Wladimir Palant

4,994 reputation

1334

bio	website	adblockplus.org
	location	Germany
	age
visits	member for	1 year, 7 months
	seen	Nov 28 '12 at 11:32
stats	profile views	96

I am primarily a Firefox add-on developer these days. My main areas of expertise is everything Mozilla-related (XUL, JavaScript, XULRunner etc.), web technologies (HTML5, CSS etc.), web application security, Perl, Python. Some C++, Java and PHP is also doable but I am by no means an expert here.

	4,994 reputation	bio	website	adblockplus.org	visits	member for	1 year, 7 months
1334 badges		location	Germany		seen	Nov 28 '12 at 11:32

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Jun 9	awarded	Nice Answer
Jun 4	awarded	Nice Answer
May 28	awarded	Good Answer
May 23	awarded	Nice Answer
Apr 18	awarded	Cleanup
Apr 18	revised	Why didn't Russia help Saddam Hussein as it is helping Syria now? rolled back to a previous revision
Apr 18	comment	Did Joseph Stalin kill anyone personally? I doubt that Stalin actually killed anybody himself in Tsaritsin, he already had a leadership position by then. Even if you look at the Tiflis bank robbery, it seems that Stalin merely supervised the operation and wasn't involved personally. Still, it is likely that somewhere during his early career he had to kill somebody with his own hands (e.g. when he escaped his Siberian exile).
Apr 5	reviewed	Approve suggested edit on Did JFK win the presidential election by fraud?
Mar 23	comment	Why didn't Moldova unite with Romania? @Anixx: I don't think that the part about languages is true. Moldova had a large population of Russian-speakers with close to no knowledge of Romanian - now almost all of them are gone (with the exception of Transnistria) so the Russian language doesn't really play a role. Also, I don't think that English is significantly more widespread in Romania than in Moldova - it is definitely not required for the EU and good English knowledge is IMHO equally rare in both Romania and Moldova.
Mar 23	revised	Why didn't Moldova unite with Romania? Restored the parts of MichaelF's edit that made sense
Mar 21	awarded	Nice Answer
Mar 21	awarded	Disciplined
Mar 21	comment	Was Russo-Polish of 1919-1920 a war of independence? @mzuba: If you look at the wars led by the Soviet Union - there isn't, not really.
Mar 20	comment	Was Russo-Polish of 1919-1920 a war of independence? @mzuba: And they would support these communist movements exclusively by peaceful means, right? Neither the rhetoric nor the actions of Lenin's government left any doubts that it would be an armed conflict.
Mar 20	comment	World War II - Have Historians Envisioned How The Axis Powers Might Have Won? @ErikSchmidt: I don't think that I am assuming anything. Yes, at the end of the war the atomic bombs played their role. But I have doubts that they would achieve the same effect against an enemy that isn't weakened (e.g. Britain in 1939). You should also consider the fact that efficient delivery systems didn't exist - so air superiority was essential to deliver the bombs. Altogether, my point is simply that there isn't a single weapon that would allow to "magically" win the war.
Mar 20	comment	World War II - Have Historians Envisioned How The Axis Powers Might Have Won? The distance that the Japanese troops would have to travel in this scenario isn't exactly small either. Occupying India in one summer? That's about as realistic as occupying the Soviet Union in one summer. And why do you think that the Soviet Union would stand by and watch Germany occupy Iran?
Mar 20	comment	World War II - Have Historians Envisioned How The Axis Powers Might Have Won? Theoretically - yes, Germany could have stopped. But if you look at the development of the German national debt in the years leading up to the war, you have to wonder whether they had any other chance but to continue. Also, a peace treaty with France was simply unrealistic - and Hitler's followers would have never accepted it, taking revenge on France was one of the main ideas of the German Nazi movement.
Mar 20	comment	World War II - Have Historians Envisioned How The Axis Powers Might Have Won? Your assumptions seem to be all wrong. 1. Nobody could develop nuclear weapons in 1939, it took years of research and even then the numbers were only sufficient to demoralize the enemy, not to defeat him. Germans tried demoralizing with V2, didn't work. 2./3. The Germans realized that they didn't have any chance to defeat Britain - that's why the invasion of Soviet Union was necessary in the first place. 4. Even if ME262 could be created sooner (which is doubtful), it was far too expensive and not meant for mass-production - producing significant counts to change something was impossible.
Mar 19	comment	World War II - Have Historians Envisioned How The Axis Powers Might Have Won? @quant_dev: Americans wouldn't be able to achieve much without using Britain as a platform for the invasion. All the supply lines went to Britain, not USA.
Mar 19	comment	World War II - Have Historians Envisioned How The Axis Powers Might Have Won? @quant_dev: This is all extremely hypothetical, as I said. But you are overstating the significance of nuclear weapons - while they did have a demoralizing effect, they didn't change the course of the war. There were just too few of them, the mass-production didn't start until several years after the war.