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> 30 foot razor wire fences, and mile wide minefields.

LOL OMFG!

MILE WIDE !!! MINEFIELDS !!!

May be the confusion is with USA-Mexico border? o_O


No, I knew exactly where I was, each and every time I drove into Russia. Pretty hard to confuse with the USA.


Yeah... about as easy as to meet a wild drunken bear with a balalaika on a Moscow street.


Wow, so you'd have to work pretty hard not to receive a fake passport, then.


Nice strawman there, dude


May be Vatican.


they only offer asylum to child molesters


Let me think... it would be... the same?



So Russians feel sympathetic and supporting lending a help to a mere human who just tried to help his country and now his country hunts him down like a wild animal.

But that is somehow bad, eh? o_O

P.S. Hey, Alex, why stop at Osama?! You forgot to mention Hitler! That would be more dramatic, and equally cheap brainwashing tactic.


Snowden will halt the revelations abruptly. He would be a fool to break the agreement with Putin.

Putin is a man of his word, and expects the same from Snowden.

Information may continue to leak, but not from Snowden. His part of the show is finished (and luckily for him, he's not even bruised!).


My guess is that Putin would be happy to have Snowden break the agreement, as long as he doesn't go to the press and take credit for it. Putin's government has been working constantly to undermine America's foreign influence, and these leaks go a long way towards doing that.


> Putin's government has been working constantly to undermine America's foreign influence

Can you elaborate on that? Any concrete examples of how they were doing this?

From the same Putin's regime we hear the same about the US, although just guesses, no facts. I'm curious how the west sees that.


I have no doubt its true for the US too. They're competing for influence in many parts of the globe.

Its not a rigorous example, but I think the front page of RT (the Russian - state backed media outlet) is a good example. Most of the US based stories are highly critical of the US government. It's also no coincidence that Julian Assange has his own show on RT.

I also believe Russia's backing of Assad is mostly an attempt to block Western influence in the middle east. But there's probably a number of reason and thats just one.


>Information may continue to leak, but not from Snowden. His part of the show is finished (and luckily for him, he's not even bruised!).

In my opinion, being exiled from your home and living the rest of your life with the world superpower ready to kidnap you is relatively bruising.


> Putin is a man of his word

:-)


Can you provide proof to otherwise? I'd imagine you've done proper research on the topic of Putin's honesty due to the flippant response.


He's a politician.


Basically, he's a politician ;-)


I'm always amazed how the public opinion of putin ranges from "evil dictator" to "clever politician".


To become an evil dictator, it's often necessary to be a clever politician.


I had trouble putting this in words. By "clever politician" I mean people seeing Putin on TV or something and saying, "Ah, thats very clever" or even "Pretty amusing how he dealt with/did x". Media coverage in Central Europe is always very critical towards Putin, and while their stories may be distorted in some respects, I still believe them about many civilian rights beeing violated under his influence.


Isn't it the same for every politician?


Any reasons to believe otherwise?

The only thing I hold against him is his failure, as promised, to hang Georgian president by his balls. Eating necktie is a weak substitute.


Being president of a large country pretty much guarantees you've had to lie and cheat at least a little bit to get there.

For one random example (not being a huge student of 21st century Russia), he promised Bush that he wasn't arming Saddam's troops. Turned out they were outfitted with a lot of Russian anti-tank and night vision gear when we got there.


> For one random example (not being a huge student of 21st century Russia), he promised Bush that he wasn't arming Saddam's troops. Turned out they were outfitted with a lot of Russian anti-tank and night vision gear when we got there.

That doesn't say anything about Russia arming Saddam's troops. I'm sure there are a lot of cases U.S. arming their "allies" and then these weapons in some way became available to terrorists...

I simply don't think it is possible to know and predict how and by whom weapons will be used.


Proof, please? Soviet-designed doesn't mean Russian. Soviet designs are in manufacturing all over the world, including countries much closer to Iraq.



That could be done via 3rd party like Ukraine without direct involvement or even awareness of Russian government.


He's well known to fake publicity stunts, such as:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2045848/Vladimir-Put...

Remember, he comes from the KGB, eventually rising to be the FSB director (the KGB successor).


Reason? He's politician.


Working for a year almost full time and get "new car" revenue is not a financial success. Sorry.


> Anybody who wants to sue you must post a $25k USD bond to the Nevis government before even proceeding.

Why would they do that? o_O

They will file at their local US court. You're free to sell to Nevis all that you want -- but do not come with your product into US until the US litigation is won.


Right! US Customs will just confiscate your network traffic at the border.


The traffic is not interesting. Business transactions are; incidentally, the transactions are trivially blocked.


> “one of the largest surveillance efforts ever launched by a democratic government.”

Common, don't be shy! Don't pretend there are some "non-democratic" governments somewhere that do even more surveillance!

Largest ever launched by any government, by far.


Samsung was in South Korea. Apple blocked Samsung's sales in US based on patent issues.

It doesn't matter where you're located. What matters where you want to do business.


Blocking business seems like an unusual step, or at least we rarely hear about it in the news. Is there any precedent for a patent case successfully blocking a business whose service is all on a website? If so, what happened? Did they simply take over the domain? What if a business used a foreign owned domain?

I feel like there are options here that may not have been tried. Presumably a patent troll could try to tell your payment service and US based servers not to do business with you, but I haven't heard of that either, aside from credit card companies blocking Wikileaks and the US govt seizing servers suspected of hosting illegal stuff. I forgot why the US govt seized servers in VA a few years back but the point is that is pretty unusual too and I wonder how far a patent troll would go or how difficult it would be for them to get through all that.

The only way China blocks Facebook, for example, is through a massive firewall, and their businesses generally don't accept any foreign credit cards. The US seems unlikely to put in a huge firewall or modify DNSs to go after small businesses for patent trolls..


Wikileaks blockade is a good example of the power that can be used when parties fail to come to an agreement.

Most companies though prefer to settle out of court because the court is quite a gambling, that's why we do not hear it more often.


Wikileaks is based in Sweden and was seen as threatening by the US govt.

Companies that settle out of court are, from what I have read, small to medium sized US based companies that can face legal action if they do nothing.

What I am talking about is a small company that is foreign based in a place that does not comply with US patents. Has there been one that has ignored US patents and been shut down by having their domain blocked or their US payments disallowed?


In other words, is being small & poor a good defense against trolls? Yes, it is.

Try to get bigger though or get a investment round, and troll will come after you.

It is not a coincidence that the company in the article's got trolls about the same time it's got an investment.


What matters where you want to do business.

Only if you're a hardware startup.

If you're doing software as a service and you can deal with latency issues, you can operate many places where US patent law doesn't apply to you or to your customers. Canada and Mexico have high speed connections to the USA and Germany or Korea aren't so slow either.


SaaS are not immune too.

Example:

http://www.ca.com/ca/en/news/Press-Releases/na/2013/CA-Techn...

"... seeking ... an injunction against AppDynamics prohibiting the infringement of CA Technologies patents"

In case CA wins, the court will prohibit AppDynamics to sell any product that violate CA's patents.

Yes, one may host the company in Canada. How to sell to US customers though? VISA, MC and AMEX all have US presence and will comply with the court order (CA's lawyers will undoubtfully provide a copy). Paypal and other various Stripes are just facades to the very same VISA et all.

Without ability to charge for the product, where the business is going to be?


CA is in New York; AppDynamics is in San Francisco. Those are both places in the USA.

Getting an injunction against a company outside the USA for software running outside the USA is not within the claimed jurisdiction of US patent laws.


So we has just established that not only hardware companies are at risk. Good.

Now, step two: US trolls will not sue a company doing business outside of US; too much trouble. But any company doing business in US is a subject to local laws, and most SaaS companies want to work on US market simply because it is the biggest one.

"Doing business in US" means, among other things, having US customers and using US payment processors.


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