I was there at the National Archives, yesterday (March 31st), when this new 'discovery' was announced. This story sounds generally plausible (certainly there was a lot of other wacky stuff that happened in this period) but the anouncement was carried off with such a light touch that I honestly don't know if it's a prank or not.
I can, however, verify one or two things:
Blue Peacock was -not- on display a the National Archives, as the Slashdot story suggests. There is, in fact, another thermo-nuclear bomb there.
I have not seen the documentation behind the chickens claim, although plausible looking documents were brandished at the audience. We were told that the discovery was 'too recent' for documents to have been coppied for us in time.
If this is a prank, several famous and important Cold War and Secret World historians have been taken in. Most of the people I spoke to were utterly convinced that Prof Hennesy was telling the truth.
The text reported to us was in just the right style to be a genuine document. On the other hand, Prof Hennessy and his team are the world's leading experts in this field, so you'd expect them to get it right.
I got the impression that this was not a fully fleshed-out plan, but an idea mooted by some engineer which rated a single paragraph in a much longer document.
If, indeed, this document has been shown around, that would mean that it is almost certainly genuine. As Prof Hennessy pointed out, why would the provide many pages of highly technical writing for such a joke? On the other hand, I have not seen these documents and have not spoken, personally, to anyone who has.
Either way, hats of to Petter Hennessy and the Secret State reserch team at Queen Mary.
Most of the "Prisioners" as you call them, were tax evaders. People who could not grow enough crop for their landowner. "Real" criminals were executed.
Sorry, as a historian, I have to step in here.
The above his historically innacurate. While there were many capital crimes in the 18th and early 19th centuries, a whole host of others carried the sentence of transportation or, after 1857, penal servitude 'beyond the seas'.
A common example of an offence punished by transportation was theft under one shilling.
For Americans: you might be interested to know that, prior to the American Revolution, many convicts were 'transported' to serve out their sentences in Virginia. So parts of the United States also have a facinating convict history.
There's an aspect of this whole Psion giving up on the Series 5 that I've never seen reported anywhere, but which has deep personal relevance to me and countless others. It sounds odd to say it, but Psion computers changed my life in a very real way, and now they're not making them my life is going to get a lot worse.
I'm dyslexic (learning disabled to North Americans). I find it very difficult to write by hand and am unable to take notes effectively except by keyboard. Right now I'm a PhD student at the University of Cambridge but, if I handn't had access to a computer, I'd never have been able to finish high school.
I used to carry a full sized notebook, but these computers have many problems including lack of portability, inadiquate battery life, and the fact that they're just to big to sit on those little note taking tablets they have in university classrooms. There are countless daily tasks I couldn't acomplish on such a low-portability, slowly deploying system.
But Psion S5 computers are differnt. They are small, they are light enough to be carried everywhere. They take AA batteries that can be easily replaced on the fly and come in several convenient rechargable formats. They're instant on, so they can be used just like a non-disabled person would use a peice of paper. But most importantly, they have a full touch type keyboard. No other comptuer of its size now has a keyboard that can be used for touchtyping.
It is that last factor that makes these machines so useful to people with writing problems. Without these computers I am too disabled to do my job. With them I am able to fulfill my potential in my chosen field. Taking them away from me is like breaking the hands of a pianist.
The frustrating thing is that I can see such a ready market for these little machines. Everywhere around me are classrooms full of students writing away on paper when they would much rather be writing on a computer. I even see students perched awkwardly near ill placed power outlets, or sitting on the floor so that they can use their full sized notebook computers. How many of them would pay for a small touch-type computer if it were aimed at the student market? I'd be willing to bet a lot of them. Perhaps even the majority.
But small computer have always been aimed at executives, and executives don't need them, because executives have offices and secretaries and such. As a result of this misdirection in the PDA market, thousands and thousands of disabled people are being robbed of their potential and their future. I don't know what I'll do when I can't get any more Psion S5 machines. They don't last forever. I'm beginning to suspect my status as a non-disabled person won't last forever either.
You see a nice toy that never really sold well. I see a big part of my future disapearing.
However, some of Petrely's remarks are just silly. For example, he thinks that KDE being "more feature rich" is a good thing. Sorry, but that's not true.
In my experience, this is wrong. In my experience, people don't complain about too much configurability; people complain about not being able to find the features they want.
Let me develop this idea further:
As everybody with the ability to think knows, there are going to be different kinds of user that use any program. Some people just want to pick it up and have it work. Other people care about a few things and want to be able to change them. Other people want to be able to change every damn thing because a) they like to work with the computer in an unusual way or b) they just like to play. Then there are, obviously, going to be people arrayed at other various different points along this spectrum, but for now I'll just talk about it as a simplified model.
The first type of users aren't going to be particularly freaked out by lots of features. They never even open the preferences menu, for the most part. Many of them don't know it exists. For these people, the important thing is that there are a good set of default preferences that work in an ergonomically reasonable way, and work the way that they expect it to work and feel comfortable with. This may mean that you have to set up your defaults to work kind of like Windows. The Win32 interface has become the standard, and that's how people expect their computer to operate. But it doesn't mean you don't have to let them change it.
Ok, so lets skip ahead to the third kind of user, the kind who wants to change everything: Are these users so unreasonable? I don't think so. Partly this is because I am one. I like to play with my interface, tweaking it constantly. Gradually, as this happens, I drift way from the default windows-like standards. So be it. My point is that I will never be confused by 'too many features'.
But there's another, more important, reason to allow users who want to change everything to change everything. Computers are designed to be flexible: to do tasks you never envisaged. That's the main point of them, really. Often, people will start using a computer in a new way and find that the old default configuration is no longer convenient or ergonomic. In this situation, not letting them change basic things about the way their computer interface works is like not letting them move the furniture around in their office. User interfaces aren't just an interface between the user and your application; they are also an environment in which the user uses your application.
Ok, so to the second kind of user. The user that causes all the trouble in this respect. The user who wants to change the odd thing now and again, but not spend hours playing with tweaks. Again, this is not totally unreasonable. There are setting that users have to change even when they generally aren't into customization all that much. For example, if you don't happen to be an American and you want to use a word processor, chances are you're going to have to change the default language setting. So even the dumbest user who doesn't want to change anything will, at some point, have to venture into the bowls of some big, convoluted, preferences interface.
As they do so, they become more and more frustrated. This is the important part: they don't become frustrated by the fact that they can change every little thing in the program. They become frustrated because they can't figure out how to change the things they want to change. This is when they start 'freaking out because of too many features'.
There are a number of ways 'round this. For example, you can have a clearly marked 'meta' setting set, by default, to the simplest user mode. Alternately, you can put as many settings as possible in the context in which they're used. You want to change the way the window frames work? Click on the 'advanced' option in the window menu. This way the central prefs menu doesn't get too cluttered with options to find anything.
Above all, you should make an effort to put commonly used preferences front and centre. Language settings in word processors are a prime example of this. Programmers know that even users who change no other options are going to have to change this one, but they still tend to put it three layers down in the options panel under a section marked: 'Advanced! No, we really mean it! This is supper advanced! Experts only!'
Joe user wants to change to UK English. Joe user can't find the option for all the buttons asking whether he wants to set an alarm every time a new user logs on to a remote part of the network that doesn't exist, Joe user 'freaks out about features'.
These ideas applied to the debate over GNOME:
This is where I get to my critique of the new GNOME interface. When I started using it, there was a clear difference between GNOME and KDE from a user's perspective. KDE worked better. It kind of hung together better and look slicker. GNOME was the one you used if you liked to change everything and tweak everything. But in 2.2 they've taken out all that good stuff. Even simple things, non-confusing things, have been ripped out in the name of 'simplification'.
To make matters worse, they've made it harder to get to whatever options remain. The gnome control centre is gone, and now you have to track trough endless menus to get to the bits you want (yes, there is a strange nautilus based interface, but they don't make it easy to find at all). There are even features where they left in the 'potentially confusing' control interface, but crippled the feature so that it doesn't actually work any more (eg. I used to be able to make each of my directories look physically different from one another in nautilus by changing the background colours. The control interface is still in place for that feature, but it doesn't work any more).
Apparently, the GNOME development people think they're helping ordinary users by making all the features hard to get to, but nothing could be further from the truth. Power users are going to be pissed off because they can't find the features they used to rely on. Non-power users are going to be pissed off because they can't find or get to the few features they do need to change (remember my basic thesis: they're not annoyed by choice, but by not being able to find the choices they need). Nobody has been helped.
Gee, I don't know, mister; ever heard of a propeller? That's a set of wings that rotate under water. Get a clue.
Actually, propellers designed to operate in water mostly don't act like wings. Rather they operate on the 'screw' principle (so we call them 'screws'). This was an issue when they were designing the first aeroplanes because they couldn't use the screw principle in air (would take too much energy, I think) so they had to come up with a different idea (like having little wings attached to a spinning hub).
That said, the Bernoulli principle works just as well in water as it does in air. You can see it working in a lot of places, for example, the hydroplanes of conventional submarines, the hydrofoils of hydrofoil boats and the centreboards of sailing dinghies.
I'm trying to switch to Linux right now, so I've obviously encountered this problem, mulled over it for a while and, eventually had it dawn on me that I'd been in this position before.
Sure, I have a small gaggle of windows games I like to play every now and then (including, incidentally, SimCity3000), but before I had Linux on my desktop I had an entire childhood's worth of DOS games that wouldn't run under Win32. In order to play these aging gems, I would have to reboot my computer into Windows' "DOS mode" or, in some cases, boot the machine from a hand crafted dos boot disk.
This turns out to be a great way of rationalising the minor inconvenience of rebooting to myself and to my friends. I tend not to play graphics intensive computer games while, at the same time, trying to get work done anyway. So why should I resent the two minutes it takes to reboot my machine into "windows mode" to play games any more than I used to resent the time it took to reboot into "dos mode"?
Now if they can just solve that pesky under-documentation problem and my happiness with Linux will be complete! (sort of)
Well Mr and Mrs Environmentalist, if other plans don't reduce enough, fast enough, then you must be in favor of mass genocide of all polluters! In fact, wipe out 99% of the world's population!
A brilliant and cunning argument! With such obvious credability too: if we agree to reduce or limit CO2 emmissions it will inevitably lead to GENOCIDE! Wow, you really cut to the heart of that issue.
In fact, I think we should expand upon this idea. I think we should make right turns on red lights illegal because if we don't we're sure to end up with a government sponsored program of MASS SLAUGHTER. Similarly, the Canadian Federal Ethics Councelor should report to the House of Commons, and if you disagree with me, you must be in favour of the MURDER of MILLIONS.
The argument about ratification/non-ratification of Kyoto is an argument between people who say it is environmentally neccesary and people who contend it will hurt the economy. Doomsday scenarios about crimes against humanity don't come into it on either side.
But even if they did (which they don't) you still argue against yourself. "Don't ratify Kyoto," you seem to argue "because if we did it might not be good enough, and then we'll have to do horrible things to finish the job." Well, what happens if we don't ratify Kyoto, according to that logic? We get one of two scenarios: a) there was a never a global warming threat in the first place and we don't have a problem, or b) there was a problem and we did nothing to fix it, and we're still stuck in you're ridiculous nightmare scenario. By your logic the signing of Kyoto adds a third option: c) there is a global warming problem, Kyoto fixes it, and we all go home happy. Even if there is a chance Kyoto would be inadiquate, we might as well give it a try. Better than nothing.
Finally, on the China point: as others have pointed out, China may or may not be on the road to signing on to Kyoto. Now let's just assume, for the moment, that China signing would be a good thing (which is basically what you seem to be saying). If we ratify Kyoto (and not just Canada, but other Western countries as well) then that's a step in the right direction. If we don't ratify Kyoto then we pretty much guarantee that we won't be able to get China to do it, because we'll have no moral suasion when it comes to encouraging them to sign on. China: "Why should we abide by the terms of Kyoto, you didn't." Canada: "oh, um... well we were kind of waiting on you for that" (stares fixedly at shoes). Ok, so Kyoto may not fix everything, but surely doing something is better than doing nothing!
Ok, I am a historian, or rather a history student, and I've studied this problem in passing while doing a short paper on the ALSOS mission.
Disclaimer: this was some time ago, and my recollections are hazy. Plus, I'm speaking loosely here, so this isn't my considered historical opinion, just my offhand thoughts as a semi-informed person. Oh, and I don't have any of the books and documents here to refer to, so I may make factual errors. - I think that about covers it
1. I realise you're just repeating what you saw on TV, but I think that either the TV program really twisted the history hard, or you didn't quite understand it correctly. I don't think anybody's actually seriously suggested that H tried to recruit B for the German A-bomb program.
H said that he informed B of the German program in order to get his agreement that all scientists everywhere should refrain from building a bomb (knowing, of course, that B had contacts in Britain and the United States).
B said that H informed him of the German program for... well, he never quite explained it. From what he said after the war, he was just really shocked by the revelation that H was working on the program and was very upset by the idea that his friend might be working against the common interest of humanity.
2. I've read through the letters and they *don't* substantially clear up the case. Perhaps more documents to be released will tell us more, but these documents simply give us a lucid and interesting account of B's outrage. He says things like , but he doesn't specifically tell us *what those words were*. Not having read B's documents myself, I can't tell you whether he meant things like this seriously, or whether it was just a figure of speech, nor do I know how accurate his memory would have been. What we do know is that his impressions of that day were coloured deeply by his dismay at H's pro-Nazi comments prior to the private meeting between H and B. Which brings us to...
3. It is unclear as to how deeply H supported the Nazi regime, if at all. Now I am not an H biographer, and I would like to refer you to the many fascinating books written about him for actual authoritative comment. Having said that, a Coles Notes version is that H's relationship with Nazism and with German nationalism was extremely complex and ambiguous (for any historians out there, I discuss this merely because I'm sick to death of hackers telling me "just go program it yourself" and I think that telling them "just go read a bunch of history books yourself" would be just as bad). I would say that most observers believe that H saw himself as a patriotic and loyal German, but not a supporter of the Nazis per se. There were many Germans, at the time, who believed that the Nazis were, rightly or wrongly, the official government of Germany and that to go against them would be an act of treason against Germany (just to make it clear: I believe, personally, that this attitude was wrong, wrong, wrong, and that the Nazis were bad, bad, bad. ok? so nobody make like I'm defending this or anything). H seems to have held this opinion, at least in the period before the war (but more on that later).
Now it actually gets way more complicated than this because, I am told, in German culture there were different concepts for treason against the nation and treason against the government, but that doesn't change the fact that we *have* to keep this idea in mind (keep in mind that I'm not an expert on German culture in the middle of the 20th century). Many Germans, having courageously resisted the Nazis, had to face the stigma of having "betrayed their country" during the war.
If you want to read a fascinating and very readable account of the way these ambiguities played out among the German atomic scientists, there is a book called _Hitler's Uranium Club: The Secret Recordings at Farm Hall_ edited by Jeremy Bernstein.
This is where the plot thickens because, if we actually look at the historical record, there *was no* Nazi atomic bomb program. "What?" you say "no a-bomb program? Then what are we arguing about?"
It turns out, and bare with me here, because I don't remember the chronology, that the Nazis got wind of the idea of an a-bomb, and called in a bunch of atomic scientists to ask them about it. The answer they got was, you guessed it, ambiguous. They were told that, yes, it would be possible to build a bomb and, yes, it would be powerful and reasonably small. However, the scientists also hinted that such a program would consume an inordinate amount of resources, might not work. Now that was a reasonable thing to say, and doesn't necessarily cast doubt on their commitment to helping the war effort. But what comes next rings alarm bells: when asked whether they could guarantee that the chain reaction in a fission explosion would be contained - that is to say, to guarantee that it would not start a chain reaction in the rest of the matter in the world and turn the entire planet into one great nuclear fission fireball - they said that they could not. Now anybody who knows a little nuclear physics knows that this was a preposterous statement. Why would a nuclear explosion magically turn the air into fissionable material? You need constant core-of-the-sun like temperatures to do that. The best explanation is that the German scientists had *very* cold feet about running a bomb program.
Incidentally, this was not necessarily because they feared arming Hitler with an a-bomb. There were other good reasons for them to not want to run an a-bomb program I won't go into here for lack of space and time (rimshot!).
In the end, the scientists got to have their cake and eat it to. Substantial amounts of government money were put into a *reactor* program, allowing them to say in a job and keep their students away from the Eastern Front. At the same time, they weren't burdened with the huge and risky job of trying to produce an atomic bomb for the state.
So I said I'd get back to why H might have changed his views during the war... Several writers have pointed out, I think rightly, that H was "betraying" the German war effort by telling B about the possibility that the Germans might develop an a-bomb at all. H *knew* that B had contacts outside Nazi-occupied Europe. H *knew* that B was an ardent anti-Nazi. He was an intelligent man. He could not have been blind to the fact that B would certainly repeat every word he said to his contacts in Sweden and thence to Britain. So however we interpret the meeting, I cannot see a way in which it would support the idea that H was an ardent Nazi trying to strengthen the Nazi cause. It just doesn't make sense.
But that's the trouble, you see. None of it makes perfect sense. Nobody will ever know precisely what happened in that meeting or why, but if I had to guess, I would say that H was conflicted about what to do. He was mixed up. On the one hand lay, what her perceived to be, his duty to the state and his genuine patriotism. On the other hand lay his fear of the destructive power of the bomb in anybody's hands. Probably, on a third hand, lay his duty to science, and then on a fourth hand his friend and so on and so on (and yes, I'm aware of the fact that I totally mangled that metaphor).
Anyway, I apologise for how long that was, but I hope it helps clear up a few things.
Slashdot Mirror
I was there at the National Archives, yesterday (March 31st), when this new 'discovery' was announced. This story sounds generally plausible (certainly there was a lot of other wacky stuff that happened in this period) but the anouncement was carried off with such a light touch that I honestly don't know if it's a prank or not.
I can, however, verify one or two things:
Blue Peacock was -not- on display a the National Archives, as the Slashdot story suggests. There is, in fact, another thermo-nuclear bomb there.
I have not seen the documentation behind the chickens claim, although plausible looking documents were brandished at the audience. We were told that the discovery was 'too recent' for documents to have been coppied for us in time.
If this is a prank, several famous and important Cold War and Secret World historians have been taken in. Most of the people I spoke to were utterly convinced that Prof Hennesy was telling the truth.
The text reported to us was in just the right style to be a genuine document. On the other hand, Prof Hennessy and his team are the world's leading experts in this field, so you'd expect them to get it right.
I got the impression that this was not a fully fleshed-out plan, but an idea mooted by some engineer which rated a single paragraph in a much longer document.
If, indeed, this document has been shown around, that would mean that it is almost certainly genuine. As Prof Hennessy pointed out, why would the provide many pages of highly technical writing for such a joke? On the other hand, I have not seen these documents and have not spoken, personally, to anyone who has.
Either way, hats of to Petter Hennessy and the Secret State reserch team at Queen Mary.
Most of the "Prisioners" as you call them, were tax evaders. People who could not grow enough crop for their landowner. "Real" criminals were executed.
Sorry, as a historian, I have to step in here.
The above his historically innacurate. While there were many capital crimes in the 18th and early 19th centuries, a whole host of others carried the sentence of transportation or, after 1857, penal servitude 'beyond the seas'.
A common example of an offence punished by transportation was theft under one shilling.
For Americans: you might be interested to know that, prior to the American Revolution, many convicts were 'transported' to serve out their sentences in Virginia. So parts of the United States also have a facinating convict history.
Now what would be cool is to build the vacuum tube based machine the allies used to crack various codes...
The bombe was the first significant such electo-mechanical device used by the allies. Based on the Polish Bomba, incidentally.
Later they turned to Colossus, thought by many to be the first true computer.
Both are being rebuilt at Bletchely Park by a team of volunteers. Very cool, in my opinion.
There's an aspect of this whole Psion giving up on the Series 5 that I've never seen reported anywhere, but which has deep personal relevance to me and countless others. It sounds odd to say it, but Psion computers changed my life in a very real way, and now they're not making them my life is going to get a lot worse.
I'm dyslexic (learning disabled to North Americans). I find it very difficult to write by hand and am unable to take notes effectively except by keyboard. Right now I'm a PhD student at the University of Cambridge but, if I handn't had access to a computer, I'd never have been able to finish high school.
I used to carry a full sized notebook, but these computers have many problems including lack of portability, inadiquate battery life, and the fact that they're just to big to sit on those little note taking tablets they have in university classrooms. There are countless daily tasks I couldn't acomplish on such a low-portability, slowly deploying system.
But Psion S5 computers are differnt. They are small, they are light enough to be carried everywhere. They take AA batteries that can be easily replaced on the fly and come in several convenient rechargable formats. They're instant on, so they can be used just like a non-disabled person would use a peice of paper. But most importantly, they have a full touch type keyboard. No other comptuer of its size now has a keyboard that can be used for touchtyping.
It is that last factor that makes these machines so useful to people with writing problems. Without these computers I am too disabled to do my job. With them I am able to fulfill my potential in my chosen field. Taking them away from me is like breaking the hands of a pianist.
The frustrating thing is that I can see such a ready market for these little machines. Everywhere around me are classrooms full of students writing away on paper when they would much rather be writing on a computer. I even see students perched awkwardly near ill placed power outlets, or sitting on the floor so that they can use their full sized notebook computers. How many of them would pay for a small touch-type computer if it were aimed at the student market? I'd be willing to bet a lot of them. Perhaps even the majority.
But small computer have always been aimed at executives, and executives don't need them, because executives have offices and secretaries and such. As a result of this misdirection in the PDA market, thousands and thousands of disabled people are being robbed of their potential and their future. I don't know what I'll do when I can't get any more Psion S5 machines. They don't last forever. I'm beginning to suspect my status as a non-disabled person won't last forever either.
You see a nice toy that never really sold well. I see a big part of my future disapearing.
- NG
Of course a poor crafstman blames his tools; a poor craftsman can't afford good tools!
In my experience, this is wrong. In my experience, people don't complain about too much configurability; people complain about not being able to find the features they want.
Let me develop this idea further:
As everybody with the ability to think knows, there are going to be different kinds of user that use any program. Some people just want to pick it up and have it work. Other people care about a few things and want to be able to change them. Other people want to be able to change every damn thing because a) they like to work with the computer in an unusual way or b) they just like to play. Then there are, obviously, going to be people arrayed at other various different points along this spectrum, but for now I'll just talk about it as a simplified model.
The first type of users aren't going to be particularly freaked out by lots of features. They never even open the preferences menu, for the most part. Many of them don't know it exists. For these people, the important thing is that there are a good set of default preferences that work in an ergonomically reasonable way, and work the way that they expect it to work and feel comfortable with. This may mean that you have to set up your defaults to work kind of like Windows. The Win32 interface has become the standard, and that's how people expect their computer to operate. But it doesn't mean you don't have to let them change it.
Ok, so lets skip ahead to the third kind of user, the kind who wants to change everything: Are these users so unreasonable? I don't think so. Partly this is because I am one. I like to play with my interface, tweaking it constantly. Gradually, as this happens, I drift way from the default windows-like standards. So be it. My point is that I will never be confused by 'too many features'.
But there's another, more important, reason to allow users who want to change everything to change everything. Computers are designed to be flexible: to do tasks you never envisaged. That's the main point of them, really. Often, people will start using a computer in a new way and find that the old default configuration is no longer convenient or ergonomic. In this situation, not letting them change basic things about the way their computer interface works is like not letting them move the furniture around in their office. User interfaces aren't just an interface between the user and your application; they are also an environment in which the user uses your application.
Ok, so to the second kind of user. The user that causes all the trouble in this respect. The user who wants to change the odd thing now and again, but not spend hours playing with tweaks. Again, this is not totally unreasonable. There are setting that users have to change even when they generally aren't into customization all that much. For example, if you don't happen to be an American and you want to use a word processor, chances are you're going to have to change the default language setting. So even the dumbest user who doesn't want to change anything will, at some point, have to venture into the bowls of some big, convoluted, preferences interface.
As they do so, they become more and more frustrated. This is the important part: they don't become frustrated by the fact that they can change every little thing in the program. They become frustrated because they can't figure out how to change the things they want to change. This is when they start 'freaking out because of too many features'.
There are a number of ways 'round this. For example, you can have a clearly marked 'meta' setting set, by default, to the simplest user mode. Alternately, you can put as many settings as possible in the context in which they're used. You want to change the way the window frames work? Click on the 'advanced' option in the window menu. This way the central prefs menu doesn't get too cluttered with options to find anything.
Above all, you should make an effort to put commonly used preferences front and centre. Language settings in word processors are a prime example of this. Programmers know that even users who change no other options are going to have to change this one, but they still tend to put it three layers down in the options panel under a section marked: 'Advanced! No, we really mean it! This is supper advanced! Experts only!'
Joe user wants to change to UK English. Joe user can't find the option for all the buttons asking whether he wants to set an alarm every time a new user logs on to a remote part of the network that doesn't exist, Joe user 'freaks out about features'.
These ideas applied to the debate over GNOME:
This is where I get to my critique of the new GNOME interface. When I started using it, there was a clear difference between GNOME and KDE from a user's perspective. KDE worked better. It kind of hung together better and look slicker. GNOME was the one you used if you liked to change everything and tweak everything. But in 2.2 they've taken out all that good stuff. Even simple things, non-confusing things, have been ripped out in the name of 'simplification'.
To make matters worse, they've made it harder to get to whatever options remain. The gnome control centre is gone, and now you have to track trough endless menus to get to the bits you want (yes, there is a strange nautilus based interface, but they don't make it easy to find at all). There are even features where they left in the 'potentially confusing' control interface, but crippled the feature so that it doesn't actually work any more (eg. I used to be able to make each of my directories look physically different from one another in nautilus by changing the background colours. The control interface is still in place for that feature, but it doesn't work any more).
Apparently, the GNOME development people think they're helping ordinary users by making all the features hard to get to, but nothing could be further from the truth. Power users are going to be pissed off because they can't find the features they used to rely on. Non-power users are going to be pissed off because they can't find or get to the few features they do need to change (remember my basic thesis: they're not annoyed by choice, but by not being able to find the choices they need). Nobody has been helped.
Actually, propellers designed to operate in water mostly don't act like wings. Rather they operate on the 'screw' principle (so we call them 'screws'). This was an issue when they were designing the first aeroplanes because they couldn't use the screw principle in air (would take too much energy, I think) so they had to come up with a different idea (like having little wings attached to a spinning hub).
That said, the Bernoulli principle works just as well in water as it does in air. You can see it working in a lot of places, for example, the hydroplanes of conventional submarines, the hydrofoils of hydrofoil boats and the centreboards of sailing dinghies.
- NG
I'm trying to switch to Linux right now, so I've obviously encountered this problem, mulled over it for a while and, eventually had it dawn on me that I'd been in this position before.
Sure, I have a small gaggle of windows games I like to play every now and then (including, incidentally, SimCity3000), but before I had Linux on my desktop I had an entire childhood's worth of DOS games that wouldn't run under Win32. In order to play these aging gems, I would have to reboot my computer into Windows' "DOS mode" or, in some cases, boot the machine from a hand crafted dos boot disk.
This turns out to be a great way of rationalising the minor inconvenience of rebooting to myself and to my friends. I tend not to play graphics intensive computer games while, at the same time, trying to get work done anyway. So why should I resent the two minutes it takes to reboot my machine into "windows mode" to play games any more than I used to resent the time it took to reboot into "dos mode"?
Now if they can just solve that pesky under-documentation problem and my happiness with Linux will be complete! (sort of)
Well Mr and Mrs Environmentalist, if other plans don't reduce enough, fast enough, then you must be in favor of mass genocide of all polluters! In fact, wipe out 99% of the world's population!
A brilliant and cunning argument! With such obvious credability too: if we agree to reduce or limit CO2 emmissions it will inevitably lead to GENOCIDE! Wow, you really cut to the heart of that issue.
In fact, I think we should expand upon this idea. I think we should make right turns on red lights illegal because if we don't we're sure to end up with a government sponsored program of MASS SLAUGHTER. Similarly, the Canadian Federal Ethics Councelor should report to the House of Commons, and if you disagree with me, you must be in favour of the MURDER of MILLIONS.
The argument about ratification/non-ratification of Kyoto is an argument between people who say it is environmentally neccesary and people who contend it will hurt the economy. Doomsday scenarios about crimes against humanity don't come into it on either side.
But even if they did (which they don't) you still argue against yourself. "Don't ratify Kyoto," you seem to argue "because if we did it might not be good enough, and then we'll have to do horrible things to finish the job." Well, what happens if we don't ratify Kyoto, according to that logic? We get one of two scenarios: a) there was a never a global warming threat in the first place and we don't have a problem, or b) there was a problem and we did nothing to fix it, and we're still stuck in you're ridiculous nightmare scenario. By your logic the signing of Kyoto adds a third option: c) there is a global warming problem, Kyoto fixes it, and we all go home happy. Even if there is a chance Kyoto would be inadiquate, we might as well give it a try. Better than nothing.
Finally, on the China point: as others have pointed out, China may or may not be on the road to signing on to Kyoto. Now let's just assume, for the moment, that China signing would be a good thing (which is basically what you seem to be saying). If we ratify Kyoto (and not just Canada, but other Western countries as well) then that's a step in the right direction. If we don't ratify Kyoto then we pretty much guarantee that we won't be able to get China to do it, because we'll have no moral suasion when it comes to encouraging them to sign on. China: "Why should we abide by the terms of Kyoto, you didn't." Canada: "oh, um... well we were kind of waiting on you for that" (stares fixedly at shoes). Ok, so Kyoto may not fix everything, but surely doing something is better than doing nothing!
- NG
Ok, I am a historian, or rather a history student, and I've studied this problem in passing while doing a short paper on the ALSOS mission.
Disclaimer: this was some time ago, and my recollections are hazy. Plus, I'm speaking loosely here, so this isn't my considered historical opinion, just my offhand thoughts as a semi-informed person. Oh, and I don't have any of the books and documents here to refer to, so I may make factual errors. - I think that about covers it
1. I realise you're just repeating what you saw on TV, but I think that either the TV program really twisted the history hard, or you didn't quite understand it correctly. I don't think anybody's actually seriously suggested that H tried to recruit B for the German A-bomb program.
H said that he informed B of the German program in order to get his agreement that all scientists everywhere should refrain from building a bomb (knowing, of course, that B had contacts in Britain and the United States).
B said that H informed him of the German program for... well, he never quite explained it. From what he said after the war, he was just really shocked by the revelation that H was working on the program and was very upset by the idea that his friend might be working against the common interest of humanity.
2. I've read through the letters and they *don't* substantially clear up the case. Perhaps more documents to be released will tell us more, but these documents simply give us a lucid and interesting account of B's outrage. He says things like , but he doesn't specifically tell us *what those words were*. Not having read B's documents myself, I can't tell you whether he meant things like this seriously, or whether it was just a figure of speech, nor do I know how accurate his memory would have been. What we do know is that his impressions of that day were coloured deeply by his dismay at H's pro-Nazi comments prior to the private meeting between H and B. Which brings us to...
3. It is unclear as to how deeply H supported the Nazi regime, if at all. Now I am not an H biographer, and I would like to refer you to the many fascinating books written about him for actual authoritative comment. Having said that, a Coles Notes version is that H's relationship with Nazism and with German nationalism was extremely complex and ambiguous (for any historians out there, I discuss this merely because I'm sick to death of hackers telling me "just go program it yourself" and I think that telling them "just go read a bunch of history books yourself" would be just as bad). I would say that most observers believe that H saw himself as a patriotic and loyal German, but not a supporter of the Nazis per se. There were many Germans, at the time, who believed that the Nazis were, rightly or wrongly, the official government of Germany and that to go against them would be an act of treason against Germany (just to make it clear: I believe, personally, that this attitude was wrong, wrong, wrong, and that the Nazis were bad, bad, bad. ok? so nobody make like I'm defending this or anything). H seems to have held this opinion, at least in the period before the war (but more on that later).
Now it actually gets way more complicated than this because, I am told, in German culture there were different concepts for treason against the nation and treason against the government, but that doesn't change the fact that we *have* to keep this idea in mind (keep in mind that I'm not an expert on German culture in the middle of the 20th century). Many Germans, having courageously resisted the Nazis, had to face the stigma of having "betrayed their country" during the war.
If you want to read a fascinating and very readable account of the way these ambiguities played out among the German atomic scientists, there is a book called _Hitler's Uranium Club: The Secret Recordings at Farm Hall_ edited by Jeremy Bernstein.
This is where the plot thickens because, if we actually look at the historical record, there *was no* Nazi atomic bomb program. "What?" you say "no a-bomb program? Then what are we arguing about?"
It turns out, and bare with me here, because I don't remember the chronology, that the Nazis got wind of the idea of an a-bomb, and called in a bunch of atomic scientists to ask them about it. The answer they got was, you guessed it, ambiguous. They were told that, yes, it would be possible to build a bomb and, yes, it would be powerful and reasonably small. However, the scientists also hinted that such a program would consume an inordinate amount of resources, might not work. Now that was a reasonable thing to say, and doesn't necessarily cast doubt on their commitment to helping the war effort. But what comes next rings alarm bells: when asked whether they could guarantee that the chain reaction in a fission explosion would be contained - that is to say, to guarantee that it would not start a chain reaction in the rest of the matter in the world and turn the entire planet into one great nuclear fission fireball - they said that they could not. Now anybody who knows a little nuclear physics knows that this was a preposterous statement. Why would a nuclear explosion magically turn the air into fissionable material? You need constant core-of-the-sun like temperatures to do that. The best explanation is that the German scientists had *very* cold feet about running a bomb program.
Incidentally, this was not necessarily because they feared arming Hitler with an a-bomb. There were other good reasons for them to not want to run an a-bomb program I won't go into here for lack of space and time (rimshot!).
In the end, the scientists got to have their cake and eat it to. Substantial amounts of government money were put into a *reactor* program, allowing them to say in a job and keep their students away from the Eastern Front. At the same time, they weren't burdened with the huge and risky job of trying to produce an atomic bomb for the state.
So I said I'd get back to why H might have changed his views during the war... Several writers have pointed out, I think rightly, that H was "betraying" the German war effort by telling B about the possibility that the Germans might develop an a-bomb at all. H *knew* that B had contacts outside Nazi-occupied Europe. H *knew* that B was an ardent anti-Nazi. He was an intelligent man. He could not have been blind to the fact that B would certainly repeat every word he said to his contacts in Sweden and thence to Britain. So however we interpret the meeting, I cannot see a way in which it would support the idea that H was an ardent Nazi trying to strengthen the Nazi cause. It just doesn't make sense.
But that's the trouble, you see. None of it makes perfect sense. Nobody will ever know precisely what happened in that meeting or why, but if I had to guess, I would say that H was conflicted about what to do. He was mixed up. On the one hand lay, what her perceived to be, his duty to the state and his genuine patriotism. On the other hand lay his fear of the destructive power of the bomb in anybody's hands. Probably, on a third hand, lay his duty to science, and then on a fourth hand his friend and so on and so on (and yes, I'm aware of the fact that I totally mangled that metaphor).
Anyway, I apologise for how long that was, but I hope it helps clear up a few things.