Slashback: Riftiness, Ixianism, Eclipse

Slashback (below) brings you tonight more on the fate of Mobilix, "borrowing" from the Onion, keeping track of campus, the recent (partial) eclipse, and animated television. Enjoy!

I want you to hear my side of the story. R. Benjamin Shapiro writes "Hi There, After reading the reactionary (and slanted) Salon story (of which I am a subscriber) and the responses to it, I thought I'd point the /. community to a paper describing what we are actually doing. Many of the suggestions posted on /. are things we have been doing for some time now. Thanks very much for your feedback!"

A minor but nice victory. Werner Heuser writes "In the hearing from June 12th the court has rejected the arguments of 'Lés Editions Albert René.' The court says the words 'MobiliX' and 'Obelix' can hardly be mixed up with each other. Also the work of MobiliX is dedicated to another audience. This is a great success for the Free Software Community.

MobiliX is a very well-known site dedicated to Linux and BSD on mobile devices (like laptops, PDAs, cell phones and more). In November 2001 Werner Heuser, owner of the Open Source project MobiliX - UniX on Mobile Computers was charged by 'Lés Editions Albert René,' which is owner of the trademark 'Obelix.' In their opinion the names Obelix and MobiliX are very similar. The charge aimed for a deletion of the trademark 'MobiliX' and a compensation fee. The charge has been discussed in many newsgroups and mailing lists. It seems to be a very important case for the Free Software Community, because there are many projects, which names are also ending on 'iX.' Some other projects have even silently withdrawn their names, because the financial risk of losing a trademark case is high. The documentation of the case is available online. It includes the letters from MobiliX lawyers Jaschinski Biere Brexl - JBB."

In 10,000 years, these plates will be mandatory. An Anonymous Coward writes "The director of the Nevada DMV has denied the application for a custom plate depicting a mushroom-shaped cloud. The plates where apparently 'insensitive' and otherwise politically incorrect. .. "

Truer than you know. Zeekamotay writes "Referring to this previously reported story, The Beijing Evening News has now apologized to its readers for printing a story that originated from The Onion. They don't quite seem to grasp the concept of satire though: 'Some small American newspapers frequently fabricate offbeat news to trick people into noticing them, with the aim of making money,' the paper said. 'This is what the Onion does.'"

One more item for your bazillion-hour PVR. Stalke writes "This is a little old, but Tripping the Rift, first mentioned in a previous slashdot article, has been picked up by the SCI FI channel as their first ever animated series. For those of you that don't know, this is a parody of Starwars and Star Trek that takes place on the "Free Enterprise" and includes Chode, a purple alien, Six, a half-naked android, and a dark clown named Bobo. A higher res version of the original movie linked by the previous article is also available on their website."

Some of the "Sun" projectors were just down for scheduled maintenance. leananglemorgan writes "Just in case anyone missed the ol' Solar Eclipse on the 10th, here is a link to quick snaps I took ... Not the greatest, but reasonable enough to get some 'Hey that's cool!' remarks. Enjoy! I thought a couple came out good enough to share!" Another reader submits: "Thought everyone would enjoy this eclipse video I found."

Comments

Re:We'll try back in a few generations...

[discstickers]

When has the US insisted that it was purely democratic? It has always been viewed as a republic. Hence the electoral college. ::ducks as flame war begins over the last election::

Re:Nevada Nuke License Plates

[Anonymous Coward]

you ignorant fucker the Russians won WWII,

America just dropped a couple of bombs on a little island just below China

Translation of beijing evening new article

[gargle]

Following on my translation of the original beijing evening news article, I now translate the apology:

On June 3rd, we reported that members of the US Congress were pressing for construction of a brand-new Capitol, complete with a retractable dome and luxury boxes, in order to stay competitive.

Our reporter in Washington checked out the story, he discovered that some of its contents were identical to the Onion's joke article.

Some small American newspapers frequently fabricate offbeat news to trick people into noticing them, with the aim of making money. This is what the Onion does. According to congressional workers, the Onion is a publication that never ceases making up false reports.

This is a practice that we, fortunately, do not suffer from China. In China, newspapers are not allowed to make up all sorts of wild stories about our dear leaders. We were therefore caught off guard.

We are open to our readers' criticism, and we apologize.

Re:Nevada Nuke License Plates

[alexjohns]

The U.S. winning WW2 started in Nevada at the test site.

Wow! Nice revisionist history. Maybe that's what they're teaching in school these days. Let's be clear: We didn't win World War II because of the atomic bomb. The Japanese were already negotiating their surrender before anyone outside Los Alamos knew about the bomb. Truman's whole cabinet was willing to accept their surrender except for his Secretary of State (can't remember his name - but it should live in infamy.)

The Japanese's one condition was that they get to keep their monarchy intact. The SoS didn't want that, so we kept bombing the crap out of them and then popped a couple of atomic bombs. They surrendered unconditionally after that. Yeah, us winning WWII was really dependent on those two nukes. The firestorm that raged through Tokyo (which really got the Japanese to have second thoughts about this whole 'conquering the world' thing) was started by which one of the nukes? Oh yeah, that's right, conventional bombing did that. Tell me, I forget in my dotage, which cities in Germany did we nuke to win the war there?

So, to sum up, Unicron doesn't have a pretty new license plate and the citizens of Washington, DC have no representatives in this country's legislature.

You are one to talk about revisionist history!

[ionpro]

As the documents show at http://www.ibiblio.org/pha/war.term/093_03.html, the Japanese were NOT willing to surrender prior to the atomic explosions. While they were half-heartedly persuing peace through Soviet negotiations, it was known that Americans were accepting surrenders through the Swiss, as is customary is wars of such scale. The Japanese correspondance with the Soviets was for a seperate peace, thereby ensuring that they would only face a war from the Pacific side of their country. Remember, the Soviets only declared war on the Japanese on August 7th, 1945 -- ONE day before the bomb was dropped on Nagasaki and days AFTER the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Prior to that date, Americans had been unable to use Soviet territory for aerial bombing of Japan, and instead used carriers and captured islands as their primary Japanese staging areas.

The Japanese never surrendered unconditionally. They were <i>still</i> allowed to keep their Emperor as a figurehead leader, much like the British Constitutional Monarchy, <i>as a condition of their final surrender</i>!. Prior to August 6th, the Japanese had said they would never surrender; a long and drawn-out invasion of the Japanese mainland was called for, probably resulting in heavy casulties on both sides. As it was, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the prime navy/army (forget which is which) bases left in Japan that had not been firebombed out of existance. Thus, they were valid military targets. Less lives were lost in both the atomic explosions then in the firebombing of Tokyo.

So, yes, victory in Japan was dependant upon those two nukes, or perhaps an invasion of Japanese territory. Did you know there were still Japanese who had not surrendered in the Philipeans until sometime after 1960? A Japanese officer had continued raids on Americans in the Philipeans until sometime during the Kennedy administration. Once the Japanese start a war, they try <b>very</b> hard to finish it in their favor.

Re:You are one to talk about revisionist history!

[alexjohns]

First, the comment I was replying to said that we won WWII because of the bomb. Germany surrendered in May, we didn't drop the bomb until August. So for all of June and July, we were concentrating on beating the crap out of the Japanese. We'd been bombing them continously since November 1944. If there was no Atomic Bomb, we were still beating them so badly that by the end of 1945 we would have run out of targets to bomb. We would have been relegated to bombing individual homes if they hadn't surrendered.

On July 27th, 1945, with the Potsdam Proclamation, we told the Japanese to surrender unconditionally. The Japanese considered their emperor a god. There were high level talks between Truman's cabinet and the Japanese cabinet about the surrender. J. F. Byrnes (looked it up this time), Truman's Secretary of State insisted that we not accept Japan's surrender with the condition that they keep their emperor.

On the 6th of August, we dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. On the 9th, Russia invaded Manchuria at the same time we dropped the bomb on Nagasaki. Up until this point, Russia and Japan had been neutral and Japan had been trying to negotiate a conditional surrender through the Russians.

For the next 4 days, the Japanese Cabinet debated whether to surrender. It required a unanimous vote to do so and the 'hawks' weren't having any of it. On the 14th, Emperor Hirohito himself told the cabinet to accept the surrender. This was after he'd learned, through diplomatic channels, that 'unconditional surrender' didn't mean the same thing to us as it did to the Japanese. The Japanese were afraid it meant that we might execute the emperor or put him on trial for war crimes. We told them it actually meant we didn't care if they kept the emperor, as long as there was a democratically elected government. The cabinet voted to surrender then and the head of the War Department committed hara-kiri the day after.

The fact is that the Japanese did accept our terms for surrender and that it was 'unconditional', but there was an understanding that it didn't mean they had to get rid of the emperor. We can debate endlessly about what would have happened if we hadn't used nukes or if we'd dropped the 'unconditional surrender' or even if Russia had decided to switch sides or if we'd allowed Patton to roll the tanks and take on Russia like he wanted to.

Getting back to the original point, we didn't win WWII because of the atomic bomb. It helped decide when exactly the end was going to be, but without the backroom - 'yeah, we said unconditional, but we don't really care' - the Japanese would have fought on for quite some time. And I know we're looking back on it with 20/20 hindsight, but a diplomatic ending to the war could have been achieved much earlier, except for the fact that everyone was looking for a military solution. And there was the revenge factor for Pearl Harbor.

There's our history lesson for the day. Your inane comment about a few Japanese idiots in the Philippines has no bearing. I grew up in Georgia and to this day there's numbnuts down there who have rebel flags and vow 'the South's going to rise again.' The fact that some people are unable to accept defeat and move on with their lives says nothing about the Japanese (or American) people as a whole.