A search for "the" on each show Yahoo significantly in the lead.
The problem with such searches is that if a search engine misindexes a mirror site or a 401 page and that is returned in the count, then that SE looks bigger.
On the other hand if you launch a query that has 5-10 answers you can actually examine every single page on both result pages and make sure that all hits are correct and distinct.
Using that technique Google comes ahead of Yahoo, by a large margin.
you do know that shortages of skilled personel are a GOOD thing for a Profession don't you?
Good point, and I'm aware of it since for the last n years I've benefited from it. However if the shortages get too large, we run the risk of all of our jobs being shipped abroad.
Actually compared to the previous wars America had fought, Vietnam Casualities were no where near as high.
Not so, Vietnam deaths were almost double than those from the Korean War and about the same as the First World War. Only the Civil War and WWII reported a higher number of deaths.
Militarily America was superior to the Vietnamese,
That goes without saying, as we had atomic bombs and they didn't.
But the Vietnamese beat the U.S. government in the propaganda war, and not only that, they won the propaganda war over the american people!
I'd like to think that Americans would have never fully and wholeheartedly backed a war half a world away against a people holding a strategically insignificant territory and whose primary demand had always been independence. But hey, maybe you are right and all that was needed was more and better propaganda and the VC could have killed another 50K young Americans.
The VC had fought for 28 years until Tet, so they could have fought another 28.
the fact is they couldn't have launched another Tet Offensive even if they wanted to.
You are making the same mistakes of classically trained soldiers (are you an officer by any chance?). Yes, the VC might have not been able to launch another traditional offensive, as Tet was (even this is debatable but lets concede the point for argument's sake). Instead the VC would have gone back to the guerilla tactics for a few years until they had time to lick their wounds and replenish their forces. Iraq today is a good example of the large amount of damage that a very small but determined guerrilla force can inflict, until a point that is not worth hanging on (see also Algeria).
Us command didn't lose shit in Vietnam, LBJ and the U.S. media gave victory to the NVA.
This is the standard BS put out by the pentagon. All wars are fought until one side cries uncle. If one side is willing to fight forever and the other isn't then the former wins (see Afghanistan vs USSR).
Our side was unwilling to see more than 50K soldiers die. In contrast the other side (VC) was quite comfortable to launch several offensives (such as Tet) even if the kill ratio was 10 to 1. So we had to cry uncle.
The United States Military carried out every single objective laid out to them by the politicians.
But they didn't carry them at the personnel cost that America was willing to bear. So they failed.
There is the small matter of the Japanese being ready to surrender.
They were not ready to surrender in any short term kind of way. Even after two atomic bombs it took Japan seven days and a strong push from the Emperor to issue a surrender. Without the bombs it would have taken at least six months to muster the internal political forces to defeat the Hawks.
To give an idea of how long this can take see under the V for Vietnam, where the US command knew they had lost by during the late periods of the LBJ administration, yet the actual surrender did not take place until 1972, under Nixon/Kissinger.
We should keep in mind that there are good economic incentives built into the funding system for scientists to overstate their case. There are plenty of examples of this in action:
(i) the advantages of a reusable Shuttle.
(ii) the advantages of a Space station.
(iii) the exaggerated AIDS risk, where the NIH kept on promising a million infected Americans every year, for nearly two decades, before it came true. This one has the distinction from the two above that fighting AIDS is a worthwhile cause that was not properly funded until alarmist statements were made.
(iv) the risk of meteorites hitting earth.
(v) the risks of overpopulation (see Malthus).
(vi) the risks of shortages (see the Ehlrich-Simon wager).
(vii) the benefits of the next $20B megasuperduper-cyclotron (still waiting for my muon toaster oven).
(viii) the benefits of artificial intelligence.
and on and on.
The publicity seekers have been talking about global warming of several degrees C as a fact since the mid 1990s. Examining the literature the picture is different: global warning of just half a degree C was conclusively proven only a couple of years back.
So to sum it up, the risks of global warming are overstated by the scientific press. Something to keep in mind is that tempering the claims of global warming does not mean completely ignoring them (like Dubya does today or Regan did with AIDS in his time).
Truman always insisted (and there is no reason to doubt it) that saving American lives was a prime reason for him to drop the bomb.
To make this more clear, Truman was a politician and he knew that he could never be reelected if it ever became known that he had sat on a weapon that could have finished the war at once while American soldiers died in the Pacific theatre.
All the same this does not negate the fact that dropping the bomb was (i) convenient politically and (ii) resulted in all likelihood in a lower number of deaths in Japan.
In other words, any way one looks at it, dropping the bomb made sense: in terms of internal politics, in terms of global politics, and in saving deaths.
Remember the battle for Berlin, entirely surrounded and isolated had a death toll of over 70,000 Soviet soldiers and 150,000 German soldiers. And that was just one battle! Imagine how many would have been lost in the battle for Honshu, before reaching Tokyo and then in Tokyo itself.
These repeated restrospective justifications that the a-bombs were dropped to "save lives" are lies.
Wow, quite a statement. And completely false. Truman always insisted (and there is no reason to doubt it) that saving American lives was a prime reason for him to drop the bomb. After Iwo Jima, where the casualty rate was a thousand soldiers a day even while the Japanese defenders were starving and running out of food and water made it obvious that the invasion of a weakened and starved Japan would result in at least ten thousand American soldiers dead.
Moreover, war is politics by other means. So this supposed distinction between military and political reasons is quite artificial. Every single battle we fought in the war was for political reasons, as we could have surrendered (like the French did) rather than fight.
Well, looks line Linux is about to pull an IMDB on us and start making money on the volunteers work. IMHO all successful open source projects will eventually end up being comercially owned and operated one way or another. The temptation is too big and the number of people who would like to profit from it is just too large.
Wrong. Mitnick originally pleaded guilty and was sentenced accordingly to "a year in a low-security prison and three years of probation" [CNN]. Furthermore, the judge ordered that that he serve his sentence in a halfway house. He violated the terms of his probation and became a fugitive. The second time he was caught he had to continue serving the original sentence, hence no rush to go to trial with the second set of charges. Eventually Mitnick pleaded guilty to the second set of charges. The judge in this case did not have much choice in the length of the sentence since Mitnick was now a repeat offender and fell under the federal sentencing guidelines for those.
Mitnick was charged for crimes spanning 15 years and four different trials starting in the early eighties and finishing in the late 90s. That he generates so much undeserved sympathy has to be the ultimate meme.
If you read TFA you'll see that the AOLer got off easy because he pleaded guilty very early on. In contrast this Kevin Mitnick nitwit is even now trying to play the victim and not really sounding contrite about it.
What is really interesting about this story is that this secondary offering will be done "old school" using investment bankers. The fact that they are going back to Wall Street after their much flaunted dutch auction IPO is very telling.
I don't agree. When the new MSN search index launched we ran a set of comparisons and the Google answer was still superior. Not by much mind you: the answer set had 5 to 7 entries overlapped in the same page, and of the remaining three-five, about one or two that appeared in Google should have been in the MSN page. I was indifferent to the rest of the delta set.
In the past, search engines were overwhelmed because they didn't scale. Google's algorithm scales to infinity. The algorithm is well known and is no longer novel. It can be replicated now.
It is not so simple. Inktomi also had what it looked like a "scalable to infinity" solution but in the end they fell behind. In fact Inktomi was the first to propose the "lots-of-cheap-pcs" solution. Yet theirs didn't scale.
Indeed. It is interesting to note that the new MSN engine crawling like mad had a hard time matching Google's count, much less surpasssing it. Out of the blue comes laggard Yahoo with a much larger count. Pardon me, but I'm somewhat skeptical.
Say using the old technique of searching for typos I just tried Yahoo and Google. Yahoo reports five matches versus Google's five. However out of the five Yahoo matches three of them are spurious!
Some other searches with their actual count:
Yahoo 1, Google 1. Yahoo 0, Google 1. Yahoo 1, Google 5. Yahoo 26, Google 36.
This reminds me of an old Altavista crawl, where they discovered that nearly 10% of their pages where non-standard 401 pages.
a) Yahoo crawler is not as discriminating as google, collecting loads of garbage and mirrored sites
or
b) Google is finally falling behind the Web. In the past every snazy search engine eventually got overwhelmed by web growth and fell beihnd. Has that time arrived for Google?
On a different note I've heard a rumor that Google's total CPU count across all its server sites is fast approaching a million. If this is true, talk about barriers to entry! Anyone out there who can confirm or deny this?
To finish that thought even after the second bomb was dropped there were still hawks in the war cabinet who were still arguing about conditions of surrenderment. Hirohito overruled them by taking directly to the airwaves and declaring the defeat of Japan.
So you see, even two bombs were not enough to convince some cabinet members that unconditional surrender was the only option. Most cabinet members were operating under the illusion that they would be able to impose some or all of four conditions for surrenderment. Even in the end the USA acquiesced in one: keeping Hirohito.
Wow, that's a nice fairy tale. They were ready to surrender before the bomb, they just wanted to negotiate.
Sure we mobilize the entire country's war machinery so that at the end we negotiate a nice end to the war according to the wishes of the enemy. Any other suggestions?
Moreover, while certain Japanese goverment factions had come to term with the fact that war was lost, Hawks had taken a Tareq-Aziz-like approach of refusing to accept any evidence of defeat and had already started the deployment of long term resistance measures on the main island. All of this is well documented.
Even some of the factions which were in favour of surrendering sooner-rather-than-later wanted to initiate a beach-by-beach defense so that the peace would be signed under more favourable conditions for Japan.
The battle for Berlin, entirely surrounded and isolated had a death toll of over 70,000 Soviet soldiers and 150,000 German soldiers. And that was just one battle! Imagine how many would have been lost in the battle for Honshu, before reaching Tokyo and then in Tokyo itself.
It is difficult to estimate this number with estimates varying widely, between a few hundred thousands and a few million deaths, depending on how long and drawn the resistance would turn out to be. Predicting these things is an imprecise science, e.g. Vietnam resisted a lot longer than the US ever thought, Iraq folded much quicker than most analysts expected.
In any case: these were Japanese, not Americans, there is lots of honor involved. I know, its difficult, but it is a different culture. There was lots of talking needed.
During which time the USSR would have taken over half of Japan condemnding large parts of its population to Stalin style repression as happened in Eastern Europe. So you see, the decision wasn't as black as white as after-the-fact simplistic analysis makes it sound.
They did not refuse to surrender, but I guess Truman did not want to wait. Or perhaps, as other claim, wanted to give Fat man a try.
Sorry but the records have long been open. The Japanese war cabinet met the day after Hiroshima and discussed the possibility of surrendering. The war cabinet voted against it. Hirohito voted in favor of surrendering, but nonetheless he was outvoted.
Actually it did. The only thing holding back the American and Russian generals and politicians from going at each other was the nuclear carnage. Plenty of classified discussions from both sides have been released to support this thesis.
Second, this is again, limited hindsight. Japan was asked to surrender after the first bomb and they refused under the belief that it was very unlikely the Americans had a second bomb. If Japan had surrendered after the first one, there would not have been a Nagasaki. By dropping the second bomb so closely after the refusal to surrender the USA signaled "there is plenty more from where this one comes from". By the way, an American physicist on his own accord dropped a letter with the first bomb saying so, and urging them to surrender. This letter made it up the chain of command in Japan and had no effect.
It is easy to condemn the bomb drop without all the facts at hand. Look at all the information that was missing from your judgment (a) letter attached to the bomb (b) in which way it was dropped so that it would survive the explosion and (c) be found by the Japanese after the blast (d) that it was addressed to a distinguished Japanese scientist who was a friend of the American scientist so that he could vouch for the credibility of its contents (e) that another Japanese physicist independently informed the Japan war cabinet that it was unlikely the US would have enough material for more than one bomb (f) that based on this Japan decided to continue fighting (g) that as soon as the second bomb was dropped the Japanese surrendered (h) that the US already had a third bomb on the way to the Pacific theater.
Dropping the bomb was a horrific act. The alternative (not dropping it, millions death upon invasion of the mainland) was equally horrific. Truman faced a veritable Sophie's Choice and either choice would haunt him forever. (Sophie was forced by the Nazis to choose which one of her two children would survive.)
Salon magazine reprinted a fairly balanced Der Spiegel (a German magazine) article about the decision to drop the atomic bomb.
It is easy to get on a high horse, feel morally superior, and use limited hindsight to condemn Truman. The article in contrast makes the point that even with the benefit of hindsight the decision to drop the bomb is a lot more defensible than what people think, since the A-bomb put an end to global wars.
Slashdot Mirror
No it isn't. In principle yes, but I tested for this, and it is Yahoo the one that returns more spam:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=159703&cid=13
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=158453&cid=13
A search for "the" on each show Yahoo significantly in the lead.
The problem with such searches is that if a search engine misindexes a mirror site or a 401 page and that is returned in the count, then that SE looks bigger.
On the other hand if you launch a query that has 5-10 answers you can actually examine every single page on both result pages and make sure that all hits are correct and distinct.
Using that technique Google comes ahead of Yahoo, by a large margin.
you do know that shortages of skilled personel are a GOOD thing for a Profession don't you?
Good point, and I'm aware of it since for the last n years I've benefited from it. However if the shortages get too large, we run the risk of all of our jobs being shipped abroad.
Actually compared to the previous wars America had fought, Vietnam Casualities were no where near as high.
Not so, Vietnam deaths were almost double than those from the Korean War and about the same as the First World War. Only the Civil War and WWII reported a higher number of deaths.
Militarily America was superior to the Vietnamese,
That goes without saying, as we had atomic bombs and they didn't.
But the Vietnamese beat the U.S. government in the propaganda war, and not only that, they won the propaganda war over the american people!
I'd like to think that Americans would have never fully and wholeheartedly backed a war half a world away against a people holding a strategically insignificant territory and whose primary demand had always been independence. But hey, maybe you are right and all that was needed was more and better propaganda and the VC could have killed another 50K young Americans.
But they couldn't have fought on forever.
The VC had fought for 28 years until Tet, so they could have fought another 28.
the fact is they couldn't have launched another Tet Offensive even if they wanted to.
You are making the same mistakes of classically trained soldiers (are you an officer by any chance?). Yes, the VC might have not been able to launch another traditional offensive, as Tet was (even this is debatable but lets concede the point for argument's sake). Instead the VC would have gone back to the guerilla tactics for a few years until they had time to lick their wounds and replenish their forces. Iraq today is a good example of the large amount of damage that a very small but determined guerrilla force can inflict, until a point that is not worth hanging on (see also Algeria).
Us command didn't lose shit in Vietnam, LBJ and the U.S. media gave victory to the NVA.
This is the standard BS put out by the pentagon. All wars are fought until one side cries uncle. If one side is willing to fight forever and the other isn't then the former wins (see Afghanistan vs USSR).
Our side was unwilling to see more than 50K soldiers die. In contrast the other side (VC) was quite comfortable to launch several offensives (such as Tet) even if the kill ratio was 10 to 1. So we had to cry uncle.
The United States Military carried out every single objective laid out to them by the politicians.
But they didn't carry them at the personnel cost that America was willing to bear. So they failed.
There is the small matter of the Japanese being ready to surrender.
They were not ready to surrender in any short term kind of way. Even after two atomic bombs it took Japan seven days and a strong push from the Emperor to issue a surrender. Without the bombs it would have taken at least six months to muster the internal political forces to defeat the Hawks.
To give an idea of how long this can take see under the V for Vietnam, where the US command knew they had lost by during the late periods of the LBJ administration, yet the actual surrender did not take place until 1972, under Nixon/Kissinger.
We should keep in mind that there are good economic incentives built into the funding system for scientists to overstate their case. There are plenty of examples of this in action:
(i) the advantages of a reusable Shuttle.
(ii) the advantages of a Space station.
(iii) the exaggerated AIDS risk, where the NIH kept on promising a million infected Americans every year, for nearly two decades, before it came true. This one has the distinction from the two above that fighting AIDS is a worthwhile cause that was not properly funded until alarmist statements were made.
(iv) the risk of meteorites hitting earth.
(v) the risks of overpopulation (see Malthus).
(vi) the risks of shortages (see the Ehlrich-Simon wager).
(vii) the benefits of the next $20B megasuperduper-cyclotron (still waiting for my muon toaster oven).
(viii) the benefits of artificial intelligence.
and on and on.
The publicity seekers have been talking about global warming of several degrees C as a fact since the mid 1990s. Examining the literature the picture is different: global warning of just half a degree C was conclusively proven only a couple of years back.
So to sum it up, the risks of global warming are overstated by the scientific press. Something to keep in mind is that tempering the claims of global warming does not mean completely ignoring them (like Dubya does today or Regan did with AIDS in his time).
Truman always insisted (and there is no reason to doubt it) that saving American lives was a prime reason for him to drop the bomb.
To make this more clear, Truman was a politician and he knew that he could never be reelected if it ever became known that he had sat on a weapon that could have finished the war at once while American soldiers died in the Pacific theatre.
All the same this does not negate the fact that dropping the bomb was (i) convenient politically and (ii) resulted in all likelihood in a lower number of deaths in Japan.
In other words, any way one looks at it, dropping the bomb made sense: in terms of internal politics, in terms of global politics, and in saving deaths.
Remember the battle for Berlin, entirely surrounded and isolated had a death toll of over 70,000 Soviet soldiers and 150,000 German soldiers. And that was just one battle! Imagine how many would have been lost in the battle for Honshu, before reaching Tokyo and then in Tokyo itself.
These repeated restrospective justifications that the a-bombs were dropped to "save lives" are lies.
Wow, quite a statement. And completely false. Truman always insisted (and there is no reason to doubt it) that saving American lives was a prime reason for him to drop the bomb. After Iwo Jima, where the casualty rate was a thousand soldiers a day even while the Japanese defenders were starving and running out of food and water made it obvious that the invasion of a weakened and starved Japan would result in at least ten thousand American soldiers dead.
Moreover, war is politics by other means. So this supposed distinction between military and political reasons is quite artificial. Every single battle we fought in the war was for political reasons, as we could have surrendered (like the French did) rather than fight.
Well, looks line Linux is about to pull an IMDB on us and start making money on the volunteers work. IMHO all successful open source projects will eventually end up being comercially owned and operated one way or another. The temptation is too big and the number of people who would like to profit from it is just too large.
Wrong. Mitnick originally pleaded guilty and was sentenced accordingly to "a year in a low-security prison and three years of probation" [CNN]. Furthermore, the judge ordered that that he serve his sentence in a halfway house. He violated the terms of his probation and became a fugitive. The second time he was caught he had to continue serving the original sentence, hence no rush to go to trial with the second set of charges. Eventually Mitnick pleaded guilty to the second set of charges. The judge in this case did not have much choice in the length of the sentence since Mitnick was now a repeat offender and fell under the federal sentencing guidelines for those.
Mitnick was charged for crimes spanning 15 years and four different trials starting in the early eighties and finishing in the late 90s. That he generates so much undeserved sympathy has to be the ultimate meme.
If you read TFA you'll see that the AOLer got off easy because he pleaded guilty very early on. In contrast this Kevin Mitnick nitwit is even now trying to play the victim and not really sounding contrite about it.
What is really interesting about this story is that this secondary offering will be done "old school" using investment bankers. The fact that they are going back to Wall Street after their much flaunted dutch auction IPO is very telling.
to be able to control individual atoms and molecules
This part is mostly hot air.
well enough to design molecule-size machines, advanced electronics and "smart" materials."
This actually might happen to a certain extent.
Search is in fact a commodity.
I don't agree. When the new MSN search index launched we ran a set of comparisons and the Google answer was still superior. Not by much mind you: the answer set had 5 to 7 entries overlapped in the same page, and of the remaining three-five, about one or two that appeared in Google should have been in the MSN page. I was indifferent to the rest of the delta set.
In the past, search engines were overwhelmed because they didn't scale. Google's algorithm scales to infinity. The algorithm is well known and is no longer novel. It can be replicated now.
It is not so simple. Inktomi also had what it looked like a "scalable to infinity" solution but in the end they fell behind. In fact Inktomi was the first to propose the "lots-of-cheap-pcs" solution. Yet theirs didn't scale.
Indeed. It is interesting to note that the new MSN engine crawling like mad had a hard time matching Google's count, much less surpasssing it. Out of the blue comes laggard Yahoo with a much larger count. Pardon me, but I'm somewhat skeptical.
Say using the old technique of searching for typos I just tried Yahoo and Google. Yahoo reports five matches versus Google's five. However out of the five Yahoo matches three of them are spurious!
Some other searches with their actual count:
Yahoo 1, Google 1.
Yahoo 0, Google 1.
Yahoo 1, Google 5.
Yahoo 26, Google 36.
This reminds me of an old Altavista crawl, where they discovered that nearly 10% of their pages where non-standard 401 pages.
I read this in one of two ways:
a) Yahoo crawler is not as discriminating as google, collecting loads of garbage and mirrored sites
or
b) Google is finally falling behind the Web. In the past every snazy search engine eventually got overwhelmed by web growth and fell beihnd. Has that time arrived for Google?
On a different note I've heard a rumor that Google's total CPU count across all its server sites is fast approaching a million. If this is true, talk about barriers to entry! Anyone out there who can confirm or deny this?
To finish that thought even after the second bomb was dropped there were still hawks in the war cabinet who were still arguing about conditions of surrenderment. Hirohito overruled them by taking directly to the airwaves and declaring the defeat of Japan.
So you see, even two bombs were not enough to convince some cabinet members that unconditional surrender was the only option. Most cabinet members were operating under the illusion that they would be able to impose some or all of four conditions for surrenderment. Even in the end the USA acquiesced in one: keeping Hirohito.
Wow, that's a nice fairy tale. They were ready to surrender before the bomb, they just wanted to negotiate.
Sure we mobilize the entire country's war machinery so that at the end we negotiate a nice end to the war according to the wishes of the enemy. Any other suggestions?
Moreover, while certain Japanese goverment factions had come to term with the fact that war was lost, Hawks had taken a Tareq-Aziz-like approach of refusing to accept any evidence of defeat and had already started the deployment of long term resistance measures on the main island. All of this is well documented.
Even some of the factions which were in favour of surrendering sooner-rather-than-later wanted to initiate a beach-by-beach defense so that the peace would be signed under more favourable conditions for Japan.
The battle for Berlin, entirely surrounded and isolated had a death toll of over 70,000 Soviet soldiers and 150,000 German soldiers. And that was just one battle! Imagine how many would have been lost in the battle for Honshu, before reaching Tokyo and then in Tokyo itself.
It is difficult to estimate this number with estimates varying widely, between a few hundred thousands and a few million deaths, depending on how long and drawn the resistance would turn out to be. Predicting these things is an imprecise science, e.g. Vietnam resisted a lot longer than the US ever thought, Iraq folded much quicker than most analysts expected.
In any case: these were Japanese, not Americans, there is lots of honor involved. I know, its difficult, but it is a different culture. There was lots of talking needed.
During which time the USSR would have taken over half of Japan condemnding large parts of its population to Stalin style repression as happened in Eastern Europe. So you see, the decision wasn't as black as white as after-the-fact simplistic analysis makes it sound.
They did not refuse to surrender, but I guess Truman did not want to wait. Or perhaps, as other claim, wanted to give Fat man a try.
Sorry but the records have long been open. The Japanese war cabinet met the day after Hiroshima and discussed the possibility of surrendering. The war cabinet voted against it. Hirohito voted in favor of surrendering, but nonetheless he was outvoted.
Actually it did. The only thing holding back the American and Russian generals and politicians from going at each other was the nuclear carnage. Plenty of classified discussions from both sides have been released to support this thesis.
Second, this is again, limited hindsight. Japan was asked to surrender after the first bomb and they refused under the belief that it was very unlikely the Americans had a second bomb. If Japan had surrendered after the first one, there would not have been a Nagasaki. By dropping the second bomb so closely after the refusal to surrender the USA signaled "there is plenty more from where this one comes from". By the way, an American physicist on his own accord dropped a letter with the first bomb saying so, and urging them to surrender. This letter made it up the chain of command in Japan and had no effect.
It is easy to condemn the bomb drop without all the facts at hand. Look at all the information that was missing from your judgment (a) letter attached to the bomb (b) in which way it was dropped so that it would survive the explosion and (c) be found by the Japanese after the blast (d) that it was addressed to a distinguished Japanese scientist who was a friend of the American scientist so that he could vouch for the credibility of its contents (e) that another Japanese physicist independently informed the Japan war cabinet that it was unlikely the US would have enough material for more than one bomb (f) that based on this Japan decided to continue fighting (g) that as soon as the second bomb was dropped the Japanese surrendered (h) that the US already had a third bomb on the way to the Pacific theater.
Dropping the bomb was a horrific act. The alternative (not dropping it, millions death upon invasion of the mainland) was equally horrific. Truman faced a veritable Sophie's Choice and either choice would haunt him forever. (Sophie was forced by the Nazis to choose which one of her two children would survive.)
Salon magazine reprinted a fairly balanced Der Spiegel (a German magazine) article about the decision to drop the atomic bomb.
It is easy to get on a high horse, feel morally superior, and use limited hindsight to condemn Truman. The article in contrast makes the point that even with the benefit of hindsight the decision to drop the bomb is a lot more defensible than what people think, since the A-bomb put an end to global wars.
Where do you draw your line between "serious" and "self made hack"?
Has a red carpet/debian package distribution?