If Snowden was a Russian intelligence operator he wouldn't be a high school dropout. When countries like Russia recruit operatives they don't go for people who linger about at the bottom. They go for people who can get as far and deep as they can.
Snowden got the information he did because it turns out the NSA's internal systems, particular to contractors weren't exactly very secure. For Russia to have planned his work all along they'd have to have known about the security and weak points of the NSA's systems all along, meaning they must've already had someone else in there who could do it all anyway.
There'd be literally no point recruiting someone like Snowden because you'd be hiring someone going in at such a low level it would be utterly pointless unless you already knew that the systems were trivially compromisable from that level in which case you wouldn't need Snowden.
The idea that Snowden is a spy makes no sense in literally a thousand ways, it's just poppycock from the right wing US nationalists who think security services and the military should get to do whatever they want without question.
I think you need to get off the conspiracy theories. The idea that things like the Ukrainian revolution are Western backed are equally nonsense. It's just absolutely absurd to think that people wouldn't ever rebel because they wanted greater freedoms themselves, that the only reason people would want greater freedoms and fairer representation is because the West has been stirring shit. Here's news for you kid - revolutions like that in Ukraine have been going on since long before the US even existed, and why exactly do you think the US does exist?
The West has kept out of Ukraine largely because it didn't want this exact kind of shit storm. But when Ukrainians have, for over a decade seen the successful nations their neighbouring ex-soviet states have and are becoming since post collapse of the USSR in moving to the West and the EU off their own backs then of course they're going to want that too. Who the hell doesn't want to see their living standards, freedoms, rights and ability to move throughout the world drastically improve?
"This certainly differs from TIOBE's methodology (based on Google searches)."
Actually TIOBE's methodology is absolutely awful. It takes the most popular sites on the net and weights them in an inversely exponential manner.
One of these pages is Wikipedia, which is editable by anyone, and it puts a massive weighting on them. Similarly it applies arbitrary filters that cut out legit results for some languages, and throw in illegitimate results in favour of other languages.
You can as an individual trivially subvert TIOBE by making up a new language, posting on Wikipedia with a number of links to it, and creating a number of fake blogs on it.
Long story short, TIOBE is utterly worthless so using it as a standard of comparison is complete nonsense. Any more rational index would take job postings and so forth from global job posting sites and that sort of thing. Weighting based on information on sites that anyone who wants to can trivially manipulate is utterly stupid.
The difficulty in creating a nuclear weapon isn't the command and control, it's creating the warheads and the delivery vehicles. Slapping on different electronics to control the missiles would've been a trivial task compared to the job of developing warheads and rocket technology required for delivery.
It's probably the one thing about creating nuclear weapons that your average bedroom hardware hacker could do with physical access to the missiles.
Though it should also be noted that many of the USSR's weapons were created in the Ukraine in the first place, so the Ukraine probably still has some of the guys who actually made these things to start with, regardless of the fact that actual command and control was in Russia.
I think there's two camps, there's the clear and obvious propaganda campaign, you see this on prominent sites like the BBC when they have live feeds on the topic and it's full of nonsense such as:
Nikki e-mails: I LOVE PUTIN HE'S THE GREATEST MAN IN THE UNIVERSE AND THE WHOLE WORLD SHOULD BE OWNED BY RUSSIA!!
Okay that was hypoerbole, but you get the point. Then you get sites like this, where there is a non-negligible bunch of useful idiots available. These are people that just like to argue, they like to do so even if their point is completely untenable, and they'll pursue it long after their points has been highlighted as complete and utter bollocks. They like to play devils advocate, which is sometimes useful, as it's good to question, but other times it just makes them look more than just a bit retarded.
A handful are ideological, you get people who were so scarred by what the West did in fucking up in attacking Iraq in 2003 that they think everything that's wrong in the world is entirely the fault of America and it's allies, and that no other nation could ever possibly be evil, hence, if America has an opinion on it, they assume it's automatically wrong, and the other guy is right. These people really are retarded, they're the people who were arguing that because America had a problem with Ahmadinejad's Iran and his nuclear program, that Iran must inherently be a peaceful, friendly, freedom and liberty loving nation. It was just incomprehensible to them that there could be wrongs on both sides of the argument.
"As a matter of fact, India left the British empire without war. Look up Ghandi..."
Why even just use India as an example? Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa. There are many many more examples. The manner in which countries left British control covers pretty much every part of the spectrum, from violent exit, to exit by referendum, to the British themselves deciding it's time for them to go independent.
"But in the end what we know is that once Russia offered, if there were a fair and free referendum the Crimean people would like to join Russia and leave Ukraine.
No we don't know that, if anything we can only say we know the opposite - a handful of weeks before the Russia occupation support for joining Russia in a poll was only at 41%. There was slightly higher support for independence - 52%, but certainly we absolutely cannot say in a free and fair referendum people would've voted to join Russia - polls without the barrels of Russian soldiers watching over them tell a completely different story to what you're suggesting. At worst they'd have voted for independence by a margin of only 2%.
"Notably: OECD received invitation to the elections to monitor them. They came under massive pressure from EU and US and ended up declining the invitation."
Wow, what an obscure twist on reality. The OECD observers were fucking shot at as soon as they tried to get near Crimea:
Being shot at and told you're not welcome is not even remotely the same as "They came under massive pressure from EU and US and ended up declining the invitation.". Putin and his cronies make statements like "But we invited the OECD, it's all the West's fault!" precisely because he's talking to the folk at home who can't get information from anything other than state outlets. I'm amazed there are people like you who do not take advantage of what is available to us in the West - plurality of media information to realise what actually went on.
You seem to have swallowed Putin's propaganda hook, line, and sinker. What's wrong with you?
"6 months after the C64 came out were there already rumblings that the Amiga was on its way? Obviously in a decade where you went from the ZX80 to the 486 there were new computers on a fairly regular basis, but it was really not the same as it is today with yearly PC updates (cpu/video), yearly phones, yearly games"
Really, it wasn't much different, only the technology that rapid iteration happened to changed. As I pointed out there are systems today that have relatively long life cycles (consoles) just as there were then, but similarly just as there were then there were short lifecycle systems too. All that's changed is that the highly dynamic open architecture of the PC won out as the most prominent computing device in people's homes, whilst those fixed-spec systems just found their niche in the console gaming arena and so forth.
Comparing phones seems pointless, there was a constant flurry of new landline phones you could buy back then, but given that mobile phones didn't really exist beyond the fairly experimental stage it's silly to compare them, they're a whole new market that just wasn't around then.
There were games coming out every year, I'm pretty sure off the top of my head that the Dizzy series of games were a yearly thing given that there were so many in such a short few years for example.
As someone else pointed out to you the whole nickel and diming thing was incredibly prominent with 80s arcade culture too.
"there is going to (predictably) be a new and (slightly) improved model next year or in a couple of years at the most, there is not as much attachment as there used to be."
The C64 came out in 1982, the Commodore Amiga, and Commodore 128 came out in 1985, with the Amiga 500 in 87, the Amiga 500 Plus in 1991, the Amiga 600 in March 1992, and finally, the Amiga 1200 in October 1992. That's 3, 2, 4, 1, and 0.5 years respectively between releases.
In contrast, the Xbox 360 lasted from 2005 until 2013 before a new model came out, that's 8 years. The PS3 only one year less. If you want computers, then I guess we have to look at the PC, but it's a different situation because they're so bespoke nowadays, however a moderate PC is going to last at least 5 years (mine from 2008 even is still perfectly good for modern releases like the latest Diablo expansion etc.).
Suggesting there's ever been any longer period of release cycles on some devices then than there is now is nonsense, but there's a rather amusing irony when you're suggesting so to try and argue the joke "nostalgia is better than it used to be" is true.
Long story short, you've fallen victim to nostalgia, and are trying to argue against it being possible now, begging the question, do you even know what nostalgia is? It's hit you and you don't even know it.
"It is important to note that the 2C you are talking about is surface air temperature. It is less than 1 percent of our climate overall. The oceans are a vast reservoir of thermal sink, as is the stratosphere."
Right, but that's a sustained 2C, you can't have one thing at 2C and an adjacent thing much lower. Heat transfer occurs from hot to cold and the rate of transfer is proportional to the difference in temperature. To maintain a 2C surface temperature increase that means everything else must have increased too so pretending only 1% of our climate is going to increase in temperature is utter nonsense - the entirety of the oceans and stratosphere must also drastically increase in temperature for that 2C increase in surface temperature to be sustained, otherwise you wouldn't get a sustained 2C increase because the temperature would just be pulled into the oceans and stratosphere.
Just because the surface temperature is commonly cited doesn't mean that's the only thing changing, everything else has to increase too, it's just more convenient to quote the only immediately obvious temperature to your average human - that which they're sat in day in and day out rather than to quote all the possible ecosystems that will increase by their relative but varying amount.
"Local effects will be more extreme - milder arctic winters and longer growing seasons should improve crops in Russia, Canada and northern Europe."
Right, central and southern North America, Australia, and much of Africa and the Middle East will become too prone to drought for any reliable crop growth. Why just focus on the areas where crop yield potential will improve and ignore the vast swathes of the Earth where agriculture will become impossible unless you have some kind of insanely biased agenda here?
"Africa will see more precipitation turning the Sahara into grassland again."
Great, that's Europe and South America fucked then given that dust from the Sahara blown to those continents is essential for the fertilisation that allows the high levels of green growth.
What, you thought you could change a major ecosystem in the globe like the Sahara and there wouldn't be impacts elsewhere? that's not the way the world works.
"This may stress reefs, but really - they are millions of years old and have seen this before."
Not on a timescale that leaves no time for adaptation via evolution.
At first you seemed to have an extremely over simplistic understanding of the natural world, and that that was leading you to reach a gross underestimation on the negative impacts global warming would have, but your cherry picking of the benefits and certain statistics implies it's not necessarily that you don't or couldn't understand the respective elements of the natural world, but that you're being intentionally dishonest to push a short sighted and selfish view.
Well he's still the legal owner by law, so there's nothing to stop him literally just walking in, picking them up, and walking out with them. Common sense would suggest telling the police you're doing exactly that first, and letting them know you've done it afterwards, but legally short of them preventing you accessing the shop (in which case you'd have to get the police to do it for you) there isn't jack shit they can do to stop you just taking your items back.
In fact, it'd arguably be immoral not to just take them back, because anyone buying them is potentially liable for handling stolen goods, even if they weren't aware they were stolen, so letting them stay there risks leaving someone else at risk of prosecution when they've not knowingly done anything wrong.
If the shop owner has a problem with you walking into his shop and just picking up your items and walking off with them then it's upto him to call the police and take it up with them, it's not your problem - they're your goods and they legally belong to you still. If he's lost money on it then tough shit, he should've worked harder to make sure the goods were legit by asking for an original receipt or something.
Yep, no need to beat about the bush, there has been numerous occasions where CEX has been found peddling stolen goods.
When big well known nationwide brands are doing it and getting away with it what have the small guys got to worry about? CEX is the place of choice for many criminals trying to offload stolen Blurays, laptops, DVDs, video games, and mobile phones.
"Sure it was a coup and the vote for impeachment happened after the coup."
That doesn't even make sense, how can you have a coup if the leadership is not yet deposed? Changing will of parliament is not a coup, not under any circumstances. That's democracy in action. If the leader is still in power then by definition, no coup can have happened. To follow the constitutional process a committee to investigate the offence had to be formed, but Yanukovych resigned before that happened (then rescinded his resignation when he got to Russia which IS unconstitutional). Let's be clear - Yanukovych ran before he was pushed because he saw the tide had turned against him, there was a 73% majority in favour of impeachment which was enough to trigger the required investigation which he resigned before could happen.
"But if you consider what happened as a coup, then it all starts making sense."
Yes, I suspect if you view most things with a predetermined bias then they make sense to you, but that's no reflection on what actually happened.
The only changes that have occurred other than preparing for elections and acting in a security capacity are those to revert the constitution and a couple of other things that were already agreed by Yanukovych and the existing parliament before the interim leadership came into play. You seem to be implying this interim government plans to stay permanently but where is your evidence for this? the election date is set and there's not the slightest shred of evidence they're going to cancel this - in fact, despite the fact Russia has started now to send Spetsnatz units into Eastern Ukraine the leadership has explicitly not called a state of emergency because by law that would mean they would have to cancel the elections.
"I am not saying that the situation on Crimea wasn't a sham. There was no need to rig that vote really, the majority would have voted for an annexation anyway."
This doesn't make sense, if they would've voted for it anyway (polls prior to the Russian invasion suggest they wouldn't) then why go through such extraordinary effort to rig the vote including all the things I mentioned previously on top of installing an unelected puppet leadership in Crimea that called the referendum (again, things that most definitely were unconstitutional).
"Yes it was a coup d'etat. A coup does not have to be a military one. Every illegal usurpation of the government is a coup."
Yes you're right, but there was nothing illegal here. The democratically elected parliament voted for early elections and to impeach the president after deciding to support the will of their constituents (the Ukrainian people). That's not illegal by any measure, therefore, it wasn't a coup.
It was more akin to the parliament voting to impeach the president and then resigning themselves. Unless you're saying parliaments shouldn't be able to bring down a president that has lost popular support, or unless you're saying parliamentarians shouldn't be able to resign and force early elections, then there's no reasonable way this can possibly be described as a coup.
"No. Even in the most fraudulent vote outcome (Rostov region) Putin has received 58.99% of the votes."
I think his comment was largely hyperbole, but really, he's right. Putin has a long history of rigged polls. If there was anything legitimate about the view of the Crimean people in the referendum then why did Putin have to deny international observers, limit all propaganda to pro-Russian propaganda, shut down all communication in and out of Crimea prior to the referendum? Surely if it's what the people wanted then a verifiably free and fair referendum would've been far easier and far easier for him to claim victory for a more legitimate annexation? It's hard to see how an election can ever be called fair when the ballot counting isn't independently verified by objective observers and when it takes place under the barrel of the guns of only one side of the debate. That's before you consider the ballot options - independence and closer ties to Russia, or join Russia. Where was the "Fuck off Russia" option? Surely you can't honestly believe that was a legitimate referendum even putting aside arguments about what the people supposedly did or didn't want?
Scotland is holding an independence referendum later this year, would you believe it legitimate if English soldiers turned up outside every polling station with guns, tore down all the independence campaign posters and replaced them with "Alex Salmond and the SNP are Nazis", took over the television and radio airwaves to broadcast pro-union propaganda, shut down the cell phone towers to lock down communications, and took away all the ballots to be counted at David Cameron's house? That's what Putin did in Crimea.
"The legitimately elected pro-Russia government in Ukraine was overthrown in a coup."
Where do you get this shit from? The legitimately elected government wasn't just pulled out of office physically or anything. They are the ones who voted with a majority of 73% to oust Yanukovych, and allow a new round of elections. If responding to your constituents is a coup then I hope the fuck you permanently stay away from politics as I don't like the sound of your type of dictatorship where democracy is defined as doing what another nation (Russia) wants and ignoring the demands of your constituents. The healthier the democracy, the easier it is to recall representatives who no longer have popular support - the very fact the Ukraine did it this way is a sign of a healthy democratic action. Far better than the likes of Gordon Brown taking power and sitting there for over a year after his approval rating had sunk as low as 15%.
You're parroting Putins propaganda and ignoring that Yanukovych's ousting was a wholly democratic impeachment by an elected parliament. There was no coup in the Ukraine, that's just Putin's line, a coup is, by definition, a violent, illegal, seizure of power. The only violence was from Yanukovych's pro-Russian Berkut puppets who shot police and protesters alike to try and stir violent confrontation between the two. It was entirely a legitimate democratic action.
If you don't understand what happened it's probably best not to comment, parroting Putin's line is the worst form of idiocy and is akin to the muppets who were parroting Blair's 45 minute WMD claim to justify their support for the war in Iraq. Don't do it, you're better than that.
"I'm not saying I agree completely with all that, but people seem to forget that there was a coup and the people of Crimea asked for Russian assistance."
The majority of Ukrainians are pro-Western, that's why this happened in the first place. The pro-Russians are a minority. Given that the pro-Western grouping have asked for NATO assistance is your view then that we should send British, America, and other NATO troops into the Ukraine to kill the Russians that annexed Crimea? That's the logical conclusion of your thought process - that if a group of people ask for support then the nation(s) being asked have an obligation to give that support.
"Even the most cynical adjustment of the numbers still shows a majority."
Your fault is assuming the numbers were in any way legitimate in the first place, which given objective polls from only a few weeks before gave only 41% support for joining Russia there's a pretty strong suggestion it is not the case.
I just held a poll of all Crimeans and they actually said 100% that they don't want to be part of Russia, even if you adjust for a bit of normal statistical error there you can't manipulate it far enough to say I'm wrong.
See how that works? That's basically what Putin did in reverse, so congratulations on being one of his useful idiots. The simple fact is that there was supposedly an 82% turn out, despite the fact that at least 30% weren't even ethnic Russian and had no interest in Russia. The results Russia spat out just were not credible in the slightest, and that's before you factor in the 120%+ election turnout in Sevastapol where Russian troops who weren't even Ukrainian nationals voted. Yes, you read that right.
"There was no evidence that the people of Iraq or Afghanistan wanted to be liberated, yet the world is just peachy with that."
Amusingly, whilst I disagree with the Iraq war, that's simply not true. The people were extremely grateful for liberation in the aftermath, it was the failure to plan to build a working nation state that resulted in all the case. There was actually massive popular support for Saddam's rival, the UK/US just completely failed to fill the vacuum left by his departure leading to a brutal power struggle, that's what went wrong there. The same has happened in Libya and Egypt - the vast majority wanted liberation from their respective dictators, the problem is they also didn't want the chaos that followed but eventually did because they didn't plan for what happens afterwards.
Look, the whole Iraq war was wrong, and that's fine, I get it, you hate America and the UK and whoever else for what they did. But that doesn't magically make Russia not as bad, Russia is still just as bad, arguably worse - at least the UK and US always planned to pull out and eventually did, Russia just annexed the place and declared it there own. You cannot honestly criticise the West for what they did and then defence Russia's actions, that just makes you the worst kind of hypocrit. That just tells us you've no interest in the truth, or the facts, you just want an excuse to slag off the West and big up Russia and if that's what you want then fine, just at least have the fucking courage to say what you mean and believe - that you're pro-Russian, agree with Putin and hate the West. At least have the courtesy to cut the bullshit.
Cards on the table, I'm embarrassed by what my country did, I'm disgusted by what the US did, but I'm also appalled by what Russia is doing. The UK and US' stupidity doesn't make Russia an angel, it just makes it another asshole nation as well in carrying out actions equally as unacceptable as the 2003 Iraq invasion and subsequent occupation.
If you mount it on a sliding rail running parallel to and pointing at an infinite length horizontal board with an infinite belt of ammo and set it moving with a correctly calibrated exponentially increasing speed then you can use it to reproduce, using a measurement of the distance from the start, the Fibonacci sequence.
Useful if you're in a zombie apocalypse and you need to remember it.
PCs follow a standardise open architecture, you can verify one and that verification follows comfortably onto others
Most phones follow a black box architecture, you can verify an open phone but it tells you nothing about the hardware or software on the majority of other phones that people are using.
Apparently you can't grasp this simple argument though in your desperation to pursue the nonsense idea that phones are somehow as safe and as well understood from a security standpoint as PCs.
"My point is that you can generalise. I.e. that green1's statment was correct."
Then you are talking shit, you are actually saying that murder of someone who wants to die anyway is worse for the victim than being gang raped repeatedly for many years or some other extreme scenario. If you're saying what you're saying you're saying then the extremity of any example I provide is not irrelevant in proving what utter nonsense you are talking, any such example if realistic (it is, both these things have happened and will continue to happen somewhere in this world) is proof by counter-example that your argument is incorrect. I'm sorry if you find that inconvenient to your desperate attempts to continue to be an argumentative tit for the sake of being an argumentative tit.
"No, but stating that rape is as bad as murder will make some victims feel that way."
Again this shows your utter disconnect between what victims actually feel and what you think they should feel and highlights how far from reality your understanding of this topic is. If you tell a victim what happened to them can indeed leave them feeling like they'd rather have just been killed then you're showing empathy with their situation - you're highlighting that you understand how they feel. Telling them well it's not as bad as being murdered so they can be thankful of that does not show empathy, it shows a complete lack of it.
But I get it, I really do, many people on Slashdot do not have that property of empathy, and that's fine, not everyone is or need be empathetic, it's just the way they are, but let's not pretend that's representative of the population at large, or that we should be putting non-empathetic people like you in any kind of position that involves trying to help victims of crimes like rape. There is a very long way to go, but thankfully there is a massive amount of money, time and effort going towards training in police stations and hospitals across the globe in general to help train people in the need to be empathetic in the face of such issues. Thankfully your non-empathetic view of dealing with victims is a dying one, so it really doesn't matter that you think your non-empathetic view is the correct way to deal with the matter regardless of how much you may disagree.
I don't disagree with anything you're saying here for what it's worth, but I don't think your original post came off well - it has the implication that rape is always more trivial than murder, but some victims will always feel that is not the case, and in my opinion, understandably so.
"You're comparing rape with a killing someone on their death bed. Sure, people have been killed right before they would have died, but that does not make rape worse than murder. By that logic you can say that bullying and teasing is as bad as murder, because there are people that would rather die than be bullied. "
You're taking my example and implying I'm claiming some kind of generalisation, which is complete nonsense - you're building an argument against a point I never even made. My point was simply that you can't generalise and say that murder is always worse than rape, which is nonsense.
My point is simply that these things occur on a spectrum - there are murders that are brutal and unwanted like the killing of a young boy for some sick thrill, and there are murders where the victim was on the edge of suicide anyway so would barely even care that their life was about to end.
Similarly there are rapes, that are questionable to even classify as rape at one end, and brutal ones involving gangs, and possible death at the end of it to boot.
These spectrums overlap - there are some rapes that are worse for the victims than some murders, hence why I do not believe we can make the blanket claim that murder is always worse than rape.
"I think you're misunderstanding me. I'm not saying that one should blame the victim of rape or not talk about it. Saying murder is worse than rape is not victim blaming."
No, but it does trivialise it for some victims - i.e. those who would rather just be dead as a result of it anyway, try telling them "Oh well, at least you weren't murdered", don't be surprised if they tell you they wish they had been and genuinely mean it.
"Rape isn't trivial, but implying that people should just as well be dead because they were raped pisses me off."
I don't know where you even got that from, it's not even close to anything I said. Stating that some victims will feel that way is not the same as stating that victims should feel that way.
Yes, I was probably being a bit unfairly facetious there:)
For what it's worth I suspect it's a debate we'll be having in the UK soon, there have been a string of high profile prosecutions of historic abuse against high profile celebrities that have failed because it's so hard to prove such an event so long after the fact.
Ultimately this long after the only evidence you can get is circumstantial, and this is why the cases are persistently failing. Despite the fact it's hard to reconcile how multiple victims who have never met can provide non-conflicting accounts of intimate personal details with innocence it's trivial for the defence to simply argue that as a high profile celebrity they're just a victim of money grabbers at which point the jury simply can't possibly accept that the beyond reasonable doubt test has been achieved, hence the innocence ruling. Normally, DNA evidence would swing it in favour of a guilty verdict but in the absence of that 20, 30, 40, in some cases even 50 or more years after the fact what can they do? There seems a reasonable chance at least some of these people are still guilty but how do you prove it beyond reasonable doubt so long after the fact?
Of course then the flip side is that the beyond reasonable doubt test is extremely important, so what do you do? What options are being suggested in Sweden for getting the balance right?
Slashdot Mirror
If Snowden was a Russian intelligence operator he wouldn't be a high school dropout. When countries like Russia recruit operatives they don't go for people who linger about at the bottom. They go for people who can get as far and deep as they can.
Snowden got the information he did because it turns out the NSA's internal systems, particular to contractors weren't exactly very secure. For Russia to have planned his work all along they'd have to have known about the security and weak points of the NSA's systems all along, meaning they must've already had someone else in there who could do it all anyway.
There'd be literally no point recruiting someone like Snowden because you'd be hiring someone going in at such a low level it would be utterly pointless unless you already knew that the systems were trivially compromisable from that level in which case you wouldn't need Snowden.
The idea that Snowden is a spy makes no sense in literally a thousand ways, it's just poppycock from the right wing US nationalists who think security services and the military should get to do whatever they want without question.
I think you need to get off the conspiracy theories. The idea that things like the Ukrainian revolution are Western backed are equally nonsense. It's just absolutely absurd to think that people wouldn't ever rebel because they wanted greater freedoms themselves, that the only reason people would want greater freedoms and fairer representation is because the West has been stirring shit. Here's news for you kid - revolutions like that in Ukraine have been going on since long before the US even existed, and why exactly do you think the US does exist?
The West has kept out of Ukraine largely because it didn't want this exact kind of shit storm. But when Ukrainians have, for over a decade seen the successful nations their neighbouring ex-soviet states have and are becoming since post collapse of the USSR in moving to the West and the EU off their own backs then of course they're going to want that too. Who the hell doesn't want to see their living standards, freedoms, rights and ability to move throughout the world drastically improve?
"This certainly differs from TIOBE's methodology (based on Google searches)."
Actually TIOBE's methodology is absolutely awful. It takes the most popular sites on the net and weights them in an inversely exponential manner.
One of these pages is Wikipedia, which is editable by anyone, and it puts a massive weighting on them. Similarly it applies arbitrary filters that cut out legit results for some languages, and throw in illegitimate results in favour of other languages.
You can as an individual trivially subvert TIOBE by making up a new language, posting on Wikipedia with a number of links to it, and creating a number of fake blogs on it.
Long story short, TIOBE is utterly worthless so using it as a standard of comparison is complete nonsense. Any more rational index would take job postings and so forth from global job posting sites and that sort of thing. Weighting based on information on sites that anyone who wants to can trivially manipulate is utterly stupid.
So if I don't pay taxes I become an independent nation or?
The difficulty in creating a nuclear weapon isn't the command and control, it's creating the warheads and the delivery vehicles. Slapping on different electronics to control the missiles would've been a trivial task compared to the job of developing warheads and rocket technology required for delivery.
It's probably the one thing about creating nuclear weapons that your average bedroom hardware hacker could do with physical access to the missiles.
Though it should also be noted that many of the USSR's weapons were created in the Ukraine in the first place, so the Ukraine probably still has some of the guys who actually made these things to start with, regardless of the fact that actual command and control was in Russia.
I think there's two camps, there's the clear and obvious propaganda campaign, you see this on prominent sites like the BBC when they have live feeds on the topic and it's full of nonsense such as:
Nikki e-mails: I LOVE PUTIN HE'S THE GREATEST MAN IN THE UNIVERSE AND THE WHOLE WORLD SHOULD BE OWNED BY RUSSIA!!
Okay that was hypoerbole, but you get the point. Then you get sites like this, where there is a non-negligible bunch of useful idiots available. These are people that just like to argue, they like to do so even if their point is completely untenable, and they'll pursue it long after their points has been highlighted as complete and utter bollocks. They like to play devils advocate, which is sometimes useful, as it's good to question, but other times it just makes them look more than just a bit retarded.
A handful are ideological, you get people who were so scarred by what the West did in fucking up in attacking Iraq in 2003 that they think everything that's wrong in the world is entirely the fault of America and it's allies, and that no other nation could ever possibly be evil, hence, if America has an opinion on it, they assume it's automatically wrong, and the other guy is right. These people really are retarded, they're the people who were arguing that because America had a problem with Ahmadinejad's Iran and his nuclear program, that Iran must inherently be a peaceful, friendly, freedom and liberty loving nation. It was just incomprehensible to them that there could be wrongs on both sides of the argument.
"As a matter of fact, India left the British empire without war. Look up Ghandi..."
Why even just use India as an example? Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa. There are many many more examples. The manner in which countries left British control covers pretty much every part of the spectrum, from violent exit, to exit by referendum, to the British themselves deciding it's time for them to go independent.
"But in the end what we know is that once Russia offered, if there were a fair and free referendum the Crimean people would like to join Russia and leave Ukraine.
No we don't know that, if anything we can only say we know the opposite - a handful of weeks before the Russia occupation support for joining Russia in a poll was only at 41%. There was slightly higher support for independence - 52%, but certainly we absolutely cannot say in a free and fair referendum people would've voted to join Russia - polls without the barrels of Russian soldiers watching over them tell a completely different story to what you're suggesting. At worst they'd have voted for independence by a margin of only 2%.
"Notably: OECD received invitation to the elections to monitor them. They came under massive pressure from EU and US and ended up declining the invitation."
Wow, what an obscure twist on reality. The OECD observers were fucking shot at as soon as they tried to get near Crimea:
http://www.dw.de/warning-shots...
Being shot at and told you're not welcome is not even remotely the same as "They came under massive pressure from EU and US and ended up declining the invitation.". Putin and his cronies make statements like "But we invited the OECD, it's all the West's fault!" precisely because he's talking to the folk at home who can't get information from anything other than state outlets. I'm amazed there are people like you who do not take advantage of what is available to us in the West - plurality of media information to realise what actually went on.
You seem to have swallowed Putin's propaganda hook, line, and sinker. What's wrong with you?
"6 months after the C64 came out were there already rumblings that the Amiga was on its way? Obviously in a decade where you went from the ZX80 to the 486 there were new computers on a fairly regular basis, but it was really not the same as it is today with yearly PC updates (cpu/video), yearly phones, yearly games"
Really, it wasn't much different, only the technology that rapid iteration happened to changed. As I pointed out there are systems today that have relatively long life cycles (consoles) just as there were then, but similarly just as there were then there were short lifecycle systems too. All that's changed is that the highly dynamic open architecture of the PC won out as the most prominent computing device in people's homes, whilst those fixed-spec systems just found their niche in the console gaming arena and so forth.
Comparing phones seems pointless, there was a constant flurry of new landline phones you could buy back then, but given that mobile phones didn't really exist beyond the fairly experimental stage it's silly to compare them, they're a whole new market that just wasn't around then.
There were games coming out every year, I'm pretty sure off the top of my head that the Dizzy series of games were a yearly thing given that there were so many in such a short few years for example.
As someone else pointed out to you the whole nickel and diming thing was incredibly prominent with 80s arcade culture too.
He used to but they outsourced his job to India.
"there is going to (predictably) be a new and (slightly) improved model next year or in a couple of years at the most, there is not as much attachment as there used to be."
The C64 came out in 1982, the Commodore Amiga, and Commodore 128 came out in 1985, with the Amiga 500 in 87, the Amiga 500 Plus in 1991, the Amiga 600 in March 1992, and finally, the Amiga 1200 in October 1992. That's 3, 2, 4, 1, and 0.5 years respectively between releases.
In contrast, the Xbox 360 lasted from 2005 until 2013 before a new model came out, that's 8 years. The PS3 only one year less. If you want computers, then I guess we have to look at the PC, but it's a different situation because they're so bespoke nowadays, however a moderate PC is going to last at least 5 years (mine from 2008 even is still perfectly good for modern releases like the latest Diablo expansion etc.).
Suggesting there's ever been any longer period of release cycles on some devices then than there is now is nonsense, but there's a rather amusing irony when you're suggesting so to try and argue the joke "nostalgia is better than it used to be" is true.
Long story short, you've fallen victim to nostalgia, and are trying to argue against it being possible now, begging the question, do you even know what nostalgia is? It's hit you and you don't even know it.
"It is important to note that the 2C you are talking about is surface air temperature. It is less than 1 percent of our climate overall. The oceans are a vast reservoir of thermal sink, as is the stratosphere."
Right, but that's a sustained 2C, you can't have one thing at 2C and an adjacent thing much lower. Heat transfer occurs from hot to cold and the rate of transfer is proportional to the difference in temperature. To maintain a 2C surface temperature increase that means everything else must have increased too so pretending only 1% of our climate is going to increase in temperature is utter nonsense - the entirety of the oceans and stratosphere must also drastically increase in temperature for that 2C increase in surface temperature to be sustained, otherwise you wouldn't get a sustained 2C increase because the temperature would just be pulled into the oceans and stratosphere.
Just because the surface temperature is commonly cited doesn't mean that's the only thing changing, everything else has to increase too, it's just more convenient to quote the only immediately obvious temperature to your average human - that which they're sat in day in and day out rather than to quote all the possible ecosystems that will increase by their relative but varying amount.
"Local effects will be more extreme - milder arctic winters and longer growing seasons should improve crops in Russia, Canada and northern Europe."
Right, central and southern North America, Australia, and much of Africa and the Middle East will become too prone to drought for any reliable crop growth. Why just focus on the areas where crop yield potential will improve and ignore the vast swathes of the Earth where agriculture will become impossible unless you have some kind of insanely biased agenda here?
"Africa will see more precipitation turning the Sahara into grassland again."
Great, that's Europe and South America fucked then given that dust from the Sahara blown to those continents is essential for the fertilisation that allows the high levels of green growth.
What, you thought you could change a major ecosystem in the globe like the Sahara and there wouldn't be impacts elsewhere? that's not the way the world works.
"This may stress reefs, but really - they are millions of years old and have seen this before."
Not on a timescale that leaves no time for adaptation via evolution.
At first you seemed to have an extremely over simplistic understanding of the natural world, and that that was leading you to reach a gross underestimation on the negative impacts global warming would have, but your cherry picking of the benefits and certain statistics implies it's not necessarily that you don't or couldn't understand the respective elements of the natural world, but that you're being intentionally dishonest to push a short sighted and selfish view.
Well he's still the legal owner by law, so there's nothing to stop him literally just walking in, picking them up, and walking out with them. Common sense would suggest telling the police you're doing exactly that first, and letting them know you've done it afterwards, but legally short of them preventing you accessing the shop (in which case you'd have to get the police to do it for you) there isn't jack shit they can do to stop you just taking your items back.
In fact, it'd arguably be immoral not to just take them back, because anyone buying them is potentially liable for handling stolen goods, even if they weren't aware they were stolen, so letting them stay there risks leaving someone else at risk of prosecution when they've not knowingly done anything wrong.
If the shop owner has a problem with you walking into his shop and just picking up your items and walking off with them then it's upto him to call the police and take it up with them, it's not your problem - they're your goods and they legally belong to you still. If he's lost money on it then tough shit, he should've worked harder to make sure the goods were legit by asking for an original receipt or something.
Yep, no need to beat about the bush, there has been numerous occasions where CEX has been found peddling stolen goods.
When big well known nationwide brands are doing it and getting away with it what have the small guys got to worry about? CEX is the place of choice for many criminals trying to offload stolen Blurays, laptops, DVDs, video games, and mobile phones.
"Sure it was a coup and the vote for impeachment happened after the coup."
That doesn't even make sense, how can you have a coup if the leadership is not yet deposed? Changing will of parliament is not a coup, not under any circumstances. That's democracy in action. If the leader is still in power then by definition, no coup can have happened. To follow the constitutional process a committee to investigate the offence had to be formed, but Yanukovych resigned before that happened (then rescinded his resignation when he got to Russia which IS unconstitutional). Let's be clear - Yanukovych ran before he was pushed because he saw the tide had turned against him, there was a 73% majority in favour of impeachment which was enough to trigger the required investigation which he resigned before could happen.
"But if you consider what happened as a coup, then it all starts making sense."
Yes, I suspect if you view most things with a predetermined bias then they make sense to you, but that's no reflection on what actually happened.
The only changes that have occurred other than preparing for elections and acting in a security capacity are those to revert the constitution and a couple of other things that were already agreed by Yanukovych and the existing parliament before the interim leadership came into play. You seem to be implying this interim government plans to stay permanently but where is your evidence for this? the election date is set and there's not the slightest shred of evidence they're going to cancel this - in fact, despite the fact Russia has started now to send Spetsnatz units into Eastern Ukraine the leadership has explicitly not called a state of emergency because by law that would mean they would have to cancel the elections.
"I am not saying that the situation on Crimea wasn't a sham. There was no need to rig that vote really, the majority would have voted for an annexation anyway."
This doesn't make sense, if they would've voted for it anyway (polls prior to the Russian invasion suggest they wouldn't) then why go through such extraordinary effort to rig the vote including all the things I mentioned previously on top of installing an unelected puppet leadership in Crimea that called the referendum (again, things that most definitely were unconstitutional).
"Yes it was a coup d'etat. A coup does not have to be a military one. Every illegal usurpation of the government is a coup."
Yes you're right, but there was nothing illegal here. The democratically elected parliament voted for early elections and to impeach the president after deciding to support the will of their constituents (the Ukrainian people). That's not illegal by any measure, therefore, it wasn't a coup.
It was more akin to the parliament voting to impeach the president and then resigning themselves. Unless you're saying parliaments shouldn't be able to bring down a president that has lost popular support, or unless you're saying parliamentarians shouldn't be able to resign and force early elections, then there's no reasonable way this can possibly be described as a coup.
"No. Even in the most fraudulent vote outcome (Rostov region) Putin has received 58.99% of the votes."
I think his comment was largely hyperbole, but really, he's right. Putin has a long history of rigged polls. If there was anything legitimate about the view of the Crimean people in the referendum then why did Putin have to deny international observers, limit all propaganda to pro-Russian propaganda, shut down all communication in and out of Crimea prior to the referendum? Surely if it's what the people wanted then a verifiably free and fair referendum would've been far easier and far easier for him to claim victory for a more legitimate annexation? It's hard to see how an election can ever be called fair when the ballot counting isn't independently verified by objective observers and when it takes place under the barrel of the guns of only one side of the debate. That's before you consider the ballot options - independence and closer ties to Russia, or join Russia. Where was the "Fuck off Russia" option? Surely you can't honestly believe that was a legitimate referendum even putting aside arguments about what the people supposedly did or didn't want?
Scotland is holding an independence referendum later this year, would you believe it legitimate if English soldiers turned up outside every polling station with guns, tore down all the independence campaign posters and replaced them with "Alex Salmond and the SNP are Nazis", took over the television and radio airwaves to broadcast pro-union propaganda, shut down the cell phone towers to lock down communications, and took away all the ballots to be counted at David Cameron's house? That's what Putin did in Crimea.
"The legitimately elected pro-Russia government in Ukraine was overthrown in a coup."
Where do you get this shit from? The legitimately elected government wasn't just pulled out of office physically or anything. They are the ones who voted with a majority of 73% to oust Yanukovych, and allow a new round of elections. If responding to your constituents is a coup then I hope the fuck you permanently stay away from politics as I don't like the sound of your type of dictatorship where democracy is defined as doing what another nation (Russia) wants and ignoring the demands of your constituents. The healthier the democracy, the easier it is to recall representatives who no longer have popular support - the very fact the Ukraine did it this way is a sign of a healthy democratic action. Far better than the likes of Gordon Brown taking power and sitting there for over a year after his approval rating had sunk as low as 15%.
You're parroting Putins propaganda and ignoring that Yanukovych's ousting was a wholly democratic impeachment by an elected parliament. There was no coup in the Ukraine, that's just Putin's line, a coup is, by definition, a violent, illegal, seizure of power. The only violence was from Yanukovych's pro-Russian Berkut puppets who shot police and protesters alike to try and stir violent confrontation between the two. It was entirely a legitimate democratic action.
If you don't understand what happened it's probably best not to comment, parroting Putin's line is the worst form of idiocy and is akin to the muppets who were parroting Blair's 45 minute WMD claim to justify their support for the war in Iraq. Don't do it, you're better than that.
"I'm not saying I agree completely with all that, but people seem to forget that there was a coup and the people of Crimea asked for Russian assistance."
The majority of Ukrainians are pro-Western, that's why this happened in the first place. The pro-Russians are a minority. Given that the pro-Western grouping have asked for NATO assistance is your view then that we should send British, America, and other NATO troops into the Ukraine to kill the Russians that annexed Crimea? That's the logical conclusion of your thought process - that if a group of people ask for support then the nation(s) being asked have an obligation to give that support.
"Even the most cynical adjustment of the numbers still shows a majority."
Your fault is assuming the numbers were in any way legitimate in the first place, which given objective polls from only a few weeks before gave only 41% support for joining Russia there's a pretty strong suggestion it is not the case.
I just held a poll of all Crimeans and they actually said 100% that they don't want to be part of Russia, even if you adjust for a bit of normal statistical error there you can't manipulate it far enough to say I'm wrong.
See how that works? That's basically what Putin did in reverse, so congratulations on being one of his useful idiots. The simple fact is that there was supposedly an 82% turn out, despite the fact that at least 30% weren't even ethnic Russian and had no interest in Russia. The results Russia spat out just were not credible in the slightest, and that's before you factor in the 120%+ election turnout in Sevastapol where Russian troops who weren't even Ukrainian nationals voted. Yes, you read that right.
"There was no evidence that the people of Iraq or Afghanistan wanted to be liberated, yet the world is just peachy with that."
Amusingly, whilst I disagree with the Iraq war, that's simply not true. The people were extremely grateful for liberation in the aftermath, it was the failure to plan to build a working nation state that resulted in all the case. There was actually massive popular support for Saddam's rival, the UK/US just completely failed to fill the vacuum left by his departure leading to a brutal power struggle, that's what went wrong there. The same has happened in Libya and Egypt - the vast majority wanted liberation from their respective dictators, the problem is they also didn't want the chaos that followed but eventually did because they didn't plan for what happens afterwards.
Look, the whole Iraq war was wrong, and that's fine, I get it, you hate America and the UK and whoever else for what they did. But that doesn't magically make Russia not as bad, Russia is still just as bad, arguably worse - at least the UK and US always planned to pull out and eventually did, Russia just annexed the place and declared it there own. You cannot honestly criticise the West for what they did and then defence Russia's actions, that just makes you the worst kind of hypocrit. That just tells us you've no interest in the truth, or the facts, you just want an excuse to slag off the West and big up Russia and if that's what you want then fine, just at least have the fucking courage to say what you mean and believe - that you're pro-Russian, agree with Putin and hate the West. At least have the courtesy to cut the bullshit.
Cards on the table, I'm embarrassed by what my country did, I'm disgusted by what the US did, but I'm also appalled by what Russia is doing. The UK and US' stupidity doesn't make Russia an angel, it just makes it another asshole nation as well in carrying out actions equally as unacceptable as the 2003 Iraq invasion and subsequent occupation.
If you mount it on a sliding rail running parallel to and pointing at an infinite length horizontal board with an infinite belt of ammo and set it moving with a correctly calibrated exponentially increasing speed then you can use it to reproduce, using a measurement of the distance from the start, the Fibonacci sequence.
Useful if you're in a zombie apocalypse and you need to remember it.
Do I get my own Slashdot article now?
The Register, on climate change, really?
You might as well just have posted "TEA PARTY, FUCK YEAH, CLIMATE CHANGE IS BULLSHIT".
It would've had the same impact.
No, it boils down to:
PCs follow a standardise open architecture, you can verify one and that verification follows comfortably onto others
Most phones follow a black box architecture, you can verify an open phone but it tells you nothing about the hardware or software on the majority of other phones that people are using.
Apparently you can't grasp this simple argument though in your desperation to pursue the nonsense idea that phones are somehow as safe and as well understood from a security standpoint as PCs.
"My point is that you can generalise. I.e. that green1's statment was correct."
Then you are talking shit, you are actually saying that murder of someone who wants to die anyway is worse for the victim than being gang raped repeatedly for many years or some other extreme scenario. If you're saying what you're saying you're saying then the extremity of any example I provide is not irrelevant in proving what utter nonsense you are talking, any such example if realistic (it is, both these things have happened and will continue to happen somewhere in this world) is proof by counter-example that your argument is incorrect. I'm sorry if you find that inconvenient to your desperate attempts to continue to be an argumentative tit for the sake of being an argumentative tit.
"No, but stating that rape is as bad as murder will make some victims feel that way."
Again this shows your utter disconnect between what victims actually feel and what you think they should feel and highlights how far from reality your understanding of this topic is. If you tell a victim what happened to them can indeed leave them feeling like they'd rather have just been killed then you're showing empathy with their situation - you're highlighting that you understand how they feel. Telling them well it's not as bad as being murdered so they can be thankful of that does not show empathy, it shows a complete lack of it.
But I get it, I really do, many people on Slashdot do not have that property of empathy, and that's fine, not everyone is or need be empathetic, it's just the way they are, but let's not pretend that's representative of the population at large, or that we should be putting non-empathetic people like you in any kind of position that involves trying to help victims of crimes like rape. There is a very long way to go, but thankfully there is a massive amount of money, time and effort going towards training in police stations and hospitals across the globe in general to help train people in the need to be empathetic in the face of such issues. Thankfully your non-empathetic view of dealing with victims is a dying one, so it really doesn't matter that you think your non-empathetic view is the correct way to deal with the matter regardless of how much you may disagree.
I don't disagree with anything you're saying here for what it's worth, but I don't think your original post came off well - it has the implication that rape is always more trivial than murder, but some victims will always feel that is not the case, and in my opinion, understandably so.
"You're comparing rape with a killing someone on their death bed. Sure, people have been killed right before they would have died, but that does not make rape worse than murder. By that logic you can say that bullying and teasing is as bad as murder, because there are people that would rather die than be bullied. "
You're taking my example and implying I'm claiming some kind of generalisation, which is complete nonsense - you're building an argument against a point I never even made. My point was simply that you can't generalise and say that murder is always worse than rape, which is nonsense.
My point is simply that these things occur on a spectrum - there are murders that are brutal and unwanted like the killing of a young boy for some sick thrill, and there are murders where the victim was on the edge of suicide anyway so would barely even care that their life was about to end.
Similarly there are rapes, that are questionable to even classify as rape at one end, and brutal ones involving gangs, and possible death at the end of it to boot.
These spectrums overlap - there are some rapes that are worse for the victims than some murders, hence why I do not believe we can make the blanket claim that murder is always worse than rape.
"I think you're misunderstanding me. I'm not saying that one should blame the victim of rape or not talk about it. Saying murder is worse than rape is not victim blaming."
No, but it does trivialise it for some victims - i.e. those who would rather just be dead as a result of it anyway, try telling them "Oh well, at least you weren't murdered", don't be surprised if they tell you they wish they had been and genuinely mean it.
"Rape isn't trivial, but implying that people should just as well be dead because they were raped pisses me off."
I don't know where you even got that from, it's not even close to anything I said. Stating that some victims will feel that way is not the same as stating that victims should feel that way.
Yes, I was probably being a bit unfairly facetious there :)
For what it's worth I suspect it's a debate we'll be having in the UK soon, there have been a string of high profile prosecutions of historic abuse against high profile celebrities that have failed because it's so hard to prove such an event so long after the fact.
Ultimately this long after the only evidence you can get is circumstantial, and this is why the cases are persistently failing. Despite the fact it's hard to reconcile how multiple victims who have never met can provide non-conflicting accounts of intimate personal details with innocence it's trivial for the defence to simply argue that as a high profile celebrity they're just a victim of money grabbers at which point the jury simply can't possibly accept that the beyond reasonable doubt test has been achieved, hence the innocence ruling. Normally, DNA evidence would swing it in favour of a guilty verdict but in the absence of that 20, 30, 40, in some cases even 50 or more years after the fact what can they do? There seems a reasonable chance at least some of these people are still guilty but how do you prove it beyond reasonable doubt so long after the fact?
Of course then the flip side is that the beyond reasonable doubt test is extremely important, so what do you do? What options are being suggested in Sweden for getting the balance right?