What we cannot be proud of is our roots in the Confederate States of America. Pride in the Confederacy is irresponsible, it is dangerous, and it is dishonest. Lay aside the revisionist history you were fed in the sixth grade, and open a book. Southern historian Gordon Rhea can lay it out for you right now:
“The battle flag was never adopted by the Confederate Congress, never flew over any state capitols during the Confederacy, and was never officially used by Confederate veterans’ groups. The flag probably would have been relegated to Civil War museums if it had not been resurrected by the resurgent KKK and used by Southern Dixiecrats during the 1948 presidential election.
What’s the tl;dr (Cliff’s Notes) of different countries’ entire history?
USA: Killed and enslaved enough people to build the greatest beacon of Freedom and Justice the world has ever known
Net of Insecurity: A flaw in the design
“It’s not that we didn’t think about security,” Clark recalled. “We knew that there were untrustworthy people out there, and we thought we could exclude them.”
.. When they thought about security, they foresaw the need to protect the network against potential intruders or military threats, but they didn’t anticipate that the Internet’s own users would someday use the network to attack one another.
“We didn’t focus on how you could wreck this system intentionally,” said Vinton G. Cerf, a dapper, ebullient Google vice president who in the 1970s and ’80s designed key building blocks of the Internet. “You could argue with hindsight that we should have, but getting this thing to work at all was non-trivial.”
.. Computers in that era were huge, costly behemoths that could fill a room and needed to serve multiple users at the same time. But logging on to them often required keeping expensive telephone lines open continuously even though there were long periods of silence between individual transmissions.
Davies began proposing in the mid-1960s that it would be better to slice data into pieces that could be sent back and forth almost continuously, allowing several users to share the same telephone line while gaining access to a remote computer.
.. As the ARPANET developed in its first years, soon connecting computers in 15 locations across the country, the key barriers were neither technological nor AT&T’s lack of interest. It simply wasn’t clear what the network’s practical purpose was. There was only so much file sharing that needed to be done, and accessing computers remotely in that era was cumbersome.
.. Debate remains, however, about whether widespread use of encryption was feasible in the early days of the Internet. The heavy computing demands, some experts say, could have made TCP/IP too difficult to implement, leading to some other protocol — and some network other than the Internet — becoming dominant.
“I don’t think the Internet would have succeeded as it did if they had the [encryption] requirements from the beginning,” Johns Hopkins cryptologist Matthew Green said. “I think they made the right call.”
What kind of peace would Germany have imposed on France had it won in 1918 in WW1?
Direct annexations were to be kept to a minimum, since the politicians didn’t want to make millions of non-German speakers into citizens of the Reich. Instead, the idea was to set up vassal states on Germany’s borders.
These would be nominally independent, but allied to Germany – with German troops stationed in their territory and controlling their fortresses and strategic railways. Likewise their economies would be subject to German supervision, with German control over their tariffs and customs policy. This was the fate that awaited Belgium, Poland and the Baltic States after the war, had the Germans won. France, however, was considered too large to be subjugated in this way.
Instead, France would be forced to pay a huge war indemnity. The amount contemplated should be large enough to pay off Germany’s entire national debt, and leave France economically weakened and unable to afford to maintain an army for several decades to come.
.. Germany also envisaged making colonial gains, but here their eyes were set on the Belgian Congo as the main prize to be acquired. Not only was it believed to be wealthy, but its possession would link up the existing German colonies in Kamerun, Ostafrika and Südwest Afrika.