It's not that they don't mention MSIE, it's that they don't link to it, which is what helps improve the page rank. I mean, everybody (95% of personal computers) has IE to start with, so it's not like you need to say "click here to download Internet Explorer". If you have the possibility of using IE, it's already going to be on your machine.
A search for Operating system produces 11 *nix hits before getting around to Windows. Interesting.
I have never had as many problems getting a linux ditro running on my machine as I have with the Fedora series (I'm running Fedora core 2 pre-3 or whatever it was.) OK, maybe back in the 1.2.13 kernel days it was a bit more difficult, but given how far things have come, I really think Fedora is moving in the opposite direction in terms of Penguiny-goodness.
My biggest problem has been getting GRUB to boot my OSes correctly. I have one of those bugy BIOSes that necessitates some configuration magic when installing GRUB. Knoppix had no problem with this. Fedora, even though it is supposed to be a cinch to install, caused me to go two weeks without both my OSes booting correctly. This may just be a GRUB thing, but if you're creating a distribution, you're graded on the quality of those things that you choose to include.
Next up is the up2date thing. I've lived in RPM hell since the Redhat 4.0 days, and I'm not really sure why I still endure it. By now, the fact that I still can't get a DVD or MP3 player installed with a simple command line statement or GUI tool is simply absurd. It's generally a multistep proecess: download foo-3.3-2.rpm for five minutes, try to install it to find out it depends on bar-1.2-3.rpm, so I download that for another five minutes, try to install that to find that baz-0.2-23-monkeychowder.rpm depends on bar-1.2-2.rpm and that by installing anything more recent, I'm just screwed. Am I the only person that finds this completely unacceptable?
And I could go on. Still, I'm planning on going home tonight and torrenting the new ISO, apparently because I like pain (acquired and accustomed to over the course of 10 years of using linux...).
Remember kids, one of the reasons they need to raise taxes like these is because they need funding for something else they enacted. The next time you are asked (either a person such as a pollster or when you vote) if you think it's a good idea for the local/state/federal goverment to raise $X million dollars for doing something like giving every convicted murderer a cupcake, consider where the money comes from. And the things they want to raise money for range from the obnoxious (e.g. the indoor rain forest in Iowa, thank you Mr. Grassley) to the otherwise reasonable (e.g. better roads or higher pay for teachers).
If you always give the thumbs up to every little thing (either if you're directly voting on it or if you're electing people like Chuck Grassley), they're going to take it out of you in some way. A better way of doing things would be to ditch the obnoxious and allocate that money for the reasonable projects, rather than raising new taxes for every reasonable thing.
There's been quite a buzz on Slashdot lately wrt open source and usability. Making a computer easy to use for "Grandma" (an insulting label for non-Slashdorks) isn't about limiting the number of icons on the desktop, or choosing the right text labels that these "Grandmas" of the world will understand. The slashdot communal mind needs to understand that usable software isn't just about adding a shiney coating to the outside--usable software has to be designed that way from the very beginning, and is a huge undertaking!
Personally, I hope that the recent trend on slashdot to talk about usability is more than just a fad and the open source world is finally starting to come around. These books are good starting points.
I think it's OK as long as the new thing won't be confused with the older thing. Some terms from computing that spring to mind: mouse, firewall, bug... Word overloading is one of the ways that languages evolve.
It's much easier to remember the name of the thing as 'Sapphire' rather than 'Novec 1230' or whatever. In some industries (high tech and pharmacy) they like to invent new words all the time and it just ends up being hard to remember. For example, Paxil. What the heck is that? It's not always bad, for example, 'Zoloft' has a phonetic similarity to 'Loft', as in, raise your spirits.
I'm sure they spent a chunk of change in doing some research before giving their new concoction a street name. I wish the Mozilla people would do that with The-Browser-Currently-At-0.8.
First let me say (unrelated to your comments) that I've been reading some of Havoc's thoughts on usability and I need to include him on the list of 'clued in' individuals.
In response to you, I think specific widget behavior changes should only go into widespread use if they have been scientifically tested (usability testing). Of course, the itch to change it has to originate from somewhere, and in the case of open source software that source is almost always some hacker. So in this case, somebody thought that maybe the size of the thumb should be proportional to the amount of stuff in the scrollpane--or, inversely proportional as it is usually done. A usability test for this would show if the thumb size indeed does have a practical use or, as you suggest, none.
In my company, interface decisions are made based on what somebody in management feels is the best. It's a small company and, as the logic goes, we don't have the resources to dedicate to usability testing. But I'm seeing things shipped out in our product that would never, ever be released if these things were tested properly. My biggest frustration is in convincing my higher-ups that when making UI decisions, ego (somebody just deciding that something is of no practical use, for example) is the wrong way to do it, and some modicum of user testing is.
And I'm not meaning to say here that your statement was just an egotistical raving of a madman--actually, quite the contrary. I say things all the time about UI idioms ("Oh, that'll never fly") and then being proved completely wrong once users see it. Everybody has opinions and preconceptions--that's just natural. But it's also a limitation because we pre-judge rather than doing things in a more scientific approach.
Newsmap is based on Treemaps, which is both a
conceptual GUI idiom as well as a commercial product. This is the work that Ben Schneiderman is most well-known for, and he's been working on different forms of interactive information visualization for decades.
The parent was asking about projects like KDE and Gnome picking up cool concepts like this. The HCI world is full of 'hey neat' ideas that on the surface really seem like they should be brought into the fold, but aren't for a variety of reasons. One company in particular that I worked for (and won't name) has a really cool project that I feel could become a standard UI idiom like radio buttons and scrollpanes, but the product is doomed to failure because the company is horribly mismanaged and (having been the sole coder--as an intern, even) I also know the code to be completely inflexibly designed. Furthermore, they want to make all sorts of money on the thing, which means they're charging customers an arm and a leg to use it.
The Linux desktop environment projects have issues equally as inibitive as the one described above, but rather than being financially oriented, their problems are more about ego and (with the exception of some of the KDE guys) a complete misunderstanding of what HCI is all about. I really wish KDE/Gnome would use these experimental UI metaphors, but alas, I think their structures prohibit this sort of thing.
So there's the aphorism about the guy with the hammer that only sees nails. Really, this translates very nicely into the world of lawmaking--if your job is to come up with rules and regulations, the first thing you're going to think of when coming across something like this is to draft legislation.
It stopped surprising me a long time ago, but it still bothers me. People's first reaction to something that they fear is to legislate it out of existence. Ask any random person on the street what they think about some high-profile issue (gay marriage, abortion, gun control, "taxes cuts for the rich" as the saying goes) and they're likely to tell you how the government ought to fix the problem.
These city council guys didn't make any new laws in this case because the media helped them see their error. But how many other times do they actually PASS silly legislation based on whim? My I-can't-even-find-an-envelope calculation works out to 98% of all laws are passed because the people doing the lawmaking have nothing else to do, and they see lots of nails.
Tune in next time...
Re:One reason to think again
on
SCOoby Snacks
·
· Score: 1
The parent post (the one from Yahoo Finance) made a whole bunch of connections, which in a murder-mystery sort of way, is saturated with innuendo. There may be something there, but, I don't know if it would be easy to prove securities fraud.
In english, the yahoo post says this: Guys A and B are intimately involved with corporations C, D, and E. A and B had C, D, and E collectively buy 1.4 million shares of SCOX, underwritten by corporation F. SCOX has about 13.8 million outstanding (tradeable) shares.
(As an aside, 75% of SCOX stock is owned either by insiders or by institutions--10.4M shares. The remaining 25% are owned by the schmucks who think they can outsmart the pump&dump operation that is clearly underway.)
Guy A has gone around saying "Yay SCOX", which given his stature involving C, D, and E, and given their large investment in SCOX, may constitue fraud. I don't know if it is fraudulent, but it definitely is slimey.
Some people have already pointed out the obvious weakness of this, that the secret knock is only an added layer of obscurity, and security by obscurity is flawed in many ways. But this scheme could be a little more secure if the knock itself was a function only known to those 'in the know'. For example, it could be a function of time, so if time.nist.gov says it's time X, then I look in my secret list of knocks and get the port and timing sequence for this particular f(X).
A third party could be watching your knock, and as soon as they recognize the knock they could try it themselves. But by then, the knock-as-a-function-of-time would have changed, so it would do them no good.
When you sign up for one of those things, there's always fine print saying what they can and can't do regarding your information. This isn't rocket science--rtfm and your questions will be answered. Safeway (to pick the grocery store that I tend to go to) states:
Safeway may use this information to give you personally-tailored coupons, offers or other information
And then further down, they essentially say that at any point they can amend the terms of the agreement at will:
We reserve the right at our discretion to change, modify, add, or remove portions of this Statement at any time.
In any event, they make it clear that they will contact you for whatever reason they see fit. I'm a little bit confused as to why anybody would feel that a grocery card entitles you to privacy, when you voluntarily agree to give them your information even while they state that they will essentially do whatever they please with it. If you aren't comfortable with Grocery X tracking your purchasing habits, do what everybody else on the planet does--provide incorrect information and forget about it. Not everything is a constitutional issue.
There are two reasons that they don't advertise the final price. One reason is that taxes change all the time and are different in various localities.
The second reason (if you subscribe to conspiracy theories of gubmint) is because they want to make it appear as though you're really getting the thing for 29.99, so when you end up paying 29.99 + taxes, you don't remember the value of the taxes. If people knew and were cognizant of how much they're paying in taxes, they'd be mad as hell. This is the same reason why they take your income taxes out of your check--so you don't miss it as much.
This thread is dead though, i doubt if anybody reads this...
Here's the text of the petition; you can sign it if you like at mediareform.net.
Dear (Name):
We, the undersigned, call on Congress to overturn the Federal Communication Commission's relaxation of media ownership rules that was passed by a 3-2 vote on June 2, 2003.
A self-governing and free society requires an open, fair, and representative media system with the widest possible dissemination of diverse, local, and independent information and ideas. These are values we hold to be central to our democracy.
The new media ownership rules handed down by the FCC are in clear violation of these values. American citizens from across the political spectrum have spoken out against them with a unified voice. The FCC review that produced the new rules ignored informed public input and used skewed studies to justify trading public service for private profit.
Whether Congress legislates to overturn the new FCC rules, passes a resolution nullifying the FCC action, or votes for a spending bill that accomplishes the same result, we demand a total rollback of the June 2 rule change.
That's a really good point. I doubt that a democratically elected government would dream of doing something like this. And even if they did, the voters would kick them out! No, this dam is being build because the people don't really have a choice. If theirs were a functioning market economy the power problem wouldn't necessarily take care of itself, but the dam would also not be necessary. I really look at this as another example of why liberties are good, and just how sad it is that over a billion people in china don't have any and apparently aren't willing to do anything about it.
At one point in the past I would have agreed with the poster. But somebody asked me: what do I have against these people from other countries who want to make a living selling software in my own country?
This is a question that anti-globalization people need to ask themselves. If somebody in mexico can turn screws for $1.24 an hour, it makes sense that you would use that labor source before using a $38 an hour source in Michigan. That $38 figure only because so obnoxiously high because of some tortured sense of nationalism, and the wonderfully effective extortion campaigns brought to us by national unions.
This situation is entirely brought on because people either don't understand basic economics, or feel better about themselves if they feign ignorance.
As with physical labor as with software: Nothing good can come from the government issuing a tax on the import of what is essentially foreign brain power. As another poster mentioned, once written into law, such a tax would be damn near impossible to undo.
If a Mexican (or Indian or Russian) programmer is willing and able to write equivalent code as I can for half the price, which would a rational buyer choose? Yes, it sucks for me, but these other people have made good decisions to get to where they are that they can threaten my job security. I think tariffs such as this is at best nationalistic and at the worst, racist. Such tariffs only succeed in widening the artifical economic gaps in the world, and supporting them is tantamount to supporting poor quality of life in other countries.
There are too many laws that place restrictions on business when the free market is perfectly able to handle the situation on its own. For example, the original poster wants to go to a shop where all the techs are certified. But such a consumer has the option of taking his box to a place where the techs are certified. Creating a law saying techs must be certified will just lead to a large number of certifications being given to people who don't deserve them, thus diluting whatever statement of quality certifications had previously. There are just too many laws.
"Hello, is this the Bad Guys? This is Col. Sanders of the US Army. Listen, do you think you could tell your advancing armies to please stop jamming our systems with those pesky wireless networking signals? It's really making it difficult to prevent you from invading us. What's that you say? We should have thought of this? Well, yeah, we
did, but we dealt with it by telling our citizens to knock it off. Hey, it worked for them, why should it be any different with you?"
How are poorly armed rice farmers going to compete with F-15s, gunships, and napalm?
Well, they did from 1965 to 1975, and the F-15s lost.
I was implying that if the nazis had met more resistance, the allies may have not been caught so completely off guard and been kicked off the continent until 1943.
I was implying that the trains heading toward the death camps may not have been as full if the Gestapo had to watch out for more snipers on roofs or gunmen behind the doors they were kicking down.
I'm talking about guerilla warfare and resistance. The nazis did indeed have panzers, but more than that they had surprise, and that bought them pretty much four years during which time most of the genocide took place. I'm saying that an armed population would not have allowed that to happen.
Aside from my cousin's Daisy air rifle from when i was a kid, I haven't ever fired a gun. I personally don't understand the facination some people have with guns, but then again, I don't understand some people's facination with knitting. So, now that I've put myself into the "not a gun freak" category, let me make an observation.
The nazis were able to roll across and conquer Poland in 1939, and pretty much the rest of Europe the next spring. They did this with next to no resistance among the people who lived there (that is, in comparison with the blitz). What guns were held by private citizens in the expanded Lebensraum were collected, and not without bias. It would have been next to impossible to find a Jew in the posession of a firearm in the months before the Holocaust began.
Europe's private citizens not being able to defend themselves led to the deaths of something like thirty million people.
If this were all about numbers, I would claim that domestic gun violence is a fair price to pay for preventing events such another holocaust.
Like I said, I'm not a gun freak. But I have read a history book or two.
To win a patent, Hunt notes, all an inventor must do is describe or teach some new skill that is not obvious.
Bezos agrees.
Now, I'm not one of those raving anti-patent people, but it seems to me that when it comes to patents that are based on discoveries of natural phenomena, those awarding the patent have to be very, very careful. It reminds me of the pharmaceutical companies receiving patents on some exotic plant that only grows in Brazil, and then sending their lawyers south to prevent the natives from using the plant that the Company owns.
If you had NANs poping up, how long would it be before the geek (previously confined to his cable connection in the basement hapilly perusing slashdot) becomes a common invitee to neighborhood social events.
Slashdot Mirror
A search for Operating system produces 11 *nix hits before getting around to Windows. Interesting.
I have never had as many problems getting a linux ditro running on my machine as I have with the Fedora series (I'm running Fedora core 2 pre-3 or whatever it was.) OK, maybe back in the 1.2.13 kernel days it was a bit more difficult, but given how far things have come, I really think Fedora is moving in the opposite direction in terms of Penguiny-goodness.
My biggest problem has been getting GRUB to boot my OSes correctly. I have one of those bugy BIOSes that necessitates some configuration magic when installing GRUB. Knoppix had no problem with this. Fedora, even though it is supposed to be a cinch to install, caused me to go two weeks without both my OSes booting correctly. This may just be a GRUB thing, but if you're creating a distribution, you're graded on the quality of those things that you choose to include.
Next up is the up2date thing. I've lived in RPM hell since the Redhat 4.0 days, and I'm not really sure why I still endure it. By now, the fact that I still can't get a DVD or MP3 player installed with a simple command line statement or GUI tool is simply absurd. It's generally a multistep proecess: download foo-3.3-2.rpm for five minutes, try to install it to find out it depends on bar-1.2-3.rpm, so I download that for another five minutes, try to install that to find that baz-0.2-23-monkeychowder.rpm depends on bar-1.2-2.rpm and that by installing anything more recent, I'm just screwed. Am I the only person that finds this completely unacceptable?
And I could go on. Still, I'm planning on going home tonight and torrenting the new ISO, apparently because I like pain (acquired and accustomed to over the course of 10 years of using linux...).
If you always give the thumbs up to every little thing (either if you're directly voting on it or if you're electing people like Chuck Grassley), they're going to take it out of you in some way. A better way of doing things would be to ditch the obnoxious and allocate that money for the reasonable projects, rather than raising new taxes for every reasonable thing.
There's been quite a buzz on Slashdot lately wrt open source and usability. Making a computer easy to use for "Grandma" (an insulting label for non-Slashdorks) isn't about limiting the number of icons on the desktop, or choosing the right text labels that these "Grandmas" of the world will understand. The slashdot communal mind needs to understand that usable software isn't just about adding a shiney coating to the outside--usable software has to be designed that way from the very beginning, and is a huge undertaking!
If you're interested in usable software, consider checking out these books: "The Inmates are Running the Asylum" by Alan Cooper, and Designing from Both Sides of the Screen by Ellen Isaacs and Alan Walendowski.
Personally, I hope that the recent trend on slashdot to talk about usability is more than just a fad and the open source world is finally starting to come around. These books are good starting points.
I think it's OK as long as the new thing won't be confused with the older thing. Some terms from computing that spring to mind: mouse, firewall, bug... Word overloading is one of the ways that languages evolve.
It's much easier to remember the name of the thing as 'Sapphire' rather than 'Novec 1230' or whatever. In some industries (high tech and pharmacy) they like to invent new words all the time and it just ends up being hard to remember. For example, Paxil. What the heck is that? It's not always bad, for example, 'Zoloft' has a phonetic similarity to 'Loft', as in, raise your spirits.
I'm sure they spent a chunk of change in doing some research before giving their new concoction a street name. I wish the Mozilla people would do that with The-Browser-Currently-At-0.8.
First let me say (unrelated to your comments) that I've been reading some of Havoc's thoughts on usability and I need to include him on the list of 'clued in' individuals.
In response to you, I think specific widget behavior changes should only go into widespread use if they have been scientifically tested (usability testing). Of course, the itch to change it has to originate from somewhere, and in the case of open source software that source is almost always some hacker. So in this case, somebody thought that maybe the size of the thumb should be proportional to the amount of stuff in the scrollpane--or, inversely proportional as it is usually done. A usability test for this would show if the thumb size indeed does have a practical use or, as you suggest, none.
In my company, interface decisions are made based on what somebody in management feels is the best. It's a small company and, as the logic goes, we don't have the resources to dedicate to usability testing. But I'm seeing things shipped out in our product that would never, ever be released if these things were tested properly. My biggest frustration is in convincing my higher-ups that when making UI decisions, ego (somebody just deciding that something is of no practical use, for example) is the wrong way to do it, and some modicum of user testing is.
And I'm not meaning to say here that your statement was just an egotistical raving of a madman--actually, quite the contrary. I say things all the time about UI idioms ("Oh, that'll never fly") and then being proved completely wrong once users see it. Everybody has opinions and preconceptions--that's just natural. But it's also a limitation because we pre-judge rather than doing things in a more scientific approach.
Newsmap is based on Treemaps, which is both a conceptual GUI idiom as well as a commercial product. This is the work that Ben Schneiderman is most well-known for, and he's been working on different forms of interactive information visualization for decades.
The parent was asking about projects like KDE and Gnome picking up cool concepts like this. The HCI world is full of 'hey neat' ideas that on the surface really seem like they should be brought into the fold, but aren't for a variety of reasons. One company in particular that I worked for (and won't name) has a really cool project that I feel could become a standard UI idiom like radio buttons and scrollpanes, but the product is doomed to failure because the company is horribly mismanaged and (having been the sole coder--as an intern, even) I also know the code to be completely inflexibly designed. Furthermore, they want to make all sorts of money on the thing, which means they're charging customers an arm and a leg to use it.
The Linux desktop environment projects have issues equally as inibitive as the one described above, but rather than being financially oriented, their problems are more about ego and (with the exception of some of the KDE guys) a complete misunderstanding of what HCI is all about. I really wish KDE/Gnome would use these experimental UI metaphors, but alas, I think their structures prohibit this sort of thing.
So there's the aphorism about the guy with the hammer that only sees nails. Really, this translates very nicely into the world of lawmaking--if your job is to come up with rules and regulations, the first thing you're going to think of when coming across something like this is to draft legislation.
It stopped surprising me a long time ago, but it still bothers me. People's first reaction to something that they fear is to legislate it out of existence. Ask any random person on the street what they think about some high-profile issue (gay marriage, abortion, gun control, "taxes cuts for the rich" as the saying goes) and they're likely to tell you how the government ought to fix the problem.
These city council guys didn't make any new laws in this case because the media helped them see their error. But how many other times do they actually PASS silly legislation based on whim? My I-can't-even-find-an-envelope calculation works out to 98% of all laws are passed because the people doing the lawmaking have nothing else to do, and they see lots of nails.
Tune in next time...
The parent post (the one from Yahoo Finance) made a whole bunch of connections, which in a murder-mystery sort of way, is saturated with innuendo. There may be something there, but, I don't know if it would be easy to prove securities fraud.
In english, the yahoo post says this: Guys A and B are intimately involved with corporations C, D, and E. A and B had C, D, and E collectively buy 1.4 million shares of SCOX, underwritten by corporation F. SCOX has about 13.8 million outstanding (tradeable) shares.
(As an aside, 75% of SCOX stock is owned either by insiders or by institutions--10.4M shares. The remaining 25% are owned by the schmucks who think they can outsmart the pump&dump operation that is clearly underway.)
Guy A has gone around saying "Yay SCOX", which given his stature involving C, D, and E, and given their large investment in SCOX, may constitue fraud. I don't know if it is fraudulent, but it definitely is slimey.
Some people have already pointed out the obvious weakness of this, that the secret knock is only an added layer of obscurity, and security by obscurity is flawed in many ways. But this scheme could be a little more secure if the knock itself was a function only known to those 'in the know'. For example, it could be a function of time, so if time.nist.gov says it's time X, then I look in my secret list of knocks and get the port and timing sequence for this particular f(X).
A third party could be watching your knock, and as soon as they recognize the knock they could try it themselves. But by then, the knock-as-a-function-of-time would have changed, so it would do them no good.
There are two reasons that they don't advertise the final price. One reason is that taxes change all the time and are different in various localities.
The second reason (if you subscribe to conspiracy theories of gubmint) is because they want to make it appear as though you're really getting the thing for 29.99, so when you end up paying 29.99 + taxes, you don't remember the value of the taxes. If people knew and were cognizant of how much they're paying in taxes, they'd be mad as hell. This is the same reason why they take your income taxes out of your check--so you don't miss it as much.
This thread is dead though, i doubt if anybody reads this...
however, in raising rates they loose a small amount of competitive edge. so the fine would d something--minor, yes--but tangible.
Here's the text of the petition; you can sign it if you like at mediareform.net.
jamie zawinski has a great article on webcasting legality on the webpage for his nightclub.
That's a really good point. I doubt that a democratically elected government would dream of doing something like this. And even if they did, the voters would kick them out! No, this dam is being build because the people don't really have a choice. If theirs were a functioning market economy the power problem wouldn't necessarily take care of itself, but the dam would also not be necessary. I really look at this as another example of why liberties are good, and just how sad it is that over a billion people in china don't have any and apparently aren't willing to do anything about it.
who says slashdot will not help you get laid?
At one point in the past I would have agreed with the poster. But somebody asked me: what do I have against these people from other countries who want to make a living selling software in my own country?
This is a question that anti-globalization people need to ask themselves. If somebody in mexico can turn screws for $1.24 an hour, it makes sense that you would use that labor source before using a $38 an hour source in Michigan. That $38 figure only because so obnoxiously high because of some tortured sense of nationalism, and the wonderfully effective extortion campaigns brought to us by national unions.
This situation is entirely brought on because people either don't understand basic economics, or feel better about themselves if they feign ignorance.
As with physical labor as with software: Nothing good can come from the government issuing a tax on the import of what is essentially foreign brain power. As another poster mentioned, once written into law, such a tax would be damn near impossible to undo.
If a Mexican (or Indian or Russian) programmer is willing and able to write equivalent code as I can for half the price, which would a rational buyer choose? Yes, it sucks for me, but these other people have made good decisions to get to where they are that they can threaten my job security. I think tariffs such as this is at best nationalistic and at the worst, racist. Such tariffs only succeed in widening the artifical economic gaps in the world, and supporting them is tantamount to supporting poor quality of life in other countries.
There are too many laws that place restrictions on business when the free market is perfectly able to handle the situation on its own. For example, the original poster wants to go to a shop where all the techs are certified. But such a consumer has the option of taking his box to a place where the techs are certified. Creating a law saying techs must be certified will just lead to a large number of certifications being given to people who don't deserve them, thus diluting whatever statement of quality certifications had previously. There are just too many laws.
How are poorly armed rice farmers going to compete with F-15s, gunships, and napalm?
Well, they did from 1965 to 1975, and the F-15s lost.
I was implying that if the nazis had met more resistance, the allies may have not been caught so completely off guard and been kicked off the continent until 1943.
I was implying that the trains heading toward the death camps may not have been as full if the Gestapo had to watch out for more snipers on roofs or gunmen behind the doors they were kicking down.
I'm talking about guerilla warfare and resistance. The nazis did indeed have panzers, but more than that they had surprise, and that bought them pretty much four years during which time most of the genocide took place. I'm saying that an armed population would not have allowed that to happen.
Aside from my cousin's Daisy air rifle from when i was a kid, I haven't ever fired a gun. I personally don't understand the facination some people have with guns, but then again, I don't understand some people's facination with knitting. So, now that I've put myself into the "not a gun freak" category, let me make an observation.
The nazis were able to roll across and conquer Poland in 1939, and pretty much the rest of Europe the next spring. They did this with next to no resistance among the people who lived there (that is, in comparison with the blitz). What guns were held by private citizens in the expanded Lebensraum were collected, and not without bias. It would have been next to impossible to find a Jew in the posession of a firearm in the months before the Holocaust began.
Europe's private citizens not being able to defend themselves led to the deaths of something like thirty million people.
If this were all about numbers, I would claim that domestic gun violence is a fair price to pay for preventing events such another holocaust.
Like I said, I'm not a gun freak. But I have read a history book or two.
Bezos agrees.
Now, I'm not one of those raving anti-patent people, but it seems to me that when it comes to patents that are based on discoveries of natural phenomena, those awarding the patent have to be very, very careful. It reminds me of the pharmaceutical companies receiving patents on some exotic plant that only grows in Brazil, and then sending their lawyers south to prevent the natives from using the plant that the Company owns.
So, you're going to invite the first 576 slashdot users to the wedding for being there for so long, right?
I imagine he would stop perusing slashdot.