Assadi

A lot of Russians also believe things like drinking water with ice cubes will give you a sore throat. I wouldn't put too much stock in something just because the locals believe it.

Personally, I think the water boiling thing is one of the dumber things they do because, at least in most of the big cities, the thing that is most likely to be wrong with the water is not bacteria and other things that would be killed by boiling your water but rather heavy metals (and, last I checked, boiling my water does not remove lead!).

Also, anecdotally, I've yet to die from drinking from drinking unfiltered Tomsk tap water & never noticed abnormal levels of anything nasty during blood work. I think there is a lot of paranoia about the water system here that has generally been undeserved over the past decade or so.

Same deal with iOS. Just fully sign out before you give it away

As far as I know, they use react for both. Where did you hear that they had a native android app?

When was the last time you were in Russia? I've lived here for a few years now, almost intentionally trying to get into trouble, and I've yet to ever have any real problems. The biggest issue I've run into is food poisoning.

snitch

I am not saying that either Iran or Saudi Arabia should be able to X, Y or Z. I'm not going for a "the Saudis do it so Iran should too" argument. Rather, I am simply saying that the sanctions themselves are just an imperialist American power move.

Again, it's not actually about whether Iran is good or bad. If it was simply about good VS evil, nobody would be standing idly as the Saudis yeet missiles into Yemeni civilians.

The sanctions are a joke. It is all about American political agenda.

I don't think it is that silly.

The governments of the West are totally chill with regimes that are just as brutal, if not more brutal, than Iran, like Saudi Arabia.

The difference really is mostly just "which side are you on".

Decentralized centralized-currency?

Zoom was literally reinstalling itself after being uninstalled. It's basically the definition of malware.

What do you consider to be a sketchy background?

For what it's worth, KDE [Plasma] is just a desktop environment - you can run it on Ubuntu.

As of 2019, I'm fairly happy with Linux on the desktop; usability is really solid, WINE is significantly better than years before, and many games will play perfectly fine with basically no manual configuration thanks to projects like DXVK.

I'm running KDE on Arch. And, I'm definitely happier than I was on Windows.

Alternatively: a Belgian makes a mistake, one that is common even amongst natives, in a foreign language

Hey, as a Palestinian student in Siberia, you're a really cool guy. Thanks for doing this. It's painful how many people charge the equivalent of my rent for a digital product and then wonder why Russia has such a high piracy rate.

Haha, maybe I should have written this article.

I ran into this on a couple of legacy CodeIgniter applications that I was rewriting for a small Swedish company and had such a visceral level of shock and disgust when I realised all the production servers contained a publicly accessible ".git" folder.

Worst of all, people had been committing database details. So, not only was the source code for all the applications public, all the user data effectively was too (and, let me tell you, those passwords were NOT hashed properly!).

I would say so, yeah. Criticisms against the federal government are very common amongst young students.

I regularly say things in public and in public spaces on the internet where my full name and details are attached (e.g., Facebook, VK, etc) that I think to myself "you know, maybe I am pushing this a bit too far". But, as a foreign student, that seems to be more of an irrational fear instilled in me based on the perception we have of Russia back home.

Realistically, unless you're siding with some sort of terrorist organisation, you're generally ok when it comes to the federal government. If you've very blatant about your anti-regime opinions, you might get some attention, but it isn't like you're ever going to get declined a visa renewal or deported or something like that; the most they'll do is watch you more closely.

And, don't get me wrong as well, it would have to be genuine terrorist ties to get you deported. For example, I regularly criticise Russia over their treatment of Oleg Sentsov who is, in my opinion, mislabeled as a terrorist and being treated, honestly, pretty abhorrently. My "terrorist" sympathies and criticism over human rights, however, is not enough to upset the federal migration services.

At the university level, though, I am also very proud of my institution and their commitment to their students. They and the regional government of Tomsk have regularly shown the fact that they're willing to stick up to the federal government in order to protect the students.