With interceptors that cost the defender $100k/unit and shaheds that cost the attacker $10k/unit, over time the attacker can bankrupt the defender if the target is something the defender cannot afford to lose. Sometimes it takes several interceptors to eliminate the threat. Therefore part of the focus in the design of interceptors is to keep their unit cost low.
The unit cost of the first versions of shaheds may have been $10k; more recent models that fly higher, are equipped with a jet engine, more sophisticated electronics, cameras etc. are significantly more expensive. To the point it's not clear to me, of Ukraine or Russia, who pays the higher price during a mass attack at the moment.
One I can think of is simplicity. No need to worry about what the type of the string should be (size_t?) or where it should be stored. Just pass around a pointer. Pointers fit the size of a CPU register most of the time. Though in my opinion the drawbacks (O(N) performance, NUL forbidden etc.) outweigh this benefit we are stuck. Many kernel interfaces like open, getdents etc. assume NUL-terminated strings, therefore any low-level language or library has to support them.
A rate of 10 000 (ten thousand) RPM is mentioned in the video for certain bacteria. My background is in mechanical engineering, does RPM stand for revolutions per minute here? Sounds unbelievably fast for biochemical processes.
In the EU, they've had the GDPR – a big, muscular privacy law – for nine years, and all it's really done is drown the continent in cookie-consent pop-ups. But that's not because the GDPR is flawed, it's because Ireland is a tax-haven that has lured in the world's worst corporate privacy-violators, and to keep them from moving to another tax haven (like Malta or Cyprus or Luxembourg), it has to turn itself into a crime-haven. So for the entire life of the GDPR, all the important privacy cases in Europe have gone to Ireland, and died there:
Now, again, this isn't a complicated technical question that is hard to resolve through regulation. It's just boring old corruption. I'm not saying that corruption is easy to solve, but I am saying that it's not complicated. Irish politicians made the country's economy dependent on the Irish state facilitating criminal activity by American firms. The EU doesn't want to provoke a constitutional crisis by forcing Ireland (and the EU's other crime-havens) to halt this behavior.
European leaders are far from blameless. I fully agree European countries should have weaned themselves from Russian gas and ramped up military spending much sooner. Meanwhile for a long time the US retained control of NATO military structures in Europe. And recently Trump granted a waiver allowing Hungary to continue importing Russian oil. And there is talk from the US about reviving Nordstream, that both Trump and Biden harshly (and fairly IMO) criticized.
Trump being thin-skinned does not explain much. The latest strategy document where the US administration explicitly says it will do its utmost to bring far-right parties to power in Europe goes far beyond that. It's clearly not just Trump. And again, it definitely does not help keep friends to face China. Neither does twisting Ukraine's arm to accept a disastrous deal in exchange for vague promises of riches for Trump and his clan. History shows appeasing an aggressor invites more aggression. Russia's partner, China, is watching, will sense weakness and draw conclusions neither Europe nor America will like.
I am now convinced that Russian complaints about supposed US influence campaigns, “NATO expansion” etc. were never sincere. Russia has conducted info-ops in the West forever, during the Cold War and after. If there's an expansionist power here in Europe, it's Russia. Liberal democracy stands in its way so it's no wonder Russia fights against it in every way, both at home and abroad. Authoritarian regimes are notorious for using grievances, real or made-up, to justify their authoritarian rule and hostile actions toward other countries. Nazi Germany: Versailles treaty, supposed oppression of Germans in Sudetenland; Hungary: Trianon treaty; Serbia: Ottoman rule; China: opium wars. I could go on but the last example is interesting: Russia took land from China in the 19th century, yet China only talks about the actions of Western nations. Which shows IMO that these grievances are a mere tool to advance geopolitical interests and should not be taken too seriously. Many moves were made to bring Russia and West closer: Russian leaders showed repeatedly by their actions that they were not interested.
There is not shortage of narratives Russian propagandists disseminate via influencers or useful idiots, tuned for the appropriate audience. You identify as a pacifist? Russia is a peaceful nation, it's its adversaries that are the warmongers! (Don't ask how Russia became so large.) You oppose colonialism? Russia stands against US hegemony, demands a multi-polar world! (In reality Russia behaves as a colonial empire and has a long history of oppression of the nations it has conquered.) You identify as a conservative? Russia is the main defender of order and traditional Christian values! (Well, the Russian Orthodox Church is just an arm of the state security services; church attendance is low; crime and divorce rates are high; Russia has no problem with Islamic regimes like the Taliban, Iran, Hamas or Kadyrov's Chechnya.)
I do not deny the threat China poses and that the way the West approached globalization was naive. Indeed, China has close ties with regimes of Russia, Iran and North Korea. Given this reality, what I don't understand is the policies of the current US administration. China is churning out missiles, warships etc. at an alarming rate, yet the US reduces military spending. China's reach via TikTok is growing yet the US administration does next to nothing about it. The US sided with Russia and North Korea on UN votes about Ukraine (https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/02/1160456). Trump antagonizes traditional EU allies, except those with authoritarian tendencies like Orban's Hungary. On the other hand, he has only kind words for Putin, Xi, Kim; his only complaint seems to be that he's not a member of their club.
> Are you suggesting that the Russians were using __ The Guardian __ as part of an influence campaign....in 2004?
Definitely! Because they did the exact same thing in France, where I lived at that time, and probably other countries. I remember op-eds in French newspapers, Russia-friendly politicians on TV with the same talking points.
My wife and I go married on Oct 31st, 2004, the day of the first round of this election. These are things I can't forget, like her voting in Kyiv in her wedding dress.
Thinking the US ambassador could gather crowds of hundreds of thousands during long winter weeks all by himself, even with a few million USD is ridiculous, especially when you know the country. This is not at all how it works.
There was massive fraud during the second round, evidence of it was abundant, election monitors and independent organizations like OSCE witnessed it.
Yushchenko, controlled by the US government? There is no indication of that. And when his term ended, power was transferred peacefully to Yanukovych.
Ukrainians are educated people and just like anywhere else do not like to be told what to do from abroad, be it from Washington or Moscow. Now that the US government sides with that of Russia and Ukrainians continue to resist the pressure, it is even more obvious that these narratives were completely false.
The linked article is long on opinion, short on facts. The content does not support the headline. This is likely part of a Russian influence campaign (they did not start yesterday), aimed at de-legitimizing the protest movement and denying that Ukrainian citizens had any agency.
I had a similar experience of writing machine code for Z80-based computers (Amstrad CPC) in the 90's, as a teenager. I didn't have an assembler so I manually converted mnemonics to hex. I still remember a few opcodes: CD for CALL, C9 for RET, 01 for LD BC, 21 for LD HL... Needless to say, the process was tedious and error-prone. Calculating relative jumps was a pain. So was keeping track of offsets and addresses of variables and jump targets. I tended to insert nops to avoid having to recalculate everything in case I needed to modify some code... I can't say I miss these times.
I'm quite sure none of my friends knew any CPU opcode; however, people usually remembered a few phone numbers.
In a dictatorship, running against the leader involves more personal risk than in a country that is already democratic. Also, democracies tend to be more peaceful than dictatorships; my understanding is that efforts to transition from dictatorship to democracy may be regarded as a contribution to peace.
She also received the Sakharov Prize not long ago; if she had to receive only one, the latter would be easier to explain.
Ukraine was left out of NATO. When Russia first invaded in 2014, European leaders looked the other way. Claims that there plans for Ukraine to join NATO and that Russia felt threatened and was forced to attack are just lies to attempt to justify this war.
At the time fictions like "Russian-backed separatists" were made up to deny the reality: that it was a foreign invasion. Yet all the signs were there: for example, "separatist" leaders like Igor Girkin were citizens of Russia, not Ukraine; OSCE observers found military vehicles containing documentation indicating that the equipment had been maintained in Russia.
European leaders called for "deescalation", "political resolution"; seeing weakness and appeasement in the Minsk agreements, Putin escalated. That's the problem with aggressive leaders like Putin: if you look weak and vulnerable, they will attack you.
Russian leaders see Russia as an empire and regularly say Eurasia should extend from Lisbon to Vladivistok. Putin tries to terrorize us, stating that if we resist it will lead to "World War III" or "nuclear apocalypse". We must not fall for this, or we will gradually lose our freedoms.
Russia is the aggressor in this war; if it stopped its aggression and withdrew from Ukraine, the war would stop. So the responsibility for deescalating falls squarely on Russia.
Russia has no intention to stop; on the contrary it is ramping up the production of military equipment. As only military means can stop a military aggression, it makes every sense for European leaders to support Ukraine militarily.
If anything, European leaders deserve criticism for not supporting Ukraine enough.
I have heard this move characterized as "horizontal escalation". Putin is stuck in Ukraine (hasn't taken anything strategically significant, controls less territory than 3 years ago). So he tries to widen the confrontation geographically.