Finally, now I understand all those references to "good old times"

Perm is a decent place by Russian standards. At least it was :)

Too bad it'll never work out. The station deserves to be build for the sake of high energy beams randomly poking earth surface due to a software glitch.

There are police officers' day and physicians' day among official Russian holidays.

You're doing something wrong.

Science isn't about improving human life - it's about "just looking at stuff, and figuring out how it works". Science is a goal, in and of itself. The bulk of the science does nothing to imrove human life, and that's ok.

First learn to use Helium 3, than start mining it, not the other way around. Right now Helium 3 is absolutely useless.

send probes out.

was arguably the greatest science fiction writer would be more accurate, IMHO.

Times have changed.

Most likely the reasoning was "Hey, everyone seems to get money from MS, why not us?". The rest is a smokescreen.

Cetainly not "almost everyone". Russian authorities are really fighting piracy for the last couple of years. Of course a)it's done with their usual level of competence and eagerness b)it's most likely the result of some (cough cough MS?) companies figuring out "how thing work in post-soviet countries", not a genuine desire of Russian authorities to protect intellectual property.

How exactly would you do that?

"government" and "criminals" are definitely not the same thing. government is just the biggest player on that market (in fact, several players - government agencies commit crimes on their own, not conspiring but, in fact, competing with each other), but there are lot's of others who want their own slice of the pie

"We've got fivefold increase of health-related complaints since we installed that cellular antenna. That's pretty scary. What's gonna happen when we actually start to use it?"