses belonging to Kremlin being used in the attack against Estonian sites. If KGB is that stupid, then nobody should worry about them.
"not loyal" as in being denied civil rigths in the country where they were born unless they positively prove they are "loyal" ?
Most of the attacks on my network come from network addresses registered in US, then comes Poland, then Korea and China. When I send notifications, only the Poles care to answer and say "thank you for letting us know we have a bot in our network". What should I do about the rest ? Declare war ?
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"Dmitri Galushkevich is not an Estonian name (just in case anyone wonders)." He might be Pole, Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, Chech, Slovenian, Slovakian, Rumanian or Bulgarian. Oh, he lives in Estonia, he's not called Habermann, Hippius, Peterson or Lepikson, so he must be Russian
how about HP office scanners ?
so *you* fixed the critical bug Richardson wasted three weeks attempting to reproduce before I fired him ? ... way to go, Mr. Layne ... now would you please step into my office ? You can take your personal items with you, you won't come back to your cubicle.
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[joke alarm, just in case Richardson got fired and you began to think about going into hiding]
I feel your pain ... I would rant about articles published before 1990 not being indexed, but my 10 years stint in the "not currently available on the shelf" hell was over when I decided I'm not going to lose more time chasing after books, begging for access to sources and pretending to be a hot-shot research historian.
TFA whines about the "new generation" not having patience to go through the dumb procedures set up 100 years ago, when a research library might have bought a maximum of a couple of hundreds of books each month, had a collection of about 2000 to 5000 books and journal volumes, and serviced under 20 people, most of whom could afford to buy most of those books or the journals themselves. Now a librarian has to deal with hosts of full time researchers, research assistants, graduate students, undergrads and amateurs with enough connections to get them access to the library. Now librarians has to get info on thousands of titles each month, so they won't upset some of the "elders" with an oversight when they submit the list of books to the acquisition committee (books that the acquisition committee won't approve, since they are the scientists and they know better, but you have to show you tried), then negotiate budgets for paper clips to RAID arrays, deal with evaluation committees and inventories, prepare reports for the beancounters, prepare reports for the administrative management, prepare reports for the various departments, track down and negotiate with the privileged lenders (those permitted to take books home), meet and appease donors, socialize with donors, socialize with the management etc. It used to be that the librarian in a research or university library had to be a scholar: now it must be in the same time a scholar, an accountant, a debt recovery officer and a PR agent. Large libraries hire different people for these jobs. Small research libraries (~ 100k items), such as the one I worked for for a few month before being promoted to a more glamorous "research" position for administrative merits, have only a couple librarians, since that's what was mentioned in the charter drawn a gazillion of years back, and there are no money to spare for folks that just "sit at the desk the whole day".
The result is that the trouble of getting an item from the "block X storage area" which is a few hours away by trolley cart speed discourages the "new generation", which has to prove itself fast. Oh, they don't want to take the pains of tracking down the last extant copy of "Labor force composition report", published in 1899 ? It certainly means they are no-good-spoiled-brats. It definitely does not mean that they are under pressure to deliver a paper tomorrow, so they choose to write about whatever they can find with the help of Google Scholar and the free access shelves in the library.
The mystical "good library nearby" so many people talk about probably refers to some Ivy League university library, and "nearby" means within a circle with the radius of 5000 miles. 95% of the public or research libraries are dumpsters for Harry-Potter-style of (scientific) literature, since there is so much relevant stuff published that they cannot even get informed about it, and even less buy it. What gets bought is general stuff and the spillover from the latest fad with the accidental gem for which there were enough votes in the acquisition committee.
Oh, the youth these days ... they want to have it easy ... during the good old days you had to dig for clay, prepare the tablets, sharpen the sticks, bake the written tablets, QA the baked tablets, chop the trees, fashion the shelves etc. Those were times fit for scholarship. Nowadays its all about these papyri and scrolls and texts where the words are marked by spaces and punctuation that we hear about but would not get into since they are cold and dehumanizing ... these spoiled brats are to lazy to find time to sit down and meditate while the tablets bake in the oven.
It's not about jobs and kids and fame and glory. It's about controlling the high ground, and right now the higher ground that matters is in low Earth orbit. 60 years ago US was the only country in the world that was not wrecked by WWII, and it could afford to be complacent. In 2008 that's not longer true, and if you want to keep your "jobbies" and vacation in [insert your favorite second or third world country here] without fear of local government abuse, US must control the high ground, and make sure that any upstart (such as China, Russia or even EU) know that they have to play fair.
Right now it's US that bans toys made in China and not China the one that bans toys made in US only because the folks in Beijing know that they do not afford to piss off your government, and that, the way the things are now, they can be sent back to the 1850 technology quite fast (or have the flow of know-how cut short, for lesser "transgressions"), in case they get uppity.
These days LEO is as important as Gibraltar was a hundred years ago, as Suez was up to 1947, as Malta was during WWII, as Iceland during the Cold War, and even more important than the Panama canal is right now.
This is the precise reason nobody talks about this side of the story: if any government would issue declarations about the importance of having control over LEO, it would be the equivalent of a war declaration on the other pretenders to supremacy.
The day China would announce it can put 20000 pounds object in orbit with only a couple of days preparations, and if US would not be able to do the same, that day you'll do better to start growing a queue and learning the Han characters.
It will float, but the gentle rocking of the sea will soon put the hard drives to sleep.
And the Martians are notorious for being green.
In my experience, Soviet Union devices used to be functional, made to work within a temperature range between -40 and +50 degrees Celsius, quite heavy, and most of the time quite ugly, but no corners were cut. If you imagine they matched US in military technology by cutting corners, you need a refresher course in industrial management. After all, is not Russia the only state that has the gear needed to supply the ISS ?
If any microbe can survive a few months in space (searing heat alternating with deep cold, gamma radiation etc.), it is quite probably it will survive even the most careful sterilization procedures.
The purpose of going to a technical college is to give you the skills to go out and be a competent cog in the machine. The purpose of going to university is primarily to teach you how to play the machine to your advantage.
there, fixed that for you
Well, in Southern and South-Eastern Europe you just have to pick a random spot, and if it was not disturbed by a river, you will almost certainly find some ancient (medieval, ancient proper, iron age etc.) settlement within a 500 m. radius of the chosen place. The only reason the whole area is not covered with tourist-trap ruins is that the people of old had the common sense of recycling old structures to build new ones. The Coliseum still stands only because in Rome there was such a great store of old ruins to be mined for better stone that it did not make sense to tear it apart.
No need for Google Earth: it might help you find large structures, but those are already easy to spot for a trained eye.
Aerial photography works better: it provides better resolution and you can adjust the angle or the moment of the day you take the pictures (hint: the ground above large stone structures will dry faster after rain; if the structures are close to the topsoil, the vegetation will be poorer; if you take the pictures at a low angle, you will see the mounds better: after 3000 years, even the most ambitious tumuli will have only 10 to 30 cm of height).
and how do you appoint competent governments ? use a council of wise people ?