I guess I missed the part where the US has annexed sovereign states by force, or systematically imprisoned, impressed into forced labor, and murdered millions of people based solely on their ethnicity.
Then you must be Rip Van Winkle. There is an element of truth in your assertion, in that - since the 19th century, as others have pointed out - the USA has not seen fit to annex other nations in the sense of adding them to its own territory. Instead, it finds it more convenient to invade them, destroy their existing political systems, and set up puppet "Quisling" regimes. But dead people are dead however they got that way, and wherever the US armed forces have gone there seem to be an awful lot of "excess deaths". Maybe the liberated brown people simply die of excessive joy at their newly-conferred rights and freedoms.
>More importantly, comparing the USA today with Nazis during WW2 is like saying the Nazis weren't all that bad, and that the genocide of millions of people is comparable to modern Western civilization.
"Millions" isn't enough to differentiate. South-East Asia 3-4 million; Iraq 1.5 million; already we are pushing that famous figure of 6 million, and that's without even mentioning a score of other nations that have seen their citizens killed by US aggression. (But as war wasn't declared, and few if any Americans were hurt, that's OK).
OK, now I understand one thing but there is another thing I can't understand. If the first officer was asleep while the captain flew, why were the first officer's controls live?
Maybe it's naive of me, but why does a pilot have to nap at all during a flight? Surely, as long as we have human flight crews, there should always be a wakeful pilot at the controls, ready to take over if the automated systems fail, or request human intervention.
If the flight is too long for a pilot to stay wakeful, even if he was fully rested at takeoff, then there must be at least one equally qualified backup who can sleep while his opposite number is alert on duty.
I don't see how any economic or business argument can justify entrusting the lives of hundreds of passengers to someone who is not wide awake.
But if we hadn't joined WW2, the outcome would very likely have been very different.
The USA didn't join WW2. First Japan, then Germany declared war on the USA, which had remained steadfastly neutral for the first (count them) 27 MONTHS of the war. The USA watched placidly while Germany overran Poland, Norway, Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands, France, the Balkans, Greece, Crete, and the USSR as far as the Moscow tramlines. The USA gave no military help to Britain when it was fighting for its life in the Battle of Britain and the Blitz. It showed NO sign of ever "joining" the war on its own initiative.
Not just because of the American military, but because of American *production*. We built (and provided to our allies -- including Russia) megatons of critical supplies.
How did those megatons of critical supplies - including, according to you, enough food for tens of millions of people - reach the USSR? The almost exclusively British Arctic convoys to Murmansk could only carry the most vital of military supplies. Of course, by mid-1943 the tide had turned on the Eastern Front, and the Soviets were inevitably going to sweep the Germans right back to their own country.
As for supplies to Britain, everything was paid for in full - when the cash ran out, in military bases and technology, and then on credit. I know, we finally paid off the debt about ten years ago. (And the debt we were still repaying to the USA after WW1 was instrumental in preventing us from rearming enough to face down the Nazis in the 1930s).
The UK, for example, would now be a Nazi satellite and its Jews would have been eliminated.
Entirely hypothetical. In fact, Britain survived the Battle of France, the Battle of Britain, and the Blitz - all of them finished over a year before the USA was forced into the war. By 1941, Hitler had turned his attention to the USSR and had no plans for attacking Britain again.
But "WWII" didn't truly become a *world war* until the late 1930s.
Need I say anything about this? Of course it began in September 1939, so what you wrote is technically true.
Well, of course Byrne should have resigned earlier because of his big material deficit. But he wanted the spectators to enjoy the finish. Anyway, he was only down a queen against rook and two minor pieces.
An advantage of 5 is equivalent to an extra rook, or a minor piece (bishop or knight) and two pawns. No decent chess player would play on with such a deficit; instead he would resign to spare his opponent the tedium (and himself the distress) of playing on when the outcome is a foregone conclusion.
There are exceptions in practice. In 5-minute chess (with each player restricted to 5 minutes for the entire game) it is perfectly feasible to play on a piece down and perhaps even win, because the opponent may not have time to work out the position properly. There are also some "pathological" positions that used to fool primitive chess programs - where, for instance, one side has a queen against one or two pieces, but the queen is imprisoned and can never escape. I assume the methods used in this project would check for such positions.
Computer chess is very different from chess between human players. There are no tricks or traps, for example - the computer never falls into a trap unless it is going to backfire and turn out badly for the human player. Being a single pawn down against a really strong computer program, without good compensation, is utterly fatal and means one might as well resign.
The first VB (as such) came out in 1991. Java was released to the world in 1995, although it too was first created in 1991 (as "Oak"). Until 1995 it remained an internal project at Sun.
Their original introduction of VB (with all it's short comings) made it much easier for people with limited experience to create applications. On the other hand Java based developer support was much weaker at the same time.
Yes indeed. I remember clearly that Java's support for developers was abysmal in 1991.
What I find interesting - and seriously worrying - is that Grishnakh's point about the super-rich not caring about inflation would come as a surprise to any Slashdotter. Isn't it fairly obvious?
Imagine you are an intelligent, ruthless, selfish person who has, by focused effort and an utter lack of empathy, amassed a huge fortune. What is your top priority? No, not partying with starlets - making sure you keep and expand your huge fortune. One of the very first things you do is hire a bunch of even more intelligent, highly qualified economists and accountants. They will tell you - although no businessperson needs to be told - about inflation and its effects (and its purposes). Of course you are not going to get caught by it to your detriment: inflation is one of a number of relatively unobtrusive, relentless mechanisms that quietly transfer vast sums of money from the poor and moderately well off to the rich.
The Pentagon is crammed with thousands of big, slow, inefficient human beings. As I read TFA, this new place is largely devoted to densely-packed electronic equipment.
"if you despise the Democrats, you can eiher vote Democrat or waste your vote".
Please read
"if you despise the Democrats, you can either vote Republican or waste your vote".
Doh! I don't know whether my fingers refused to type the words "vote Republican", or whether I was just incompetent. Probably the latter. (But at least I was competent enough to notice that I'd been incompetent...)
The advantage of a representative democracy is not the right to elect a government of our choice to office --since as stated above almost all of us are ill qualified to make this judgement --the advantage is the right to dismiss from office a government which is under-performing, and that, as the recipients of the effects of poor performance, We The People are in the best situation to judge.
Unfortunately, in the USA and most other supposedly "democratic" nations today, after the voters dismiss the government they have decided is inadequate, they have precisely ONE other choice: the other party. In the USA, if you despise the Democrats, you can eiher vote Democrat or waste your vote. In the UK, if you want to get rid of the Conservatives (with or without a small parasitic growth of Lib Dems) your only alternative is Labour.
So the voters are easily fooled into thinking they are boss. All that is necessary is to ensure that both main parties dance to the same tune. In a country where you cannot get elected without spending vast amounts of money - because no one understands the issues, or even what the real issues are, so they need to be entertained into voting - that is as easy as falling off a log (if you happen to have vast sums of money).
I wasn't outraged at deploying to Oil War 1. Anyone who serves thinking they are defending the US instead of playing Smedley Butler is nuts. That's what most wars anywhere are for, not moralist crusades. So what?
Our casualties are tiny, our forces are well-paid volunteers (who can volunteer back to the block by not re-upping), and we can stay at war as long as funding holds up. Yes, really.
So your ethics are really exactly the same as the Nazis'.
In 3 months, Iran could legitimately have them, too, by formally withdrawing from the treaty.
And that "hostile act", of course, would be exactly the pretext for launching an aggressive war against Iran that Israel and the USA have been longing for.
So if US cops "demands" Iran hand over the details of their nuclear scientist's e-mail traffic it is just going to happen?
Iran is one of maybe four or five nations in the whole world that does not automatically do what Washington tells it to do. That, of course, is why it is at ground zero for the most terrifying display of nuclear sabre-rattling that Washington can muster.
There used to be a few other countries that refused to follow orders from Washington. Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya... are you seeing a pattern here yet?
This is a case where simply saying "No" would actually work. Try it, "No, you may not have the data."
See, very simple. No need for weapons or belligerence.
Very nice, until you suddenly find that your company's operations in the USA have been closed down, or all your money in US-controlled banks has been frozen. That no one who has ever met you, or any of your family, or anyone with the same initials as you, is allowed to enter the USA or any of its widespread dominions. That no US-based corporation (or corporation that ever hopes to do any business in the USA, or with US-based corporations) will give you the time of day. That all your communications may be tapped, and diligently searched for the slightest excuse to harass or prosecute you for further alleged wrongdoing. That no one will hire you. That other governments hoping for favour from Washington (i.e. all governments except perhaps Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea) will presently follow suit. And on, and on, and on.
Oh, and you may unexpectedly find yourself being extradited to Sweden on multiple charges of aggravated rape.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess I missed the part where the US has annexed sovereign states by force, or systematically imprisoned, impressed into forced labor, and murdered millions of people based solely on their ethnicity.
Then you must be Rip Van Winkle. There is an element of truth in your assertion, in that - since the 19th century, as others have pointed out - the USA has not seen fit to annex other nations in the sense of adding them to its own territory. Instead, it finds it more convenient to invade them, destroy their existing political systems, and set up puppet "Quisling" regimes. But dead people are dead however they got that way, and wherever the US armed forces have gone there seem to be an awful lot of "excess deaths". Maybe the liberated brown people simply die of excessive joy at their newly-conferred rights and freedoms.
>More importantly, comparing the USA today with Nazis during WW2 is like saying the Nazis weren't all that bad, and that the genocide of millions of people is comparable to modern Western civilization.
"Millions" isn't enough to differentiate. South-East Asia 3-4 million; Iraq 1.5 million; already we are pushing that famous figure of 6 million, and that's without even mentioning a score of other nations that have seen their citizens killed by US aggression. (But as war wasn't declared, and few if any Americans were hurt, that's OK).
Try "anonymity".
What makes you think those things can't happen in the USA?
Is this a record for the number of replies before getting back on topic?
Also, HTF is he supposed to control how long he sleeps? Sounds like a rule made by an Irishman. (And I'm part Irish, I'm allowed).
OK, now I understand one thing but there is another thing I can't understand. If the first officer was asleep while the captain flew, why were the first officer's controls live?
Maybe it's naive of me, but why does a pilot have to nap at all during a flight? Surely, as long as we have human flight crews, there should always be a wakeful pilot at the controls, ready to take over if the automated systems fail, or request human intervention.
If the flight is too long for a pilot to stay wakeful, even if he was fully rested at takeoff, then there must be at least one equally qualified backup who can sleep while his opposite number is alert on duty.
I don't see how any economic or business argument can justify entrusting the lives of hundreds of passengers to someone who is not wide awake.
Sadly I have no mod points today, but nevertheless I award the parent the honour of being the first substantive response to TFA.
I wish Slashdot had a button to take you past all the jokes and trash talk to where the actual discussion begins...
But if we hadn't joined WW2, the outcome would very likely have been very different.
The USA didn't join WW2. First Japan, then Germany declared war on the USA, which had remained steadfastly neutral for the first (count them) 27 MONTHS of the war. The USA watched placidly while Germany overran Poland, Norway, Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands, France, the Balkans, Greece, Crete, and the USSR as far as the Moscow tramlines. The USA gave no military help to Britain when it was fighting for its life in the Battle of Britain and the Blitz. It showed NO sign of ever "joining" the war on its own initiative.
Not just because of the American military, but because of American *production*. We built (and provided to our allies -- including Russia) megatons of critical supplies.
How did those megatons of critical supplies - including, according to you, enough food for tens of millions of people - reach the USSR? The almost exclusively British Arctic convoys to Murmansk could only carry the most vital of military supplies. Of course, by mid-1943 the tide had turned on the Eastern Front, and the Soviets were inevitably going to sweep the Germans right back to their own country.
As for supplies to Britain, everything was paid for in full - when the cash ran out, in military bases and technology, and then on credit. I know, we finally paid off the debt about ten years ago. (And the debt we were still repaying to the USA after WW1 was instrumental in preventing us from rearming enough to face down the Nazis in the 1930s).
The UK, for example, would now be a Nazi satellite and its Jews would have been eliminated.
Entirely hypothetical. In fact, Britain survived the Battle of France, the Battle of Britain, and the Blitz - all of them finished over a year before the USA was forced into the war. By 1941, Hitler had turned his attention to the USSR and had no plans for attacking Britain again.
But "WWII" didn't truly become a *world war* until the late 1930s.
Need I say anything about this? Of course it began in September 1939, so what you wrote is technically true.
No decent chess player.... Calling bullshit on that....
Game of the century - Move 18
http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1008361
Well, of course Byrne should have resigned earlier because of his big material deficit. But he wanted the spectators to enjoy the finish. Anyway, he was only down a queen against rook and two minor pieces.
An advantage of 5 is equivalent to an extra rook, or a minor piece (bishop or knight) and two pawns. No decent chess player would play on with such a deficit; instead he would resign to spare his opponent the tedium (and himself the distress) of playing on when the outcome is a foregone conclusion.
There are exceptions in practice. In 5-minute chess (with each player restricted to 5 minutes for the entire game) it is perfectly feasible to play on a piece down and perhaps even win, because the opponent may not have time to work out the position properly. There are also some "pathological" positions that used to fool primitive chess programs - where, for instance, one side has a queen against one or two pieces, but the queen is imprisoned and can never escape. I assume the methods used in this project would check for such positions.
Computer chess is very different from chess between human players. There are no tricks or traps, for example - the computer never falls into a trap unless it is going to backfire and turn out badly for the human player. Being a single pawn down against a really strong computer program, without good compensation, is utterly fatal and means one might as well resign.
When did the first VB come out?
The first VB (as such) came out in 1991. Java was released to the world in 1995, although it too was first created in 1991 (as "Oak"). Until 1995 it remained an internal project at Sun.
Their original introduction of VB (with all it's short comings) made it much easier for people with limited experience to create applications. On the other hand Java based developer support was much weaker at the same time.
Yes indeed. I remember clearly that Java's support for developers was abysmal in 1991.
Yes, a lot of people lose data on mainframes
Citations to back this up?
What I find interesting - and seriously worrying - is that Grishnakh's point about the super-rich not caring about inflation would come as a surprise to any Slashdotter. Isn't it fairly obvious?
Imagine you are an intelligent, ruthless, selfish person who has, by focused effort and an utter lack of empathy, amassed a huge fortune. What is your top priority? No, not partying with starlets - making sure you keep and expand your huge fortune. One of the very first things you do is hire a bunch of even more intelligent, highly qualified economists and accountants. They will tell you - although no businessperson needs to be told - about inflation and its effects (and its purposes). Of course you are not going to get caught by it to your detriment: inflation is one of a number of relatively unobtrusive, relentless mechanisms that quietly transfer vast sums of money from the poor and moderately well off to the rich.
The Pentagon is crammed with thousands of big, slow, inefficient human beings. As I read TFA, this new place is largely devoted to densely-packed electronic equipment.
Erratum:
For
"if you despise the Democrats, you can eiher vote Democrat or waste your vote".
Please read
"if you despise the Democrats, you can either vote Republican or waste your vote".
Doh! I don't know whether my fingers refused to type the words "vote Republican", or whether I was just incompetent. Probably the latter. (But at least I was competent enough to notice that I'd been incompetent...)
The advantage of a representative democracy is not the right to elect a government of our choice to office --since as stated above almost all of us are ill qualified to make this judgement --the advantage is the right to dismiss from office a government which is under-performing, and that, as the recipients of the effects of poor performance, We The People are in the best situation to judge.
Unfortunately, in the USA and most other supposedly "democratic" nations today, after the voters dismiss the government they have decided is inadequate, they have precisely ONE other choice: the other party. In the USA, if you despise the Democrats, you can eiher vote Democrat or waste your vote. In the UK, if you want to get rid of the Conservatives (with or without a small parasitic growth of Lib Dems) your only alternative is Labour.
So the voters are easily fooled into thinking they are boss. All that is necessary is to ensure that both main parties dance to the same tune. In a country where you cannot get elected without spending vast amounts of money - because no one understands the issues, or even what the real issues are, so they need to be entertained into voting - that is as easy as falling off a log (if you happen to have vast sums of money).
I wasn't outraged at deploying to Oil War 1. Anyone who serves thinking they are defending the US instead of playing Smedley Butler is nuts. That's what most wars anywhere are for, not moralist crusades. So what?
Our casualties are tiny, our forces are well-paid volunteers (who can volunteer back to the block by not re-upping), and we can stay at war as long as funding holds up. Yes, really.
So your ethics are really exactly the same as the Nazis'.
In 3 months, Iran could legitimately have them, too, by formally withdrawing from the treaty.
And that "hostile act", of course, would be exactly the pretext for launching an aggressive war against Iran that Israel and the USA have been longing for.
We have always been at war with Eastasia.
I never cease to be astonished at the abysmally low level of historical knowledge that people not only reveal, but positively flaunt on Slashdot.
So if US cops "demands" Iran hand over the details of their nuclear scientist's e-mail traffic it is just going to happen?
Iran is one of maybe four or five nations in the whole world that does not automatically do what Washington tells it to do. That, of course, is why it is at ground zero for the most terrifying display of nuclear sabre-rattling that Washington can muster.
There used to be a few other countries that refused to follow orders from Washington. Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya... are you seeing a pattern here yet?
This is a case where simply saying "No" would actually work. Try it, "No, you may not have the data."
See, very simple. No need for weapons or belligerence.
Very nice, until you suddenly find that your company's operations in the USA have been closed down, or all your money in US-controlled banks has been frozen. That no one who has ever met you, or any of your family, or anyone with the same initials as you, is allowed to enter the USA or any of its widespread dominions. That no US-based corporation (or corporation that ever hopes to do any business in the USA, or with US-based corporations) will give you the time of day. That all your communications may be tapped, and diligently searched for the slightest excuse to harass or prosecute you for further alleged wrongdoing. That no one will hire you. That other governments hoping for favour from Washington (i.e. all governments except perhaps Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea) will presently follow suit. And on, and on, and on.
Oh, and you may unexpectedly find yourself being extradited to Sweden on multiple charges of aggravated rape.