Or alternatively, the guy's claim that it was a mistaken send to everyone was just his cover story and the jury thought there was enough evidence to that effect.
At the end of the day, this was a case overseen by a jury, and it's non-trivial to send a message to everyone on a Blackberry.
"Hitler made the traditional mistake of not listening to his generals/admirals, the Battle of Britain could have been won, the strategy was just taking effect around the time Hitler ordered the Luftwaffe to cease operations."
I'm not sure this is true, for about 500 dead RAF pilots, Germany saw around 2500 dead Luftwaffe pilots and 1000 captured. How could that ever be sustainable a 7:1 loss in airmen for the Luftwaffe vs. the RAF? Their aircraft loss was about 1800 vs. 1500, and many of their lost aircraft were vastly slower and more expensive to produce bombers vs. the RAF's cheap, light, fast to produce fighters. It's not like the UK was at breaking point unlike say, Malta was where the Nazis could probably have broken Malta with just a little bit more effort as it really was right on the edge.
There's also this view too, that even if the Luftwaffe had won in the air it probably still wouldn't have been enough:
You'll also note that the article points out that by the end of the Battle of Britain, the UK was far outproducing the Luftwaffe in terms of fighter output too which further suggests the Luftwaffe would only have suffered more and more if they'd have prolonged the Battle of Britain possibly increasing further again the number of airmen they were throwing away relative to their RAF counterparts.
I agree though much of the Nazis problems were due to Hitler's blunders, I recall that plans to assassinate him were called off for precisely that reason - they were scared that someone more competent may have replaced him.
Honestly, I've never met a brilliant jerk who actually is.
People only get genuinely brilliant because they're capable of introspection, because they're capable of looking at themselves and seeing in what areas they can improve and then they go out and do exactly that, they improve that area. If they could do that, they wouldn't be a jerk because they'd recognise it as an area of improvement.
People who are jerks often think they're better than they are and simply don't have anyone above them competent enough to call them out on their bullshit.
All they've announced is an old soviety carrier is now seaworthy. They don't have any aircraft for it or anything.
It's a long way from having an active carrier battlegroup, let alone a number of them like the US has and that's before you consider that they have no one to do any serious wargames with to get some proper experience and practice in meaning that in a real standoff they'll likely be easy fodder for any western submarines.
Even if they get two or three carriers round towards Europe then what? Europe doesn't even have to engage with boats or planes, they'll be in cruise missile range to boot and one carrier group doesn't carry even a fraction of the troops needed to launch any kind of land invasion.
If they had an airforce and navy the size of the US I'd be concerned, but right now they're still in a weak position. You only have to look at this chart to also see that they wont even be close to a threat any time soon because their expenditure isn't even close to the US. It's barely even above just France and the UK, let alone the whole of the EU combined:
The Battle of Britain and naval superiority had already been attained before Hitler even started Operation Barbarossa.
The whole reason he went for Russia was precisely because the Royal Navy, the RAF and it's allies had made sure that was the only direction left open as an option to Hitler for further expansion - Britain was out of the question by that point as Hitler simply didn't have the naval or air power left to invade it by then.
There's no doubt that once Hitler had made that decision that Russia deserves a massive amount of credit for the defeat of the Nazis, that's absolutely not in question, but where else was he going to go? His ability to advance anywhere else had been well and truly blocked by that point as the only way he could then reliably move troops was by land.
So back to topic, this is precisely what I'm talking about, US naval domination would be akin to British naval superiority in World War II, sure the Chinese would have a lot of troops they could roll West towards Europe with, but they'd be pretty vulnerable by the time they got there just as the Germans were the further they got into Russia - that's what happens when supply lines get stretched and forces get spread ever more thinly, and because of US naval and air superiority there's no way the Chinese could get troops across the Pacific.
The point being that just as Hitler found out, it doesn't matter how many troops you've got, if you haven't got full air/naval mobility then your abilities become drastically limited. So here's a question, if Hitler had left Britain alone, and not lost 3,000 - 4000 people and 1,900 aircraft in the Battle of Britain, and had been given freedom of the seas, would Russia's sacrifice have been enough if the German navy took somewhere like Murmansk and/or areas around the White Sea then started a Northern invasion towards Moscow too? That seems pretty unlikely. Russia won because Germany had been forced (due to earlier events like the Battle of Britain) to fight a war that was both exactly the type of war that Russia excelled at and also that Hitler simply couldn't avoid.
"I don't need to know the math of bilinear interpolation to use it."
No, but you need to know what it is regardless to understand why such interpolation modes have the effect they do and hence what mode you need to get the effects you desire. If you hadn't studied maths you wouldn't even know what bilinear interpolation even was, so how would you know to look for it or that it was what you were looking for in API docs etc.?
You may not need to do matrix manipulation thanks to libraries, but you need to know how matrix manipulation works to understand the effects of making those function calls.
I think you're making the mistake that because you clearly do understand these sorts of things, and use them subconciously when figuring out what function to call from the API, and with what parameters, that you're assuming you don't need it, you do.
Take it from someone who always loved 3D programming, but simply just didn't "get it" until I did my maths degree, after which it was simply just so easy.
Even if you're not writing the libraries, and functions yourself, you still need to understand how they work at least on a high level even if not the exact implementation to understand their effect.
I think you underestimate the use of algebra in computing. Even people doing HTML and CSS work only will often need algebra to produce some layouts and effects. Even more so if you intend to use many of CSS3's transforms with it's growing popularity. On that note, if you ever do anything like writing custom controls in something like MFC or Winforms you're going to need to use algebra to layout parts of it.
Just watched it for myself, and as someone who isn't from the US nor particularly cares which one wins because at this point American politics is such a fucking trainwreck that it makes no odds to us in the rest of the world, I'd say whilst his tone seems generally light hearted his comment on why windows don't open clearly wasn't part of that, it makes no sense in the context of his light hearted delivery of the situation as a joke and only as a genuine question slipped in as an aside to the situation he was talking about.
It seems he genuinely didn't understand why they don't roll down.
You can't really do a like for like comparison of numbers as it's not that simple. You only have to look at why China already has an army that size to see the problem - it's because it needs it to supress internal dissent.
If China thins it's internal ranks to fight an external war you can guarantee some of that 4:1 population advantage will actually act in the US' favour - Xinjiang, Tibet, Taiwan, Inner Mongolia are all just waiting for such an opportunity to break away.
But there's also the logistics issue- how exactly are those 3 billion people or even a tiny proportion of them going to cross the ocean to the US where they can actually cause a threat? Or are they all going to go via Russia? There in itself lies a problem though, whilst Russia often aligns with China in UN security council votes because they both want to keep Europe and US influence in check, it doesn't make them friends. Russia and China have their own border disputes, and you can be rest assured a stretched China would give Russia the chance it's been waiting for to bolster it's claims on that disputed territory. For what it's worth, India, Vietnam, Laos, also have disputes with China on borders, so it can't count on their support for anything, and in fact similarly risks them taking territory from it if they weaken their military.
China is a threat to local nations offshore from it - Japan, South Korea, and so forth, but it's got a strong internal military for it's own security. It can't afford to weaken that with sizable external deployments, because just about everyone on all of it's borders and half of it's internal provinces are all just waiting for their opportunity to pounce and pull bits of both it's population and land mass away from it.
"Germany was initially only limited to their own immediate neighborhood in Europe back in World War 2, right? How did that work out last time?"
Last I checked they lost?
In large part, this is because for all the mainland European territory they took, they just couldn't duke it out with the Royal Navy which was, still, an empire-grade navy at the time.
Between Hitler throwing away half his air force in the Battle of Britain, and the Royal Navy eventually controlling the seas around the whole of Europe, from Norway, down through the North Sea, and all the way round into the Med covering Northern Africa, Italy, Malta, and so on it was the very fact that Britain and it's allies controlled the seas that put a stop on them.
Despite this I don't disagree that China is a threat to nations in it's region- and that does include nations that have a body of water between it and them such as Japan, but ultimately, I do not think China is a threat to North America, precisely because of the distinct lack of worthwhile naval power. Similarly, I don't think it's a threat to Europe because by the time it reaches there it'll already be spread far too thin including having passed a nation almost it's size and manpower - India.
That and when you point out issues to them i.e. memory leaks in Firefox they deny they exist. Then they finally admit to them when they fix them a couple of years later they deny ever denying they existed and basically try and troll you over it.
Between that sort of attitude, a concern I have that at least one of their devs didn't seem to grasp basic modular extensible software design, and things like the do not track debacle where they came up with some nonsensical reason as to why not to enable it by default (which again, has now proven to be nonsensical now the ad companies refuse to honour it anyway) I'm not convinced these are the sorts of folks I want going anywhere near my OS right now.
Firefox was great, it really was, but it steadily lost it's way and lost it's focus. It's developers I've encountered seem to have an attitude of the customer is always wrong, and they're always right, about everything, ever - the issues you cite are emblamatic of this exact attitude. It's marketshare decline has been evidence that it's not simply me that thinks the browser isn't as good as it used to be a lot of people clearly feel it's been outcompeted. Mozilla needs to engage constructively with it's users much more effectively than it has, simply telling them they're wrong about everything clearly isn't effective.
Honestly, Mozilla needs to take a massive step back, look at itself, reevaluate it's goals and check it is still following them, consider where they went wrong to cause people to start walking away from them, and learn a basic bit about dealing with users in a constructive manner before it embarks on this sort of thing. I'd actually like to see this succeed as competition is always good, but it needs a real step change in so many areas and so many ways at Mozilla if it's to go anywhere.
Then they'll suffer sanctions, which means restriction on trade, which means that in this economic climate they'll end up needing a bailout from guess who?
It'd be economic suicide to shut yourself off from your biggest trading partners like that, no country is stupid enough to do so. It's easier to just fulfil their obligations.
No one said anything about 100%, that's something you obviously made up in your head because you somehow need to rationalise your failure to accept that public support on an issue flows against your personal belief.
Support for Europe or not is a pretty fundamental thing as it effects the fabric of a country. If you don't believe the democratic outcome of elections though you could always look at single issue polls which show the French do overwhelmingly support the EU.
Even right now, when support for the EU is at an all time low, most member nations state they want to stay in. All voted to enter it in the first place, every single one of them in a membership referendum, even the UK which is the most eurosceptic there is and most likely to have a referendum to see if they still want to stay in.
It doesn't really matter how you twist it, how you try and use misdirection to move the focus elsewhere, you're wrong, period. Sucks for you that you're a eurosceptic who can't impose his will on everyone else, but I'm glad about that, I don't really have time for dictators.
If you raise a problem and someone points to a solution outside the scope of the article you can't simply write it off as off-topic.
You similarly can't assume that censorship will be applied fairly, so it's stupid to even bother going down that route. You can't ever assume fairness, but if you work on the principle that an idea is not worth bothering with because there's no guarantee of it being applied fairly, then no solution at all is going work.
The issue you raise is entirely down to an unhealthy media landscape, as I said before, censorship is not the solution to that problem. You're right that different cultures may have different views, but that doesn't mean that said cultures are right in their views, especially as nowadays censorship doesn't even work in this sort of case - if YouTube is blocked you can guarantee a thousand other pages will put the video up and people will be more inclined to go and see what the fuss is about.
But that's only an issue if you have unhealthy media laws. In this case we're talking about YouTube, the opposition can put up their counterclaim, they're more than welcome to.
Similarly in the UK for example we have a public broadcaster, the BBC, who is explicitly forbidden from this sort of thing. If it is found guilty of bias it's forced to issue a public apology and retraction. The good thing is is that forces other broadcasters to similarly be fairly objective else no one would waste their time with them, as such all the UK's main news channels are fairly objective - even Sky, Murdoch's owned station is forced to be more objective than his paper monopoly is for example.
The issue you're raising isn't one that requires outright censorship, it's one that requires a healthy media. If you have a country that's allowed one guy to create a complete monopoly then I agree there's an issue, but as I say, it's most definitely not censorship that's the solution.
Right, and why are those two pro-Europe parties the big parties with a reasonable chance of presidency? Because those pro-Europe parties are the parties the French populace support.
There are anti-European parties in Europe, but the populace do not support that.
"Both installing censors to prevent any media for saying anything you dislike and simply killing them if they do is censorship, since both are suppression of speech. It does not matter if it is direct or indirect."
No it's not, unless you kill them before they make that speech.
Censorship is simply the process of preventing someone broadcasting something either vocally, by the internet, using a book or whatever. You're only preventing someone from saying something by killing them if you do so before they get their message out, if you do it after they say it, you're not censoring them, you're discouraging them if they're aware of the consequences, but you are absolutely not stopping them and hence censoring them. It may be that you're then censoring them getting a further message out, but you did not censor that original message.
Look, you're getting freedom of speech and censorship mixed up, that's fine, you don't understand the subtle difference, but that's your problem if you can't grasp that. Note that freedom of speech is arbitrarily defined anyway- in America freedom of speech isn't absolute for example but you're not being censored if you're discouraged from shouting fire in a crowded theatre, merely being reminded that there are consequences for abusing free speech.
What's your point exactly then? If it's got enough plausibility to get through libel laws then it's just as trivially got the plausibility to get past censorship laws and there wont be enough time to act either way.
I don't see how this is an argument for censorship? It's still going to be 100% ineffective in this case.
Actually he's right in many cases. Some of the most succesful viruses to date don't rely on someone to simply receive and executable and run it but rely on a browser exploit, a buffer overflow or similar in a mail client or other internet-exposed software.
By the time that vector has been exploited malicious code has executed and yet your virus scanner has no file to check - if that code hits your virus scanner before downloading it's main payload then it's already too late.
Of course, even in cases where you have downloaded or been e-mail a dodgy payload, the AV software will only flag it before execution if it recognises it as malicious, if it doesn't then yes, exactly as the GP says it will get to go first.
The problem is that even when heuristics are used they're still far from useful as most virus developers will test against those heuristics and work around them before they release so again the AV companies are only being reactive.
I don't think there's an AV solution out there that's anything other than a bit of a con in this respect. Honestly, AV software is like putting a jumper on when it's raining - it may keep you warm and dry for a few minutes longer, but the water is still eventually going to soak through it. The best option is to stick to areas that are undercover and the rain doesn't fall (i.e. avoid dodgy sites and files), there is as yet no equivalent of the rain coat that will keep you dry no matter what in the AV world. They're all a bit naff and will only protect you from the things you could've fairly trivially just protected yourself against if you'd been sensible in the first place. Whether you feel that's worth a fairly noticable drain on your computing resources or not is upto the individual in question, personally, I don't think it is as the only threats it can protect me against are those I never intend to execute - untrusted downloads/e-mail attachments.
Glad to see your post, sad to see it modded down as it's exactly right.
I've not use resident AV for over a decade now, and just run weekly scans overnight, but even this is worthless. The reason I stopped was because the resident shield didn't detect if for some time and even when it did it couldn't remove it anyway.
Honestly, the best anti-virus is yourself - don't run any untrusted executable files on your system, don't leave any random ports open, connect to the net via NAT, and make sure other attack vectors such as your browser are a) uptodate, and b) don't visit any dodgy sites, at least without turning off Javascript.
If you really must download something dodgy like a crack or pirated software, then upload any executable content to an online scanning site, or check it in a sandbox. Assume that because you've downloaded said dodgy software that it's infected, and treat appropriately - if you're convinced you've checked it and cleaned it then use away, if you're not sure, don't risk it, find another source.
AV really is a waste of resources, at best it protects stupid people from the oldest most common viruses whilst living them vulnerable and exposed to other viruses. Fundamentally though these people will access so many unsafe sites and click on so many things they shouldn't that the number of attack vectors they've created for themselves means that AV isn't going to magically protect them.
There are better methods of handling this sort of thing that don't apply to shouting fire though-
1) Transparency. If an opponent is making a claim against you then be transparent about the issue and prove them wrong. Allow an independent body to investigate and verify your taxes or whatever is in question.
2) Libel laws. If someone is lying about you, get a libel judgement against them. Even if the election passes most countries have sane enough laws to allow for an election to be ruled invalid based on this sort of ruling forcing a re-run and possibly even banning them from running if they lied about you.
Censorship though is not the solution, it just makes people more suspicious that you have something to hide and further muddies the water.
It's not about being pre-emptive, that's not the issue at stake here. It's about the outright blocking of content, whether that happens immediately, or sometime after the fact.
In the case of shouting fire in a crowded theatre, no one whatsoever is stopping you doing that. They're just saying you're going to get punished if you do it without good reason and put people's lives at risk. It's then upto you if you believe your right to exercise free speech is more important than suffering the consequences if you choose to do so, it's about enforcing the point that with free speech comes responsibility to use it sensibly and where it matters.
"Lets say, we outlaw saying anything bad about the President. We do not prevent anyone from saying these things, ?how would you even do this?, but whenever you get a report of it, the criminal gets executed (for example) and the offending material taken down if it was not simply speech. This is not censorship?"
There's a few issues here. The first point is not in itself censorship, enforcement determines whether censorship has occured or not. Killing someone for saying something you don't want them to is not censorship, but it is a gross human rights abuse. Taking the content down if it was not speech is also censorship.
Where you're probably getting confused is with the concept of self-censorship - this is where people choose to censor themselves because they are afraid of the punishment. This is not state imposed censorship as much as it is state encouragement for consideration to self-censor.
An example of actual censorship would be a regime locking up someone or executing someone before they get to say what they wish to say. The case in the article is censorship because the judging is actually asking that content be made outright unavailable rather than simply saying "You can leave it available, but I'll arrest your boss and fine you billions of pounds" or whatever. That would not be censorship, but it may encourage Google to self-censor if they do not feel defending their will to free expression outweighs the downsides of doing so.
Self-censorship is indeed not always a bad thing I suppose, but certainly I'm not convinced that state enforced censorship is ever a good thing. In this particular case, what if the video is right? what if the candidate really is a crook and is just using Brazil's media laws to mask that fact from the public? How is this a good thing? If he isn't really a crook, then why doesn't he release whatever records he needs to prove this is the case? Why doesn't he counter-attack? Why doesn't he call for an emergency judgement on the legitimacy of the video and get a libel judgement in his favour? There are plenty of ways to deal with the problem, censorship isn't one, because it'll just make people even more curious about the video if the opposition is so desperate to silence it and make them even more likely to believe he has something to hide.
"They can and it still does happen (often in Poland), please stop confusing law with reality."
The law is reality if you bother to enforce it, if people are having this forced upon them and doing nothing about it (again, the law is on their side) then that's their own stupid fucking fault. There are plenty of mechanisms within the EU for citizens to ensure these sorts of things are being enforced, and countries that don't enforce them get investigated, and fined until they do comply. It's not like countries can get away with non-compliance indefinitely unless they're willing to put up with the enforced fines or unless the populace chooses to let them get away with it.
"Not quite, some manufacturers begin their warranty the day it leaves their factory, not when the end user purchases the equipment (Seagate did this on some of their harddrive models). Had the UK kept it's original laws unmodified, this would have not been acceptable."
This is completely false, as your warranty isn't provided by the manufacturer but by the person you bought the product from. It doesn't matter what Seagate say, if you bought it 18 months after manufacture from say, PC World, then PC World has a responsibility to serve you with repair, refund, or replacement 2 years after the date you bought it. Also, the UK didn't modify it's laws, they were already sufficient to fulfil the EU's obligations on this.
"There are also fine examples of things like 'arrest warrants' that remove founding principles like Habeas Corpus from functioning in existing legal systems, leading to massive abuse, which is in my opinion, more important than a silly warranty."
Agreed, so let's point this out to our representatives and get it changed. Note though that countries like the UK have done this unilaterally with the US anyway though and with less safeguards so extradition without trial is certainly not a purely EU specific problem but a much broader issue which needs to be stopped both in the EU, and out.
"You mean like how Greece tried to pull out and then their government was replaced by a puppet?"
What are you on about? I'm not really interested in conspiracy theories that have no basis in reality, they hold no relevance to what's happening in the real world. Even the anti-bailout parties in Greece support staying in the EU, the only parties that really don't are the far-right minority groups, but the overwhelming majority support continued membership, including those against the bailout and austerity measures.
"Or how Ireland kept having a referendum on laws they didn't want until they accepted the EU's proposal?"
That's a rather odd twist on reality too. What actually happened: Ireland rejected the original treaty based on the results of a referendum, the Irish government lobbied for some amendments and then went back to it's populace after those changes had been made. The Irish public were then satisfied with those changes and voted in favour of the referendum's proposal and so it passed. Democracy in action.
If a country voted in favour of a referendum's proposal and you don't like that, then tough fucking shit. It was their referendum, they chose to vote that way.
Slashdot Mirror
Or alternatively, the guy's claim that it was a mistaken send to everyone was just his cover story and the jury thought there was enough evidence to that effect.
At the end of the day, this was a case overseen by a jury, and it's non-trivial to send a message to everyone on a Blackberry.
"Hitler made the traditional mistake of not listening to his generals/admirals, the Battle of Britain could have been won, the strategy was just taking effect around the time Hitler ordered the Luftwaffe to cease operations."
I'm not sure this is true, for about 500 dead RAF pilots, Germany saw around 2500 dead Luftwaffe pilots and 1000 captured. How could that ever be sustainable a 7:1 loss in airmen for the Luftwaffe vs. the RAF? Their aircraft loss was about 1800 vs. 1500, and many of their lost aircraft were vastly slower and more expensive to produce bombers vs. the RAF's cheap, light, fast to produce fighters. It's not like the UK was at breaking point unlike say, Malta was where the Nazis could probably have broken Malta with just a little bit more effort as it really was right on the edge.
There's also this view too, that even if the Luftwaffe had won in the air it probably still wouldn't have been enough:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/1527068/Battle-of-Britain-was-won-at-sea.-Discuss.html
You'll also note that the article points out that by the end of the Battle of Britain, the UK was far outproducing the Luftwaffe in terms of fighter output too which further suggests the Luftwaffe would only have suffered more and more if they'd have prolonged the Battle of Britain possibly increasing further again the number of airmen they were throwing away relative to their RAF counterparts.
I agree though much of the Nazis problems were due to Hitler's blunders, I recall that plans to assassinate him were called off for precisely that reason - they were scared that someone more competent may have replaced him.
Honestly, I've never met a brilliant jerk who actually is.
People only get genuinely brilliant because they're capable of introspection, because they're capable of looking at themselves and seeing in what areas they can improve and then they go out and do exactly that, they improve that area. If they could do that, they wouldn't be a jerk because they'd recognise it as an area of improvement.
People who are jerks often think they're better than they are and simply don't have anyone above them competent enough to call them out on their bullshit.
All they've announced is an old soviety carrier is now seaworthy. They don't have any aircraft for it or anything.
It's a long way from having an active carrier battlegroup, let alone a number of them like the US has and that's before you consider that they have no one to do any serious wargames with to get some proper experience and practice in meaning that in a real standoff they'll likely be easy fodder for any western submarines.
Even if they get two or three carriers round towards Europe then what? Europe doesn't even have to engage with boats or planes, they'll be in cruise missile range to boot and one carrier group doesn't carry even a fraction of the troops needed to launch any kind of land invasion.
If they had an airforce and navy the size of the US I'd be concerned, but right now they're still in a weak position. You only have to look at this chart to also see that they wont even be close to a threat any time soon because their expenditure isn't even close to the US. It's barely even above just France and the UK, let alone the whole of the EU combined:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/timeline/9b6b4ac6234a38d7f61757290055617d.png
The Battle of Britain and naval superiority had already been attained before Hitler even started Operation Barbarossa.
The whole reason he went for Russia was precisely because the Royal Navy, the RAF and it's allies had made sure that was the only direction left open as an option to Hitler for further expansion - Britain was out of the question by that point as Hitler simply didn't have the naval or air power left to invade it by then.
There's no doubt that once Hitler had made that decision that Russia deserves a massive amount of credit for the defeat of the Nazis, that's absolutely not in question, but where else was he going to go? His ability to advance anywhere else had been well and truly blocked by that point as the only way he could then reliably move troops was by land.
So back to topic, this is precisely what I'm talking about, US naval domination would be akin to British naval superiority in World War II, sure the Chinese would have a lot of troops they could roll West towards Europe with, but they'd be pretty vulnerable by the time they got there just as the Germans were the further they got into Russia - that's what happens when supply lines get stretched and forces get spread ever more thinly, and because of US naval and air superiority there's no way the Chinese could get troops across the Pacific.
The point being that just as Hitler found out, it doesn't matter how many troops you've got, if you haven't got full air/naval mobility then your abilities become drastically limited. So here's a question, if Hitler had left Britain alone, and not lost 3,000 - 4000 people and 1,900 aircraft in the Battle of Britain, and had been given freedom of the seas, would Russia's sacrifice have been enough if the German navy took somewhere like Murmansk and/or areas around the White Sea then started a Northern invasion towards Moscow too? That seems pretty unlikely. Russia won because Germany had been forced (due to earlier events like the Battle of Britain) to fight a war that was both exactly the type of war that Russia excelled at and also that Hitler simply couldn't avoid.
Why is it bad? It unquestionably means you're an intellectual!
Congratulations on your official designation.
"I don't need to know the math of bilinear interpolation to use it."
No, but you need to know what it is regardless to understand why such interpolation modes have the effect they do and hence what mode you need to get the effects you desire. If you hadn't studied maths you wouldn't even know what bilinear interpolation even was, so how would you know to look for it or that it was what you were looking for in API docs etc.?
You may not need to do matrix manipulation thanks to libraries, but you need to know how matrix manipulation works to understand the effects of making those function calls.
I think you're making the mistake that because you clearly do understand these sorts of things, and use them subconciously when figuring out what function to call from the API, and with what parameters, that you're assuming you don't need it, you do.
Take it from someone who always loved 3D programming, but simply just didn't "get it" until I did my maths degree, after which it was simply just so easy.
Even if you're not writing the libraries, and functions yourself, you still need to understand how they work at least on a high level even if not the exact implementation to understand their effect.
I think you underestimate the use of algebra in computing. Even people doing HTML and CSS work only will often need algebra to produce some layouts and effects. Even more so if you intend to use many of CSS3's transforms with it's growing popularity. On that note, if you ever do anything like writing custom controls in something like MFC or Winforms you're going to need to use algebra to layout parts of it.
Just watched it for myself, and as someone who isn't from the US nor particularly cares which one wins because at this point American politics is such a fucking trainwreck that it makes no odds to us in the rest of the world, I'd say whilst his tone seems generally light hearted his comment on why windows don't open clearly wasn't part of that, it makes no sense in the context of his light hearted delivery of the situation as a joke and only as a genuine question slipped in as an aside to the situation he was talking about.
It seems he genuinely didn't understand why they don't roll down.
You can't really do a like for like comparison of numbers as it's not that simple. You only have to look at why China already has an army that size to see the problem - it's because it needs it to supress internal dissent.
If China thins it's internal ranks to fight an external war you can guarantee some of that 4:1 population advantage will actually act in the US' favour - Xinjiang, Tibet, Taiwan, Inner Mongolia are all just waiting for such an opportunity to break away.
But there's also the logistics issue- how exactly are those 3 billion people or even a tiny proportion of them going to cross the ocean to the US where they can actually cause a threat? Or are they all going to go via Russia? There in itself lies a problem though, whilst Russia often aligns with China in UN security council votes because they both want to keep Europe and US influence in check, it doesn't make them friends. Russia and China have their own border disputes, and you can be rest assured a stretched China would give Russia the chance it's been waiting for to bolster it's claims on that disputed territory. For what it's worth, India, Vietnam, Laos, also have disputes with China on borders, so it can't count on their support for anything, and in fact similarly risks them taking territory from it if they weaken their military.
China is a threat to local nations offshore from it - Japan, South Korea, and so forth, but it's got a strong internal military for it's own security. It can't afford to weaken that with sizable external deployments, because just about everyone on all of it's borders and half of it's internal provinces are all just waiting for their opportunity to pounce and pull bits of both it's population and land mass away from it.
"Germany was initially only limited to their own immediate neighborhood in Europe back in World War 2, right? How did that work out last time?"
Last I checked they lost?
In large part, this is because for all the mainland European territory they took, they just couldn't duke it out with the Royal Navy which was, still, an empire-grade navy at the time.
Between Hitler throwing away half his air force in the Battle of Britain, and the Royal Navy eventually controlling the seas around the whole of Europe, from Norway, down through the North Sea, and all the way round into the Med covering Northern Africa, Italy, Malta, and so on it was the very fact that Britain and it's allies controlled the seas that put a stop on them.
Despite this I don't disagree that China is a threat to nations in it's region- and that does include nations that have a body of water between it and them such as Japan, but ultimately, I do not think China is a threat to North America, precisely because of the distinct lack of worthwhile naval power. Similarly, I don't think it's a threat to Europe because by the time it reaches there it'll already be spread far too thin including having passed a nation almost it's size and manpower - India.
That and when you point out issues to them i.e. memory leaks in Firefox they deny they exist. Then they finally admit to them when they fix them a couple of years later they deny ever denying they existed and basically try and troll you over it.
Between that sort of attitude, a concern I have that at least one of their devs didn't seem to grasp basic modular extensible software design, and things like the do not track debacle where they came up with some nonsensical reason as to why not to enable it by default (which again, has now proven to be nonsensical now the ad companies refuse to honour it anyway) I'm not convinced these are the sorts of folks I want going anywhere near my OS right now.
Firefox was great, it really was, but it steadily lost it's way and lost it's focus. It's developers I've encountered seem to have an attitude of the customer is always wrong, and they're always right, about everything, ever - the issues you cite are emblamatic of this exact attitude. It's marketshare decline has been evidence that it's not simply me that thinks the browser isn't as good as it used to be a lot of people clearly feel it's been outcompeted. Mozilla needs to engage constructively with it's users much more effectively than it has, simply telling them they're wrong about everything clearly isn't effective.
Honestly, Mozilla needs to take a massive step back, look at itself, reevaluate it's goals and check it is still following them, consider where they went wrong to cause people to start walking away from them, and learn a basic bit about dealing with users in a constructive manner before it embarks on this sort of thing. I'd actually like to see this succeed as competition is always good, but it needs a real step change in so many areas and so many ways at Mozilla if it's to go anywhere.
Yes, see here:
http://falkvinge.net/2012/03/02/how-microsoft-pays-big-money-to-smear-google-audaciously/
Then they'll suffer sanctions, which means restriction on trade, which means that in this economic climate they'll end up needing a bailout from guess who?
It'd be economic suicide to shut yourself off from your biggest trading partners like that, no country is stupid enough to do so. It's easier to just fulfil their obligations.
No one said anything about 100%, that's something you obviously made up in your head because you somehow need to rationalise your failure to accept that public support on an issue flows against your personal belief.
Support for Europe or not is a pretty fundamental thing as it effects the fabric of a country. If you don't believe the democratic outcome of elections though you could always look at single issue polls which show the French do overwhelmingly support the EU.
Even right now, when support for the EU is at an all time low, most member nations state they want to stay in. All voted to enter it in the first place, every single one of them in a membership referendum, even the UK which is the most eurosceptic there is and most likely to have a referendum to see if they still want to stay in.
It doesn't really matter how you twist it, how you try and use misdirection to move the focus elsewhere, you're wrong, period. Sucks for you that you're a eurosceptic who can't impose his will on everyone else, but I'm glad about that, I don't really have time for dictators.
If you raise a problem and someone points to a solution outside the scope of the article you can't simply write it off as off-topic.
You similarly can't assume that censorship will be applied fairly, so it's stupid to even bother going down that route. You can't ever assume fairness, but if you work on the principle that an idea is not worth bothering with because there's no guarantee of it being applied fairly, then no solution at all is going work.
The issue you raise is entirely down to an unhealthy media landscape, as I said before, censorship is not the solution to that problem. You're right that different cultures may have different views, but that doesn't mean that said cultures are right in their views, especially as nowadays censorship doesn't even work in this sort of case - if YouTube is blocked you can guarantee a thousand other pages will put the video up and people will be more inclined to go and see what the fuss is about.
But that's only an issue if you have unhealthy media laws. In this case we're talking about YouTube, the opposition can put up their counterclaim, they're more than welcome to.
Similarly in the UK for example we have a public broadcaster, the BBC, who is explicitly forbidden from this sort of thing. If it is found guilty of bias it's forced to issue a public apology and retraction. The good thing is is that forces other broadcasters to similarly be fairly objective else no one would waste their time with them, as such all the UK's main news channels are fairly objective - even Sky, Murdoch's owned station is forced to be more objective than his paper monopoly is for example.
The issue you're raising isn't one that requires outright censorship, it's one that requires a healthy media. If you have a country that's allowed one guy to create a complete monopoly then I agree there's an issue, but as I say, it's most definitely not censorship that's the solution.
Right, and why are those two pro-Europe parties the big parties with a reasonable chance of presidency? Because those pro-Europe parties are the parties the French populace support.
There are anti-European parties in Europe, but the populace do not support that.
"Both installing censors to prevent any media for saying anything you dislike and simply killing them if they do is censorship, since both are suppression of speech. It does not matter if it is direct or indirect."
No it's not, unless you kill them before they make that speech.
Censorship is simply the process of preventing someone broadcasting something either vocally, by the internet, using a book or whatever. You're only preventing someone from saying something by killing them if you do so before they get their message out, if you do it after they say it, you're not censoring them, you're discouraging them if they're aware of the consequences, but you are absolutely not stopping them and hence censoring them. It may be that you're then censoring them getting a further message out, but you did not censor that original message.
Look, you're getting freedom of speech and censorship mixed up, that's fine, you don't understand the subtle difference, but that's your problem if you can't grasp that. Note that freedom of speech is arbitrarily defined anyway- in America freedom of speech isn't absolute for example but you're not being censored if you're discouraged from shouting fire in a crowded theatre, merely being reminded that there are consequences for abusing free speech.
Can't we all just like, file DMCA complaints about it until he gets fed up of issuing counterclaims?
What's your point exactly then? If it's got enough plausibility to get through libel laws then it's just as trivially got the plausibility to get past censorship laws and there wont be enough time to act either way.
I don't see how this is an argument for censorship? It's still going to be 100% ineffective in this case.
Actually he's right in many cases. Some of the most succesful viruses to date don't rely on someone to simply receive and executable and run it but rely on a browser exploit, a buffer overflow or similar in a mail client or other internet-exposed software.
By the time that vector has been exploited malicious code has executed and yet your virus scanner has no file to check - if that code hits your virus scanner before downloading it's main payload then it's already too late.
Of course, even in cases where you have downloaded or been e-mail a dodgy payload, the AV software will only flag it before execution if it recognises it as malicious, if it doesn't then yes, exactly as the GP says it will get to go first.
The problem is that even when heuristics are used they're still far from useful as most virus developers will test against those heuristics and work around them before they release so again the AV companies are only being reactive.
I don't think there's an AV solution out there that's anything other than a bit of a con in this respect. Honestly, AV software is like putting a jumper on when it's raining - it may keep you warm and dry for a few minutes longer, but the water is still eventually going to soak through it. The best option is to stick to areas that are undercover and the rain doesn't fall (i.e. avoid dodgy sites and files), there is as yet no equivalent of the rain coat that will keep you dry no matter what in the AV world. They're all a bit naff and will only protect you from the things you could've fairly trivially just protected yourself against if you'd been sensible in the first place. Whether you feel that's worth a fairly noticable drain on your computing resources or not is upto the individual in question, personally, I don't think it is as the only threats it can protect me against are those I never intend to execute - untrusted downloads/e-mail attachments.
Glad to see your post, sad to see it modded down as it's exactly right.
I've not use resident AV for over a decade now, and just run weekly scans overnight, but even this is worthless. The reason I stopped was because the resident shield didn't detect if for some time and even when it did it couldn't remove it anyway.
Honestly, the best anti-virus is yourself - don't run any untrusted executable files on your system, don't leave any random ports open, connect to the net via NAT, and make sure other attack vectors such as your browser are a) uptodate, and b) don't visit any dodgy sites, at least without turning off Javascript.
If you really must download something dodgy like a crack or pirated software, then upload any executable content to an online scanning site, or check it in a sandbox. Assume that because you've downloaded said dodgy software that it's infected, and treat appropriately - if you're convinced you've checked it and cleaned it then use away, if you're not sure, don't risk it, find another source.
AV really is a waste of resources, at best it protects stupid people from the oldest most common viruses whilst living them vulnerable and exposed to other viruses. Fundamentally though these people will access so many unsafe sites and click on so many things they shouldn't that the number of attack vectors they've created for themselves means that AV isn't going to magically protect them.
There are better methods of handling this sort of thing that don't apply to shouting fire though-
1) Transparency. If an opponent is making a claim against you then be transparent about the issue and prove them wrong. Allow an independent body to investigate and verify your taxes or whatever is in question.
2) Libel laws. If someone is lying about you, get a libel judgement against them. Even if the election passes most countries have sane enough laws to allow for an election to be ruled invalid based on this sort of ruling forcing a re-run and possibly even banning them from running if they lied about you.
Censorship though is not the solution, it just makes people more suspicious that you have something to hide and further muddies the water.
"Yes it is. Most censorship is not pre-emptive"
It's not about being pre-emptive, that's not the issue at stake here. It's about the outright blocking of content, whether that happens immediately, or sometime after the fact.
In the case of shouting fire in a crowded theatre, no one whatsoever is stopping you doing that. They're just saying you're going to get punished if you do it without good reason and put people's lives at risk. It's then upto you if you believe your right to exercise free speech is more important than suffering the consequences if you choose to do so, it's about enforcing the point that with free speech comes responsibility to use it sensibly and where it matters.
"Lets say, we outlaw saying anything bad about the President. We do not prevent anyone from saying these things, ?how would you even do this?, but whenever you get a report of it, the criminal gets executed (for example) and the offending material taken down if it was not simply speech.
This is not censorship?"
There's a few issues here. The first point is not in itself censorship, enforcement determines whether censorship has occured or not. Killing someone for saying something you don't want them to is not censorship, but it is a gross human rights abuse. Taking the content down if it was not speech is also censorship.
Where you're probably getting confused is with the concept of self-censorship - this is where people choose to censor themselves because they are afraid of the punishment. This is not state imposed censorship as much as it is state encouragement for consideration to self-censor.
An example of actual censorship would be a regime locking up someone or executing someone before they get to say what they wish to say. The case in the article is censorship because the judging is actually asking that content be made outright unavailable rather than simply saying "You can leave it available, but I'll arrest your boss and fine you billions of pounds" or whatever. That would not be censorship, but it may encourage Google to self-censor if they do not feel defending their will to free expression outweighs the downsides of doing so.
Self-censorship is indeed not always a bad thing I suppose, but certainly I'm not convinced that state enforced censorship is ever a good thing. In this particular case, what if the video is right? what if the candidate really is a crook and is just using Brazil's media laws to mask that fact from the public? How is this a good thing? If he isn't really a crook, then why doesn't he release whatever records he needs to prove this is the case? Why doesn't he counter-attack? Why doesn't he call for an emergency judgement on the legitimacy of the video and get a libel judgement in his favour? There are plenty of ways to deal with the problem, censorship isn't one, because it'll just make people even more curious about the video if the opposition is so desperate to silence it and make them even more likely to believe he has something to hide.
"They can and it still does happen (often in Poland), please stop confusing law with reality."
The law is reality if you bother to enforce it, if people are having this forced upon them and doing nothing about it (again, the law is on their side) then that's their own stupid fucking fault. There are plenty of mechanisms within the EU for citizens to ensure these sorts of things are being enforced, and countries that don't enforce them get investigated, and fined until they do comply. It's not like countries can get away with non-compliance indefinitely unless they're willing to put up with the enforced fines or unless the populace chooses to let them get away with it.
"Not quite, some manufacturers begin their warranty the day it leaves their factory, not when the end user purchases the equipment (Seagate did this on some of their harddrive models). Had the UK kept it's original laws unmodified, this would have not been acceptable."
This is completely false, as your warranty isn't provided by the manufacturer but by the person you bought the product from. It doesn't matter what Seagate say, if you bought it 18 months after manufacture from say, PC World, then PC World has a responsibility to serve you with repair, refund, or replacement 2 years after the date you bought it. Also, the UK didn't modify it's laws, they were already sufficient to fulfil the EU's obligations on this.
"There are also fine examples of things like 'arrest warrants' that remove founding principles like Habeas Corpus from functioning in existing legal systems, leading to massive abuse, which is in my opinion, more important than a silly warranty."
Agreed, so let's point this out to our representatives and get it changed. Note though that countries like the UK have done this unilaterally with the US anyway though and with less safeguards so extradition without trial is certainly not a purely EU specific problem but a much broader issue which needs to be stopped both in the EU, and out.
"You mean like how Greece tried to pull out and then their government was replaced by a puppet?"
What are you on about? I'm not really interested in conspiracy theories that have no basis in reality, they hold no relevance to what's happening in the real world. Even the anti-bailout parties in Greece support staying in the EU, the only parties that really don't are the far-right minority groups, but the overwhelming majority support continued membership, including those against the bailout and austerity measures.
"Or how Ireland kept having a referendum on laws they didn't want until they accepted the EU's proposal?"
That's a rather odd twist on reality too. What actually happened: Ireland rejected the original treaty based on the results of a referendum, the Irish government lobbied for some amendments and then went back to it's populace after those changes had been made. The Irish public were then satisfied with those changes and voted in favour of the referendum's proposal and so it passed. Democracy in action.
If a country voted in favour of a referendum's proposal and you don't like that, then tough fucking shit. It was their referendum, they chose to vote that way.