Hitler lost the war because he was out produced, not because of his faith in technology.
Hitler lost because he made a very large strategic error: breaking the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact thus opening a second front in the war. Hitler should have consolidated his position in France and the Low Countries while continuing to press for the subdual of Britain. Every other country in Western Europe was either an ally or neutral: Franco's Spain, Mussolini's Italy, Free Ireland (neutral). If he eliminated Britain and achieved a true submarine blockade, there would have been nearly no chance for the U.S. to invade Europe later in the war. Instead, he foolishly surprise attacked Russia, fighting Stalin. If there was a dictator who cared less about his people than Hitler, it was Stalin. Stalin sent 20 million undernourished, poorly trained, ill-equipped draftees to the front to get mowed down by the Germans. But eventually the massive numbers of Siberian draftees overwhelmed the superior German army. The two-front war delayed Hitler's consolidation of the West and subdual of Britain, allowing enough time for the U.S. to enter the war. With his forces split he lost. It was a strategic error, not an error in production or faith in technology.
Meanwhile, another error Hitler made (but one which he was not entirely in control of) was his alliance with Imperial Japan. The attack on Pearl Harbor was the only way to get the U.S. public into the war. The United States public was still very isolationist after WWI and the Great Depression. There was little motivation at all to get into WWII, and Roosevelt had to content himself with the Lend-Lease program to assist the Allies. When Pearl Harbor was attacked, Roosevelt declared war on both Japan and Germany, although Germany hadn't participated in the attack or planned it. That alliance with Japan allowed Roosevelt to justify entering the war in Europe against Hitler. The alliance with Japan did more harm to Germany than good.
In retrospect, Hitler should have kept the truce with Russia, while not bothering to ally with Japan (they didn't really have many shared interests in any case). But he made significant strategic errors on those counts.
I can't decide who is the devil however, does he wear a turtleneck or does he throw chairs?
Let's not try to shoehorn this into a monotheistic or dualistic metaphor here.
I would liken Microsoft to Saturn perhaps. Google and Yahoo! (and perhaps Apple's current Jobs 2.0 incarnation) represent the Gods of Olympus. The Web 2.0 companies are the various assorted nymphs and sprites.
Moreover, the first amendment is intended to protect political/intellectual/social speech. It's so you can't be persecuted for expressing your beliefs and opinions on the state of things.
Free speech doesn't protect what amounts to industrial espionage.
Not a pun at all. There's nothing to get here - it's just a saying that means "close, but you missed the target". Either you know what the saying means or not, there's no way to figure it out. Apparently a reference to the mid-1900s practice of giving out cigars as prizes at local fairs for winning contests.
You've explained the idiom, but didn't explain why it was clever wordplay. Monica Lewinsky testified that Clinton had "used a cigar in a sexual manner" with her. Since the impeachment trial concerned Clinton lying under oath during these investigations, using the phrase "Close but no cigar" to describe him escaping punishment had added meaning.
Historical data supports a fairly strong correlation between a population bulges (a large generation of young people) and instability or belligerence. The fact that China has fewer young people in it current generation than in previous generations is a sign of declining population and supports the likelihood that they will be less belligerent.
It's not xenophobia, it's politics. We do counterespionage on every country that spies on us, whether they're ostensibly threatening (Russia, China), ostensibly allies (Britain, Israel), or just plain frustrating (France). The public nature of this brouhaha over China is simply because of trade politics--Senators are once again using trade with China as a populist issue, drumming up a lot of hysteria, and trying to put pressure on the Chinese to allow their currency to float more (i.e. increase the yuan's value).
Both parent's comment and grandparent's comment are misguided. Neither type of blanket rule is suitable for a pluralistic society. There should be no rule that government must be the healthcare provider for all, nor should there be a rule that corporations must be the healthcare provider for all.
There should be a wide mix of healthcare options available to all: private healthcare programs for anyone who wants their own specific plan; last resort government-provided healthcare protection; company-provided healthcare plans from those corporations that think it's a value-add; community/collective/faith-based/whatever healthcare provision; etc. No one element of society has the sole moral responsibility to provide healthcare--a pluralistic society ought to have a plethora of options available to choose from.
Nevermind that they pretty much did going from Win95/98/ME line to WinNT/2k/XP.
This is what kills me. They have a huge legacy codebase that they hate dealing with, but they feel like they can't give it up because they don't want to break apps. Why don't they write a new core for their OS--an ideal one that they would love to work with and has all the advanced feature capability that they desire--and then float it alongside the old version of the OS? Those that don't want to break their apps for the next 5-7 years can use the old version. Those that want the advanced features that can be developed on the new core can make the switch. Soon it will become apparent to the developers and the home user that the new core is where it's at, and they'll drop the old version as well.
If Apple can maintain Classic, PPC OS X, and Intel OS X + Rosetta all at the same time, I'm sure Microsoft can do another two-track OS line to make things easier on themselves.
Re:Its a self serving press release, NOT a news st
on
Al-Qaeda Hacker Caught
·
· Score: 1
It was in the weekend "Outlook" section, which is essentially just like the NYTimes magazine. They're long-form op-ed, human interest, rambling musings for the weekend reader. It's not part of the proper news section.
It doesn't appear that he was a cyberterrorist per se. More like an online courier in illicit information. No one particularly had to worry about him blowing something up, but they do have to worry about the activities of the people he provided training materials to.
Btw, I went to the movies yesterday to see that new Spike Lee film and saw not on but two upcoming movies about 9/11. One's about the flight 93 that got downed in PA, and the other is simply called "World Trade Center" and it's directed by Oliver fucking Stone. It's still too soon, I'm sorry.
If you look at the release roadmap it looks like they should not have bumped 1.1 to 1.5 and thus 1.5 to 2. The change between 1.5 and 2 is going to be nearly all bugfixes and interface changes, but no underlying upgrade. Then, we'll all-of-a-sudden leap from 2.0 to 3.0 in six months, with the major change being the Gecko upgrade. IMHO, the Gecko upgrade should have signalled the shift from the 1.x series to the 2.x series. The change in Gecko from 1.5 to 2.0 was only from 1.8 to 1.8.1. Silly. That six month leap from 2.0 to 3.0 is not legit.
I think the release numbering has more to do with the logic of post-1.0 branding. Now that Firefox has reached 1.0+ status it's supposed to be a public, finished product. Major corporations don't do point releases for each iteration. Big round numbers inspire trust in the non-computer savvy, which is the market that Firefox is trying to break into now. Let's face it, Firefox 2.0 sounds much more reliable for n00b or corporate use than Firefox 0.9.8.13.1. It may ruffle some feathers in the open-source community, but such is the price we pay for Firefox playing with the big boys now.
Civil Rights are things you have the right *to*, such as the right to free speech, the right to travel between states freely, etc.
Actually, your examples are civil liberties, not civil rights. Civil rights are things like the right to vote and the right to equal treatment before the law. Civil liberties are things that are your inherent freedoms, which the government cannot interfere with. If you read the text of the first amendment, it doesn't say: you have the right to free speech. Your right to those things is assumed. It says that the government can make no law prohibiting free speech, practice of religion, free press, etc.
The Cuba embargo has failed to bring down Casto because domestic Cuban opposition has been crushed.
This is incorrect. The Cuban embargo failed to bring down Castro because it was a unilateral embargo. The Soviet bloc and even Europe traded with him to keep his regime afloat. While one would expect that of his Soviet bloc comrades, it was refreshing to see the Europeans express their solidarity with the Cuban dictator.
Likewise, Google doesn't want to unilaterally exclude itself from a market, while its erstwhile cousins Yahoo! and Baidu et al take up where it leaves off.
However, there is generally an inverse relationship between how many descriptions you use in your country's offical name and how free your country is. The People's Republic of China? Not so good, despite having "people's" and "republic". The Democratic People's Republic of Korea? Hellhole, despite having three nice descriptions.
Ambassadors need to be confirmed by the Senate, just like nearly every other presidential appointment. The search process and the vetting take a long time, simply to avoid embarrassments when the nominee goes before the Senate. I agree that 12-13 months is quite a long time, but that has to be taken in the larger context of appointments: there are currently a huge number (hundreds, perhaps in the thousands) of vacant seats awaiting appointments all throughout the federal government. It's not just a snap process. Meanwhile, it's not as if the U.S. embassy in Australia is running aimlessly or adrift--they have a perfectly capable DCM (probably a career FSO from the political cone) who runs things in the absence of an ambassador.
As a former tobacco industry lawyer, I highly doubt this current appointee needs a sinecure--he's doubtless rolling in money from years spent on retainer for big tobacco. And being an ambassador, even to a very friendly country, is not a low stress job. If he were being appointed ambassador to St. Barts or Jamaica, that would look a lot more like a cushy sinecure. As far as the trust issue, I have no doubts that the Bush administration is highly insular and instinctively distrusts people outside of their own circles. It's been that way from the beginning of their administration, and it's not really a pattern of behavior one would expect to see change now. That doesn't alter the fact that a political appointment to Australia is extremely common, and that political appointments in general are an unremarkable event--not some sort of sinister indication of cronyism.
Cultural - an expectation to have to know what you are doing to succeed and not just be buddies with someone whose dad can get him a top job (recently appointed US ambassator to Australia a case in point - was in the same club as GW Bush at Yale).
This is not a terribly good example. While it may appear like cronyism, the political appointment of ambassadors is a long tradition (our Presidents have been doing it for approximately two centuries now, give or take a few decades). The difference between a career ambassador and a political appointee is that the career ambassador doesn't have a personal relationship with the President, and is a product of the State Department culture, whereas the political appointee doesn't have proper diplomatic experience, but also will represent the President more closely and likely have a better rapport with the President. Many countries, India is a good example, pride themselves on (nearly) always having a political appointee as the ambassador from the U.S. Far from being a sign of cronyism, it's a sign that the relationship is important enough to warrant an ambassador who's close to the President. Most countries that the U.S. has a long, established, and important relationship with have political appointees (amb.'s to Canada, Europe, Russia, China, Japan, India, Australia, etc). Political appointees make up approximately 1/3rd of all ambassadors, in fact. The fact the Bush appointed an old buddy of his to go to Australia is a sign that his relationship with Australia and President Howard is important enough to warrant a personal envoy, not just a career diplomat from the Australia desk at the Department of State.
Slashdot Mirror
Hitler lost because he made a very large strategic error: breaking the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact thus opening a second front in the war. Hitler should have consolidated his position in France and the Low Countries while continuing to press for the subdual of Britain. Every other country in Western Europe was either an ally or neutral: Franco's Spain, Mussolini's Italy, Free Ireland (neutral). If he eliminated Britain and achieved a true submarine blockade, there would have been nearly no chance for the U.S. to invade Europe later in the war. Instead, he foolishly surprise attacked Russia, fighting Stalin. If there was a dictator who cared less about his people than Hitler, it was Stalin. Stalin sent 20 million undernourished, poorly trained, ill-equipped draftees to the front to get mowed down by the Germans. But eventually the massive numbers of Siberian draftees overwhelmed the superior German army. The two-front war delayed Hitler's consolidation of the West and subdual of Britain, allowing enough time for the U.S. to enter the war. With his forces split he lost. It was a strategic error, not an error in production or faith in technology.
Meanwhile, another error Hitler made (but one which he was not entirely in control of) was his alliance with Imperial Japan. The attack on Pearl Harbor was the only way to get the U.S. public into the war. The United States public was still very isolationist after WWI and the Great Depression. There was little motivation at all to get into WWII, and Roosevelt had to content himself with the Lend-Lease program to assist the Allies. When Pearl Harbor was attacked, Roosevelt declared war on both Japan and Germany, although Germany hadn't participated in the attack or planned it. That alliance with Japan allowed Roosevelt to justify entering the war in Europe against Hitler. The alliance with Japan did more harm to Germany than good.
In retrospect, Hitler should have kept the truce with Russia, while not bothering to ally with Japan (they didn't really have many shared interests in any case). But he made significant strategic errors on those counts.
Let's not try to shoehorn this into a monotheistic or dualistic metaphor here.
I would liken Microsoft to Saturn perhaps. Google and Yahoo! (and perhaps Apple's current Jobs 2.0 incarnation) represent the Gods of Olympus. The Web 2.0 companies are the various assorted nymphs and sprites.
Free speech doesn't protect what amounts to industrial espionage.
You've explained the idiom, but didn't explain why it was clever wordplay. Monica Lewinsky testified that Clinton had "used a cigar in a sexual manner" with her. Since the impeachment trial concerned Clinton lying under oath during these investigations, using the phrase "Close but no cigar" to describe him escaping punishment had added meaning.
What's more surprising is that there were so few applications for those domains.
You'll still have to deal with Apple shipping Macs with yesterday's graphics cards.
Historical data supports a fairly strong correlation between a population bulges (a large generation of young people) and instability or belligerence. The fact that China has fewer young people in it current generation than in previous generations is a sign of declining population and supports the likelihood that they will be less belligerent.
It's not xenophobia, it's politics. We do counterespionage on every country that spies on us, whether they're ostensibly threatening (Russia, China), ostensibly allies (Britain, Israel), or just plain frustrating (France). The public nature of this brouhaha over China is simply because of trade politics--Senators are once again using trade with China as a populist issue, drumming up a lot of hysteria, and trying to put pressure on the Chinese to allow their currency to float more (i.e. increase the yuan's value).
Ha! Everyone look at parent n00b who thinks we have editors.
There should be a wide mix of healthcare options available to all: private healthcare programs for anyone who wants their own specific plan; last resort government-provided healthcare protection; company-provided healthcare plans from those corporations that think it's a value-add; community/collective/faith-based/whatever healthcare provision; etc. No one element of society has the sole moral responsibility to provide healthcare--a pluralistic society ought to have a plethora of options available to choose from.
This is what kills me. They have a huge legacy codebase that they hate dealing with, but they feel like they can't give it up because they don't want to break apps. Why don't they write a new core for their OS--an ideal one that they would love to work with and has all the advanced feature capability that they desire--and then float it alongside the old version of the OS? Those that don't want to break their apps for the next 5-7 years can use the old version. Those that want the advanced features that can be developed on the new core can make the switch. Soon it will become apparent to the developers and the home user that the new core is where it's at, and they'll drop the old version as well.
If Apple can maintain Classic, PPC OS X, and Intel OS X + Rosetta all at the same time, I'm sure Microsoft can do another two-track OS line to make things easier on themselves.
It was in the weekend "Outlook" section, which is essentially just like the NYTimes magazine. They're long-form op-ed, human interest, rambling musings for the weekend reader. It's not part of the proper news section.
This is one of the funniest posts I've ever read on Slashdot. I don't even know where to start.
Btw, I went to the movies yesterday to see that new Spike Lee film and saw not on but two upcoming movies about 9/11. One's about the flight 93 that got downed in PA, and the other is simply called "World Trade Center" and it's directed by Oliver fucking Stone. It's still too soon, I'm sorry.
Yeah, it's pretty clear that this is going to be Vista's response to Expose.
If you look at the release roadmap it looks like they should not have bumped 1.1 to 1.5 and thus 1.5 to 2. The change between 1.5 and 2 is going to be nearly all bugfixes and interface changes, but no underlying upgrade. Then, we'll all-of-a-sudden leap from 2.0 to 3.0 in six months, with the major change being the Gecko upgrade. IMHO, the Gecko upgrade should have signalled the shift from the 1.x series to the 2.x series. The change in Gecko from 1.5 to 2.0 was only from 1.8 to 1.8.1. Silly. That six month leap from 2.0 to 3.0 is not legit.
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_U nited_Kingdom
I agree, and I find that generally version 3.0 is when most given applications begin to jump the shark and lose out to their nimbler competitors.
I think the release numbering has more to do with the logic of post-1.0 branding. Now that Firefox has reached 1.0+ status it's supposed to be a public, finished product. Major corporations don't do point releases for each iteration. Big round numbers inspire trust in the non-computer savvy, which is the market that Firefox is trying to break into now. Let's face it, Firefox 2.0 sounds much more reliable for n00b or corporate use than Firefox 0.9.8.13.1. It may ruffle some feathers in the open-source community, but such is the price we pay for Firefox playing with the big boys now.
Actually, your examples are civil liberties, not civil rights. Civil rights are things like the right to vote and the right to equal treatment before the law. Civil liberties are things that are your inherent freedoms, which the government cannot interfere with. If you read the text of the first amendment, it doesn't say: you have the right to free speech. Your right to those things is assumed. It says that the government can make no law prohibiting free speech, practice of religion, free press, etc.
This is incorrect. The Cuban embargo failed to bring down Castro because it was a unilateral embargo. The Soviet bloc and even Europe traded with him to keep his regime afloat. While one would expect that of his Soviet bloc comrades, it was refreshing to see the Europeans express their solidarity with the Cuban dictator.
Likewise, Google doesn't want to unilaterally exclude itself from a market, while its erstwhile cousins Yahoo! and Baidu et al take up where it leaves off.
However, there is generally an inverse relationship between how many descriptions you use in your country's offical name and how free your country is. The People's Republic of China? Not so good, despite having "people's" and "republic". The Democratic People's Republic of Korea? Hellhole, despite having three nice descriptions.
As a former tobacco industry lawyer, I highly doubt this current appointee needs a sinecure--he's doubtless rolling in money from years spent on retainer for big tobacco. And being an ambassador, even to a very friendly country, is not a low stress job. If he were being appointed ambassador to St. Barts or Jamaica, that would look a lot more like a cushy sinecure. As far as the trust issue, I have no doubts that the Bush administration is highly insular and instinctively distrusts people outside of their own circles. It's been that way from the beginning of their administration, and it's not really a pattern of behavior one would expect to see change now. That doesn't alter the fact that a political appointment to Australia is extremely common, and that political appointments in general are an unremarkable event--not some sort of sinister indication of cronyism.
Cock-a-doodle-doo!!!!!! Cluck cluck cluck...
This is not a terribly good example. While it may appear like cronyism, the political appointment of ambassadors is a long tradition (our Presidents have been doing it for approximately two centuries now, give or take a few decades). The difference between a career ambassador and a political appointee is that the career ambassador doesn't have a personal relationship with the President, and is a product of the State Department culture, whereas the political appointee doesn't have proper diplomatic experience, but also will represent the President more closely and likely have a better rapport with the President. Many countries, India is a good example, pride themselves on (nearly) always having a political appointee as the ambassador from the U.S. Far from being a sign of cronyism, it's a sign that the relationship is important enough to warrant an ambassador who's close to the President. Most countries that the U.S. has a long, established, and important relationship with have political appointees (amb.'s to Canada, Europe, Russia, China, Japan, India, Australia, etc). Political appointees make up approximately 1/3rd of all ambassadors, in fact. The fact the Bush appointed an old buddy of his to go to Australia is a sign that his relationship with Australia and President Howard is important enough to warrant a personal envoy, not just a career diplomat from the Australia desk at the Department of State.