If the French were as good at surrendering and as bad as standing up for themselves and others as some people would like you to believe then all you Americans would still be singing "God Save The Queen".
Think about that next time you reach for the cheap and ignorant jibes or the next time you celebrate Independence Day.
Yeah, argue the semantics all you want. He was a vital part of the machinery that was responsible for tens of millions of deaths in the largest conflict in human history. He might not have been a member of the Nazi Party but he was guilty of being a war criminal and a mass murderer.
And it's not like his weapons targetted willing combatants either, as both the V1 and V2 were flying bombs designed to cause as much death and destruction to London and its civilian population as possible. That's where the V in the name comes from: "Vergeltungswaffen", meaning "vengeance weapon". In a very real sense, the V1 and V2 were Hitler's WMDs, designed solely to terrorise and murder as many Londoners as possible.
So AC, do you still think it's that important whether he was a card-carrying party member?
If it wasn't bloody obvious the first time, I'll make it so this time: a large proportion of the projected fatalites caused by such a hypothetical scenario would be outside the US. So, assuming a figure of 50 percent US fatalities, that's 25-75 million US dead: why are you worrying about a third of the US not living within x many miles of the Eastern seaboard if you really are paying more than just lip service about how other nations would be affected?
Worst hit will be harbours and estuaries that funnel the waves inland: goodbye Halifax, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington, DC. Miami and Havana go under almost entirely, as do low-lying islands like the Bahamas and Barbados. Likely death toll, if there is no mass evacuation beforehand? A hundred million people, give or take fifty million.
So it says 100 million dead +/- 50 million, assuming no evacuations. Nowhere does it say those are all US citizens - in fact it pointedly makes reference to islands in the Carribean - so how do you manage to make such a ridiculous leap of logic and assume that it's only talking about US fatalities?
I don't know what's worse: the morons who posted complete crap in the original story ("they chose to live there", "it's karma coming round for all those tech jobs going to India", "Oh, there's a natural disaster affecting millions; is Arthur C Clarke OK?") or your assumption that the only nation that would be affected by a catastrophic event of this nature in the Atlantic Ocean would be the US.
(You do realise that you're talking about an event that would hurt the US but totally annihilate those island nations in the Atlantic, right? That there would still be plenty of the US left untouched but places like the Bahamas would be most probably be wiped out completely? And that, while we're debating this hypothetical, people around the Indian Ocean are living through and dying from the real deal?)
Seriously, some people here need their heads examined. The amount of narcissism, myopia and even xenophobia that I've seen attached to the tsunami-related stories here on Slashdot beggars belief.
I think you underestimate the value of Steve Jobs to Apple and overestimate the value of a PVR solution to it too.
Apple, in case it had slipped your mind, was a rudderless ship before Steve Jobs rejoined the company. It was losing market share not only to IBM PC compatibles but to its own authorised clones. It took Jobs next to no time to reverse that slide, develop the iMac, kickstart OSX development and return Apple to its "insanely great" roots.
Yes, the CEO's that Apple had during Jobs' absence from the company made it more profitable but Jobs has made Apple more popular too.
More than anything, Jobs has positioned Apple and its products as accessable and desirable: Apply is now a company focused on style (the iMacs, the G3/G4/G5 designs compared to their predecessors, the iPod) and simplicity (again, the iMacs, OS X, the iPod).
Frankly, it's hard to imagine Apple being where it is today without Jobs at the helm. I'd bet my life that Apple's board, its employees and the overwhelming majority of its shareholders and customers would agree with that sentiment. Certainly, it's hard to see someone like Gil Amelio, Apple's previous Chairman and CEO, steering such a successful course.
Look around at the PC industry today. Who's the most innovative company out there? IBM's shedding its PC division, HP marriage with Compaq still looks like a bad deal, Dell doesn't innovate at all,Sony is obsessed with its own technology (Memory Stick, etc, although they finally caved in with regards to ATRAC vs MP3), and everyone else is small potatoes.
Will Apple ever have a PVR product? My head says, yes, eventually they will. But it won't be until Apple is ready, and that won't be until it's confident that it has a killer product. In that regard, it'll be the same strategy as Apple adopted with the personal music player market: let everyone else spend their time and money selling the concept to the public and making the early mistakes and then jump in once it's got a bigger market to aim for with a more polished product (iPod plus iTunes).
Frankly, there's more chance of Osama Bin Laden presenting himself at the front gate of the White House tomorrow than there is of Apple making the same mistake it's made once before and firing Jobs over his reluctance to jump into the PVR market.
It's not so blatant to me. Change will come, but it will most likely come slowly rather than quickly, if for no reason other than China is a big country, with a huge population that enjoy a range of disparate lifestyles.
Sometime in our lifetimes China is going to become a consumer culture, consuming many of the goods that it already makes and exports to the rest of the world. My PDA was made in China. My keyboard was made in China. My colour laser printer was made in China. Can you see where I'm going with this?
Sooner or later, China's markets will open up to near Western levels. Chinese people will buy widescreen TVs, computers and designer goods. And when that happens, the gates will open too, albeit in a controlled manner. How strict those controls will be or how they will function is open to speculation but for over a decade now China has been becoming a more relaxed and less restrictive society.
Just because they have limits on internet access now that doesn't mean that they will always have limits on internet access. The US once had limits on the rights of blacks and women, yet it progressed from that point and China will to.
Don't forget, China isn't just a different country it's a different country with a totally different culture to that which we're familiar with in the West. Concepts that seem alien to us are natural to them, and vice versa. And, obviously, it's the negative aspects of Chinese society that always get played up rather than the positive ones.
And when it comes to things as subjective as human rights, please realise that there's an "eye of the beholder" aspect to be considered. You might regard China as being oppressive when it comes to religion or expression but there's not a country in the world that hasn't done the same at some time or another or that has its own human rights abuses going on right now.
So to recap, don't dismiss China as being stuck permanently on hold. China will progress and develop, but at its own pace and in its own time. Who knows when change will come and how suddenly. After all, the day before the Berlin Wall fell, or before Nelson Mandela was released, or any ground-breaking event, who would have predicted that such a radical change would come overnight?
I already have a 'work to live' rather than 'live to work' philosophy, but whereas I can't live my life constantly ignoring everything but the things that are nearest and dearest to me you can bet your life that I wouldn't be devoting my attention to anything but the things that are most important to me in that ELE scenario.
If the Earth was going to be devastated tomorrow and the chances of me and mine surviving were next to zero then I'd rather spend the time I had left doing something important to me than going to work.
And, no by "something important to me" I don't mean playing EverQuest.
Exactly. It has very little to do with merit. After all, just what did Bush achieve or do in 2000 that was so exemplorary and worthy of merit to win the award in that year?
Winning an election in which more people voted for the other guy and in which dirty tricks, family connections and ultimately heavily contested court cases were the deciding factors hardly counts as a great and noble achievement.
Hey, I'm not an American, so I didn't lose anything. It's you who've lost buddy, and when I say "you" I mean all of you, including the Republicans. Enjoy your "No Child Left Behind" and "Clean Air" Acts.
So just because one document proved to be false then you consider that proof beyond any possible doubt that Dubya fulfilled his commitment to the fullest of his ability? Puh-leaze.
Q. If the explanation is as simple as you say it is then why not come out and say it? And why aren't there other people with similar experiences who are queuing up to tell us that's the case?
A. Because that's not how it happened.
Re:Like Dan Rather and...
on
The Media in 2014
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Not that it excuses Bill Clinton's draft-dodging, but I think Dubya not fulfilling his commitment and then using his service as some badge of honour is worse.
After all, it's not like Dubya's daddy didn't do a good job of making sure junior was out of danger by getting him a placement in the ANG where he was in no danger whatsoever, is it? I find the fact that he was onto a cushy number yet still failed to do what little was asked of him incredible.
That someone who showed such little regard for duty then is now the Commander-In-Chief responsible for sending young men off to die in an unnecessary and illegal war, all whilst cutting their pay and benefits, is the sickest joke.
Have you considered that the average Slashdotter probably knows that there's no link between September 11th and Iraq yet, when polled, half the people who voted for Bush said that Saddam Hussein was responsible?
In other words, the average Slashdotter isn't so dumb that they fell for the whole smoke and mirrors routine that the Bush administration has been running in its "war on terror"?
I'll stop tearing down Fox News when it starts reporting facts without first dripping them in right-wing bias and making up stories. I'm not holding my breath though.
So what you're saying is that Fox News didn't hesitate to cry "fire!" whenever there was the slightest opportunity whereas CNN, MSNBC, BBC News, etc took their time (a whole 15-30 minutes!) to verify the facts before making wild claims.
And you saying that that's a good thing? That Fox is happy to put put any information, no matter if it's right or wrong, as long as it gets it out first?
Do I need to remind you that this thread started as a discussion about journalistic integrity?
The NYT was caught with its pants down because one guy decided to take a free ride. It sincerely apologised, and it was also rightly castigated for what happened. It's age-old good reputation was tarnished and everyone knew about it.
Fox News tells lie after lie systematically. It's not one lie by one individual, it's countless lies being passed off as the truth by the organisation as a whole, and all the time. It's its modus operandi. Occasionally, it makes the briefest of apologies if it ever tells one too big to pass off, but it won't be long until it's doing the same thing again. What good reputation Fox News had disappeared a long time ago.
There's a very big difference between someone letting the team down and the team being rotten to the core.
I'll take The New York Times over Fox "News" any time. The former was badly let down by one reporter whereas the latter has made an art form of combining half-truths and lies to present what it calls "the facts".
How many times did Fox claim that WMDs had been found in Iraq? It became a running joke in our house to guess how long it would be until they made their next false discovery.
Just because you've never used a feature that doesn't make it useless.
Operating systems, applications and services have all have core features that almost everyone uses but they also have other features that almost nobody uses, but that's not a bad thing. Whether its help for disabled users, a mail merge facility or whatever else, there are plenty of little-used features that make a huge difference to some people's use of software, and these Amazon and Google tools are no different.
You might never feel the need to search within a book, or create a Google group but it's pretty egocentric to think that just because you don't use them these facilities are useless to everyone else.
The "someone" in this case is the city or some such municipal body, so they own the streets, so what they do with them is their business, so all your talk of "private retail space without paying anything for it" is just a complete red herring.
Regardless of that, a weak lock isn't an excuse to commit what's clearly a crime, taking something that's not yours to take without paying the proper price for it. A weak front door lock doesn't give you the right to enter someone's house, watch their TV and take a nap in their bed and a weak lock on a bike doesn't give you the right to treat it as if its your own property either.
Slashdot Mirror
The 60s called. They want their pie-in-the-sky utopian vision of the future back.
He [Von Braun] was absolutely not an vital part of the arms industry or science of Germany in the second World War.
Wow. An AC who's full of crap. Quelle surprise.
If the French were as good at surrendering and as bad as standing up for themselves and others as some people would like you to believe then all you Americans would still be singing "God Save The Queen".
Think about that next time you reach for the cheap and ignorant jibes or the next time you celebrate Independence Day.
Yeah, argue the semantics all you want. He was a vital part of the machinery that was responsible for tens of millions of deaths in the largest conflict in human history. He might not have been a member of the Nazi Party but he was guilty of being a war criminal and a mass murderer.
And it's not like his weapons targetted willing combatants either, as both the V1 and V2 were flying bombs designed to cause as much death and destruction to London and its civilian population as possible. That's where the V in the name comes from: "Vergeltungswaffen", meaning "vengeance weapon". In a very real sense, the V1 and V2 were Hitler's WMDs, designed solely to terrorise and murder as many Londoners as possible.
So AC, do you still think it's that important whether he was a card-carrying party member?
No, but he didn't hesitate to help them build rockets, such as the V1 and the V2, to bomb Britain with, did he?
You are.
If it wasn't bloody obvious the first time, I'll make it so this time: a large proportion of the projected fatalites caused by such a hypothetical scenario would be outside the US. So, assuming a figure of 50 percent US fatalities, that's 25-75 million US dead: why are you worrying about a third of the US not living within x many miles of the Eastern seaboard if you really are paying more than just lip service about how other nations would be affected?
2. Use your brain.
The paragraph your referring to says this:
So it says 100 million dead +/- 50 million, assuming no evacuations. Nowhere does it say those are all US citizens - in fact it pointedly makes reference to islands in the Carribean - so how do you manage to make such a ridiculous leap of logic and assume that it's only talking about US fatalities?
I don't know what's worse: the morons who posted complete crap in the original story ("they chose to live there", "it's karma coming round for all those tech jobs going to India", "Oh, there's a natural disaster affecting millions; is Arthur C Clarke OK?") or your assumption that the only nation that would be affected by a catastrophic event of this nature in the Atlantic Ocean would be the US.
(You do realise that you're talking about an event that would hurt the US but totally annihilate those island nations in the Atlantic, right? That there would still be plenty of the US left untouched but places like the Bahamas would be most probably be wiped out completely? And that, while we're debating this hypothetical, people around the Indian Ocean are living through and dying from the real deal?)
Seriously, some people here need their heads examined. The amount of narcissism, myopia and even xenophobia that I've seen attached to the tsunami-related stories here on Slashdot beggars belief.
I think you underestimate the value of Steve Jobs to Apple and overestimate the value of a PVR solution to it too.
Apple, in case it had slipped your mind, was a rudderless ship before Steve Jobs rejoined the company. It was losing market share not only to IBM PC compatibles but to its own authorised clones. It took Jobs next to no time to reverse that slide, develop the iMac, kickstart OSX development and return Apple to its "insanely great" roots.
Yes, the CEO's that Apple had during Jobs' absence from the company made it more profitable but Jobs has made Apple more popular too.
More than anything, Jobs has positioned Apple and its products as accessable and desirable: Apply is now a company focused on style (the iMacs, the G3/G4/G5 designs compared to their predecessors, the iPod) and simplicity (again, the iMacs, OS X, the iPod).
Frankly, it's hard to imagine Apple being where it is today without Jobs at the helm. I'd bet my life that Apple's board, its employees and the overwhelming majority of its shareholders and customers would agree with that sentiment. Certainly, it's hard to see someone like Gil Amelio, Apple's previous Chairman and CEO, steering such a successful course.
Look around at the PC industry today. Who's the most innovative company out there? IBM's shedding its PC division, HP marriage with Compaq still looks like a bad deal, Dell doesn't innovate at all,Sony is obsessed with its own technology (Memory Stick, etc, although they finally caved in with regards to ATRAC vs MP3), and everyone else is small potatoes.
Will Apple ever have a PVR product? My head says, yes, eventually they will. But it won't be until Apple is ready, and that won't be until it's confident that it has a killer product. In that regard, it'll be the same strategy as Apple adopted with the personal music player market: let everyone else spend their time and money selling the concept to the public and making the early mistakes and then jump in once it's got a bigger market to aim for with a more polished product (iPod plus iTunes).
Frankly, there's more chance of Osama Bin Laden presenting himself at the front gate of the White House tomorrow than there is of Apple making the same mistake it's made once before and firing Jobs over his reluctance to jump into the PVR market.
It's not so blatant to me. Change will come, but it will most likely come slowly rather than quickly, if for no reason other than China is a big country, with a huge population that enjoy a range of disparate lifestyles.
Sometime in our lifetimes China is going to become a consumer culture, consuming many of the goods that it already makes and exports to the rest of the world. My PDA was made in China. My keyboard was made in China. My colour laser printer was made in China. Can you see where I'm going with this?
Sooner or later, China's markets will open up to near Western levels. Chinese people will buy widescreen TVs, computers and designer goods. And when that happens, the gates will open too, albeit in a controlled manner. How strict those controls will be or how they will function is open to speculation but for over a decade now China has been becoming a more relaxed and less restrictive society.
Just because they have limits on internet access now that doesn't mean that they will always have limits on internet access. The US once had limits on the rights of blacks and women, yet it progressed from that point and China will to.
Don't forget, China isn't just a different country it's a different country with a totally different culture to that which we're familiar with in the West. Concepts that seem alien to us are natural to them, and vice versa. And, obviously, it's the negative aspects of Chinese society that always get played up rather than the positive ones.
And when it comes to things as subjective as human rights, please realise that there's an "eye of the beholder" aspect to be considered. You might regard China as being oppressive when it comes to religion or expression but there's not a country in the world that hasn't done the same at some time or another or that has its own human rights abuses going on right now.
So to recap, don't dismiss China as being stuck permanently on hold. China will progress and develop, but at its own pace and in its own time. Who knows when change will come and how suddenly. After all, the day before the Berlin Wall fell, or before Nelson Mandela was released, or any ground-breaking event, who would have predicted that such a radical change would come overnight?
I already have a 'work to live' rather than 'live to work' philosophy, but whereas I can't live my life constantly ignoring everything but the things that are nearest and dearest to me you can bet your life that I wouldn't be devoting my attention to anything but the things that are most important to me in that ELE scenario.
I would think that even the least socially-gifted geek would have no trouble finding someone to screw if the world was going to end tomorrow.
If the Earth was going to be devastated tomorrow and the chances of me and mine surviving were next to zero then I'd rather spend the time I had left doing something important to me than going to work.
And, no by "something important to me" I don't mean playing EverQuest.
Exactly. It has very little to do with merit. After all, just what did Bush achieve or do in 2000 that was so exemplorary and worthy of merit to win the award in that year?
Winning an election in which more people voted for the other guy and in which dirty tricks, family connections and ultimately heavily contested court cases were the deciding factors hardly counts as a great and noble achievement.
What a nice present for the open source community.
Hey, I'm not an American, so I didn't lose anything. It's you who've lost buddy, and when I say "you" I mean all of you, including the Republicans. Enjoy your "No Child Left Behind" and "Clean Air" Acts.
So just because one document proved to be false then you consider that proof beyond any possible doubt that Dubya fulfilled his commitment to the fullest of his ability? Puh-leaze.
Q. If the explanation is as simple as you say it is then why not come out and say it? And why aren't there other people with similar experiences who are queuing up to tell us that's the case?
A. Because that's not how it happened.
Not that it excuses Bill Clinton's draft-dodging, but I think Dubya not fulfilling his commitment and then using his service as some badge of honour is worse.
After all, it's not like Dubya's daddy didn't do a good job of making sure junior was out of danger by getting him a placement in the ANG where he was in no danger whatsoever, is it? I find the fact that he was onto a cushy number yet still failed to do what little was asked of him incredible.
That someone who showed such little regard for duty then is now the Commander-In-Chief responsible for sending young men off to die in an unnecessary and illegal war, all whilst cutting their pay and benefits, is the sickest joke.
Have you considered that the average Slashdotter probably knows that there's no link between September 11th and Iraq yet, when polled, half the people who voted for Bush said that Saddam Hussein was responsible?
In other words, the average Slashdotter isn't so dumb that they fell for the whole smoke and mirrors routine that the Bush administration has been running in its "war on terror"?
I'll stop tearing down Fox News when it starts reporting facts without first dripping them in right-wing bias and making up stories. I'm not holding my breath though.
So what you're saying is that Fox News didn't hesitate to cry "fire!" whenever there was the slightest opportunity whereas CNN, MSNBC, BBC News, etc took their time (a whole 15-30 minutes!) to verify the facts before making wild claims.
And you saying that that's a good thing? That Fox is happy to put put any information, no matter if it's right or wrong, as long as it gets it out first?
Do I need to remind you that this thread started as a discussion about journalistic integrity?
The NYT was caught with its pants down because one guy decided to take a free ride. It sincerely apologised, and it was also rightly castigated for what happened. It's age-old good reputation was tarnished and everyone knew about it.
Fox News tells lie after lie systematically. It's not one lie by one individual, it's countless lies being passed off as the truth by the organisation as a whole, and all the time. It's its modus operandi. Occasionally, it makes the briefest of apologies if it ever tells one too big to pass off, but it won't be long until it's doing the same thing again. What good reputation Fox News had disappeared a long time ago.
There's a very big difference between someone letting the team down and the team being rotten to the core.
I'll take The New York Times over Fox "News" any time. The former was badly let down by one reporter whereas the latter has made an art form of combining half-truths and lies to present what it calls "the facts".
How many times did Fox claim that WMDs had been found in Iraq? It became a running joke in our house to guess how long it would be until they made their next false discovery.
Just because you've never used a feature that doesn't make it useless.
Operating systems, applications and services have all have core features that almost everyone uses but they also have other features that almost nobody uses, but that's not a bad thing. Whether its help for disabled users, a mail merge facility or whatever else, there are plenty of little-used features that make a huge difference to some people's use of software, and these Amazon and Google tools are no different.
You might never feel the need to search within a book, or create a Google group but it's pretty egocentric to think that just because you don't use them these facilities are useless to everyone else.
The "someone" in this case is the city or some such municipal body, so they own the streets, so what they do with them is their business, so all your talk of "private retail space without paying anything for it" is just a complete red herring.
Regardless of that, a weak lock isn't an excuse to commit what's clearly a crime, taking something that's not yours to take without paying the proper price for it. A weak front door lock doesn't give you the right to enter someone's house, watch their TV and take a nap in their bed and a weak lock on a bike doesn't give you the right to treat it as if its your own property either.
Don't worry, the modem works fine under Line.