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I don't call Gorbachev a failure.  He was head of a government when, through its own internal structural problems that he inherited, it fell apart.  Many others in his position would have tried to sustain his own power by force, and with resulting civil disorder and grabs for power by multiple factions.  The transition from Soviet Union to CIS was far smoother and far less disorderly than anyone would have predicted, I think.  Yes, the economic problems in the former USSR were horrendous for at least a decade, and probably not yet fully recovered even now; but civil war did not happen and only under its current dictator has Russia resumed conquest of its neighbors by force.  I think it will be decades before a full analysis will appear, but I think a case can be made that Gorbachev was the greatest world statesman of the last quarter of the 20th Century.

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The Journal reports that a certain Mr. Cheeseboro will be spending his prison time in a wheel chair after signing a plea deal for murder. His other charges will run at the same time according to the paper. Mr. Cheeseboro is a victim of bad luck because while he was shooting his victim, his accomplice was shooting him.

CES 

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13 hours ago, Cancer said:

I don't call Gorbachev a failure.  He was head of a government when, through its own internal structural problems that he inherited, it fell apart.  Many others in his position would have tried to sustain his own power by force, and with resulting civil disorder and grabs for power by multiple factions.  The transition from Soviet Union to CIS was far smoother and far less disorderly than anyone would have predicted, I think.  Yes, the economic problems in the former USSR were horrendous for at least a decade, and probably not yet fully recovered even now; but civil war did not happen and only under its current dictator has Russia resumed conquest of its neighbors by force.  I think it will be decades before a full analysis will appear, but I think a case can be made that Gorbachev was the greatest world statesman of the last quarter of the 20th Century.

 

Preservation of the Soviet Union was his stated and implicit goal -- he only wanted to reform it to make it more functional. At that he failed. His overtures to the West to reduce political tensions endeared him in that part of the world, but domestically his efforts contributed to economic hardship and political instability, and that's what Russians remember him for.

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I've noticed that there's often a big disconnect between how national leaders are seen on the world stage, and how they're viewed at home. Global audiences usually only pick up on the leaders of other countries when they do something noteworthy at international events, or that impact a person's own country directly. Domestic audiences witness their leaders daily, and scrutinize how they handle all the affairs of the country, for good and bad. Of course, in more autocratic countries the leader's government generally controls the media and the message their people receive. But that can also lead to disconnect internationally, when their actions are covered by more liberal extra-national media.

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10 hours ago, Pariah said:

 

Eh, Wal Mart was getting scammed as well.  They can't track everything across their marketplace.  Both they and Amazon act simply as a promotional vehicle.

 

And, yeah, I just got a 1 TB external SSD because my HP SSD had weird issues.  IIRC it was about $50.  Prices tend to go UP for extremely large drives, and 30 TB would be well up there.  TechRadar has a story on this...the biggest they found is 100 TB.  And it's $40,000.  Not exactly a home unit;  drives like this are for the seriously massive data centers where speed is also critical.  Think Amazon...those pages aren't small with the amount of graphics involved, and there's *sooo many* products.  Or Facebook...it's reported they generate 4 petabytes a day.  A petabyte is 1000 terabytes.  

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37 minutes ago, unclevlad said:

 

Eh, Wal Mart was getting scammed as well.  They can't track everything across their marketplace.  Both they and Amazon act simply as a promotional vehicle.

 

And, yeah, I just got a 1 TB external SSD because my HP SSD had weird issues.  IIRC it was about $50.  Prices tend to go UP for extremely large drives, and 30 TB would be well up there.  TechRadar has a story on this...the biggest they found is 100 TB.  And it's $40,000.  Not exactly a home unit;  drives like this are for the seriously massive data centers where speed is also critical.  Think Amazon...those pages aren't small with the amount of graphics involved, and there's *sooo many* products.  Or Facebook...it's reported they generate 4 petabytes a day.  A petabyte is 1000 terabytes.  

 

Most of my external drives are still spinning rust--I have a big media collection, and there are still benefits to traditional hard drives for backups and the like. Flash memory isn't really good for long-term storage, as the cards can lose information as the cells lose charge over time. Additionally, it's cheaper for larger capacities (4TB and up). Smaller flash drives (256 GB and lower) are mainly for SneakerNet transfers, and are frequently cleared for reuse afterwards.

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Oh yeah.  For a lot of things, hard drives still work just fine...a co-worker had a personal web site set up with his personal music collection.  This was...15 years ago?  And it was rather sizable.  For that, hard drives are fine.  I've got a terabyte SSD for the system drive, and a 4 TB hard drive for anything non-system.  

 

And for anything that's static...like my Hero PDFs...Google Drive.

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2 hours ago, assault said:

Curiously, Australian native bees are less likely to kill you than bees elsewhere. We also have Introduced species, but so far not the Africanised types that attacked this guy. The quarantine service is very careful about them coming in.


Nice try but we know you’re just trying to lure us into drop bear range. 

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