Your last post hasn't answered the question: how did Windows domination has caused these people (we are talking 3rd world people) to be poor?
It did not make them poor, it prevented them from ceasing to be poor. The same way how Catholic Church kept European peasants poor over Middle Ages -- by shitting up and suffocating all scientific development.
It does not matter, what "those" people know. If engineers' and scientists' minds are damaged, "those people" don't get a chance to use discoveries and inventions that mankind would develop otherwise.
Please, go on. Tell me precisely how market dominance in a desktop computer operating system has kept the desperately poor of Africa from becoming "not poor". Perhaps it has to do with increased electrification of the African countryside? Brought computers and wireless connections to those people?
Basically, Windows design is so poisonous, it rots brains of people who are trying to advance science and technology whenever they try to build anything that has to work under Windows and therefore they have to internalize this insane design. With progress in technology being slowed down and misdirected, the whole world does not get benefits of better technology, medicine, infrastructure development, art, etc. that would be developed if Windows did not exist.
Huh? AMD developed x86-64 when Intel hijacked HP CPU development and was busy developing Merced/Itanium as their primary 64-bit platform. It was also AMD who implemented multiple packet-based links with on-chip controller as the primary bus architecture. Intel has more resources, however their development often goes into stupid directions, then returns back to sanity imitating AMD decisions.
If AMD will stop doing new research, Intel will eventually get derailed into some new Itanium/RDRAM/P4/... crap.
Without Bill Gates keeping science and engineering from developing, those people wouldn't be poor in the first place.
There is at least a decade of progress (on average in all human activities) lost thanks to Windows and retarded mode of thinking it imposes on its users -- and progress in some areas won't restart until Microsoft's dominant position is gone.
Nothing Gates can do (or anyone can do with all his money) is sufficient to compensate for that. He will be remembered as a monster, just like all other billionaires who tried to buy a place in history by throwing some of their ill-gotten money at high-profile "causes".
So are you a Holodomor denier, then? It either never happened,
Famine happened. At worst, government reacted in a less than competent manner.
or ten million very real deaths are directly attributable to Soviet corruption and apathy in the best case.
Fortunately for the rest of mankind, your insistence has no effect on reality.
In the worst case, it is outright genocide.
There was no evidence of any policy targeting Ukrainians (or any other specific ethnicity) -- regions of Russia that suffered from the same disaster were just as affected. Neither there was any possible reason for anything directed against Ukrainians. The whole thing is ridiculous, and no one would ever discuss it if not American propaganda workers tirelessly reiterating this. Hell, "Ukrainian nationalists" themselves wouldn't claim that it was a genocide if not American propaganda creating such a convenient fiction for them.
Either way, I don't see how you can excuse Stalin of these deaths and yet attribute the sum total of WWII casualties to Hitler. It's a double standard.
Stalin was guilty of many things, but neither genocide nor intentionally starting wars of conquest at mind-boggling scale are among them.
Casualties of war aren't mass premeditated murder based on ethnicity. Plain and simple. You can try to redefine language to suit your agenda, but I'm not going to let your Newspeak go unchallenged.
And casualties of aggressive war are mass premeditated murder based on aggressor being a total monster. For fuck sake, I am Jewish, generations of my family suffered after being selected for discrimination, violence and death based on their ethnicity, I have more reasons than anyone else to be specifically against genocide and racism. And yet I admit that when mass murder is concerned, it does not matter if it is accompanied with racism or any other rhetoric -- actions at that scale speak louder than any words.
Nobody is excusing German aggression and the deaths it caused. But again, it is one thing to kill on the battlefield against armed combatants, and quite another to inflict mass homicide on an unarmed and mostly unaware populace. Neither may be "good", but one of them is a war crime and one is not. Can you at least acknowledge this, whether or not you believe it should be the case?
This is only true for DEFENDING a country -- military has no choice but to fight against the invaders. Aggressor has to actively choose to attack, so killing soldiers and civilians is both his fault.
Of course, considering that US wages aggressive wars like there is no tomorrow, American propaganda workers had to instill this kind of perverse ethics in Americans.
If the law is against you, argue the facts. If the facts are against you, argue the law. And if the law and the facts are against you, call the other side names.
Was that supposed to be some kind of a witty retort? I merely explained how I evaluate this kind of ethics, lest someone will think that I accept your premise as anything other than complete lunacy.
Read up. The Fourth Geneva Convention sets guidelines for treatment of civilians during wartime. In other words, it defines a distinction between soldiers and civilians, and makes the intentional killing of civilians a crime, but not--and this is my point--the intentional killing of combatants, or even the inadvertent death of civilians due to collateral damage. Thankfully, the particular beliefs of Alex Belits neither reflect nor influence international law. While you're reading, you may also be interested in the Genocide Convention, which explicitly defines the crime of genocide (and again, distinguishes it from deaths caused by military action).
Waging a war of aggression is a war crime all by itself. You don't have to specifically target
So you admit that you believe in a massive conspiracy to attach deaths to Stalin's name unfairly. That's all anyone needs to know about you. There's no argument that can be presented to you to challenge your religious beliefs in this matter.
Huh? This is how propaganda is always done -- by taking the truth, selecting the worst (or best) parts, then adding lies that look consistent yet distort the facts to fit the politicians' agenda. It would be surprising if there was no such distortions attempted with a target as convenient as Stalin.
"Insisted in the face of all presented evidence" would be more correct than "demonstrated".
What evidence? Even best Americans "historians" admit that they had to resort to guesswork and unreliable/fictional sources when they estimated their "numbers of Stalin's victims" in 50's-80's. On top of that inclusions of famine deaths (something that never was attributed to any other politicians' death count) shows how it was obviously done with intentions other than legitimate research. When NKVD/KGB archives became available, the actual evidence was found for up to two millions of deaths -- including those caused by increased mortality in forced exiles/relocation. For any honest historian that would be the end of controversy.
I'm not the one excusing tens of millions of deaths that Stalin could have directly prevented
Any evidence to back that claim? Other than "A teacher told me so".
had he the slightest inclination to do so because they don't fit into my very narrow and self-serving definition of genocide.
I have never mentioned anything about fitting or not fitting the definition of genocide. That's your strawman.
And please do work on your reading comprehension skills. Twice now I've said that Stalin wasn't necessarily worse than Hitler, only that he killed more people. It's a subtle distinction, I know, but do try to comprehend it.
I have can read your words just fine. I merely reject your point of view that any other kind of mass murder is "better" than genocide. This has very little to do with Stalin, as evidence shows that by your definition he was a red-blooded American hero kind of mass murderer.
You are the only person in the world who believes the Holocaust was anywhere near the scale of 70 million deaths.
WWII was, not Holocaust. I don't see how Hitler can be accused of deaths in Holocaust but absolved of WWII deaths -- both were held under his orders, to implement his party's policy. Obviously I only included deaths in parts of WWII where Germany participated as the main aggressor.
You also may well be the only person in the world who does not understand the difference between the deaths of soldiers and the intentional killing of noncombatants.
There is (some) difference when applied to defending a country from an aggressor. There is none when you are an aggressor invading another country -- both kinds of victims are innocent people that aggressor is killing to advance his political goals. However just to humor you (as I mentioned, a sick fuck that you are), about FORTY MILLIONS of those seventy millions are civilian war victims, not counting six millions of Jews killed in Holocaust on top of those forty.
Thankfully for all of us, you were not present at the signing of the Fourth Geneva Convention.
Last time I checked, Geneva Convention is about treatment of prisoners of war, not about what is or isn't a despicable act of mass murder.
I'm sure it compiles for ARM and x86. Last I heard an MIPs port was possible. Android is slated for phones and netbooks.
Modern phones run ARM, not x86 or MIPS. Even if it did, binaries for three architectures are a pretty easy task to handle, as it can be clearly seen in any Linux distribution's repository.
Netbooks? The last thing netbooks need is another crippled, provider-controlled OS that is barely sufficient to provide functionality usable on celphones. Previous generation of "netbooks" (when they were called PDA) was wiped out by a disease called Windows CE.
I said he killed more people, not necessarily that he was worse.
And this is obviously not true because he killed two millions -- less than any number you attributed to Hitler.
I'm not going to dispute this with you anymore. If you seriously believe there is a massive concerted effort to pin crimes on Stalin that he didn't commit, when you freely admit that there are a tremendous number of crimes he did commit under any definition of the word, then I don't really know how to convince you that this is your own delusion.
How so? Do you mean, the truth does not matter as long as "evil" people are involved?
Go take a class in world history at the local community college. Until you've done that, you're just making things up because you want to believe them.
Thank you very much, I don't need your "sovietologists" teaching me about my own history. My maternal grandfather's family was killed by Nazi -- one person in battle, the rest in mass killing of Jews from their village (Streshin, Belarus). All of them are just as dead as Jews, Russians, Ukrainians, Poles, and -- yes -- Germans that would be alive if not Hitler's little exercise in world conquest. Stalin has nothing on this, and least of all it is related to other Communists.
Ah, of course. It all comes back to America. No idea how that entered the discussion, but hey.
You are American, and you are trying to defend American ideology that turns ethics inside out in an attempt to justify, among other things, your government's constant warmongering.
I think I'm starting to see the problem here. I'm using the term "genocide" as defined under international law, such as the Genocide Convention. You are using the Alex Belits definition, where it only counts as genocide if you disagree with the ideology of the people committing it. So the Nazis and the United States have committed genocide, but the Soviets get a pass because communism is totally cool.
I have already demonstrated that none of Stalin's mass murders were ethnically motivated, and that claims about Ukrainian famine being a result of genocide are baseless. This has nothing to do with definitions. Absolutely unrelated to this, the total number of deaths that Stalin is responsible for is nowhere close to anything done by Hitler -- in acts of genocide or otherwise.
You, however not only are trying to mix up the facts to make Stalin worse than Hitler at any cost, you are clinging to your "Only genocide matters -- all other kinds of mass murder is OK!" system of values. Fortunately no one outside US borders (or Americans with any capacity for independent thinking) shares this point of view, so all I have to do is to point this out.
The only supported hardware is ARM. Considering that all other CPU have power requirements far beyond anything usable on a phone, it is likely that phones will be tied to ARM for the foreseeable future, likely longer than lifetime of Android platform itself.
The way how companies work, guarantees that it will happen. SOP is to abuse the dominant position as much as possible, and absorb all court decisions and fines that come from it, as they are never enough to make those activities unprofitable.
That is, in US. I hope, EU will do enough slapping to change that.
When I read the "article" (why this is not in "Ask Slashdot" in the first place), and my eyes were rolling at 7200rpm.
The person apparently can't clearly describe the problem. What is his goal? What kind of "experience" is he trying to get? Did he check if there are any jobs available that he is interested in and qualified for? What is the result that his friends use to judge "better" or "worse" of his options, and how does it correspond to his own goals. Last and most puzzling, what are the actual options he believes he has? Is he expecting that he will work for less than two years after getting Master degree? (And then what, die? retire? leave Computer Engineering forever?)
I assume, the actual question was supposed to be "Would the next two years be better spent working on Masters degree or should I jump out of school two years earlier and go looking for a job?" Obviously if the optimal answer for everyone was "Just get a job two years earlier", no one by now would have Masters (or Ph.D) degree, and if such universal answer was "Get a Masters degree", there would be no people with Bachelor degree anywhere outside of school. Therefore there is no point asking without providing some explanation of goals, criteria, or other details that give an idea what would make either choice preferable over the other.
And if a question was asked in such manner I would try to answer it. However faced with a failure to state the problem clearly, and lack of understanding of the basic logic behind it, I can make only one recommendation:
Find a job in something that has nothing to do with engineering and computers.
Also, if you're up to it, there's plenty of colleges that'd let you do your MBA on a part-time basis, or at least schedule your classes around your work requirements.
I would just give MBA to everyone who asks, so it will be clear how worthless it is.
However the OP asked about Master degree in Computer Engineering.
If you seriously believe that the majority of people in the United States believe Stalin was more evil than Hitler, then you are delusional. Ask ten people on the street in the United States whether Hitler or Stalin was worse, and I guarantee you that all of them will say Hitler.
I don't have to. You and other people in this very thread claimed that Stalin was worse. However merely HALF AN HOUR AGO I have heard an American claiming exactly that.
As I said, most people barely know who Stalin is. Everybody knows Hitler was a bad guy.
This is obviously not true.
You're contradicting yourself by stating that U.S. propaganda has been focused on painting Stalin as the most evil monster in history, then saying it proves your point when nobody knows or particularly is interested in what Stalin did.
Americans "know" that Stalin was the worst person's ever -- the details are irrelevant. Did Hitler kill 6 millions? Then Stalin killed tens of millions! Oh, Hitler killed tens of millions? Then Stalin might have killed hundreds of millions! Or billions! And that's just Jews! Hitler had syphilis? Then Stalin must have had AIDS! And fucked babies! And Pravda published an editorial that explained how it is AWWWWRIGHT!
This is the level of "knowledge" Americans have about him.
Your logic is truly dizzying.
There is very little logic in this, I am talking about facts.
So let me get this straight. Casualties resulting from war are equivalent to mass premeditated murder targeted against a specific ethnicity? But massive casualties suffered by a particular ethnic population due to the indifference or incompetence of Ol' Joe are somehow excused from being genocide? Wow.
Yes. Killing people to advance selfish goals is bad. Killing mind-bogglingly huge numbers of people is even worse. What the murderer says about this, how he tries to justify this, what kind of excuses he presents, matters very little in the face of fact that he and his followed killed people who posed no threat to them.
Of course, in special American kind of ethics, mass murder is perfectly justified it it is "casualties of war" -- never mind, it's a war started by Nazi with the goal of clearing up the "living space" for themselves from all "less deserving" people -- Jewish or otherwise. War is OK. Attacking formerly friendly countries is OK. Bombing and shooting at civilians is OK. But targeting a specific ethnicity while sparing others is a big no-no. Mass murder is fine as long as it's equal opportunity mass murder. This is why US government can attack countries all over the globe, killing tens of thousands of people in each of those wars -- it's all perfectly fine because it is not motivated by racism.
This is why the whole world hates Americans. You have gobbled up your propaganda hook, line and sinker. You are responsible for all this. Not just neocons, not just Republicans, not your military. You. Remember that when next time you will talk to a foreigner about "freedom" and "democracy", and he will punch you in the face.
If an individual (or a group of individuals) does not follow the 'rules' in the Geneva Convention, they're not entitled to its protection.
As I have mentioned in my previous response, this is not true.
This is why we had the the Nuremberg Trials, which (among others) was instrumental in shaping the protocols of the Geneva Convention.
Nuremberg Trials were anything but an established legal procedure. While I agree with their "spirit", formally they were kangaroo courts imposed by victors on the defeated organizations. They also had some extremely poor standards for proof and evidence. Even so, they still applied general ideas of reasonable scope of accusations -- they charged people involved in egregious acts, not everyone who fought on the Nazi side. Scale and nature of those acts were so far removed from anything any existing law was prepared to deal with, those trials were the only reasonable way of dealing with it.
This is also why people like Slobodan Milosevic were prosecuted for things like genocide, crimes against humanity, violations of the customs of war, and breaches of the Geneva Convention.
For all intents and purposes, Milosevic was charged as a proxy for the whole Serbian government and military, so legality of the whole thing was questionable from the very beginning. He also died before the end of the trial, conveniently leaving a lot of questions no longer necessary to answer. And yet, that was far, far more than anything Guantanamo prisoners and other "illegal combatants" ever got.
I guess so. However then the platforms won't stay exclusive for long.
I realize that total lack of copyright may be undesirable for many reasons, however the primary reason for GPL was problems that were caused by excessive restrictions imposed by copyright.
So you're saying that the American propaganda that I've been fed all my life is so terrified of the notion that somebody might find communism attractive that they have been ascribing the deaths en masse in the Soviet Union to Stalin in particular rather than the shortcomings of communism itself? Seems sort of counterproductive to me.
Propaganda does not work by intellectual discussion, and it is very difficult to demonstrate inherent virtues or shortcomings of some idea anyway. On the other hand, pointing fingers at poster boys and their actions, claiming that they discredit their political movements/organizations is extremely easy, and pretty much all political propaganda is based on that.
Anyway, you're completely wrong. Most people in the United States have only have a very vague idea, if they have heard at all, of the atrocities Stalin committed. Vastly more are aware of what Hitler did.
This is the whole point -- making him look worse than Hitler. Stalin is described in a manner that doesn't even leave anything memorable -- he is painted as some kind of comic book villain, someone who did everything evil imaginable and unimaginable.
Vastly more are aware of what Hitler did. In fact, when WWII is discussed in schools, Stalin is generally portrayed as a hero who helped us liberate Europe from the grasp of an evil dictator. His own genocides are usually swept by the wayside, because A) they're much more difficult to discuss without an in depth knowledge of Soviet politics in the early 20th century, B) he committed them by and large upon his own people, so it just doesn't produce the same degree of revulsion in the public, and C) he was much more subtle about it than Hitler, so it's just a much drier subject than the Holocaust, especially since it doesn't particularly involve the United States.
I have never ever heard anyone in US teaching it in this manner. After WWII Communists were always portrayed as an enemy, and Stalin as leader of those enemies -- even long after his death and denouncement by Khruschev. Look at the message in this thread by pipingguy -- he asked how much Stalin participated in Holocaust.
Casualties of war, even those resulting from collateral damage, are QUITE different from the targeted extermination of a group of people based on ethnicity.
"Casualties of war"? Who, do you think, killed all those people? Except for seven millions Germans, they were all killed by Nazi. Indiscriminate mass murder of people, soldiers and civilians alike, in the process of aggressive war covering a whole continent is somehow BETTER than mass murder, 1/10 of the former in scale, targeting a particular ethnicity? What kind of sick fuck are you? I am Jewish myself, and I find this disgusting -- Nazi rule in Germany and WWII was an unprecedented tragedy, and Holocaust is merely a part of it.
Hitler may have been more evil than Stalin, but he couldn't match him in terms of sheer numbers.
Stalin killed up to two millions. This is what was found after going through archives. Bad enough, but this is dwarfed by both Holocaust and WWII.
Sometimes you WANT to give credit to the original developer, even though you made a minor modifications. For example, OS port to some hardware not supported by the original developers -- port may involve a minor amount of changes, so it would be misleading to call it by something other than the original name.
But without copyright, what is the point of releasing binaries and not providing source? Users will distribute binaries to each other (no copyright -> no one has to buy or license them from you), AND won't contribute to your development, AND you will have to update your binaries for every new platform because no one else can produce the binaries.
Actually, when it comes to the question of whether the Holodomor constitutes genocide, I give more credence to the Ukrainian government, which has officially recognized it as such, than Soviet apologists.
Yeah, the same Ukrainian government that is desperately trying to find some kind of "national idea" that will compensate for its massive incompetence, and the same Ukrainian government that tried to cozy up to US, to the extent of sending its military to Iraq. They still didn't outdo Poland though.
Stalin withheld food from the Ukrainians until they could meet production quotas they didn't have a prayer of filling. The reasons for doing this may be disputable, but the government knew the effect would be disastrous on the Ukrainian population and proceeded to do it anyway. Not all genocide involves rounding people up and putting them in ovens. Taking food from people with the intent of letting them die is just as much murder. And mass murder that is targeted against a specific population is genocide.
It was ALREADY a massive famine when government started this. It was a mismanagement, but government neither intentionally cause the famine, nor targeted any particular ethnicity in any actions related to it.
I don't think you understand the history of tensions between the Soviet government and Ukrainian nationalists.
I know it very well. "Ukrainian nationalists" suddenly appear every time when either there is something to loot, or when a foreign state (Germany, US, and before that even Poland) offers them support.
And your attempts to absolve Stalin of blame because the policies were supposedly implemented by Ukrainians--as if Stalin didn't know about them and couldn't have done anything about them--are laughable.
I am not trying to absolve Stalin of blame for things he did -- and there is plenty of blame he deserves. The problem is, you Americans have absolutely no idea what he is actually responsible for, and what is attributed to him in an attempt to paint him as some kind of generic villain. Your government was so afraid that you will find Communists' ideas attractive, it didn't seem enough to have a really bad Communist ruler as a bogeyman, they had to present him as worst possible politician and combination of all imaginable sins, genocide included.
Two millions dead, oppressive rule and random acts of assholeness just didn't seem impressive enough, so your propaganda not only massively inflated Stalin's crimes, it went as far as whitewashing Hitler. Think of it -- they tell you about Hitler killing 6-11 millions in Holocaust, and never mention 70 millions of WWII victims in Europe, who are solely his responsibility, the number that dwarfs any other act of mass murder, war, genocide or anything that happened before or after that. It's almost a quarter of your country's population. The only reason why you aren't taught this in school is to make him less of a distraction from the image of the designated greatest villain ever -- Stalin. Just because he was a Communist, and there was nothing more important than making Communists look bad. The ends justifiy the means, right?
Stalin killed more people than Hitler in terms of outright genocide. He let 10 million Ukrainians starve to death in the 30s over a policy dispute, and that's barely scratching the surface for him.
No.
First of all, Ukrainian famine was a result of drought exacerbated by poor management -- the "evidence" that US propaganda loves to present was at most misguided last-ditch efforts to keep the famine from wiping out the population. Second, famine was not limited to Ukraine -- some regions in Russia suffered about as much.
Third, at no point before or after that there was any conflict, significant discrimination or any ethnic tension between Russians and Ukrainians, and for most of USSR history, Ukraine was second most powerful member in the union. "Genocide" would be absolutely pointless.
Fourth, Stalin himself was Georgian, and all government policies in Ukraine were implemented by Ukrainians.
Of course, being American, you would rather listen to "historians" like Robert Conquest, who could only cite their imagination and great demand for anti-Soviet propaganda as their sources.
Slashdot Mirror
Your last post hasn't answered the question: how did Windows domination has caused these people (we are talking 3rd world people) to be poor?
It did not make them poor, it prevented them from ceasing to be poor. The same way how Catholic Church kept European peasants poor over Middle Ages -- by shitting up and suffocating all scientific development.
It does not matter, what "those" people know. If engineers' and scientists' minds are damaged, "those people" don't get a chance to use discoveries and inventions that mankind would develop otherwise.
Please, go on. Tell me precisely how market dominance in a desktop computer operating system has kept the desperately poor of Africa from becoming "not poor". Perhaps it has to do with increased electrification of the African countryside? Brought computers and wireless connections to those people?
Basically, Windows design is so poisonous, it rots brains of people who are trying to advance science and technology whenever they try to build anything that has to work under Windows and therefore they have to internalize this insane design. With progress in technology being slowed down and misdirected, the whole world does not get benefits of better technology, medicine, infrastructure development, art, etc. that would be developed if Windows did not exist.
Huh? AMD developed x86-64 when Intel hijacked HP CPU development and was busy developing Merced/Itanium as their primary 64-bit platform. It was also AMD who implemented multiple packet-based links with on-chip controller as the primary bus architecture. Intel has more resources, however their development often goes into stupid directions, then returns back to sanity imitating AMD decisions.
If AMD will stop doing new research, Intel will eventually get derailed into some new Itanium/RDRAM/P4/... crap.
Then maybe to do it correctly is not to do it at all. You know, you don't HAVE TO privatize everything.
Without Bill Gates keeping science and engineering from developing, those people wouldn't be poor in the first place.
There is at least a decade of progress (on average in all human activities) lost thanks to Windows and retarded mode of thinking it imposes on its users -- and progress in some areas won't restart until Microsoft's dominant position is gone.
Nothing Gates can do (or anyone can do with all his money) is sufficient to compensate for that. He will be remembered as a monster, just like all other billionaires who tried to buy a place in history by throwing some of their ill-gotten money at high-profile "causes".
So are you a Holodomor denier, then? It either never happened,
Famine happened. At worst, government reacted in a less than competent manner.
or ten million very real deaths are directly attributable to Soviet corruption and apathy in the best case.
Fortunately for the rest of mankind, your insistence has no effect on reality.
In the worst case, it is outright genocide.
There was no evidence of any policy targeting Ukrainians (or any other specific ethnicity) -- regions of Russia that suffered from the same disaster were just as affected. Neither there was any possible reason for anything directed against Ukrainians. The whole thing is ridiculous, and no one would ever discuss it if not American propaganda workers tirelessly reiterating this. Hell, "Ukrainian nationalists" themselves wouldn't claim that it was a genocide if not American propaganda creating such a convenient fiction for them.
Either way, I don't see how you can excuse Stalin of these deaths and yet attribute the sum total of WWII casualties to Hitler. It's a double standard.
Stalin was guilty of many things, but neither genocide nor intentionally starting wars of conquest at mind-boggling scale are among them.
Casualties of war aren't mass premeditated murder based on ethnicity. Plain and simple. You can try to redefine language to suit your agenda, but I'm not going to let your Newspeak go unchallenged.
And casualties of aggressive war are mass premeditated murder based on aggressor being a total monster. For fuck sake, I am Jewish, generations of my family suffered after being selected for discrimination, violence and death based on their ethnicity, I have more reasons than anyone else to be specifically against genocide and racism. And yet I admit that when mass murder is concerned, it does not matter if it is accompanied with racism or any other rhetoric -- actions at that scale speak louder than any words.
Nobody is excusing German aggression and the deaths it caused. But again, it is one thing to kill on the battlefield against armed combatants, and quite another to inflict mass homicide on an unarmed and mostly unaware populace. Neither may be "good", but one of them is a war crime and one is not. Can you at least acknowledge this, whether or not you believe it should be the case?
This is only true for DEFENDING a country -- military has no choice but to fight against the invaders. Aggressor has to actively choose to attack, so killing soldiers and civilians is both his fault.
Of course, considering that US wages aggressive wars like there is no tomorrow, American propaganda workers had to instill this kind of perverse ethics in Americans.
If the law is against you, argue the facts. If the facts are against you, argue the law. And if the law and the facts are against you, call the other side names.
Was that supposed to be some kind of a witty retort? I merely explained how I evaluate this kind of ethics, lest someone will think that I accept your premise as anything other than complete lunacy.
Read up. The Fourth Geneva Convention sets guidelines for treatment of civilians during wartime. In other words, it defines a distinction between soldiers and civilians, and makes the intentional killing of civilians a crime, but not--and this is my point--the intentional killing of combatants, or even the inadvertent death of civilians due to collateral damage. Thankfully, the particular beliefs of Alex Belits neither reflect nor influence international law. While you're reading, you may also be interested in the Genocide Convention, which explicitly defines the crime of genocide (and again, distinguishes it from deaths caused by military action).
Waging a war of aggression is a war crime all by itself. You don't have to specifically target
So you admit that you believe in a massive conspiracy to attach deaths to Stalin's name unfairly. That's all anyone needs to know about you. There's no argument that can be presented to you to challenge your religious beliefs in this matter.
Huh? This is how propaganda is always done -- by taking the truth, selecting the worst (or best) parts, then adding lies that look consistent yet distort the facts to fit the politicians' agenda. It would be surprising if there was no such distortions attempted with a target as convenient as Stalin.
"Insisted in the face of all presented evidence" would be more correct than "demonstrated".
What evidence? Even best Americans "historians" admit that they had to resort to guesswork and unreliable/fictional sources when they estimated their "numbers of Stalin's victims" in 50's-80's. On top of that inclusions of famine deaths (something that never was attributed to any other politicians' death count) shows how it was obviously done with intentions other than legitimate research. When NKVD/KGB archives became available, the actual evidence was found for up to two millions of deaths -- including those caused by increased mortality in forced exiles/relocation. For any honest historian that would be the end of controversy.
I'm not the one excusing tens of millions of deaths that Stalin could have directly prevented
Any evidence to back that claim? Other than "A teacher told me so".
had he the slightest inclination to do so because they don't fit into my very narrow and self-serving definition of genocide.
I have never mentioned anything about fitting or not fitting the definition of genocide. That's your strawman.
And please do work on your reading comprehension skills. Twice now I've said that Stalin wasn't necessarily worse than Hitler, only that he killed more people. It's a subtle distinction, I know, but do try to comprehend it.
I have can read your words just fine. I merely reject your point of view that any other kind of mass murder is "better" than genocide. This has very little to do with Stalin, as evidence shows that by your definition he was a red-blooded American hero kind of mass murderer.
You are the only person in the world who believes the Holocaust was anywhere near the scale of 70 million deaths.
WWII was, not Holocaust. I don't see how Hitler can be accused of deaths in Holocaust but absolved of WWII deaths -- both were held under his orders, to implement his party's policy. Obviously I only included deaths in parts of WWII where Germany participated as the main aggressor.
You also may well be the only person in the world who does not understand the difference between the deaths of soldiers and the intentional killing of noncombatants.
There is (some) difference when applied to defending a country from an aggressor. There is none when you are an aggressor invading another country -- both kinds of victims are innocent people that aggressor is killing to advance his political goals. However just to humor you (as I mentioned, a sick fuck that you are), about FORTY MILLIONS of those seventy millions are civilian war victims, not counting six millions of Jews killed in Holocaust on top of those forty.
Thankfully for all of us, you were not present at the signing of the Fourth Geneva Convention.
Last time I checked, Geneva Convention is about treatment of prisoners of war, not about what is or isn't a despicable act of mass murder.
I'm sure it compiles for ARM and x86. Last I heard an MIPs port was possible. Android is slated for phones and netbooks.
Modern phones run ARM, not x86 or MIPS. Even if it did, binaries for three architectures are a pretty easy task to handle, as it can be clearly seen in any Linux distribution's repository.
Netbooks? The last thing netbooks need is another crippled, provider-controlled OS that is barely sufficient to provide functionality usable on celphones. Previous generation of "netbooks" (when they were called PDA) was wiped out by a disease called Windows CE.
I said he killed more people, not necessarily that he was worse.
And this is obviously not true because he killed two millions -- less than any number you attributed to Hitler.
I'm not going to dispute this with you anymore. If you seriously believe there is a massive concerted effort to pin crimes on Stalin that he didn't commit, when you freely admit that there are a tremendous number of crimes he did commit under any definition of the word, then I don't really know how to convince you that this is your own delusion.
How so? Do you mean, the truth does not matter as long as "evil" people are involved?
Go take a class in world history at the local community college. Until you've done that, you're just making things up because you want to believe them.
Thank you very much, I don't need your "sovietologists" teaching me about my own history. My maternal grandfather's family was killed by Nazi -- one person in battle, the rest in mass killing of Jews from their village (Streshin, Belarus). All of them are just as dead as Jews, Russians, Ukrainians, Poles, and -- yes -- Germans that would be alive if not Hitler's little exercise in world conquest. Stalin has nothing on this, and least of all it is related to other Communists.
Ah, of course. It all comes back to America. No idea how that entered the discussion, but hey.
You are American, and you are trying to defend American ideology that turns ethics inside out in an attempt to justify, among other things, your government's constant warmongering.
I think I'm starting to see the problem here. I'm using the term "genocide" as defined under international law, such as the Genocide Convention. You are using the Alex Belits definition, where it only counts as genocide if you disagree with the ideology of the people committing it. So the Nazis and the United States have committed genocide, but the Soviets get a pass because communism is totally cool.
I have already demonstrated that none of Stalin's mass murders were ethnically motivated, and that claims about Ukrainian famine being a result of genocide are baseless. This has nothing to do with definitions. Absolutely unrelated to this, the total number of deaths that Stalin is responsible for is nowhere close to anything done by Hitler -- in acts of genocide or otherwise.
You, however not only are trying to mix up the facts to make Stalin worse than Hitler at any cost, you are clinging to your "Only genocide matters -- all other kinds of mass murder is OK!" system of values. Fortunately no one outside US borders (or Americans with any capacity for independent thinking) shares this point of view, so all I have to do is to point this out.
Android runs on a variety of hardware platforms
Android runs on WHAT????!!!
The only supported hardware is ARM. Considering that all other CPU have power requirements far beyond anything usable on a phone, it is likely that phones will be tied to ARM for the foreseeable future, likely longer than lifetime of Android platform itself.
The way how companies work, guarantees that it will happen. SOP is to abuse the dominant position as much as possible, and absorb all court decisions and fines that come from it, as they are never enough to make those activities unprofitable.
That is, in US. I hope, EU will do enough slapping to change that.
When I read the "article" (why this is not in "Ask Slashdot" in the first place), and my eyes were rolling at 7200rpm.
The person apparently can't clearly describe the problem. What is his goal? What kind of "experience" is he trying to get? Did he check if there are any jobs available that he is interested in and qualified for? What is the result that his friends use to judge "better" or "worse" of his options, and how does it correspond to his own goals. Last and most puzzling, what are the actual options he believes he has? Is he expecting that he will work for less than two years after getting Master degree? (And then what, die? retire? leave Computer Engineering forever?)
I assume, the actual question was supposed to be "Would the next two years be better spent working on Masters degree or should I jump out of school two years earlier and go looking for a job?" Obviously if the optimal answer for everyone was "Just get a job two years earlier", no one by now would have Masters (or Ph.D) degree, and if such universal answer was "Get a Masters degree", there would be no people with Bachelor degree anywhere outside of school. Therefore there is no point asking without providing some explanation of goals, criteria, or other details that give an idea what would make either choice preferable over the other.
And if a question was asked in such manner I would try to answer it. However faced with a failure to state the problem clearly, and lack of understanding of the basic logic behind it, I can make only one recommendation:
Find a job in something that has nothing to do with engineering and computers.
Also, if you're up to it, there's plenty of colleges that'd let you do your MBA on a part-time basis, or at least schedule your classes around your work requirements.
I would just give MBA to everyone who asks, so it will be clear how worthless it is.
However the OP asked about Master degree in Computer Engineering.
No, he has Catholics to do it for him.
If you seriously believe that the majority of people in the United States believe Stalin was more evil than Hitler, then you are delusional. Ask ten people on the street in the United States whether Hitler or Stalin was worse, and I guarantee you that all of them will say Hitler.
I don't have to. You and other people in this very thread claimed that Stalin was worse. However merely HALF AN HOUR AGO I have heard an American claiming exactly that.
As I said, most people barely know who Stalin is. Everybody knows Hitler was a bad guy.
This is obviously not true.
You're contradicting yourself by stating that U.S. propaganda has been focused on painting Stalin as the most evil monster in history, then saying it proves your point when nobody knows or particularly is interested in what Stalin did.
Americans "know" that Stalin was the worst person's ever -- the details are irrelevant. Did Hitler kill 6 millions? Then Stalin killed tens of millions! Oh, Hitler killed tens of millions? Then Stalin might have killed hundreds of millions! Or billions! And that's just Jews! Hitler had syphilis? Then Stalin must have had AIDS! And fucked babies! And Pravda published an editorial that explained how it is AWWWWRIGHT!
This is the level of "knowledge" Americans have about him.
Your logic is truly dizzying.
There is very little logic in this, I am talking about facts.
So let me get this straight. Casualties resulting from war are equivalent to mass premeditated murder targeted against a specific ethnicity? But massive casualties suffered by a particular ethnic population due to the indifference or incompetence of Ol' Joe are somehow excused from being genocide? Wow.
Yes. Killing people to advance selfish goals is bad. Killing mind-bogglingly huge numbers of people is even worse. What the murderer says about this, how he tries to justify this, what kind of excuses he presents, matters very little in the face of fact that he and his followed killed people who posed no threat to them.
Of course, in special American kind of ethics, mass murder is perfectly justified it it is "casualties of war" -- never mind, it's a war started by Nazi with the goal of clearing up the "living space" for themselves from all "less deserving" people -- Jewish or otherwise. War is OK. Attacking formerly friendly countries is OK. Bombing and shooting at civilians is OK. But targeting a specific ethnicity while sparing others is a big no-no. Mass murder is fine as long as it's equal opportunity mass murder. This is why US government can attack countries all over the globe, killing tens of thousands of people in each of those wars -- it's all perfectly fine because it is not motivated by racism.
This is why the whole world hates Americans. You have gobbled up your propaganda hook, line and sinker. You are responsible for all this. Not just neocons, not just Republicans, not your military. You. Remember that when next time you will talk to a foreigner about "freedom" and "democracy", and he will punch you in the face.
If an individual (or a group of individuals) does not follow the 'rules' in the Geneva Convention, they're not entitled to its protection.
As I have mentioned in my previous response, this is not true.
This is why we had the the Nuremberg Trials, which (among others) was instrumental in shaping the protocols of the Geneva Convention.
Nuremberg Trials were anything but an established legal procedure. While I agree with their "spirit", formally they were kangaroo courts imposed by victors on the defeated organizations. They also had some extremely poor standards for proof and evidence. Even so, they still applied general ideas of reasonable scope of accusations -- they charged people involved in egregious acts, not everyone who fought on the Nazi side. Scale and nature of those acts were so far removed from anything any existing law was prepared to deal with, those trials were the only reasonable way of dealing with it.
This is also why people like Slobodan Milosevic were prosecuted for things like genocide, crimes against humanity, violations of the customs of war, and breaches of the Geneva Convention.
For all intents and purposes, Milosevic was charged as a proxy for the whole Serbian government and military, so legality of the whole thing was questionable from the very beginning. He also died before the end of the trial, conveniently leaving a lot of questions no longer necessary to answer. And yet, that was far, far more than anything Guantanamo prisoners and other "illegal combatants" ever got.
I guess so. However then the platforms won't stay exclusive for long.
I realize that total lack of copyright may be undesirable for many reasons, however the primary reason for GPL was problems that were caused by excessive restrictions imposed by copyright.
So you're saying that the American propaganda that I've been fed all my life is so terrified of the notion that somebody might find communism attractive that they have been ascribing the deaths en masse in the Soviet Union to Stalin in particular rather than the shortcomings of communism itself? Seems sort of counterproductive to me.
Propaganda does not work by intellectual discussion, and it is very difficult to demonstrate inherent virtues or shortcomings of some idea anyway. On the other hand, pointing fingers at poster boys and their actions, claiming that they discredit their political movements/organizations is extremely easy, and pretty much all political propaganda is based on that.
Anyway, you're completely wrong. Most people in the United States have only have a very vague idea, if they have heard at all, of the atrocities Stalin committed. Vastly more are aware of what Hitler did.
This is the whole point -- making him look worse than Hitler. Stalin is described in a manner that doesn't even leave anything memorable -- he is painted as some kind of comic book villain, someone who did everything evil imaginable and unimaginable.
Vastly more are aware of what Hitler did. In fact, when WWII is discussed in schools, Stalin is generally portrayed as a hero who helped us liberate Europe from the grasp of an evil dictator. His own genocides are usually swept by the wayside, because A) they're much more difficult to discuss without an in depth knowledge of Soviet politics in the early 20th century, B) he committed them by and large upon his own people, so it just doesn't produce the same degree of revulsion in the public, and C) he was much more subtle about it than Hitler, so it's just a much drier subject than the Holocaust, especially since it doesn't particularly involve the United States.
I have never ever heard anyone in US teaching it in this manner. After WWII Communists were always portrayed as an enemy, and Stalin as leader of those enemies -- even long after his death and denouncement by Khruschev. Look at the message in this thread by pipingguy -- he asked how much Stalin participated in Holocaust.
Casualties of war, even those resulting from collateral damage, are QUITE different from the targeted extermination of a group of people based on ethnicity.
"Casualties of war"? Who, do you think, killed all those people? Except for seven millions Germans, they were all killed by Nazi. Indiscriminate mass murder of people, soldiers and civilians alike, in the process of aggressive war covering a whole continent is somehow BETTER than mass murder, 1/10 of the former in scale, targeting a particular ethnicity? What kind of sick fuck are you? I am Jewish myself, and I find this disgusting -- Nazi rule in Germany and WWII was an unprecedented tragedy, and Holocaust is merely a part of it.
Hitler may have been more evil than Stalin, but he couldn't match him in terms of sheer numbers.
Stalin killed up to two millions. This is what was found after going through archives. Bad enough, but this is dwarfed by both Holocaust and WWII.
Sometimes you WANT to give credit to the original developer, even though you made a minor modifications. For example, OS port to some hardware not supported by the original developers -- port may involve a minor amount of changes, so it would be misleading to call it by something other than the original name.
But without copyright, what is the point of releasing binaries and not providing source? Users will distribute binaries to each other (no copyright -> no one has to buy or license them from you), AND won't contribute to your development, AND you will have to update your binaries for every new platform because no one else can produce the binaries.
Sure it is. FIS agents, if caught, will be tried for their crimes.
Tried according to a local law, not sent to a torture-and-death camp.
This is not true. I'm not sure where you're getting your information from, but you need a serious reality check.
There is no "information", it's in the definition of a "treaty". Individuals are not a party of a treaty, governments are.
Actually, when it comes to the question of whether the Holodomor constitutes genocide, I give more credence to the Ukrainian government, which has officially recognized it as such, than Soviet apologists.
Yeah, the same Ukrainian government that is desperately trying to find some kind of "national idea" that will compensate for its massive incompetence, and the same Ukrainian government that tried to cozy up to US, to the extent of sending its military to Iraq. They still didn't outdo Poland though.
Stalin withheld food from the Ukrainians until they could meet production quotas they didn't have a prayer of filling. The reasons for doing this may be disputable, but the government knew the effect would be disastrous on the Ukrainian population and proceeded to do it anyway. Not all genocide involves rounding people up and putting them in ovens. Taking food from people with the intent of letting them die is just as much murder. And mass murder that is targeted against a specific population is genocide.
It was ALREADY a massive famine when government started this. It was a mismanagement, but government neither intentionally cause the famine, nor targeted any particular ethnicity in any actions related to it.
I don't think you understand the history of tensions between the Soviet government and Ukrainian nationalists.
I know it very well. "Ukrainian nationalists" suddenly appear every time when either there is something to loot, or when a foreign state (Germany, US, and before that even Poland) offers them support.
And your attempts to absolve Stalin of blame because the policies were supposedly implemented by Ukrainians--as if Stalin didn't know about them and couldn't have done anything about them--are laughable.
I am not trying to absolve Stalin of blame for things he did -- and there is plenty of blame he deserves. The problem is, you Americans have absolutely no idea what he is actually responsible for, and what is attributed to him in an attempt to paint him as some kind of generic villain. Your government was so afraid that you will find Communists' ideas attractive, it didn't seem enough to have a really bad Communist ruler as a bogeyman, they had to present him as worst possible politician and combination of all imaginable sins, genocide included.
Two millions dead, oppressive rule and random acts of assholeness just didn't seem impressive enough, so your propaganda not only massively inflated Stalin's crimes, it went as far as whitewashing Hitler. Think of it -- they tell you about Hitler killing 6-11 millions in Holocaust, and never mention 70 millions of WWII victims in Europe, who are solely his responsibility, the number that dwarfs any other act of mass murder, war, genocide or anything that happened before or after that. It's almost a quarter of your country's population. The only reason why you aren't taught this in school is to make him less of a distraction from the image of the designated greatest villain ever -- Stalin. Just because he was a Communist, and there was nothing more important than making Communists look bad. The ends justifiy the means, right?
Are you serious?
Absolutely.
Stalin killed more people than Hitler in terms of outright genocide. He let 10 million Ukrainians starve to death in the 30s over a policy dispute, and that's barely scratching the surface for him.
No.
First of all, Ukrainian famine was a result of drought exacerbated by poor management -- the "evidence" that US propaganda loves to present was at most misguided last-ditch efforts to keep the famine from wiping out the population. Second, famine was not limited to Ukraine -- some regions in Russia suffered about as much.
Third, at no point before or after that there was any conflict, significant discrimination or any ethnic tension between Russians and Ukrainians, and for most of USSR history, Ukraine was second most powerful member in the union. "Genocide" would be absolutely pointless.
Fourth, Stalin himself was Georgian, and all government policies in Ukraine were implemented by Ukrainians.
Of course, being American, you would rather listen to "historians" like Robert Conquest, who could only cite their imagination and great demand for anti-Soviet propaganda as their sources.