I think the truth in this point lies in the fact that this was when the British Empire was still around and held large swathes of land with sway over large numbers of people.
That plus the German Empire lost large amounts of land after the great war.
It wasn't insane to pursue land. Not at that time.
The reasons, "science" and supremacism that surrounded it? Yes. Unfortunately, the kind that sweeps a broken, defeated nation under a spell, a mass delusion of grandeur.
Insanely barbaric, when the "more room" part means taking it from other people. And when it's rationalized by racial and national mythology, then yes, it is absolutely insane.
You have to get pretty creative to explain why the US are sprinkling missile interceptors ever closer to Russian soil without considering "mad power drive".
I'm tired of people saying that they are tired of it. It's one freaking day of the year on the internet. You know, you could just work today and not visit too many websites and you'd never know if there were a "lot" of April 1st stuff.
I don't care for these april pranks at all, but to complain about it is just next level.
I don't see how you come up with this stuff. Codeplex was simply uglier than Github, that's it. Both graphical design wise and interaction design wise.
Well, Russia has been repeatedly invaded. Overrun by the Mongols. The French, the Germans, the British, the Germans again. And threatened with nuclear attack by the US, after Japan surrendered. So they're paranoid, perhaps understandably.
About every nation in Europe has been repeatedly invaded, this is hardly unique with Russia. At least they didn't lose their statehood for a couple centuries like Poland or got a third of population exterminated like Belarus or got starved off into cannibalism like much of Ukraine.
rijrjrgyg says: "Russia lost 20 million people in WWII."
While rudely stated, The factual content of rijrjrgyg's post is an undeniable outrage of history "Losing statehood" would, in comparison, be a walk in the park.
Poland, on top of all the statehood problems, also lost 1/5 of it's population to WWII (6 million), which is a substantially larger share of the prewar population than the ~26.5 million Soviet losses were for the Soviet Union, and (again compared to population) Russia wasn't even the worst off of the Soviet Republics in thar.
So, no, Russia's WWII losses don't make Poland's problems a "walk in the park".
My sincerest apologies for that unthinking statement - losing statehood is always much, much more than simply the words 'losing statehood' - it almost inevitably includes war, strife and famine. And certainly every one of Poland's six million or more lost souls, each of those dislocated, wounded and in all ways harmed by war, was a loss to someone's mother, brothers, father, sisters and friends. Were we able to find these lost souls and somehow bring them back we would certainly do so. But words and acts fail: we are but human, not gods, and so Poland's loss, as well as the losses of all involved, will always weigh upon us heavily. What was lost was incalculable and irreplaceable. Who knows what we could have been had only it not happened?
Russians love to bathe in their victimhood and equal their participation in WW2 to Soviet, but worth reminding Belarus and Ukraine were parts of Soviet Union as well and suffered disproportionately more losses than Russia.
And they also like to forget that their (and not just theirs) losses in WWII were exacerbated by the fact that they were initially co-aggressors with the Nazis, not opponents of them.
in 2017 this matters for absolutely nothing. Germany and France have been at war for decades, does that mean if both their leaders were paranoid and warmongering they'd be justified? No, it's a different world.
As I noted in another thread, Putin grew up in the immediate aftermath of WWII. And he's from Leningrad. And then there's the Cold War, and the collapse of the Soviet Union. So yes, he has issues about all that, and so do many other Russians, and that's why he's so popular.
The lazy traditional mass media thinks it can just ignore any nefarious angle or pretend that it doesn't exist and that it cannot exist.
The best example is the Sandy Hook conspiracy. I have no stake in this game, but I'm as interested as anybody to hear both sides and it turns out that CNN will not ever provide the other side of the story while infowars will. It's that easy: Infowars does its actual journalistic job and questions everything.
That's what CNN is supposed to be doing. That's what the are all supposed to be doing as journalists, you should be JUMPING at the option of Sandy Hook being a false flag.
If it isnt, that's even better. But I want to hear all angles about it. There is no value in being blindly trusting of the government. I'm not an american but I'm pretty sure that one core value is to distrust the government, to be ready for it to turn evil.
I listen to Alex Jones for many hours every week and he is definitely hyperbolic (which can be funny and this is often the goal -partly) and he sometimes gets things wrong too. But he provides much more value than reading the equivalent of a machine generated press release on CNN.com.
Based on a quick read, it seems to have a solid methodology, clearly defines its terms, and is refreshingly upfront about possible shortcomings. I particularly liked this disclaimer: "It is important to note that the first author is a left-leaning individual who receives her news primarily through mainstream sources and who considers the alternative narratives regarding these mass shooting events to be false. This may have affected how the content on these domains was perceived and classified."
So while your criticism is appropriate for most of the "fake news" coverage I've seen, I think this paper gets beyond that to some points you'd probably agree with. Personally, I liked that it didn't try to force the findings onto a linear Left-Right scale, and instead noted the need for a distinct "International Anti-Globalist" cluster as well.
Should mainstream media check after every shooting if Elvis had been spotted leaving the scene because he never died and was cryogenically frozen for use by the NSA as a super assassin to further their role in subverting the NRA?
No, only an idiot believes nonsense like that, like only an idiot thinks crisis actors are used to stage mass shootings.
Somethings aren't worth investigating. And as the article points out, actually investigating them often backfires into giving them an sheen of legitimacy.
The best example is the Sandy Hook conspiracy. I have no stake in this game, but I'm as interested as anybody to hear both sides and it turns out that CNN will not ever provide the other side of the story while infowars will. It's that easy: Infowars does its actual journalistic job and questions everything.
Some stories just don't have two sides.
Infowars doesn't do a "journalistic job". What they do is take a story, work out what their world view says ("Guns make people safer and the government is bad" in this case I think?) and then finds some theory - any theory - to back their view and calls it the other side of the story.
Sure. I understand completely why people believe in theories like this. The paper linked from the article has a good explanation.
I don't know a useful way to talk about though. Evidence doesn't seem the best approach because there is always some theory why their evidence is better.
Reporting is about facts. Reporters should question, based on factual evidence. Conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones start with the conclusion and then try to find ways to bend news stories into it, ignoring things that don't fit.
Alex Jones is basically a journalist that mostly does opinion pieces. There is nothing wrong with that.
If I were you, I would use the word "fact" a little less confidently, facts are only facts until disproven and they are always tied to other facts which can in turn be disproven.
And all this time I thought facts were carefully verified and reviewed. Cross-checked against detailed research and evaluation; and then respected as truth.
Sounds like you're attempting to discredit 'facts'. This is exactly what conspiracy theorists do. Anything that gets in the way of their fantasy perspectives, even facts themselves, are cast aside with a broad sweep of the Truther's brush. Replaced with a new spicy version of reality.
The thing I hate most about Truthers, is their disrespect towards victims and grieving communities, which include emergency personnel.
Claims that everyone involved is a crisis actor, is no different than looking up at clouds and seeing faces in the clouds, and then believing those faces to be actual real faces rather than clouds formed in the shape of a face. It takes a certain kind of stupid to believe that.
Is there an awards night for Crisis actors? "Best Crisis Actor" and so on? There must be. Secret underground event naturally.
I plan to never switch away from my iPhone 5S unless it breaks for some reason. It's a phone, why would I need anything new on my phone? I consider it pretty much perfect and it only gets better because now the value is so little, I dont have to be so scared anymore that it will be stolen.
Would really be nice if it could offer generic linux binaries... this ubuntu only development approach is quite aggravating. I don't mind a big download, why not just bundle your LLVM changes and package it all in a single download?
Regarding systemd: I guess I like the systemctl commandline interface, I wasnt around for the alternatives. (if there were any?)
I like that part of systemd. I like the fairly easy to write service files.
I'm not sure how it relates to booting an OS though.
Regarding programming languages: I think we absolutely need better programming languages, they are all still a joke to me. Rust sounded like the perfect language but then we all know what happened, same as c++.
Personally I'm always surprised when somebody makes a new language and doesn't include a debugger or intellisense. It must be only me but it just shows a general disrespect or unawareness for me, the user you want to attract. You actually expect me to be productive with your language without them? C'mon.
> Essentially, people who write code are just glorified digital welders
Yep, that's actually what I think as well. Most programmers just don't think about the higher end goal, usability in the greater context of the OS or interaction design, simplicity, or even whether alternatives exist. They just see a job to do and they do it - often badly actually.
Honestly, it's not just about software development though but that's what I know best. E.g the first Apple iPhone comes to mind: Finally a product that was truly just good. In basically every single way, designed for the user. It was beautiful.
Github comes to mind, it just worked. Immediately and it solved a need. Before we had sourceforge. Facebook was similar in my opinion, although the situation is more complex there.
> What should have been done - whip the developers into submission, force them to create a backward-compatible framework that supports everything, and make backend changes that do not affect the user in any way. That's how product-driven development is done
Haha, somebody speaks from experience. Yeah that's actually how it is done in enterprise development in my limited experience. You just have to be backwards compatible, end of story. Don't care how it's done, just do it.
> Why did smartphones succeed? Because they allowed a common person to do the same things they did on the PC cheaper and faster
Yep, and also because it allowed the common person to be connected while not having to sit hunched over at a PC. The internet and the PC are clearly great things but people want to live their lives and be connected. With smartphones they get to have both. Personally I will never agree with these weird "wow look at how sad all those people are, staring at their smartphones". I remind myself of the pictures of people in the 1900s where everyone at the train station was hunched over their newspapers.
This is what I mean when I tend to say that all scientific papers should have a minimal reproducable working sample with instructions attached.
Lets say I am interested in dam building with turbines and all its glory: One would assume that this is really complex cross cutting tech, but I still firmly believe that if you cant show me how to build a tiny sample dam that powers my mobile phone or my computer, you havent done your part to make your theory sufficiently reproduceable.
Just another generic complaint about Go's lack of bloat. It's all completely naive, never understanding why Go doesnt want generics beyond a simple "b-b-but look, the pattern matching of Rust is simple too!" No it isnt simple just because you say it is. It is the opposite of simple. I've read the Rust docs on it several times and I still dont have a clear mental picture of how to read a match statement out loud. "match result with Some(number) .. then do..? But match HOW?"
I've been thinking of a clearer syntax/naming for match and in my humble opinion it should literally just be called 'if' and any inconsistency that doesnt align with that be removed from the language.
Calling 'match' match is haskell programmers gone wild. Programmers in the real world dont have a clue how to read 'match'
I agree a bit, in haskell for example it is not always easy to figure out the computation order, it is about tradeoff and go looks too much on the simpler side.
More room = more people = more power is insane to you?