Then it is equivalent to mentioning Open Source in the same breath as piracy and they are still saying that a sovereign government mandating Open Source for their own use are borderline criminals of some sort. It still stinks to high heaven.
Not all Linux drivers had to be developed from reverse engineering. For hardware typically used in servers like ethernet cards and RAID controllers, the hardware companies often supply drivers and if not drivers at least specs to the kernel devs. Even Broadcom helps with ethernet drivers, it's with wireless that they're difficult.
But with Nouveau, yeah, it's a miracle that it works at all.
I wouldn't deploy a FUSEed filesystem as a server filesystem. I'm glad to have the option in case I need to use a live-cd or something to retrieve files. I can't see it being good for much more than rescue purposes.
Believe it or not many things you might want to do to an image don't need a GUI or just a minimal one. Resizing every image in a directory to 640x480 or converting all to png would be examples.
mtpaint can also be set to do external actions on an image so if you find an exif utility you like.......
When it comes up, you may be fooled into thinking it is a 256 color program. It isn't. It defaults to 256 color palletted pix for new images but will edit and allow higher depth color choices fine. gwenview is nice to view a directory of images and has a nice enough gui for editing exif and can be set to use mtpaint as an editor.
The "first" film was the best because you were 12 years old at the time. Talk to a 12 year old now and they love pod races.
Nostalgia is a lie. I liked Jedi the most because it appealed to me at my age at that time.
We hate the prequels because we expected to see them like we were all 10 years old again. The problem was we are all now in our 30s for example trying to watch a film made for young kids and expecting to see it like a young kid. The fact is the prequels were not made for us, they were made for kids and teens. The same way the original 3 were made. Have a 30 year old watch Star Wars for the first time and, on the few times I've been able to find someone who has never seen it, gotten the same 'meh' response I had to the Phantom Menace.
I see this meme a lot but I was there in the 70s and it just ain't so. People of ALL AGES were lined up around the block (literally) to see those movies and many saw them multiple times. Going to see a movie you thought especially badass several times was more common then because video rental and VCRs were still five years from being common consumer items.
The first three movies were hotly anticipated because there wasn't anything else like them at the time and they were very fun action/adventure films. Kids watched them. Teens watched them. 20, 30, 40, 50, etc somethings watched and enjoyed them......
In the years since, we've gotten cable, video rental, internet video, gaming consoles and many many more ways to spend an entertainment dollar. The multimillion dollar special effects extravaganza become much more common too and most ARE indeed marketed at teens and twenties since they form most of the shrinking audience for movie theaters. But it is a mistake to assume that just because the original Star Wars Trilogy was a special effects action extravaganza that everything true of one today applies to it WHEN IT WAS FIRST RELEASED.
Anything Star Wars that comes out these days has to be marketed and survive in a much different environment than the original trilogy.
Now if you want to argue that the first movies were re-edited with extra little-kid insipness and the last three made with to be purely insipid then I'll agree with you. I would also agree that even the un-"enhanced" trilogy is more Space Opera than sci-fi but what of it? They were some of the summer movies of their day and even fully mature adults today don't mind turning their brains off for an hour and a half and taking one in.
The only Star Wars novel I ever bothered read had "Grand Admiral Thrawn" as the heavy. He was a Napoleon/Genghis Khan style military and political genius who had command of a large remnant of the Imperial Fleet after the events of Endor. The most interesting subplots involved him using highly innovative military strategies to thwart the "New Republic". Nice stuff but Lucas would never go for it when there are endless fluffy things that can be done big explosions, wooden acting, and badly realized mysticism.
The books are long winded and preachy but Frank Herbert covered this pretty well in Destination Void. In that book, a ship full of clones is being sent to colonize another solar system and the exceedingly complex colony ship...which was deliberately designed that way...is run by an Organic Mental Core and a small crew of humans. The OMC is a re-engineered human brain that has been deliberately bred, grown, and trained for this task. The colony ship is like the OMC's body and routine aspects of maintaining the ship are handled by parts of the brain that normally control autonomous functions like breathing while the OMC can consciously do more complex repairs and maintenance with "robox units". The work of maintaining the ship is constant and would be extraordinarily taxing if the ship has to be manually run by the human crew. Unbeknownst to most of the human crew, the OMCs have been set up to fail. The OMC they start out with and the backup OMCs they are carrying all go mad and either die or have to be killed to stop them from killing everybody else.
At this point the crew has to manually maintain the ship. They are constantly having to menially balance temperatures, fluid flows, and small repairs that if neglected will quickly escalate into destructive problems. And the ship has been deliberately designed such that it cannot be kept running very long that way. And just sticking one of their brains or a colonist's brain into the OMC slot is unthinkable and wouldn't work anyway. You can't put just any old brain there. So they have to implement an AI to run the ship or die. They were put in that position because AI research on Earth was succeeding too well in some respects and the AIs being built down there either had to be put down or did extraordinarily destructive things.
In the process, the objections in the parent post were covered. The only model of consciousness they had was a human's so anything they built would have to be based on a human model and that meant human instincts, motivations, drives, and yes even an infancy of sorts. They couldn't leave aspects of life like a sex drive out to "optimize" things because they only had very broad ideas of makes for consciousness so it was either all or none.
I've actually been happy with 4.3 as a desktop but Amarok is a major fail for me these days. It isn't the speed or the interface which didn't take much digging to look the way I wanted it. Where it DOES fail is assuming the network is the canonical source for metadata. I've put considerable effort into tagging my music with lyrics, artwork, and other accurate information. My music collection is self-describing. Though I had to use a few add-ons to do it, Amarok 1.4 referred to the id3 tags first and network sources secondarily. Even with add-ons, Amarok 2.x insists on internet look-ups for artwork and lyrics and often getting them wrong in the bargain. I further understand that the devs are basically allergic to fully using the tags because they're afraid of Amarok being blocked from the various look-up services. It should at least support reading the tags since I use other apps for writing them anyway.
I was able to get Songbird behaving the way I expect in only a few minutes. If either Amarok proper or Amarok with plugins come to fully support artwork and lyrics in the tags before dropping to the network for that then I'll check it out again.
The KDE ports to Mac and Windows don't provide the Workspace components that make for a desktop. They supply just enough infrastructure to let the apps run so that you can have say KMail on OS X if you want. That said, I have found the state of the KDE ports a disappointment. I last tried the 4.2 port on Windows and it would consistently bring the virtual I was trying it out on to it's knees besides basically Not Working at all. I like the idea of the KDE apps being portable but they just don't seem to have enough userbase and devs to make it truly viable.
On the bright side, I'm running 4.3 on satisfactorily Ubuntu (believe it or not) but I treat Ubuntu like a Debian with a good release policy for desktops rather than some sort of "OS Experience". So I just pull in just the desktop parts and the apps that I want.
Professional Image Manipulation Program Streamlined Image Manipulation Program Windowed Image Manipulation Program Lightspeed Image Manipulation Program
I would think all the pros would just leap at the change to PIMP their graphics.
All well and good unless something goes seriously wrong. If you have a breech or a cord wrapped around the child's neck then things can get ugly fast. Most of the time nature will take it's course just fine but if it doesn't there are a multitude of medically nasty things that can endanger either mother or child you WON'T be able to handle yourself.
My kid had the cord wrap around his neck. A home birth would have killed him.
As bad as Nazi Germany was, the USSR during Stalin's Reign Of Terror was worse and China during the Cultural Revolution was at least as nasty but even Maoist and Stalinist China don't appear to be the absolute worst. Pol Pot's Cambodia probably had the highest body count per capita and pretty much EVERYONE had to give up their profession and work the fields while propaganda was being shouted at them. And such garden spots aren't relics of the past. By all accounts today's North Korea gets as close as anywhere to the absolute totalitarian state. I'll also note that NK has little need for extensive Internet monitoring technologies since most people there don't even have so much as a phone. They seem to do pretty well by turning everyone's kid into a stoolie and having a Political Officer in every village and apartment building.
But all of these places had one thing in common: a personality cult devoted to a godlike Glorious Leader. Oligarchies replaced the Glorious Leaders in both China and Russia ushering in era that while still repressive, you could tell the leadership was at least sane. Germany and Cambodia required outside impose ass-whippings to lose theirs and NK shows every sign that no matter happens next a Glorious Leader named Kim will be in charge.
I have to look on the bright side here. At least most us didn't have Glorious Leader El Ron to put up with. Though I find it mildly amazing and disturbing that Sea Org members voluntarily live NK-like existences.
I wasn't the tallest, but I was the most imposing. The best part? Never been in a fight my entire life.
I've noticed that both big people and big dogs tend to have good attitudes and they have those attitudes because being on the receiving end of a lot of crap darkens your outlook. If you've never been screwed with or only lightly screwed with then it is easier to have a positive attitude. By contrast I'm more worried about bites from little yapper dogs and aggression from those who have obviously experienced a lot of it.
A lot of schools today have "zero tolerance" policies toward fighting. It doesn't matter if he started it; it doesn't matter if you were defending yourself. You are disciplined if you are in a fight with another student.
What many of us have to learn the hard way is that taking the "discipline" is worth it if it gets the bullies to leave you alone. What the spineless pricks who make such policy need to hear from victims who fight back is "You're punishing me for doing the job YOU failed to do. " Yes it is a "mark on your permanent record" but what happens to you when you knuckle under to bullies is pretty damn permanent too.
I know they bought SUN but do they "own" (as in possessive form) the OpenOffice?
Sun required copyright assignment so Sun owned OpenOffice in every meaningful way. Since Oracle basically bought Sun lock,stock, and barrel then I would need convincing the other way. How could Oracle not own OpenOffice?
You WANT that question being asked. It is an incentive to have proper command and control of your weapons. If you make these weapons or the materials to make them then you are responsible for them. And you can count on being held accountable regardless. If someone blows Moscow or Washington off the map then the first question asked is going to be "Who did it?" If the answer is "terrorists" then the next question will be "How did they get it?" If there even is a third question it will be "Why were they permitted to have it?" And someone will have to pay irregardless. Such an act can't be ignored.
So bad stewardship of a nuclear arsenal is stupid and as rightfully pointed out possibly suicidal. Using terrorists as a "stealth delivery system" is definitely suicidal. Either they're real terrorists who can't keep their mouths shut after doing something like that or they're faux terrorists who'll probably be exposed by someone's intelligence service...and that's on top of possible nuclear forensics.
All I'm saying is that MAD still applies when nukes are used either accidentally or accidentally-on-purpose. With a city destroyed, the enraged target will want to regard the terrorists as somebody's tool of state.
It isn't as surefire as tracking an ICBM to it's source but nuclear fuel has a "fingerprint" of particular isotopes depending on which reactor it came from. And there aren't too many places capable of making weapons grade material. One way to handle the "panel truck scenario" is to make it known that the source of fuel if traced will be considered the attacker. It would make the likes of Iran a bit more reluctant to accidentally-on-purpose let terrorists get their hands on some.
High profile terrorism is all about dramatics. To be sure, the scenario you outlined has about as high a body count as a plane falling from the sky. But terrorists probably like the mental image of a fireball dropping out the sky..or maybe even actual images.. that blowing up a plane would cause. I suspect though that if something like the recent attempt were successful the most that would have happened is a few dead passengers and a gaping hole in the side of the plane. If an airliner can land after the entire roof coming off, it can probably survive a hole blown in the side of it. It would take a fair bit of luck to explosively rupture and ignite a plane's fuel supply.
Measures like these scanners are the height of stupidity. They only prove to the terrorists that they have succeeded in causing terror. The correct response is cold anger and an implacable resolve to hunt the scum down.
That would be hard to do without the original teams that designed and flew it in the first place. The tooling and production facilities would also have to be rebuilt from scratch. The effort required to modernize the Saturn V and bring it back into production is probably comparable to what it would take to design an equivalent booster from scratch. That said, I agree with those who say shutting down the production of the Saturn V in favor of the Shuttle was damn near criminal. If we hadn't shut it down we could have been on the Saturn X by now.
As far as I know, they did not provide anything of importance.
Then you don't know much. Google "Alexander Feklisov" to get started. People like Klaus Fuchs handed over voluminous amounts of extremely detailed information. The Joe 1 device was an almost exact copy of the Fat Man because Beria insisted starting with proven designs first. Yes, it is true the Soviets had extremely capable talent like Kurchatov and he used the espionage in the best possible way. The spy information was primarily used as a check and confirmation of their own progress. If a young physicist came in his office with a hot sounding idea, Kurchatov would open a safe, look at some papers, and then say "No, try again." So they both came up with their own theoretical understanding as quickly as possible while avoiding costly blind alleys that we had to go down. Another example of a blind alley avoided was something called "Wigner's Disease" that very nearly required an extensive refit of the Hanford enrichment facilities.
After the initial device, the Soviets didn't copy nearly as much but the espionage allowed their initial development to focus almost exclusively on productive ideas and shaved years off their nuclear program.
Slashdot Mirror
Then it is equivalent to mentioning Open Source in the same breath as piracy and they are still saying that a sovereign government mandating Open Source for their own use are borderline criminals of some sort. It still stinks to high heaven.
Not all Linux drivers had to be developed from reverse engineering. For hardware typically used in servers like ethernet cards and RAID controllers, the hardware companies often supply drivers and if not drivers at least specs to the kernel devs. Even Broadcom helps with ethernet drivers, it's with wireless that they're difficult.
But with Nouveau, yeah, it's a miracle that it works at all.
I wouldn't deploy a FUSEed filesystem as a server filesystem. I'm glad to have the option in case I need to use a live-cd or something to retrieve files. I can't see it being good for much more than rescue purposes.
Stumbling around in the dark with hairy hands?
Believe it or not many things you might want to do to an image don't need a GUI or just a minimal one. Resizing every image in a directory to 640x480 or converting all to png would be examples.
Perhaps mtpaint:
http://mtpaint.sourceforge.net/
mtpaint can also be set to do external actions on an image so if you find an exif utility you like.......
When it comes up, you may be fooled into thinking it is a 256 color program. It isn't. It defaults to 256 color palletted pix for new images but will edit and allow higher depth color choices fine. gwenview is nice to view a directory of images and has a nice enough gui for editing exif and can be set to use mtpaint as an editor.
"Much Darker" also means the body count of the minor characters will go up. Might as well put red shirts on Sirius Black and Cedric Diggory.
I see this meme a lot but I was there in the 70s and it just ain't so. People of ALL AGES were lined up around the block (literally) to see those movies and many saw them multiple times. Going to see a movie you thought especially badass several times was more common then because video rental and VCRs were still five years from being common consumer items.
The first three movies were hotly anticipated because there wasn't anything else like them at the time and they were very fun action/adventure films. Kids watched them. Teens watched them. 20, 30, 40, 50, etc somethings watched and enjoyed them......
In the years since, we've gotten cable, video rental, internet video, gaming consoles and many many more ways to spend an entertainment dollar. The multimillion dollar special effects extravaganza become much more common too and most ARE indeed marketed at teens and twenties since they form most of the shrinking audience for movie theaters. But it is a mistake to assume that just because the original Star Wars Trilogy was a special effects action extravaganza that everything true of one today applies to it WHEN IT WAS FIRST RELEASED.
Anything Star Wars that comes out these days has to be marketed and survive in a much different environment than the original trilogy.
Now if you want to argue that the first movies were re-edited with extra little-kid insipness and the last three made with to be purely insipid then I'll agree with you. I would also agree that even the un-"enhanced" trilogy is more Space Opera than sci-fi but what of it? They were some of the summer movies of their day and even fully mature adults today don't mind turning their brains off for an hour and a half and taking one in.
The only Star Wars novel I ever bothered read had "Grand Admiral Thrawn" as the heavy. He was a Napoleon/Genghis Khan style military and political genius who had command of a large remnant of the Imperial Fleet after the events of Endor. The most interesting subplots involved him using highly innovative military strategies to thwart the "New Republic". Nice stuff but Lucas would never go for it when there are endless fluffy things that can be done big explosions, wooden acting, and badly realized mysticism.
The books are long winded and preachy but Frank Herbert covered this pretty well in Destination Void. In that book, a ship full of clones is being sent to colonize another solar system and the exceedingly complex colony ship...which was deliberately designed that way...is run by an Organic Mental Core and a small crew of humans. The OMC is a re-engineered human brain that has been deliberately bred, grown, and trained for this task. The colony ship is like the OMC's body and routine aspects of maintaining the ship are handled by parts of the brain that normally control autonomous functions like breathing while the OMC can consciously do more complex repairs and maintenance with "robox units". The work of maintaining the ship is constant and would be extraordinarily taxing if the ship has to be manually run by the human crew. Unbeknownst to most of the human crew, the OMCs have been set up to fail. The OMC they start out with and the backup OMCs they are carrying all go mad and either die or have to be killed to stop them from killing everybody else.
At this point the crew has to manually maintain the ship. They are constantly having to menially balance temperatures, fluid flows, and small repairs that if neglected will quickly escalate into destructive problems. And the ship has been deliberately designed such that it cannot be kept running very long that way. And just sticking one of their brains or a colonist's brain into the OMC slot is unthinkable and wouldn't work anyway. You can't put just any old brain there. So they have to implement an AI to run the ship or die. They were put in that position because AI research on Earth was succeeding too well in some respects and the AIs being built down there either had to be put down or did extraordinarily destructive things.
In the process, the objections in the parent post were covered. The only model of consciousness they had was a human's so anything they built would have to be based on a human model and that meant human instincts, motivations, drives, and yes even an infancy of sorts. They couldn't leave aspects of life like a sex drive out to "optimize" things because they only had very broad ideas of makes for consciousness so it was either all or none.
I've actually been happy with 4.3 as a desktop but Amarok is a major fail for me these days. It isn't the speed or the interface which didn't take much digging to look the way I wanted it. Where it DOES fail is assuming the network is the canonical source for metadata. I've put considerable effort into tagging my music with lyrics, artwork, and other accurate information. My music collection is self-describing. Though I had to use a few add-ons to do it, Amarok 1.4 referred to the id3 tags first and network sources secondarily. Even with add-ons, Amarok 2.x insists on internet look-ups for artwork and lyrics and often getting them wrong in the bargain. I further understand that the devs are basically allergic to fully using the tags because they're afraid of Amarok being blocked from the various look-up services. It should at least support reading the tags since I use other apps for writing them anyway.
I was able to get Songbird behaving the way I expect in only a few minutes. If either Amarok proper or Amarok with plugins come to fully support artwork and lyrics in the tags before dropping to the network for that then I'll check it out again.
The KDE ports to Mac and Windows don't provide the Workspace components that make for a desktop. They supply just enough infrastructure to let the apps run so that you can have say KMail on OS X if you want. That said, I have found the state of the KDE ports a disappointment. I last tried the 4.2 port on Windows and it would consistently bring the virtual I was trying it out on to it's knees besides basically Not Working at all. I like the idea of the KDE apps being portable but they just don't seem to have enough userbase and devs to make it truly viable.
On the bright side, I'm running 4.3 on satisfactorily Ubuntu (believe it or not) but I treat Ubuntu like a Debian with a good release policy for desktops rather than some sort of "OS Experience". So I just pull in just the desktop parts and the apps that I want.
Install the HomeBrew Channel and Gecko OS to get around that.
Let me make some suggestions then:
Professional Image Manipulation Program
Streamlined Image Manipulation Program
Windowed Image Manipulation Program
Lightspeed Image Manipulation Program
I would think all the pros would just leap at the change to PIMP their graphics.
All well and good unless something goes seriously wrong. If you have a breech or a cord wrapped around the child's neck then things can get ugly fast. Most of the time nature will take it's course just fine but if it doesn't there are a multitude of medically nasty things that can endanger either mother or child you WON'T be able to handle yourself.
My kid had the cord wrap around his neck. A home birth would have killed him.
As bad as Nazi Germany was, the USSR during Stalin's Reign Of Terror was worse and China during the Cultural Revolution was at least as nasty but even Maoist and Stalinist China don't appear to be the absolute worst. Pol Pot's Cambodia probably had the highest body count per capita and pretty much EVERYONE had to give up their profession and work the fields while propaganda was being shouted at them. And such garden spots aren't relics of the past. By all accounts today's North Korea gets as close as anywhere to the absolute totalitarian state. I'll also note that NK has little need for extensive Internet monitoring technologies since most people there don't even have so much as a phone. They seem to do pretty well by turning everyone's kid into a stoolie and having a Political Officer in every village and apartment building.
But all of these places had one thing in common: a personality cult devoted to a godlike Glorious Leader. Oligarchies replaced the Glorious Leaders in both China and Russia ushering in era that while still repressive, you could tell the leadership was at least sane. Germany and Cambodia required outside impose ass-whippings to lose theirs and NK shows every sign that no matter happens next a Glorious Leader named Kim will be in charge.
I have to look on the bright side here. At least most us didn't have Glorious Leader El Ron to put up with. Though I find it mildly amazing and disturbing that Sea Org members voluntarily live NK-like existences.
I wasn't the tallest, but I was the most imposing. The best part? Never been in a fight my entire life.
I've noticed that both big people and big dogs tend to have good attitudes and they have those attitudes because being on the receiving end of a lot of crap darkens your outlook. If you've never been screwed with or only lightly screwed with then it is easier to have a positive attitude. By contrast I'm more worried about bites from little yapper dogs and aggression from those who have obviously experienced a lot of it.
A lot of schools today have "zero tolerance" policies toward fighting. It doesn't matter if he started it; it doesn't matter if you were defending yourself. You are disciplined if you are in a fight with another student.
What many of us have to learn the hard way is that taking the "discipline" is worth it if it gets the bullies to leave you alone. What the spineless pricks who make such policy need to hear from victims who fight back is "You're punishing me for doing the job YOU failed to do. " Yes it is a "mark on your permanent record" but what happens to you when you knuckle under to bullies is pretty damn permanent too.
I know they bought SUN but do they "own" (as in possessive form) the OpenOffice?
Sun required copyright assignment so Sun owned OpenOffice in every meaningful way. Since Oracle basically bought Sun lock,stock, and barrel then I would need convincing the other way. How could Oracle not own OpenOffice?
You WANT that question being asked. It is an incentive to have proper command and control of your weapons. If you make these weapons or the materials to make them then you are responsible for them. And you can count on being held accountable regardless. If someone blows Moscow or Washington off the map then the first question asked is going to be "Who did it?" If the answer is "terrorists" then the next question will be "How did they get it?" If there even is a third question it will be "Why were they permitted to have it?" And someone will have to pay irregardless. Such an act can't be ignored.
So bad stewardship of a nuclear arsenal is stupid and as rightfully pointed out possibly suicidal. Using terrorists as a "stealth delivery system" is definitely suicidal. Either they're real terrorists who can't keep their mouths shut after doing something like that or they're faux terrorists who'll probably be exposed by someone's intelligence service...and that's on top of possible nuclear forensics.
All I'm saying is that MAD still applies when nukes are used either accidentally or accidentally-on-purpose. With a city destroyed, the enraged target will want to regard the terrorists as somebody's tool of state.
It isn't as surefire as tracking an ICBM to it's source but nuclear fuel has a "fingerprint" of particular isotopes depending on which reactor it came from. And there aren't too many places capable of making weapons grade material. One way to handle the "panel truck scenario" is to make it known that the source of fuel if traced will be considered the attacker. It would make the likes of Iran a bit more reluctant to accidentally-on-purpose let terrorists get their hands on some.
High profile terrorism is all about dramatics. To be sure, the scenario you outlined has about as high a body count as a plane falling from the sky. But terrorists probably like the mental image of a fireball dropping out the sky ..or maybe even actual images.. that blowing up a plane would cause. I suspect though that if something like the recent attempt were successful the most that would have happened is a few dead passengers and a gaping hole in the side of the plane. If an airliner can land after the entire roof coming off, it can probably survive a hole blown in the side of it. It would take a fair bit of luck to explosively rupture and ignite a plane's fuel supply.
Measures like these scanners are the height of stupidity. They only prove to the terrorists that they have succeeded in causing terror. The correct response is cold anger and an implacable resolve to hunt the scum down.
That would be hard to do without the original teams that designed and flew it in the first place. The tooling and production facilities would also have to be rebuilt from scratch. The effort required to modernize the Saturn V and bring it back into production is probably comparable to what it would take to design an equivalent booster from scratch. That said, I agree with those who say shutting down the production of the Saturn V in favor of the Shuttle was damn near criminal. If we hadn't shut it down we could have been on the Saturn X by now.
Parent post is making a Star Control 2 reference.
As far as I know, they did not provide anything of importance.
Then you don't know much. Google "Alexander Feklisov" to get started. People like Klaus Fuchs handed over voluminous amounts of extremely detailed information. The Joe 1 device was an almost exact copy of the Fat Man because Beria insisted starting with proven designs first. Yes, it is true the Soviets had extremely capable talent like Kurchatov and he used the espionage in the best possible way. The spy information was primarily used as a check and confirmation of their own progress. If a young physicist came in his office with a hot sounding idea, Kurchatov would open a safe, look at some papers, and then say "No, try again." So they both came up with their own theoretical understanding as quickly as possible while avoiding costly blind alleys that we had to go down. Another example of a blind alley avoided was something called "Wigner's Disease" that very nearly required an extensive refit of the Hanford enrichment facilities.
After the initial device, the Soviets didn't copy nearly as much but the espionage allowed their initial development to focus almost exclusively on productive ideas and shaved years off their nuclear program.