And you think comparing an eastern european country (which is industrialized nation, more expensive housing due to historical restrictions etc) to India is fair? That's idiotic, care-free knee-jerk comment; based partially on misreading exactly what I said.
For some things things can be directly compared, sure; imports can not be much cheaper (except for medicines that are overpriced in US), but labour based products invariably ARE cheaper.
And to highest per capita GDP; strictly speaking that's not true. Go check your statistics. There are couple of countries higher; mostly oil-rich ones. Plus more importantly, it all depends on current US$ exchange rate. Now that dollar is coming down, except USA to "drop" down few notches next time you read the charts. But that just points the fallacy of comparing nominal salaries between countries; realistically change is hardly equivalent to what statistics tell.
And finally for whatever it's worth; the idea of "living like a king" is based on what I was told by an indian co-worker, who I would assume knows situation much better than you or I; esp. since he is rather likely to move back there in future.
Equality using currency exchange rate tells little about local purchasing power (parity) of monetary amounts. So, in case of India MANY things are cheaper, not just workers (which is indicated by lower "absolute" salaries); so relatively speaking your salaries goes much farther. Obviously this mostly relates to domestic products; for buying iPods it has less effect. In that sense salaries will approach _relative_ US salaries much quicker; depending on how one calculates purchasing power for comparisons.
So it's basically possible for both salaries to be globally-speaking lower (just use raw currency exchange rates), to make outsourcing look more attractive, AND for that difference to be much lesser from employee's perspective (to make working in India a viable option).
Also note that there is already big difference in salaries inside USA. Some companies are "outsourcing" from California and New York to cheaper states. Thus, there is no single US salary rate either; which means that India (et al) will reach salary rates of, say, Alabama IT workers much sooner than those of Massachusetts.
The problem is the blood-colored glasses they view America with.
Or perhaps it's rosy glasses through which some americans (including the president) see their nation? Can't blame the mirror if your face looks ugly.
Seriously, BBC hardly qualifies as anti-american broadcasting corp. Any nation doing the same as US (waging an ill-founded war of aggression) would have been reported similarly, or, more likely, much much worse.
People aren't leaving high paid jobs in the US to go work for peanuts in India. I'd rather work at Quiznos.
Were you by any chance raised by wolves?
You know, what they get paid in India is
relatively speaking most likely very nice amount? Purchasing parity is nice; one can live like a king there... so in some ways they'll be better
off there. One can not really afford servants with programmer salary in USA; but can most definitely
do that in India.
It's not like they go there to starve; quite the opposite. It's even possible that the salaries are getting closer to those of, say, southern Europe ones; and trend is likely to continue. In couple of years high quartile of programmers in India earn more than low quartile in, say, mid-west.
Furthermore, the article did mention that it may be considered a good career move; working in India helps in managing teams in India, even if one works in USA (assuming there'll be managing jobs remaining in USA). So, it can also be thought of as sort of extreme internship.:-)
I'm looking forward for Solaris + Opteron servers. Should be another interesting combo, performance wise. For one, Solaris 9 has some fantastic scheduling for multiprocessor machines. Additionally, it has been implemented in 64 bit for many years.
One potential concern, though, is that while
there has been Solaris for x86 for a while,
it's not really its main platform... so it's
bit like waiting for 2.4.6 kernel on, say,
Sparc systems. So I'm wondering if Solaris design
of scheduling (and other kernel parts) takes
some advantage of Sparc processor's design, that
wouldn't map nicely into Opteron? In future this should get better (since Sun is now allied with AMD), but Solaris 9 was written probably well before x86 was seen as strategic platform for Sun.
Of course, the 5.2 schedULEr was well thought out and designed before being coded and will probably last quite a while. The linux 2.6 one will probably need major patches for 2.8 and will need to be rewritten for v3.
Care to elaborate what is wrong with linux 2.6 scheduler design (or implementation)? And in comparison what is elegant about FreeBSD's?
Even one of BBC's top guys recently left over a probe stating that they misreported the war.
If you are claiming BBC has significant "liberal" bias you are making multiple mistakes. First of all, since BBC is a british media, you should call it "leftist"; outside of USA word "liberal"
has well-defined meaning that's probably what you meant by using that term.
Secondly, such claim is laughable in itself. BBC is fiercely independent from british government (independent of its composition leftist, rightist), and widely regarded as being a decent example of journalistic objectivity. They call
it as they see it. And more importantly, they
try to get balanced view -- US govt statements
were at one end of spectrum of statements; they
were small part of the puzzle of reporting the
war, and couldn't be used as more than just
input from one of parties involved.
That BBC reported events other than ones US army and govt wanted to show -- in addition to ones those sources provided, after verifying them -- just proves their integrity, as compared to most all US big broadcasting co's... who thought their main "duty" was to serve as relays for US government during war. To me that's repulsive --
it's almost like taking time warp back to WW2.
Except that this time there was no need for state-initiated censorship: corporations chose
to self-censor their content instead.
Well, in (military) dictatures it's hardly THAT strange, actually... in Africa feudal-like system leads to generals running lots of state-owned companies.
Point, though, was just that news organizations probably should be bit more careful about running breaking news; Fox would have done well to verify facts from other (independent) sources instead of just relaying official statement of the
organization
that has lots of pressure to get "we FOUND them" news through.
And you need to speak french. Don't forget about that! Add another 3 years to get fluent in that
Hmmh. And they don't teach french in canadian schools outside Quebeq? Most other bilingual countries are pretty good at either demanding or at least providing for decent language education for secondary languages. So... it'd seem like perhaps in many cases mountie wannabes would have at least basic fluency in french, n'est pas?
Interesting. Too bad there didn't seem to be much info about compression itself. Is that proprietary, or perhaps documented somewhere (white paper)? And comparisons didn't seem to include bzip2 results which would have been interesting (since that's an open standard, although not with that many implementations).
It is shocking when you consider.NET is really only MS's J++, but renamed "Dot Net".
No, no, no..NET is bigger framework; not consisting of just one language. You should have claimed "C# is just J++". But even that would have been wrong; C# is a different language; obviously closely modelled after "good" parts of Java (things that work), but not identical. I'd even claim it has some nifty features Java does not have... and I'm Java guy with no intention to get locked by Microsoft, and thus won't be using C# any time soon. But I prefer my facts straight, even when discussing companies I don't especially like.
It's one thing to be critical of Microsoft's antics as a de-facto OS monopoly, and another to
claim things that are not true. C# as well.NET were and are major efforts by Microsoft, which are NOT xerox copies of their (or others) Java efforts .
Well, England did have a large airforce, but how much of it could have been considered to be "front line" fighters?
My understanding was that it was relatively speaking well-funded... which doesn't necessarily mean top-notch, just better than, say, ground forces. But I understood that tank situation was much worse (was fixed by US help), and also number of infantry soldiers was way too small (to degree it was a problem for Normandy invasion... thanks to Italy operation, that was, after getting Sicily airfields, waste of time and resources).
It's also kind of interesting how both Napoleon and Hitler had preliminary plans of invading England; Napoleon though had much more ambition, and real dedication to get it done... but eventually lost his navy, and then interest. I'm not sure if Hitler ever seriously really considered it... although german army obviously did couple of plans, just to see feasibility (or lack of, rather).
Being frank is for engineers, and thats why people dont like them.
No. All other professionals, and most non-professionals can be frank, and will be, occasionally. It's just that there's time and place for frankness, sugar-coating, and many other approaches in-between. All-around good engineers (ie. ones with normal or good social skills) know the distinction as well as, say, business people. And whether one likes frankness or not depends on person (and situation to some degree) more than profession of person(s) involved.
There are of course occupations where frankness for all but limited partners and special occasions is strongly frowned upon. Lawyers are extreme examples where act of trying to be frank seems to cause extreme distress; it's like they were physically ill or something:-)
Do you think we should not have committed these acts?
What if the Nazi regime were permitted to conquor, unabated without resistance, because killing is wrong?
You may want to read more on Dresden bombings, and similar large-scale fire bombings, to understand what I was commenting on. There is difference between fighting a war against enemy army (including attacking its support facilities such as factories, power plants, roads etc) -- which was entirely legitimate, due to Germany's aggressions --, and attacking civilian targets. My point is and was that escalating war to include civilian targets was wrong; even though germans had done the same earlier (mostly during battle for england); and it was especially senseless as such bombing did not further the main goal of winning the war and getting nazi regime responsible for its actions.
Further, since bombing strategy was devised by limited number of high-ranking air force generals,
it's reasonable to say they should be held responsible (morally, at least) for unnecessary destruction they brought; whereas most of the army fought the war without resorting to such high-level terrorism.
When or where did I say my relatives died in Dresden, or fought with (or against for that matter) nazis? People who order cowardous fire bombings (like the ones is Dresden, or over London, or wherever) are war criminals, even if not convicted; and people who support them are immoral cowards. Your idea of revenge for anyone related by blood or creed is brutal and barbaric (I hope it's just a kneejerk reaction though).
And as to "if the nation you live in wages aggressive war, YOU are responsible", I'm not very happy to live in USA; being by your logic responsible for that illegal unprovoked attack too. I wonder what I could do that repair the damage caused by that war of aggression, personally, to get rid of my guilt?
And finally, go read your history books. Large-scale civilian targeting bombings of WWII really had LITTLE IF ANY (positive) effect on winning the war. That's the saddest part of it; it didn't help getting rid of Hitler. May even have helped him get last german men to fight in volksgrenadiers, prolong the war by almost a year.
but do you think the incessant dropping of "give up" leaflets on the German troops would have caused them to surrender?
Of course not. But problem is, the war was really won by ground forces, and strategic bombers contributed little to victory, but lots to civilian casualties and general destruction. I basically think there's point in trying to keep one's own core ideals intact; there were plenty of other military actions available (and were being used obviously). Using air power for tactical ground support, for example, was what was crucial both for initial German victories (in Poland and France) and later for allied. And Soviet troops also succesfully used Sturmoviks to support their troops; they didn't have many strategic bombers to use, and still won the war on eastern front.
As to ballistic missiles, well, just like bombers they are just weapons with longer range, and act of developing them is not in itself ultra evil. It's just modern connotation with nuclear and chemical warheads that makes them scarier than many other weapons. That is, Nazi evilness was unfortunately expressed in many worse ways than development of V1/V2 (although, using them for hitting random civilian targets was, granted, equivalent in principle to allied nighttime fire bombing raids).
With some justification I can call your attitude 20-20 hindsight. You're probably right about the bombings, but it's a little bit too easy.
Fair enough; it's hard enough to really estimate efficiency during campaign. It's just that it was probably pretty easy to estimate civilian damage (since hitting accuracy was studied extensively during the war, plus there was plenty of intelligence material)... so it's scary how strong belief of efficiency was (even with evidence being gathered), and how it apparently was enough to justify "punishment" bombings.
In any case, I wasn't attemtping to justify Dresden; just to point out the context in which it occured.
Yeah, I probably overreacted a bit... but I know there are people who would consider it acceptable reason (and during war it's more understandable feeling of course), and that's a scary thought.
Second was waiting for the Germans to attack (the phoney war) instaed of attacking first.
Another common misconception. It's not well known, but french DID attack on western front right after Poland was invaded. And with quite a force too (3 or 4 tank divisions supported by infantry); although mostly just trying to see how it goes... too bad attack was halted right on by german minefields & fortifications at west wall. At that point, french figured they'd get slaughtered trying to attack through that part of border (and were probably right)... but they didn't want to (try to) violate Belgium or Netherlands; for good reason too -- both countries were neutral, unless a bigger country attacked, and thus might have allied with Germany if allied had tried that.
Hitler's chances of invading England were nil, though; germans just didn't have naval force to do that to begin with, nor enough air force (which british had plenty; about the only part of military that was decently funded before the war). And Germany had also lost much/most of its airborne forces and eq; plus significant part of navy in Norway campaign. Just like Napoleon, Hitler didn't have means to fight british in their own turf.
Obviously you haven't read about the book I mentioned, have you? Belgians surrendered largely because british left (indicated they will leave), not the other way around. And while there was bit of a breakthrough by germans on french side, it wasn't something that was (at that point) outflanking british troops; nor anything that couldn't have been stopped with proper reaction.
Worst thing was french leaders panicked, and as a result Churchill too panicked (which was bit unusual for him, to take french panicking too seriously).
The idea that germans were unstoppable was created later to defend panicky retreat at Dunkerque.
And that's why it'd be good to read some actual descriptions of how french campaign really went; not just what allied generals wanted to paint it as. It's not that it was THE worst outcome, but it certainly wasn't very good either.
.
Content management systems are apparently something vaguely along the lines of Slashcode -- they store data in a database and let you more easily generate webpages from said data.
This is one of my pet peeves though -- nothing requires a CMS to do any HTML publishing whatsoever. There should be some more specific term for CMSes (WCPS, web content publishing system) that are mostly used for maintaining web sites (which, granted is majority of things called CMS nowadays), since it'd make more sense for larger systems to only have HTML publishing as a smallish compontent plugged as one output format of a CMS.
Certainly, the firebombing of German cities was an atrocity; but these acts were conducted in response to previous deliberate targetting of UK cities by the Luftwaffe. This is the historical context which I think the parent post is lacking in.
Sure, but that's a lousy excuse for atrocities. That the scope of german bombings was miniscule compared to allies' may be irrelevant, but the fact is none of those civilians was responsible for bombings. Further, Hitler was considered a brutal barbarian (and rightly so); allied bombing raids did nothing to make US and UK look any better. Strategic bombing was also clearly MEANT to "break the german will", by targeting alongside 'real' military targets also civilian ones... so those weren't accidents by any means. It would have been normal to have civilian casualties, obviously, but pure collateral damage would have been much less. This was, like you said, pure revenge.
It's too bad those bombing barons were never held responsible for their callous disregard of human life (both for their own soldiers and enemy civilians); and the worst thing is it had very little positive effect on war itself. German industrial production kept on raising all through 43 (during heaviest bombing raids), all the way to summer of 44; after which germans started losing important resources (iron ore from France, Romanian oil from Ploesti), and then war industry started to decline. And as to spirit to fight... it was actually studied (after the war), and it was found to have little effect there either. Will to fight between heavily bombed cities, and those that weren't was nominal (study was done by USAF, by the way, to try to evaluate how well campaign went). One can wonder how anyone thinks that killing your loved ones makes you less willing
to fight against enemy that caused the deaths.
But not only were german civilians grilled alive by tens or hundreds of thousands; allied also lost over 100k air force personnel during the war; most of them during bomb raids. And yet many still consider generals who devised these strategic bombing campaings heroes. Sad how winners can write and rewrite history.
Doh. How about reading a book like "Blitzkrieg myth" by John Mosier, and learn how invasion went... and who were the real cowards in the battlefield; not soldiers, but leaders, esp. english ones. Dunkerque was a fiasco later turned as "victory" by revisionist historians. Sure, not too many losses... at the expense of losing western front for couple of years.
French troops fought pretty valiantly, in any case (as did Polish... but somehow they are never considered same as french [which they obviously were not either btw]).
I know the usual paranoids are up in arms about the AF doing this, but the same people would flood "The DoD is so stupid" if it were found out that people were abusing the technology to transport classified info.
I don't have a tin-foil hat, but I think it's rather naive to assume that if such technology exists or can be implemented, there wouldn't be
desire to apply it elsewhere as well. Put another way; if there is/was plans to use it much more widely, this is the natural first step; use it for something that's easily defensible ("if you are not with us, you're with terrorists and enemy spies"); and see where that leads.
But you can't detect steg with encrypted messages, because the encrypted messages seem as random as the normal data, so there's nothing to clue you into the fact that it means anything.
I'm not steg expert, but saying
"as random as normal data" isn't of much help -- normal data is NOT random, statistically speaking.
One of clues is that random data has highest theoretical amount of information that is, can not be compressed (as there's no redundancy to compress); thus, anything that compresses using some algorithm is somewhat non-random (non-uniformly distributed values of bits independent of how one looks at it; same number of 0s and 1s on any given subset of data).
Thing is; it'd be neat if some encryption (or compression) algorithm (or combination of two) could indeed hide (statistic) non-randomness of real data well enough to prevent steg analysis from working. I think encryption/compression in general does improve "white noiseness", but probably not enough to prevent analysis of whether something is "as random as it should".
Slashdot Mirror
For some things things can be directly compared, sure; imports can not be much cheaper (except for medicines that are overpriced in US), but labour based products invariably ARE cheaper.
And to highest per capita GDP; strictly speaking that's not true. Go check your statistics. There are couple of countries higher; mostly oil-rich ones. Plus
more importantly, it all depends on current
US$ exchange rate. Now that dollar is coming down, except USA to "drop" down few notches next time you read the charts. But that just points the fallacy of comparing nominal salaries between countries; realistically change is hardly equivalent to what statistics tell.
And finally for whatever it's worth; the idea of "living like a king" is based on what I was told by an indian co-worker, who I would assume knows situation much better than you or I; esp. since he is rather likely to move back there in future.
So it's basically possible for both salaries to be globally-speaking lower (just use raw currency exchange rates), to make outsourcing look more attractive, AND for that difference to be much lesser from employee's perspective (to make working in India a viable option).
Also note that there is already big difference in salaries inside USA. Some companies are "outsourcing" from California and New York to cheaper states. Thus, there is no single US salary rate either; which means that India (et al) will reach salary rates of, say, Alabama IT workers much sooner than those of Massachusetts.
Or perhaps it's rosy glasses through which some americans (including the president) see their nation? Can't blame the mirror if your face looks ugly.
Seriously, BBC hardly qualifies as anti-american broadcasting corp. Any nation doing the same as US (waging an ill-founded war of aggression) would have been reported similarly, or, more likely, much much worse.
Were you by any chance raised by wolves?
You know, what they get paid in India is relatively speaking most likely very nice amount? Purchasing parity is nice; one can live like a king there... so in some ways they'll be better off there. One can not really afford servants with programmer salary in USA; but can most definitely do that in India. It's not like they go there to starve; quite the opposite. It's even possible that the salaries are getting closer to those of, say, southern Europe ones; and trend is likely to continue. In couple of years high quartile of programmers in India earn more than low quartile in, say, mid-west.
Furthermore, the article did mention that it may be considered a good career move; working in India helps in managing teams in India, even if one works in USA (assuming there'll be managing jobs remaining in USA). So, it can also be thought of as sort of extreme internship. :-)
One potential concern, though, is that while there has been Solaris for x86 for a while, it's not really its main platform... so it's bit like waiting for 2.4.6 kernel on, say, Sparc systems. So I'm wondering if Solaris design of scheduling (and other kernel parts) takes some advantage of Sparc processor's design, that wouldn't map nicely into Opteron? In future this should get better (since Sun is now allied with AMD), but Solaris 9 was written probably well before x86 was seen as strategic platform for Sun.
Care to elaborate what is wrong with linux 2.6 scheduler design (or implementation)? And in comparison what is elegant about FreeBSD's?
If you are claiming BBC has significant "liberal" bias you are making multiple mistakes. First of all, since BBC is a british media, you should call it "leftist"; outside of USA word "liberal" has well-defined meaning that's probably what you meant by using that term. Secondly, such claim is laughable in itself. BBC is fiercely independent from british government (independent of its composition leftist, rightist), and widely regarded as being a decent example of journalistic objectivity. They call it as they see it. And more importantly, they try to get balanced view -- US govt statements were at one end of spectrum of statements; they were small part of the puzzle of reporting the war, and couldn't be used as more than just input from one of parties involved.
That BBC reported events other than ones US army and govt wanted to show -- in addition to ones those sources provided, after verifying them -- just proves their integrity, as compared to most all US big broadcasting co's... who thought their main "duty" was to serve as relays for US government during war. To me that's repulsive -- it's almost like taking time warp back to WW2. Except that this time there was no need for state-initiated censorship: corporations chose to self-censor their content instead.
Point, though, was just that news organizations probably should be bit more careful about running breaking news; Fox would have done well to verify facts from other (independent) sources instead of just relaying official statement of the organization that has lots of pressure to get "we FOUND them" news through.
Hmmh. And they don't teach french in canadian schools outside Quebeq? Most other bilingual countries are pretty good at either demanding or at least providing for decent language education for secondary languages. So... it'd seem like perhaps in many cases mountie wannabes would have at least basic fluency in french, n'est pas?
Interesting. Too bad there didn't seem to be much info about compression itself. Is that proprietary, or perhaps documented somewhere (white paper)? And comparisons didn't seem to include bzip2 results which would have been interesting (since that's an open standard, although not with that many implementations).
No, no, no. .NET is bigger framework; not consisting of just one language. You should have claimed "C# is just J++". But even that would have been wrong; C# is a different language; obviously closely modelled after "good" parts of Java (things that work), but not identical. I'd even claim it has some nifty features Java does not have... and I'm Java guy with no intention to get locked by Microsoft, and thus won't be using C# any time soon. But I prefer my facts straight, even when discussing companies I don't especially like.
It's one thing to be critical of Microsoft's antics as a de-facto OS monopoly, and another to claim things that are not true. C# as well .NET were and are major efforts by Microsoft, which are NOT xerox copies of their (or others) Java efforts .
My understanding was that it was relatively speaking well-funded... which doesn't necessarily mean top-notch, just better than, say, ground forces. But I understood that tank situation was much worse (was fixed by US help), and also number of infantry soldiers was way too small (to degree it was a problem for Normandy invasion... thanks to Italy operation, that was, after getting Sicily airfields, waste of time and resources).
It's also kind of interesting how both Napoleon and Hitler had preliminary plans of invading England; Napoleon though had much more ambition, and real dedication to get it done... but eventually lost his navy, and then interest. I'm not sure if Hitler ever seriously really considered it... although german army obviously did couple of plans, just to see feasibility (or lack of, rather).
No. All other professionals, and most non-professionals can be frank, and will be, occasionally. It's just that there's time and place for frankness, sugar-coating, and many other approaches in-between. All-around good engineers (ie. ones with normal or good social skills) know the distinction as well as, say, business people. And whether one likes frankness or not depends on person (and situation to some degree) more than profession of person(s) involved.
There are of course occupations where frankness for all but limited partners and special occasions is strongly frowned upon. Lawyers are extreme examples where act of trying to be frank seems to cause extreme distress; it's like they were physically ill or something :-)
What if the Nazi regime were permitted to conquor, unabated without resistance, because killing is wrong?
You may want to read more on Dresden bombings, and similar large-scale fire bombings, to understand what I was commenting on. There is difference between fighting a war against enemy army (including attacking its support facilities such as factories, power plants, roads etc) -- which was entirely legitimate, due to Germany's aggressions --, and attacking civilian targets. My point is and was that escalating war to include civilian targets was wrong; even though germans had done the same earlier (mostly during battle for england); and it was especially senseless as such bombing did not further the main goal of winning the war and getting nazi regime responsible for its actions.
Further, since bombing strategy was devised by limited number of high-ranking air force generals, it's reasonable to say they should be held responsible (morally, at least) for unnecessary destruction they brought; whereas most of the army fought the war without resorting to such high-level terrorism.
When or where did I say my relatives died in Dresden, or fought with (or against for that matter) nazis? People who order cowardous fire bombings (like the ones is Dresden, or over London, or wherever) are war criminals, even if not convicted; and people who support them are immoral cowards. Your idea of revenge for anyone related by blood or creed is brutal and barbaric (I hope it's just a kneejerk reaction though).
And as to "if the nation you live in wages aggressive war, YOU are responsible", I'm not very happy to live in USA; being by your logic responsible for that illegal unprovoked attack too. I wonder what I could do that repair the damage caused by that war of aggression, personally, to get rid of my guilt?
And finally, go read your history books. Large-scale civilian targeting bombings of WWII really had LITTLE IF ANY (positive) effect on winning the war. That's the saddest part of it; it didn't help getting rid of Hitler. May even have helped him get last german men to fight in volksgrenadiers, prolong the war by almost a year.
Of course not. But problem is, the war was really won by ground forces, and strategic bombers contributed little to victory, but lots to civilian casualties and general destruction. I basically think there's point in trying to keep one's own core ideals intact; there were plenty of other military actions available (and were being used obviously). Using air power for tactical ground support, for example, was what was crucial both for initial German victories (in Poland and France) and later for allied. And Soviet troops also succesfully used Sturmoviks to support their troops; they didn't have many strategic bombers to use, and still won the war on eastern front.
As to ballistic missiles, well, just like bombers they are just weapons with longer range, and act of developing them is not in itself ultra evil. It's just modern connotation with nuclear and chemical warheads that makes them scarier than many other weapons. That is, Nazi evilness was unfortunately expressed in many worse ways than development of V1/V2 (although, using them for hitting random civilian targets was, granted, equivalent in principle to allied nighttime fire bombing raids).
Fair enough; it's hard enough to really estimate efficiency during campaign. It's just that it was probably pretty easy to estimate civilian damage (since hitting accuracy was studied extensively during the war, plus there was plenty of intelligence material)... so it's scary how strong belief of efficiency was (even with evidence being gathered), and how it apparently was enough to justify "punishment" bombings.
Yeah, I probably overreacted a bit... but I know there are people who would consider it acceptable reason (and during war it's more understandable feeling of course), and that's a scary thought.
Another common misconception. It's not well known, but french DID attack on western front right after Poland was invaded. And with quite a force too (3 or 4 tank divisions supported by infantry); although mostly just trying to see how it goes... too bad attack was halted right on by german minefields & fortifications at west wall. At that point, french figured they'd get slaughtered trying to attack through that part of border (and were probably right)... but they didn't want to (try to) violate Belgium or Netherlands; for good reason too -- both countries were neutral, unless a bigger country attacked, and thus might have allied with Germany if allied had tried that.
Hitler's chances of invading England were nil, though; germans just didn't have naval force to do that to begin with, nor enough air force (which british had plenty; about the only part of military that was decently funded before the war). And Germany had also lost much/most of its airborne forces and eq; plus significant part of navy in Norway campaign. Just like Napoleon, Hitler didn't have means to fight british in their own turf.
And that's why it'd be good to read some actual descriptions of how french campaign really went; not just what allied generals wanted to paint it as. It's not that it was THE worst outcome, but it certainly wasn't very good either. .
This is one of my pet peeves though -- nothing requires a CMS to do any HTML publishing whatsoever. There should be some more specific term for CMSes (WCPS, web content publishing system) that are mostly used for maintaining web sites (which, granted is majority of things called CMS nowadays), since it'd make more sense for larger systems to only have HTML publishing as a smallish compontent plugged as one output format of a CMS.
Sure, but that's a lousy excuse for atrocities. That the scope of german bombings was miniscule compared to allies' may be irrelevant, but the fact is none of those civilians was responsible for bombings. Further, Hitler was considered a brutal barbarian (and rightly so); allied bombing raids did nothing to make US and UK look any better. Strategic bombing was also clearly MEANT to "break the german will", by targeting alongside 'real' military targets also civilian ones... so those weren't accidents by any means. It would have been normal to have civilian casualties, obviously, but pure collateral damage would have been much less. This was, like you said, pure revenge.
It's too bad those bombing barons were never held responsible for their callous disregard of human life (both for their own soldiers and enemy civilians); and the worst thing is it had very little positive effect on war itself. German industrial production kept on raising all through 43 (during heaviest bombing raids), all the way to summer of 44; after which germans started losing important resources (iron ore from France, Romanian oil from Ploesti), and then war industry started to decline. And as to spirit to fight... it was actually studied (after the war), and it was found to have little effect there either. Will to fight between heavily bombed cities, and those that weren't was nominal (study was done by USAF, by the way, to try to evaluate how well campaign went). One can wonder how anyone thinks that killing your loved ones makes you less willing to fight against enemy that caused the deaths.
But not only were german civilians grilled alive by tens or hundreds of thousands; allied also lost over 100k air force personnel during the war; most of them during bomb raids. And yet many still consider generals who devised these strategic bombing campaings heroes. Sad how winners can write and rewrite history.
French troops fought pretty valiantly, in any case (as did Polish... but somehow they are never considered same as french [which they obviously were not either btw]).
I don't have a tin-foil hat, but I think it's rather naive to assume that if such technology exists or can be implemented, there wouldn't be desire to apply it elsewhere as well. Put another way; if there is/was plans to use it much more widely, this is the natural first step; use it for something that's easily defensible ("if you are not with us, you're with terrorists and enemy spies"); and see where that leads.
I'm not steg expert, but saying "as random as normal data" isn't of much help -- normal data is NOT random, statistically speaking. One of clues is that random data has highest theoretical amount of information that is, can not be compressed (as there's no redundancy to compress); thus, anything that compresses using some algorithm is somewhat non-random (non-uniformly distributed values of bits independent of how one looks at it; same number of 0s and 1s on any given subset of data).
Thing is; it'd be neat if some encryption (or compression) algorithm (or combination of two) could indeed hide (statistic) non-randomness of real data well enough to prevent steg analysis from working. I think encryption/compression in general does improve "white noiseness", but probably not enough to prevent analysis of whether something is "as random as it should".