oddx

Another effect of "single child policy" is significant prevalence of number of men over women. And it's known for making society significantly more aggressive.

If you want understand what communists did in China it's better look on other numbers. For example, rise of life expectancy was incredible (especially if you look at comparable country like India) http://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&c...

Child mortality http://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&c...

From my personal experience I can confirm p. 1, totally disagree with p.2 (there are plenty of good and well payed jobs for IT specialists in xUSSR countries). About p.3 - exploit-selling is not a respectable profession, but in recent 20 years people have seen too many examples of people becoming rich by illegal and dirty ways and this definitely did bad influence.

Because Amazon doesn't want to confirm it I'm pretty sure they don't use ECC.

i7-920 works with 48GB http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/313665-30-48gb#4425619

SORM is used for selective surveillance (by adjudication) and not even close for total monitoring programs like PRISM.

I look at the numbers because they are something that can not be speculated and manipulated easily.

Lets take a claim "a random chance could land you in jail". I've seen numbers that percent miscarriage of justice in US is about 5-10% (not sure it's correct, but anyway even for death penalty there are many mistakes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrongful_execution). So for modern US 0.05% (about 160000 people) are in jail by random chance. I don't have numbers of USSR and, again, I am not trying to compare. I show that you should be very careful when using simple claims without numbers.

Or let take "simple political joke". Do you know that in many modern countries you can go to jail for ten years just for telling something that is not accepted by mainstream (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_against_Holocaust_denial#A...)? Again it's incorrect to compare. but I think raw numbers people in prison is quite accurate and objective estimate of "badness" of system. And for USSR in thirtieth numbers doesn't look very terrible.

1. Healthcare was avaliable in GULAG prisoners. And it was free of course 2. Yes, GULAG workers get 3 meals a day (often part as dry ration) 3. Workday in GULAG was about 10 hours, so yes they have about 6 hours leisure time.

But this isn't my point. Of course conditions in prison in modern US is better then in USSR 80 years ago. My point that you have higher probability go to jail in modern US then in USSR in thirtieth. Target for great terror in USSR was elite and it was insignificant (again, lesser then in modern US) for ordinary people.

V-2 is progenitor of all modern rockets, but it's difficult to call it "minimal modifications": compare http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Fus%C3%A9e_V2.jpg ,http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:V-2_rocket_diagram_%28with... and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:R-7_%287A%29_misil.svg, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sputnik_8K71PS_grey.svg

Yes, United States stopped using penal labor at twentieth (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_labour#United_States). Soviet Union at fifties.

I think 30 years lag is not soo bad considering level of social-economic development of USSR and USA.

May be it was no best model, but about "hundreds of thousands to forced labor camps"- it was about 1 million people in GULAG before second world war (0.59% of 170 millions population). For modern USA incarceration rate is 0.74%. Are you sure it's better model?

> You want a competition between producers? Have you tried the so-called 'market'?

Market is nice when you have many producers. But as soon as company became 'too big to fail' competition disappearing.