Are you just tryin to be an ass, or are you really supportive of what Germany was trying to do? Don't you know that Hitler ordered the destruction of Paris, and his general conspired to disobey him? It's a pretty famous story. Don't you know that Hitler didn't actually believe that France had a civilization worth saving? He only believed in German civilization, and only his approved German civilization.
And look at what was done in the Soviet Union, the destruction of cities not for military reasons but for the goal of killing off people.
Tell us, now that you've spent so much time defending how restrained the Germans were, are you denying that the Holocaust took place? Tell us straight out. No evasions.
Yikes, you certainly are an active agent of pro-Nazi propaganda. Jews were required to leave so it was OK to kill them? Are you really arguing that?
The Jews that were required to leave were Jews from other countries. German Jews were often prevented from leaving under the assumption they would take their property with them. Jews in conquered countries were most of the Jews killed, which means they didn't have any warnings either. Jews had to be smuggled out to keep them alive.
Comparing the Nazis to the Israelis is a comic, ironic sort of turn around, since without the Nazis Israel probably never would have come about. Most Jews were happy to continue to live happily in their HOME COUNTRIES where they had lived FOR GENERATIONS and had every right to continue to live.
Side note: This does not mean I endorse what the Israelis are doing to the Palestinians right now. I find it appalling, reprehensible, and worthy of the name genocide.
You certainly don't know what actually happened. Germany started the war with a campaign in Poland. During that campaign, there were massive one day aerial assaults on Polish cities, particularly Warsaw. And BTW, that wasn't a war to "reclaim their lost territories" as most of Poland that was conquered by the Germans was never part of Germany, and yes even taking into account the parts that were transferred over the the Soviets.
Following the rapid conquest of Poland, the occupation targetted civilian population. Jews were immediately forced into ghettos. While systematic murder in the camps didn't start until 1941, widespread attacks on conquered civilians, Jews and ethnic Poles and others, were common.
During the Polish campaign the French advanced a few kilometers into Germany, did no actual fighting and withdrew immediately after the Polish campaign was finished. From then until the invasion of Norway the following spring, there was virtually no combat, certainly no combatting of civilians by the Allies, though there certainly was by the Germans.
In May of 1940, after conquering Norway, the Germans attacked into Holland, Belgium and France, and again used massive bombardments of civilian populations to cow the Dutch and Belgians.
As for problems the death camps caused for the Germans, here's a couple:
1) Massive expenditure of human resources trying to hunt down, capture, and control the population prior to killing them off.
2) Large scale diversion of rail infrastructure into death camp system. Think about it: If only 50% of the killed were transported to the camps, that's bare minimum 3,000,000 people transported to camps, usually over the course of more than a day. That is a massive use of resources.
Arguably, the propaganda value and expropriation of land and resources helped the German economy. Hitler is often credited with bringing about economic growth, but it was accomplished in large part through expropriation of resources. The death camps were also run as factories, so there's arguably some slave labor benefit to the economy. I haven't seen an economic analysis so it's difficult for me to say whether this was a net plus or minus. Probably no one can say. There is also the economic minus of having massive economic uncertainty and certainly some flight of capital.
Another inaccuracy in your post: Most Jews were not allowed to emmigrate before the war, or if they were they were robbed along the way. A major goal of the war for Hitler was the killing of Jews and other people he considered racially impure.
Another inaccuracy: Germany didn't hold off the WHOLE world. After all, two of the major powers on Earth were pro-German at the beginning of the war(Japan and the Soviet Union). The only reason Germany ended up fight most of the world is that they attacked them!
While you're right, the Germany military effort is impressive, it is also appalling considering what they were fighting for. All in all, it's clear from the tone your posting that you're either a dupe of pro-Nazi propaganda, or an active agent of pro-Nazi propaganda.
I'm not much of a programmer, I did a some scripting in VBA, but tackling a real programming language was really hard. Then someone recommended Head First Java, which is written by a programmer and someone who is a learning specialist. It's really great, and seems to teach the basics well:
http://www.oreilly.com/headfirst/
Absolutely. I've had to deal with Compaqs at work and friends who have them, they've been nothing but trouble. They seem to have inherited the old Packard-Bell method of construction.
I hear they made good servers, though. Before they were bought out. I haven't heard anything about the brand since.
I'm so tired of this kind of post. So many people on/. think it is the height of brilliance to tell everyone else why they are stupid. And to post it as an AC too.
The original poster may or may not have done some of this research themselves, but many people would much rather get advice from experienced users than rely on a resource they find on the web which may or may not be accurate.
Also, you can't tell the worth of a, say, book without reading. It's helpful if someone else says "I've read this book and it is good" because that gives them a sense that at least one othe poster found it to be a good resource.
I personally have wasted lots of time trying to get something out of a web resource, only to realize that it's not worthwhile, or there's a better resource somewhere else, often by having someone say to me, or post somewhere "Hey, have you tried this?"
You've hit on a powerful point. Many small/medium businesses use Access, which MS won't even let onto the Mac. Couple that with VBA, which is a powerful scripting language, and you have something that so far no one has been able to replicate. It is unfortunate, it is a lock, and it's something that many of us rely on.
This is for my primary use computer, rather than my secondary gaming computers:
1) UT2004
2) Half-Life + (Currently only The Specialts)
3) MS Office (get over it)
4) WinZip
5) Kohan: Ahriman's Gift
6) Warcraft III
7) UT/TacOps
8) Real Player
9) Patches, Patches, Patches
10) Mechwarrior Black Knight
[Referring to people distributing songs for free after downloading them]It's not like they're preventing that as it is. I know "people" who've done ALL OF THAT.
That's a good point, of course. The efforts by RIAA seem to be oriented on keeping the level of copying and distributing (piracy in their twisted minds) to a minimum. I think there's some justification to their belief that if they make it difficult for the average person to copy songs, they won't. It may not be difficult for the average Slashdot reader, but for the average user who just wants to copy files they'll think it's too hard.
Perhaps they believe that if they open up their files to different standards they're increasing the risk that someone will make it easy to strip DRM from them.
And why do you think Apple is going for the DRM solution? 2 reasons:
1) Apple likes to make money. They don't make money if one person downloads a song and gives it to hundreds of friends in whatever format they want, especially if the format is freely changable thereby allowing them to put the files on non-iPod music players
2) RIAA would sue them into the next century if they tried to do otherwise.
Now for WINDOWS, this was a huge problem, because you couldn't install the drivers without the original cd, don't ask me why. Couldn't download them from the site, couldn't do crap
Just to be clear, by going to this site:
http://us.creative.com/support/downloads/
You couldn't install them without a
didn't allow you to install unless there was a cd in the drive?
Because the statement that you couldn't download them from the site seems inaccurate. Perhaps you just meant that if you downloaded them, you couldn't install them?
The big media companies will always find some way around small changes, in this case making the pricing for ala carte as much or more than the fix-price option. Some sort of systemic reform needs to happen if prices are going to come down.
Actually, I would think that the spam-merchants would love it. After all, if the zombies are doing mass-sending, they're getting their CPU usage.
The Feds on the other hand...
Terrorism, war, hunger, poverty, homelessness, child abuse, disease, et al. We should be dealing with those issues first. Leave consenting adults alone. But should be be surprised that this administration is wasting tax payers money on this?
Essentially, the article references 2 on-line worlds that have been scrapped this year as evidence that the PC market is in trouble. But both those on-line worlds sound like they might have sucked anyway. One is an attempt to revive an old franchise, Myst, which while a fabulous game in itself, has somewhat faded from consciousness, and the other is by Microsoft. Maybe the games were just not marketable, or there were significant problems with them. But no, it has to be about consoles destroying PC gaming, which BTW, they've been threatening to do for how long now?
If you read the articles you'd know that it means cross-Microsoft platforms. Microsoft has gotten itself into an interesting place where the different Microsoft platforms are diverging significantly, despite the introduction of Windows XP and 2003 which integrated two of their lines. This is meant to adjust for that.
California didn't elect these people, the "good" people of Aliso Viejo, California did. Local government is often filled with overworked people who don't have time to check the work of their advisors. That's not an excuse, and if you RFTA, you'll see that they NEARLY passed the law, but didn't.
I know I'm being testy, but every time someone does something boneheaded in CA, everyone says "There goes California again" but if they do something boneheaded in Ohio, which they do fairly often, everyone only responds "Why would anyone want to live in Ohio anyway, I guess they deserve a break for sticking it out"
This post will probably be modded down on principle, but what the Hell.
1) Yet another article that says how much better Linux is than Windows, and for largely the same reasons as every other article that says Linux is better than Windows.
2) I see all the posts from people who complain that Windows doesn't work right out of the box, but that Linux is very configurable...If you tweak Windows, it's a lot more stable than if you don't.
3) Not to say that Linux doesn't have superior tweaking ability and have some definite strengths over Windows, but Windows has some stregnths too. Like availablity of software. Now will come all the posts saying how much freeware there is for Linux. Great. What versions do they all work with? Is there a central easy way to tell if it will work with my machine? There's the classic Grandma dilema, though Linux is gaining ground there.
4) Installing Windows is easier. What, am I crazy for making that statement? No. I've attempted several installs of Linux. One has actually worked, and that was Redhat 9.0, which is now not easily available. I've installed 10s of Windows machines, and had a far smaller failure rate, mostly from hardware that had gone bad or that I didn't have drivers for.
5) Linux is arguably a better OS, but constant sniping at Windows is not just a religion on Slashdot, it also obscures the fact that Microsoft has done more to bring about the popularity of computers than anyone except perhaps Apple, which only comparitively recently switched to a Unix varient. Microsoft has certainly done more to bring about affordable computers that work out of the box, even if they don't meet exacting performance standards.
6) For computer owners, you don't need to know much if you run Windows, other than the phone number of your nearest friend/relative who can fix it. I'm constantly asking people "What kind of computer are you running" and they will say "It's a Compaq" or worse "It's a Trinitron" because that's the label on the monitor. That's arguably not a good thing, but in order to run Linux on a box, you need to know all about kernal versions, dependancies, etc. when you're trying to install software. And you have to be very careful which hardware you use because you want to make sure you are getting something that is theoretically usable with your system.
I don't have Dish Network, I have basic cable, and I got all these messages scrolling along the bottom of the screen urging me to call Dish networks to harrass them about some I don't give a flying #%$#$^^&&*! about, and distracting me from my TV watching for days. Just made me change channels, not what they wanted I'm sure, or had any way of tracking.
I am Gay, and it's a frustrating to see the strings of invectives that come poring across my screen, but if you've ever posted on Yahoo! message boards you know it is even worse there. Usually if I call someone on it, they'll stop for awhile. But when I used an ID that had the word "gay" in it, I had people change teams so they could try to kill me. Of course, the real bigot/haters are usually horrible players, probably because they spend so much time typing they forget to play.
So much of it is also profoundly misogynist and uses profoundly sexist language. If I were a woman, I'd feel I was getting a rather hostile response from people who didn't even know, most of the time, that I was a woman. I support servers that make an attempt to keep it clean and ban those who are overtly hostile.
It depends on how secure they keep it. I agree, beyond maybe attempting to show that someone viewed a channel they weren't authorized to, I can't see where the illegal content was, unless they could somehow link it to whether or not there was a child in the room and someone's on the Playboy channel. In that case, I almost hope they do catch that person.
On the other hand, say they keep the individual data, and someone gets their hands on it. In this day and age of insure computing, not an unreasonable choice. They show that you were viewing say Queer as Folk, or In The Life (a news program re: the Gay community). Could be grounds for blackmail. Or the government can show that you watched a show that had violent imagery on it, and use that to build a case against you in court. Or based on your viewing habits, you start receiving targeted mailing/spam.
Keep in mind, TiVo says that now they don't release individualized data. That doesn't mean in the future they can't mine it when their revenues start to dry up. I don't know of their current corporate relationships, but if they are a subsidiary, would it be "releasing" the data to share it with a company they have a relationship with?
The potential for abuse is actually fairly large. If you're of the "I don't have anything to hide" mentality, that's fine. But some people do, or at least want the choice in the matter. Of course, you do have a choice in the matter. You can not get TiVo. That's my choice.
I know about the refusal to run MoveOn.org's ad, but I didn't know there was a pro-Republican ad. Of course I didn't watch the superbowl. Can you tell me what got aired?
This will probably be modded down, but I have to say whenever Starship Troopers comes on cable, I watch at least part of it. I actually liked it, stilted acting and all. I thought it wasn't a good rendition of the original, but a good update. Kind of like Clueless was for...I want to say "Emma". The universe that was created was far more compelling than the characters, of course, but that was true of the original as well. And the subtext on propaganda was great.
Slashdot Mirror
Are you just tryin to be an ass, or are you really supportive of what Germany was trying to do? Don't you know that Hitler ordered the destruction of Paris, and his general conspired to disobey him? It's a pretty famous story. Don't you know that Hitler didn't actually believe that France had a civilization worth saving? He only believed in German civilization, and only his approved German civilization. And look at what was done in the Soviet Union, the destruction of cities not for military reasons but for the goal of killing off people. Tell us, now that you've spent so much time defending how restrained the Germans were, are you denying that the Holocaust took place? Tell us straight out. No evasions.
Yikes, you certainly are an active agent of pro-Nazi propaganda. Jews were required to leave so it was OK to kill them? Are you really arguing that?
The Jews that were required to leave were Jews from other countries. German Jews were often prevented from leaving under the assumption they would take their property with them. Jews in conquered countries were most of the Jews killed, which means they didn't have any warnings either. Jews had to be smuggled out to keep them alive.
Comparing the Nazis to the Israelis is a comic, ironic sort of turn around, since without the Nazis Israel probably never would have come about. Most Jews were happy to continue to live happily in their HOME COUNTRIES where they had lived FOR GENERATIONS and had every right to continue to live.
Side note: This does not mean I endorse what the Israelis are doing to the Palestinians right now. I find it appalling, reprehensible, and worthy of the name genocide.
You certainly don't know what actually happened. Germany started the war with a campaign in Poland. During that campaign, there were massive one day aerial assaults on Polish cities, particularly Warsaw. And BTW, that wasn't a war to "reclaim their lost territories" as most of Poland that was conquered by the Germans was never part of Germany, and yes even taking into account the parts that were transferred over the the Soviets.
Following the rapid conquest of Poland, the occupation targetted civilian population. Jews were immediately forced into ghettos. While systematic murder in the camps didn't start until 1941, widespread attacks on conquered civilians, Jews and ethnic Poles and others, were common.
During the Polish campaign the French advanced a few kilometers into Germany, did no actual fighting and withdrew immediately after the Polish campaign was finished. From then until the invasion of Norway the following spring, there was virtually no combat, certainly no combatting of civilians by the Allies, though there certainly was by the Germans.
In May of 1940, after conquering Norway, the Germans attacked into Holland, Belgium and France, and again used massive bombardments of civilian populations to cow the Dutch and Belgians.
As for problems the death camps caused for the Germans, here's a couple:
1) Massive expenditure of human resources trying to hunt down, capture, and control the population prior to killing them off.
2) Large scale diversion of rail infrastructure into death camp system. Think about it: If only 50% of the killed were transported to the camps, that's bare minimum 3,000,000 people transported to camps, usually over the course of more than a day. That is a massive use of resources.
Arguably, the propaganda value and expropriation of land and resources helped the German economy. Hitler is often credited with bringing about economic growth, but it was accomplished in large part through expropriation of resources. The death camps were also run as factories, so there's arguably some slave labor benefit to the economy. I haven't seen an economic analysis so it's difficult for me to say whether this was a net plus or minus. Probably no one can say. There is also the economic minus of having massive economic uncertainty and certainly some flight of capital.
Another inaccuracy in your post: Most Jews were not allowed to emmigrate before the war, or if they were they were robbed along the way. A major goal of the war for Hitler was the killing of Jews and other people he considered racially impure.
Another inaccuracy: Germany didn't hold off the WHOLE world. After all, two of the major powers on Earth were pro-German at the beginning of the war(Japan and the Soviet Union). The only reason Germany ended up fight most of the world is that they attacked them!
While you're right, the Germany military effort is impressive, it is also appalling considering what they were fighting for. All in all, it's clear from the tone your posting that you're either a dupe of pro-Nazi propaganda, or an active agent of pro-Nazi propaganda.
I'm not much of a programmer, I did a some scripting in VBA, but tackling a real programming language was really hard. Then someone recommended Head First Java, which is written by a programmer and someone who is a learning specialist. It's really great, and seems to teach the basics well: http://www.oreilly.com/headfirst/
Absolutely. I've had to deal with Compaqs at work and friends who have them, they've been nothing but trouble. They seem to have inherited the old Packard-Bell method of construction. I hear they made good servers, though. Before they were bought out. I haven't heard anything about the brand since.
The original poster may or may not have done some of this research themselves, but many people would much rather get advice from experienced users than rely on a resource they find on the web which may or may not be accurate.
Also, you can't tell the worth of a, say, book without reading. It's helpful if someone else says "I've read this book and it is good" because that gives them a sense that at least one othe poster found it to be a good resource.I personally have wasted lots of time trying to get something out of a web resource, only to realize that it's not worthwhile, or there's a better resource somewhere else, often by having someone say to me, or post somewhere "Hey, have you tried this?"
You've hit on a powerful point. Many small/medium businesses use Access, which MS won't even let onto the Mac. Couple that with VBA, which is a powerful scripting language, and you have something that so far no one has been able to replicate. It is unfortunate, it is a lock, and it's something that many of us rely on.
This is for my primary use computer, rather than my secondary gaming computers: 1) UT2004 2) Half-Life + (Currently only The Specialts) 3) MS Office (get over it) 4) WinZip 5) Kohan: Ahriman's Gift 6) Warcraft III 7) UT/TacOps 8) Real Player 9) Patches, Patches, Patches 10) Mechwarrior Black Knight
That's a good point, of course. The efforts by RIAA seem to be oriented on keeping the level of copying and distributing (piracy in their twisted minds) to a minimum. I think there's some justification to their belief that if they make it difficult for the average person to copy songs, they won't. It may not be difficult for the average Slashdot reader, but for the average user who just wants to copy files they'll think it's too hard.
Perhaps they believe that if they open up their files to different standards they're increasing the risk that someone will make it easy to strip DRM from them.
1) Apple likes to make money. They don't make money if one person downloads a song and gives it to hundreds of friends in whatever format they want, especially if the format is freely changable thereby allowing them to put the files on non-iPod music players
2) RIAA would sue them into the next century if they tried to do otherwise.
Just to be clear, by going to this site: http://us.creative.com/support/downloads/ You couldn't install them without a didn't allow you to install unless there was a cd in the drive?
Because the statement that you couldn't download them from the site seems inaccurate. Perhaps you just meant that if you downloaded them, you couldn't install them?The big media companies will always find some way around small changes, in this case making the pricing for ala carte as much or more than the fix-price option. Some sort of systemic reform needs to happen if prices are going to come down.
Actually, I would think that the spam-merchants would love it. After all, if the zombies are doing mass-sending, they're getting their CPU usage. The Feds on the other hand...
Terrorism, war, hunger, poverty, homelessness, child abuse, disease, et al. We should be dealing with those issues first. Leave consenting adults alone. But should be be surprised that this administration is wasting tax payers money on this?
Essentially, the article references 2 on-line worlds that have been scrapped this year as evidence that the PC market is in trouble. But both those on-line worlds sound like they might have sucked anyway. One is an attempt to revive an old franchise, Myst, which while a fabulous game in itself, has somewhat faded from consciousness, and the other is by Microsoft. Maybe the games were just not marketable, or there were significant problems with them. But no, it has to be about consoles destroying PC gaming, which BTW, they've been threatening to do for how long now?
If you read the articles you'd know that it means cross-Microsoft platforms. Microsoft has gotten itself into an interesting place where the different Microsoft platforms are diverging significantly, despite the introduction of Windows XP and 2003 which integrated two of their lines. This is meant to adjust for that.
California didn't elect these people, the "good" people of Aliso Viejo, California did. Local government is often filled with overworked people who don't have time to check the work of their advisors. That's not an excuse, and if you RFTA, you'll see that they NEARLY passed the law, but didn't.
I know I'm being testy, but every time someone does something boneheaded in CA, everyone says "There goes California again" but if they do something boneheaded in Ohio, which they do fairly often, everyone only responds "Why would anyone want to live in Ohio anyway, I guess they deserve a break for sticking it out"
1) Yet another article that says how much better Linux is than Windows, and for largely the same reasons as every other article that says Linux is better than Windows.
2) I see all the posts from people who complain that Windows doesn't work right out of the box, but that Linux is very configurable...If you tweak Windows, it's a lot more stable than if you don't.
3) Not to say that Linux doesn't have superior tweaking ability and have some definite strengths over Windows, but Windows has some stregnths too. Like availablity of software. Now will come all the posts saying how much freeware there is for Linux. Great. What versions do they all work with? Is there a central easy way to tell if it will work with my machine? There's the classic Grandma dilema, though Linux is gaining ground there.
4) Installing Windows is easier. What, am I crazy for making that statement? No. I've attempted several installs of Linux. One has actually worked, and that was Redhat 9.0, which is now not easily available. I've installed 10s of Windows machines, and had a far smaller failure rate, mostly from hardware that had gone bad or that I didn't have drivers for.
5) Linux is arguably a better OS, but constant sniping at Windows is not just a religion on Slashdot, it also obscures the fact that Microsoft has done more to bring about the popularity of computers than anyone except perhaps Apple, which only comparitively recently switched to a Unix varient. Microsoft has certainly done more to bring about affordable computers that work out of the box, even if they don't meet exacting performance standards.
6) For computer owners, you don't need to know much if you run Windows, other than the phone number of your nearest friend/relative who can fix it. I'm constantly asking people "What kind of computer are you running" and they will say "It's a Compaq" or worse "It's a Trinitron" because that's the label on the monitor. That's arguably not a good thing, but in order to run Linux on a box, you need to know all about kernal versions, dependancies, etc. when you're trying to install software. And you have to be very careful which hardware you use because you want to make sure you are getting something that is theoretically usable with your system.
I don't have Dish Network, I have basic cable, and I got all these messages scrolling along the bottom of the screen urging me to call Dish networks to harrass them about some I don't give a flying #%$#$^^&&*! about, and distracting me from my TV watching for days. Just made me change channels, not what they wanted I'm sure, or had any way of tracking.
Thanks for proving my point. Now go home, your mama's calling. I hear there's brownies for dessert!
I am Gay, and it's a frustrating to see the strings of invectives that come poring across my screen, but if you've ever posted on Yahoo! message boards you know it is even worse there. Usually if I call someone on it, they'll stop for awhile. But when I used an ID that had the word "gay" in it, I had people change teams so they could try to kill me. Of course, the real bigot/haters are usually horrible players, probably because they spend so much time typing they forget to play. So much of it is also profoundly misogynist and uses profoundly sexist language. If I were a woman, I'd feel I was getting a rather hostile response from people who didn't even know, most of the time, that I was a woman. I support servers that make an attempt to keep it clean and ban those who are overtly hostile.
And yet oddly, you continue to use it. I always think that's funny, there's so many technologies that people hate, but still use.
It depends on how secure they keep it. I agree, beyond maybe attempting to show that someone viewed a channel they weren't authorized to, I can't see where the illegal content was, unless they could somehow link it to whether or not there was a child in the room and someone's on the Playboy channel. In that case, I almost hope they do catch that person. On the other hand, say they keep the individual data, and someone gets their hands on it. In this day and age of insure computing, not an unreasonable choice. They show that you were viewing say Queer as Folk, or In The Life (a news program re: the Gay community). Could be grounds for blackmail. Or the government can show that you watched a show that had violent imagery on it, and use that to build a case against you in court. Or based on your viewing habits, you start receiving targeted mailing/spam. Keep in mind, TiVo says that now they don't release individualized data. That doesn't mean in the future they can't mine it when their revenues start to dry up. I don't know of their current corporate relationships, but if they are a subsidiary, would it be "releasing" the data to share it with a company they have a relationship with? The potential for abuse is actually fairly large. If you're of the "I don't have anything to hide" mentality, that's fine. But some people do, or at least want the choice in the matter. Of course, you do have a choice in the matter. You can not get TiVo. That's my choice.
I know about the refusal to run MoveOn.org's ad, but I didn't know there was a pro-Republican ad. Of course I didn't watch the superbowl. Can you tell me what got aired?
This will probably be modded down, but I have to say whenever Starship Troopers comes on cable, I watch at least part of it. I actually liked it, stilted acting and all. I thought it wasn't a good rendition of the original, but a good update. Kind of like Clueless was for...I want to say "Emma". The universe that was created was far more compelling than the characters, of course, but that was true of the original as well. And the subtext on propaganda was great.