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Comment Re:Btrfs (Score 5, Insightful) 271

If this is the case, whats the fucking point really?

The fucking point is to encourage beta-testers. Bleeding-edge users who know what they are doing and don't care about data loss are being offered the chance to test a new and interesting filesystem and (ab)use it in ways that upstream developers had not thought of, hopefully uncovering major bugs before the thing will get marked as feature-complete and enabled by default for new installs by major distros.

Comment look beyond the party slogans (Score 1) 156

United Russia is the party of Putin's yes-men, put in parliament to approve anything that Putin proposes. Stupendously corrupt and proud of it. A Just Russia are random leftists who make a show of being in the opposition, but are for the most part too scared to oppose Putin on important matters. Liberal Democrats are assorted wingnuts, clowns, mafiosi, and nationalists who try hard to be more Putinist than Putin himself. Communists are Soviet dinosaurs, supported by old people nostalgic for the USSR and by young people disgusted with the other major parties.

Comment Re:Courts are supposed to be predictable (Score 1) 186

Note quite. Lower level courts, the ones that hand out the final decision for the vast majority of everyday cases, are supposed to be predictable. But the Supreme Court is supposed to only handle appeals for the most difficult and borderline cases where nobody can really tell in advance what the right decision ought to be. Your local traffic court's decisions are supposed to be very predictable, but it's truly disturbing if an algorithm can accurately model SCOTUS.

Comment Re:No shit (Score 2, Informative) 146

15 times that farm's quota

Not quite. The law that you are referring to (passed by the Politburo of the Ukrainian Communist Party, which at the time was led by an ethnic Pole) stated that if a farm failed to meet its quota, the farm could be subject to fines of up to 15 monthly quotas of meat. Even if government agents decided to apply the maximum penalty and to seize the fine immediately, in theory the farm would still be left with grain and vegetables.

Comment Great move, Sweden. (Score 2, Insightful) 115

Let's make it harder for websites to use cookies for legitimate purposes such as persistent logins, habituate Swedish computer users to clicking on the "yes, allow" button, and make foreign companies face trial in Swedish courts for using standard web technologies, while doing nothing about advertisers' ability to track users without permission!

Comment Re:No shit (Score 2, Interesting) 146

And to expand on my point: the 1932-1933 Soviet famine wasn't genocide. It was a horrific man-made accidental disaster that affected the entire Soviet grain belt with no regard for ethnicity, and was caused by a combination of poorly thought-out and brutally implemented collectivization, habitual use of fake statistics, and a bureaucratic culture where underlings were afraid to tell their higher-ups that the higher-ups' "wise policies" were rapidly leading to disaster. Thirty years later, the same scenario was played out on an even grander scale, and with even more victims, during China's Great Leap Forward.

Comment Re:No shit (Score 3, Informative) 146

they tried to starve us to death

Who's "they"? Do you mean Stalin (a Georgian)? Or maybe you are talking about the (ethnic Ukrainian) communist functionaries who sent Stalin fake statistics to try to convince him that his economic policies were working well and that there was no starvation in Ukraine? And who is "us"? Because the entire grain belt of the Soviet Union (covering parts of Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan) was starving in 1932-1933. Millions of ethnic Russians starved to death too, yet today the Ukrainian authorities are cynically trying to appropriate the tragedy for themselves and portraying the event as an Ukrainian genocide by the evil Russians.

Comment Re:The Ukrainian complaints are utterly ridiculous (Score 1) 146

where Ilya Muromets came from is known today as the Ukraine

Ilya Muromets came from Murom. Murom is and has always been in Russia, not Ukraine. And it's in the solidly Russian part of Russia; the territories where Ukrainians form a major part of the population are hundreds of miles to the south.

Comment The Ukrainian complaints are utterly ridiculous (Score 4, Informative) 146

Back in the middle ages, when these fairy tales were created, Russians and Ukrainians were one, united ethnic group speaking one language (it took many centuries for the languages and cultures to drift apart, and Ukrainians didn't really start to develop a separate national identity until the 19th century); so claiming that an ancient fairy tale character is exclusively Ukrainian or exclusively Russian is utterly ridiculous. Unless, of course, that character is somehow firmly tied to a particular geographic location. One such example is Ilya Muromets, who (as you can guess from the name) is from the town of Murom, located in Russia, 400 miles north-west of the Ukrainian border. The insane people claiming Ilya Muromets exclusively for Ukrainian folklore have clearly failed both history and geography.

Comment On the plus side.. (Score 2) 145

...the people who resort to buying ISK from RMTers are usually those who don't know how to earn ISK legally in the game - i.e. noobs and clueless folk of one form or another. So of course they end up spending all their bought ISK on shiny ships that they have no idea how to fly properly, quickly get themselves blown up, and leave wrecks full of juicy loot for those of us who play by the rules.

Comment For the xenophobes and small-town residents (Score 4, Informative) 159

who are wondering why healthcare language barrier is such a major issue in America:
  • In major US cities, there are a lot of people who were born overseas and don't known English well. They include foreign tourists (whose grasp of English may be limited to a few dozen phrases from a guidebook); recently arrived immigrants who haven't had time to fully learn the language; and residents of ethnic enclaves who don't know much English because they don't need to — 95% of their daily communication is in another language.
  • Human biology being what it is, the people who are the most likely to find themselves in need of medical attention are old. And old people universally suck at languages. They have trouble remembering new vocabulary, they have trouble getting the pronunciation right, and when they get stressed (such as when they are in a hospital due to a sudden medical problem), they tend to forget English words and phrases and have to resort to their native language.
  • Even foreigners who know English fairly well may have trouble with medical vocabulary (if you don't believe me, here is a quick illustration: if there is a foreign language that you think you know pretty well, try saying "irregular heartbeat" or "intestinal bleeding" in it). Not to mention the prevalence of false cognates (e.g. "angina" means "chest pains" in English and "tonsillitis" in Russian) and the fact that different countries often use completely different names for the same drug.

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