Is that what the spec says? Or is this something that Google decided, by making an optional feature a requirement when interoperating with their systems?
It is something Google decided. SHOULD means the other party should anticipate may not. The party examining a SHOULD and deciding not to do something is obviously not required to consider incompetence of other RFC readers as a reason to global replace SHOULD with SHALL before examining requirements.
Draw your free-hand shape in Inkscape, export to SVG, import it in FreeCAD and go from there.
I used that trick to trace a part from an image and it worked surprisingly well. Not very efficient compared to commercial tooling, but despite the clumsiness its fairly intuitive and free.
> They felt like they'd eventually get swallowed unless they did something and the end result was WWI. And WW2 if you think about it.
I think this exactly how the US administration _feels_. Alexandr Dugin proposed spheres of influence. Russia starts acting on those. China is getting more powerful. Its now or never.
I'm an historical materialist. That means I don't believe religion, ethnicity or political philosophy ever drives international conflict. It's always, always, always material interests. Those other things are just an excuse, something to rile up the populace into supporting the government and dying on the front line.
So some think Duginism and a Greater Russia is driving Putin's expanionist activity in Ukraine (including Crimea and the invasion in 2022). I don't see it that way. It's using the Russian diaspora as an excuse for expansion, similar to what Hitler did in Austria and the Sedetenland. But the interests are material.
Russia does have a "legitimate" interest in not having a hostile Great Power on its borders. I include NATO as an extension of the US. I say "legitimate" in the sense that they're doing the exact same thing the US does. The US has the (ever-changing) Monroe Doctrine and almost started World War Three over Cuba (despite instigating the confrontation in Turkey).
But NATO was never going to expand to include Ukraine. Bush and Biden both made offhand comments about it but countries like Germany would always veto Ukraine's membership because they don't want NATO on Russia's borders. And Putin knows this. So there's some historical revisionism going on to say that Putin invaded Ukraine because of NATO. I personally think he would've done it anyway.
The real problem is that Russia wants a warm water port on the Black Sea and that's what Sevastopol is. Ukraine cut off the water and it's becoming increasingly expensive to maintain that holding so Russia has captured what's essentially a land bridge to Crimea and plans to hold on to it until the West gets bored.
I believe that Putin arguably overplayed his hand by buying European silence on the matter with natural gas dependence.
The US however spends a ton of money and military force and political will projecting power into, say, the Middle East. Is that in the US sphere of influence? No. The US is also a net energy exporter now so you can't even blame securing oil as an excuse for it.
The US isn't operating in a deeply insecure fashion. Instead, they're simply extracting wealth from all over the world for the benefit of a handful of billionaires.
I guess where the US is insecure is in that no system other than neoliberalism can be allowed to exist and prosper because it might cause the populace to revolt. The existence of the USSR actually forced to the US to give Americans something so they didn't revolt. This desire means that any quasi-socialist nation gets starved with sanctions and couped to maintain this illusion.
And the US's big problem is they can't bully and starve China in this way.
Overall some great points here, but some don't make sense.
> The real problem is that Russia wants a warm water port on the Black Sea
Russia already had several other ports on the Black Sea, so it's not clear to me why they'd need to invade Ukrainian territory to get one extra.
> Germany would always veto Ukraine's membership because they don't want NATO on Russia's borders.
They've already voted three other Russia-bordering countries into NATO. They were practically falling over themselves to add Finland (along with Sweden)[1]
> The process in the Bundestag was "extremely fast," DW's political correspondent Nina Haase said.
> Haase said, citing unnamed sources, that Germany had intended to become the first country to ratify the accession, but other countries were faster. "But nevertheless, the signal remains the same... [Germany] is firmly behind the idea of Finland and Sweden joining NATO," she added.
You make the point that the US is insecure about any other system being successful, I think there's a case to be made that Russia similarly couldn't tolerate a prosperous democratic Ukraine sitting right next door and embarrassing them. You could also argue that, materially, Ukraine has natural resources that Russia just wants to steal.
> Russia already had several other ports on the Black Sea
You're not wrong. I kind of glossed over the details for brevity. Sevastopol has historically been the home of the Russian Black Sea fleet and is a much larger port than other Russian ports on the Black Sea, who also have significant commercial traffic, so they're much more crowded.
Behind all this is the Montreux Convention on Turkey's governance of the Bosphorus. Anyone with a permanent naval base on the Black Sea is allowed to traverse the straits (other than in times of war; it's complicated) so should Sevastopol in future fall into enemy hands, it would allow a foreign military power to station warships in the Black Sea. That foreign power could be Ukraine as a NATO member.
As I stated elsewhere, I don't believe this was a realistic possibility but it makes for a justification. I still say Sevastopol is more significant for it being a deep water port and control of territorial waters than any legitimate security threat.
> They've already voted three other Russia-bordering countries into NATO
There's a difference. I'll try to be brief.
Ukraine is flat. It is basically the conventional invasion corridor from Europe to Moscow and was used that way by both Napoleon and Hitler. I mean they failed spectacularly but that's another story. So there's a security argument that the Ukraine border is, in the very least, more sensitive than other borders.
Technically Poland shares a border with Kaliningrad, which is technically Russian territory but that's not quite the same thing. Also, the 1990s and early 2000s were a different time when post-Soviet Russia was weak before it became an energy giant and reawakened as a regional power.
Norway joined in 1949. Different time. Mountainous border. Not really a strategic threat. Norway was a founding member and this occurred before the USSR had the atomic bomb (by a matter of months).
Finland was really a direct response to the Ukraine invasion. It's a softer border than Norway but doesn't have the same strategic threat.
So you can make an argument that Russia has a legitimate concern of having NATO forces on their border. Imagine a scenario where Canada or Mexico joined a military alliance with China and China wanted to put military bases along the US border. would the US just stand by and take that? Absolutely not. So it's hard to completely dismiss Russia having the exact same strategic concern.
But, like I said, I don't think there was a serious threat of Ukraine joining NATO. Borders go both ways. Pre-invasion I don't think the European powers had any interest in a NATO buildup on the Ukraine-Russia border and if Ukraine was a NATO member, a Russian buildup on their side of their border would then become a serious NATO problem.
Would Germany really want to have Article 5 invoked if Russian forces crossed into the Dombas? I don't think so.
> I think there's a case to be made that Russia similarly couldn't tolerate a prosperous democratic Ukraine sitting right next door and embarrassing them.
I... don't. Ukraine is a poor country. A lot of its economy was built on transit fees for Russian natural gas going to Europe in Russian pipeline, a situation that Russia didn't like and they'd actively been building pipelines around Ukraine to avoid those transit fees (eg Nordstream 1 & 2).
In all this, nobody really knows just how rich Putin is. There are just wild guesses but those guesses realistically go all the way up to hundreds of billions of dollars. Russia is a kleptocracy (in a way that the US is becoming, as an aside). It could be that Putin miscalculated Ukraine's resolve and Europe's response and saw it as an opportunity to enrich himself further. I really don't know.
If anything Ukraine is like Venezuela. It's not so much about profiting from Ukraine's oil and gas deposits (for example) but simply making sure nobody else can. Developing Venezuelan oil fields would actually devalue Western oil companies so they're not going to do it. But if nobody else can? Great.
There's a lot of speculation here. Reasonable people can disagree. What I mostly object to is the self-referential idealist interpretation that underlies US foreign policy messaging. We are the good guys because we're the good guys. Rusia are the bad guys because they're the bad guys. Nobody is inherently anything. There are just people and governments responding to material interests. That's my philosophy.
> Anyone with a permanent naval base on the Black Sea is allowed to traverse the straits (other than in times of war; it's complicated) so should Sevastopol in future fall into enemy hands, it would allow a foreign military power to station warships in the Black Sea. That foreign power could be Ukraine as a NATO member.
You have already been corrected regarding ports in Crimea being the only ones available to Russia and your reply doesn't make any sense either. There are multiple NATO member countries with ports on the Black Sea. Including Turkey who controls Bosphorus!
> Russia does have a "legitimate" interest in not having a hostile Great Power on its borders. I include NATO as an extension of the US. I say "legitimate" in the sense that they're doing the exact same thing the US does. The US has the (ever-changing) Monroe Doctrine and almost started World War Three over Cuba (despite instigating the confrontation in Turkey).
Russia already shares borders with multiple NATO countries. Invading Ukraine caused yet another country (Finland) to join and Russia didn't seem to concerned about it.
Many interesting points. I of course know nothing, but I don't see the strategic importance of Sevastopol. If you're Russia controlling Sevastopol, yes it doesn't freeze but where are you going to go? In peace time it doesn't matter who controls Sevastopol, your merchant marine can use it just fine. In war time, where are you going to go? You are certainly not going to cross the Bosphorus, Suez, or Gibraltar. Going back to spheres of influence I guess it does make sense to project power and keep control of the Black Sea and it's neighborhood, and if Russia honestly thought they could take Ukraine in three days then I get how it seemed like a reasonable bet.
> But NATO was never going to expand to include Ukraine.
Agreed on all points but this. This is just factually wrong. Ukraine formally declared its intention to pursue NATO membership which was accepted by the NATO council.
The most significant early push occurred at the Bucharest Summit (April 2008). Ukraine (along with Georgia) requested a Membership Action Plan (MAP) - the standard preparatory program for aspiring members. NATO's declaration welcomed Ukraine's aspirations and stated that "these countries will become members of NATO". Ukraine's parliament repealed its non-bloc status and amended its constitution to enshrine irreversible pursuit of NATO (and EU) membership as a national goal. Then, NATO officially listed Ukraine as an aspiring member.
In the Vilnius Summit, NATO even declared that "Ukraine’s future is in NATO" and its path is "irreversible".
These were empty words of consolation after the allies decided not to invite Ukraine and Georgia into NATO.
Eventually, you will receive a million bucks from me. I am not giving you any timeline or conditions, but trust me, you are on an irreversible path toward that, I promise.
Der Spiegel has a report detailing the efforts of Germany (particularly Merekel) and France (under Sarkozy) actively blocking any efforts to block Ukraine from joining NATO [1]:
> [2008] was the year that Ukraine was likely closer to becoming a member of the Western alliance than ever, before or since. United States President George W. Bush stood solidly behind Kyiv's accession. But the effort failed, as Zelenskyy made clear, due to the opposition of Merkel and Sarkozy – and an "absurd fear" of Russia. Because of this "miscalculation," the Ukrainian president continued, his country is facing "the most terrible war in Europe since World War II."
There were other European members who had objections or serious reservations.
> Ukraine's parliament repealed its non-bloc status and amended its constitution to enshrine irreversible pursuit of NATO
There was also a period under Yanukovych (a Russian puppet, to be clear) that repealed those efforts, which again changed after the revolution in 2014-2015.
The Vilnius Summit took place in 2023, a year into the war with Russia. As such, I consider it empty platitudes. For one thing, no country can join NATO with active border disputes. I don't see that ever happenign simply because Russia will start a border dispute to avoid that happening.
Even Zelensky recognized the plan as "absurd" [2].
Eh, I don't think that is really a consistent, useful model. It's not that material interests are irrelevant, but ideological alignment even at the most Machiavellian level constrains what's possible, if not outright defining where lines are drawn. You can't ignore how politics happens within countries when looking at how they interact with each other.
Also, messaging matters. To make a crass analogy, if I punch you in the face and tell you it’s because I just felt like it, vs. because I thought you slept with my girlfriend, you’re going to respond completely differently (after the initial surprise).
In fact, everyone who bore witness to the punch would come away with different opinions depending on the reason I gave for punching you. And those opinions have knock-on effects (“We shouldn’t come to this part of town anymore, people just get punched out of nowhere…”)
Remember that there are more flights during the day than during the night. When you posted this it was late afternoon in Europe, noon on the East Coast US and early morning on the West Coast. And of course it was night in Asia.
I would file this under blogspam, given the length of the article, the atrocious oversimplifying, highly compressed map and the number of ads.
If you are interested in the geology of Scotland, there are excellent books available, including "Land of Mountain and Flood: The Geology and Landforms of Scotland". I am sure good books about the Appalachians and the Atlas are available, too.
I did something similar many years ago. I was amazed that Fortran was not more discussed as an option to write performant code within a Python / numpy codebase.
At the time everyone seems to default to using C instead. But Fortran is so much easier! It even has slicing notations for arrays and the code looked so much like Numpy as you say.
The headline should have been ...especially in English Class.
Even in the 90s most people got book summaries to get through the curriculums. I would say, the highest performing language students and teachers pets at school did exactly that.
School unfortunately is largely about reciting of the teachers knowledge, so there is no need to read the source and think for yourself.
Same for me. My Pixel magically fixed scrambled words (and was very fast doing it). iOS is terrible, even without described bug.
I am now much faster typing with the speech-to-text feature. Maybe that is what they are pushing. Maybe Apple wants to remove the keyboard and it is slowly increasing the friction so people use it less and less? Similarly how Chrome degrades browser performance until it gets restarted to force an update.
If that is true, then the data impacted was likely account data, as we also got the email and yet we are only just starting the integration work, and we dont have events in there yet.
This is not an issue for the Government though. They can change the laws. That takes time and due process of course. But thats what the German government is doing [0]
