Nazi's were greeted as liberators by russian peasants.
This sounds like someone re-writing history because they're anti-communist. I'm not saying that all the peasants loved Uncle Joe Stalin, but they must have realised how bad the Nazis were by then?
Overall though, Hitler became grossly overconfident as a result of the 'easy' victory in France.
Thank you, I've never heard a good strategic reason for Operation Barbarossa, only ever idealistic excuses that didn't sound really plausible. This makes sense.
No, from the Nazis point of view, the invasion and subjugation of Russia was essential both on racial and political grounds: they thought of the Russians as Slavic Subhumans, and of course they hated Communism.
Without thse ideological elements, they wouldn't have been Nazis.
Actually, the Nazis could have won if they didn't have a racial idealogue.
Well, yes, it usually all comes down to that the Nazis could have won if they weren't Nazis, or hadn't had Hitler as their leader.
The problem with Nazism is that it required the whole world to be invaded and run as one big slave camp. The problem with Hitler is that he was a poor military strategist.
In both cases, early successes led them to believe that they were unbeatable.
It'd be interesting if some historians wrote some alternate-timeline novels about how things would be today if things had gone differently back then, perhaps with Hitler being deposed and replaced with someone smarter and more realistic, or a chancellor being elected who didn't start a war.
The probelm with that is that most interesting alternative histories are based on scenarios where something worse happens than actually did.
A story about the gradual rise of a non-aggressive Social Democratic Germany, ending up more or less with the political and economic situation we have today, would probably not grip that many people on the face of it, even though it would actually be fascinating to see what happened to Russia, the USA and the UK in the absence of WW2.
It's why dystopian fiction is much more popular than utopian fiction.
Nobody ever claimed Iraq had nukes. WMDs can be chemical or biological as well, and everyone knew Saddam had used chemical weapons on the Kurds.
Calling chemical weapons Weapons of Mass Destruction is pushing things though. I suppose theoretically a biological weapon could wipe out a whole city if you could properly weaponise anthrax or something, but I don't think anyone has actually proved this can be done in practice. And a chemical attack, although psychologically unpleasant, doesn't really kill any more people than a conventional bombing or rocket raid.
The whole "WMD" thing was just a way of conflating theoretical threats with that of nuclear weapons, which are genuinely capable of killing hundreds of thousands of people at once.
Which is all well and good for you, except for the vast majority of people in the first world these days, it's not just a phone, it's a pocket computer. Sometimes the primary method by which they access the internet.
I don't know anyone who uses a phone as their primary method to access the internet. Even teenagers would rather use a tablet or laptop for anything other than simple text only messaging.
Aside: it would also be good if Slashdot had a "Reply to This" link under each post, so that people wouldn't reply out of place at the end of the thread all the time.
Er, I'm replying to this by clicking the "Reply to This" link under your post. One of us is missing something.
Thanks for conforming to the official Slashdot posting instruction: "any post correcting a grammatical mistake must itself contain a grammatical mistake"
In other words, a demographic that respects the concept of property rights. Once I buy [a copy of] something, I own it [i.e., that copy]. Because it is my property, I have the right to use it as I wish!
But I thought software, like digital music and movies, wasn't property and therefore couldn't be stolen?
I agree with you, but it's kind of ironic that you can use the same argument for god. You can't assume that there is no god, just because you can't detect him/her/it.
There is at least some logic behind a belief in the existence of extra-terrestial life, whereas there is none behind that of god(s).
As a person who believes God created the earth in 6 days -I'm curious- why do you care what we think?
No one would care what you believed if you just kept it to yourself. I don't have a problem with Flat Earthers or UFO Abductees because their beliefs do not impact on public life.
But religion is far more organised and popular, so potentially your ideas may be taught as fact in schools.
I'm not saying it's 1 or 2 people, I'm saying it's a small percentage of the population.
But the point is that intelligence is a curve, not a series of step jumps. And it is simply not true that only a tiny fraction of a percentage point of people can do anything beyond working as a simple farm labourer. Something approaching 50% of kids now go to University in the UK. They're not all Albert Einstein, but neither are they illiterate serfs.
A lot of the donkey work in science and technology (and everything else) is done by people with average IQs.
I would tend to agree. Even within our own human population it seems that only a relatively small number of people have allowed us to advance past the age of agriculture, into the age of electronics and interconnected networks. If the average person was just a little bit dumber, we probably wouldn't be able to sustain the level of technology we currently have. If the average IQ of people was closer to where an IQ of 75 currently is, we'd probably never reach the point where the average person could read, because they would lack the cognitive capacity to do it, or it would take so much training for such a low level of reading, that the effort would be close to useless.
You are using the "great men" theory of history, where the occasional genius produces a step change in human development. In reality, technological progress is much more the result of the work of thousands or millions of previous discoveries and inventions in an incremental fashion.
Sir Tim Berners Lee couldn't have invented the WWW in the 1880s.
Surely if your friend posted a story on "school shooting, 30 dead" they'd have a comment at the end like "so sad" at least. It's their comment you're "liking".
Me too. In 1970. I brought a box to school, all taped closed, with a switch and a blinking light. 2nd grade. Teacher asked me "what's that?". I answered "It's a bomb."
They called my mom. "XXX says he has a bomb. Does he really have a bomb?". "No, he has a vivid imagination." That was the end of it.
This really happened.
Punchline: it then exploded and razed the school to the ground, and you are posting this anecdote from Hell.
"That's "whom to contact", as any 9th grader would tell you:D"
In everyday British English 'who to contact' is quite correct. In formal written English 'whom' is considered to be more appropriate - but this practice is increasingly looked upon as pedantic and affected. The only place where it is mandatory to use 'whom' is when it is governed by a preposition.
The only time I ever hear people use "whom" nowadays is in quotations like "for whom the bell tolls". Someone who answered a phone call with "to whom am I speaking?" would sound like they were taking the piss or had been watching too much Downton Abbey, however correct it might be in theory.
There's a lot of islamophobic stupidity in this country at the moment and it runs deep in all government institutions especially involving police or defense.
Yes, it is not easy to overcome millions of years of evolution which selected for greater pattern recognition, allowing our species to survive over others with inferior pattern recognition skills.
Being able to identify that someone has a different skin colour is of little evolutionary benefit . Unless you think people with different skin colours are a different species, I suppose, and there's a word for that.
Slashdot Mirror
Nazi's were greeted as liberators by russian peasants.
This sounds like someone re-writing history because they're anti-communist. I'm not saying that all the peasants loved Uncle Joe Stalin, but they must have realised how bad the Nazis were by then?
Overall though, Hitler became grossly overconfident as a result of the 'easy' victory in France.
Thank you, I've never heard a good strategic reason for Operation Barbarossa, only ever idealistic excuses that didn't sound really plausible. This makes sense.
No, from the Nazis point of view, the invasion and subjugation of Russia was essential both on racial and political grounds: they thought of the Russians as Slavic Subhumans, and of course they hated Communism.
Without thse ideological elements, they wouldn't have been Nazis.
Actually, the Nazis could have won if they didn't have a racial idealogue.
Well, yes, it usually all comes down to that the Nazis could have won if they weren't Nazis, or hadn't had Hitler as their leader.
The problem with Nazism is that it required the whole world to be invaded and run as one big slave camp. The problem with Hitler is that he was a poor military strategist.
In both cases, early successes led them to believe that they were unbeatable.
It'd be interesting if some historians wrote some alternate-timeline novels about how things would be today if things had gone differently back then, perhaps with Hitler being deposed and replaced with someone smarter and more realistic, or a chancellor being elected who didn't start a war.
The probelm with that is that most interesting alternative histories are based on scenarios where something worse happens than actually did.
A story about the gradual rise of a non-aggressive Social Democratic Germany, ending up more or less with the political and economic situation we have today, would probably not grip that many people on the face of it, even though it would actually be fascinating to see what happened to Russia, the USA and the UK in the absence of WW2.
It's why dystopian fiction is much more popular than utopian fiction.
Nobody ever claimed Iraq had nukes. WMDs can be chemical or biological as well, and everyone knew Saddam had used chemical weapons on the Kurds.
Calling chemical weapons Weapons of Mass Destruction is pushing things though. I suppose theoretically a biological weapon could wipe out a whole city if you could properly weaponise anthrax or something, but I don't think anyone has actually proved this can be done in practice. And a chemical attack, although psychologically unpleasant, doesn't really kill any more people than a conventional bombing or rocket raid.
The whole "WMD" thing was just a way of conflating theoretical threats with that of nuclear weapons, which are genuinely capable of killing hundreds of thousands of people at once.
Which is all well and good for you, except for the vast majority of people in the first world these days, it's not just a phone, it's a pocket computer. Sometimes the primary method by which they access the internet.
I don't know anyone who uses a phone as their primary method to access the internet. Even teenagers would rather use a tablet or laptop for anything other than simple text only messaging.
People who ARE serious about taking photos will buy a real DSLR. People who are serious about 4K video will buy a dedicated 4K camcorder
That is a pretty feeble argument. For most people, a modern smartphone camera/video is all they need for selfies, holiday snaps or whatever.
Aside: it would also be good if Slashdot had a "Reply to This" link under each post, so that people wouldn't reply out of place at the end of the thread all the time.
Er, I'm replying to this by clicking the "Reply to This" link under your post. One of us is missing something.
Yet here were are
Thanks for conforming to the official Slashdot posting instruction: "any post correcting a grammatical mistake must itself contain a grammatical mistake"
In other words, a demographic that respects the concept of property rights. Once I buy [a copy of] something, I own it [i.e., that copy]. Because it is my property, I have the right to use it as I wish!
But I thought software, like digital music and movies, wasn't property and therefore couldn't be stolen?
I agree with you, but it's kind of ironic that you can use the same argument for god. You can't assume that there is no god, just because you can't detect him/her/it.
There is at least some logic behind a belief in the existence of extra-terrestial life, whereas there is none behind that of god(s).
As a person who believes God created the earth in 6 days -I'm curious- why do you care what we think?
No one would care what you believed if you just kept it to yourself. I don't have a problem with Flat Earthers or UFO Abductees because their beliefs do not impact on public life.
But religion is far more organised and popular, so potentially your ideas may be taught as fact in schools.
There are decades of reports from credible people of unidentifiable flying objects that cant be passed off as weather, flying rocks or balloons.
More than that, the US government shot one down over Roseell in 1947. I've seen the alien autopsy pictures and everything.
Plus I was abducted by a UFO last year and anally probed. At least, that's what they said after that stag do.
I'm not saying it's 1 or 2 people, I'm saying it's a small percentage of the population.
But the point is that intelligence is a curve, not a series of step jumps. And it is simply not true that only a tiny fraction of a percentage point of people can do anything beyond working as a simple farm labourer. Something approaching 50% of kids now go to University in the UK. They're not all Albert Einstein, but neither are they illiterate serfs.
A lot of the donkey work in science and technology (and everything else) is done by people with average IQs.
I would tend to agree. Even within our own human population it seems that only a relatively small number of people have allowed us to advance past the age of agriculture, into the age of electronics and interconnected networks. If the average person was just a little bit dumber, we probably wouldn't be able to sustain the level of technology we currently have. If the average IQ of people was closer to where an IQ of 75 currently is, we'd probably never reach the point where the average person could read, because they would lack the cognitive capacity to do it, or it would take so much training for such a low level of reading, that the effort would be close to useless.
You are using the "great men" theory of history, where the occasional genius produces a step change in human development. In reality, technological progress is much more the result of the work of thousands or millions of previous discoveries and inventions in an incremental fashion.
Sir Tim Berners Lee couldn't have invented the WWW in the 1880s.
Until you get arrested for 'hugging' a post made by a teenager ...
But, officer, it said on her profile she was born on 01/01/1990!
No love for flamebait, off-topic or redundant?
I'm pretty sure that every single facebook post is the last of these.
If there's already 15 empathy comments, it's hard to come up with something original.
I find a couple of jokes normally lightens the mood.
I'll get my coat.
"My condolences" ... really? That's NOT better than a button. It's WORSE. Because if you actually meant it, you'd have more to say.
When someone close to you dies there is almost nothing you can say.
And for people you don't know well, anything more than a simple conventionality is just showing off.
Surely if your friend posted a story on "school shooting, 30 dead" they'd have a comment at the end like "so sad" at least. It's their comment you're "liking".
"Islamophobia" is rationally based on the actions of people who loudly proclaim to be Muslims.
No, it's based on a logical fallacy, whose name I forget.
Even if all Terrorists were Muslims, it simply would not follow that all Muslims wereTerrorists.
As a comparison "All KKK members are white men" does not mean "all white men are KKK members".
Me too. In 1970. I brought a box to school, all taped closed, with a switch and a blinking light. 2nd grade. Teacher asked me "what's that?". I answered "It's a bomb."
They called my mom. "XXX says he has a bomb. Does he really have a bomb?". "No, he has a vivid imagination." That was the end of it.
This really happened.
Punchline: it then exploded and razed the school to the ground, and you are posting this anecdote from Hell.
"That's "whom to contact", as any 9th grader would tell you :D"
In everyday British English 'who to contact' is quite correct. In formal written English 'whom' is considered to be more appropriate - but this practice is increasingly looked upon as pedantic and affected. The only place where it is mandatory to use 'whom' is when it is governed by a preposition.
The only time I ever hear people use "whom" nowadays is in quotations like "for whom the bell tolls". Someone who answered a phone call with "to whom am I speaking?" would sound like they were taking the piss or had been watching too much Downton Abbey, however correct it might be in theory.
One of those could be fixed. He could change his name to "Dave."
Yeah "Dave Mohamed" doesn't sound Muslim at all.
There's a lot of islamophobic stupidity in this country at the moment and it runs deep in all government institutions especially involving police or defense.
Yes, it is not easy to overcome millions of years of evolution which selected for greater pattern recognition, allowing our species to survive over others with inferior pattern recognition skills.
Being able to identify that someone has a different skin colour is of little evolutionary benefit . Unless you think people with different skin colours are a different species, I suppose, and there's a word for that.