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in reply to Re^6: Help to have real Perl's advantage
in thread Help to have real Perl's advantage

Please not Godwin's law, lets concentrate on WW1

Agreed. WW1 is more interesting for me as a history nut anyway. And it was the time the Vickers machine gun was invented (bonus point right there) plus it was the first major conflict that hinged on encryption (or rather the inept use it it).

German was already first foreign language in most parts of Europe, this would have been enhanced.

And it would have meant more cultural export from Germany. Beer for breakfast and Oktoberfest for everyone. That's certainly something i can see myself supporting.

The Brits build an empire on piracy, slave trade, opium trade and killing Bores for diamonds and gold in so called "concentration camps".

I think they call it "colonization", which for the typical Brit meant "bringing civilization to the rest of the world", and more importantly, and endless supply of tea. I always thought it stupid to try to invade Britain. Pretty much every nation in Europe has tried and failed in the last 300 years or so. Just take control of their tea supply lines and you got them on their knees in a couple of years.

Pretty much every nation has its own achilles heel (or two). For France, you have basically two options: Either invade Paris, or just wait until they have another revolution. For Italy its even simpler: Start the conflict with Italy on the enemies side, then just wait until they switch to your side mid-war.

These days, dealing with the USA is also very simple, provided your country doesn't have oil...

Who really talks about this?

But yeah, every nation has their own dark side of history. A few hundred meters from the house where i grew up, there is a memorial to the Bleiburg repatriations. On the other hand, the area was also part of the 1920 Carinthian plebiscite. It was one of the first times in human history that a region decided in a (more or less) free and fair election which nation it wanted to be part of.

War also has some unexpected results and sometimes strange results. Programmable electronic computers where invented to crack high level encryption in WW2, after the groundwork for modern codebreaking was laid down in WW1. The british monarchy helped to bring democracy to large parts of Europe. Modern radiation therapy has its basis in the Manhattan project. And GPS was invented to provide better navigation for US soldiers in case of war with the Soviet Union...

That's unfortunately the reality of politics

I always say: Wars happen if politicians fail to do their job. Fortunately, in a democracy we all have the power to fire incompetent politicians and replace them with politicians that are incompetent in a completely different way. It's only a small improvement, but at least it provides for good TV. And we get the occasional highly entertaining scandal that results in the unexpected comeback of the Vengaboys of all things...

perl -e 'use Crypt::Digest::SHA256 qw[sha256_hex]; print substr(sha256_hex("the Answer To Life, The Universe And Everything"), 6, 2), "\n";'