Of course they do. To China, Russia is a cheap mafia-owned gas station. It can no longer provide any real business opportunities thanks to sanctions; see how the Russian part of Belt and Road got shut down and everything moved south to Kazakhstan.
Long term, Russia used to be a strategic problem to China, as its huge, aggressive direct neighbor. This problem has now been solved, but helping Russia develop would risk it becoming a threat again in a generation or two.
I don’t mean favoritism towards specific companies; I mean suppressing opinions that are inconvenient to companies. For example, blatant anti-Chinese xenophobia or hate speech towards economically disadvantaged seem to be welcome here, but just try to link something to Christian fundamentalism, or try to point out the kinds of hate speech that is still tolerated by American mainstream.
I’d say the real problem is not the technical insecurity - that’s a result. The real problem is in the last paragraph: the fact that banks are incentivized to use insecure mechanisms by being able to shed any responsibility simply by denying customers claim.
Logging is a good example of how the opposite to what you say tends to be true. Have you ever wondered why Windows logs are so useless? It’s not windows-specific; when you look at journald you’ll see plenty of structured junk; the actually useful parts are plaintext.
“Every program as a function” would be a disaster for reliability and security. There’s a reason no mature operating system does that, apart from tiny embedded ones.
So what makes you assume it was “homeless and junkies” who mugged them, and not some Christian republican human trash?
(“Human trash” as a counterpoint to your “junkie” slur; also note I’m not really interested in _your_ response, I already know what you are; the point of this comment is to show dang’s skewed moderation criteria. Might not work this time, so I’ll continue doing it for a while, of course without annotating it.)
Ah. Now I suspect I know what you're talking about: the terror campaign. Essentially what Russia did in Syria - they don't stand a chance against a proper army, but they definitely can commit genocide and level entire cities, like they did in Mariupol.
So, yes, indeed, they are starting to do it again. But because they have already spent most of the tools they could use to do it - we know that because they are forced to use very expensive weapons in a way that doesn't make any sense, like attacking ground targets using anti-ship missiles - it will quickly fizzle out. They got one last push using Iranian ghetto-drones, but even those are in limited quantity - all of this stuff depends on western parts.
I’m not sure about the “plenty of equipment”. Case in point - over the past six months there have been _ten_ Russian plane crashes caused by malfunctions. Even though they almost don’t use their aviation because of lack of air superiority.
One way to fix the problem would be to somehow feed Copilot a corpora of closed source code. This would either force Microsoft to add necessary copyright protections, or - which is imho more likely - would prove that those protections are already in place, but disabled for open source code.
A good start would be to take a leaked code of Windows, and then mechanically adjust all the names, constant values, and code formatting, and then publish it and observe.
I’m not sure if using nukes would get NATO directly involved. First, it would be counterproductive wrt Putin’s goal above. Second, it could provoke strikes against NATO - Russia stands no chance militarily, but they can still kill civilians. Third, I don’t think isn’t even necessary - looking at experiences so far, Ukraine is more than capable of wiping the floor with Russian army, provided they get the hardware necessary. So far NATO has been very (way too much imho) careful to only provide Ukraine with defensive weapons; they didn’t give them cruise missiles or fighter jets, for example. Likewise Ukraine so far avoided striking anything that’s not strictly a military target. Nuclear strike would probably change that.
Puertoricans are American citizens by name only - they can’t vote, for example. It’s a colony, and US treats it as such - it doesn’t enjoy the privileges of actual US territory.
If you want to help, becoming a proper, independent country could be a good start. The majority of citizens opposes the current colonial status, as evidenced by several referendums, but, well, it’s not theirs to decide - because they are just a colony and aren’t allowed to vote.
>How spent are the Russian forces? They haven't even applied 15% of their full forces to this operation
This is in stark contrast to what analysts are saying, which is that Russia already _lost_ about half of its military. Visually confirmed losses of Russian tanks alone are over one thousand units. Russians are so desperate they had to introduce mandatory conscription, despite it being a suicide from political point of view.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proofs, and you hadn’t provided a single source that would support your view.
>as democratic as West
Lol, no. Russia isn’t even a dysfunctional democracy; it lacks basic prerequisites to become one. You’re probably imagining Russia is kind of like Eastern Europe, only poorer. It’s not - the "cultural distance” between Russia and, say, Poland is much greater then between Poland and, say, UK.
Such as USA with $11B of goods manufactured by forced labour in prison camps?
(Note: this is not whataboutism, it’s pointing out hypocrisy.)