KaskadskyjKozak

Those are essentially entity references to unicode characters - similar to HTML markup ">" to represent a ">" character

Yeah, look what happens when you try and post in cyrillic: Вот и что-то написано по-русски I used the Windows 1251 encoding...

Esli tak, togda podskazhi mne pozhalujste: pochemu komunisty eshche v sili v Kitayu? I kogda ikh sistema raspadetsya? Mne kazhetsya, chto svitlo na konce togo zhe tunnelya eshche ne vidno...

I'm no liberal, but I have to agree with you on NASCAR... as for beer, the only domestics I like are Microbrews.

That is a great little qualifyer. A chto novoye? Vot i istoriya Rosii i russkikh lyudej (da sosyedov yikh tozhe), nesmotrya na politicheskuyu sistemu, chas.

It was sustainable at the expense of its people. The return of a hard-liner, who clamped down on them could have kept things going. And you are how old? What did you SEE? Give me a break. If you "saw" things going down in 1989-1991 that does not cut it. We are talking about the world as it WOULD have been if Reagan had NOT been president. You need to go back to 1980 for that. It is intellectually dishonest to look at the Soviet Economy in the late 80's and state that Reagan did not have a significant impact on said economy and that it would have collapsed on its own. Reagan's policies were in play for years affecting the economy by this time and the two can not be separated. You need to go back to the state of the Soviet Economy under the Carter administration. Russia has never had a "healthy" system. Ever. What I expected for the Soviets, given free reign to do as they pleased under a non-confrontation Chamberlain-esque diplomacy, was more misery and suffering for Eastern Europe and the Soviet peoples at any cost necessary to keep the sovyetskaya nomenklatura fat and rich.

Nothing was in the cards. You can not possibly know how things would have turned out with a continuation of detante. Slashing of the military budget (say, under a 2nd Carter administration), and retreating from confrontation with Soviet-led international communism would have significantly reduced internal political and economic pressures within the Soviet Union to an extent that could have made their system sustainable. And the cost would have been how many more years of slavery for the peoples of Eastern Europe, the Baltics, Ukraine, and the Central Asian countries?

The policies of the Reagan administration forced the Soviet Union into a political and economic collapse. Had his predecessors' policy of detante continued, there is no guarantee that the collapse would have occurred on the same time frame - if ever. The Soviet Union had weaknesses which were exploited to our advantage at the right time. Gorbachev wanted to fine-tune the communist economy and hold the Soviet Union together (including the Baltics). He is to be credited for trying to reform his country on the one hand and for not taking a hard line when his empire began to crumble.

What a crock. I just love this type of revisionism: you disagreed with Reagan's policies - which history has proven to have been correct. So, you must attempt to show that he had nothing to do with his successes (or deny they were successes to begin with), rather than admit you were mistaken - all in order to maintain your world view. BTW, you must be talking to a whole different set of "Russians" than I do. Or perhaps something is "lost in translation"...

I'm a lot more worried about manipulation of vote tallies on the back-end than some malicious programming on the UI. Even barring intentional fraud, there are a multiltude of issues including scalability, data integrity, network connectivity, and software defects (bugs).

And your point is?

A bottle of Nightrain is better...

what's lacking are the synapses...

maybe if you had the IQ of a houseplant, you could learn it...

ty s RuMR-om iz odnogo polya yagody: nasladites' drug s drugom, sosunki!

keep spraying with your insipid postings - you might drive me to it.

I'd rather drown in a bucket of snot.

By your avatar/image one can ASSume that you like to take it in the butt regularly...

LOL.

I can provide you with an XMLSchema or DTD if you'd like...

<satire> Your postings are SO indicative of a superior intellect: replete with impressive word choice, unusual phrasing, arguments, and clever retorts. So impressive, indeed. </satire> Later to you as well, "punkass".

I see you're delusional as well.

RuMR: The first step is acknowledging your problem...

YOU don't seem to have a problem with eating man-meat:

Lick sack.