If you consider Temple of Doom to be the first movie, Indiana Jones is playing more of the mercenary lifestyle. Mod this guy all the way up. How did this slip by me for a quarter of a century?
"Too bad the Hovitos don't know you the way I do, Belloq" - That's right, Indy and Belloq used to be fellow travelers, then after the events of Temple, they developed a "difference of opinion". Belloq is Indy five years before. This also ties in the Crusade teaser, in a broader sense. See Indy the idealist in full force, living the first experience that will turn him cynical. Then back to Raiders, look at the way Marion receives him, with a sucker punch to the mouth - Indiana the cynical bastard we see at the beginning of Temple getting a taste of his just desserts.
As for personal taste, I found the action in Temple to be more than passable, while I found myself grimacing during several points in Crusade, a wholly unsatisfactory experience, as compared to the monumental achievement that was Raiders.
Holy cow, have we just witnessed a guy p0wning hisself? Like the soccer player who unwittingly kicks the ball the wrong way and ends up scoring a goal for the opposing team? How about the guy who KO'd himself in the boxing ring? Or the fielder who tries to catch the deep long fly ball, and it ends up bouncing off his glove for a home run?
Dude, he'll fucking kill your entire family on a dare from the devil, ask Job!
It wasn't just the family, he was turned into a destitute leper, too, if you'll remember. Then within a couple of decades, Yahweh had magnanimously given Job back his health, his livelihood and a new family. His excuse to the man? "Behold the behemoth I have made of thee".
Wow... I was doing pretty good before all this, but thanks a lot... I guess...
Are you implying that Yahweh is like the old man at the car wash that stands by the guy earning minimum wage then barks: "You missed a spot right there"?
Listen, Mr Alphaville detective guy (one of my all time favorite movies), your range of opposites was much narrower than mine, too sane to be declared "safe for consumption".
And what do you think of early Siouxsie And The Banshees, BTW?
The Jesus And Mary Chain, if anything, were influential as opposed to "rock stars". But I see what you mean, even as right now I'm listening to authentic fifties rockabilly, thoroughly impressed. It cuts through many generations, The Jesus And Mary Chain being the last great example of that spirit.
I can only wish that Sonic Youth would have been the kick-start and main influence for the nineties. So far, twenty years down the line, Godspeed You Black Emperor! and The Boredoms are the only bands that I know of, even trying to reach the grand panoramic levels of Daydream Nation.
Talking Heads as Talking Heads is too easy, yet they made it too obvious. Neither points in favor or against. Did I even say anything? Let me try again: immediately after Talking Heads, David Byrne put out an album named The Forest, classical and contemporary pieces named after cities of antiquity (Ur, Tenochtitlan, etc.) My point is that post-Heads output is too weird to qualify as "Rock Star".
The Fall? Stone Roses? Apples? Oranges? I understand your intention. Mark E Smith is a hurricane-force-strength talent. Howard Devoto is nothing to sneeze at, either. Just as it took Hendrix, The Byrds and Bob Dylan to transform fifties rock to sixties smorgasboard, Mark E Smith and Buzzcocks/Magazine built the crucial bridge between 1978 and 1980, pivotal years in the history of rock as an art form, right at the moment when it was being counted out as dead and dead by the mainstream media (known in naive days as "the press"), in quaint pre-Internet days.
So far, Joy Division sounds eternal. Often, so does early New Order, first few albums. I fucking love early New Order, up until Low Life.
- "Hello, my name is Michael" - "HELLO, Michael " - "I'm a Slashdot user and I haven't posted in the last 24 hours" - Cue round of approving applause.
And beyond...
A bunch of support group guys sitting in a circle, shooting the shit:
- "Man, I used to think I had it under control, y'know?" - Silent, nodding acknowledgment. - "Then I was invited to meta-moderate" - More nodding. - "Next thing I knew, I had twenty tabs open, all of them Slashdot. Most were threads, but I always kept the meta page open, and checked the Firehose every fifteen seconds". Then the voice starts to quiver. - (Sobbing) "Even my imaginary girlfriend walked out on me!" At this point, the guy breaks down. - Group hug - "That's okay, bro, that's okay"
Since I can't post proper columns on/., for contrast, I'll do this Artist (well known ones) - - Rock Star.
The Byrds - - The Monkees The New York Dolls - - Kiss The Pixies - - Limp Bizkit Roxy Music - - Duran Duran Public Enemy - - MC Hammer Neil Young - - Hootie And The Blowfish Genesis (Peter Gabriel) - - Genesis (Phil Collins) Stevie Wonder (early seventies) - Celine Dion John Coltrane - - Kenny G (jazz, not rock, but very illustrative)
The list can go on for a long, long time. I was unable to come up with watered-down quasi-equivalents to Joy Division, The Velvet Underground, Wilco, Sonic Youth, Talking Heads, The Stone Roses, etc. Have fun playing this parlor game!
I think the meaning here is clear: "invented" implies that mathematics is an artifact that would not exist if humans (or some other reasoning entity) did not create it; "discovered" implies the contrary: that mathematics does have an independent existence.
Good explanation, which leads me to the semantic conclusion that the term "discovered" is loaded in this whole discussion. I can accept an Edwin Hubble "discovering" the red shift of galaxies, as it concerns observation of discreet objects and signatures within their energies we detect. When it comes to Mathematics, a more detached term might be "observed", as in regarding an abstract mechanism, detecting patterns, nuances and branches.
Hang on a tick, I'm having a thought... Reminding myself of the Human Genome Project, maybe the correct term to describe the development of Mathematics is "mapping".
The world changes. The market's demand shifts. And you, and people like you, continue to blame the customer base for wanting the product how they want it. In just a few words, you've nailed it. Plenty of armchair capitalists shrug off large corporations' merciless tactics that make upstart ventures go belly up, by calling it "survival of the fittest". Well as it happens, in the music and MP3 arena, "the fittest" is what the consumer wants, so call the waaahmbulance! It's been nine years since Napster, and the recording industry continues to drag its' ass for years on end over percentage points in the digital realm. "When we're good and ready, we'll tell you what you want and how you want it" - at least this freak child of capitalism has been exposed through this debacle. And still this perspective is defended by a chunk of consumers, who probably grew up never questioning the motives of GM, or Disney for that matter. Good, docile little consumers.
* Included you on a To: or CC: list of recipients, * Used your email address to search for you on social sites, * Sent you e-cards/e-invites
There is an astonishing number of people who've had email accounts for years now, and still do the very first and worst thing you mention in your no-no list. I guess it's the most convenient (read: lazy) way to re-send the same lame joke to fifty people. The CEO of the company I work for keeps doing this in my business account! Or those blasted chain emails. I can imagine that many of those were created by spammers harvesting addresses, exploiting peoples' superstitions in machiavellian fashion.
Back in the days of dialup, when the "Dalai Lama wisdom tidbits, send this to twenty people you know" type pps files were already bugging me beyond belief, some bitch that somebody knew that somebody knew that I knew had the nerve to send out a gigantic list of CC: recipients to hundreds of people, with no message whatsoever, just the headline "Let's see what happens". Needless to say, she was bombarded with hate mail, but it was too late. In a few months' time, I was getting about a hundred and fifty spam mails a day, so I created a new address, notified my inbox contacts and asked them to never, ever put me on a CC: list.
It worked for a while, then I started getting spam again, and I couldn't figure out why. Then it hit me: "Damn, I used my address to register in Amazon (also buying stuff through its' independent affiliate sellers), Paypal, eBay and the like". Could that be an additional reason?
I'm not disputing the spectacular industrial contribution the United States gave allied countries with the Lend Lease Act. I'm saying that Berlin would have fallen in 1945 regardless of Operation Overlord. In fact, Overlord could almost be viewed in retrospective as a race to beat the Red Army to Berlin.
Also, I believe that one of the points being made in this thread is that in popular culture (Hollywood, for example) the Western Front is portrayed in the spotlight, while the massive inferno that was the Eastern Front is relegated to the back burner. You have to remember, the majority of the Wehrmacht's elite fighting forces were engaged with the Soviets.
Have you ever played the board game Axis And Allies? France, Belgium and Holland are played with a couple of dice, while in Karelia, Belarus and the Ukraine you have to throw a bulging handful, every single round, on both sides.
Now, when it comes to the Pacific Theater Of Operations, it's a whole different ballgame. But that's another topic.
It's also true that a disproportionate amount of Soviet men were used as cannon fodder, at first. Yet to the horror of the nazis, the waves of soldiers just kept on coming, incredibly, every time better trained and with better equipment than the previous batch. It was the most unbelievable nightmare conceivable for the invaders.
What was it that the man said? Oh yeah, never get involved in a land war in Asia. I think the principle applies, as most of the Soviet Union was in Asia, even though the nazi invasion was confined to the west of the Urals. The industries and training camps were in Asia.
It's true that Stalin had his military geniuses shot and surrounded himself with incompetent cronies like Budienny and Timoshenko, who faithfully toed the party line. However, Stalin also knew that Zhukov, who was also wildly popular with the troops (a major point of jealousy and paranoia), was the one general he could not afford to execute. And so, Zhukov was shipped off to Siberia and was brought back when the cronies had things on the verge of catastrophe, such as the defense of Moscow and the siege of Leningrad. And then, there was Stalingrad and Kursk. In fact, it is said that Zhukov was the only man in the world who could storm into Stalin's office and call him an idiot to his face, which he did on occasion, making everybody around feel like they were about to have a heart attack.
Good job pointing out the fact that it was the Soviet army that did the lion's share of the task. Any doubt in that area can be dispelled by reading about The Battle Of Kursk, in July of 1943. After this campaign, which effectively broke the nazi army's back, Soviet forces were in a continuous forward march towards Berlin, which would have easily been achieved regardless of Operation Overlord and its' subsequent campaigns. Most US citizens like to believe that Patton was the military genius in WWII, and he was very good indeed, but any historian worth his/her salt will tell you unequivocally that Field Marshall Georgy Zhukov was The Man.
With an eye on recycling materials and reducing construction costs for storage cellars, some wineries in northern Mexico have opted for this great idea: Dig a deep trench, place old RR cars inside, then fill the trench up again with dirt. And there it is, a cave build like a Lego. A little bit of retrofitting may be necessary, especially where car doors meet, but still, you can save a ton of money in this fashion. Surely, not only Mexican wineries are using the same technique.
...it proves how unlikely it is that we'll find another solar system "just like ours". If astronomers think that being off by 50% is a discovery worth announcing worldwide, then that shows just how unlikely they think it is that they'll discover something that's only off by 5-10%.
Another way of looking at it, is that the technologies and techniques used to detect extrasolar planets are getting more sensitive and precise, we're inching closer the point in which we'll be able to detect solar systems much more similar to our own. The announcement is the equivalent of saying "We've attained a new milestone, we're getting there".
Ten years ago, only super-Jupiters with orbital periods of a couple of days could tug at its' star strongly enough to be detected from Earth, while today much more subtle (and complex) influences can be inferred.
Even though extrasolar planets are discovered so often now that it's almost become a mundane occurrence, we've yet to even begin the Golden Age Of Planet Discovery. Just you wait until the Kepler Mission, New Worlds Mission, Terrestrial Planet Finder Mission, or any other of an array of proposals, come to fruition. Then the fun will truly start. And let's be patient, as Hubble, COBE and WMAP took like what seemed forever to get off the ground, yet look at the results.
Nah, a goatee used to make you look evil, but now only makes you look like a disaffected member of generation X. Old lady - OMG, here comes another Gen X'er with a goatee and a Soundgarden tat on his arm! Run for your lives! Gen X'er - But ma'am, wouldn't you like to buy some of my homemade cookies for charity to the blind? Old lady - Shoo! Go away, you filthy slacker, or I'm yelling "rape"!
When will this cruel, pointless discrimination end? And who's the evil mutant in this little parable, eh?
The "Great Leap Forward" killed more than 30 million.
Since many people probably don't know about it, I believe it's worthwhile to expand on that incredible humanitarian catastrophe a bit more. Mao's government put several key factors into play in the late 1950's:
1. The Great Sparrow Campaign, in which the population was summoned to act as human scarecrows, to keep seed-eating sparrows in flight until they fell dead from exhaustion. The result was that locust populations, with their main predator virtually gone, ballooned in size. 2. The Chinese government's adoption of Soviet charlatan TD Lysenko's "ideas" of agriculture innovation, which included planting more densely than normal and plowing up to 2 meters in depth. 3. Mao's campaign to dramatically increase China's production of steel. A mobilized Chinese population proudly tossed their pots and pans into village foundries, in turn creating sub-standard alloys that could not be exported nor even used locally for industry. While the population was involved in this misguided activity, many of the nation's crops were left unattended. In a nutshell, complete failure on both fronts. 4. Unusual drought and floods for two full two years, with the locusts swarms kicking into full gear. 5. General incompetence by the Chinese authorities, along with an attitude of suppression and ass-covering.
The result was that between 20 and 42 million people (some put the accurate number closer to 38 million) died of starvation, some areas of China sliding into cannibalism. One final astonishing fact is that not a single photograph of the famine's onslaught exists, every one of these people died in complete and utter obscurity, a massive yet faceless famine the second half of the twentieth century. For some reason, I visualize George Orwell's ghost hovering over all of this.
It's a truly sobering lesson to think that even as these people cheered the flocks of agonizing sparrows falling from the sky, they were summoning imminent, untold suffering upon themselves.
> Let us see some other of the well-known authors filmed. Asimov's "Nightfall" [...]
Let's not.And again, not. A long time ago, I had the misfortune of watching this late 1980's travesty, done in a late 1970's Playboy Channel style, with the corresponding production values to boot, and some sort of sensuality cult where women dance naked to bland instrumental synth music, lost to the outside world in their "groovy" trip. Having read both Asimov's original novella and the Asimov-Silverberg full novel, I thought "I've never heard of the movie, so it sank like a stone when it was released, but it's a great story, surely it can't be that bad, can it?" To my complete astonishment, it was that bad, and then some.
Three settings on the space bears' ray guns: Stun, Kill and Porridge.
They'll hunt them down and find them, of course. In Ursa Major. When they open them up, they'll find that inside, they're full of people. 'Cause you know, sometimes you eat the space bear, sometimes the space bear eats you.
You can not deny the raw hatred that comes from the far left of this country.
For a taste of the far right, have a look at the forums of The Free Republic. The freepers are quite a piece of work. It bears mentioning that right after 9-11, many people wearing turbans were randomly attacked within the US, even though many of them were Sikhs. I can't see anybody from the far left acting with that particular brand of blind hatred, can you?
Sadly, there is a deep polarization currently prevalent in United States society in general, which also comes from vicious attacks and infuriating, meaningless yet effective catch-phrases (aka talking points) from the right wing, and a pretty good argument can be stated that they began the contemporary cycle of bile. The list is long and thoroughly undistinguished - Hannity, Limbaugh, Coulter, et al.
- The incessant bombardment of John Kerry's status as a flip-flopper, whatever the hell that means. - The purple band aids worn as fashion accessories by the GOP faithful during the 2004 convention. - "Cut and run", repeated incessantly whenever Iraq policy was questioned. - Limbaugh, among many other things, mocking a man with Parkinson's Disease, in his crony opposition to stem-cell research. - Coulter's insane comments, among many other things, about John Edwards - "Total fag". - And of course, "You want the terrorists to win, don't you?", or "Why do you hate America?"
In the last seven years, progressives have been dismissed or loudly ridiculed to the breaking point and beyond, all the while witnessing how their government attacked the wrong country with fabricated reasons, tortures people in their name, severely eroded their rights as citizens even as the vice-president literally got away with shooting another man in the face.
In 2004, after the dirtiest of dirty campaigns, a textbook Karl Rove campaign, serious allegations of electoral fraud surface again, four years after Florida was yanked from Al Gore. And with a margin of less than one percentage point, with bizarre pro-Bush discrepancies in Diebold paperless machines in key states, Bush pronounced a "mandate" and that "the people have spoken", showing not the slightest hint of acknowledgement at the massive level of dissent on his hands. This attitude will inevitably generate a simmering outrage.
Progressives also witnessed in disbelief how an extensive intelligence operation in Africa and the Middle East was treasonously blown sky-high, to target the wife of a "political enemy", as revenge and an example for all detractors, nobody in government held accountable, Scooter Libby awarded a Get Out Of Jail pass. And then, the consequences of the current administration's policies became apparent in the tragic wake of Katrina and beyond. Also, crucially, every year we hear about the polar ice caps shrinking, and the current administration does exactly nothing. Corporate shenanigans like Halliburton and Enron are just the icing on the cake.
If progressives are furious, with a deep sense of urgency, they have every reason to be. And make no mistake about it, they are also mad as hell at their own party (Pelosi and Reid, in particular), for what they regard as either lack of backbone or complicity. To interpret that as hatred is to not acknowledge the astonishing series of debacles of the last seven years.
Slashdot Mirror
"Too bad the Hovitos don't know you the way I do, Belloq" - That's right, Indy and Belloq used to be fellow travelers, then after the events of Temple, they developed a "difference of opinion". Belloq is Indy five years before.
This also ties in the Crusade teaser, in a broader sense. See Indy the idealist in full force, living the first experience that will turn him cynical. Then back to Raiders, look at the way Marion receives him, with a sucker punch to the mouth - Indiana the cynical bastard we see at the beginning of Temple getting a taste of his just desserts.
As for personal taste, I found the action in Temple to be more than passable, while I found myself grimacing during several points in Crusade, a wholly unsatisfactory experience, as compared to the monumental achievement that was Raiders.
Holy cow, have we just witnessed a guy p0wning hisself? Like the soccer player who unwittingly kicks the ball the wrong way and ends up scoring a goal for the opposing team? How about the guy who KO'd himself in the boxing ring? Or the fielder who tries to catch the deep long fly ball, and it ends up bouncing off his glove for a home run?
Dude, he'll fucking kill your entire family on a dare from the devil, ask Job!
It wasn't just the family, he was turned into a destitute leper, too, if you'll remember.
Then within a couple of decades, Yahweh had magnanimously given Job back his health, his livelihood and a new family.
His excuse to the man? "Behold the behemoth I have made of thee".
Wow... I was doing pretty good before all this, but thanks a lot... I guess...
Are you implying that Yahweh is like the old man at the car wash that stands by the guy earning minimum wage then barks: "You missed a spot right there"?
Listen, Mr Alphaville detective guy (one of my all time favorite movies), your range of opposites was much narrower than mine, too sane to be declared "safe for consumption".
And what do you think of early Siouxsie And The Banshees, BTW?
The Jesus And Mary Chain, if anything, were influential as opposed to "rock stars". But I see what you mean, even as right now I'm listening to authentic fifties rockabilly, thoroughly impressed. It cuts through many generations, The Jesus And Mary Chain being the last great example of that spirit.
I can only wish that Sonic Youth would have been the kick-start and main influence for the nineties. So far, twenty years down the line, Godspeed You Black Emperor! and The Boredoms are the only bands that I know of, even trying to reach the grand panoramic levels of Daydream Nation.
Talking Heads as Talking Heads is too easy, yet they made it too obvious. Neither points in favor or against. Did I even say anything? Let me try again: immediately after Talking Heads, David Byrne put out an album named The Forest, classical and contemporary pieces named after cities of antiquity (Ur, Tenochtitlan, etc.) My point is that post-Heads output is too weird to qualify as "Rock Star".
The Fall? Stone Roses?
Apples? Oranges?
I understand your intention. Mark E Smith is a hurricane-force-strength talent. Howard Devoto is nothing to sneeze at, either.
Just as it took Hendrix, The Byrds and Bob Dylan to transform fifties rock to sixties smorgasboard, Mark E Smith and Buzzcocks/Magazine built the crucial bridge between 1978 and 1980, pivotal years in the history of rock as an art form, right at the moment when it was being counted out as dead and dead by the mainstream media (known in naive days as "the press"), in quaint pre-Internet days.
So far, Joy Division sounds eternal. Often, so does early New Order, first few albums. I fucking love early New Order, up until Low Life.
Taking it to its' logically absurd conclusion...
- "Hello, my name is Michael"
- "HELLO, Michael "
- "I'm a Slashdot user and I haven't posted in the last 24 hours"
- Cue round of approving applause.
And beyond...
A bunch of support group guys sitting in a circle, shooting the shit:
- "Man, I used to think I had it under control, y'know?"
- Silent, nodding acknowledgment.
- "Then I was invited to meta-moderate"
- More nodding.
- "Next thing I knew, I had twenty tabs open, all of them Slashdot. Most were threads, but I always kept the meta page open, and checked the Firehose every fifteen seconds".
Then the voice starts to quiver.
- (Sobbing) "Even my imaginary girlfriend walked out on me!" At this point, the guy breaks down.
- Group hug - "That's okay, bro, that's okay"
One is an artist, the other is a rock star.
/., for contrast, I'll do this Artist (well known ones) - - Rock Star.
Since I can't post proper columns on
The Byrds - - The Monkees
The New York Dolls - - Kiss
The Pixies - - Limp Bizkit
Roxy Music - - Duran Duran
Public Enemy - - MC Hammer
Neil Young - - Hootie And The Blowfish
Genesis (Peter Gabriel) - - Genesis (Phil Collins)
Stevie Wonder (early seventies) - Celine Dion
John Coltrane - - Kenny G (jazz, not rock, but very illustrative)
The list can go on for a long, long time.
I was unable to come up with watered-down quasi-equivalents to Joy Division, The Velvet Underground, Wilco, Sonic Youth, Talking Heads, The Stone Roses, etc. Have fun playing this parlor game!
I think the meaning here is clear: "invented" implies that mathematics is an artifact that would not exist if humans (or some other reasoning entity) did not create it; "discovered" implies the contrary: that mathematics does have an independent existence.
Good explanation, which leads me to the semantic conclusion that the term "discovered" is loaded in this whole discussion.
I can accept an Edwin Hubble "discovering" the red shift of galaxies, as it concerns observation of discreet objects and signatures within their energies we detect. When it comes to Mathematics, a more detached term might be "observed", as in regarding an abstract mechanism, detecting patterns, nuances and branches.
Hang on a tick, I'm having a thought... Reminding myself of the Human Genome Project, maybe the correct term to describe the development of Mathematics is "mapping".
Plenty of armchair capitalists shrug off large corporations' merciless tactics that make upstart ventures go belly up, by calling it "survival of the fittest". Well as it happens, in the music and MP3 arena, "the fittest" is what the consumer wants, so call the waaahmbulance!
It's been nine years since Napster, and the recording industry continues to drag its' ass for years on end over percentage points in the digital realm. "When we're good and ready, we'll tell you what you want and how you want it" - at least this freak child of capitalism has been exposed through this debacle. And still this perspective is defended by a chunk of consumers, who probably grew up never questioning the motives of GM, or Disney for that matter. Good, docile little consumers.
* Included you on a To: or CC: list of recipients,
* Used your email address to search for you on social sites,
* Sent you e-cards/e-invites
There is an astonishing number of people who've had email accounts for years now, and still do the very first and worst thing you mention in your no-no list. I guess it's the most convenient (read: lazy) way to re-send the same lame joke to fifty people. The CEO of the company I work for keeps doing this in my business account!
Or those blasted chain emails. I can imagine that many of those were created by spammers harvesting addresses, exploiting peoples' superstitions in machiavellian fashion.
Back in the days of dialup, when the "Dalai Lama wisdom tidbits, send this to twenty people you know" type pps files were already bugging me beyond belief, some bitch that somebody knew that somebody knew that I knew had the nerve to send out a gigantic list of CC: recipients to hundreds of people, with no message whatsoever, just the headline "Let's see what happens". Needless to say, she was bombarded with hate mail, but it was too late. In a few months' time, I was getting about a hundred and fifty spam mails a day, so I created a new address, notified my inbox contacts and asked them to never, ever put me on a CC: list.
It worked for a while, then I started getting spam again, and I couldn't figure out why. Then it hit me: "Damn, I used my address to register in Amazon (also buying stuff through its' independent affiliate sellers), Paypal, eBay and the like". Could that be an additional reason?
But what if he's carrying a pointed stick?
I'm not disputing the spectacular industrial contribution the United States gave allied countries with the Lend Lease Act. I'm saying that Berlin would have fallen in 1945 regardless of Operation Overlord. In fact, Overlord could almost be viewed in retrospective as a race to beat the Red Army to Berlin.
Also, I believe that one of the points being made in this thread is that in popular culture (Hollywood, for example) the Western Front is portrayed in the spotlight, while the massive inferno that was the Eastern Front is relegated to the back burner. You have to remember, the majority of the Wehrmacht's elite fighting forces were engaged with the Soviets.
Have you ever played the board game Axis And Allies? France, Belgium and Holland are played with a couple of dice, while in Karelia, Belarus and the Ukraine you have to throw a bulging handful, every single round, on both sides.
Now, when it comes to the Pacific Theater Of Operations, it's a whole different ballgame. But that's another topic.
Forgot to mention another important point.
It's also true that a disproportionate amount of Soviet men were used as cannon fodder, at first. Yet to the horror of the nazis, the waves of soldiers just kept on coming, incredibly, every time better trained and with better equipment than the previous batch. It was the most unbelievable nightmare conceivable for the invaders.
What was it that the man said? Oh yeah, never get involved in a land war in Asia. I think the principle applies, as most of the Soviet Union was in Asia, even though the nazi invasion was confined to the west of the Urals. The industries and training camps were in Asia.
It's true that Stalin had his military geniuses shot and surrounded himself with incompetent cronies like Budienny and Timoshenko, who faithfully toed the party line.
However, Stalin also knew that Zhukov, who was also wildly popular with the troops (a major point of jealousy and paranoia), was the one general he could not afford to execute.
And so, Zhukov was shipped off to Siberia and was brought back when the cronies had things on the verge of catastrophe, such as the defense of Moscow and the siege of Leningrad. And then, there was Stalingrad and Kursk.
In fact, it is said that Zhukov was the only man in the world who could storm into Stalin's office and call him an idiot to his face, which he did on occasion, making everybody around feel like they were about to have a heart attack.
Good job pointing out the fact that it was the Soviet army that did the lion's share of the task. Any doubt in that area can be dispelled by reading about The Battle Of Kursk, in July of 1943. After this campaign, which effectively broke the nazi army's back, Soviet forces were in a continuous forward march towards Berlin, which would have easily been achieved regardless of Operation Overlord and its' subsequent campaigns.
Most US citizens like to believe that Patton was the military genius in WWII, and he was very good indeed, but any historian worth his/her salt will tell you unequivocally that Field Marshall Georgy Zhukov was The Man.
With an eye on recycling materials and reducing construction costs for storage cellars, some wineries in northern Mexico have opted for this great idea:
Dig a deep trench, place old RR cars inside, then fill the trench up again with dirt. And there it is, a cave build like a Lego. A little bit of retrofitting may be necessary, especially where car doors meet, but still, you can save a ton of money in this fashion.
Surely, not only Mexican wineries are using the same technique.
...it proves how unlikely it is that we'll find another solar system "just like ours". If astronomers think that being off by 50% is a discovery worth announcing worldwide, then that shows just how unlikely they think it is that they'll discover something that's only off by 5-10%.
Another way of looking at it, is that the technologies and techniques used to detect extrasolar planets are getting more sensitive and precise, we're inching closer the point in which we'll be able to detect solar systems much more similar to our own. The announcement is the equivalent of saying "We've attained a new milestone, we're getting there".
Ten years ago, only super-Jupiters with orbital periods of a couple of days could tug at its' star strongly enough to be detected from Earth, while today much more subtle (and complex) influences can be inferred.
Even though extrasolar planets are discovered so often now that it's almost become a mundane occurrence, we've yet to even begin the Golden Age Of Planet Discovery. Just you wait until the Kepler Mission, New Worlds Mission, Terrestrial Planet Finder Mission, or any other of an array of proposals, come to fruition. Then the fun will truly start. And let's be patient, as Hubble, COBE and WMAP took like what seemed forever to get off the ground, yet look at the results.
Gen X'er - But ma'am, wouldn't you like to buy some of my homemade cookies for charity to the blind?
Old lady - Shoo! Go away, you filthy slacker, or I'm yelling "rape"!
When will this cruel, pointless discrimination end? And who's the evil mutant in this little parable, eh?
The "Great Leap Forward" killed more than 30 million.
Since many people probably don't know about it, I believe it's worthwhile to expand on that incredible humanitarian catastrophe a bit more. Mao's government put several key factors into play in the late 1950's:
1. The Great Sparrow Campaign, in which the population was summoned to act as human scarecrows, to keep seed-eating sparrows in flight until they fell dead from exhaustion. The result was that locust populations, with their main predator virtually gone, ballooned in size.
2. The Chinese government's adoption of Soviet charlatan TD Lysenko's "ideas" of agriculture innovation, which included planting more densely than normal and plowing up to 2 meters in depth.
3. Mao's campaign to dramatically increase China's production of steel. A mobilized Chinese population proudly tossed their pots and pans into village foundries, in turn creating sub-standard alloys that could not be exported nor even used locally for industry. While the population was involved in this misguided activity, many of the nation's crops were left unattended. In a nutshell, complete failure on both fronts.
4. Unusual drought and floods for two full two years, with the locusts swarms kicking into full gear.
5. General incompetence by the Chinese authorities, along with an attitude of suppression and ass-covering.
The result was that between 20 and 42 million people (some put the accurate number closer to 38 million) died of starvation, some areas of China sliding into cannibalism. One final astonishing fact is that not a single photograph of the famine's onslaught exists, every one of these people died in complete and utter obscurity, a massive yet faceless famine the second half of the twentieth century. For some reason, I visualize George Orwell's ghost hovering over all of this.
It's a truly sobering lesson to think that even as these people cheered the flocks of agonizing sparrows falling from the sky, they were summoning imminent, untold suffering upon themselves.
Let's not. And again, not.
A long time ago, I had the misfortune of watching this late 1980's travesty, done in a late 1970's Playboy Channel style, with the corresponding production values to boot, and some sort of sensuality cult where women dance naked to bland instrumental synth music, lost to the outside world in their "groovy" trip.
Having read both Asimov's original novella and the Asimov-Silverberg full novel, I thought "I've never heard of the movie, so it sank like a stone when it was released, but it's a great story, surely it can't be that bad, can it?" To my complete astonishment, it was that bad, and then some.
Three settings on the space bears' ray guns:
Stun, Kill and Porridge.
They'll hunt them down and find them, of course. In Ursa Major. When they open them up, they'll find that inside, they're full of people.
'Cause you know, sometimes you eat the space bear, sometimes the space bear eats you.
Congratulations, sir, you have come up with an instant classic! Along the quality levels of this exchange from a few years back:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=160059&cid=13397749
[_] Bill
[_] Hillary
[x] CowboyNeal
Hmm... needs to replace "s" for that weird medieval "f" type and replace "i" for "y" somewhere in there.
ye infaenfityeve clode!
There... fixed that for you? He asked, expecting the answer "no".
You can not deny the raw hatred that comes from the far left of this country.
For a taste of the far right, have a look at the forums of The Free Republic. The freepers are quite a piece of work. It bears mentioning that right after 9-11, many people wearing turbans were randomly attacked within the US, even though many of them were Sikhs. I can't see anybody from the far left acting with that particular brand of blind hatred, can you?
Sadly, there is a deep polarization currently prevalent in United States society in general, which also comes from vicious attacks and infuriating, meaningless yet effective catch-phrases (aka talking points) from the right wing, and a pretty good argument can be stated that they began the contemporary cycle of bile. The list is long and thoroughly undistinguished - Hannity, Limbaugh, Coulter, et al.
- The incessant bombardment of John Kerry's status as a flip-flopper, whatever the hell that means.
- The purple band aids worn as fashion accessories by the GOP faithful during the 2004 convention.
- "Cut and run", repeated incessantly whenever Iraq policy was questioned.
- Limbaugh, among many other things, mocking a man with Parkinson's Disease, in his crony opposition to stem-cell research.
- Coulter's insane comments, among many other things, about John Edwards - "Total fag".
- And of course, "You want the terrorists to win, don't you?", or "Why do you hate America?"
In the last seven years, progressives have been dismissed or loudly ridiculed to the breaking point and beyond, all the while witnessing how their government attacked the wrong country with fabricated reasons, tortures people in their name, severely eroded their rights as citizens even as the vice-president literally got away with shooting another man in the face.
In 2004, after the dirtiest of dirty campaigns, a textbook Karl Rove campaign, serious allegations of electoral fraud surface again, four years after Florida was yanked from Al Gore. And with a margin of less than one percentage point, with bizarre pro-Bush discrepancies in Diebold paperless machines in key states, Bush pronounced a "mandate" and that "the people have spoken", showing not the slightest hint of acknowledgement at the massive level of dissent on his hands. This attitude will inevitably generate a simmering outrage.
Progressives also witnessed in disbelief how an extensive intelligence operation in Africa and the Middle East was treasonously blown sky-high, to target the wife of a "political enemy", as revenge and an example for all detractors, nobody in government held accountable, Scooter Libby awarded a Get Out Of Jail pass. And then, the consequences of the current administration's policies became apparent in the tragic wake of Katrina and beyond. Also, crucially, every year we hear about the polar ice caps shrinking, and the current administration does exactly nothing. Corporate shenanigans like Halliburton and Enron are just the icing on the cake.
If progressives are furious, with a deep sense of urgency, they have every reason to be. And make no mistake about it, they are also mad as hell at their own party (Pelosi and Reid, in particular), for what they regard as either lack of backbone or complicity. To interpret that as hatred is to not acknowledge the astonishing series of debacles of the last seven years.