I lost mod- and meta-mod privs (literally) years ago. A while later, I realised that my meta-mod privs had returned; as far as I know, I still don't have my mod-privs back. I guess I *could* have missed the points, but as I tend to browse the site a couple of times a day every day it seems unlikely...
Actually, in CmdrTaco's defense, I think that's how Slashcode works. If you browse the site "a couple of times a day" it might consider you too busy to receive mod points. Somewhere in the FAQ it mentions that you won't get mod points if you spend all day reloading the front page -- and you won't get them if you only read it every six months.
When I go on a posting binge (as often happens when a story comes up about an issue I care about) I can easily reach 30 or 40 comments in a day. After that it seems that I don't receive mod points for awhile.
Today when I logged in I had five mod points waiting for me -- I hadn't posted in awhile and only read the site a few times over the last week or so because I've been busy.
So what? Free speech isn't about escaping the consequences of what you write. It's about freedom of expression.
If he was being punished for writing "I disagree with this professors political views" or "I disagree with his teaching methods" then, yeah, we'd have a reason to be outraged.
But, "cockmaster"? WTF? Yeah, the original punishment seems a little harsh (loss of scholarship!). Even so I don't see how this is "your rights online".
Actually combine both the js script answer of 10.x.x.x and their server logs and they have machines of lots of guys behind the NAT. Knowing you're 10.0.2.2 behind a NAT gives them nothing. Knowing you're someone behind a NAT of 142.213.23.13 gives them little. Knowing both gives them your precise address.
Yeah, because I wanna see RIAA subpeona the logs off my Linksys NAT Router. Ooops.... the power flickered because I turned the dryer on and the unit reset. Sorry, better luck next time;)
I guess it could be done, but through a script of elevated permissions. Either dig in ActiveX, or in internals of Mozilla/Firefox (userScript, extension), or through some kind of smart xmlHttpRequest() headers mangling by bouncing it against some remote host.
There's a lot of things that can be done in JS despite people telling you otherwise (and specs saying so too).
Even if you could do it in ActiveX or with an undocumented script it wouldn't be reliable. My machine's IP address is 10.0.0.122. Something tells me that IP isn't much use to RIAA. Of course it would be funny if they filed some John Doe lawsuits against 10/8s or 192.168/16s;) Have they yet?
The Windows 2000/XP equivalent is FIXMBR, accessed from the recovery console. I have no idea what ReactOS uses, but it must use something or else you would not be able to install it on an empty disk.
Just pray you haven't forgotten the password that you just know that you set on the hidden "administrator" account (in XP anyway). I went through this nonsense awhile ago when I removed my second hard drive and hosed LILO. I couldn't access the Windows Recovery Console because for some really stupid reason it insisted on having the admin password.
Sure, it's a "security" measure. I call it an annoyance because you can bypass that security with any number of boot CDs (most based on Linux) that let you remove the password from the SAM files. Of course I didn't have any of those CDs on me at the time -- nor did I have a knoppix CD or anything else useful (I had just moved). I eventually wound up driving to a friends house to make a password bypass cd.
Really? I thought the Intelligent Designer (who we wont name because that would show us up for who we are; fundie idiots) blinked the world in to existance in a single instant. I mean life is too complicated to arise by chance, right? I just don't want to believe I'm related to an animal renound for picking shit out of it's ass. Man was created by God and that's that, these scientist don't know anything.
As a consumer, you have two choices - buy it or go without. There is no justification to the third option that people on here assume - take it anyway.
As a business, you have two choices. Adapt or die. Suing your customers and buying off politicians is not a viable strategy in the long term. Of course nowadays the CEOs don't need to think long term because if they mess things up badly enough that they need to leave they will just get a fat severance package. Maybe one day shareholders will start thinking long term again instead of hoping for that huge price jump tomorrow.
Wasn't the approval ratings for the then currently ruling party's policies something like 75% in 1936 in Germany?
Wow it only took four messages to invoke Goodwin's law. That's gotta be some kind of record.
I'm getting tired of the Nazi references in every discussion. A lot of us don't like Bush either but we don't make that stupid reference. Get back to me when Bush has roasted 16,000,000 people in ovens and killed another 20,000,000 or so in a war of aggression.
As much as I hate the man that comment is really stupid. Bush is a fascist? Bush has never stepped one foot outside of public opinion. Witness his "have it both ways" stances on stem cell research, the Dept. of Homeland Security that he initially opposed, campaign finance reform, etc, etc. It's hard to call him a fascist when he hasn't issued a single veto and when everything is run by the political wing. Fascists don't really care what public opinion thinks.
That would be NO binary drivers. You use binary drivers at your own risks.
Then I guess I can wait until that brand spanking new video card is obsolete before I can use it in X, because it'll take that long to reverse engineer it and write drivers that can do half the stuff the vendor supplied drivers can.
Let's be real. We all can't take that stand of principal and lock ourself out of a lot of options. Kudos to those who can but "use them at your own risk" is not a good enough answer for most people.
I should also mention that I've heard from the horse's mouth (a Microsoft engineer that spoke to my operating systems class in college) that MS knows third-party drivers cause most of their kernel crashes (at least in 2000/XP). If Linux is made by hardware vendors to rely on binary drivers, where exactly does that leave its stability advantage?
Actually this is a very important point that I hope doesn't get overlooked in this discussion. Even going back to Win95/98 I think the lions share of the stability issues could legitimately be blamed on hardware drivers. Who here doesn't remember the lovely "house of PCI cards" effect with Win95?
So if Linux starts relying on vendor supplied binary drivers then how would the community protect the stability and security of the OS? What would the Linux version of Microsoft's signed/certified drivers be?
2) "Tech companies" did not fail to constrain costs in the late 1990s, internet startups failed to have viable business plans. There is a big difference.
What's not viable about selling dimes for nickels and making up the loss in volume?
I suppose that clever satire is more work than just making some stupid unthinking GNU/joke. Hahahahahaha! I put "GNU/" in front of a word! I'm so funny and cool!
Did you get up on the wrong side of bed this morning or something?
I was trying to create a light moment at the expense of people who are actually serious about the "GNU/Whatever" naming scheme. It seemed more productive then the GNOME v. KDE flamefest that was about to kick off.
But, congrats, I got a flamebait mod. I guess you got what you were looking for. One can only onder if the mod was using a GNU system. Would that mean I got GNU/Flamebait'ed?
Hey look, I'm feeding the troll here, but where did I say anything but CLI was for lamers? I said that I could almost get by in this day and age without a GUI. I didn't say that I could or that I would.
For the record I spend about 25% of my time in Windows XP, 50% of my time in KDE and 25% of my time at the Linux console. If I'm coding anything more complicated then a small PHP script then I'd prefer to be on the command line. Less distractions that way and I can switch between consoles with ALT + Fkey a lot faster then I can take my hands off the keyboard and use the mouse.
In fact, when I code stuff from Windows I'm almost always using putty in full screen mode and screen on the remote box. Personally I find it hard to think clearly about solving a problem if I'm distracted by a bright screen littered with icons I'm not using.
Well this could be the other argument: "Gnome is for idiots, KDE is too, for that matter any windowing system is designed with idiots in mind. They are just dumbed down. My choice is CLI, there are so many programs written for it and it is not intuitive at all, just like a system interface should be."
Laugh, but when I built my first Linux system I got by for almost two years with just the CLI because X wasn't stable enough in those days to run on my crappy Compaq hardware.
ircII epic, a cmdline IM client whose name I can't recall, pine, and MCL. Yeah, I spent most of my time on the internet playing MUDs and chatting on IRC. But I was more then happy with my CLI only Linux box. I didn't even need to boot into Windows to do my banking -- because back in those days my credit union had a dial-in system. They supplied front end software but you could easily access it through minicom if you wanted to.
In fact, other then Firefox and a Word Processor I could almost get by with a CLI only environment in this day and age.
And Linus surely doesn't either. Maybe Gnome is better for Mom and Grandpa. I'll stick with KDE, myself.
I don't even know if that point is valid. All of my non-geek friends that I've converted to Linux are using KDE. It works very well for them -- in most cases right out of the box.
If people can learn how to use Windows then they can learn how to use KDE or GNOME. I personally use KDE because I think it's more powerful and it's the only one still shipping with Slackware (yep, I'm one of those). In fact I lost a lot of faith in ever using GNOME when I saw how many packages I would need to install just to get GNUCash working. Perhaps that isn't fair (KDE has almost as many packages and GNUCash is close to becoming abandonware), but first impressions are everything and mine was somewhat negative.
I'm also not a very big fan of the GNU zealots and their crusade. I just want something that works and that I have control over. I don't really care of it's an Apache license, BSD license or GPL. I suspect that most people don't either.
Just as governement agencies can request your telephone records if you call someone with a death threat (now, in complete secrecy, whether or not you've violated the law), it's hard to imagine them not being able to acquire the same kind of information from the service responsible for routing them.
So the protocol would force the message to be deleted off the headset but the network would retain a copy? Kinda defeats the purpose of the security doesn't it?
Do the cell networks even keep a copy of normal SMS traffic? Or do they just log the fact that an SMS message was sent for billing purposes (like normal phone records -- they don't log the call itself)? Do they even keep a record of who you send messages to or just a running count?
As a service this would sell to a) bad managers and b) people who make videotapes of themselves... Wait a second, how do I invest again? That seems to be a fair-sized market.
I don't think it's a troll at all. The minute I read this story the word "DRM" popped into my head.
Why should a sender be able to control what happens to a message that my device receives? It's all well and good that they can tell the network to drop the message after X seconds (assuming it isn't delivered) -- but why the hell should they be able to tell my device what to do with that message?
What's next? A new e-mail protocol where you can add an "X-No-Archive" like header to your messages and force the people who receive your e-mails to delete them after reading them?
1. Expecting England to fold: He offered very advantageous peace terms which Churchill rationally should have accepted. (I think this ties in with all that Hess mystery.) England was a big loser in WW2: it lost its empire and its investments in Poland, and it lost its world markets to the US. But Churchill's career was based on "Carthago delenda est", and he always did what the US wanted.
You say that like it's a bad thing. Churchill sacarficed the British Empire to prevent Nazi Germany from becoming a World Power. That took guts. Hitler had always wanted peace (if not an outright alliance) with the "Anglo-Saxon Sea Powers". If Churchill had made peace with the Germans it's anybody guess as to what would have happened.
Poland wasn't lost because of British action. Poland was lost because the Allies decided it wasn't worth going to war with Stalin to save it. We can debate the wisdom of that decision all these years later. There were a lot of people in the British Government and Officer Corps that advocated continuing the war back to the Soviet Union's borders once Germany was defeated. Churchill himself probably even toyed with the idea (when he wasn't busy splitting Europe up with Stalin). Of course it's highly unlikely that the Brits could have gotten the United States to go along with it. If we had then it's anybody's guess as to what would have happened. Even without the Atomic Bomb it doubtless would have been the most destructive conflict in World history. Given the Allied advantage in Air Power it's probable that the Soviet Union would have been completely devistated. Who knows which Army would have survived to claim the ashes of Europe.
2. Declaring war on US: US was shipping large amounts of munitions to England in breach of the Geneva Convention on noncombatants. By declaring war, Hitler was free to attack US shipping without breaching the Geneva Convention.
True, and FDR had unleashed the US Navy on German U-Boats. Hitler actually swallowed this provocation for quite awhile. Still, I don't think it was wise to declare war on the United States. If I was in his shoes I would have condemned the Japanese Attack, terminated my alliance with them, offered assistance to the United States and done everything in my power to turn American public opinion against going to war with Germany. Half of the American public would have celebrated a German victory over the Soviet Union. Germany was already embroiled in a war of annihilation against the second most powerful country in the World. To declare war on the first seems pretty suicidal in hindsight. By the time he was done Germany was fighting an alliance that had about 30 times as much territory and 10 times the population.
3. Declaring war on Soviet Union: Hitler indeed had always planned to seize territory to the east. He had good information that the Soviet officer cadre, obliterated during the purges, was close to becoming effective again; he was also extremely worried about the new T34 tank, which the Soviets were not able to produce in large quantities until 1942. He felt that he needed to seize a window of opportunity while the US was precoccupied with the Japs.
There was a very good chance the Germans could have beaten the Russians. I just question the wisdom of going to war against them while still fighting the British. There was zero chance of peace while Churchill was in power. But then, I don't know what Germany could have done to knock the UK out of the war in any case. There was no chance of defeating the Royal Air Force or Navy. Had the Germans defeated the Soviet Union then it's probable that England would have had no other choice but to make peace -- think a Normandy landing is possible if the German Army wasn't in Russia? In any case I think you'd agree that drawing the United States in was sheer insanity.
As far as the Japanese go, they were idiots about it too. If I had been in their position I would have just seized the Dutch East Indies an
I'm sure it was. And I didn't mean to slam you. Just pointing out that we've heard way too much about bird-flu and not enough about other issues that are important.
Hell, if mankind weathered the Spanish Flu with WW1 technology then somehow I think we'll manage the bird-flu. Kinda makes you wonder how the human race survived for all those years without media pundits and politicans scaring them half to death.
Slashdot Mirror
I lost mod- and meta-mod privs (literally) years ago. A while later, I realised that my meta-mod privs had returned; as far as I know, I still don't have my mod-privs back. I guess I *could* have missed the points, but as I tend to browse the site a couple of times a day every day it seems unlikely...
Actually, in CmdrTaco's defense, I think that's how Slashcode works. If you browse the site "a couple of times a day" it might consider you too busy to receive mod points. Somewhere in the FAQ it mentions that you won't get mod points if you spend all day reloading the front page -- and you won't get them if you only read it every six months.
When I go on a posting binge (as often happens when a story comes up about an issue I care about) I can easily reach 30 or 40 comments in a day. After that it seems that I don't receive mod points for awhile.
Today when I logged in I had five mod points waiting for me -- I hadn't posted in awhile and only read the site a few times over the last week or so because I've been busy.
So what? He didn't name the teacher.
So what? Free speech isn't about escaping the consequences of what you write. It's about freedom of expression.
If he was being punished for writing "I disagree with this professors political views" or "I disagree with his teaching methods" then, yeah, we'd have a reason to be outraged.
But, "cockmaster"? WTF? Yeah, the original punishment seems a little harsh (loss of scholarship!). Even so I don't see how this is "your rights online".
Actually combine both the js script answer of 10.x.x.x and their server logs and they have machines of lots of guys behind the NAT. Knowing you're 10.0.2.2 behind a NAT gives them nothing. Knowing you're someone behind a NAT of 142.213.23.13 gives them little. Knowing both gives them your precise address.
Yeah, because I wanna see RIAA subpeona the logs off my Linksys NAT Router. Ooops.... the power flickered because I turned the dryer on and the unit reset. Sorry, better luck next time ;)
I guess it could be done, but through a script of elevated permissions. Either dig in ActiveX, or in internals of Mozilla/Firefox (userScript, extension), or through some kind of smart xmlHttpRequest() headers mangling by bouncing it against some remote host. There's a lot of things that can be done in JS despite people telling you otherwise (and specs saying so too).
Even if you could do it in ActiveX or with an undocumented script it wouldn't be reliable. My machine's IP address is 10.0.0.122. Something tells me that IP isn't much use to RIAA. Of course it would be funny if they filed some John Doe lawsuits against 10/8s or 192.168/16s ;) Have they yet?
It has to be server side to do what they want.
The Windows 2000/XP equivalent is FIXMBR, accessed from the recovery console. I have no idea what ReactOS uses, but it must use something or else you would not be able to install it on an empty disk.
Just pray you haven't forgotten the password that you just know that you set on the hidden "administrator" account (in XP anyway). I went through this nonsense awhile ago when I removed my second hard drive and hosed LILO. I couldn't access the Windows Recovery Console because for some really stupid reason it insisted on having the admin password.
Sure, it's a "security" measure. I call it an annoyance because you can bypass that security with any number of boot CDs (most based on Linux) that let you remove the password from the SAM files. Of course I didn't have any of those CDs on me at the time -- nor did I have a knoppix CD or anything else useful (I had just moved). I eventually wound up driving to a friends house to make a password bypass cd.
Really? I thought the Intelligent Designer (who we wont name because that would show us up for who we are; fundie idiots) blinked the world in to existance in a single instant. I mean life is too complicated to arise by chance, right? I just don't want to believe I'm related to an animal renound for picking shit out of it's ass. Man was created by God and that's that, these scientist don't know anything.
You aren't related to an animal. Humans appeared in the Garden of Eden, widely regarded to be in the Middle East somewhere (Taurus Mountains?). The Middle East is in Asia. So TFA and Intelligent Design are both correct!
Woo-hoo!
As a consumer, you have two choices - buy it or go without. There is no justification to the third option that people on here assume - take it anyway.
As a business, you have two choices. Adapt or die. Suing your customers and buying off politicians is not a viable strategy in the long term. Of course nowadays the CEOs don't need to think long term because if they mess things up badly enough that they need to leave they will just get a fat severance package. Maybe one day shareholders will start thinking long term again instead of hoping for that huge price jump tomorrow.
This guy would probably have some things to say about Hitler's honesty.
We're agreeing! I'm going to www.accuweather.com to check a temperature. Do you have the ZIP Code for Hell?
There was a time when you could have gone to NOAA to check that temperature. Did Rick Santourm finally get this way?
Disclaimer: May not want to follow that link at the office ;)
Wasn't the approval ratings for the then currently ruling party's policies something like 75% in 1936 in Germany?
Wow it only took four messages to invoke Goodwin's law. That's gotta be some kind of record.
I'm getting tired of the Nazi references in every discussion. A lot of us don't like Bush either but we don't make that stupid reference. Get back to me when Bush has roasted 16,000,000 people in ovens and killed another 20,000,000 or so in a war of aggression.
And I would say that Bush truely is a fascist,
As much as I hate the man that comment is really stupid. Bush is a fascist? Bush has never stepped one foot outside of public opinion. Witness his "have it both ways" stances on stem cell research, the Dept. of Homeland Security that he initially opposed, campaign finance reform, etc, etc. It's hard to call him a fascist when he hasn't issued a single veto and when everything is run by the political wing. Fascists don't really care what public opinion thinks.
That would be NO binary drivers. You use binary drivers at your own risks.
Then I guess I can wait until that brand spanking new video card is obsolete before I can use it in X, because it'll take that long to reverse engineer it and write drivers that can do half the stuff the vendor supplied drivers can.
Let's be real. We all can't take that stand of principal and lock ourself out of a lot of options. Kudos to those who can but "use them at your own risk" is not a good enough answer for most people.
I should also mention that I've heard from the horse's mouth (a Microsoft engineer that spoke to my operating systems class in college) that MS knows third-party drivers cause most of their kernel crashes (at least in 2000/XP). If Linux is made by hardware vendors to rely on binary drivers, where exactly does that leave its stability advantage?
Actually this is a very important point that I hope doesn't get overlooked in this discussion. Even going back to Win95/98 I think the lions share of the stability issues could legitimately be blamed on hardware drivers. Who here doesn't remember the lovely "house of PCI cards" effect with Win95?
So if Linux starts relying on vendor supplied binary drivers then how would the community protect the stability and security of the OS? What would the Linux version of Microsoft's signed/certified drivers be?
2) "Tech companies" did not fail to constrain costs in the late 1990s, internet startups failed to have viable business plans. There is a big difference.
What's not viable about selling dimes for nickels and making up the loss in volume?
I suppose that clever satire is more work than just making some stupid unthinking GNU/joke. Hahahahahaha! I put "GNU/" in front of a word! I'm so funny and cool!
Did you get up on the wrong side of bed this morning or something?
I was trying to create a light moment at the expense of people who are actually serious about the "GNU/Whatever" naming scheme. It seemed more productive then the GNOME v. KDE flamefest that was about to kick off.
But, congrats, I got a flamebait mod. I guess you got what you were looking for. One can only onder if the mod was using a GNU system. Would that mean I got GNU/Flamebait'ed?
(Ok, I'll stop now ;)
GNU/CLI ? *dive*
Careful. When I made that joke I got modded flamebait. Some people have no sense of humor :)
Hey look, I'm feeding the troll here, but where did I say anything but CLI was for lamers? I said that I could almost get by in this day and age without a GUI. I didn't say that I could or that I would.
For the record I spend about 25% of my time in Windows XP, 50% of my time in KDE and 25% of my time at the Linux console. If I'm coding anything more complicated then a small PHP script then I'd prefer to be on the command line. Less distractions that way and I can switch between consoles with ALT + Fkey a lot faster then I can take my hands off the keyboard and use the mouse.
In fact, when I code stuff from Windows I'm almost always using putty in full screen mode and screen on the remote box. Personally I find it hard to think clearly about solving a problem if I'm distracted by a bright screen littered with icons I'm not using.
Well this could be the other argument: "Gnome is for idiots, KDE is too, for that matter any windowing system is designed with idiots in mind. They are just dumbed down. My choice is CLI, there are so many programs written for it and it is not intuitive at all, just like a system interface should be."
Laugh, but when I built my first Linux system I got by for almost two years with just the CLI because X wasn't stable enough in those days to run on my crappy Compaq hardware.
ircII epic, a cmdline IM client whose name I can't recall, pine, and MCL. Yeah, I spent most of my time on the internet playing MUDs and chatting on IRC. But I was more then happy with my CLI only Linux box. I didn't even need to boot into Windows to do my banking -- because back in those days my credit union had a dial-in system. They supplied front end software but you could easily access it through minicom if you wanted to.
In fact, other then Firefox and a Word Processor I could almost get by with a CLI only environment in this day and age.
And Linus surely doesn't either. Maybe Gnome is better for Mom and Grandpa. I'll stick with KDE, myself.
I don't even know if that point is valid. All of my non-geek friends that I've converted to Linux are using KDE. It works very well for them -- in most cases right out of the box.
If people can learn how to use Windows then they can learn how to use KDE or GNOME. I personally use KDE because I think it's more powerful and it's the only one still shipping with Slackware (yep, I'm one of those). In fact I lost a lot of faith in ever using GNOME when I saw how many packages I would need to install just to get GNUCash working. Perhaps that isn't fair (KDE has almost as many packages and GNUCash is close to becoming abandonware), but first impressions are everything and mine was somewhat negative.
I'm also not a very big fan of the GNU zealots and their crusade. I just want something that works and that I have control over. I don't really care of it's an Apache license, BSD license or GPL. I suspect that most people don't either.
No, but it's more important what he didn't say then what he did. I for one, can't help but notice how he left out the GNU in "GNU/KDE". Oh wait....
*duck*
Just as governement agencies can request your telephone records if you call someone with a death threat (now, in complete secrecy, whether or not you've violated the law), it's hard to imagine them not being able to acquire the same kind of information from the service responsible for routing them.
So the protocol would force the message to be deleted off the headset but the network would retain a copy? Kinda defeats the purpose of the security doesn't it?
Do the cell networks even keep a copy of normal SMS traffic? Or do they just log the fact that an SMS message was sent for billing purposes (like normal phone records -- they don't log the call itself)? Do they even keep a record of who you send messages to or just a running count?
As a service this would sell to a) bad managers and b) people who make videotapes of themselves... Wait a second, how do I invest again? That seems to be a fair-sized market.
There are good managers?
I don't think it's a troll at all. The minute I read this story the word "DRM" popped into my head.
Why should a sender be able to control what happens to a message that my device receives? It's all well and good that they can tell the network to drop the message after X seconds (assuming it isn't delivered) -- but why the hell should they be able to tell my device what to do with that message?
What's next? A new e-mail protocol where you can add an "X-No-Archive" like header to your messages and force the people who receive your e-mails to delete them after reading them?
1. Expecting England to fold: He offered very advantageous peace terms which Churchill rationally should have accepted. (I think this ties in with all that Hess mystery.) England was a big loser in WW2: it lost its empire and its investments in Poland, and it lost its world markets to the US. But Churchill's career was based on "Carthago delenda est", and he always did what the US wanted.
You say that like it's a bad thing. Churchill sacarficed the British Empire to prevent Nazi Germany from becoming a World Power. That took guts. Hitler had always wanted peace (if not an outright alliance) with the "Anglo-Saxon Sea Powers". If Churchill had made peace with the Germans it's anybody guess as to what would have happened.
Poland wasn't lost because of British action. Poland was lost because the Allies decided it wasn't worth going to war with Stalin to save it. We can debate the wisdom of that decision all these years later. There were a lot of people in the British Government and Officer Corps that advocated continuing the war back to the Soviet Union's borders once Germany was defeated. Churchill himself probably even toyed with the idea (when he wasn't busy splitting Europe up with Stalin). Of course it's highly unlikely that the Brits could have gotten the United States to go along with it. If we had then it's anybody's guess as to what would have happened. Even without the Atomic Bomb it doubtless would have been the most destructive conflict in World history. Given the Allied advantage in Air Power it's probable that the Soviet Union would have been completely devistated. Who knows which Army would have survived to claim the ashes of Europe.
2. Declaring war on US: US was shipping large amounts of munitions to England in breach of the Geneva Convention on noncombatants. By declaring war, Hitler was free to attack US shipping without breaching the Geneva Convention.
True, and FDR had unleashed the US Navy on German U-Boats. Hitler actually swallowed this provocation for quite awhile. Still, I don't think it was wise to declare war on the United States. If I was in his shoes I would have condemned the Japanese Attack, terminated my alliance with them, offered assistance to the United States and done everything in my power to turn American public opinion against going to war with Germany. Half of the American public would have celebrated a German victory over the Soviet Union. Germany was already embroiled in a war of annihilation against the second most powerful country in the World. To declare war on the first seems pretty suicidal in hindsight. By the time he was done Germany was fighting an alliance that had about 30 times as much territory and 10 times the population.
3. Declaring war on Soviet Union: Hitler indeed had always planned to seize territory to the east. He had good information that the Soviet officer cadre, obliterated during the purges, was close to becoming effective again; he was also extremely worried about the new T34 tank, which the Soviets were not able to produce in large quantities until 1942. He felt that he needed to seize a window of opportunity while the US was precoccupied with the Japs.
There was a very good chance the Germans could have beaten the Russians. I just question the wisdom of going to war against them while still fighting the British. There was zero chance of peace while Churchill was in power. But then, I don't know what Germany could have done to knock the UK out of the war in any case. There was no chance of defeating the Royal Air Force or Navy. Had the Germans defeated the Soviet Union then it's probable that England would have had no other choice but to make peace -- think a Normandy landing is possible if the German Army wasn't in Russia? In any case I think you'd agree that drawing the United States in was sheer insanity.
As far as the Japanese go, they were idiots about it too. If I had been in their position I would have just seized the Dutch East Indies an
I'm sure it was. And I didn't mean to slam you. Just pointing out that we've heard way too much about bird-flu and not enough about other issues that are important.
Hell, if mankind weathered the Spanish Flu with WW1 technology then somehow I think we'll manage the bird-flu. Kinda makes you wonder how the human race survived for all those years without media pundits and politicans scaring them half to death.