It is now 127-GBH

I have many more than just one quote. Hitler refers to the Christian God and Jesus many times in his various speeches; at one point the Nazis even tried to setup their own church. There were attempts to evict those Christian sects that were felt to be insufficiently Germanic, but the Nazis in general were a Christian group.

A more telling quote from historian Richard Steigmann-Gall is more telling:

The Nazis used the writings of Martin Luther in particular to support their beliefs; the party even held mass celebrations in support of his 450th birthday.

Also inarguable is the fact that 95+% of Nazis were brought up in Christian households with Christian values. None of which apparently did anything to stop them from perpetrating the worst injustices of the modern age.

I'd be careful using Wikipedia as a reference here. There are unfortunately many writings both for and against Hitler's belief or disbelief in 'God'; however the Nazi regime was much bigger than just Hitler. And as Mr. Steigmann-Gall alludes to in the above quote, many historians and writers since the end of WWII have tried to paint Hitler as being non-Christian, as they are unable to conceive how a Christian person could commit such atrocities, in "No True Scotsman" fashion. Regardless, Hitler wasn't brought up as an Atheist with modern Humanist values, and he certainly wasn't opposed to religion -- at the very least, everyone can pretty much agree that he was more than happy to use it as a useful tool in advancing his agenda.

Yaz

Nazi Germany was not opposed to religion -- they were very specifically Christian. Hitler himself said: "We tolerate no one in our ranks who attacks the ideas of Christianity ... in fact our movement is Christian.". 94% of the German population at the time of the war were Christians, as was the bulk of the Nazi party members.

Indeed, the SS specifically did not permit atheists in their ranks; the SS Oath went like so:

Hitler wasn't opposed to religion -- like many despots, he was opposed to potential political threats against his interests. There is a significant difference between the two.

Yaz

Which is fine if you want to listen to one song. But most people prefer to listen to multiple songs.

So you've been using your media player for a while, full of music, and you decide you want to change what you're listening to. You can't just sync in a new playlist like you can on the iPod -- you wind up having to manually delete the songs you don't want in there, make sure the directory structure is correct, and then move in all of the songs you want to add.

And hope that you only ever want to organize or select songs based on album, or perhaps artist. You don't easily have the option of selecting songs off your hard drive by genre, or perhaps by decade, unless you've pre-organized your music in this manner (in which case, adding songs by album or artist is probably going to be impossible, unless you've manually maintained some huge directory full of symbolic links to organize your music along multiple vectors simultaneously). Again, doing this is ridiculously simple on the iPod, but it's a chore on media players that just present themselves as a mass-storage device. You wind up doing all the things that a computer is good at handling by hand.

And that's fine if you like that. Some people like chores. I know some people who love sweeping their floors. I'll stick to my Roomba. There are tasks that machines are simply better at than humans are, and if you like to do those things yourself, more power to you. I'm not trying to put down your choice of device, but don't fool yourself into thinking that it's easier than plug-and-play synchronization (and if you had to "go through all kinds of options to sync" an iPod, you were doing it wrong).

Again, this is one big reason why the masses flocked to the iPod. For most people, dragging music around in a UI to load up their device is boring busywork that wastes their time. The iPod only ever asked them to plug it in, wait, and go.

Yaz

I can agree with that, although in a somewhat qualified manner. Apple has always been pretty open that the Apple TV is more of a hobby device for them. It shows, especially outside the US where the app/"channel" support is pretty pathetic. Here in Canada, it's really only useful for Netflix and iTunes content (I bought one for my parents a few years ago after the last video rental shop in their town closed; my father, who is virtually computer-illiterate, loves it for renting movies). I own a lot of Apple gear (although not exclusively), but have avoided the Apple TV as other that Airplay, I can't figure out what I'd use it for (we already have three devices in our entertaining centre that can play Netflix).

I think for the watch we'll need to wait and see. I feel it could still go either way. It could be the next iPhone 1 (remember how the original iPhone had no app store, and the push was for HTML5/Javascript based apps?) and bring in enough early adopters to kick off a critical mass of users and innovation on Apple's part, or it could be the next Apple TV (a nifty device that most people don't really need or know what to do with).

But you're right -- neither have much of an immediate "wow" factor. The only devices they seem to be somewhat hitting with "wow" is with their new laptops -- I do find it pretty hard not to be impressed by the latest MacBook, and look forward to getting my hands on one in a store to check it out. That, however, is a different market than their consumer electronics like the iPhone, and isn't going to drive the same sort of uptake as the iPod and iPhone did.

Yaz

I think you might be selling Shomi and Cineplex Online a bit short. Both seem to be fine services -- what is really holding them back is a near total lack of device support, making it more difficult to integrate them into the living room (or in the case of Shomi,needing to be a Shaw or Rogers customer).

I recently cancelled my 90 day free Shomi trial. It's more geared towards TV binge watching it seems -- while it has movies, its selection is sparse, and in some cases duplicates what Netflix already provides. I'm not much into TV shows, however my wife may have watched it if it had actually been available on any of our smart entertainment devices. They technically support cable boxes from Shaw and Rogers, but that doesn't include much in the way of browsing; you have to use another device to find what you want to watch, flag it, and then find it on your cable box's "On Demand" section as a saved item. Perhaps even more stupid, the service just started three months ago, and the only other non-PC and non-phone/tablet device they support is the Xbox 360. Way to aim for last generation there, guys!

I've never even used Cineplex's offering, even though it looks like a pretty decent service overall. Again -- the device support just isn't there for set-top devices, although it seems to be better than Shomi. They also support the Xbox 360, the Roku 3, and some LG and Samsung smart TVs.

Then there is the National Film Board of Canada (NFB). Nearly their entire collection is available to watch online (http://www.nfb.ca) -- over 2500 films. I was surprised to learn that they do have some device support (Roku, LG Smart TV, Samsung Smart TV, Panasonic, Google TV, Opera TV, Philips). No Playstation (or Sony TV/BluRay player) or Apple TV support, unfortunately.

The CBC would seem to be ripe for this sort of streaming service. Their iOS app already has a full compliment of all of their shows and original programming available to watch free on-demand, as does their website. They also have streams of all of their radio stations, again for free. I'm rather surprised that nobody has done the footwork to get their content on their devices (beyond PCs and iOS/Android mobile devices).

So I'd argue that the content is there -- it's the device support that sucks. It's all over the place. You might get two or three services with a Roku, but for others you'd need an Xbox 360. Apple Canada should be pursuing more of these sorts of connections. It's bad enough we don't get many of the US service like Hulu here, but it feels nearly criminal that we also don't even get was access to the existing Canadian services either. The services are there -- it's the lack of widespread device support that is hurting them.

Yaz

On the other hand, maybe that's a bad idea, as I may then have to sleep forever...

This is why, even though I do own a bunch of other Apple gear, I don't own an Apple TV. The Apple TV "channel" selection here in Canada is pretty pathetic. And while we do have a variety of online streaming services at our disposal (Netflix, Shomi, Cineplex Store, NFB, and probably a few more), none of them are available on the Apple TV, other than Netflix (indeed, many of them aren't available on ANY devices outside PCs (Windows/OS X, and sometimes Linux), or phones/tables (running iOS or Android)).

Honestly, the only thing the Apple TV potentially has going for it is Airplay support, which would allow me to use my iPad to stream stuff to the Apple TV, or to use as a secondary wireless display for my MacBook Pro. It's cheap enough I might buy one someday just for AirPlay, but otherwise the online services are sufficiently pathetic outside the US that it makes it hard to really get excited about.

Apple needs to spend more time in international markets like Canada in getting more content. Or they should just open up the device to 3rd party developers ala iOS, and permit "channel apps". All of the big networks in Canada already have iOS apps for streaming and watching shows online; porting these to the Apple TV should be trivial, and would open up a huge world of possibilities. I already have the HDMI interface cable for my iPad so my wife and I can watch content we may have missed, and so my wife can watch TV from her home country -- being able to do something like this directly on the Apple TV would be greatly welcomed (that, or have more such apps available on the PS4, which is already part of our entertaining system).

Yaz

Which only reenforces my point that Apple came along, and won the market by introducing a device that didn't suffer from these issues. And a huge part of that was the end-to-end software integration that all the other device manufacturers ignored.

Sure, you could pop open some piece of software and tell it to rip tracks from your CD player, resulting in a whole bunch of files name TRACK_XXX.MP3, but then you had to manually do the work of naming them, organizing them into an album, and getting them into your MP3 player (as your mp3 player-of-choice's sync software of the day typically didn't include its own CD ripping software). It was a chore. iTunes did away with all of this; it had a built-in CD ripper, it used CDDB (now Gracenote) to automatically tag track data, it uses a database to automatically categorize and organize music along multiple vectors.

Sure, the parts were there for other MP3 players, but getting them all integrated together was a chore, and not one likely to be undertaken by your average everyman. The iPod integrated all of these things together, making ripping your CD and putting it onto your iPod as easy as insert CD, press button, plug-in iPod, wait. It took the chore out of it, along with the need to get together all of the disparate pieces of software you'd need to do the task, as it was with other MP3 players. That is why the iPod won.

Yaz

Perhaps even more importantly, Apple made it dirt simple for the everyman to actually get their music onto their device.

I had an early MP3 player. It was from before USB was popular, and used a parallel port interface. Getting music onto it required the following procedure:

1. - Unplug the printer (after ensuring no print jobs were going)
2. - Plug in the custom parallel cable
3. - Run the custom software
4. - Hope that the custom software would actually work from the time you started it, to the time the transfer completed. The software for my MP3 player was notoriously bad, and updates were virtually non-existent.
5. - Find music you don't want on the device anymore and delete it
6. - Navigate around the file interface to find all the MP3s you wanted added to the device
7. - Transfer the files, and hope the software didn't crash during the transfer.
8. - It was completely up to you to organize your music on your hard drive. The device had no display, didn't work with any form of metadata like ID3 tags.

Contrast this with the original iPod, where iTunes took care of organizing all your music on your hard drive for you, made metadata handling easy, and allowed you to simply plug-in your iPod, wait for the "Do not unplug" icon on its display to go away, and unplug and walk away.

I had the opportunity back-in-the-day to experiment with a lot of MP3 players, and for almost every single one, it's bigger failing was in the software to get music onto the device. These devices were primarily pushed out by small consumer electronics companies that knew very little about software development; the software was often painfully craptastic. Some of the better ones did simply identify themselves as USB Mass Storage devices, but you still had to manually catalog and organize all your music (a task admittedly some people seem to enjoy; myself this is a perfect sort of task for the computer to do for me while I focus on more important tasks), and then sit and drag-and-drop music to the device.

It was the overall iPod experience that really made it excel. Apple took the time and care to make everything right end-to-end. The majority of the other devices just pushed out hardware, and paid very little attention to decent software integration to make the process seamless to the (particularly non-technical) end user.

Not to mention the fact that virtually no other MP3 player had an integrated store to make it even easier to put music on your devices -- I remember the days of ripping CDs, or scouring FTP sites known to host MP3s. Apple made both CD ripping and downloading (for a fee) pretty simple, whereas for most other MP3s, getting the music in the first place was your problem, and not one their software would tackle.

Yaz

Murderers rationalize their crimes in exactly the same way.

Yaz

For those who aren't aware of what was said, in the case of Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau's comments, I don't think Godwin is being appropriately applied.

Mr. Trudeau didn't compare the government to that of the Nazis. He didn't compare it to Hitler. He didn't claim that a government policy was as bad as the Holocaust.

What he did say is that current anti-Muslim government policies are akin to the Canadian policy just after World War II of "none is too many" when it came to Jewish immigrants to Canada, which the Government of Canada has since admitted was wrong.

In essence, it compared a current policy to a previous policy that the Government had admitted was wrong. I don't see why everyone is so upset, other than that the government would like to try to make this into a Godwin-like comparison in order to score cheap political points. For the record, according to the interview (for anyone who doesn't RTFA), Mr. Godwin agrees with this analysis.

Minister Blaney, however, seems in my mind to have skirted the line much more closely, specifically bringing up the Holocaust as an example to try to prop up support for an unpopular bill. His specific statement, that the Holocaust didn't begin with the gas chambers, but with words is correct -- however I have to agree with MP Randall Garrison (FWIW, he represents my riding, although admittedly I didn't vote for him in the last election) who said that this was "over-inflated rhetoric".

So in essence we have one instance worthy of invoking Godwin against, and another that had nothing directly to do with the Holocaust, but instead a Canadian policy that happened around the same time, and affected the same people, which mirrors in some respects what the current Government is attempting to do with a different population, for which Godwin shouldn't apply (but which is being brought out in some corners in an attempt to score political hay).

Yaz

Well, then you'd simply be wrong.

You see, there isn't one "Placebo Effect". The effect is different for different ailments.

An example: you have a patient who is suffering from a migraine. You give them a placebo. In 10 minutes, they say they feel somewhat better. That may be the "placebo effect".

A second patient comes in who has had a heart attack. They aren't breathing, and there is no pulse. You give them a placebo. In 10 minutes, they're dead.

When constructing studies with placebos, you typically have to compare like with like. There isn't a universal Placebo Constant you just throw into your paper to compare against-- you have to compare outcomes between a population of patients with condition X taking the substance being tested, to the outcomes of a population of patients, also with condition X, who are taking placebos. The placebos may or may not have any effect -- that makes no difference. What is important is that the substance you're testing will ideally do better than placebos do, otherwise you might as well just use the cheaper placebos for the condition at hand, and head back to the drawing board.

(This is, of course, a gross oversimplification of how such studies are run and constructed -- it is provided for illustrative purposes only)

Yaz

And that's why they compare things like this to placebos, and not poisons.

The purpose of such testing to see if the medicine in question is actually having an active, biological effect against disease. Placebos don't have any sort of active biological effect on people; they have a more passive, mental effect. If your effect is statistically indistinguishable from a placebo, than all you really have is a different type of placebo. If you do statistically better than a placebo, then we infer that there is an active biological effect of the substance in question. If you somehow do statistically worse than a placebo, then you have some serious issues with the compound you're studying.

In effect, what this research has found is that homeopathic preparations have no active biological effect, and that they are, in fact, just overly-processed, overly-expensive placebos. For things that can be healed psychosomatically (or which will heal in the normal course of time, and just makes the patient feel less anxiety over something being done about their condition), they're just a very expensive version of a sugar pill. They still, however, have no effect on AIDS or brain tumours or TB.

Placebos are often used as the control because we expect medicine to be better than a placebo. And as this study has shown, homeopathy isn't better than a plain-jane placebo.

Now if homeopathic practitioners were honest about this, it probably wouldn't be an issue. But they claim they can cure everything from ingrown toenails to cancer -- and that's a serious issue.

Yaz

Actually, that may depend. I haven't looked at the WatchKit APIs yet to see what internal time representation they're using, but it may be susceptible to the Year 2038 Problem

Of course, what everyone seems to be ignoring is that the case is (as are some of the pins in the straps) 18k gold. According to Apple, the large Apple Edition watch has a case that weighs 69g. Now that's probably not all gold (the back is ceramic, the front is glass, the internals are electronic), however at the very least there is roughly $1000 USD of gold in there.

So while it's possible it won't retain its original price, it will probably never become worthless -- at the very least, there is some 30g or so of 18k gold there.

Yaz

Sure they are -- they're just really early on the euphemism treadmill

Can you recall a time when someone didn't use one of these terms as a put-down? I sure can't.

Yaz