Not saying you're wrong but there are many issues with "democracy" in states under Russian control. Yanukovych's main opponent during his first stint as a presidential candidate was "miraculously" poisoned. Federal units within Russia that are clearly against Russian rule regularly give 100% of all their votes to Putin during "democratic" elections (with turnouts reaching above 100%), and so on and so on.
Sure, there are these problems with Chechen region (not Ukrain). But the last presidential elections of Yanukovich, because of the 2004 fiasco, were extremely closely watched by very many groups and were internationally acknowledged as legitimate.
The deportation happened in 1944, the 1939 census shows Russians at 49,6%. Crimean Tatars were down to 19,4%.
That still doesn't excuse Russian intervention the last few days, though.
>Genocide works.
Genocide and deportations or ethnic cleansing are distinct things. Deporting hundreds of thousands of people is already bad enough, no need to use terms that don't apply to it.
"It's the biggest public outcry Google's faced thus far."
Care to share what metrics are you using to define that?
I just dont see this. Including that Google got under fire for closing Google reader, NSA leaks, Wi-Fi data gathering, circumventing safari protections to track users, privacy policy consolidation, etc.
If you look only at the latest youtube thing, it might not be the worst google's been through. But if you look back at all the examples you compiled, two of them happened in the last 6 months. I don't know how it's all perceived outside of the "tech community", and maybe people don't care after all. My impression of all this is that it's a lot of bad press, in a fairly short amount of time. It's definitely changed my view on google, and I guess the question that all articles / speculations / blogspams are trying to get at is: how many people's views of google changed as a result to the recent events. And is that number big enough to start worrying google?
A common view, from what I gather, is that being a "data-driven" company, google has probably run the numbers and concluded that whatever "outcry" is going on, it is the result of a small group, and that it is not going to threaten their business. I am usually wary of such non-arguments. I really don't know what the short-term/long-term effects of all this are going to be (if any), but I don't think that any company can really predict the full extent of "bad press" either. So even if it's a relatively small percentage of the user base, writing off this movement as being "insignificant" seems a little unwise.
... because allowing every minority or every individual to use their own alphabet would soon require the full unicode support everywhere, which is not a big deal, as well as that everyone else knows how to read/write it, which is a big deal.
Btw, I am also not allowed to use Cyrillic alphabet or latin "ć" here in Germany when filling out official forms, but I don't consider that my rights are somehow jeopardized because of that.
The Polish minority in Lithuania is autochtone, as far as I know (unlike Cyrillic in Germany). Furthermore, it's not merely a matter of not using the Polish letters - as the link that I provided says, their names get Lithuanized. (Mickiewicz > Mickevičius)
Since I assume you're Serbian (your handle + the mention of ć and Cyrillic), here's an example.
Imagine that the Hungarians in North of Serbia weren't allowed to write their name as Szabo Lajos (or Lajos Szabo) and instead they were forced to use Lajoš Sabić.
> Imagine that the Hungarians in North of Serbia weren't allowed to write their name as Szabo Lajos (or Lajos Szabo) and instead they were forced to use Lajoš Sabić.
You are absolutely right here. I was speaking only about an alphabet part of the problems, and why it is not practical. Forcing someone else to "translate" the name is completely other problem, which is much more severe. There is certainly a difference between writing István as Ištvan simply because it's how it's pronounced and the lack of á in alphabet and forcing him to call himself Ivan (or Stefan).
There are many offenders to this, like Greece, or Bulgaria, or China, which IIRC at one moment required its own citizens to have "westernized" names in their travel documents.
The new Gmail's focus on whitespace, hiding buttons that don't do anything yet (until you check things of course), the new compose panel (with ultra-minimalistic controls and send to/from fields), Google's removal of the black bar, the auto-overflow for labels, lack of borders, lack of "containers," etc. etc. all convince me of Gmail's minimalism.
Just about the only thing that isn't minimal about it anymore is the footer.
It would be interesting to know why the option is enabled by default for some (most?) Google accounts and why it isn't for some (few?) Google accounts.
Are you sure about that? Jeffrey Carney, an American who worked for the US Air Force and spied for the DDR, was sentenced to 38 years in prison, but only ended up serving 11 years.
Except it's not only informationless hyperbole, it's also just a tired catchphrase at this point. Witness the thread from yesterday on the verge story covering the same post that is this submission[1]. You'll notice a "Don't be evil" and an "Open always wins" comment there too. Mix in some beowulf clusters and netcraft confirmations and we can be well on our way to generating these threads via markov chains. No humans needed!
Although I'm pretty satisfied with my current reader, and wasn't looking for a replacement, this looks really nice. It didn't require linking my Google account, OPML import worked instantly unlike on some other readers, the interface is nice, editing folders and feeds works through the main interface (rather than requiring a special menu)
