kutakbash

Politkovskaya case is attributed to her activity in Chechnya, which falls under 'provincial oligarchs' rubric I mentioned upthread. That's pretty bad, but that's not the government still.

So somehow Russian government is unworthy of presumption of innocence? Or it is guilty as long as dominant discourse asserts it is? Once again, Russian government is not responsible for murdering journalists, there is no firm evidence it is. Certainly not for most of people on that list on the wiki.

Yeah, I see that link come up pretty often. First off, does it really make sense to attribute to government each and every journalist who was killed, for whatever reason? Including sports reporter, including the guy from press service of the Moscow Region governor? Mind you, homicide rate in Russia is twice as high as that of the US.

Sure, it looks like government isn't providing them (and everyone else, for that matter) with enough security, but it's nothing like saying it deliberately murders them. The most hard evidence for me is that Russian press itself doesn't put much emphasis on it.

It's not really proven that Russian government murders journalists. Though. Which is the whole premise of my comment.

>which runs a sideline business in murdering inconveniently critical journalists

Not trying to defend Russian govt (which is without a doubt pretty sinister), but this 'journalist murdering' thing that pops up every time Westerners discuss Russian internal policy is a bit off the mark. The way you say it cues that all Russian media is pro-government and Russian citizens en masse are either brainwashed drones or impregnable oppositional free-thinkers. While in fact its only TV which is thoroughly controlled by the government. Russian press is pretty vocal and most of it is clearly critical of the United Russia party policy. More so Russian online press — I don't know a single popular online news outlet which isn't critical of United Russia (modestly or very much so). Sure there are a couple of high profile murder cases that may be linked to Russian govt, but list of murdered journalists found in wiki is in its entirety composed either of people died in 90s or people whose death may (or may not) be connected with provincial level oligarchs, especially on North Caucasus. So saying that murdering journalists is what Russian govt does is just not true. It is true that govt doesn't provide them with utmost security though.

Why do I even care? Because you guys could be more critical of real and serious United Russia's wrongdoings (like prosecution of a row of activists involved in protests of 2011-2), instead of reiterating on secondary matters like journalist murders (ostensibly committed by government) or gay rights.

I hope I will not have to change accounts after this post.

Truth be told, you won't be able to call them 'communists' (evil or good) regardless.

Why on Earth do they need to tap athletes? Mr. Putin heard about NSA and thought Russia needs some surveillance as well to look cool?

The curl part is also pretty shoddy btw. Would you really use curl to setup a server running behind TOR? I don't have adequate 'training and experience', but it seems natural that website working through TOR should use normal web server software behind some sort of reverse proxy, not curl. He, whoever, wrote that document, seems to imply that questions about curl and TOR network are necessarily connected with running a website through it. He also doesn't mention dates of the questions.

Is it really? If you look past Western Europe and North America it is definitely not. And even there you can see things, like that spike in Bay Area. Except for population size, there seem to be at least two more major factors at play: wealth and English proficiency. Even in Europe they are clearly visible: Oslo and Sofia are about the same population, Rome is at least three times more populated than Edinburgh. So, no, not really.

Strangely, this is not so different from Belarus as you would imagine.

Is it really a norm? Most of online stores don't attempt to 'validate' your CC number in this way. Entire reshipping businesses are built on this premise.

Sometimes these arbitrary pseudo-technical restrictions are just infuriating. Once I came across an online store that wouldn't let you ship to one country and pay with credit card of another one (say, you try to order something to the US and pay with Canadian credit card), like no one ever moves between countries. Or Elance.com won't check your address in Belarus because they don't 'support' Belarus (I guess it means they didn't want to find anyone who can read Belarussian), preventing anyone from Belarus from using their service.

It's great the author brought this problem to everyone's attention.

I see your point, but nowadays English is not merely yet another foreign language, in a way it belongs to people of all over the world by right of their contribution to universal English-speaking culture (think Vladimir Nabokov or Linus Torvalds). Today Runglish (flavour of English spoken by those whose mother tongue is Russian) is nothing but derogatory term, but some day, when most of Russians will know English well enough, we are going to start to skip articles out of pure pride.

This, pretty much. "Cancel" is always going to stay [kuh-ntseh-l], "OK" [oh-k] and "Delete" [deh-leh-t].