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Crow T. Trollbot

Truth is, for those who remember it, Chernobyl ended the saftey argument for very "rational" reasons.

Hogwash. Chernobyl didn't end "the safety argument" for "rational" reason. Using Chernobyl as an example of "Nuclear bad!" is anything but rational. It's based on poor knowlege and even poorer understanding of what happened at Chernobyl. Unless someone is planing to build a Russian 1950's designed RBMK reactor again, nothing like Chernobyl can or will ever happen again.

It really must take a lot of effort for millions of people to remain so stubournly ignorant. You've all had twenty years to find this stuff out; what's been keeping you?

I hope you were being facetious.

Three Mile Island was nearly catastrophic. And radiation did leave the plant during the accident.

A quick Google search gave me this:http://www.fatherryan.org/nuclearincidents/tm i.htm/

I was a young child then, and I still remember the terror of living within the evacuation area. Nobody knew when they would need to jump in the car and leave their homes behind.

• Here's a page which talks about Jasper becker's book Hungry Ghosts, which covers how farm collectivization during Mao's "Great Leap Forward" resulted in the death of some 30-60 million of your countrymen.
• Here's a page which discusses the genocide rsulting from China's invasion of Tibet, where "over 17 percent of the Tibetan people killed, and 6,000 monasteries ruined."
• Finally, here's a page discussing the practice of Falun Gong. Now I'm personally not a believer in Falun Gong, but since I live in a nation blessed with freedom of religion, and since your government would rather execute people rather than let them practice it, perhaps you should find out for yourself what it is they so desperately don't want you to hear.
• Finally, here's the profile of a true Chinese hero.

Freedom starts with you.

Sorry, wrong link (relevant, but that's a book). Check this other. Be warned though, there're some pretty graphics photograps in there.

• Here's a page which talks about Jasper becker's book Hungry Ghosts, which covers how farm collectivization during Mao's "Great Leap Forward" resulted in the death of some 30-60 million of your countrymen.
• Here's a page which discusses the genocide rsulting from China's invasion of Tibet, where "over 17 percent of the Tibetan people killed, and 6,000 monasteries ruined."
• Finally, here's a page discussing the practice of Falun Gong. Now I'm personally not a believer in Falun Gong, but since I live in a nation blessed with freedom of religion, and since your government would rather execute people rather than let them practice it, perhaps you should find out for yourself what it is they so desperately don't want you to hear.
• Finally, here's the profile of a true Chinese hero.

Freedom starts with you.

PJ has an excellent analysis of this case and what software pantents mean for the industry over at Groklaw this morning.

Your casualty estimate of "millions of Japanese and millions of Americans" needs a bit of refinement.

Let's look at the possible justifications for dropping nuclear devices on mainland Japan:

To win the war? The war was already won strategically, the peace process having already been begun at the time.

To prevent millions of casualties on both sides? Projected casualties for Operation Olympic, as predicted by senior military staff, ranged from 25 000 to 45 000. Subsequent, increased casualty predictions were made by politicians, not Generals.

To show off their shiny new toy to the Reds? Hrm.....

After all, if they hadn't nuked Japan and gotten a 10-minute surrender, Russia might have had time to get its commie paws on Japan, as it had Germany.

Note the phrasing: negotiated peace, not surrender. The Japanese were not offering surrender, just an end to hostilities.

So it's unreasonable to expect the leaders of the Japanese empire to have sought out the best solution for themselves? I don't understand your point here.

Do we have responsibility for what happened to Nagasaki and Hiroshima? Yes. Does Japan have more responsibility? Yes.

You make some good points, and yes, Japan was responsible for its own defeat in WWII because it made a conscious decision to start a fight. But the assertion that the Japanese Empire was responsible for Hiroshima and Nagasaki is diametrically false. There were numerous, non-criminal ways in which the U.S.A. could have easily won against the Japanese. In fact, the Japanese had already conceded military defeat and were actively negociating for peace when they were nuked. [1]

World War Two was a horrible period of human history, one in which even good nations did terrible things in order to prevent terrible nations from doing things even more atrocious. [...] And note: these were the good guys.

While Germany, Russia and Japan were certainly in the grips of terrible and atrocious regimes during WWII, calling the allies "the good, guys is a bit of a stretch -- even for the more 'virtuous' among them. [2] War is war, and the winners win. As Mae West said, "Goodness had nothing to do with it".

EOF

[1] While the supposed dilemma of "should we bomb or not" is a classic and controversial one as popularly presented, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is/was unambiguously and incontrovertably a war crime according to the terms of the Geneva Convention.

[2] Of course, my metric for judging a nation 'good' is probably overly harsh. I cannot think of a single nation since Magellan's circumnavigation of the Earth that I would qualify as consistently good (except perhaps for the tiny ones like Monaco, Andorra, Biafra, Tibet, East Timor et al, which may only be good because they don't have the longevity/independance required to 'do bad'). The Benelux nations and New Zealand come the closest in recent times, IMHO.

The technology field now consists primarily of certified-morons and foreign coders. What happened to the guys who started modern computing on its way back during World War II when they cracked the German enigma encryption by creating the computer? Where have all the talented white men gone?

Nono, Proud American, you should ask yourself where have all the talented men came from?

For your interest, Enigma code was cracked by a bunch of foreigners (some Brits and Poles).