No, that's his kind of weird because he's an attention whore, that's all.
Mein Kampf is not illegal in Germany. In fact, a turkish-born comedian toured Germany a few years ago reading from it in his show. No, he wasn't a Nazi, he thought that actually reading people the crap opens their eyes. In fact, I agree, because it usually has that effect in all areas of ideology. In the words of Pen from Pen & Teller: Read the bible, we need more atheists. Same with Mein Kampf, reading it will very likely eradicate any tendencies towards Nazi ideology anyone had.
The reason you can't buy Mein Kampf in a bookstore in Germany is not that it is illegal, but because after Hitlers death, the copyright fell to the state of Bavaria, which has held it ever since and has not authorized any new printings. If I recall correctly, it is going to enter the public domain in a few years.
Why do you think journalism was any better back then?
All you need to do is watch an interview with a politician on TV. They're talk shows now, not interviews. I still remember when journalists actually dared asking difficult questions and insisting on an answer.
I also remember when there was investigative journalism and magazines actually came out with stories that could topple a government. When's the last time that happened?
What has happened is that it's become far easier to point out and identify bad journalism, and that's at least a large part of the perception of bad journalism.
There is truth to that, yes. There are several effects at work.
There used to be real journalism done by real journalists, but thanks to everyone wanting everything on the cheap and mostly due to a huge sell-out by the media who jumped on the "advertisement will pay for everything" bandwaggon long before the Internet did, that is rapidly going the way of the Dodo bird.
The problem is that selling out to advertisement means quality doesn't matter anymore, eyeballs do. A carefully researched, well-balanced article usually doesn't draw as many eyes as some bullshit attention whoring. "EVIL DANGER! YOU WILL DIE!" headlines used to be the domain of the tabloid press...
Since advertisement payment follows the same path everywhere you look - down after an initial hype - most media simply doesn't have the money to pay quality journalists anymore.
So there used to be a difference, but it's going away, all because you get what you pay for, and when you pay the minimum amount possible, you get the minimum acceptable quality in return.
History says very clearly that once you allow government to get involved with religion, or religion with government, pretty soon you have government-mandated religion, or religion-run government. And both of those are Very Bad. Religions have never -- ever, ever -- been good heads of government. And it's pretty obvious why government-mandated religion is just as bad.
Yes, but you missed the point by exactly 180 degrees there.
Government giving special status to religions (by tax excemption) is the opposite of government staying out of religion. What the GP wants is that religion has no special status and is treated just like everyone else, and that would be less government involvement with religion, because it does away with the special treatment and registration, and reduces the interface between them. Now they aren't special little kids anymore, they're just taxpayers just like everyone else.
Looking at the whole thing from Europe, I can rarely decide whether to laugh or cry. These people belong into a mental institution, not on TV, and yet they do actually have an audience? People take them seriously? They are powerful enough to change election results? WTF America ?
That their whole "equal time" attack angle isn't seen as dramatically failing the giggle test is a mystery that I can't wrap my head around. How about equal time for Scientology, african witch doctors and the norse Ragnarok myth, too? Can I please get my own made-up pet-theory from the religion I founded yesterday into the textbooks? No one has ever disproved it, you know? And I have a scientist who (after a few beers) told me it sounds plausible...
These people are clowns and need to be ridiculed and laughed at and nothing else and until that happens, I will shake my head about America and consider you all mentally unstable.
The problem is that trust diminishes. If I trust you 80%, and you trust Joe 75%, and Joe trusts Jennifer 90% and Jennifer trusts Josh 80% and Josh signs that key, then my total trust in that signature is only 43% - worse than flipping a coin.
The web needs to be a lot thicker than it is so that I have multiple paths towards the key in question that add up. If the web is as thin as it still is, despite decades of keysigning parties and such, then it is utterly useless.
It's a good theoretical concept, but we should admit that it didn't work out in real life and start figuring out something better.
You don't need a citation, you need to get out into the real world and make some real-life busines experience.
I encountered this little fact first in university, thanks to a professor with two decades of that experience, and ever since it has been confirmed everywhere I could look under the bonnet, including when I was the senior manager in charge of SOX at a large telco.
...what this means in meaningful terms. Does it mean I get to actually withdraw the single bitcoin that I had tried to exchange at MtGox? Probably not, right?
I would have thought that computers would make it impossible to "lose" such funds - even with the most simplistic of accounting programs.
ROTFL.
The dark secret of business world-wide: It's all a hodgepodge of hacks and duct-tape. Large corporations regularily misplace money and assets, often in the millions. And yes, despite SOX and all that.
Computers or not, large corporations are complex beasts, and all the accounting trickery they play for tax purposes doesn't exactly make it easy nor transparent, because it intentionally isn't. For a fast-growing company, most CFOs are pretty happy if their accounting isn't too far off.
So yeah, losing a hundred million is a rare event, but it's impossible nor unheard of.
a country, or any country? That's important here. If they can do it to one country that only means that have one target thoroughly infiltrated. But if they can do it to any country of their choosing, then I'm seriously frightened.
Here's why: Telecommunication is considered vital infrastructure in every country I know. I used to work in the industry. We had some of our phone switches in frigging nuclear-blast-proof bunkers. They and our primary storage system occupied the highest security data center available to us. There's nothing civilian above that.
As a security guy, I can of course imagine a few ways to breach security or hack the switch, i.e. both electronically and physically. But it would require a considerably amount of resources. So if they have done that for everything everywhere, then... wow.
Someone broke Betteridge's Law. That's quite a lot more interesting than the actual question, which is, of course, dumb.
That only young people can learn is one of those myths that get debunked all the time and no one ever pays any attention. You know that bullshit about language and how children pick up languages (including their mother tongue) magically while adults struggle so much? Yeah, it's total bogus, in fact adults learn languages faster and better than kids with the same investment in time and dedication.
The main difference is that young people in practice learn faster because they have little else to do. If you'd get the same exposure and personal teacher attention as a small kid does, you'd pick up a new language in half the time.
So the real question is: How much time and effort are you willing to expend? Is it something you really want and are willing to spend a few hours a day on?
That's the by far dumbest comment I've seen here in a long time, and that's saying something.
I own a small company, and I've been in hiring positions in previous jobs. Trust me, there is massive value in not having to check if everyone can read, write and do basic math. In social settings, it's really great to be able to assume some basic knowledge about the world, there would be many, many awkward situations if you make a Nazi joke and have to explain who the Nazis were to one or two people afterwards.
Society wouldn't work very well if we didn't share some basic ground.
Even when it ultimately drove out invaders, the costs were massive.
Yes, but - just like the West supplied material to Russia, so did Russia take (and bind) most of the German fury. Look up the destruction and losses in Russia when you feel like it, it's crazy. Just two numbers to get you started: Russia lost 15,800 locomotives and almost half a million wagons. That they could still move an army around at all is incredible.
Imagine that all the destructive power that Germany unleashed upon Russia had awaited the US troops on D-Day. They would've never even reached the beach if Germany hadn't had most of its troops tied up in Russia.
So while Russia isn't as invincible and almighty as its propaganda paints it - neither were the western allies. Neither could've done it without the other.
However, if you have billions of the stuff around, you can do interesting things with it. And if you're a petro nation, you can do even more interesting things. One of them is switching your oil trade to Euros. The US is so deathly afraid of that, some rumour mills say the Iraqs plans to do just that were a major reason for starting that war.
The US$ isn't strong because it is backed by the US economy, it is strong because it is the international exchange currency of choice, and the only currency with which you can buy oil at nation-state amounts.
Losing that advantage would hurt the US a lot more than a couple billions dumped on the market.
Keep in mind that the new Ukrainian government has announced massive austerity program.
This. Among the first things the new Ukrainian leadership did was bend over backwards to let the IMF fuck them in the ass, agreeing to the same politics that already ruined Greece and Spain.
If I were living in the Crimean, that alone would've been reason enough to vote for Russia.
The USA should be put under crippling sanctions, its foreign assets should be seized, its foreign nationals put on the next planes back to America. At some point the billionaires that Bush/Obama relies on for his powerbase will blink and then we can back to reasonable talk, without american forces sitting in a state that they invaded under completely made-up evidence.
There, fixed that for you.
No, I'm not saying we should ignore russian aggression. I'm saying we should bomb the US a bit in retaliation for Iraq and then we can sanction Russia for its current actions. Or is it you who is doing double-standards all of a sudden?
It was kind of predictable how the feminazi crowds would come out, pretending to be too dumb to understand the deeper meaning.
Man, woman, straight or gay - it doesn't matter, that sentence works in all ways. As human beings with base instincts in addition to all our intelligence, we do quite a lot of things for basic needs like food and warmth - or its abstraction, safety - and of course, sex. Being considered sexy and attractive and desireable is a force in deciding which path to take in life, like it or not.
Then why the horrible push for austerity? The same forces are at work. There's no more trust in the Government, and there's no more trust in each other.
That's not true.
The push for austerity has very little popular support, it's just that every single party subscribes to it (aka, has been corrupted). You simply can't elect anything with a snowballs chance in hell to actually get into government that does not support austerity. So since that appears to be a given no matter what, people vote based on other differences between parties, small as they may be.
Two things, first, maybe girls didn't fuck the nerds because they were unattractive.
Interesting hypothesis, but it depends on your definition of attraction, and that exactly is my point. Attractiveness has a social element to it. Different ages do have different beauty standards. If you exclude the muscular body, quite a few of those football studs aren't actually that attractive. And if you take away the glasses and the bad taste clothes, some of those nerds actually are.
All of our problems can be summed up by thinking about what happened over the last 40 years. We got told that Government is the problem. Then when we systematically gutted the system and trust in the system we found out exactly we lost. In short, we tried to fixed what wasn't even broken and now we're in an extremely bad, but not insurmountable bad place.
I live in Europe, and I've seen much of the same happening, so it's not a) a particular USA problem and b) specific to the "small government" idiocity that we in Europe largely don't share.
1) Some of those smart people might actually be girls!
Yes, and some of them may be gay, lesbian, etc. - I was saying something metaphorical, maybe it needs a tag.
2) Please do not define a student's success by the number of "sexy girls" who want to have sex with them.
I don't. I define how much society values him by it. That's a different thing. And females finding socially valuable mates more attractive is - sexism or not - a strongly substantiated finding.
Slashdot Mirror
Attention whore.
That's really all you need to know about Kimble, it explains everything about him.
No, that's his kind of weird because he's an attention whore, that's all.
Mein Kampf is not illegal in Germany. In fact, a turkish-born comedian toured Germany a few years ago reading from it in his show. No, he wasn't a Nazi, he thought that actually reading people the crap opens their eyes. In fact, I agree, because it usually has that effect in all areas of ideology. In the words of Pen from Pen & Teller: Read the bible, we need more atheists. Same with Mein Kampf, reading it will very likely eradicate any tendencies towards Nazi ideology anyone had.
The reason you can't buy Mein Kampf in a bookstore in Germany is not that it is illegal, but because after Hitlers death, the copyright fell to the state of Bavaria, which has held it ever since and has not authorized any new printings. If I recall correctly, it is going to enter the public domain in a few years.
Why do you think journalism was any better back then?
All you need to do is watch an interview with a politician on TV. They're talk shows now, not interviews. I still remember when journalists actually dared asking difficult questions and insisting on an answer.
I also remember when there was investigative journalism and magazines actually came out with stories that could topple a government. When's the last time that happened?
What has happened is that it's become far easier to point out and identify bad journalism, and that's at least a large part of the perception of bad journalism.
There is truth to that, yes. There are several effects at work.
Or not. There were things, sometimes important, that "real journalists" just didn't cover, or slanted heavily
Oh please. Just because it wasn't 110% perfect doesn't mean it wasn't good. That's a strawman.
Of course mass media has its own troubles and problems and bias and issues. But it's gone downhill from there quite a lot.
There used to be real journalism done by real journalists, but thanks to everyone wanting everything on the cheap and mostly due to a huge sell-out by the media who jumped on the "advertisement will pay for everything" bandwaggon long before the Internet did, that is rapidly going the way of the Dodo bird.
The problem is that selling out to advertisement means quality doesn't matter anymore, eyeballs do. A carefully researched, well-balanced article usually doesn't draw as many eyes as some bullshit attention whoring. "EVIL DANGER! YOU WILL DIE!" headlines used to be the domain of the tabloid press...
Since advertisement payment follows the same path everywhere you look - down after an initial hype - most media simply doesn't have the money to pay quality journalists anymore.
So there used to be a difference, but it's going away, all because you get what you pay for, and when you pay the minimum amount possible, you get the minimum acceptable quality in return.
Outside the city? Pfft. Try world-wide. Once you go across the ocean, the whole web hangs on a comparatively small number of individuals.
History says very clearly that once you allow government to get involved with religion, or religion with government, pretty soon you have government-mandated religion, or religion-run government. And both of those are Very Bad. Religions have never -- ever, ever -- been good heads of government. And it's pretty obvious why government-mandated religion is just as bad.
Yes, but you missed the point by exactly 180 degrees there.
Government giving special status to religions (by tax excemption) is the opposite of government staying out of religion. What the GP wants is that religion has no special status and is treated just like everyone else, and that would be less government involvement with religion, because it does away with the special treatment and registration, and reduces the interface between them. Now they aren't special little kids anymore, they're just taxpayers just like everyone else.
Looking at the whole thing from Europe, I can rarely decide whether to laugh or cry. These people belong into a mental institution, not on TV, and yet they do actually have an audience? People take them seriously? They are powerful enough to change election results? WTF America ?
That their whole "equal time" attack angle isn't seen as dramatically failing the giggle test is a mystery that I can't wrap my head around. How about equal time for Scientology, african witch doctors and the norse Ragnarok myth, too? Can I please get my own made-up pet-theory from the religion I founded yesterday into the textbooks? No one has ever disproved it, you know? And I have a scientist who (after a few beers) told me it sounds plausible...
These people are clowns and need to be ridiculed and laughed at and nothing else and until that happens, I will shake my head about America and consider you all mentally unstable.
The problem is that trust diminishes. If I trust you 80%, and you trust Joe 75%, and Joe trusts Jennifer 90% and Jennifer trusts Josh 80% and Josh signs that key, then my total trust in that signature is only 43% - worse than flipping a coin.
The web needs to be a lot thicker than it is so that I have multiple paths towards the key in question that add up. If the web is as thin as it still is, despite decades of keysigning parties and such, then it is utterly useless.
It's a good theoretical concept, but we should admit that it didn't work out in real life and start figuring out something better.
obtaining a forged certificate is much harder than simply uploading a fake PGP key,
Not for an intelligence agency.
would be strong evidence that an issuing CA had been compromised: something that seems plausible but for which we currently lack any evidence.
Uh, no? Short memory? We already had CAs compromised. Was it last year or the one before, I'm not sure.
You don't need a citation, you need to get out into the real world and make some real-life busines experience.
I encountered this little fact first in university, thanks to a professor with two decades of that experience, and ever since it has been confirmed everywhere I could look under the bonnet, including when I was the senior manager in charge of SOX at a large telco.
...what this means in meaningful terms. Does it mean I get to actually withdraw the single bitcoin that I had tried to exchange at MtGox? Probably not, right?
I would have thought that computers would make it impossible to "lose" such funds - even with the most simplistic of accounting programs.
ROTFL.
The dark secret of business world-wide: It's all a hodgepodge of hacks and duct-tape. Large corporations regularily misplace money and assets, often in the millions. And yes, despite SOX and all that.
Computers or not, large corporations are complex beasts, and all the accounting trickery they play for tax purposes doesn't exactly make it easy nor transparent, because it intentionally isn't. For a fast-growing company, most CFOs are pretty happy if their accounting isn't too far off.
So yeah, losing a hundred million is a rare event, but it's impossible nor unheard of.
a country, or any country? That's important here. If they can do it to one country that only means that have one target thoroughly infiltrated. But if they can do it to any country of their choosing, then I'm seriously frightened.
Here's why: Telecommunication is considered vital infrastructure in every country I know. I used to work in the industry. We had some of our phone switches in frigging nuclear-blast-proof bunkers. They and our primary storage system occupied the highest security data center available to us. There's nothing civilian above that.
As a security guy, I can of course imagine a few ways to breach security or hack the switch, i.e. both electronically and physically. But it would require a considerably amount of resources. So if they have done that for everything everywhere, then... wow.
Someone broke Betteridge's Law. That's quite a lot more interesting than the actual question, which is, of course, dumb.
That only young people can learn is one of those myths that get debunked all the time and no one ever pays any attention. You know that bullshit about language and how children pick up languages (including their mother tongue) magically while adults struggle so much? Yeah, it's total bogus, in fact adults learn languages faster and better than kids with the same investment in time and dedication.
The main difference is that young people in practice learn faster because they have little else to do. If you'd get the same exposure and personal teacher attention as a small kid does, you'd pick up a new language in half the time.
So the real question is: How much time and effort are you willing to expend? Is it something you really want and are willing to spend a few hours a day on?
That's the by far dumbest comment I've seen here in a long time, and that's saying something.
I own a small company, and I've been in hiring positions in previous jobs. Trust me, there is massive value in not having to check if everyone can read, write and do basic math. In social settings, it's really great to be able to assume some basic knowledge about the world, there would be many, many awkward situations if you make a Nazi joke and have to explain who the Nazis were to one or two people afterwards.
Society wouldn't work very well if we didn't share some basic ground.
Even when it ultimately drove out invaders, the costs were massive.
Yes, but - just like the West supplied material to Russia, so did Russia take (and bind) most of the German fury. Look up the destruction and losses in Russia when you feel like it, it's crazy. Just two numbers to get you started: Russia lost 15,800 locomotives and almost half a million wagons. That they could still move an army around at all is incredible.
Imagine that all the destructive power that Germany unleashed upon Russia had awaited the US troops on D-Day. They would've never even reached the beach if Germany hadn't had most of its troops tied up in Russia.
So while Russia isn't as invincible and almighty as its propaganda paints it - neither were the western allies. Neither could've done it without the other.
Obviously, just dumping it is stupid.
However, if you have billions of the stuff around, you can do interesting things with it. And if you're a petro nation, you can do even more interesting things. One of them is switching your oil trade to Euros. The US is so deathly afraid of that, some rumour mills say the Iraqs plans to do just that were a major reason for starting that war.
The US$ isn't strong because it is backed by the US economy, it is strong because it is the international exchange currency of choice, and the only currency with which you can buy oil at nation-state amounts.
Losing that advantage would hurt the US a lot more than a couple billions dumped on the market.
Keep in mind that the new Ukrainian government has announced massive austerity program.
This. Among the first things the new Ukrainian leadership did was bend over backwards to let the IMF fuck them in the ass, agreeing to the same politics that already ruined Greece and Spain.
If I were living in the Crimean, that alone would've been reason enough to vote for Russia.
The USA should be put under crippling sanctions, its foreign assets should be seized, its foreign nationals put on the next planes back to America. At some point the billionaires that Bush/Obama relies on for his powerbase will blink and then we can back to reasonable talk, without american forces sitting in a state that they invaded under completely made-up evidence.
There, fixed that for you.
No, I'm not saying we should ignore russian aggression. I'm saying we should bomb the US a bit in retaliation for Iraq and then we can sanction Russia for its current actions. Or is it you who is doing double-standards all of a sudden?
What does this tell us about how movie studios view the world?
That they're greedy bastards who will screw over absolutely everyone if they can make a quick buck. But then, we already knew that.
It was kind of predictable how the feminazi crowds would come out, pretending to be too dumb to understand the deeper meaning.
Man, woman, straight or gay - it doesn't matter, that sentence works in all ways. As human beings with base instincts in addition to all our intelligence, we do quite a lot of things for basic needs like food and warmth - or its abstraction, safety - and of course, sex. Being considered sexy and attractive and desireable is a force in deciding which path to take in life, like it or not.
Then why the horrible push for austerity? The same forces are at work. There's no more trust in the Government, and there's no more trust in each other.
That's not true.
The push for austerity has very little popular support, it's just that every single party subscribes to it (aka, has been corrupted). You simply can't elect anything with a snowballs chance in hell to actually get into government that does not support austerity. So since that appears to be a given no matter what, people vote based on other differences between parties, small as they may be.
Two things, first, maybe girls didn't fuck the nerds because they were unattractive.
Interesting hypothesis, but it depends on your definition of attraction, and that exactly is my point. Attractiveness has a social element to it. Different ages do have different beauty standards. If you exclude the muscular body, quite a few of those football studs aren't actually that attractive. And if you take away the glasses and the bad taste clothes, some of those nerds actually are.
All of our problems can be summed up by thinking about what happened over the last 40 years. We got told that Government is the problem. Then when we systematically gutted the system and trust in the system we found out exactly we lost. In short, we tried to fixed what wasn't even broken and now we're in an extremely bad, but not insurmountable bad place.
I live in Europe, and I've seen much of the same happening, so it's not a) a particular USA problem and b) specific to the "small government" idiocity that we in Europe largely don't share.
1) Some of those smart people might actually be girls!
Yes, and some of them may be gay, lesbian, etc. - I was saying something metaphorical, maybe it needs a tag.
2) Please do not define a student's success by the number of "sexy girls" who want to have sex with them.
I don't. I define how much society values him by it. That's a different thing. And females finding socially valuable mates more attractive is - sexism or not - a strongly substantiated finding.