Comment History repeating itself all over (Score 1) 203
Location: Munich Olympic games
Act: terrorist attack with Israeli hostages
We're leaving a lot more up to the Iraqis than we did with, say, Japan after WWII. Japan is actually a very respectable part of the world community today, despite the kind of atrocities they were committing during WWII. We used a heavy hand in the aftermath. We're using a much lighter hand in post-war Iraq.
We'll have to see if that pays off.
It's convenient to rationalise the destruction caused by the iraq war on the basis of we-are-leaving-so-many-things-behind, when in reality:
Not all of it is high school calc. IIRC the integral of 4sin(x)/x has to be solved with Taylor series, and I only got those in the second semester of university calculus.
It's 2nd semester univ.calculus if you are from the US. In some countries it's indeed high school math.
Who are these guys anyway? You expect better from NIST.
They are the same guys who came up with this piece of scientific work
History has taught us, the truth always comes out.
How can you tell since you can't count the times it actually didn't come out?
Corporations aren't innocent, but their guilt exists due in big part to lack of consumer pressure.
According to The Corporation, corporations lack the ability to feel guilt. And history has taught us that as well.
Even right here in the US we see much of the early Nazi behavior being repeated, but most people cannot see it because they have a cartoon view of the Nazi Party.
You can easily spot 2 differences though: the Nazi's had a designated ministry, the Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda (must have had some marketing team to come up with that name) and more importantly Germany (and all prior to them) was out in the open about building an empire (which still today can't be openly admitted about the US as they're the first in human History to do it so covertly on such a great scale).
What a weird coincidence. At my part of the world (.gr) as I write these lines national TV is broadcasting (sadly at 1am) Michael Moore's documentary "Fahrenheit 911". Seeing in 2 hours the things that managed to take place in such a short period of time following 9/11, the civil liberties the americans kissed goodbye (Patriot Act anyone?), the censorship capabilities gained by all sorts of nearsighted "agencies" and the media-assisted propaganda (weapons of mass destruction I hear you say?), I can't but feel history is repeating itself and the saddest repetitive pattern is how little we learned last time these things came around.
Just yesterday (yet another coincidence) I watched "People vs. Larry Flynt" (yet another time). I loved Edward Norton's speech in front of the Supreme Court which culminates in "...really what you are talking about is a matter of taste and not a matter of Law...it's useless to argue about taste and even more useless to litigate it".
I'm not suggesting child porn is just a matter of taste, but then again Larry Flynt's prosecution was not really about the smut (plenty other dirty magz were out already) but about how openly he did it. Familienministerin(!) Frau Ursula von der Leyen is not out to blacklist child porn (those who want it will always find ways to get it), she's out to eventually be able to selectively blacklist things now available in the open for anyone interested to read.
Allowing such baby steps towards taking away things on the premise of "what's good for the community", will eventually lead to us being the last of our kind to see the Net in its original & meant-to-be form. It feels like the Net is already being "televisionized" (term coined yet?)I learned pretty well the base of censorship through the epitome of censorship satire: "This Film Is Not Yet Rated"
Where there's a will, there's a relative.