While I can concur with most of your points regarding the subsequent wars (though however costly the Korean War was, it's still technically a stalemate rather than an outright loss), WWII was not won for the Americans by European scientists.

Certainly the Pacific front was ended sooner with the advent of the atomic bomb, but the European front was unaffected by this technology. The European front was finished off by the Allies after the Russians battled Germany to a standstill. Not to mention that the Pacific front was able to be ended with the atomic bomb because of the American victories in the Pacific up to that point, which involved many hard fought battles.

I would argue that it's not the American soldiers who didn't have many successes with their fighting, but rather the US Administration and their strategists and bureaucrats that have mucked up the potential of the American military.

Yes and no. Depends on whose perspective you take. Usually the victor gets to determine "the truth" after the fact.

There were no American citizens involved in the Revolutionary War until either the Declaration of Independence in 1776 (at which point they no longer considered themselves British subjects) or 1777 when the Articles of Confederation were adopted (i.e. United States government was formed and thus had its own citizens) or 1778 when France recognized the United States of America's sovereignty (i.e. even more official nationhood and thus citizenship established).

Definitely by the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1783, they were in fact citizens of the United States of America.

The truth is uncouth when scrawled on the wall of a bathroom stall or a telephone booth.

With torrents, the act of downloading is simultaneous with uploading, and unavoidable. It's the same act. The company is double dipping if they try to hold you accountable for both downloading and uploading, because they're also suing the guy who downloaded from you.

Mod parent as: WTF are you talking about?!?

You have a choice to make.

In one respect, the Emperor has no clothes. College is a just a bunch of hoops to jump through to get a piece of paper that supposedly (but doesn't) mean that you have skills. What it actually means is that you spent a lot of money (and made the loan servicer and your college a lot of money) and you jumped through a bunch of hoops. The skills you could gain can be gained through checking books out from the library, camping at the bookstore, and googling everything. RTFM and JFGI (google the acronyms if you don't know what they stand for).

The upside to college is that there are some skills that are more difficult to learn on your own. Also, there are a lot of entrenched managers from older generations that won't look at your resume if you don't have that stupid piece of paper. So it can get you places and a modicum of respect, but you have to smile and say you learned a lot and deny that the emperor is buck naked.

On the other hand, you can just be self-taught. Web design can be learned through reading design blogs, reading web design books from the library, and a lot of experimentation and experience actually designing websites. Web design is a demonstrable skill that doesn't necessarily require a piece of paper on the wall. There will be some closed doors because of the lack of the piece of paper, though.

If you decide to go to college for web design, stay away from rip off online colleges that are just diploma mills. Four year colleges are expensive and unnecessary for a web design degree. Find a nice, cheap community college with a distance learning program and web design major available.

Build your resume with as much experience as possible and build an online portfolio of your designs. This will get you a lot farther than a piece of paper in many cases. A lot of clients are just looking for people who know how to design and they don't care where you picked it up. Show them what you can do.

JFGI

So apparently you didn't RTFA to which you posted a link. The comments explain that the results were merely domain vs domain and didn't take into account Google's other domains and services. It was strictly traffic to google.com and facebook.com. YouTube (owned by Google) was left out from Google's stats, as well as every other domain Google runs. Damn lies != proof.

Your observation, however, hasn't been relevant at any point in history.

And what if you can't change the system? What if you could look at the state of the system and realize that you don't have the kind of the budget to invest in fighting those who have near-infinite budgets for buying off the politicians and purchasing the laws they need to perpetuate their obsolete business models? I have heard the "change the system" rhetoric a lot, but I've never actually heard any of the people who espouse that approach provide authentic, practical methods for doing so. Beyond money, you would need to be very clever to come up with strategies to overcome the efforts and the cleverness of the significant portion of the population that is employed in maintaining and expanding the wealth of the wealthiest percent of the population. Tell me, in practical, realistic steps, how I can change the system, while still remaining employed and able to make payments on my mortgage, and I will put full effort into it. If you can't think of any such steps, please, don't suggest an impossibility and act like you contributed something valuable to the discussion.

I've always thought that since they're called "public servants," politicians elected to office should give up their privacy and become publicly broadcast. Basically they need their own reality shows. Camera crews following them 24/7. CSPAN meets Wifeswap. And corrupt politicians would be the sorry people. Bacon would no longer be good for them.

Great, now /. is going to get investigated by the Pakistani police. Happy?

Um...Did you RTFB? It had everything to do with rewriting history. "We've always been at war with Eastasia." It was a reference to the actions of Stalin's regime. Hence the famous pictures of Stalin with the guys airbrushed out once they became persona non grata.

And I'll leave this right here: http://adblockplus.org/en/

I'm tired of the fanbois talking about malware on PCs. If you have malware on your PC, you're an idiot who downloads shady programs from shady websites and doesn't use security software. That's not a flaw in the OS, it's a flaw in the user.