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The Vortex Gun Coming Soon To a Protest Near You
An anonymous reader writes "Vortex technology has been used in everything from rocket-powered fire extinguishers to Nerf guns, but neither of those things are capable of giving the beat-down to hapless protesters. By giving spinning vortices an electric charge, though, pepper spray can be sent over 150 feet at between 60 and 90 mph. A vortex gun uses a pressure wave and a carefully designed barrel to fire donut-shaped rings of air that can hold themselves together over long distances. The military (starting with the German military during World War II) has been running experiments with using vortex canons to knock things over, but it's not a particularly efficient or effective way to go. What the gas rings can be used for is transporting other gasses (like pepper spray or tear gas or pesticide) long distances with a decent amount of accuracy, holding their cargo inside the calm center spinning vortex."
ya funny how tech that was designed for the nazi saucer craft is now being used to suppress free speech isn't it...WONDER are nazi scientists cheeringy et?
Another gun that lowers the inhibition of police to shoot at protesters.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
They're coming up with ever-more creative ways to hurt peaceful protesters -- and let's be honest: Most of the time, they provoke, prod, cajoule, and taunt these people until one of them out of the dozen, hundred, or thousand there snaps, then they point and say "See! See! We're justified" and open up unholy horror on everyone nearby, including journalists, children, and anyone else, then seize or destroy the evidence of what went down, counting on their purchases media contacts to portray their victims as all manner of bad. But whether it's rubber bullets or real ones, the fact is this is a business of causing pain and misery... and it is because the people its being inflicted upon had the audacity to say "I think we can do better than this."
... Well, it happened because you stupid bastards didn't do your job and report the truth. It happened because people don't like being silenced.
I am the last person to suggest violence as a response to improper government action: I live in a democracy, and one of our main pressure valves to prevent violence is peaceful protest. They're busy stuffing that up now, and just like every other country that has tried it in the past, eventually public sentiment is going to shift. It'll be fine one day, and the next shit will be on fire and they'll be declaring martial law, and the bought-off press will be busy with headlines like "How did this happen?"
It happened... because human nature isn't all that different from an animal: Keep poking it with a stick and eventually it will stop hiding in the corner and come sink its claws and teeth into you. And why? Because it didn't have a choice.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
The nazi scientists are all dead or senile, that's why NASA hasn't been doing much except reruns ;).
I've got a 14 month old boy. I need to warm up my fart joke capacity, so it'll be ready when I need it. I wonder if a positively-charged fart would be different from a negatively-charged fart.
Typical of a certain mindset that sufficient force will stop a demonstration.
And it will, of course. ONE demonstration. But if you don't want another twice as big, you can't stop it with force.
Ghaddafi used anti-aircraft ammunition on human bodies. That tidied up the whole street in jig time. But where is he now?
It worked for him for about 40 years. And it seems to work for Bashar al-Assad right now.
The German Wehrmacht (and the other regular branches of the German military in WWII) had little to do with the Nazi party. The only "Nazi" military was the Waffen-SS, whose notable accomplishments include running death camps and overall pathetic performance in actual combat. The American stereotype of branding anything related to Germany in the 1933-1945 era as "Nazi" is just wrong.
Ze German Wehrmacht (und ze other regular branches of ze Heer in WWII) had little to do mit ze Nazi party. Ze only "Nazi" military vas ze Waffen-SS, whose notable accomplishments include running ze death camps und overall pathetic performance im actual combat. Ze American stereotype of branding anything related to Germany in ze 1933-1945 era als "Nazi" is just wrong.
Gotta' love the attempted spin there by tying it to the Nazis... except that pretty much ALL of the tech in use today was also researched by the Nazis. You know: jet engines, radar, rockets, remote guidance, computers, cryptography, etc etc etc lol
The German Wehrmacht (and the other regular branches of the German military in WWII) had little to do with the Nazi party. The only "Nazi" military was the Waffen-SS, whose notable accomplishments include running death camps and overall pathetic performance in actual combat. The American stereotype of branding anything related to Germany in the 1933-1945 era as "Nazi" is just wrong.
Even the Wehrmacht had to at least toe the party line. If I remember correctly, Rommel, arguably the best general of WWII(on either side) was punished for not being a Nazi. It is important to remember that the assassination plot that came closest to killing Hitler was planned out and executed by Wehrmacht officers. But yeah, your average Wehrmacht grunt was not a Nazi. And the Waffen-SS actually had a fairly strong reputation on the Eastern front, and were known as very effective and fierce fighters.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Police are supposed to be trained officers. They are being provoked by taunts? Throw those goddamn police out of their jobs, with a black mark on their records. What you say is (trolling?) bullshit. I have seen numerous videos of peaceful people blindsided by police with pepper spray and bludgeons. Overwhelming force, yet the police are provoked by taunts? You live in a world of hypocrisy and denial, previous poster.
Don't kid yourself. Daffy would still be in power if the Europeans (with American support) hadn't pushed him out. His response to protests and then later outright civil war was working very well.
And the Waffen-SS actually had a fairly strong reputation on the Eastern front, and were known as very effective and fierce fighters.
Effective and fierce at killing unarmed peasants, yes.
Allright, I laughed. I speak English without an accent though.
Getting people to disperse in a matter that will piss them off will only work if they wake up in the morning and think "Gosh, I'm kind of embarrassed I was there at all.". Otherwise, it will just make them angrier. And it may not even get them to disperse and go home like you want them to in the first place.
The people who work at firms who make stuff like this should be ashamed of themselves for the world they help create.
But, of course, there are enough people on Slashdot who think that might makes right, and that authority is always correct (most of whome paradoxically are against 'big government') that I suspect these people feel not a glimmer of guilt.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
Their computer tech sucked - the British pwned them on that front. Likewise with radar. They did excel in rocketry, rocket guidance and Really Big Guns.
And the Waffen-SS actually had a fairly strong reputation on the Eastern front, and were known as very effective and fierce fighters.
Effective and fierce at killing unarmed peasants, yes.
They did that, yes, but they also often fought against and defeated Soviet forces that not only outnumbered but also out-equipped them.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Although Waffen SS did include camp guards and such it also had elite panzer & infantry divisions.. we're taking about over 900 000 soldiers that fought in all major battles of war world 2.Waffen SS divisions were some of the best trained military units in the conflict.
The German Wehrmacht (and the other regular branches of the German military in WWII) had little to do with the Nazi party. The only "Nazi" military was the Waffen-SS, whose notable accomplishments include running death camps and overall pathetic performance in actual combat. The American stereotype of branding anything related to Germany in the 1933-1945 era as "Nazi" is just wrong.
I know, right? I mean, when we got there we couldn't find a single person who was a Nazi.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
During the time the Nazis were in power, you had to be a member of the Nazi party just to have a job, so technically every working german at the time was a Nazi. So it makes it confusing to disentangle the real Nazis who did all the horrible things and the ones that just said they were 'Nazi' just to keep a job.
Well duh, you already killed all of them on the way there.
Now wondering if you spray an aerosol into the chamber *thinks*
Computers and cryptography you say? That's interesting, because when last I checked, it was an English mathematician who laid down the theory of computation, general purpose computers, software defined computation (as opposed to building a machine to compute problems or classes of problems), it was a Dutch linguist whose theory about secret keys became central to cipher design and an American engineer whose work on information theory became the basis of cipher design (at least for symmetric cryptography). I guess the Germans did an OK job with the Enigma machine, but they certainly did not invent computers or cryptography (not even modern cryptography).
Palm trees and 8
It sounds perfect for a small variation on an ARM device. A very simple sensor could continuously detect the vortexes and their centers, a simple circuit programmed into an FPGA could adjust fins to keep it on course. An easily constructed device would fly straight down the concentric rings and at target radiate spherical pattern of jagged shrapnel, eliminating the device and killing or otherwise neutralizing anyone within about 10 meters. One could acquire the components off the shelf in a city of any size. If you spend a great deal of money developing this you would need to tell the operator to be sure there was no one with an engineering degree at the other end.
One bad game does not mean that the other quarterback is necessarily better in EVERY game.
How come Slashdot never gets Slashdotted?
During the time the Nazis were in power, you had to be a member of the Nazi party just to have a job, so technically every working german at the time was a Nazi. So it makes it confusing to disentangle the real Nazis who did all the horrible things and the ones that just said they were 'Nazi' just to keep a job.
Much the same happens anywhere you have a totalitarian political system. e.g. in Iraq with the Ba'ath Party.
That is just an idiotic statement. The concentration and labor camps were run by the SS-Totenkopfverbände. The Waffen-SS were fighting units, and the two organizations were distinct. The Waffen-SS had elite training and indoctrination, but their duties were straight combat, which they conducted for the most part as honorably as regular army fighting units in Germany and other countries. Only someone truly clueless would characterize Waffen-SS combat performance as "pathetic". They were highly effective, They were respected and feared by all opponents. They were arguably the finest elite troops anywhere in the history of the world.
The article is basically a press release from a company in Ohio that filed a patent application for delivering electrically charged bubbles of gas with a vortex gun. Somehow Slashdot turned it into a rallying cry for Occupy Someplace for Some Reason protesters.
You have a right to peaceful protest. You don't have a right to trespass and disrupt businesses or political gatherings. Respect others' rights and yours will be respected too.
and a couple thousand other 'wehrmacht' people who suffered under the German High Command's alliance with hitler and the SS.
and the nazi scientific community was controlled and/or infiltrated by the SS, as were most other parts of society, universities, corporations, research labs, radio societies, the youth groups, the judiciary, the hospitals, the churches, etc etc etc
It'll be interesting about the time they use one on some one wearing a pacemaker or defibrillator. You can't even go through the X-Ray machine or let them use a wand on you in airports. A lot of younger people do have these devices now days.
Seems like it would make a good fireball thrower.
Or paint aerosol to mark individual protestors.
Deleted
There was a time, perhaps, when only the government had the shiny, new. Super secret facilities in Nevada or Los Alamos chock full of stolen nazi scientists with equipment only defense budgets could afford.
But now I'm seeing massive computing power at the fingertips of most Americans, and amazing technologies like additive manufacturing on the brink of hitting the mainstream, and I wonder how long it will be before the people, getting hit with LRADs and vortex cannons for voicing their opinions, will turn all of it on the police and the elites they serve, whom they outnumber 10,000 to one.
These "non-violent" weapons are not based on some crypto science Uncle Sam learned from aliens from the Kla'arg galaxy. They are not made out of solid platinum or unobtainium. The software needed to run them? Crap, there are probably open source packages out there to do so already (soon, also on BSD!).
Why do they think that people, highly incensed at the injuries to their freedom, won't put all that together and employ it?
I suspect someone among the elites is clear-eyed enough to see it, but clueless how to prevent it, and they're scared shitless and panicking.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
the intelligentsia who were truly intelligent understood what was happening in the 1930s, and they left. or were kicked out. the people doing research on vortex cannons during wwii would not have been 'innocent bystanders', they were more like von braun , scientists who did not care about the social implications of their work or their relationship with mass murderers.
of which there are several tons at the US holocaust museum. the situation is not as simple as you make it sound.
IBM, actually, but lets not nitpick ... this is slashdot after all
No, it was all alien technology that the Nazis got from a crashed flying saucer in 1936! I saw it on the History Channel, so it must be true!
Then another spaceship crashed in Roswell after WW2 and gave the Americans all kinds of stuff - the transistor, fiber optics, and tang.
Didn't he also kind of screw the pooch on the whole D-Day thing?
-- Let us endeavor so to live that when we pass even the undertaker shall be sorry. -- M. Twain
The only reason it didn't work for Ghaddafi this time was the fact that Europe wanted to shop it's fighter planes for export markets against the US F-35. A lot of countries will be replacing F-16's in the next 15 years and this was the perfect place to showcase the Typhoon and Rafael so they could earn their "proven in combat" badge to potential buyers. Now they can go to countries and say their planes are "combat proven now" while the F-35 is still in testing.
It worked for Iran in 2008. It's going to work now for Syria unless there is a similar international movement to arm the Syrian resistance and provide air support.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
Nazis wore clothes and ate food. You know what we must now outlaw.
by Anonymous Coward: I, for one, welcome the shift from car analogies to pizza analogies. um.. overlords?
Didn't he also kind of screw the pooch on the whole D-Day thing?
No, he didn't. The Germans had several Panzer units stationed only a few miles from the coast in France. However, Hitler would not allow them to be released because he was convinced the invasion would be at Calais, where the Channel is actually the thinnest. By the time he allowed the tanks to be released, the Allies had already established a beachhead and moved inland. Had they been released when the request was made, the landings would have failed.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
It bears reminding that the Wehrmacht was fighting to implement the National Socialist vision, and that their advances secured areas allowing the Gestapo, SS, Todt Organisation, and various other German and Axis police, slave labor, and extermination groups to operate.
There is no logical reason to believe that educated members of a modern society like Germany didn't know what was going on. Just because it was EXPEDIENT to pretend that so West Germany could be integrated into NATO doesn't mean one should buy the excuses. :-)
Ask any G.I. (there are some left) who served during and after VE Day about the amazing number of "good Germans".
"overall pathetic performance in actual combat"
"Overall"? Bullshit. The Waffen SS combat record, often against superior odds, was frequently outstanding and they were employed accordingly, often spearheading attacks. (Some units were less effective as standards slipped due to casualties.) Even the divisions from occupied countries often fought well. Physical courage and military prowess are orthogonal to conventional morality.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2nd_SS_Panzer_Division_Das_Reich
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Just wait until they challenge Gandalf. He cheats with magic.
Here's video of a similar device: SRL: Weird Weapons of WWII from History Channel's Weird Weapons of WWII featuring Survival Research Laboratories' (SRL's) demonstrating the "shockwave cannon.' "
That's why we need more money spent on cloning tech dammit, we're out of Nazis! Everybody knows we kicked them Ruskies only because our Nazis was better than their Nazis, and now we're all out of Nazis! We'll start with a dozen copies of everyone on Operation paperclip and go from there, starting with a dozen Von Brauns, that'll show the world who leads in Nazis!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Although Waffen SS did include camp guards ....
its all that black leather and tight trousers
The German Wehrmacht (and the other regular branches of the German military in WWII) had little to do with the Nazi party.
Wehrmacht units burned down plenty of villages in Belarus. And, while not every soldier was a Nazi, plenty were, and plenty more were sympathetic.
E.g. this picture depicts Wehrmacht soldiers holding a blackboard saying "The Russian must die, so that we may live" - a clear reference to Lebensraum.
The only "Nazi" military was the Waffen-SS, whose notable accomplishments include running death camps and overall pathetic performance in actual combat.
Waffen-SS never ran death camps, that was the job of "general" SS. Some Waffen SS units (e.g. Totenkopf) were formed from death camp guards, yes. Most were not.
As for performance, it was actually higher than regular army units in those divisions that were formed from Western European volunteers - pretty much all German ones except for Totenkopf, and especially Das Reich and Leibstandarte; but also Wiking, Nordland, Charlemagne etc. The remains of Nordland, for example, were defending Reichstag in the final battle right until the point where they learned of Hitler's suicide, and they did real well there, effecting casualties far in excess of what they have themselves sustained.
Divisions which did have poor performance, and a particularly nasty war crime record, were usually those recruited among collaborationists in Eastern Europe - Croatian, Albanian, Baltic, Russian, Ukrainian, Belorusian, and various legions from Caucasus. Reason being, those guys were more eager to settle old scores (i.e. Croatians and Albanians against Serbs, Ukrainians and Belorusians against Poles and Russians etc) than to fight the common "war on bolshevism" that Axis promoted
Our Nazi scheme cost us just a small fraction of what we had been spending on defense in a single year. The deciding factor was when we learned that your country was working along similar lines, and we were afraid of a Nazi gap.
Wow! The Catholic church is getting very high-tech!
Ecclesiastical rules coming straight at you in a vortex.
Duck, sinners, duck!!
Gotta' love the attempted spin there by tying it to the Nazis... except that pretty much ALL of the tech in use today was also researched by the Nazis. You know: jet engines, radar, rockets, remote guidance, computers, cryptography, etc etc etc lol
Radar was researched by many different people in different countries. The first working prototype was done by US Army, and the first use for real-world purposes was by the Brits.
Jet engine was similarly being researched by several countries, and successfully put into production independently by Germans and Brits.
Modern crypto was developed after the war, and largely came out of British and American research during the war.
Germans can claim the first computer (Z3), but they didn't really understand the importance of what they had. Meanwhile, US and UK have independently developed their own machines - which were fully electric rather than electromechanical - and actually put them to good use.
About the only thing you can give to Nazis are rockets, though even there von Braun borrowed a lot from Goddard, so it was not a clean room design.
Ghaddafi used anti-aircraft ammunition on human bodies. That tidied up the whole street in jig time. But where is he now?
The catch it, it took a considerable radical resistance movement - not peaceful protesters, but determined Islamists - to bring him down. And even then they were being steadily pushed back until UN intervened and started bombing Gaddafi's armor and shooting down his plains.
It will be an invitation to retaliate with modern DIY weapons like EMP cannons, sneezing and itching powder mortars and good old fashioned stink bombs, R/C battlebots and superglue in aerosol cans.
Gotta love riots.
The German Wehrmacht (and the other regular branches of the German military in WWII) had little to do with the Nazi party. The only "Nazi" military was the Waffen-SS, whose notable accomplishments include running death camps and overall pathetic performance in actual combat. The American stereotype of branding anything related to Germany in the 1933-1945 era as "Nazi" is just wrong.
Conversations between captured soldiers of the Wermacht were recorded by the Allies, and the recordings prove that they knew about the death camps and that many of them had taken part in war crimes themselves. Source.
everything else aside... if you're creating a toroidal vortex that can travel 150± you're likely going to hear it before it gets there, you'll probably still hit your target, but anyone more than like 10 feet from the target will be like "oh, they're right there just 150 feet away" - boom dead... as apposed to grenade launchers which can be upwards of 1500 meters away. (MK19, MK47, etc).
There also isn't too much chance of rapid fire since the vortexes will disturb the previously calm air, making them dissipate closer and closer to the cannon itself, or causing them to go off target from pressure differences, and turbulence.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDx-mQqzYNw
... the warp drive recently mentioned.
ourpla.net is your planet
Anybody who thinks that all this represents a new wave of police brutality that will lead to the coming downfall of democracy is white and has never read the history of the civil rights movement. Or of the labor movement for that matter.
If anything, the modern use of pepper spray and tasers is something of an improvement over releasing the dogs and wading in with truncheons. People used to die for their peaceful protests. It's still wrong, but democracy has survived worse. No need for chicken little.
Hitler would not allow them to be released because he was taken in by a massive counter-intelligence plot designed to imply that the invasion would be at Calais.
It wasn't exactly an unfounded belief.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Fortitude
Captcha: Furious, brilliantly fitting.
Pffft. I had one of those when I was a kid.
That's what they all say. My wife sounds like Natasha from the Rocky and Bullwinkle show, but she thinks she speaks unaccented English.
When she writes a math paper, I have to go over it and put in all the articles before she submits it. Slavs are allergic to "the" and "a".
You are welcome on my lawn.
No, he didn't. The Germans had several Panzer units stationed only a few miles from the coast in France. However, Hitler would not allow them to be released because he was convinced the invasion would be at Calais, where the Channel is actually the thinnest. By the time he allowed the tanks to be released, the Allies had already established a beachhead and moved inland. Had they been released when the request was made, the landings would have failed.
In fairness, the allies went to pretty extreme lengths to convince him that they were in fact aiming at Calais.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
Rommel was "punished" because he was accused of participating in the attempt to assassinate Hitler. Most historical records raise serious doubt about his involvement but back then just being accused was an automatic death sentence. He was lucky to be given a choice between being executed and committing suicide and he accepted suicide to safe guard his family. A public executoin would have been bad press in Germany so the government promised not to harm his family if he took the suicide choice which could be blamed on natural causes or even battle injuries. As far as being one of the best generals on either side goes he retreated from Africa in defeat and failed to stop the invasion of France. He was a good officer but calling him the best is a stretch.
Does the federal government not regulate local PD's measures in crowd control?
I'm afraid we're about to turn some bad corners in development of such measures, nationally, and I don't know if we'll be able to turn back from those.
The assaults on the Occupy protesters in Oakland - to speak only of one recent incident in Police abuse - it sets a bad precedent. The development of even more aggressive crowd control measures, if it would not be regulated, may lead to even further abuses - not a thing we should allow, as a democratic people, though I'm certainly not one to propose any rash responses to which.
As far as being one of the best generals on either side goes he retreated from Africa in defeat and failed to stop the invasion of France. He was a good officer but calling him the best is a stretch.
A lesser General would never have had the successes he had in Africa in the first place. To steal from Wikipedia: "Rommel is regarded as having been a humane and professional officer. His Afrikakorps was never accused of war crimes. Soldiers captured during his Africa campaign were reported to have been treated humanely. Furthermore, he ignored orders to kill captured commandos, Jewish soldiers and civilians in all theaters of his command." And like I said, he didn't lose France. Hitler's ever increasing need to control the military and dictate strategy is what cost the Germans France (and also hundreds of thousands of lives on the Eastern Front).
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
I can respect that there's a distinction between the Nazi Party as a political movement and the German Military as a governmentally operated military body. Speculatively, though - and this could only be in speculation, I suppose, so, speaking only hypothetically - I wonder how easy it may be for a nation's military to not become wholly engrossed with an authoritarian agenda of the nation the military serves? ..speaking only hypothetically, as it were ;} I mean, cough nothing about Neocon ideology cough cough...
I can attest to this as well. My wife is Armenian, but was raised in Russia. While her accent is much "softer" than Natasha's it is definitely there, and she thinks she has very little to no accent. I have also become accustomed to adding articles to papers :)
Also, for some reason Slavic-language-speaking people tend to be able to understand Ws, but repeat them as Vs.
Herm...
"All the women and children were locked in the church while the village was looted. Meanwhile, the men were led to six barns and sheds where machine-gun nests were already in place.
[...]
The soldiers proceeded to the church and placed an incendiary device there. After it was ignited, women and children tried to escape through the doors and windows of the church, but they were met with machine-gun fire. A total of 247 women and 205 children died in the carnage. Only two women and one child survived;"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oradour-sur-Glane
"The massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane involved men, women and children, some as young as one week, and some as old as ninety. Oradour-sur-Glane was not the only collective punishment reprisal action committed by the Waffen SS: other well-documented examples include the French towns of Tulle, Ascq, Maillé, Robert-Espagne, and Clermont-en-Argonne; the Soviet village of Kortelisy (in what is now Ukraine); Lithuanian village of Piriupiai; the Czechoslovakian villages of Leáky and Lidice (in what is now the Czech Republic); the Greek towns of Kalavryta and Distomo; the Dutch town of Putten; Serbian towns of Kragujevac and Kraljevo; Norwegian village of Telavåg; and the Italian villages of Sant'Anna di Stazzema and Marzabotto. "
Yeah, the finest of the finest......
Yeah, the first function Turing complete computer in 1941, it's not like the concept is named for work done by Alan Turing, a Princeton-educated Englishman who published the idea of a universal computing machine in 1936.
Palm trees and 8
Rommel was indeed a honorable and military professional. All the documentaries and other sources of data seem to support this. His biography revealed a man devoted to protecting his country. He also had no direct association with those who committed war crimes. According to his biography he found out about the concentration camps and that led him to talk with some people about the plan to kill Hitler. He did not come out and support the assassination but did meet with some of the conspirators and that ultimately caused his downfall. And he did lose France. It was in his operational area and he was at home when the invasion started because he believed the weather would prevent any large scale invasion. He also fell for Montgomery's use of regular vehicles to create dust clouds that created the illusion that they were tanks which resulted in him retreating faster.
Damned Ruskies! I bet you're just laughing your asses off ain't ya? First we help you and the damned Limeys out in WWII only for you to get half of Europe, what did we get? Nothing, not a damned thing! Hell the tea swillers even stabbed us in the back and went with that Frog metric system! Then you build all these kick ass fighters for dirt cheap that can land on a fricking two lane while our MIC give us these technocrappers that have so many bugs you can't turn the damned things to the left without screwing up the stupid computers so now you can crank out a dozen SU27s for the cost of a single F35 and they still can't make the damned thing work!
We should have listened to our greatest Hero, the great General Patton, hired them damned Nazis, put their asses in Sherman tanks and rolled right into Moscow! Would have showed your asses THEN huh? Instead that pussy Truman gives it all back, hell we didn't even keep the car building Nazis, bet they wouldn't have built no damned pintos or k cars that's for damned sure!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Oh they weren't "Nazis"? I guess it was okay that they killed millions of people then..
Words have meanings, DUMBASS
For example, a dumbass is a bass with a particularly carefree attitude towards being fished. It's humming can sometimes be heard through the bottoms of fishing boats.
Rommel lost in Africa and France for the same reason Germany lost the war, completely outnumbered and out gunned. Germany had to garrison a hostile empire in Europe and fight on the eastern front while Britain, which was in every way a comperable military power had all of the resources from both its metropole and empire available to make life difficult from Germany in Africa and the Middle East.
In France, American and British forces were storming over the beaches in massive numbers, while the Red Army had most of the Wermacht tied up in a costly war in Russia that had already killed pretty much all of Germany's best soldiers.
The fault was wholly Hitler's for getting into that stupid, unwinnable war to begin with.
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxZu_Y_m8i4 I have, actually still have, one of these. Worked with a tight vortex at least over room distances. Didn't put pepper spray in mine though. In college worked on a larger version. Larger volume blast of air and more air over greater distances. Not too hard to scale up and optimize for pepper spray use. Probably not too bad a non-lethal weapon. All things considered maybe safer than tear gas grenades normally used. Less chance of injury, no fire hazard etc.
The fact is that most people around the world believe that WWII era Germans in general were some of the most pure evil mass murderers ever to walk the earth and that belief seems well founded to me. Pretty much everyone who was a member of the Nazi party can be held responsible for the gigadeathcrimes that took place during the war. The rest of the world is grateful though for creating such perfect opponents in video games. No one feels bad about killing Nazis. Although I must admit I enjoy killing cops more than Nazis. Either way they pretty much define pure evil. That (in)human bloodlust, the craving to snuff out as many lives as possible combined with ethnic cleansing.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Einstein was Jewish and therefore had more reason than most to be aware of the Nazis and to get out. Even then I don't think that the Jewish intelligentsia in general took the Nazi party seriously enough or left in time, for various reasons.
The British had magnetrons and the Germans had klystrons. Klystrons had and still have much better frequency stability. Which is why the Germans (and presumably the Japanese) used them. Magnetrons were more compact and lighter and easier to use at higher power. The allies made due with the "inferior" magnetron frequency drift by synchronizing the receiver with the transmitter in a clever way. In the long run klystrons were seen as superior technology. The problem is the Germans just didn't have it figured out well enough at the time. The Germans, as always, loved precision and couldn't bear the thought of using the more practical magnetron technology. A decision they paid dearly for.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Waffen-SS [...] were arguably the finest elite troops anywhere in the history of the world.
The SAS laugh at this claim.
"To any truly impartial person, it would be obvious that I am right."
Sorry, but free speech and right of assembly does not give you the right to stage peaceful protests wherever you want. You do not have a right to protest on my private property, and you do not have a right to protest in a way that gets in the way of other people, like blocking public roads or places. If you do, police can remove you, if necessary by force.
Hello,
Studying German history atm (superficially for points) in German, and I would like to inform you that The Nazi "upbringing" were so permeated through the generations until Allied victory, that an estimated 90% of the population had some not insubstantial tie with the party.
At least that's what my German history books say (Deutsche Geschichte in Schlaglichtern and Deutsche Kultur Geschichte), once I've deciphered them.
Thus the Entnazifisierung, which unfortunately only bothered the true nazis like a fart in a dinner party.
Defining Statistics and Social Research
We frequently hear the same thing in South Africa today. Usually phrased by black people as "Ever noticed how you can never find any white person who supported appartheid anywhere ?"
The truth of course, is a bit more subtle than that. In 1977 the University of Potchefstroom (arguably the most conservative university outside of the American South - a University that to this day teaches creationism as science) held an anonymous poll among it's all-white student-body. 87% of respondents voted that appartheid was unjust and should be dismantled.
Despite that the National Party remained in power and didn't start the reforms that would ultimately end appartheid until 9 years later with the repeal of several of the worst appartheid laws including the racial classification law and the immorality act in 1986 by P.W. Botha.
The last of the appartheid laws were not repealed until February 1989 when De Klerk freed Mandela and repealed them all in his very first speech as president - starting the negotiation process that would ultimately end in the first universal-vote elections of 1994.
The date of De Klerk's speech is not a coincidence - it was just a few months after the fall of the Berlin Wall. While the ANC was communist funded, the majority of white people would not support a complete end to appartheid. When the wall fell, the risk of South Africa becoming a USSR sub-state went away -and they were suddenly much more willing to negotiate.
In fact, in 1992 a small group of ultra-right-wing parties made a claim that the NP government had no mandate to end appartheid - leading to the very last whites-only election ever held in the country. The 1992 referendum where whites had to vote on whether to continue negotiations and end appartheid (yes), or revert back to the old system (no).
The "yes" vote won by an absolutely overwhelming majority.
This is important as it shows that the vast majority of white South Africans in 1992 did not believe in Appartheid as a just or workable system anymore - very much in line with that university poll from 1976.
Then there is the final subtlety: the cruelest parts of apparthed were secret. I remember my dad watching the Truth and Reconciliation Commision hearings with tears in his eyes saying "that wasn't what we voted for ! How could they DO that ?"
People were voting for seperate development out of a sincere (but misguided) belief that it was the best way to guarantee equal rights and freedom to all the people in South Africa, they believed the propaganda. The cruelty, the tortures, the massacre's happening on the ground were very carefully hidden by a propaganda machine that controlled the media very tightly with a very efficient censorship system.
Just one example: South African television in the early 1980's, weather reports. The weather maps used showed all the TBVC states (so-called independent states established by the appartheid government for other races to live in). Except one: the state of Bophutatswana didn't show up at all.
Why not ? Well because Bop was about 9 different patches of land that weren't even physically attached to each other. It was a screaming declaration that the theory of "people living in their ancestral land" wasn't working - so it was simply edited out of the official maps.
So considering what I know of the history of the country where I grew up (I'm South African, I'm white, I'm Afrikaans and that first fully democratic election happend just a week after my 14th birthday) - I have a lot of sympathy with the Germans who said they really didn't know.
Perhaps a part of it is "choosing not to see" - but I know how effective a government in the 70's and 80's could control the information citizens had, the propaganda that shaped their thinking, and the German's in the 1940's had much less media-technology to deal with.
It seems to me utterly feasible that the vast majority of people who supported the NAZI party had no concept of the Holocaust happening. Indeed most of the government conferences where i
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Anti-first amendment weapon.
Wrong.
Konrad Zuze's computers were the first programmable, Turing-complete computers (particularly the Z3) . They predated the first such computers built in Britain or the USA by over 15 years.
The technology got lost during the war but they were rediscovered later and sorry - but they were Von Neumann architecture machines more than a decade before Von Neumann proposed it.
Oh, did I mention Konrad Zuze was German ?
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
The German Wehrmacht (and the other regular branches of the German military in WWII) had little to do with the Nazi party. The only "Nazi" military was the Waffen-SS, whose notable accomplishments include running death camps and overall pathetic performance in actual combat. The American stereotype of branding anything related to Germany in the 1933-1945 era as "Nazi" is just wrong.
Yes, well it's a shame that the apparently overwhelming non-Nazi majority in Germany didn't do a bit more to get rid of the half dozen rotten apples in the barrel, isn't it?
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Amusingly, if you're American you probably also think you have no accent.
Whereas as we all know, the only neutral accent is the one in Southern England, which coincidentally I possess.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
It is your duty as a man to initiate James Bond-themed role play XD
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
One of the Waffen-SS officers, Werner von Braun, had a few other notable accomplishments too.
And he should have been executed, along with the rest of the SS, rather than given the chance to create weapons for destroying the red untermenschen.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
They were arguably the finest elite troops anywhere in the history of the world.
Welcome to the world of the SS fanboy. And weren't there uniforms just so...butch!
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
their
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
I'm South African, I'm white, I'm Afrikaans and that first fully democratic election happend just a week after my 14th birthday) - I have a lot of sympathy with the Germans who said they really didn't know.
Well it's a bit fucking odd that the whole of the rest of the world knew how evil the apartheid regime was, but all you poor white Afrikaaners didn't. Talk about blinkers.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Konrad Zuze's computers were the first programmable, Turing-complete computers (particularly the Z3) .
Emphasis mine, because we do not call them "Zuse-complete computers" nor should we -- Alan Turing's work was more detailed than Zuse' and predated the Z3 by several years. Why don't you read what I wrote? It was an Englishman who developed the theory of computation and who demonstrated that stored-program computers could be as powerful as purpose-built computing machines. At best, you can credit the Germans for being the first to successfully build a general purpose stored-program computer.
If it is a matter of dates, then this is the chronology you were looking for:
1837 -- Babbage describes the Analytical Engine, a Turing-complete computer, but does not develop a theory of computation (which is why nobody speaks of "Babbage-complete" computers).
1935 -- Church answers the Entscheidungsproblem with a theory of computation, the lambda calculus.
1936 -- Turing answers the Entscheidungsproblem with a theory of computation which includes universal computing machines that can be used to implement algorithms "in software," by writing a description of an algorithm on the working tape of a computing machine and simulating the machine the algorithm describes.
1936 -- Konrad Zuse writes about stored-program computers, but does not develop a theory of computation.
1941 -- Konrad Zuse builds a general purpose electro-mechanical computer.
1946 -- the first fully electric, general purpose computer is built in America: ENIAC
In no case do the Germans get credit for general purpose programmable computers, except that they managed to build one first (and even then, it was many years before anyone demonstrated that the machine was Turing complete). If you want an ad-hoc, "it looks like you could compute anything you can describe" approach, then you credit Babbage and not Zuse. If you want a well-developed, "here is what you can build machines to do, and here is a machine that can simulate the operation of any other computing machine," then you credit Turing, not Zuse.
It is easy to forget that before Turing's work, it was not clear if a stored program computer could be programmed to do anything that a purpose-built computing machine could do. Most of the computing machines in the 1930s and 40s were special-purpose, designed to compute specific functions or narrow classes of functions. That is exactly what the first digital computer, the Atanasoffâ"Berry Computer (1939), was -- a computing machine that could solve particular programs in linear algebra. Zuse did not answer the question of what the limitations of the Z3 actually were, beyond the physical limitations of its computational resources (not that he needed to, since Turing had already answered the question).
So sorry, but Zuse was the one who "rediscovered" general purpose computation, and had a more limited understanding of the concept than the British or Americans did.
Palm trees and 8
>Well it's a bit fucking odd that the whole of the rest of the world knew how evil the apartheid regime was, but all you poor white Afrikaaners didn't. Talk about blinkers
1) I said I was 14 when it ended. I had nothing to do with it, nor could I have influenced it. I am speaking of the experiences of the previous generation.
2) Indeed - because the rest of the world was NOT getting our censored media, when somebody from here went overseas and saw some of the news there they would be told "it's just communist propaganda".
3) When that stopped working so well, the government actually banned camera's at protest events.
Blinkers, yes, but not self-imposed. These blinkers were put in place by a government who had absolute control over every single aspect of life. Who literally WROTE every line in every school and university textbook (and wrote history books that matched their own desires over facts for example). Who controlled every single newspaper (what they did not own, they censored) and every television station and the entire radio network.
It was easy among all that to get people to discount discenting voices as "communist propagandists".
4) The rest of the world really wasn't much better. America still had laws that matched appartheid in both structure and intent until the 1950's ! The inspiration for appartheid came at least in part out of a conscience desire NOT to do to the black people in South Africa what Europe had done to the black people in the colonies (at that stage they were just starting to abandon them).
Indeed South Africa did nothing the USA didn't do - including ban interracial marriages (though sometimes the USA did it on a state rather than federal level). The only difference from the voter's point of view was that they did it longer.
5) You're wrong anyway. The tortures and massacres were mostly rumors worldwide. There wasn't any prove locally or abroad (you think the secret police was THAT useless ?) the occasional video - but the rest was hush-hush. A lot of rumor but no provable fact. When you control the media, you control which rumors your citizens hear.
The rest of the world didn't get confirmation of the real atrocities until the same time WE got it- during the TRC hearings of the late 90's.
See despite what you may think - killing or torturing a black man was NEVER legal in South Africa. The people who did those things were breaking the law - even under appartheid they broke them. Indeed if one of them fucked up badly enough for it to become publicly known he would have hanged with a big fanfare - the government would have made an example of him, to prove that such rogue ellements are NOT going to be tolerated.
That it was actually a common practice in certain police departments WAS a carefully held secret - because admitting it would have been admitting to being criminals.
The laws were bad, but the cruelty and torture that was done to sustain those laws were NEVER themselves legal. My ancestor were bad, but they weren't quite NAZI's, they never believed in legally sanctioned murder or slavery.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
I don't know if it was unwinnable, if he could have reloaded from an earlier save after learning from his mistakes we might be speaking german.
Cheap storage VM.
I'm surprised there was no reference to the movie "Minority Report" in the original post.
"Amusingly, if you're American you probably also think you have no accent. "
Now why y'all think I don't know I have an accent? I once had a theater teacher from up North have me read from Tom Sawyer. She said, "No need to put on so much accent." I replied, "Pardon me ma'am but I grew up on the Mississippi River. That is not a put on accent."
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Even more strange, as an American, I agree completely.
I come from Chicago, but I do my best to imitate an elitist, Southern England Sloaney-speech accent. Needless to say, my fellow Chicagoans all think I'm a big fruit.
You are welcome on my lawn.