Drop the superego. Learn the value of who you already are, and be proud of it.
It sounds like what got you the problem that almost nobody wants to learn in school any more, eh? Learn the value of being a prom queen who'll either marry a millionaire (stiff competition there, though) or be a waitress for the rest of your days, and be proud of that. Or learn to be value of being the jock who _might_ one day get lucky and get into a minor league sports team, but most likely will operate a gas pump or maybe unload crates at Wall-Mart.
Let's face it, in life you'll almost invariably hit lower than you aim. If you already aim low, you'll hit even lower. Starting from being nothing(*) and being proud and content with what you _already_ are (my emphasis) is a recipe for failure.
(*) and being mommy and daddy's "special" darling doesn't count there. If that's all you are and aim no higher, you'll eventually grow out of that and with _nothing_.
As for the middlers, I'll call bullshit on that feel-good fairy-tale. Historically the "middlers" were the guys ploughing the field and being plundered by both armies in a war. From the Roman Kingdom (yes, they were that before being a Republic, which they were before becoming an Empire) to some time during the 19'th century, that's what some 80% of the population was doing: the mind-numbingly boring task of walking behind a plough behind an ox or horse, holding onto the handles. Dawn to dusk. That's how the acre was even defined: how much a peasant can plough from dawn to dusk.
Add some miners, craftsmen, mercenaries and the like, and that accounts for even more people.
To even have the chance to be the guy who tinkers with a genius's ideas until they work, you had to be one of the most privileged 5% or less. The middlers were at best those guys kneading hides in dog shit (yes, that's how tanning worked) for the leather straps your invention needed. Or while those top few percent were busy inventing a better gun, the middlers were fermenting shit with piss to make saltpetre for that gun. Or while those top few were figuring out how to make a gothic cathedral (no mean feat, given the lack of even a mathematical notation you'd use these days), the middlers were hauling square slabs of rock for it. Stable contribution to technological progress of that middler gang: zero point zero.
Valuable contributions, nevertheless, but spare me the bullshit self-fellatio that such middlers were what caused stable technological progress.
Now I'm not saying you should go depressed about your skills or anything. But do aim higher, or you'll never improve. And spare us and yourself the bullshit story in which it's perfectly ok to be an underachiever and proud of it, and how such underachieving middlers had jack shit to do with technological progress.
Well, I kinda doubt that even the RIAA can be _that_ stupid. (Though, funnily enough, every time I say that, someone or some entity promptly proves me wrong.)
Let's face it, today's lawyers are tomorrow's judges. I'm also going to take a wild guess that even today's judges, no matter how much they enjoy making lawyers work to earn their play, will not take it very lightly when faced with an attempt to bully the legal profession as a whole.
_Especially_ in civil cases, where really the whole standard of evidence is along the lines of "who's better at persuading the judge", you don't want to start from the position of the known bully abusing the legal system and work your way up from there. So the judges are one group they'd be smart to not annoy.
Also let's not forget that lawyers do have very large and powerful professional associations. They don't exist just to provide some exams for their members. And they tend to know the laws, precedents and available avenues. Even _if_ you could somehow bully one or two of them into submission, I think any attempt to basically carpet-bomb their profession as a whole into no longer being able to do its job (on some cases), might find some rather stiff resistance there. Sooner or later you'd find yourself not just against one or two lawyers, but against an entity bigger than yourself and more adept at working the system than you are.
As I was saying, I don't think that even the RIAA is _that_ stupid.
Well, then it seems to me that democracy is the first thing that should be fixed there. In fact, the only thing. The rest will then follow, or not, depending on whether the people like it that way or not.
Because we can? Why should anybody who has the ability to help others do so?
I think my point had less to do with "helping" and more with the fact that it _is_ a sovereign nation, and it can fix thing itself by legal means, if it doesn't want our crap jobs or our garbage any more.
Look, we're not talking some puppet banana-republic government there. Both India and China are major nations, who had no problems thumbing their nose at the USA before. They're not doing this because the USA tells them to, because there's not much you can do to force China to do what you want it to. If China or India decide to pass some laws to protect their environment or fix minimum wages for their workers, there isn't much the USA or anyone else can do to stop them.
So let's stop blaming our collective selves there. China can solve it pretty much overnight, any time it wants to. If it doesn't want to, well, that's that.
Going above any beyond that, is already past the realm of "help" and more into the realm of "trying to impose your world view upon a foreign government".
It's not like the workers decided this was what they wanted, large corporations have created a system whereby this is the most profitable thing for suppliers to do. They are complicit as they know what happens with their money.
The free market is ultimately just an optimization algorithm. The results it produces are largely a function of the constraints that are placed on it.
I.e., again, if China wants to fix it, it can simply change the constraints that apply over there. There isn't much that those large corporations can do to force any other result there.
China apparently chose a set where the result is that... well, as someone else's sig went, the invisible hand has its middle finger extended. I fail to see why would anyone put the blame squarely and solely on the western corporations, when essentially it's China's decision to compete in that way and under those conditions. Way I see it, they're at least accomplices there, or actually IMHO the main culprit.
The western corporations didn't do much more there than try to get the best prices. Which is how capitalism and the free market are supposed to work. If two companies offer to take your thrash, and one asks for half the sum, you pick that one. That's how that optimization works. It wasn't the corporations who couped governments there to make someone burn our plastics. (God knows there was enough of that in other places, but none of us couped China lately.) It was someone from that country which came and said, basically, "hey, we can take your thrash for half the price these other guys ask for." It seems to me like the blame lies mostly with them, then. I'm not saying that the west doesn't share _some_ share of the blame there, but I don't see it as the main share any way I want to look at it.
Just because it's legal there doesn't make it right (just as the common line on slashdot is in the vein of "just because it's illegal doesn't make it wrong").
I never claimed that legal is right, so we can even aggree there. All I'm saying is that China should fix its own damned laws. If legal != right, then you change what is legal. As I was saying, we're talking about a major sovereign nation, not about some muppet government with no choice but to nod.
You're grouping the people suffering with those able to solve things together. "Let them sort it out" isn't quite the right line, "Let the people currently benefiting change things" is more accurate.
Except that never worked that way. The people currently benefiting from the status quo, will invariably either
A) try to maintain the status quo, or
B) come up with some surrealistic mis-conception about what those poor proletars actually need.
You can find examples of both either in the same 19'th century I've mentioned before. History is full
Imagine if we had the same conversation about heroin or crack, and said it was none of your business if black people were selling to other black people, as it was "them" doing that exploitation to "themselves"?
1. Most importantly, that's a bullshit strawman. Laws about drugs are mostly _internal_ laws. E.g., US citizens tell other US citizens what they can't do. Fair enough.
The only point where it becomes equivalent to what I was saying, is when you start telling another country that they're not allowed to do drugs. It happens too. And there I'll have the same position: fucking leave them alone. It's not your job to dictate world morals. Stick to your own country.
2. Actually, I'll make an even stronger claim there: why should drugs be my problem in the first place? Most are harmless enough, and there are millions of people doing drugs that haven't harmed anyone as a result.
And the usual "OMG it's addictive" argument is bull too. We do allow tobacco, which causes some pretty strong physiological addiction. As in, actual brain chemistry changes. Some drugs, e.g., hemp, don't even do that. We allow alcohol, where the withdrawal symptoms can literally _kill_ you. Look up delirium tremmens some day. That's withdrawal syndrome for alcohol addiction.
And I've worked with people who smoked pot before, and they didn't strike me as the kind that'll get violent or delirious. Now tobacco, _that_ can get funny. You keep me in a meeting for 2-3 hours without my cigarettes, and I hope you don't imagine I can still pay any attention. But somehow my nicotine addiction is considered harmless, while that mellow admin who occasionally does pot is a menace to society. Hmm...
So unless you also feel a need to tell blacks (or for that matter whites, asians, and everyone else) that they aren't allowed to smoke or drink any more, why _would_ you care about them selling heroine or coke to each other.
I don't think morals are that black and white. While on one hand it would be nice if we in the west disposed of our own garbage, I don't think it's our duty to keep anyone else from shooting themselves in the foot. Unless you want to go back to the old (and even worse) "mission to civilize" and "white man's burden" doctrines.
If China wants to import garbage for some quick cash, it's China's problem alone. They should fix their own laws, if they don't want it to happen.
There _are_ situations where the west did actual harm, including
- bribes (we practically created the 3'rd world kleptocracies, by making it so that taking a bribe from the western corporations is the most profitable thing one could do, better than any industry or commerce)
- military/CIA interventions
- economic pressures to make some countries destroy their own industry and agriculture (including occasionally to take the same good ol' right-wing measures in a crisis that that would turn a crisis into an all out depression, according to the economics we apply in the west)
Etc.
And for that we are rightfully hated.
But things that they do to themselves for a buck? Why would it be our business to stop them from doing that?
E.g., the west didn't hold anyone hostage to make them take our garbage. It's stuff that someone there figured out would be a good way to make some bucks. And is probably acclaimed as the great entrepreneur and one of the guys doing something for their economy there.
E.g., I don't think many western companies take _slaves_ in China, much less India. While I do find that running some of those sweatshops says something about the greedy fucks who moved there just for that, ultimately it's India's and China's job to decide whether that's ok with them or not. They _can_ give minimum wage and maximum hours per week laws if they want to, you know? If they'd rather get dollars than that, why should the west be the one to blame?
And again in most cases it's not the west who even runs those "slave labour" camps, but some local company who subcontracts for a western company. In most cases the western company can't even control what membranes go into their batteries (see incendiary batteries made in China that have a cheap non-working replacement for the membrane that was supposed to collapse and open the circuit when overheated), or what paint is used on their toys (lead-painted toys made in China ftw), or what glue goes into their beads that are supposed to be wet and stuck to a board and most kids will lick to get wet (replaced by some enterprising Chinese with a toxic and psychoactive glue.) What makes you think that the western company gets much more to say about how a Chinese boss treats Chinese employees at that company?
Or, as I was saying, are we back to the "mission to civilize" (China, India and everyone else) doctrine from the 19'th century?
Plus, even if the western corporations didn't directly subcontract to those, they'd still find ways to exploit each other just the same. Whether it's cheap pens or counterfeit watches or farming gold in WoW, they'll _still_ take advantage of the missing legislation to make each other work 90+ hour weeks for a pittance. E.g., I remember an article from some months ago about WoW gold farmers, and those guys were working 12 hour days in essentially a high-tech sweatshops. I don't think any western corporation made them do that. (Blizzard probably would rather they crawl somewhere and die, for example.)
Don't get me wrong, I'm not going to play the bullshit card that we're some kind of great benefactors for giving them those crap jobs. I'm not _that_ deluded. But I _am_ saying that ultimately they do most of that exploitation to themselves, and they must find their own way and equilibrium point there. It's their own f-ing country, and it's mostly their own sociopaths not ours doing that to their workers or environment. It's not _our_ job to clean up _their_ act.
Blaming the west for that, and doubly so trying to
The problem is that all the articles become unnavigable messses of shit trivia and geek mastubatry nonsense. The idea is that this should be a usable reference for a general audience, not a competition against other nerds to crap up articles.
Well, so basically it should only contain the list of Britney Spears and Back Street Boys songs, plus the quick answers to high school tests? That's what the general audience is interested in.
Is quantum physics supposed to even be there, if we're talking about general audiences? As someone who had a genuine passion for physics, I can tell you that that shit is hard. It's abstract thinking at its finest. You can imagine bodies sliding down slopes in your head, or gases expanding in tubes, you can even picture relativistic stuff, but quantum mechanics pretty much requires you to not even try. Any kind of RL intuition you might apply to it is actually _the_ source of misunderstandings and getting it wrong.
So how many people genuinely need that on Wikipedia? For 99% of the population it's something they'll never really need, and would need more effort to understand than they're willing to put into anything. Some people probably aren't even wired to ever understand it. And I don't even necessarily mean that in an elitist or demeaning way, they're just wired for a whole other class of endeavours.
And whoever really needs to understand Hawking radiation, already has better sources than that. (And isn't that the mantra anyway? It's not a primary source, you need to check everything you read on Wikipedia.)
So is it a kind of geek masturbatory exercise too? It's most definitely _not_ for a general audience.
Seems to me like there isn't that much difference. If you don't want to read something, be it quantum stuff or the list of everything Bart wrote on the blackboard, don't look at those pages, right? It's not like someone drags you kicking and screaming to those pages.
However, they have to earn it. I don't consider 'Gun +1' to be worthy of buying.
Actually, I'll go even further and say that any game which officially sells in-game advantages (e.g., "Gun +1") for RL cash has already elliminated itself from my purchase list. It taints any claims of skill or achievements, much in the same way as being able to pay to use a horseshoe in the glove at a boxing match.
Honestly, what's such a rigged contest supposed to prove? Who has a bigger disposable income IRL? I just need to look on my bank account to see whether I'm doing fine there, I don't also need to blow that money so a stupid game can tell me essentially, "yay! You're so great! Your $1000 payment puts you ahead of the guy who paid $900, but you're still way behind the guy who paid $20,000." (Don't laugh, I've been briefly in a web-based game where supposedly someone had paid that ridiculous sum for unfair advantages.)
And if anyone still thinks that that's a kind of achievement, hey, here's an idea: just send me the money and I'll put up a top score page with the rankings by sum paid. You don't even have to bother ganking newbies with bought loot or anything. It goes directly to your score. Won't that be fun?
Ah, wait, I forget that the whole point there is for some loser to pretend he's so much cooler and achieved something by paying for enough advantages to finally muster up the courage to attack a newbie. Carry on.
You know, that's the thing makes me wonder the most about the whole christian god thing. Essentially we're taught that the guy is a good and loving god, but if you look at what he does, he actually acts like a complete asshole. He'll:
- punish people for something their ancestors did. It's a bit like me kicking you in the nuts because one of your ancestors sold slaves 2000 years ago. But, no, if God does it, it's a good and just thing.
- he plays favourites among his sons, in a major way. See the Abel and Cain episode for the first instance of it. And that was already barely generation 2.
- is an asshole about accepting gifts. Abel and Cain again. I mean, imagine me as a cranky old guy and two grandsons bring me gifts. And I'd go, "WTF? You give me a tie? What am I supposed to with that? Get out of here, you idiot. Get a hint from your brother. He gave me socks. He's my new favourite. In fact, I'll disown you, you little prick." Seriously, if anyone pulled that kind of a stunt, he'd be seen as an antisocial arsehole, and rightfully so. But if God does it? Nah, he's a good and loving guy.
- doesn't even bother sorting evil-doers from good guys before doing a genocide or two in the name of good. See Sodom and Gommorah, plus the Noah incident. (I have trouble believing that everyone killed there was a monster, including some thousands of babies who hadn't done anything wrong yet.)
- if he has to do a miracle, hey, nothing beats a plague or two or killing a few thousand babies to make a point. See, convincing the Pharaoh to let the Jews go. You'd think there would be ways to do flashy stuff that doesn't arbitrarily punish millions of Egyptians peasants and craftsmen who didn't even own slaves, nor have anything to do with the Pharaoh's decision.
- has no qualms with punishing billions of people for all eternity, for merely not having heard a particular fairy tale. (The recent "anonymous christian" doctrine of Vatican kinda fixes that, but even there many see it as a heresy.)
- for that matter, if you take it all literally, he seems to care more about whether or not you brown-nose him or his Junior than whether you're a good man and live by the rules. Seriously, we're supposed to believe that essentially a loving and _omnipotent_ God can't possibly forgive you for that original sin, unless you choose Jesus.
- causes a war or two. Way to set the mood and an example, dude. E.g., that promised land wasn't exactly empty. You'd think an _omnipotent_ god could just snap his fingers and create an empty fertile island for his favourites. But, nah, let's make them kill some thousands of philistines instead and take their land. It's more fun that way.
- encourage a little genocide, war crimes, rape, etc, while you're at it. Why not?
- will randomly kick people in the nuts just to see how strong their faith was. Several biblical examples, plus used heavily to explain stuff like the plagues.
- what better way to make a cryptic prophecy than to ask a father to kill his son, then essentially tell him it was just a practical joke at the last moment. Like being on Candid Camera with a cruel twist, I guess. Bonus points if said son is an adult by now. You know, just for that "how the fuck _am_ I going to kill him?" factor on the way there.
You'd think that a sealed document to be opened on date X would do the same job of proving you always meant to have your Junior nailed, no? And you're omnipotent, so you _can_ make a seal that can't be broken. But, nah, let's scare the shit out of Abraham instead. It's more fun.
- playing favourites with some of his children again, for no other merit than being the guys whose ancestor was the random guy chosen for such a cruel prank`
- blame it on free will, or have it blamed in your name, when the world you created and uncertainty about the future create bursts of overpopulation and thus war, famines, and the like. (Bonus points if it results in witch hunts and pogroms, because, hey, if all evil is the result of free wil
The grouping didn't need to form inside a bubble of anything. The whole primordial soup was the first "cell", so to speak. It was a medium in which aminoacids and nucleotids formed by themselves. A self-replicating RNA piece would have just made lots and lots of it right there in the ocean, out of the building blocks available.
Lipids formed around too, and the funny thing about the kinds of lipids in the cell wall is that they already tend to form curved double walls. Ephemereal bubbles with some of that RNA and some of that "soup" inside would have formed all the time.
Most likely the first such groupings were actually a nuisance, as they would cut you off from the outside world and leave you without more nucleotids to replicate after a while. The first such mollecules which could assemble a hole in that lipid bubble, would have a huge advantage. (Your immune system does contain a mechanism to do just that, and of course the DNA code for it: assemble 3 proteins which combine to form the border of a hole in a cell wall.)
At that point already you have the precursor of what a lot of proteins still do: regulate the transfer of substances between the inside and outside. Increasingly more complex proteins would be better than a simple pipe to the outside, and give more and more advantages to whoever can put them on its bubble.
At some point and given enough such proteins and some changes to the outside world, it would become more of an advantage to stay in the bubble than simply survive until it bursts. Proteins which would form a scaffolding to support that lipid wall would become an advantage.
Look, if it were in response to any particular post or claim, I'd understand it. Heck, I could even swallow it as "just watch the hordes claim causation there." Then it at least also gave the question to which it answers.
But posted as a knee-jerk reaction by itself, it is just plain old dumb. And it almost invariably makes a claim about TFA, not about anyone who might misunderstand it.
I mean, picture the following conversation:
You: "But it does keep things from being subtracted by idiots who can't grasp that concept." Me: "Then you should stop sucking cock." You: "WTF?" Me: "Oh, sorry, I'm just defensively answering in advance to people who think sucking cock also keeps idiots away."
If it sounds stupidly absurd, bingo, that's about how that tired meme is too. Stick to where someone actually falsely claimed causation.
Because from where I stand, the parrots reposting that meme all over the place _are_ the idiots subtracting from the conversation. That "answering" a question nobody asked is just adding useless noise to the signal.
But, just to be a lot less nice, let me tell you what it looks like to _me_ most of the time: karma whoring and ego masturbation. It allows some loser to (A) feel like a member in the big family of skeptics, and/or (B) feel already better for his lack of scientific results or education, by having something snarky to say each time any mention of science comes up. It's a one-liner ego-stroke, that's all there is to it. "Look at how much smarter I am than those 'scientists'! I know that correlation doesn't equal causation! I bet they don't!"
Bonus point if the idiot doesn't even understand what he's talking about there.
Not that I think science needs any defense from that, and far from me to keep anyone from using their own brains about any given problem or solution. By all means, please _do_ use your brains. But the whole point is that such one-liner memes _aren't_ much of a sign of brain activity, most of the time. It's just a canned slogan that most seem to wave around mechanically and unthinkingly, just because it seemed fashionable to pull it out.
How would you know? Was there a Spore before and after being owned by EA, or wth? Because from where I stand, it kinda looks to me like Maxis was owned by EA for a long time now.
Speaking of which, have you noticed how nobody else funded a Spore or a The Sims? I don't have much love for EA as a corporation or for their DRM, but when was the last time anyone _else_ brought a new genre to the mainstream? I can't think of anything before or after The Sims, all the way to when Id made Wolfenstein 3D. Ok, ok, there was also Ultima Online which brought us the graphical MMO... also published by EA. If you look back for two decades or so, there are exactly two companies which blessed us with new genres: Id and EA. Hmm. Maybe it says something.
Or even a new take on an existing genre? Well, Spore sure feels that way. Or the only PC single-player RPGs this decade which _weren't_ yet another medieval theme? Well, blimey, I can only think of two publishers: LucasArts publishing yet another title in their StarWars franchise (but cancelling almost anything else than SW titles) because they already knew it sells, and EA taking a chance with MassEffect. You know, at a time where everyone else was rationalizing their risk-aversion via convoluted armchair-psychologist conjectures about how players only relate to swords and can't get in-character with a gun.
The average publisher these days seems to be more about cloning whatever sold well last year. Or maybe feeling bold and trying to mix two. "I know! We'll make a Grand-Theft Battlefield Tycoon! That'll sell."
EA might not be perfect, but it seems far less risk-averse when it comes to trying new things.
So did EA screw Spore? Or maybe Spore wouldn't even have existed, if not for EA? As I was saying, I can't imagine many other publishers even trying that. New unproven game type with creatures evolving? Nah, we'll make yet another wannabe HalfLife clone.
As far as RPGs go it was horrid. [...] It was definitely entertaining [...] It was well worth playing regardless [...]
Well, stop right there. Do you even listen to yourself? If it was "definitely entertaining" and "well worth playing", then WTF _did_ you expect from a _game_, and how does it make it "horrid"?
Now I'm not going to tell you what to like and what not to like. Had you said that it just wasn't fun, ok, I'm not going to tell you what to find fun. But if it _did_ entertain you, how the heck does it count as "horrid"?
"Horrid" is when you get get bored out of your skull, or rubs you the awfully wrong way, or generally you'd rather be in a dentist's chair instead of playing it. "Horrid" is when you can't think of any good reason why you played it in the first place, or why would anyone (of similar tastes) even look twice at the box on the shelf. "Well worth playing" and "definitely entertaining" is the bloody polar opposite of "horrid".
Here's a thought: the _only_ thing a game must do, is entertain you. If it did that, mission f-ing accomplished. It doesn't matter _how_ it did it. Maybe it was different, maybe it was easier, maybe it was more linear than a straight line, or the elder gods know in what other way it differed from your preconceived notions. It doesn't matter. What matters is if you were entertained or not. That's it.
Putting any other preconceived notions about what a game should include, above that, is mistaking means and goal. The goal is to entertain you. Anything else is just means and props. If it used different means, but reached the goal, who the heck cares? Why _do_ you care?
And yes, maybe it wasn't perfect, and maybe there would have been opportunities to be even better. Same as any other game ever released. That just makes it, at best, less than perfect, not "horrid". There is no perfection. The only threshold it must clear is that "well worth playing" line. If you don't regret the money or the time you blew on it, then it seems to me like it is well within the bullseye. Maybe it didn't hit the exact centre of the target, but it didn't fail either.
Geeze, Ì swear that some people buy so much into the group-think of what they should and what they shouldn't like, that they don't even try to use their head.
I use spaces instead of tabs so the code always looks correct no matter who is looking at it.
I hate people that use tabs because their code always contains a mix of tabs and spaces which I then have to figure out what indention they were using just to view it.
3 space tabs is perfect for still being able to see the indent clearly yet keep the code from running off to the right. Many people are using 3 space indents these days. It is the perfect spacing for the general case.
That may be so, and I'm not saying it doesn't have its advantages. But it's hardly worth getting in an indent war over _that_. I mean, honestly, even the general coding style like braces and whatnot, I just use whatever that team uses. I've seen some exotic ones so far. Who cares?
I mean, seriously, I've even worked for a while with IIRC 6 space tabs, inherited from WordStar. Or was it 5 spaces? I've seen 8 space tabs (the kernel folks seemed to love that, last I checked), or as little as 2, and almost anything else in between. Someone likes each of them. Each of them is not exactly optimal for someone else's taste. It's just tabs. Get over it.
I mean, do offer your input in the beginning, when the style guide is written. But when a team already has a style, and a ton of sources indented like that, and everyone else is already used to that... I dunno... Anyone who starts an ofice war over _that_ and spends some inordinate amount of effort trying to rouse the rabble to "fix" _that_... needs to get a life. Seriously.
Or in other words, there are support groups for OCPD, ya know? Do apply perfectionism to your algorithms and such, but there _are_ better things to achieve than the perfect indentation:P
I can see your point, but the question and the context was about laptops that run PC games.
Portables like the original gameboy or the newer DS, are a bit of a fixed target: a game either runs on that one configuration, or it doesn't. There are no games written for a DS with an upgraded graphics card, or with more RAM.
PC gaming doesn't really have such fixed targets. All games try to surpass last year's in terms of graphics, if nothing else because screenshots sell, and the hardware requirements are occasionally outright silly. I can think of some games (e.g., EQ2) which were launched to match hardware specs that didn't even yet exist. E.g., seriously, to run EQ2 with full graphics details you needed a 512 MB graphics card, and that just didn't exist yet. (Well, ok, maybe except as a high-end, professional OpenGL card for CAD.)
There's the likes of Uri Geller for example, which make a fortune out of being media celebrity. There are dowsers which land pretty lucrative contracts to dowse for oil. There are guys who contract to find missing persons. There are people selling amulets, electronic gizmos, etc. There are guys like this one who advertises himself as being able to scan someone's brain and see if they murdered someone. I'd imagine it's not for free.
Basically pretty much anyone I've heard about making a claim to be a psychic or to have somehow managed to leapfrog current technology or science, peddles themselves for money.
Even letting aside the cool 1 million dollars from Randi, can you imagine what would it do for their reputation to win that prize and be basically certified as indeed having paranormal skills?
E.g., given how much it costs to drill in one place and see if you find oil, someone certified that he _can_ reliably dowse for oil, would make a bloody fortune. You could ask for a couple of millions just to go dowse in one place regardless of whether you find anything.
E.g., if you got yourself certified that you can find missing persons... well, let's just say some people would currently kill to find Osama.
E.g., telepathy? That's like the Holy Grail for submarine warfare. You'd suddenly have a reliable, instant communication method that works even when the sub is hundreds of metres underwater, and which communication can't be intercepted or detected either. Both the USA and the USSR experimented with it, and both would pay a king's ransom for something like that. I mean, seriously, something like that is worth _billions_ of dollars. Just being able to park even one single submarine next to the enemy's coast, that doesn't have to move or communicate by any detectable means, is something that's an immense advantage and threat by itself.
E.g., reading minds? I bet a few dictators would really pay a king's ransom to know if anyone from their entourage is plotting against them.
Etc. It would be the kind of thing that moves one to the next league.
1. Yep. Let me even give an example. It didn't happen in a team I was in, but I know several people from that team.
So they got a new guy who had some outstanding experience, according to his resume. He had worked on major enterprise projects, been an architect, ate Enterprise Java Beans for breakfast, etc.
Turns out he was utterly incompetent. He spent about a month just getting used to their architecture and IDE and everything, apparently everything they did or the way they did it was new to him, and he needed some time to accomodate. Fair enough. Then started working on something, but never was quite done with it. Eventually they started asking to see some results. He started randomly changing files and checking them back in. The first few times he even had a good excuse, like "oops, I hadn't worked with this particular versioning system before" or "oops, I forgot some other file that mine depends on." There go a few more weeks, before it's obvious that his changes can't possibly even compile, because they have elementary syntax errors.
Eventually they fire him, but by now he's got several months of "experience" there.
Then someone finds his updated resume online. The guy claimed he singlehandedly improved their architecture, increase performance X times, got project management back on track, etc.
2. 'Nother example, my ex-coworker Wally. Spent two years on a trivial module, whose core someone else rewrote from scratch in 6 hours. It took another two weeks or so, mostly of testing, to get it bug-for-bug compatible with his, since a couple of teams already had their own workarounds for them. (Trying to get him to fix it was a bit like negotiating with the terrorists.) The rewrite was also benchmarked as 40 times faster than Wally's on large data sets. Literally. Measured.
The thing everyone remembers fondly about him, is how he asked for 2 weeks just to estimate the effort to fix a trivial bug. He got it too. (His team leader was a bit a Mr Testicle: technically he was involved, but he kept out of it as much as possible;)
He also massively practiced obfuscation. Any of his modules contained half the techniques from How To Write Unmaintainable Java code (literally) and megabytes of files copied from unrelated stuff to pad the number of lines of code per day. Obviously, it worked on his team leader.
Then he got moved through the maintenance of two other programs (one at a time), and just managed to make them both worse.
There we go, that's his provable 2-4 years employment. Well, ok, 5 in his case.
3. Example number 3: Old Father Williams. I got to think of him that way after a particular fortune on my linux box:
"You are old," said the youth, "and your programs don't run,
And there isn't one language you like; Yet of useful suggestions for help you have none --
Have you thought about taking a hike?"
"Since I never write programs," his father replied,
"Every language looks equally bad; Yet the people keep paying to read all my books
And don't realize that they've been had."
Pretty much spent 6 years in a place complaining about everything that everyone else did. Coding style, IDE, OS, _everything_. His first choice of a whine was Windows, which might even have had a point, but when Linux was finally allowed and half the team switched to Linux, plus the servers actually went Linux... he proclaimed Linux to be sell-out crap for idiots, and switched to preaching BSD.
He also caused a reformat-and-commit war in which he was preaching _three_ space tabs, as spaces. And wasn't affraid to check out someone else's project and reformat it, to make his point.
He spent two years, just "modernizing" the build process. Nobody knows what he experimented with on his c
Well, don't get me wrong. I _don't_ support censorship and generally find it stupid. I'm just saying that it didn't give Nazis street cred, like the OP claimed. Really nothing more.
As I was saying in another message, that Hitler fellow had no problems with pretending to be whatever he thought you liked. He had been diagnosed a psychopath during WW1.
The party name, yes, it said "socialist". And he pretended to be socialist to the workers, while at the same time making backroom deals with the industrialists to curb the power of workers and outlaw unions. Which he did. Also the largely socialist (if still thugs) SA got dismantled quite the brutal way, during the "Night Of The Long Knives."
Remember, it's the same guy who pretended to be a friend of the Soviet Union and the socialism/communism when negotiating with Stalin, while at the same time holding internal speeches about communism being the ultimate evil and preaching expansion towards the East.
I guess we won't know what he really believed in. Possibly only that he wants more power. Everything he publically said, was later shown that he couldn't care less about.
E.g., even his brutal hatred of jews... well, for example Heydrich (a.k.a., The Butcher of Prague, or The Blonde Beast) had a jewish grandfather which, under the Third Reich racial purity law would have made him a jew too. He nevertheless rose through the NSDAP, was given important administrative positions, and generally earned a lot of recognition from Hitler. And on one night the SS spent some time in the city archives and changed the records to show that said grandfather wasn't a jew _and_ wasn't even Heydrich's grandfather anyway.
That's just one example. Something didn't add up there. The same guy who publically foamed at the mouth about Jews, had no problem with it when his henchmen qualified as such.
Or they publically denounced the influence of Jews on the culture, and single out operetta (musicals) as some great cultural poison. But at the very same time Hitler had no problem with having favourite operettas whose texts were composed by a Jew, and giving public honours to the German composer who put them on music. (Meanwhile, the guy who wrote those texts was sent to IIRC Auschwitz and died a horrible death there.) I mean, again, something doesn't add up.
I haven't seen that movies, but that's largely inaccurate.
1. The Nazis didn't get a majority in the parliament. In '32 the NSDAP got 37.4% of the votes in Juli, but it had already declined to 33% when new elections had been called in November.
So it's hardly fair to say that the majority of Germans had voted for the Nazis. A disappointingly large number, yes, but not a majority.
2. You have to realize that a lot of this was mostly voting in (a stupidly misguided) protest at the other discredited parties, rather than voting for genocide.
3. You also have to bear in mind that Hitler was quite a two faced fellow. His party claimed to be "Socialist" right in the party name to win the workers' votes, while at the exact same time secretly promising the industry bigwigs to outlaw unions and reduce the workers' rights. He had no problem with pretending to be anything that got him popularity or power. (He had been diagnosed a psychopath in WW1, btw.)
I think far more Germans voted for the "Socialist" part than anything else about that party.
(Boy, were they wrong. Immmediately after he managed to secure power, Hitler did outlaw unions and turned the workers' (and generally everyone's) right to nearly nothing at all. The largely socialist SA faction was purged in the infamous "Night of the Long Knives." Etc.)
4. The hatred agenda wasn't _that_ much popularized. It wasn't exactly secret, but most of the propaganda at that point hammered on two points: more power to the workers, and hatred towards the Treaty of Versailles that ended WW1 on catastrophic terms for Germany. While he made no secret of his dislike for Jews, what he hammered far more on was, "hate the French for the treaty they imposed on us."
5. Even after they were comfortably in power, the Nazis didn't exactly advertise the holocaust. The Eugenics program was all but secret, as it proved hugely unpopular with the German population. The Anti-Semite propaganda generally used euphemisms like sending them back to their land, or generally anywhere else, rather than telling everyone about the brutal holocaust. The "special units" which conducted the pogroms were kept very separate from the Army (Wehrmacht; the SS was not the Army, it was a paramilitary organization) and strictly on a voluntary basis, as it was correctly assessed that it would completely ruin morale if the Army was drafted into doing that.
Now I'm not saying that Germany as a whole doesn't bear some of the guilt there. It does. But there was a carefully constructed wall of plausible deniability, and keeping it as at most something incidentally happening in parallel, rather than as the whole point of the war or of the government. What they hammered on even later was stuff like stopping the spread of communism in Europe, by stopping the Red Army. Nobody put in the official propaganda that they're slaughtering Soviet peasants and prisoners by the million.
What I'm trying to say is that for the average German it was more like something he could choose not to think about, or many probably genuinely didn't even know about, than a case of, "hell yeah! Good thing we elected the Nazis to do that!"
As far as America's involvement in WWII, I realize that we had a small component in the European theater compared to Russia. But Britain arguably would not have survived without our help (including before Dec. 7th, 1941). America's toughest WWII battles were in the Pacific.
Well, I'm not trying to minimize your country's contribution. Lend-Lease was probably far more important to the fate of the war than the actual troops in Europe, for example, and the B17s did a fine job at tying up inordinate resources to defend against them. Just saying that it's probably not that up close and personal, so to speak.
It's one thing to know that it happens, and it's another to have two grandfathers that got crippled in that war. The latter makes one a lot less likely to pine for a repeat of it, if millions of people are in
I wasn't trying to diminish your country's contribution. I was just taking a wild estimate about _Europe_ and fighting Nazis. From my limited knowledge of history, most of the US troops and casualties were in the Pacific War, which had less to do with Nazis and more with... well, I guess the Japanese delusions of military grandeur.
Still, my bad. I suppose I should have made it much clearer what I mean.
I have a few arab coworkers in quite well paid programming jobs. I'd assume that that counts as above pizza delivery boy.
Quite a mixed bunch too. There are a couple of very smart ones, but at least one is almost literally too stupid to piss holes in the snow. (And I'm not saying that because he's arab. I can think of at least one German coworker who's even more retarded.) I figure that if he could get and keep that job, well, someone must have been very open minded:P
Not saying that racism absolutely doesn't exist. No place on Earth could make that claim. But I'd rate it as a more open-minded place than many, on the whole.
Still, the point I was trying to make is merely that _Nazis_ didn't get some kind of popularity boost because they're forbidden. Which is what the OP was claiming,
We actually lost over 400,000 in that war:) Over 13 million were in the armed forces fighting. It's true that we didn't have a significant number of civilian deaths, but it wasn't a small fight by any measure.
I thought the majority of it was in the Pacific War, though? Which didn't have as much to do with Nazism as such, although admittedly the Japanese could be just as brutal.
You guys get a two hour lunch? Or is this one of those threads you assume your boss isn't going to read?
Learn to read, lemming: "One time I'm dumb enough to say "yes" when he wants to show me how cool CS is and how great he is, after hours. (We were pretty much free to install what we wanted to on the company computers, and a multiplayer round in the lunch break or occasionally after hours was pretty much a sacred tradition for most people.)" Emphasis added for the literacy impaired.
The whole episode happened from about 6 PM to about 8 PM.
I know that reading and comprehension are hard, but do at least try to read before jumping to the trolling;)
Additionally, well, if you're that interested:
1. The company went bankrupt in the wake of the dot-com bubble bursting, I no longer work there, so I have no particular reason to fear what that boss thinks. We parted on good terms, though.
2. It was a small company and both company owners were in the next room, and quite often in the middle of us. So I'd _worry_ if they need to read Slashdot to find out what went on there.
3. They both took part in those multiplayer rounds. In fact, the one with the most shares in it, was actually the best FPS player in the company. The afore-mentioned willy waver was consistently in the #2 place, but that might also be because nobody else was deranged enough to play only his favourite map or only CS.
I dunno. I'm in Germany, where nazi things are as forbidden as it can possibly get, but I'm not aware of neo-nazis having much street cred or too many people thinking of them as freedom fighters. From the limited and flawed sample I have, it seems to me like there are more neo-nazis, white-supremacists and the like per capita in the USA where it's not forbidden.
Bear in mind that most of Europe has been fucked up hard by WW2. You yanks know WW2 as this war that happened somewhere else, you had a one or two hundred thousand soldiers total, and generally it mostly happened to somewhere else. Here it's a lot closer to home. Germany got not only to lose over 5.5 million soldiers in the war and over 1.5 million civillians in the firebombings, but got to deal with the whole Gestapo and all first hand. There are familes who've had a member or two gassed by Hitler just because they had some chronic disease when that eugenics program was tried.
Now there _are_ a few nostalgiacs about that time, and a few trolls posing as neo-nazis, but on the whole there just isn't that much reason to pine for those times. Which would kind of be required for them to have any significant amount of "street cred."
Germany largely went pacifist and socialist after the war, mostly as a result of still remembering the war and the far-right dictatorship. (Not unlike the USA went pacifist after WW1, but without the isolationism aspect.)
Other countries have even less reasons to cheer for it. France has been bombed by us in one direction, and then by the Allies on the way back. I haven't done a poll there, so I might be talking out the arse, but I don't think many of them pine for those times. And forbidding nazi symbols and the like, doesn't seem to have made people pine for those times more.
Now there seems to be a signifficant amount of French nationalism, but really that's actually mis-labelled. France's "nationalism" and "right wing" aren't as much about nation or race, as about language and culture. The theme doesn't seem as much "go home if you're not white or French" as "go home if you don't freaking want to learn French." In a lot of countries that wouldn't even be considered "nationalism" or "right wing", but rather the baseline as expectations go.
Just about the only countries where racism and nationalism have made a come-back are in the former Eastern Bloc. But there it's not forbidden, so you can't blame it on that.
Finally, note that it's somewhat misleading to paint it as Europe forbidding it _all_ or that it's not allowed to talk about it in the open. We still have documentaries, books about it, and learn history in schools, ya know? So, yes, it is very much possible "to keep tabs on and to criticize it which in turn makes it more likely that people will see it for the bullshit it really is". Most of it, at least. All that's forbidden is nazi propaganda/hate-speech and, depending on the country, the sale or public display of crooked crosses and other nazi symbols.
Slashdot Mirror
It sounds like what got you the problem that almost nobody wants to learn in school any more, eh? Learn the value of being a prom queen who'll either marry a millionaire (stiff competition there, though) or be a waitress for the rest of your days, and be proud of that. Or learn to be value of being the jock who _might_ one day get lucky and get into a minor league sports team, but most likely will operate a gas pump or maybe unload crates at Wall-Mart.
Let's face it, in life you'll almost invariably hit lower than you aim. If you already aim low, you'll hit even lower. Starting from being nothing(*) and being proud and content with what you _already_ are (my emphasis) is a recipe for failure.
(*) and being mommy and daddy's "special" darling doesn't count there. If that's all you are and aim no higher, you'll eventually grow out of that and with _nothing_.
As for the middlers, I'll call bullshit on that feel-good fairy-tale. Historically the "middlers" were the guys ploughing the field and being plundered by both armies in a war. From the Roman Kingdom (yes, they were that before being a Republic, which they were before becoming an Empire) to some time during the 19'th century, that's what some 80% of the population was doing: the mind-numbingly boring task of walking behind a plough behind an ox or horse, holding onto the handles. Dawn to dusk. That's how the acre was even defined: how much a peasant can plough from dawn to dusk.
Add some miners, craftsmen, mercenaries and the like, and that accounts for even more people.
To even have the chance to be the guy who tinkers with a genius's ideas until they work, you had to be one of the most privileged 5% or less. The middlers were at best those guys kneading hides in dog shit (yes, that's how tanning worked) for the leather straps your invention needed. Or while those top few percent were busy inventing a better gun, the middlers were fermenting shit with piss to make saltpetre for that gun. Or while those top few were figuring out how to make a gothic cathedral (no mean feat, given the lack of even a mathematical notation you'd use these days), the middlers were hauling square slabs of rock for it. Stable contribution to technological progress of that middler gang: zero point zero.
Valuable contributions, nevertheless, but spare me the bullshit self-fellatio that such middlers were what caused stable technological progress.
Now I'm not saying you should go depressed about your skills or anything. But do aim higher, or you'll never improve. And spare us and yourself the bullshit story in which it's perfectly ok to be an underachiever and proud of it, and how such underachieving middlers had jack shit to do with technological progress.
Well, I kinda doubt that even the RIAA can be _that_ stupid. (Though, funnily enough, every time I say that, someone or some entity promptly proves me wrong.)
Let's face it, today's lawyers are tomorrow's judges. I'm also going to take a wild guess that even today's judges, no matter how much they enjoy making lawyers work to earn their play, will not take it very lightly when faced with an attempt to bully the legal profession as a whole.
_Especially_ in civil cases, where really the whole standard of evidence is along the lines of "who's better at persuading the judge", you don't want to start from the position of the known bully abusing the legal system and work your way up from there. So the judges are one group they'd be smart to not annoy.
Also let's not forget that lawyers do have very large and powerful professional associations. They don't exist just to provide some exams for their members. And they tend to know the laws, precedents and available avenues. Even _if_ you could somehow bully one or two of them into submission, I think any attempt to basically carpet-bomb their profession as a whole into no longer being able to do its job (on some cases), might find some rather stiff resistance there. Sooner or later you'd find yourself not just against one or two lawyers, but against an entity bigger than yourself and more adept at working the system than you are.
As I was saying, I don't think that even the RIAA is _that_ stupid.
Well, then it seems to me that democracy is the first thing that should be fixed there. In fact, the only thing. The rest will then follow, or not, depending on whether the people like it that way or not.
I think my point had less to do with "helping" and more with the fact that it _is_ a sovereign nation, and it can fix thing itself by legal means, if it doesn't want our crap jobs or our garbage any more.
Look, we're not talking some puppet banana-republic government there. Both India and China are major nations, who had no problems thumbing their nose at the USA before. They're not doing this because the USA tells them to, because there's not much you can do to force China to do what you want it to. If China or India decide to pass some laws to protect their environment or fix minimum wages for their workers, there isn't much the USA or anyone else can do to stop them.
So let's stop blaming our collective selves there. China can solve it pretty much overnight, any time it wants to. If it doesn't want to, well, that's that.
Going above any beyond that, is already past the realm of "help" and more into the realm of "trying to impose your world view upon a foreign government".
The free market is ultimately just an optimization algorithm. The results it produces are largely a function of the constraints that are placed on it.
I.e., again, if China wants to fix it, it can simply change the constraints that apply over there. There isn't much that those large corporations can do to force any other result there.
China apparently chose a set where the result is that... well, as someone else's sig went, the invisible hand has its middle finger extended. I fail to see why would anyone put the blame squarely and solely on the western corporations, when essentially it's China's decision to compete in that way and under those conditions. Way I see it, they're at least accomplices there, or actually IMHO the main culprit.
The western corporations didn't do much more there than try to get the best prices. Which is how capitalism and the free market are supposed to work. If two companies offer to take your thrash, and one asks for half the sum, you pick that one. That's how that optimization works. It wasn't the corporations who couped governments there to make someone burn our plastics. (God knows there was enough of that in other places, but none of us couped China lately.) It was someone from that country which came and said, basically, "hey, we can take your thrash for half the price these other guys ask for." It seems to me like the blame lies mostly with them, then. I'm not saying that the west doesn't share _some_ share of the blame there, but I don't see it as the main share any way I want to look at it.
I never claimed that legal is right, so we can even aggree there. All I'm saying is that China should fix its own damned laws. If legal != right, then you change what is legal. As I was saying, we're talking about a major sovereign nation, not about some muppet government with no choice but to nod.
Except that never worked that way. The people currently benefiting from the status quo, will invariably either
A) try to maintain the status quo, or
B) come up with some surrealistic mis-conception about what those poor proletars actually need.
You can find examples of both either in the same 19'th century I've mentioned before. History is full
1. Most importantly, that's a bullshit strawman. Laws about drugs are mostly _internal_ laws. E.g., US citizens tell other US citizens what they can't do. Fair enough.
The only point where it becomes equivalent to what I was saying, is when you start telling another country that they're not allowed to do drugs. It happens too. And there I'll have the same position: fucking leave them alone. It's not your job to dictate world morals. Stick to your own country.
2. Actually, I'll make an even stronger claim there: why should drugs be my problem in the first place? Most are harmless enough, and there are millions of people doing drugs that haven't harmed anyone as a result.
And the usual "OMG it's addictive" argument is bull too. We do allow tobacco, which causes some pretty strong physiological addiction. As in, actual brain chemistry changes. Some drugs, e.g., hemp, don't even do that. We allow alcohol, where the withdrawal symptoms can literally _kill_ you. Look up delirium tremmens some day. That's withdrawal syndrome for alcohol addiction.
And I've worked with people who smoked pot before, and they didn't strike me as the kind that'll get violent or delirious. Now tobacco, _that_ can get funny. You keep me in a meeting for 2-3 hours without my cigarettes, and I hope you don't imagine I can still pay any attention. But somehow my nicotine addiction is considered harmless, while that mellow admin who occasionally does pot is a menace to society. Hmm...
So unless you also feel a need to tell blacks (or for that matter whites, asians, and everyone else) that they aren't allowed to smoke or drink any more, why _would_ you care about them selling heroine or coke to each other.
I don't think morals are that black and white. While on one hand it would be nice if we in the west disposed of our own garbage, I don't think it's our duty to keep anyone else from shooting themselves in the foot. Unless you want to go back to the old (and even worse) "mission to civilize" and "white man's burden" doctrines.
If China wants to import garbage for some quick cash, it's China's problem alone. They should fix their own laws, if they don't want it to happen.
There _are_ situations where the west did actual harm, including
- bribes (we practically created the 3'rd world kleptocracies, by making it so that taking a bribe from the western corporations is the most profitable thing one could do, better than any industry or commerce)
- military/CIA interventions
- economic pressures to make some countries destroy their own industry and agriculture (including occasionally to take the same good ol' right-wing measures in a crisis that that would turn a crisis into an all out depression, according to the economics we apply in the west)
Etc.
And for that we are rightfully hated.
But things that they do to themselves for a buck? Why would it be our business to stop them from doing that?
E.g., the west didn't hold anyone hostage to make them take our garbage. It's stuff that someone there figured out would be a good way to make some bucks. And is probably acclaimed as the great entrepreneur and one of the guys doing something for their economy there.
E.g., I don't think many western companies take _slaves_ in China, much less India. While I do find that running some of those sweatshops says something about the greedy fucks who moved there just for that, ultimately it's India's and China's job to decide whether that's ok with them or not. They _can_ give minimum wage and maximum hours per week laws if they want to, you know? If they'd rather get dollars than that, why should the west be the one to blame?
And again in most cases it's not the west who even runs those "slave labour" camps, but some local company who subcontracts for a western company. In most cases the western company can't even control what membranes go into their batteries (see incendiary batteries made in China that have a cheap non-working replacement for the membrane that was supposed to collapse and open the circuit when overheated), or what paint is used on their toys (lead-painted toys made in China ftw), or what glue goes into their beads that are supposed to be wet and stuck to a board and most kids will lick to get wet (replaced by some enterprising Chinese with a toxic and psychoactive glue.) What makes you think that the western company gets much more to say about how a Chinese boss treats Chinese employees at that company?
Or, as I was saying, are we back to the "mission to civilize" (China, India and everyone else) doctrine from the 19'th century?
Plus, even if the western corporations didn't directly subcontract to those, they'd still find ways to exploit each other just the same. Whether it's cheap pens or counterfeit watches or farming gold in WoW, they'll _still_ take advantage of the missing legislation to make each other work 90+ hour weeks for a pittance. E.g., I remember an article from some months ago about WoW gold farmers, and those guys were working 12 hour days in essentially a high-tech sweatshops. I don't think any western corporation made them do that. (Blizzard probably would rather they crawl somewhere and die, for example.)
Don't get me wrong, I'm not going to play the bullshit card that we're some kind of great benefactors for giving them those crap jobs. I'm not _that_ deluded. But I _am_ saying that ultimately they do most of that exploitation to themselves, and they must find their own way and equilibrium point there. It's their own f-ing country, and it's mostly their own sociopaths not ours doing that to their workers or environment. It's not _our_ job to clean up _their_ act.
Blaming the west for that, and doubly so trying to
Well, so basically it should only contain the list of Britney Spears and Back Street Boys songs, plus the quick answers to high school tests? That's what the general audience is interested in.
Is quantum physics supposed to even be there, if we're talking about general audiences? As someone who had a genuine passion for physics, I can tell you that that shit is hard. It's abstract thinking at its finest. You can imagine bodies sliding down slopes in your head, or gases expanding in tubes, you can even picture relativistic stuff, but quantum mechanics pretty much requires you to not even try. Any kind of RL intuition you might apply to it is actually _the_ source of misunderstandings and getting it wrong.
So how many people genuinely need that on Wikipedia? For 99% of the population it's something they'll never really need, and would need more effort to understand than they're willing to put into anything. Some people probably aren't even wired to ever understand it. And I don't even necessarily mean that in an elitist or demeaning way, they're just wired for a whole other class of endeavours.
And whoever really needs to understand Hawking radiation, already has better sources than that. (And isn't that the mantra anyway? It's not a primary source, you need to check everything you read on Wikipedia.)
So is it a kind of geek masturbatory exercise too? It's most definitely _not_ for a general audience.
Seems to me like there isn't that much difference. If you don't want to read something, be it quantum stuff or the list of everything Bart wrote on the blackboard, don't look at those pages, right? It's not like someone drags you kicking and screaming to those pages.
Actually, I'll go even further and say that any game which officially sells in-game advantages (e.g., "Gun +1") for RL cash has already elliminated itself from my purchase list. It taints any claims of skill or achievements, much in the same way as being able to pay to use a horseshoe in the glove at a boxing match.
Honestly, what's such a rigged contest supposed to prove? Who has a bigger disposable income IRL? I just need to look on my bank account to see whether I'm doing fine there, I don't also need to blow that money so a stupid game can tell me essentially, "yay! You're so great! Your $1000 payment puts you ahead of the guy who paid $900, but you're still way behind the guy who paid $20,000." (Don't laugh, I've been briefly in a web-based game where supposedly someone had paid that ridiculous sum for unfair advantages.)
And if anyone still thinks that that's a kind of achievement, hey, here's an idea: just send me the money and I'll put up a top score page with the rankings by sum paid. You don't even have to bother ganking newbies with bought loot or anything. It goes directly to your score. Won't that be fun?
Ah, wait, I forget that the whole point there is for some loser to pretend he's so much cooler and achieved something by paying for enough advantages to finally muster up the courage to attack a newbie. Carry on.
You know, that's the thing makes me wonder the most about the whole christian god thing. Essentially we're taught that the guy is a good and loving god, but if you look at what he does, he actually acts like a complete asshole. He'll:
- punish people for something their ancestors did. It's a bit like me kicking you in the nuts because one of your ancestors sold slaves 2000 years ago. But, no, if God does it, it's a good and just thing.
- he plays favourites among his sons, in a major way. See the Abel and Cain episode for the first instance of it. And that was already barely generation 2.
- is an asshole about accepting gifts. Abel and Cain again. I mean, imagine me as a cranky old guy and two grandsons bring me gifts. And I'd go, "WTF? You give me a tie? What am I supposed to with that? Get out of here, you idiot. Get a hint from your brother. He gave me socks. He's my new favourite. In fact, I'll disown you, you little prick." Seriously, if anyone pulled that kind of a stunt, he'd be seen as an antisocial arsehole, and rightfully so. But if God does it? Nah, he's a good and loving guy.
- doesn't even bother sorting evil-doers from good guys before doing a genocide or two in the name of good. See Sodom and Gommorah, plus the Noah incident. (I have trouble believing that everyone killed there was a monster, including some thousands of babies who hadn't done anything wrong yet.)
- if he has to do a miracle, hey, nothing beats a plague or two or killing a few thousand babies to make a point. See, convincing the Pharaoh to let the Jews go. You'd think there would be ways to do flashy stuff that doesn't arbitrarily punish millions of Egyptians peasants and craftsmen who didn't even own slaves, nor have anything to do with the Pharaoh's decision.
- has no qualms with punishing billions of people for all eternity, for merely not having heard a particular fairy tale. (The recent "anonymous christian" doctrine of Vatican kinda fixes that, but even there many see it as a heresy.)
- for that matter, if you take it all literally, he seems to care more about whether or not you brown-nose him or his Junior than whether you're a good man and live by the rules. Seriously, we're supposed to believe that essentially a loving and _omnipotent_ God can't possibly forgive you for that original sin, unless you choose Jesus.
- causes a war or two. Way to set the mood and an example, dude. E.g., that promised land wasn't exactly empty. You'd think an _omnipotent_ god could just snap his fingers and create an empty fertile island for his favourites. But, nah, let's make them kill some thousands of philistines instead and take their land. It's more fun that way.
- encourage a little genocide, war crimes, rape, etc, while you're at it. Why not?
- will randomly kick people in the nuts just to see how strong their faith was. Several biblical examples, plus used heavily to explain stuff like the plagues.
- what better way to make a cryptic prophecy than to ask a father to kill his son, then essentially tell him it was just a practical joke at the last moment. Like being on Candid Camera with a cruel twist, I guess. Bonus points if said son is an adult by now. You know, just for that "how the fuck _am_ I going to kill him?" factor on the way there.
You'd think that a sealed document to be opened on date X would do the same job of proving you always meant to have your Junior nailed, no? And you're omnipotent, so you _can_ make a seal that can't be broken. But, nah, let's scare the shit out of Abraham instead. It's more fun.
- playing favourites with some of his children again, for no other merit than being the guys whose ancestor was the random guy chosen for such a cruel prank`
- blame it on free will, or have it blamed in your name, when the world you created and uncertainty about the future create bursts of overpopulation and thus war, famines, and the like. (Bonus points if it results in witch hunts and pogroms, because, hey, if all evil is the result of free wil
Well, it's even simpler.
The grouping didn't need to form inside a bubble of anything. The whole primordial soup was the first "cell", so to speak. It was a medium in which aminoacids and nucleotids formed by themselves. A self-replicating RNA piece would have just made lots and lots of it right there in the ocean, out of the building blocks available.
Lipids formed around too, and the funny thing about the kinds of lipids in the cell wall is that they already tend to form curved double walls. Ephemereal bubbles with some of that RNA and some of that "soup" inside would have formed all the time.
Most likely the first such groupings were actually a nuisance, as they would cut you off from the outside world and leave you without more nucleotids to replicate after a while. The first such mollecules which could assemble a hole in that lipid bubble, would have a huge advantage. (Your immune system does contain a mechanism to do just that, and of course the DNA code for it: assemble 3 proteins which combine to form the border of a hole in a cell wall.)
At that point already you have the precursor of what a lot of proteins still do: regulate the transfer of substances between the inside and outside. Increasingly more complex proteins would be better than a simple pipe to the outside, and give more and more advantages to whoever can put them on its bubble.
At some point and given enough such proteins and some changes to the outside world, it would become more of an advantage to stay in the bubble than simply survive until it bursts. Proteins which would form a scaffolding to support that lipid wall would become an advantage.
And so on.
Look, if it were in response to any particular post or claim, I'd understand it. Heck, I could even swallow it as "just watch the hordes claim causation there." Then it at least also gave the question to which it answers.
But posted as a knee-jerk reaction by itself, it is just plain old dumb. And it almost invariably makes a claim about TFA, not about anyone who might misunderstand it.
I mean, picture the following conversation:
You: "But it does keep things from being subtracted by idiots who can't grasp that concept."
Me: "Then you should stop sucking cock."
You: "WTF?"
Me: "Oh, sorry, I'm just defensively answering in advance to people who think sucking cock also keeps idiots away."
If it sounds stupidly absurd, bingo, that's about how that tired meme is too. Stick to where someone actually falsely claimed causation.
Because from where I stand, the parrots reposting that meme all over the place _are_ the idiots subtracting from the conversation. That "answering" a question nobody asked is just adding useless noise to the signal.
But, just to be a lot less nice, let me tell you what it looks like to _me_ most of the time: karma whoring and ego masturbation. It allows some loser to (A) feel like a member in the big family of skeptics, and/or (B) feel already better for his lack of scientific results or education, by having something snarky to say each time any mention of science comes up. It's a one-liner ego-stroke, that's all there is to it. "Look at how much smarter I am than those 'scientists'! I know that correlation doesn't equal causation! I bet they don't!"
Bonus point if the idiot doesn't even understand what he's talking about there.
Not that I think science needs any defense from that, and far from me to keep anyone from using their own brains about any given problem or solution. By all means, please _do_ use your brains. But the whole point is that such one-liner memes _aren't_ much of a sign of brain activity, most of the time. It's just a canned slogan that most seem to wave around mechanically and unthinkingly, just because it seemed fashionable to pull it out.
How would you know? Was there a Spore before and after being owned by EA, or wth? Because from where I stand, it kinda looks to me like Maxis was owned by EA for a long time now.
Speaking of which, have you noticed how nobody else funded a Spore or a The Sims? I don't have much love for EA as a corporation or for their DRM, but when was the last time anyone _else_ brought a new genre to the mainstream? I can't think of anything before or after The Sims, all the way to when Id made Wolfenstein 3D. Ok, ok, there was also Ultima Online which brought us the graphical MMO... also published by EA. If you look back for two decades or so, there are exactly two companies which blessed us with new genres: Id and EA. Hmm. Maybe it says something.
Or even a new take on an existing genre? Well, Spore sure feels that way. Or the only PC single-player RPGs this decade which _weren't_ yet another medieval theme? Well, blimey, I can only think of two publishers: LucasArts publishing yet another title in their StarWars franchise (but cancelling almost anything else than SW titles) because they already knew it sells, and EA taking a chance with MassEffect. You know, at a time where everyone else was rationalizing their risk-aversion via convoluted armchair-psychologist conjectures about how players only relate to swords and can't get in-character with a gun.
The average publisher these days seems to be more about cloning whatever sold well last year. Or maybe feeling bold and trying to mix two. "I know! We'll make a Grand-Theft Battlefield Tycoon! That'll sell."
EA might not be perfect, but it seems far less risk-averse when it comes to trying new things.
So did EA screw Spore? Or maybe Spore wouldn't even have existed, if not for EA? As I was saying, I can't imagine many other publishers even trying that. New unproven game type with creatures evolving? Nah, we'll make yet another wannabe HalfLife clone.
Well, stop right there. Do you even listen to yourself? If it was "definitely entertaining" and "well worth playing", then WTF _did_ you expect from a _game_, and how does it make it "horrid"?
Now I'm not going to tell you what to like and what not to like. Had you said that it just wasn't fun, ok, I'm not going to tell you what to find fun. But if it _did_ entertain you, how the heck does it count as "horrid"?
"Horrid" is when you get get bored out of your skull, or rubs you the awfully wrong way, or generally you'd rather be in a dentist's chair instead of playing it. "Horrid" is when you can't think of any good reason why you played it in the first place, or why would anyone (of similar tastes) even look twice at the box on the shelf. "Well worth playing" and "definitely entertaining" is the bloody polar opposite of "horrid".
Here's a thought: the _only_ thing a game must do, is entertain you. If it did that, mission f-ing accomplished. It doesn't matter _how_ it did it. Maybe it was different, maybe it was easier, maybe it was more linear than a straight line, or the elder gods know in what other way it differed from your preconceived notions. It doesn't matter. What matters is if you were entertained or not. That's it.
Putting any other preconceived notions about what a game should include, above that, is mistaking means and goal. The goal is to entertain you. Anything else is just means and props. If it used different means, but reached the goal, who the heck cares? Why _do_ you care?
And yes, maybe it wasn't perfect, and maybe there would have been opportunities to be even better. Same as any other game ever released. That just makes it, at best, less than perfect, not "horrid". There is no perfection. The only threshold it must clear is that "well worth playing" line. If you don't regret the money or the time you blew on it, then it seems to me like it is well within the bullseye. Maybe it didn't hit the exact centre of the target, but it didn't fail either.
Geeze, Ì swear that some people buy so much into the group-think of what they should and what they shouldn't like, that they don't even try to use their head.
That may be so, and I'm not saying it doesn't have its advantages. But it's hardly worth getting in an indent war over _that_. I mean, honestly, even the general coding style like braces and whatnot, I just use whatever that team uses. I've seen some exotic ones so far. Who cares?
I mean, seriously, I've even worked for a while with IIRC 6 space tabs, inherited from WordStar. Or was it 5 spaces? I've seen 8 space tabs (the kernel folks seemed to love that, last I checked), or as little as 2, and almost anything else in between. Someone likes each of them. Each of them is not exactly optimal for someone else's taste. It's just tabs. Get over it.
I mean, do offer your input in the beginning, when the style guide is written. But when a team already has a style, and a ton of sources indented like that, and everyone else is already used to that... I dunno... Anyone who starts an ofice war over _that_ and spends some inordinate amount of effort trying to rouse the rabble to "fix" _that_... needs to get a life. Seriously.
Or in other words, there are support groups for OCPD, ya know? Do apply perfectionism to your algorithms and such, but there _are_ better things to achieve than the perfect indentation :P
I can see your point, but the question and the context was about laptops that run PC games.
Portables like the original gameboy or the newer DS, are a bit of a fixed target: a game either runs on that one configuration, or it doesn't. There are no games written for a DS with an upgraded graphics card, or with more RAM.
PC gaming doesn't really have such fixed targets. All games try to surpass last year's in terms of graphics, if nothing else because screenshots sell, and the hardware requirements are occasionally outright silly. I can think of some games (e.g., EQ2) which were launched to match hardware specs that didn't even yet exist. E.g., seriously, to run EQ2 with full graphics details you needed a 512 MB graphics card, and that just didn't exist yet. (Well, ok, maybe except as a high-end, professional OpenGL card for CAD.)
Well, most do advertise themselves somehow.
There's the likes of Uri Geller for example, which make a fortune out of being media celebrity. There are dowsers which land pretty lucrative contracts to dowse for oil. There are guys who contract to find missing persons. There are people selling amulets, electronic gizmos, etc. There are guys like this one who advertises himself as being able to scan someone's brain and see if they murdered someone. I'd imagine it's not for free.
Basically pretty much anyone I've heard about making a claim to be a psychic or to have somehow managed to leapfrog current technology or science, peddles themselves for money.
Even letting aside the cool 1 million dollars from Randi, can you imagine what would it do for their reputation to win that prize and be basically certified as indeed having paranormal skills?
E.g., given how much it costs to drill in one place and see if you find oil, someone certified that he _can_ reliably dowse for oil, would make a bloody fortune. You could ask for a couple of millions just to go dowse in one place regardless of whether you find anything.
E.g., if you got yourself certified that you can find missing persons... well, let's just say some people would currently kill to find Osama.
E.g., telepathy? That's like the Holy Grail for submarine warfare. You'd suddenly have a reliable, instant communication method that works even when the sub is hundreds of metres underwater, and which communication can't be intercepted or detected either. Both the USA and the USSR experimented with it, and both would pay a king's ransom for something like that. I mean, seriously, something like that is worth _billions_ of dollars. Just being able to park even one single submarine next to the enemy's coast, that doesn't have to move or communicate by any detectable means, is something that's an immense advantage and threat by itself.
E.g., reading minds? I bet a few dictators would really pay a king's ransom to know if anyone from their entourage is plotting against them.
Etc. It would be the kind of thing that moves one to the next league.
1. Yep. Let me even give an example. It didn't happen in a team I was in, but I know several people from that team.
So they got a new guy who had some outstanding experience, according to his resume. He had worked on major enterprise projects, been an architect, ate Enterprise Java Beans for breakfast, etc.
Turns out he was utterly incompetent. He spent about a month just getting used to their architecture and IDE and everything, apparently everything they did or the way they did it was new to him, and he needed some time to accomodate. Fair enough. Then started working on something, but never was quite done with it. Eventually they started asking to see some results. He started randomly changing files and checking them back in. The first few times he even had a good excuse, like "oops, I hadn't worked with this particular versioning system before" or "oops, I forgot some other file that mine depends on." There go a few more weeks, before it's obvious that his changes can't possibly even compile, because they have elementary syntax errors.
Eventually they fire him, but by now he's got several months of "experience" there.
Then someone finds his updated resume online. The guy claimed he singlehandedly improved their architecture, increase performance X times, got project management back on track, etc.
2. 'Nother example, my ex-coworker Wally. Spent two years on a trivial module, whose core someone else rewrote from scratch in 6 hours. It took another two weeks or so, mostly of testing, to get it bug-for-bug compatible with his, since a couple of teams already had their own workarounds for them. (Trying to get him to fix it was a bit like negotiating with the terrorists.) The rewrite was also benchmarked as 40 times faster than Wally's on large data sets. Literally. Measured.
The thing everyone remembers fondly about him, is how he asked for 2 weeks just to estimate the effort to fix a trivial bug. He got it too. (His team leader was a bit a Mr Testicle: technically he was involved, but he kept out of it as much as possible;)
He also massively practiced obfuscation. Any of his modules contained half the techniques from How To Write Unmaintainable Java code (literally) and megabytes of files copied from unrelated stuff to pad the number of lines of code per day. Obviously, it worked on his team leader.
Then he got moved through the maintenance of two other programs (one at a time), and just managed to make them both worse.
There we go, that's his provable 2-4 years employment. Well, ok, 5 in his case.
3. Example number 3: Old Father Williams. I got to think of him that way after a particular fortune on my linux box:
Pretty much spent 6 years in a place complaining about everything that everyone else did. Coding style, IDE, OS, _everything_. His first choice of a whine was Windows, which might even have had a point, but when Linux was finally allowed and half the team switched to Linux, plus the servers actually went Linux... he proclaimed Linux to be sell-out crap for idiots, and switched to preaching BSD.
He also caused a reformat-and-commit war in which he was preaching _three_ space tabs, as spaces. And wasn't affraid to check out someone else's project and reformat it, to make his point.
He spent two years, just "modernizing" the build process. Nobody knows what he experimented with on his c
Well, don't get me wrong. I _don't_ support censorship and generally find it stupid. I'm just saying that it didn't give Nazis street cred, like the OP claimed. Really nothing more.
As I was saying in another message, that Hitler fellow had no problems with pretending to be whatever he thought you liked. He had been diagnosed a psychopath during WW1.
The party name, yes, it said "socialist". And he pretended to be socialist to the workers, while at the same time making backroom deals with the industrialists to curb the power of workers and outlaw unions. Which he did. Also the largely socialist (if still thugs) SA got dismantled quite the brutal way, during the "Night Of The Long Knives."
Remember, it's the same guy who pretended to be a friend of the Soviet Union and the socialism/communism when negotiating with Stalin, while at the same time holding internal speeches about communism being the ultimate evil and preaching expansion towards the East.
I guess we won't know what he really believed in. Possibly only that he wants more power. Everything he publically said, was later shown that he couldn't care less about.
E.g., even his brutal hatred of jews... well, for example Heydrich (a.k.a., The Butcher of Prague, or The Blonde Beast) had a jewish grandfather which, under the Third Reich racial purity law would have made him a jew too. He nevertheless rose through the NSDAP, was given important administrative positions, and generally earned a lot of recognition from Hitler. And on one night the SS spent some time in the city archives and changed the records to show that said grandfather wasn't a jew _and_ wasn't even Heydrich's grandfather anyway.
That's just one example. Something didn't add up there. The same guy who publically foamed at the mouth about Jews, had no problem with it when his henchmen qualified as such.
Or they publically denounced the influence of Jews on the culture, and single out operetta (musicals) as some great cultural poison. But at the very same time Hitler had no problem with having favourite operettas whose texts were composed by a Jew, and giving public honours to the German composer who put them on music. (Meanwhile, the guy who wrote those texts was sent to IIRC Auschwitz and died a horrible death there.) I mean, again, something doesn't add up.
I haven't seen that movies, but that's largely inaccurate.
1. The Nazis didn't get a majority in the parliament. In '32 the NSDAP got 37.4% of the votes in Juli, but it had already declined to 33% when new elections had been called in November.
So it's hardly fair to say that the majority of Germans had voted for the Nazis. A disappointingly large number, yes, but not a majority.
2. You have to realize that a lot of this was mostly voting in (a stupidly misguided) protest at the other discredited parties, rather than voting for genocide.
3. You also have to bear in mind that Hitler was quite a two faced fellow. His party claimed to be "Socialist" right in the party name to win the workers' votes, while at the exact same time secretly promising the industry bigwigs to outlaw unions and reduce the workers' rights. He had no problem with pretending to be anything that got him popularity or power. (He had been diagnosed a psychopath in WW1, btw.)
I think far more Germans voted for the "Socialist" part than anything else about that party.
(Boy, were they wrong. Immmediately after he managed to secure power, Hitler did outlaw unions and turned the workers' (and generally everyone's) right to nearly nothing at all. The largely socialist SA faction was purged in the infamous "Night of the Long Knives." Etc.)
4. The hatred agenda wasn't _that_ much popularized. It wasn't exactly secret, but most of the propaganda at that point hammered on two points: more power to the workers, and hatred towards the Treaty of Versailles that ended WW1 on catastrophic terms for Germany. While he made no secret of his dislike for Jews, what he hammered far more on was, "hate the French for the treaty they imposed on us."
5. Even after they were comfortably in power, the Nazis didn't exactly advertise the holocaust. The Eugenics program was all but secret, as it proved hugely unpopular with the German population. The Anti-Semite propaganda generally used euphemisms like sending them back to their land, or generally anywhere else, rather than telling everyone about the brutal holocaust. The "special units" which conducted the pogroms were kept very separate from the Army (Wehrmacht; the SS was not the Army, it was a paramilitary organization) and strictly on a voluntary basis, as it was correctly assessed that it would completely ruin morale if the Army was drafted into doing that.
Now I'm not saying that Germany as a whole doesn't bear some of the guilt there. It does. But there was a carefully constructed wall of plausible deniability, and keeping it as at most something incidentally happening in parallel, rather than as the whole point of the war or of the government. What they hammered on even later was stuff like stopping the spread of communism in Europe, by stopping the Red Army. Nobody put in the official propaganda that they're slaughtering Soviet peasants and prisoners by the million.
What I'm trying to say is that for the average German it was more like something he could choose not to think about, or many probably genuinely didn't even know about, than a case of, "hell yeah! Good thing we elected the Nazis to do that!"
Well, I'm not trying to minimize your country's contribution. Lend-Lease was probably far more important to the fate of the war than the actual troops in Europe, for example, and the B17s did a fine job at tying up inordinate resources to defend against them. Just saying that it's probably not that up close and personal, so to speak.
It's one thing to know that it happens, and it's another to have two grandfathers that got crippled in that war. The latter makes one a lot less likely to pine for a repeat of it, if millions of people are in
I wasn't trying to diminish your country's contribution. I was just taking a wild estimate about _Europe_ and fighting Nazis. From my limited knowledge of history, most of the US troops and casualties were in the Pacific War, which had less to do with Nazis and more with... well, I guess the Japanese delusions of military grandeur.
Still, my bad. I suppose I should have made it much clearer what I mean.
I have a few arab coworkers in quite well paid programming jobs. I'd assume that that counts as above pizza delivery boy.
Quite a mixed bunch too. There are a couple of very smart ones, but at least one is almost literally too stupid to piss holes in the snow. (And I'm not saying that because he's arab. I can think of at least one German coworker who's even more retarded.) I figure that if he could get and keep that job, well, someone must have been very open minded :P
Not saying that racism absolutely doesn't exist. No place on Earth could make that claim. But I'd rate it as a more open-minded place than many, on the whole.
Still, the point I was trying to make is merely that _Nazis_ didn't get some kind of popularity boost because they're forbidden. Which is what the OP was claiming,
I thought the majority of it was in the Pacific War, though? Which didn't have as much to do with Nazism as such, although admittedly the Japanese could be just as brutal.
Learn to read, lemming: "One time I'm dumb enough to say "yes" when he wants to show me how cool CS is and how great he is, after hours. (We were pretty much free to install what we wanted to on the company computers, and a multiplayer round in the lunch break or occasionally after hours was pretty much a sacred tradition for most people.)" Emphasis added for the literacy impaired.
The whole episode happened from about 6 PM to about 8 PM.
I know that reading and comprehension are hard, but do at least try to read before jumping to the trolling ;)
Additionally, well, if you're that interested:
1. The company went bankrupt in the wake of the dot-com bubble bursting, I no longer work there, so I have no particular reason to fear what that boss thinks. We parted on good terms, though.
2. It was a small company and both company owners were in the next room, and quite often in the middle of us. So I'd _worry_ if they need to read Slashdot to find out what went on there.
3. They both took part in those multiplayer rounds. In fact, the one with the most shares in it, was actually the best FPS player in the company. The afore-mentioned willy waver was consistently in the #2 place, but that might also be because nobody else was deranged enough to play only his favourite map or only CS.
I dunno. I'm in Germany, where nazi things are as forbidden as it can possibly get, but I'm not aware of neo-nazis having much street cred or too many people thinking of them as freedom fighters. From the limited and flawed sample I have, it seems to me like there are more neo-nazis, white-supremacists and the like per capita in the USA where it's not forbidden.
Bear in mind that most of Europe has been fucked up hard by WW2. You yanks know WW2 as this war that happened somewhere else, you had a one or two hundred thousand soldiers total, and generally it mostly happened to somewhere else. Here it's a lot closer to home. Germany got not only to lose over 5.5 million soldiers in the war and over 1.5 million civillians in the firebombings, but got to deal with the whole Gestapo and all first hand. There are familes who've had a member or two gassed by Hitler just because they had some chronic disease when that eugenics program was tried.
Now there _are_ a few nostalgiacs about that time, and a few trolls posing as neo-nazis, but on the whole there just isn't that much reason to pine for those times. Which would kind of be required for them to have any significant amount of "street cred."
Germany largely went pacifist and socialist after the war, mostly as a result of still remembering the war and the far-right dictatorship. (Not unlike the USA went pacifist after WW1, but without the isolationism aspect.)
Other countries have even less reasons to cheer for it. France has been bombed by us in one direction, and then by the Allies on the way back. I haven't done a poll there, so I might be talking out the arse, but I don't think many of them pine for those times. And forbidding nazi symbols and the like, doesn't seem to have made people pine for those times more.
Now there seems to be a signifficant amount of French nationalism, but really that's actually mis-labelled. France's "nationalism" and "right wing" aren't as much about nation or race, as about language and culture. The theme doesn't seem as much "go home if you're not white or French" as "go home if you don't freaking want to learn French." In a lot of countries that wouldn't even be considered "nationalism" or "right wing", but rather the baseline as expectations go.
Just about the only countries where racism and nationalism have made a come-back are in the former Eastern Bloc. But there it's not forbidden, so you can't blame it on that.
Finally, note that it's somewhat misleading to paint it as Europe forbidding it _all_ or that it's not allowed to talk about it in the open. We still have documentaries, books about it, and learn history in schools, ya know? So, yes, it is very much possible "to keep tabs on and to criticize it which in turn makes it more likely that people will see it for the bullshit it really is". Most of it, at least. All that's forbidden is nazi propaganda/hate-speech and, depending on the country, the sale or public display of crooked crosses and other nazi symbols.