God did create satan(deceiver), but he created him as Lucifer(light bearer). He was the most highly honored being in the universe other than God. Satan made some bad choices and became who he is today. God has even offered the life of His own Son to show us how much He loves us and wants our friendship. If this was a rigged match, would God have offered so much?
If this was not a rigged match, shouldn't the bible at least include the option of Darkness winning? At least in my Bible, the Revelation is quite clear on who wins in the end. And Jesus doesn't die as a kind of magical friendship offering, he dies to seal the New Covenant and redeem humanity.
All this dualistic stuff about God vs. Satan is ridiculously medieval. The whole story of Lucifer becoming Satan is not biblical at all, it's basically a myth. Where is the story of Lucifer mentioned in the Bible? Don't answer "Isaiah 14:12" now, because that's a mistranslation in the King James bible; in the Hebrew original the text is about a Babylonian king who persecuted the Jews. Did you never wonder why Lucifer is a Latin name, while most of the Old Testament is in Hebrew or Aramaic?
So, try each on that 300 MHz 128 MB and see what is best.
Been there, done that. I had Debian unstable alongside Windows XP on a Thinkpad 240 with 128, later 192 MB of RAM.
XP was workable; it didn't break any speed records, but it was OK to work with.
Debian was workable only after I kicked KDE off the hard drive and went for an slim X setup with Ion as window manager. With Ion it was working OK, as long as I refrained from using Qt and GTK applications at the same time. But then, I wouldn't want to force Ion on an inexperienced user.
God didn't say He planned all this destruction, He just predicted it. God doesn't want death, distruction or pain. We are living in a controversy between good and evil. If you want to blame the current events on someone, compare the world of perfect peace God has for us with what satan has organized down here.
I don't know, the idea that the world is some kind of boxing match between the forces of Light and Darkness doesn't strike me as particularly convincing. Especially if you assume that the forces of Light have created those of Darkness and that the outcome has been predetermined by the forces of Light, too. Looks too much like a rigged match for my taste.
I wonder why you're bad at what you're bad at if you spend so much money on your military.
Well, look at what we're bad at:
occupying Iraq
nation building
It's not hard to see why an advanced submarine, airplane, tank, or satellite isn't helpful with those tasks.
I guess some of the US' $350 billion annual military spending is going in the wrong direction then? Why do the US invest so heavily into large numbers of advanced submarines, airplanes, tanks or satellites - after all, it's not hard to see that this is not what the army needs? This was foreseeable ever since the Soviets' disaster in Afghanistan or the US disaster in Somalia. Looks like the US army has a serious military policy problem.
A lot has been said about hubris in this thread; well, it's probably hubris to just go into Iraq with a huge army and expect to have the troops home by Christmas (metaphorically speaking), without any clear plan whatsoever what to do once Saddam's army is defeated. If you want do do nation-building and policing and keep the occupied country quiet, having the deadliest army on the block isn't really helpful all by itself. How about some intercultural communication courses, or some basic language training in Arabic for the occupying force, perhaps - just to avoid the image of America that appears to be building up down there? This is clearly a case of failed planning, especially if Bush, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz were determined to go into Iraq since the beginning. Note that the Brits have considerably less trouble down in Basra, admittedly partly because the region is predimonantly Shiite, but also because they have a lot more experience as an occupant force through their colonial history.
One might be tempted to say that the US has the most expensive and best equipped army in the world, yet this very army is unable to do its job: win a war.
We in the military are acutely aware of what we're good at (witness the invasion of Iraq) and what we're bad at (witness the occupation of Iraq). Hubris and self-delusion are not nearly as common in the US military as you seem to think.
I wonder why you're bad at what you're bad at if you spend so much money on your military.
As for the story with the CS - I guess I don't see the point of that. If the purpose of the training is to operate without CS, then why blame the soldiers for doing the exercise as they were asked to? Ok, in real-life you don't know whether the other side would use CS, but then in real-life you wouldn't be told it was an exercise without CS. So is that really important?
The purpose of this particular maneuver was probably to train them to cope with unexpected situations. Of yourse, you can't tell them that something unexpected is going to happen; instead, you tell them that the purpose of the training is this and that, when in reality it's something else. This is an integral part of maneuver planning for any maneuver.
In real life, you wouldn't be told that the purpose of the training was to operate without CS.
In real life, you would be given intelligence information on the enemy:
"They don't have any chemical weapons."
"They don't have artillery support."
"There's only twenty of them."
"The civilians are on our side, because we're the liberators."
If your soldiers always put their life on this kind of information, good luck for them in combat. This is what this type of training is about.
Looking at the performance of the US military you can't really claim that they don't know how to fight. Quite apparently they are up to the job when it comes to real life.
Undoubtedly.
Their main deficits (as I see it) is in policing - they perform well in conquering a place, but poorly in holding it.
Yep. It's not exactly what they're trained for, either. Any 21st century adversary will have learned the lesson already: let the US come, then grind them down. It has been like this ever since the Russians in Afghanistan and the US in Somalia. As long as the US doesn't succeed in winning over the populace's heart, this strategy is going to work.
When we do exercises with foreign nationals, we have to mask our true sound signature, so as not to give away valuable data on HOW quiet we are, exactly what noises we normally make, and how best to detect us. [...] That means we have to run all kinds of noisy gear that we normally don't (or only do when we're sure nobody is around) when non-US subs are about.
So do they. Every other navy in the world does that, too, in a maneuver. In a sub-vs-sub battle scenario this particular disadvantage is on both sides, actually.
As I said somewhere else in this thread, I'm really waiting for the results of the first joint NATO naval maneuvers with the Germans and their 214-class AIP boats.
Also, a submarine exercise where nobody can see anyone else isn't very good training - it's just driving around in circles. So sometimes we have to give away our position on purpose to get the show on the road. [...] The interesting thing is, we don't lose EVERY time, or even MOST of the time.
This doesn't sound like you're speaking from maneuver experience. Just how many maneuvers have you attended? What do you think a submarine exercise is about? Do you think each and every joint maneuver is only about the US training the others?
What would be the point of giving away the US unit's position like that - so that the others can practice target shooting? Don't they need target acquisition practice, too?
Of course there's always a general layout for a maneuver that sets up some units in more risky positions, but after that, it isn't really that the US subs are asked to run full throttle all the time so the others can nicely home their torpedoes.
In addition, we frequently have "prospective" commanding officers play captain-for-a-day during the exercises to get some experience before we let them loose by themselves on a sub where, essentially, they're an absolute ruler.
"Frequently" is an exaggeration; experienced commanders need maneuver experience, too. And most other navies do it the same way, so it's not much of an American-only disadvantage.
The attitude of yours is exactly the sort of hubris that is cause #1 for the most catastrophically lost battles. A commander of your attitude will completely fail to account for the enemy. Clausewitz will tell you this as well as Sun Tzu; doesn't your army require you to read anymore? This kind of pattern can be found everywhere: Varus vs. the Germans, Napoleon in Russia, the Germans in Stalingrad, and I guess you can come up with a couple of US examples, too, if you remember your military history hard enough.
No, they are not. Fuel-cell subs are small, range limited & thus primarily useful for defending. The US submarine force is almost exclusively used for power projection.
Of course they serve different purposes. That's the exact reason why Germany doesn't build nuclear submarines: they don't have to lug SSBNs around half the planet, they're using their submarine force for defense, and that's what they're really good at. It's not WWII anymore when a Type XXI attack sub would have to be designed to operate in the entire Atlantic.
The fact that they're used for a different purpose doesn't make them less advanced, though, especially in defense against long-range nuclear attack subs. I'm looking forward to the next NATO naval maneuvers in 2005 and early 2006, then we'll see.
Also, having been on an earlier Australian sub (Oberon class), late model Australian submarine (Colins class), British submarine and several US subs, I might be tempted to say no other nation in the world can compete with the technology in the US subs.
Apparently, you've never been on a German class 214 submarine, then. (Germany has a long tradition of building excellent submarines ever since World War 1.) They're built by HDW in Kiel with a diesel-electric drive and a fuel cell unit for long-term underwater operation. The fuel cell drive emits very little noise as well as no significant heat at all. For more information, see the section on the class 212 and 214 projects at naval-technology.com; as fas as non-nuclear subs are concerned, they're the most advanced boats on the planet as of now, and they're becoming an export hit, too.
This is never going to work in Russia. In Moscow, a full version of Windows XP is going to cost you about five dollars. You even get a copy of the license sticker. Also note that "vendor" in Russia often means a guy in a shop on the corner who slaps some components together and sells them, never bothering about OEM licenses for the XP he installs on the boxes.
I fail to see how this is substantially different from the US, other than by scale.
oooh.. argument from moral equivalence...
Note that argument by moral equivalence is perfectly OK as long as moral equivalence is an adequate description category for the problem domain in question (i.e. the discussion is on a moral topic) and as long as participants share the same basic moral frame of reference on the subject, which is probably the case in this discussion (we both disapprove of countries wasting money needed for education of the poor etc.). For reference (note that the debate is about morality already when I make my point):
[Story]$COUNTRY is spending $MONEY on space research.
[Parent]Gosh, how can they! $MONEY on space research is $MONEY not spent on educating the children! How can they be so foolish!
[My point:] Everybody does that. Your country do it too, only on a larger scale. [Your point:] Bleat! That's argument by moral equivalence! You're an idiot!
Also note that my main point is not even argument by moral equivalence, it's argument by equivalence in substance (the money is actually being spent). It certainly does have a moral implication at this point of the discussion, though.
India is a country in which a veritable sea of people is living in appaling conditions. [...] Those eighty million might have bought the country one more university or one more hospital - which, I believe, have a better chance of saving / educating a person which makes an important scientific discovery than that pile of junk has of making a good return on its moon trip.
I fail to see how this is substantially different from the US, other than by scale. There are a lot of people living in appalling conditions in the US as well (not *quite* as many, of course). For example, the $350 billion a year of military spending might have bought the country quite a lot of educational institutions, hospitals or whatever. Instead, it's blown through the chimney in a massive dick-waving contest.
This is applicable to money spent on space, too. Or what about the military uses originally intended for the Shuttle project? Was any of the money ever put to use at all, let alone for a purpose?
We didn't win "hearts and minds" of the Germans, or the Japanese. We (the allies collectively) kicked the crap out of them, killed millions of them (including, inevitably, a lot of people who didn't deserve it), and levelled their countries.
Actually, you did win "hearts and minds", of the Germans, at least. I talked to one of our professors half a year ago, she's over eighty. She told me that in 1945, in Germany most of the population had profound hate for the Americans. In 1960, most people admired them.
My grandmother (I'm German) used to tell the same story. She lived in Berlin through the blockade. In 1946, she said, the Americans were hated, in 1948 everybody loved them. No wonder after being literally fed by the Americans for a couple of years.
Guess this isn't going to happen in Iraq, though, as it looks your guys are on the wrong track there altogether.
Pretty much, although there are a few differences:
skylarov's company was using prices in dollars
In Russia, it's quite common to have prices in dollars. Has been like this since the inflation (which lasted until '98 when they had a currency reform). You regularly hear prices quoted in dollars, then people convert them to roubles and pay in roubles).
the credit card processing company used was located in the US
Not uncommon at all in e-commerce. Guess where your VISA and MasterCard payments are being processed, regardless of where you live or where your bank is.
the pages to sell those items were available in english, instead of russian only.
WW2 Nazi paraphernalia aren't generally available in French, either. Most of the stuff is in German, actually.
In contrast, the yahoo auction site didn't have prices in francs nor euros, didn't use a french company to process payments and didn't offer a french version of those pages.
I guess if I put up an auction for World Trade Center debris or Al-Qa'ida paraphernalia from Europe, but on an international site, with prices listed in Euro, without mentioning that I'd ship to America, I could still get into legal trouble in the USA. Probably the auction would be removed more quickly than you can say "first amendment".
Erm, residents of those two places are most likely to hate the French and the Taleban, respectively, not Americans. Time to update your stereotypes, there've been two wars since the last time you apparently checked in.
I partially agree with you about the Taleban. In Afghanistan, the US army is not particularly liked, mainly because they don't show much of a presence and the Taleban are still around.
But why on earth would an Iraqi hate the French??
The truth is you're talking nonsense
on
Spectrum as Property
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· Score: 4, Insightful
But back to hating, the Africans hate the Europeans. Visit Mozembique - if you are Portugeuse, there are places you just do not visit. Visit French Guiana, where France threw its undesirable prisoners for years. If you're French, you do not leave the resort if you're wise (or at least take an escort with plenty of protection). Do you think the Czech like Germans? Go visit the village of Lidice which the Germans wiped off the map in order to show who was boss. Ask any Pole or Balkan nation native how much they love Russians. You want to know hate? Just ask.
And many of these people have legitimate hate. Most of the world has a right to hate Brits, Germans, French and Spainiards for the continued nightmare that lingers from their colonialism. They envy the US, but HATE Europeans.
You do not seem to know what you are talking about. Have you been to any of the places you're mentioning? Could you point to Moçambique on a map without looking it up first?
I'm German. I have been to a number of places in Eastern Europe that have seen the worse side of German occupation, and I have never been met with hate. I've been learning Russian, I've been learning some Hebrew so that I could read Yiddish (basically a dialect of German) and speak to some of the few remaining Jews over there, I did some reading, and then I just went there. People were a bit reserved at first, but after two minutes of talk, we got along very well. When I said I wanted to visit my German occupant grand-uncle's grave on the German military cemetery in Smolensk, we drove there together without them even asking.
My girlfriend is Ukrainian. They are probably the country that got the worst of us in World War 2. Do you think she hates me? We are talking Russian at home because my Ukrainian is too bad, and she gives me 9th-of-May victory postcards as a joke. That's Ukrainian hate for you.
I've spent the better part of the last year in Uzbekistan in the French Research Institute in Tashkent where the librarian is Crimean Tatar, born in the 1930s. We got along very well. She told me about how she got to hate Germans between '42 and '44 during German occupation of the Crimea, how Germans threatened to shoot her father before her eyes. After the war, she said, she refused even to look at Germans because of this. After the collapse of 1991, however, she said the five or ten Germans who came to Tashkent for research were young, interested in the local peopulation and their history, they spoke Russian and/or Uzbek and behaved very civilized and friendly in general. She said that these Germans were difficult to hate, and that she was compelled to relinquish her hate for Germans in general and turn it into bitter memories of the German occupants sixty years ago - an entirely different story.
So "all Africans hate the Europeans"? My brother came back a few weeks ago from eight months of work in Ghana where he lived in Accra with a host family, no running water, but the people were fine. Hated because he is European? Definitely not. I know Brits who worked in Nigeria (colony until 1960), Russians who worked in Central Asia (colony until 1917, Soviet Union afterwards) and a Portuguese who worked in Angola (colony until 1975). The memories they brought back were not ones of hate. If you visit Moçambique, there are places that you don't visit when you look like money, not when you're Portuguese. "Legitimate hate"? If that old Jew in Velizh near Smolensk had hated me, I wouldn't have blamed him, but he didn't.
Make an effort to learn people's languages, to show interest in them, their culture and their history. Respect them, look and behave in a respectable way. Stay in places for more than a couple of days, behave like a civilized person and smile when people show you their family pictures. An American who does just that is not going to be hated anywhere in the world, even in the Philippines (US colony until 1946) or Vietnam for that matter. They may not like your country (as an abstract entity) for what it does, what it did or fails to do, but they will not hate you.
That would probably have been Uzbekistan - from where I happened to read Slashdot for about three months last year, from some villages over jolly 28k8 modem lines:)
God, coming back to Tashkent to an Internet cafe with an 1 MBit line felt like being headed dead-on on the fast lane for the Century of the Fruitbat...
I see why they did that in Duisburg and Essen, two of the five or six larger cities in the Ruhrgebiet.
The Autobahn A40 that connects the Ruhrgebiet cities from Dortmund via Bochum, Essen and Mülheim to Duisburg has the reputation of being the worst motorway in Germany, at least wrt/traffic jams. Guaranteed traffic jam 8-11am and 3-7pm.
It was probably just a professor's idea how to get to work more quickly in the morning.
Actually, over here in Germany it was pretty common to vaccinate against smallpox until well into the seventies, and in East Germany into the eighties. Not that the Soviets would have dropped smallpox on East Germany. It's quite funny, if you go to a club you can tell if a girl is from West or East Germany simply because of the scar from the vaccination.
I was born in West Germany in 1977 and I've got a vaccination certificate by the WHO.
(On the other hand, it made sense for the East Germans to vaccinate their people. My Ukrainian girlfriend, born in 1978, told me some of the horror stories about the West that were spread at school in the USSR. What they thought about the aggressive West is pretty much on par with our ideas about Ivan coming through the Iron curtain.)
Hey, come on, guys. Windows XP has a personal firewall built right in. You just have to activate it for your Internet connection. It's about three clicks from the desktop.
While the XP firewall is certainly not the holy grail of secure computing, it does prevent your PC from being blasterized while you download the necessary updates. Don't tell me that you didn't know this, having been a Linux user since 1995 and being security-conscious.
Slashdot Mirror
All this dualistic stuff about God vs. Satan is ridiculously medieval. The whole story of Lucifer becoming Satan is not biblical at all, it's basically a myth. Where is the story of Lucifer mentioned in the Bible? Don't answer "Isaiah 14:12" now, because that's a mistranslation in the King James bible; in the Hebrew original the text is about a Babylonian king who persecuted the Jews. Did you never wonder why Lucifer is a Latin name, while most of the Old Testament is in Hebrew or Aramaic?
XP was workable; it didn't break any speed records, but it was OK to work with.
Debian was workable only after I kicked KDE off the hard drive and went for an slim X setup with Ion as window manager. With Ion it was working OK, as long as I refrained from using Qt and GTK applications at the same time. But then, I wouldn't want to force Ion on an inexperienced user.
A lot has been said about hubris in this thread; well, it's probably hubris to just go into Iraq with a huge army and expect to have the troops home by Christmas (metaphorically speaking), without any clear plan whatsoever what to do once Saddam's army is defeated. If you want do do nation-building and policing and keep the occupied country quiet, having the deadliest army on the block isn't really helpful all by itself. How about some intercultural communication courses, or some basic language training in Arabic for the occupying force, perhaps - just to avoid the image of America that appears to be building up down there? This is clearly a case of failed planning, especially if Bush, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz were determined to go into Iraq since the beginning. Note that the Brits have considerably less trouble down in Basra, admittedly partly because the region is predimonantly Shiite, but also because they have a lot more experience as an occupant force through their colonial history.
One might be tempted to say that the US has the most expensive and best equipped army in the world, yet this very army is unable to do its job: win a war.
In real life, you wouldn't be told that the purpose of the training was to operate without CS.
In real life, you would be given intelligence information on the enemy:
- "They don't have any chemical weapons."
- "They don't have artillery support."
- "There's only twenty of them."
- "The civilians are on our side, because we're the liberators."
If your soldiers always put their life on this kind of information, good luck for them in combat. This is what this type of training is about. Undoubtedly.Yep. It's not exactly what they're trained for, either. Any 21st century adversary will have learned the lesson already: let the US come, then grind them down. It has been like this ever since the Russians in Afghanistan and the US in Somalia. As long as the US doesn't succeed in winning over the populace's heart, this strategy is going to work.
As I said somewhere else in this thread, I'm really waiting for the results of the first joint NATO naval maneuvers with the Germans and their 214-class AIP boats.
This doesn't sound like you're speaking from maneuver experience. Just how many maneuvers have you attended? What do you think a submarine exercise is about? Do you think each and every joint maneuver is only about the US training the others?
What would be the point of giving away the US unit's position like that - so that the others can practice target shooting? Don't they need target acquisition practice, too?
Of course there's always a general layout for a maneuver that sets up some units in more risky positions, but after that, it isn't really that the US subs are asked to run full throttle all the time so the others can nicely home their torpedoes.
"Frequently" is an exaggeration; experienced commanders need maneuver experience, too. And most other navies do it the same way, so it's not much of an American-only disadvantage.
The attitude of yours is exactly the sort of hubris that is cause #1 for the most catastrophically lost battles. A commander of your attitude will completely fail to account for the enemy. Clausewitz will tell you this as well as Sun Tzu; doesn't your army require you to read anymore? This kind of pattern can be found everywhere: Varus vs. the Germans, Napoleon in Russia, the Germans in Stalingrad, and I guess you can come up with a couple of US examples, too, if you remember your military history hard enough.
The fact that they're used for a different purpose doesn't make them less advanced, though, especially in defense against long-range nuclear attack subs. I'm looking forward to the next NATO naval maneuvers in 2005 and early 2006, then we'll see.
This is never going to work in Russia. In Moscow, a full version of Windows XP is going to cost you about five dollars. You even get a copy of the license sticker. Also note that "vendor" in Russia often means a guy in a shop on the corner who slaps some components together and sells them, never bothering about OEM licenses for the XP he installs on the boxes.
Note that argument by moral equivalence is perfectly OK as long as moral equivalence is an adequate description category for the problem domain in question (i.e. the discussion is on a moral topic) and as long as participants share the same basic moral frame of reference on the subject, which is probably the case in this discussion (we both disapprove of countries wasting money needed for education of the poor etc.). For reference (note that the debate is about morality already when I make my point):
[Story] $COUNTRY is spending $MONEY on space research.
Also note that my main point is not even argument by moral equivalence, it's argument by equivalence in substance (the money is actually being spent). It certainly does have a moral implication at this point of the discussion, though.
Yes, I can. Teflon was invented in 1938 by Roy Plunkett at DuPont, trademarked and first marketed in 1945. Google for "teflon invented".
I don't know how often I've heard the urban legend that Teflon was somehow related to space research. Doesn't make it right, though.
I fail to see how this is substantially different from the US, other than by scale. There are a lot of people living in appalling conditions in the US as well (not *quite* as many, of course). For example, the $350 billion a year of military spending might have bought the country quite a lot of educational institutions, hospitals or whatever. Instead, it's blown through the chimney in a massive dick-waving contest.
This is applicable to money spent on space, too. Or what about the military uses originally intended for the Shuttle project? Was any of the money ever put to use at all, let alone for a purpose?
Your math is strange.
11,500 - 71,000 = -59,500, not +40,500.
11,500 + 71,000 = 82,500, not 186,000.
Then, of course, the actual number is 115,000 instead, but:
115,000 - 71,000 = 44,000, not 40,500.
Next time you write up a rebuttal, check that your data is straight, no matter if your actual point is correct or not.
- The US is good. MS is bad.
- The US is good. MS is bad.
- The US is good. MS is bad.
- ...
...many more iterations deleted...- ...
- The US is good. MS is bad.
Thanks! Now I feel all warm and fuzzy inside and can go on leading a happy, healthy life.I partially agree with you about the Taleban. In Afghanistan, the US army is not particularly liked, mainly because they don't show much of a presence and the Taleban are still around.
But why on earth would an Iraqi hate the French??
You do not seem to know what you are talking about. Have you been to any of the places you're mentioning? Could you point to Moçambique on a map without looking it up first?
I'm German. I have been to a number of places in Eastern Europe that have seen the worse side of German occupation, and I have never been met with hate. I've been learning Russian, I've been learning some Hebrew so that I could read Yiddish (basically a dialect of German) and speak to some of the few remaining Jews over there, I did some reading, and then I just went there. People were a bit reserved at first, but after two minutes of talk, we got along very well. When I said I wanted to visit my German occupant grand-uncle's grave on the German military cemetery in Smolensk, we drove there together without them even asking.
My girlfriend is Ukrainian. They are probably the country that got the worst of us in World War 2. Do you think she hates me? We are talking Russian at home because my Ukrainian is too bad, and she gives me 9th-of-May victory postcards as a joke. That's Ukrainian hate for you.
I've spent the better part of the last year in Uzbekistan in the French Research Institute in Tashkent where the librarian is Crimean Tatar, born in the 1930s. We got along very well. She told me about how she got to hate Germans between '42 and '44 during German occupation of the Crimea, how Germans threatened to shoot her father before her eyes. After the war, she said, she refused even to look at Germans because of this. After the collapse of 1991, however, she said the five or ten Germans who came to Tashkent for research were young, interested in the local peopulation and their history, they spoke Russian and/or Uzbek and behaved very civilized and friendly in general. She said that these Germans were difficult to hate, and that she was compelled to relinquish her hate for Germans in general and turn it into bitter memories of the German occupants sixty years ago - an entirely different story.
So "all Africans hate the Europeans"? My brother came back a few weeks ago from eight months of work in Ghana where he lived in Accra with a host family, no running water, but the people were fine. Hated because he is European? Definitely not. I know Brits who worked in Nigeria (colony until 1960), Russians who worked in Central Asia (colony until 1917, Soviet Union afterwards) and a Portuguese who worked in Angola (colony until 1975). The memories they brought back were not ones of hate. If you visit Moçambique, there are places that you don't visit when you look like money, not when you're Portuguese. "Legitimate hate"? If that old Jew in Velizh near Smolensk had hated me, I wouldn't have blamed him, but he didn't.
Make an effort to learn people's languages, to show interest in them, their culture and their history. Respect them, look and behave in a respectable way. Stay in places for more than a couple of days, behave like a civilized person and smile when people show you their family pictures. An American who does just that is not going to be hated anywhere in the world, even in the Philippines (US colony until 1946) or Vietnam for that matter. They may not like your country (as an abstract entity) for what it does, what it did or fails to do, but they will not hate you.
(well, I guess in order to get the reference, you'd have to be seriously old-school...)
That would probably have been Uzbekistan - from where I happened to read Slashdot for about three months last year, from some villages over jolly 28k8 modem lines :)
God, coming back to Tashkent to an Internet cafe with an 1 MBit line felt like being headed dead-on on the fast lane for the Century of the Fruitbat...
I see why they did that in Duisburg and Essen, two of the five or six larger cities in the Ruhrgebiet.
The Autobahn A40 that connects the Ruhrgebiet cities from Dortmund via Bochum, Essen and Mülheim to Duisburg has the reputation of being the worst motorway in Germany, at least wrt/traffic jams. Guaranteed traffic jam 8-11am and 3-7pm.
It was probably just a professor's idea how to get to work more quickly in the morning.
I was born in West Germany in 1977 and I've got a vaccination certificate by the WHO.
(On the other hand, it made sense for the East Germans to vaccinate their people. My Ukrainian girlfriend, born in 1978, told me some of the horror stories about the West that were spread at school in the USSR. What they thought about the aggressive West is pretty much on par with our ideas about Ivan coming through the Iron curtain.)
Hey, come on, guys. Windows XP has a personal firewall built right in. You just have to activate it for your Internet connection. It's about three clicks from the desktop.
While the XP firewall is certainly not the holy grail of secure computing, it does prevent your PC from being blasterized while you download the necessary updates. Don't tell me that you didn't know this, having been a Linux user since 1995 and being security-conscious.