Ted Kennedy enlists Soviet aid against Reagan in 1984

The whiners today can shove this right up their collective asses. It's just repeating past Democratic behavior.

I agree with the XKCD reference. The thing most people seem to forget is that the knife cuts both ways.

While this is absolutely true, it doesn't mean it's good -- in the long term -- for American culture to slide into "I'll boycott anyone I disagree with about anything" mentality, because it reduces social cohesion and increases social friction.

As a libertarianish conservative, I agree 100% with people's free speech, and free speech about others free speech, and economic boycotts about others' free speech. I still lament that it has come to this and hope this age passes quickly. There's a resonant effect that will kick in once the folks who grew up in a "not my president!" post-2000 mentality start having and training kids of their own; if this dumb political intolerance of other Americans doesn't stop, it'll be that much harder to turn around.

We haven't seen a first-world country devolve into civil war. I'd hate to start it now.

If someone was going to die as a result of a malfunction or breach of a system, we'd demand it be air-gapped and have robust CM. There would be hell to pay as a result of failure - think hospital systems. Or military systems.

The thing is, most of the systems businesses use aren't all that important in the grand scheme of things. No one is going to die if Twitter or Walgreens has a breach. Sure, for the individual, this is bad, but you're probably going to get your prescription anyway and having someone impersonate you on your Twitter account is irrelevant.

Cue "assumed breach"...we must assume that systems like Twitter and Walgreens are breached and are leaking data. Therefore, conduct any business with them while insulating yourself from the consequences of said breach.

Enough people obviously pay to fund the production of more. The fact that you aren't doing so is irrelevant. (neither am I)

Kursk was a strategic defeat, to be sure, but it was a tactical defeat as well. The main reason is that the gathered German mobile force was directed at a salient which had been basically turned into a fortress by the Soviets. Many lines of defense were constructed including a deep line all the way back at the Don - showing the Soviets were not convinced they could stop the Germans in the salient. Much superior results could have been had by choosing a different axis of attack in a different sector, rather than biting off Kursk after it had been fortified. The main reason why is that most casualties were caused via encirclement rather than frontal tank combat versus a staunch defense.

It is only the superior German units and tactics that resulted in the high Russian casualties you describe. The Russians could afford the loss (in purely practical terms), while the Germans could not replace their losses. Then, the Germans had their forces dispersed by the requirement to form a defensive line in Italy after that nation's collapse and armistice.

Richard Overy's "Why the Allies Won" is a good synopsis of the recent scholarship on this, while Chris Bellamy's "Absolute War" is a less readable book overall that covers the same material in more detail. Books from before 1990 (example: Albert Seaton's "The Russo-German War") had very little detail about what actually happened at Kursk from the Soviet side. In regards the mistaken attack on Kursk, Mellenthin's wonderful "Panzer Battles" or Manstein's "Lost Victories" are pretty conclusive on this score.

They've lied about their news feed provenance, they've lied about censorship, now they lie about video statistics. The whole site is a cesspool. The day is rare when someone isn't asking me about a factually inaccurate FB ad trying to scam old people.

Taking it offline would benefit all of humanity. It's as bad as e-mail at this point.

I agree entirely. Can you say bad publicity? I knew you could.

Actually, he was genetically far better off, and this explains why he was able to spearhead a European domination of the Western Hemisphere. All that inherited resistance to crowd diseases from Eurasia - smallpox most significantly, but all the rest of them, too. In fact, the only areas Europeans didn't dominate in the Western Hemisphere were areas where indigenous diseases prevented their dominance, such as the Amazon basin.

You make a better point than you perhaps think, though I have removed all the identifying information from this profile over the 15 years i've been here.

Therefore, since no attempt at electing politicians who would do what the people wanted has worked, the decision was taken to elect someone who will just fuck things up royally. Trolling the oligarchy, as it were.

That's it in a nutshell.

Well then it doesn't really destroy Raspberry Pi, then, does it?

I'd also point out that armies do the same thing - they attack at dawn because the enemy is at low ebb at that time. The counter-example is Kursk in 1943 - and the Nazi attacker lost, though not entirely because they launched their attack at 3pm.

It's also why armies get their people up really early in the morning.

Cops do this because people are usually home and aren't prepared to defend themselves at that time. Doing it at 9pm on a Friday would be a bad idea - you'd probably either be out, or alternatively already 3 or 4 beers in and more likely to fight back in some fashion.