It first occured while neo-cons were in power so it must be an absolutely awful idea.
Actually, "shock and awe" is the logical and moral successor of the Geman Blitz. So the neo-cons didn't invent it, they just followed the lead of the Nazis.
A fantastic (if depressing) first-hand account of the Gulags can be found in "The Gulag Archipelago", by Nobel prizewinner Aleksandr Solzhenitstn -- an absolute must-read.
...and that should read "Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn", apologies.
While we are handing out credit for the victory in WW2, let's not forget about our friends, the Russians
This is precisely why I used the phrase "won on the Western Front", not "won the war". I agree 100% that if any country contributed more than others to the victory over axis powers, then it was the Soviet Union. Shame so many of the poor sods in the Soviet army later ended up in Siberian Gulags. A fantastic (if depressing) first-hand account of the Gulags can be found in "The Gulag Archipelago", by Nobel prizewinner Aleksandr Solzhenitstn -- an absolute must-read.
If you want more insight into the Russian Front, a good book to read is _Stalingrad_ by Anthony Beevor.
My Grandma lent me that last year; fantastic read, and an absolutely incredible story.
When their country was about to go down, they smuggled the thing out of Poland, and gave it to the british.
From the BBC article, which you should have read before posting:
The swashbuckling film - about to be released in Britain - is loosely based on the HMS Aubretia's bombing of the U-110 from which an Enigma and codes were rescued.
No mention of Poland there, perhaps you are getting confused by a different event.
Will they also have pictures of the devastated dresden after they bombed the city center crowded with hundreds of thousands civilian refugees and no military targets in sight?
Yesterday, I was at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC. As I was wondering around (for the first time since I was 6, wow!), I happened upon a V-1 flying bomb and a V-2 rocket. These devices were used by the Germans against the civilian population of London; firebombs, similar to those used on Dresden and Hamburg, were also dropped by the Germans on Coventry and Belfast.
Certainly, the firebombing of German cities was an atrocity; but these acts were conducted in response to previous deliberate targetting of UK cities by the Luftwaffe. This is the historical context which I think the parent post is lacking in.
For those of you who have never seen "Saving Private Ryan" or "Band of Brothers", I recommend them.
And for those of you who haven't seen U-571, don't bother. Whoever was responsible in portraying the capture of an Enigma machine as the work of the USA, when it was in fact done by Brits aboard HMS Aubretia, should be shot. If you weren't aware of this pretty-insensitive reworking of history, you can read about the fuss it caused here
Let's give credit where credit is due; WWII wouldn't have been won on the Western Front without the USA; but the Brits held out for a couple of years against the greatest military in the world, and were instrumental in defeating the Luftwaffe and the Afrika Korps. That shouldn't be taken away from them.
...they are using computers to simulate asymmetric warfare, they will never gain a decent grasp of what asymmetric warfare is, nor will they understand how to defeat it.
The current shuttle fleet has computers less powerful than the modern car and structural materials about as sophisticated as a shopping trolley.
Which is not necessarily a bad thing. Take, for instance, the International Ultraviolet Explorer; build on 1960s computer and materials technology, launched in 1978 for a 3 year mission. How long did it last? 18 years. Take it from me, we don't build 'em like this anymore.
In our rush toward the bright future, we have thrown out much of the robustness which made 1960s technology very spaceworthy. An example: memory subsystems based on ferrite cores are much more difficult to fry by cosmic radiation than those based on transistors.
I just had my songs sold for muzak because I didn't opt out.
According to their FAQ, you can opt out at any point. If you don't like your music being sold as muzak, opt out right now. It's not like they've just shagged your mum, is it?
While the mainland, especially Germany, has been big on OSS, it seems the UK is more of a Windows shop than the USA is
I disagree; my last two jobs in London (one at Reuters, one at Univ. London) involved significant Linux use. The guy who ported Linux to the ARM architecture (Russell King) is English; I met him one evening when I took my A3020 Archimedes over to his house in a backpack, so he could iron out some bugs in a newly-ported 1.x kernel. And isn't Alan Cox Welsh?
Specifically, squatting a porn site on a domain name that can be misleading (e.g. whitehouse.com) was made illegal with the federal Amber Alert law last year.
Except that 'Whitehouse' is the name of a lower-echelon upper-shelf magazine which has been in print in the UK for quite a while now. How, therefore, can they object to whitehouse.com?
(As an aside, I'm highly amused that you think the Whitehouse should be under a.com TLD. You cheeky liberal, you!)
Those that put into common use the// in a hyperlink and the . before the domain extension could, in theory, say that slashdot is unfairly using their property to prosper
The// is part of a well-formed URL, and therefore comprises part of an international standard. Only retards would complain about the use of//. Are you complaining?
A friend of mine actually had the domain AMERICAONLINE.COM for many years. He offered to sell it to AOL and they blew him off and expressed no interest.
And no wonder. Why would Assholes Online have any interest in AMERICAONLINE.COM?
Imagine people running around in a virgin country, sticking up signs every thirty miles or so at random, saying "this is my land."
Except, of course, we all know it wasn't a virgin country. Somebody already lived there. They're mostly dead now, but at least they got attack helicopters named after them, as compensation for being ethnically cleansed.
...and here is the exact text of Section 4.16(b), taken from the relevant part of the Asset Purchase Agreement:
(b)Buyer shall not, and shall not have the authority to, amend, modify or waive any right under or assign any SVRX License without the prior written consent of Seller. In addition, at Seller's sole discreation, Buyer shall amend, supplement, modify or waive any rights under, or shall assign any rights to, any SVRX License to the extent so directed in any manner or respect by Seller. In the event that Buyer shall fail to take any such action concerning the SVRX Licesnes as required herein, Seller shall be authorized, and hereby is granted, the rights to take any action on Buyer's own behalf. Buyer shall not, and shall have no right to, enter into future licenses or amendments of the SVRX Licenses, except as may be incidently involved through its rights to sell and license the Assets or the Merged Product (as such term is defined in the proposed Operating Agreement, attached hereto as Ehibit 5.1(c)) or future versions thereof of the Merged Produc.
Whew, a bit long winded. Obviously, Novell is Seller and SCO (or was it Caldera back then?) is Buyer. Anyhow, I've emphasised the important paragraphs, which from my reading certainly do say that:
SCO cannot amend IBM's SVRX license (i.e., terminate it) without the prior written consent of Novell,
Novell can order SCO to waive its rights to terminate IBM's SVRX license,
If SCO does not comply with Novell's order to waive, then Novell can act on behalf of SCO and do the waiving themselves.
IANAL, but it looks like SCO has no contractural basis for terminating IBM's SVRX license without Novell's say-so; and since this say-so hasn't been given, it appears that IBM's SVRX license is still valid.
From the letter dated 12 June 2003, from Novell and IBM:
Accordingly, pursuant to Section 4.16(b) of the Asset Purchace Agreement, Novell, on behalf of The SCO Group, hereby waives any purported right SCO may claim to terminate IBM's SVRX Licenses enumerated in Amendment X or to revoke any rights thereunder, including any purported rights to terminate asserted in SCO's letter of March 6, 2003 to IBM.
This, in a nutshell, is Novell withdrawning SCO's right to terminate IBM's license, which was reported last year on Slashdot. What I really want to see, however, is the ubiquitous Asset Purchase Agreement, which appears in both this letter and most of the other ones; the whole dispute (at least, between SCO and IBM) appears to hinge on this agreement. Unfortunately, the agreement will probably never see the light of day, for reasons of corporate confidentiality.
It's always amusing to compare the people in American soap operas to the people in English ones like, say, EastEnders...
That's because American soaps are aspirational, while English ones are cautionary. Dallas: you, too, can be a millionaire with hot chicks if you work hard. East Enders: if you don't work hard, you'll end up as one of these drunk, ugly, poor peasants.
Australian soaps sit in the middle: the people are poor but beuatiful. Not sure what the message is, but it sure looks nice...
Slashdot Mirror
It first occured while neo-cons were in power so it must be an absolutely awful idea.
Actually, "shock and awe" is the logical and moral successor of the Geman Blitz. So the neo-cons didn't invent it, they just followed the lead of the Nazis.
Yeah, and we all know how the BBC is a bastion of historical accuracy.
Well, it certainly is more accurate than, say, Fox. Would you care to point out a specific issue over which the BBC has dissembled?
One can wonder how anyone thinks that killing your loved ones makes you less willing to fight against enemy that caused the deaths.
Which makes the whole neo-con idea of "shock and awe" all the more absurd.
In any case, I wasn't attemtping to justify Dresden; just to point out the context in which it occured.
A fantastic (if depressing) first-hand account of the Gulags can be found in "The Gulag Archipelago", by Nobel prizewinner Aleksandr Solzhenitstn -- an absolute must-read.
...and that should read "Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn", apologies.
While we are handing out credit for the victory in WW2, let's not forget about our friends, the Russians
This is precisely why I used the phrase "won on the Western Front", not "won the war". I agree 100% that if any country contributed more than others to the victory over axis powers, then it was the Soviet Union. Shame so many of the poor sods in the Soviet army later ended up in Siberian Gulags. A fantastic (if depressing) first-hand account of the Gulags can be found in "The Gulag Archipelago", by Nobel prizewinner Aleksandr Solzhenitstn -- an absolute must-read.
If you want more insight into the Russian Front, a good book to read is _Stalingrad_ by Anthony Beevor.
My Grandma lent me that last year; fantastic read, and an absolutely incredible story.
When their country was about to go down, they smuggled the thing out of Poland, and gave it to the british.
From the BBC article, which you should have read before posting:
The swashbuckling film - about to be released in Britain - is loosely based on the HMS Aubretia's bombing of the U-110 from which an Enigma and codes were rescued.
No mention of Poland there, perhaps you are getting confused by a different event.
Will they also have pictures of the devastated dresden after they bombed the city center crowded with hundreds of thousands civilian refugees and no military targets in sight?
Yesterday, I was at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC. As I was wondering around (for the first time since I was 6, wow!), I happened upon a V-1 flying bomb and a V-2 rocket. These devices were used by the Germans against the civilian population of London; firebombs, similar to those used on Dresden and Hamburg, were also dropped by the Germans on Coventry and Belfast.
Certainly, the firebombing of German cities was an atrocity; but these acts were conducted in response to previous deliberate targetting of UK cities by the Luftwaffe. This is the historical context which I think the parent post is lacking in.
Best guess, its probably some old server on the end of a shared university 10mb line or something. JANET are going to be so pleased.
Don't be so certain, JANET (the Joint Academic NETwork, which links together UK universities) has a 10 Gbit/s backbone. That's a pretty fat pipe...
For those of you who have never seen "Saving Private Ryan" or "Band of Brothers", I recommend them.
And for those of you who haven't seen U-571, don't bother. Whoever was responsible in portraying the capture of an Enigma machine as the work of the USA, when it was in fact done by Brits aboard HMS Aubretia, should be shot. If you weren't aware of this pretty-insensitive reworking of history, you can read about the fuss it caused here
Let's give credit where credit is due; WWII wouldn't have been won on the Western Front without the USA; but the Brits held out for a couple of years against the greatest military in the world, and were instrumental in defeating the Luftwaffe and the Afrika Korps. That shouldn't be taken away from them.
Oh Great and Learned one, how would they get a decent grasp on what asymmetrical warfare? (/sarcasm off)
Learn how to write correctly first. Then criticize.
...they are using computers to simulate asymmetric warfare, they will never gain a decent grasp of what asymmetric warfare is, nor will they understand how to defeat it.
The current shuttle fleet has computers less powerful than the modern car and structural materials about as sophisticated as a shopping trolley.
Which is not necessarily a bad thing. Take, for instance, the International Ultraviolet Explorer; build on 1960s computer and materials technology, launched in 1978 for a 3 year mission. How long did it last? 18 years. Take it from me, we don't build 'em like this anymore.
In our rush toward the bright future, we have thrown out much of the robustness which made 1960s technology very spaceworthy. An example: memory subsystems based on ferrite cores are much more difficult to fry by cosmic radiation than those based on transistors.
I just had my songs sold for muzak because I didn't opt out.
According to their FAQ, you can opt out at any point. If you don't like your music being sold as muzak, opt out right now. It's not like they've just shagged your mum, is it?
While the mainland, especially Germany, has been big on OSS, it seems the UK is more of a Windows shop than the USA is
I disagree; my last two jobs in London (one at Reuters, one at Univ. London) involved significant Linux use. The guy who ported Linux to the ARM architecture (Russell King) is English; I met him one evening when I took my A3020 Archimedes over to his house in a backpack, so he could iron out some bugs in a newly-ported 1.x kernel. And isn't Alan Cox Welsh?
As it is, he's just typical low life internet scum trying to profit off of other people's name.
What, and the same can't be said of those profiting off Tolkien's estate?
Specifically, squatting a porn site on a domain name that can be misleading (e.g. whitehouse.com) was made illegal with the federal Amber Alert law last year.
Except that 'Whitehouse' is the name of a lower-echelon upper-shelf magazine which has been in print in the UK for quite a while now. How, therefore, can they object to whitehouse.com?
(As an aside, I'm highly amused that you think the Whitehouse should be under a .com TLD. You cheeky liberal, you!)
Those that put into common use the // in a hyperlink and the . before the domain extension could, in theory, say that slashdot is unfairly using their property to prosper
The // is part of a well-formed URL, and therefore comprises part of an international standard. Only retards would complain about the use of //. Are you complaining?
A friend of mine actually had the domain AMERICAONLINE.COM for many years. He offered to sell it to AOL and they blew him off and expressed no interest.
And no wonder. Why would Assholes Online have any interest in AMERICAONLINE.COM?
Imagine people running around in a virgin country, sticking up signs every thirty miles or so at random, saying "this is my land."
Except, of course, we all know it wasn't a virgin country. Somebody already lived there. They're mostly dead now, but at least they got attack helicopters named after them, as compensation for being ethnically cleansed.
If SCO's claims that this code is in fact their own turns out to be true, doesn't that mean that their case has solid legs to stand on?
Of course. And it also means you are a filthy Microsoft shill. Only kidding! (on the square).
I've already corrected myself on this one. Shoot first and read answers later?
...and here is the exact text of Section 4.16(b), taken from the relevant part of the Asset Purchase Agreement:
(b)Buyer shall not, and shall not have the authority to, amend, modify or waive any right under or assign any SVRX License without the prior written consent of Seller. In addition, at Seller's sole discreation, Buyer shall amend, supplement, modify or waive any rights under, or shall assign any rights to, any SVRX License to the extent so directed in any manner or respect by Seller. In the event that Buyer shall fail to take any such action concerning the SVRX Licesnes as required herein, Seller shall be authorized, and hereby is granted, the rights to take any action on Buyer's own behalf. Buyer shall not, and shall have no right to, enter into future licenses or amendments of the SVRX Licenses, except as may be incidently involved through its rights to sell and license the Assets or the Merged Product (as such term is defined in the proposed Operating Agreement, attached hereto as Ehibit 5.1(c)) or future versions thereof of the Merged Produc.
Whew, a bit long winded. Obviously, Novell is Seller and SCO (or was it Caldera back then?) is Buyer. Anyhow, I've emphasised the important paragraphs, which from my reading certainly do say that:
IANAL, but it looks like SCO has no contractural basis for terminating IBM's SVRX license without Novell's say-so; and since this say-so hasn't been given, it appears that IBM's SVRX license is still valid.
Unfortunately, the agreement will probably never see the light of day, for reasons of corporate confidentiality.
I correct myself! SCO has just published the Asset Purchase Agreement. Thanks to Carl for pointing this out in another post.
From the letter dated 12 June 2003, from Novell and IBM:
Accordingly, pursuant to Section 4.16(b) of the Asset Purchace Agreement, Novell, on behalf of The SCO Group, hereby waives any purported right SCO may claim to terminate IBM's SVRX Licenses enumerated in Amendment X or to revoke any rights thereunder, including any purported rights to terminate asserted in SCO's letter of March 6, 2003 to IBM.
This, in a nutshell, is Novell withdrawning SCO's right to terminate IBM's license, which was reported last year on Slashdot. What I really want to see, however, is the ubiquitous Asset Purchase Agreement, which appears in both this letter and most of the other ones; the whole dispute (at least, between SCO and IBM) appears to hinge on this agreement. Unfortunately, the agreement will probably never see the light of day, for reasons of corporate confidentiality.
It's always amusing to compare the people in American soap operas to the people in English ones like, say, EastEnders...
That's because American soaps are aspirational, while English ones are cautionary. Dallas: you, too, can be a millionaire with hot chicks if you work hard. East Enders: if you don't work hard, you'll end up as one of these drunk, ugly, poor peasants.
Australian soaps sit in the middle: the people are poor but beuatiful. Not sure what the message is, but it sure looks nice...