In British English, companies are considered to be plural; you're talking about many people, even though they are contained within a single organization. So in the US you say something like, "Apple is dying", in the UK you'd say "Apple are dying". No grammar problem.
I don't watch a lot of TV, but here in France, I've never seen TV shows like you talk about. The TV news programs are better than American news programs, but I never saw anything like that weird political quiz show you describe.
As far as disturbing things, every country has them. "Front National" and "Come celebrate May Day with Le Pen" posters, and Le Pen getting almost 20% of the vote two years ago was pretty disturbing to me. The US just gets more attention because of its size and power. Of course, it also deserves that attention, for exactly the same reasons.
Anyway, I don't see where you really disagree with me. I never said the situation wasn't bad, merely that the fact that most Americans don't get a lot of outside news can be blamed squarely on themselves, and nobody else. Yes, this has huge consequences for the rest of the world, but you can't change it by whining about it, any more than you can stop a hurricane with a sheet of plywood.
When you buy a DVD or a CD, you are not buying a license. You are simply buying a copy of whatever data is present on it. Your rights and restrictions (e.g. can make backup copies, can't sell backup copies) come from copyright law, not an imaginary license.
Some companies would like you to think that you have a restrictive license, but until CDs start coming with a teeny-print EULA folded up inside the jewel case, it's not true.
That's all fine and good until you have to read or modify somebody else's code. Then you're in for a world of trouble, because the operators you like to use and the operators he likes to use will not be the same, and you'll have to look them up.
If you never get beyond hobby programming, of course, then this is almost never an issue.
Well, I don't read Russian, so I have no idea what the fuck Pravda was saying when I linked to it. I can read Le Monde without any extra effort. I could get an idea of what the headlines on Xinhua are about if you gave me some time and a dictionary; I'd do a little better with a radio or TV feed. (And yes, for reference, I am American.)
Of course, the most prestigious non-English news organizations often have an English version available. Pravda and Xinhua do; oddly, Le Monde apparently does not, which is too bad, but of course it doesn't really affect me directly.
However, many Americans don't pay attention to anything except the horrible 30-minute national news segment on their local network affiliate. My point is that Americans aren't prevented from accessing foreign news. If many of them choose not to, that is too bad, but these people do not represent all of us. Saying something like "you don't get much of the news the rest of the world gets" is patently untrue. I do get much of the news the rest of the world gets. Some people don't, but that's their own fault. No one is stopping them. If nobody has bothered to package it up into sound bytes and cram it into a 30-minute evening TV program with lots of animations, well, life is hard. The ability is there. If the people don't use it, they have only themselves to blame.
Interestingly, this goes for China as well. The Great Firewall won't stop you from reading CNN, BBC, Le Monde, USA Today, or even FOX News. (Yes, I've tried it. No proxies or subterfuge required.)
Yeah, it's so hard for Americans to find foreign news. It would be cool if there was a box you could sit down in front of that would somehow talk to foreign news organizations and get their news. They could hook up to organizations like Le Monde, Xinhua, Pravda, and the BBC, and let you read the stories they put out. Oh well, I guess I'll just have to keep dreaming.
If I buy a bootleg copy of Hearts of Iron in China and get caught by the police, what will happen to me? I could go to prison, a nice comfy Chinese prison, for a very long time.
If I buy a bootleg copy of Fahrenheit 9/11, what will happen? I can't get caught by the police, because it's not a crime. (Selling without permission of the copyright holder is illegal, buying is not.) I can pop it in my DVD player and go to town, invite my friends, call the Mayor, the Chief of Police, and the President and tell them all, "I'm watching Fahrenheit 9/11, and you can kiss my ass!" Nothing will happen.
In fact, I won't even have to buy a bootleg. The movie is now legally unencumbered, and I'm sure they will find a distributer very soon. Because we live in a, you know, free country, all you need is one maverick movie house who sees the incredible amount of money that film can bring in, and you have a nationwide Friday-night release.
Corporate censorship is bad, but it should never be compared to government censorship. There is an enormous difference between simply refusing to distribute a work, and punishing anyone who possesses a work.
Welcome to English, where one word can have several meanings:
universal adj. 1. Of, relating to, extending to, or affecting the entire world or all within the world; worldwide: "This discovery of literature has as yet only partially penetrated the universal consciousness" (Ellen Key).
2. Including, relating to, or affecting all members of the class or group under consideration: the universal skepticism of philosophers. See Synonyms at general.
3. Applicable or common to all purposes, conditions, or situations: a universal remedy.
I can't resist promoting my own product here, even though it's not free.
LiveDictionary is a program for Mac OS X that lets you look up words in Safari by just pointing at them with your mouse. It supports lots of bilingual dictionaries, including Japanese. It can be a great way to learn vocabulary, or to help you understand a web page that's in a language you're not very good with (which is why I wrote it in the first place), or just to understand the occasional unknown word when you're browsing in your second language, or even your first.
I haven't touched Linux for several years, although I used to do serious work on it.
I take it from the tone of the discussion that Linux still uses separate swap partitions? Why? My main machine now runs OS X, which swaps into the filesystem, and that seems to work a lot better. The system can decide what it needs to use, and I don't have to make a decision. I recall that Linux supports swap to the filesystem, but it sounds like nobody actually uses this feature. I can somewhat understand a server using a swap partition, since the needs of a server would be more or less known in advance and I assume it's marginally faster, but I don't see any reason to use one on a desktop machine. Why is everybody still using dedicated swap partitions?
First, the disclaimer. This is way outside my expertise, so everything is basically a guess.
I believe that the square-cubed law gives some subtle results. While strength and endurance goes down relative to size as size increases, absolute strength and endurance goes up. An ant can run around all day and lift stuff fifty times as big as he is, but I can easily out-distance and out-lift him. Likewise, an elephant can beat me at both. Some gigantic brontosaur or whatever could probably never get past a walk, but still move tremendous distances. Elephants can't run, but they can walk at 25 mph. Humans used to be able to bring down woolly mammoths, but we are highly adapted for endurance. Obviously, as you get too large, you get to the point where your bones can't even support your own weight, but as I recall it's really heat that kills. As an animal gets larger, its ratio of surface area to (heat-producing) volume goes down, and eventually it can't get rid of all the heat it produces.
It took me far too long to figure this out, and lots of people who would fit in very well on this site have this problem, but here you go. Both "I could care less" and "I couldn't care less" are "right", and work fine. The former is just being sarcastic about it.
If what you say is true, why do companies like Speakeasy exist?
The slashdot/IT-clueful crowd may not be that large, but if I could get one in a thousand slashdot UIDs to buy one of my products, I'd be extremely happy with that increase. But I'm just one man. However, we are a large-ish, influential group. When our less clueful friends and family come to us with advice, we will try to point them in the right direction. That kind of grassroots advocacy is something that companies love to have. Some ISPs may prefer mindless drones, but I'm sure that not all of them do. In my limited experience with broadband ISPs (RoadRunner, Charter, Wanadoo), they have all come off as pretty non-evil on the network side of things. As far as I've ever been able to tell, they've sold me the pipe and not cared what I did with it, nor prevented anything.
These days, you have to be way out in the middle of nowhere, normally, to only have one land-based broadband provider to choose from. Most places have both DSL and cable service, and pretty much any place that has DSL will have multiple DSL providers. And this doesn't even count satellite services.
Even more frightening, a female chimp, weighing a mere 135 pounds and going by the name of Suzette, checked in with a one-handed pull of 1,260 pounds.
If a 135-pound female chimp can pull over half a ton with only one hand, I think that shows pretty conclusively that they are actually stronger than us.
It all comes down to tradeoffs. An animal that is very strong will not have a great deal of endurance, and vice versa. Humans have some of the best endurance around; you can easily see this by how human hunting techniques used to involve chasing large animals until the animals simply couldn't run any more, then beating them to death with a club. In exchange for the ability to run for great distances, throw stuff really far, and do detailed work with our fingers, we lose a great deal of strength.
I read basically the same story, in an autobiography by a guy who was the real-life version of "Q" (from James Bond) during WWII, which I picked up in a little used bookstore in Normandy.
Although it wasn't quite the same. In the version I read, they company execs constantly said, "no, it can't be done". Then he asked an engineer, and the engineer said "sure", and it was done. When he confronted the execs, they gave the excuse that if they made long-life batteries, their sales would drop. In the end, they did have the company make the better batteries.
You can implement rather complex GUIs without writing a single line of code yourself (more so now thanks to the contoller objects supported) and without any other tool generating code for you.
My favorite trick is the do-it-yourself web browser, done entirely in IB.
Start IB, make a new empty nib, and drag a window into it. Drop a WebView in that window, size to your liking, and leave a bit of space at the top. Next, drag a text box into the window, then control-drag from the text box to the WebView, set its action to "takeStringURLFrom:". Then drag a button into the window, rename it to "Back", control-drag to the WebView, hook it to "goBack:". Press cmd-R, and you have a fully-functioning, albeit rather basic, browser. Type "http://slashdot.org" into the text box and away you go. (The http:// is not optional, unfortunately.)
As a bonus, I'm making this post from a browser that I constructed in IB using this technique. It works great!
You have a good point. In my defense, nuclear power is non-polluting by design; all of the pollution from nuclear power is by accident. They're not supposed to pollute, but sometimes things get screwed up. Contrast this with a coal-fired power plant, which will release thousands of kilograms of uranium per year into the air.
The waste problem is not that bad. If everyone were less paranoid, a great amount of it could be reprocessed and reused. And even without that, the most dangerous waste is, by nature, the short-term waste.
The level of cluelessness in this discussion is very frustrating.
Maybe you couldn't kill everyone, but you could completely destroy life as we know it. "Post-apocalyptic" is the term generally used for what the earth would look like if everyone started throwing their nukes at each other.
Yes. I never said that full-scale nuclear war wouldn't totally suck, it would. However, it's likely that entire countries and possibly even entire continents would be missed. There isn't really much that would be worth tasking an ICBM on in South America, Africa, and to a lesser extent Australia. Primary targets will be other nuclear powers, more specifically the nuclear forces, air forces, armies, and navies of the other nuclear powers. Human civilization will survive in some form, although there would undoubtedly be vast changes and hardship.
And it's also entirely possible that if enough radiation was splattered around, too many of the surviving people would be rendered sterile, thus ending the human race.
No. Killing (or sterilizing) large numbers of people is tough. Every '9' is increasingly difficult. Killing even 90% of people in an area is unbelievably difficult. Killing 99% would be an order of magnitude harder, and so on. Even if you killed or sterilized 99.99% of humanity, you have 600,000 people left, which is more than we've had at some points in time.
Multiply the 'dead zone' area of chernobyl by the number of nukes that countries publicly admit having, and you'll have a very conservative estimate for the percentage of earth we could make unlivable.
This is such a ridiculous statement.
The Chernobyl accident released about 7 metric tons of the reactor's nuclear fuel into the atmosphere and surrounding countryside. In contrast, a typical bomb uses at most tens of kilograms of nuclear material. You would need something on the order of 500 bombs to match the amount of material released by Chernobyl, and that's ignoring things like the amount of material rendered harmless by fission during the explosion.
The current total of nuclear warheads in the world today is about 40,000, so that's about 80 Chernobyl equivalents, worst-case. But they'd be spread out all over the world, and so highly diluted. Also consider that if people wanted to live in the "dead zone" around Chernobyl, they could. The reason people don't live there is because it's unhealthy, not because it's lethal.
Also, keep in mind that to my knowledge, an airburst thermonuclear explosion has never been attempted. Many of our nuclear warheads are 10,000 to 50,000 times more powerful than Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We really don't know how widespread the destruction from these bombs would be.
Did it ever cross your mind that the US and the USSR, who made extensive plans for all sorts of nuclear war scenarios, might have wondered what the effects of a whole bunch of bombs exploding all over the place might be? That knowing the exact destructive power of the warheads in your bombers and missiles would be very useful when figuring out how to target them? Did it also occur to you that they had extensive testing programs, with thousands of warheads exploded and measured? A whole bunch of these tests involved thermonuclear warheads. The largest one was a Soviet device with a yield of 50 megatons, roughtly two thousand times the yield at Hiroshima. No, not ten thousand or fifty thousand. Not to mention that none of the bombs that would be used in a war would be that large; bombs of that size are too heavy and too inefficient.
Thanks to the two attacks and numerous testing programs, we actually have a pretty good idea of how much damage such bombs would do. And no matter how large the bomb is (assuming existing bombs), it will only destroy at most a single city. But cities outnumber nuclear warheads by an enormous margin, and most nuclear warheads will not explode on a city in the event of a "real" nuclear war anyway.
No, we don't. We have enough nukes to make a big dent in the population, but that's nowhere close to killing everybody. There is no way, with current tech, to have any hope of killing everybody on the planet, even if we tried real, real hard. It would suck a whole bunch, of course, but it's not true that everyone would die.
Slashdot Mirror
In British English, companies are considered to be plural; you're talking about many people, even though they are contained within a single organization. So in the US you say something like, "Apple is dying", in the UK you'd say "Apple are dying". No grammar problem.
I don't watch a lot of TV, but here in France, I've never seen TV shows like you talk about. The TV news programs are better than American news programs, but I never saw anything like that weird political quiz show you describe.
As far as disturbing things, every country has them. "Front National" and "Come celebrate May Day with Le Pen" posters, and Le Pen getting almost 20% of the vote two years ago was pretty disturbing to me. The US just gets more attention because of its size and power. Of course, it also deserves that attention, for exactly the same reasons.
Anyway, I don't see where you really disagree with me. I never said the situation wasn't bad, merely that the fact that most Americans don't get a lot of outside news can be blamed squarely on themselves, and nobody else. Yes, this has huge consequences for the rest of the world, but you can't change it by whining about it, any more than you can stop a hurricane with a sheet of plywood.
When you buy a DVD or a CD, you are not buying a license. You are simply buying a copy of whatever data is present on it. Your rights and restrictions (e.g. can make backup copies, can't sell backup copies) come from copyright law, not an imaginary license.
Some companies would like you to think that you have a restrictive license, but until CDs start coming with a teeny-print EULA folded up inside the jewel case, it's not true.
Upon first detecting the offense, they should have booted him.
And that is exactly what they did. What is your complaint?
That's all fine and good until you have to read or modify somebody else's code. Then you're in for a world of trouble, because the operators you like to use and the operators he likes to use will not be the same, and you'll have to look them up.
If you never get beyond hobby programming, of course, then this is almost never an issue.
Well, I don't read Russian, so I have no idea what the fuck Pravda was saying when I linked to it. I can read Le Monde without any extra effort. I could get an idea of what the headlines on Xinhua are about if you gave me some time and a dictionary; I'd do a little better with a radio or TV feed. (And yes, for reference, I am American.)
Of course, the most prestigious non-English news organizations often have an English version available. Pravda and Xinhua do; oddly, Le Monde apparently does not, which is too bad, but of course it doesn't really affect me directly.
However, many Americans don't pay attention to anything except the horrible 30-minute national news segment on their local network affiliate. My point is that Americans aren't prevented from accessing foreign news. If many of them choose not to, that is too bad, but these people do not represent all of us. Saying something like "you don't get much of the news the rest of the world gets" is patently untrue. I do get much of the news the rest of the world gets. Some people don't, but that's their own fault. No one is stopping them. If nobody has bothered to package it up into sound bytes and cram it into a 30-minute evening TV program with lots of animations, well, life is hard. The ability is there. If the people don't use it, they have only themselves to blame.
Interestingly, this goes for China as well. The Great Firewall won't stop you from reading CNN, BBC, Le Monde, USA Today, or even FOX News. (Yes, I've tried it. No proxies or subterfuge required.)
Yeah, it's so hard for Americans to find foreign news. It would be cool if there was a box you could sit down in front of that would somehow talk to foreign news organizations and get their news. They could hook up to organizations like Le Monde, Xinhua, Pravda, and the BBC, and let you read the stories they put out. Oh well, I guess I'll just have to keep dreaming.
No, it's not.
If I buy a bootleg copy of Hearts of Iron in China and get caught by the police, what will happen to me? I could go to prison, a nice comfy Chinese prison, for a very long time.
If I buy a bootleg copy of Fahrenheit 9/11, what will happen? I can't get caught by the police, because it's not a crime. (Selling without permission of the copyright holder is illegal, buying is not.) I can pop it in my DVD player and go to town, invite my friends, call the Mayor, the Chief of Police, and the President and tell them all, "I'm watching Fahrenheit 9/11, and you can kiss my ass!" Nothing will happen.
In fact, I won't even have to buy a bootleg. The movie is now legally unencumbered, and I'm sure they will find a distributer very soon. Because we live in a, you know, free country, all you need is one maverick movie house who sees the incredible amount of money that film can bring in, and you have a nationwide Friday-night release.
Corporate censorship is bad, but it should never be compared to government censorship. There is an enormous difference between simply refusing to distribute a work, and punishing anyone who possesses a work.
The difference, of course, is that nothing's being banned in the US because it speaks unfavorably of our past. That is not insignificant.
Welcome to English, where one word can have several meanings:
universal adj.
1. Of, relating to, extending to, or affecting the entire world or all within the world; worldwide: "This discovery of literature has as yet only partially penetrated the universal consciousness" (Ellen Key).
2. Including, relating to, or affecting all members of the class or group under consideration: the universal skepticism of philosophers. See Synonyms at general.
3. Applicable or common to all purposes, conditions, or situations: a universal remedy.
I can't resist promoting my own product here, even though it's not free.
LiveDictionary is a program for Mac OS X that lets you look up words in Safari by just pointing at them with your mouse. It supports lots of bilingual dictionaries, including Japanese. It can be a great way to learn vocabulary, or to help you understand a web page that's in a language you're not very good with (which is why I wrote it in the first place), or just to understand the occasional unknown word when you're browsing in your second language, or even your first.
Incompetent monopolies, stupid governments, and incomprehensible sports are pretty much universal human experiences.
It's been years since I watched it, but I recall Marvin being very tall in the BBC miniseries as well.
I haven't touched Linux for several years, although I used to do serious work on it.
I take it from the tone of the discussion that Linux still uses separate swap partitions? Why? My main machine now runs OS X, which swaps into the filesystem, and that seems to work a lot better. The system can decide what it needs to use, and I don't have to make a decision. I recall that Linux supports swap to the filesystem, but it sounds like nobody actually uses this feature. I can somewhat understand a server using a swap partition, since the needs of a server would be more or less known in advance and I assume it's marginally faster, but I don't see any reason to use one on a desktop machine. Why is everybody still using dedicated swap partitions?
First, the disclaimer. This is way outside my expertise, so everything is basically a guess.
I believe that the square-cubed law gives some subtle results. While strength and endurance goes down relative to size as size increases, absolute strength and endurance goes up. An ant can run around all day and lift stuff fifty times as big as he is, but I can easily out-distance and out-lift him. Likewise, an elephant can beat me at both. Some gigantic brontosaur or whatever could probably never get past a walk, but still move tremendous distances. Elephants can't run, but they can walk at 25 mph. Humans used to be able to bring down woolly mammoths, but we are highly adapted for endurance. Obviously, as you get too large, you get to the point where your bones can't even support your own weight, but as I recall it's really heat that kills. As an animal gets larger, its ratio of surface area to (heat-producing) volume goes down, and eventually it can't get rid of all the heat it produces.
It took me far too long to figure this out, and lots of people who would fit in very well on this site have this problem, but here you go. Both "I could care less" and "I couldn't care less" are "right", and work fine. The former is just being sarcastic about it.
If what you say is true, why do companies like Speakeasy exist?
The slashdot/IT-clueful crowd may not be that large, but if I could get one in a thousand slashdot UIDs to buy one of my products, I'd be extremely happy with that increase. But I'm just one man. However, we are a large-ish, influential group. When our less clueful friends and family come to us with advice, we will try to point them in the right direction. That kind of grassroots advocacy is something that companies love to have. Some ISPs may prefer mindless drones, but I'm sure that not all of them do. In my limited experience with broadband ISPs (RoadRunner, Charter, Wanadoo), they have all come off as pretty non-evil on the network side of things. As far as I've ever been able to tell, they've sold me the pipe and not cared what I did with it, nor prevented anything.
Woah, flashback to the 20th century.
These days, you have to be way out in the middle of nowhere, normally, to only have one land-based broadband provider to choose from. Most places have both DSL and cable service, and pretty much any place that has DSL will have multiple DSL providers. And this doesn't even count satellite services.
It all comes down to tradeoffs. An animal that is very strong will not have a great deal of endurance, and vice versa. Humans have some of the best endurance around; you can easily see this by how human hunting techniques used to involve chasing large animals until the animals simply couldn't run any more, then beating them to death with a club. In exchange for the ability to run for great distances, throw stuff really far, and do detailed work with our fingers, we lose a great deal of strength.
I read basically the same story, in an autobiography by a guy who was the real-life version of "Q" (from James Bond) during WWII, which I picked up in a little used bookstore in Normandy.
Although it wasn't quite the same. In the version I read, they company execs constantly said, "no, it can't be done". Then he asked an engineer, and the engineer said "sure", and it was done. When he confronted the execs, they gave the excuse that if they made long-life batteries, their sales would drop. In the end, they did have the company make the better batteries.
I wish I could remember the name of the book.
You can implement rather complex GUIs without writing a single line of code yourself (more so now thanks to the contoller objects supported) and without any other tool generating code for you.
My favorite trick is the do-it-yourself web browser, done entirely in IB.
Start IB, make a new empty nib, and drag a window into it. Drop a WebView in that window, size to your liking, and leave a bit of space at the top. Next, drag a text box into the window, then control-drag from the text box to the WebView, set its action to "takeStringURLFrom:". Then drag a button into the window, rename it to "Back", control-drag to the WebView, hook it to "goBack:". Press cmd-R, and you have a fully-functioning, albeit rather basic, browser. Type "http://slashdot.org" into the text box and away you go. (The http:// is not optional, unfortunately.)
As a bonus, I'm making this post from a browser that I constructed in IB using this technique. It works great!
You have a good point. In my defense, nuclear power is non-polluting by design; all of the pollution from nuclear power is by accident. They're not supposed to pollute, but sometimes things get screwed up. Contrast this with a coal-fired power plant, which will release thousands of kilograms of uranium per year into the air.
The waste problem is not that bad. If everyone were less paranoid, a great amount of it could be reprocessed and reused. And even without that, the most dangerous waste is, by nature, the short-term waste.
The level of cluelessness in this discussion is very frustrating.
Maybe you couldn't kill everyone, but you could completely destroy life as we know it. "Post-apocalyptic" is the term generally used for what the earth would look like if everyone started throwing their nukes at each other.
Yes. I never said that full-scale nuclear war wouldn't totally suck, it would. However, it's likely that entire countries and possibly even entire continents would be missed. There isn't really much that would be worth tasking an ICBM on in South America, Africa, and to a lesser extent Australia. Primary targets will be other nuclear powers, more specifically the nuclear forces, air forces, armies, and navies of the other nuclear powers. Human civilization will survive in some form, although there would undoubtedly be vast changes and hardship.
And it's also entirely possible that if enough radiation was splattered around, too many of the surviving people would be rendered sterile, thus ending the human race.
No. Killing (or sterilizing) large numbers of people is tough. Every '9' is increasingly difficult. Killing even 90% of people in an area is unbelievably difficult. Killing 99% would be an order of magnitude harder, and so on. Even if you killed or sterilized 99.99% of humanity, you have 600,000 people left, which is more than we've had at some points in time.
Multiply the 'dead zone' area of chernobyl by the number of nukes that countries publicly admit having, and you'll have a very conservative estimate for the percentage of earth we could make unlivable.
This is such a ridiculous statement.
The Chernobyl accident released about 7 metric tons of the reactor's nuclear fuel into the atmosphere and surrounding countryside. In contrast, a typical bomb uses at most tens of kilograms of nuclear material. You would need something on the order of 500 bombs to match the amount of material released by Chernobyl, and that's ignoring things like the amount of material rendered harmless by fission during the explosion.
The current total of nuclear warheads in the world today is about 40,000, so that's about 80 Chernobyl equivalents, worst-case. But they'd be spread out all over the world, and so highly diluted. Also consider that if people wanted to live in the "dead zone" around Chernobyl, they could. The reason people don't live there is because it's unhealthy, not because it's lethal.
Also, keep in mind that to my knowledge, an airburst thermonuclear explosion has never been attempted. Many of our nuclear warheads are 10,000 to 50,000 times more powerful than Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We really don't know how widespread the destruction from these bombs would be.
Did it ever cross your mind that the US and the USSR, who made extensive plans for all sorts of nuclear war scenarios, might have wondered what the effects of a whole bunch of bombs exploding all over the place might be? That knowing the exact destructive power of the warheads in your bombers and missiles would be very useful when figuring out how to target them? Did it also occur to you that they had extensive testing programs, with thousands of warheads exploded and measured? A whole bunch of these tests involved thermonuclear warheads. The largest one was a Soviet device with a yield of 50 megatons, roughtly two thousand times the yield at Hiroshima. No, not ten thousand or fifty thousand. Not to mention that none of the bombs that would be used in a war would be that large; bombs of that size are too heavy and too inefficient.
Thanks to the two attacks and numerous testing programs, we actually have a pretty good idea of how much damage such bombs would do. And no matter how large the bomb is (assuming existing bombs), it will only destroy at most a single city. But cities outnumber nuclear warheads by an enormous margin, and most nuclear warheads will not explode on a city in the event of a "real" nuclear war anyway.
It's simply not as bad as killing everybody.
Q: What do you have after killing 99% of the human population?
A: Sixty million people.
It's tough to wipe out everybody. You have to get everybody, not just most. Yes, it would be horrible, but that's not the same as killing everyone.
I've pontificated on this with many more details at length before, but slashdot's search function totally sucks and I can't find the post.
No, we don't. We have enough nukes to make a big dent in the population, but that's nowhere close to killing everybody. There is no way, with current tech, to have any hope of killing everybody on the planet, even if we tried real, real hard. It would suck a whole bunch, of course, but it's not true that everyone would die.