at the Japanese had offered to surrender before Hiroshima and Nagasaki:
The ones offering surrender had no power to make it happen. The hardliners were in charge and were relying on the inevitable invasion to be so expensive for us that we'd lose the will to keep going. At the very least we envisioned having to conduct a years-long firebombing campaign to force Japan to surrender, should we decide not to lose the estimated hundreds of thousands of US lives in an invasion. Not just two bombs, but burning the whole fucking country to the ground. Dresden times a thousand.
In the balance, the atomic bombs saved Japanese lives, since millions were estimated otherwise. Publishing ineffectual offers for surrender may have resulted public outcry against the war as you say, and in Japan not losing.
The only thing that matters is that in the separation of powers, Congress gives its consent to military actions, regardless of what label you put on it. Given that Congress has given its clear consent to the "War on Terror," any such arguments are bunk. This has a history at least all the way back to President Jefferson and the First Barbary War, so arguments that the Founding Fathers would not agree are obviously wrong.
There's no reason to keep secrets from the people..... a democracy can no more function w/o full disclosure, than a stock market can function if the corporations don't publish financial statements.
Here's a secret the government has: Everything known about you: your name, income, deductions, taxes, address, work history, and much more. I think we the people deserve to know that, don't you?
Even companies publishing financial statements don't publish trade secrets in them.
But it wasn't done your way, and it worked quite well.
The Germans had what they thought was a secure communications channel, and broadcast their movements and intents to us daily. Had they thought it was compromised, we wouldn't have had that intelligence.
We won battles, sunk ships and avoided submarines for two years, and got some major victories over the Japanese too, because of our UNKNOWN ability to break the enemy's codes.
You would throw all that away, and probably lose the war, over an nonexistent right to know.
"Classified" material that never should have been classified
Some things we look at and think that people should know, and we may be right. However, information is often classified not because the information itself could damage national security, but because its release could reveal the identity of valuable intelligence sources to the enemy or could have other consequences not in our interest.
but instead was trying to cover-up military blunders.
Much of it wasn't even related to military, such as the hundreds of thousands of State Department cables. The military could throw out charges based on anything that could even be remotely considered to be whistleblower material, and still have enough to send him away for life.
We the People deserve to know what is actually happening.
No, we don't. Imagine a leak resulting in a New York Times front page in 1943, "Allies Crack German Enigma Code Machine!" when the Germans thought it was secure in a practical sense through the end of the war. How many battles would we have lost? Maybe even the war.
Hey at least he's not in jail like the goverment whistleblowers.
If you're talking about Manning, only a tiny fraction of what he released could be even remotely considered potential whistleblower material. The vast majority was random classified material that he found, and it's enough to put him in jail for life.
Even if the law says it does, the labels will use creative accounting to keep the artists from finding out what they are owed. We had a big government investigation about that here a while back, and it turned out artists were owed millions.
Eliot Spitzer may be a corrupt, unethical, power-hungry liberal, but he did accomplish a few good things as New York's AG.
It's streamed directly to the one subscriber (renter) of that one antenna. Broadcasting by definition requres sending that signal to a dispersed audience, such as if they took that signal and put it up on a web site for viewing by all.
I took a driving safety course once, and part of it was standing on the brakes at 40 km/hr. Some of us took one try slamming on the brakes full-force and were done. Others for some reason wouldn't. For many it took a couple/few tries before the instructor could get them to actually slam on the brakes with all their strength.
For one woman it took seven tries, with the instructor riding with her, yelling and pushing on her leg. It wasn't a physical issue sinnce she was easily strong enough. She was just too timid to stand on the brakes.
For you automatic-oriented folks, there is still left-foot braking commonly used in sporty driving with automatics (racing), disabled by this "feature."
Normal cornering: Right foot off the gas, onto the brake going into the corner, foot off the brake, foot on the gas to accelerate out. With this the engine revs have gone down, especially bad with a turbo, and you have a lag before you have power again to come out of the corner.
Left foot breaking allows you to hit the brakes but keep pressure on the gas pedal. This keeps the revs up going into that corner so you can pull out faster.
They're taking all the fun out of driving with their regulations. First ABS that can't be switched off to make sure you can't purposely lock up the brakes. I used to slide around on the ice like that, very fun.
Now they're banishing heel-toe for performance driving.
Next these electronic stability things, although most of those can be turned off since they're manufacturer choice. Not for much longer.
Of course it had nothing to do with the release of the USB2 standard which overtook every other interface on the market at the time for both speed and compatibility.
USB2 at 480 Mb/s was slower in real world use than the Firewire 400 that was already out due to inherent inefficiencies of USB, which was designed for low-speed connections. Firewire also used a superior P2P architecture and provided more much power for peripherals.
USB won because it was much cheaper to implement, but it is a technologically inferior product in every way for high-bandwidth connectivity. Within only a couple years of introduction, it was looking painfully slow compared to Firewire's second-generation 800 Mb/s.
The PC world doesn't follow Apple. Never really did.
Ditching the floppy, flat screen monitors, DVD writers as included equipment, EFI, machined cases, GUI (yes, Xerox made it originally, but Apple made it work in a low-cost consumer system), track pads in laptops (remember the scroll balls before that?), integrated wireless in laptops.
Remember how long it took Apple to even support multi-button mice
Since at least the early 90s. Kensington mice were popular with Mac users.
Remember FireWire? I have never seen a non-Apple computer have a single Firewire port
Standard on many Sony models under the name iLink. It's a very cheap way to transfer data as fast as the hard drive inside the enclosure could, not equalled until eSATA and USB3.
Remember GeoPort? AAUI? Yeah, neither does anyone else.
GeoPort was good for its day, but doomed for its purpose because of telecom vendor lock-in. Nobody wanted a universally compatible product. AAUI's problem was cost, but it was a good standard.
Apple has had failures, too. Remember the Macintosh Portable, the Pippin, the hockey puck mouse? They have been behind too. OS 9 was far technologically inferior to Windows 2000, and even to Windows 98 in some ways. They have other quasi-failures though. Newton was a failure due to PHB managment and lack of a cohesive vision for the product, but it did usher in the era of the PDA.
Remember PowerPC? How that was supposedly "so much better" than x86, both faster and less power-hungry?
It was. Apple was difficult to work with, and IBM/Moto/Freescale didn't want to put development money into a product with such low volume compared to the competition, while Intel poured billions into R&D. It lives on though, powering many embedded applications including all three current-generation gaming consoles.
Apple doesn't lead the way in introducing new technologies - it leads the way in killing old technologies
Killing old technologies is part of it, since the industry is very slow to adopt new until the old is killed.
It will probably kill you to know that ARM was supposed to be yet another low-cost processor in the form of Acorn RISC, which means it would have died by the early 90s. Back around 1990 Apple worked with Acorn to spin off ARM Ltd, and Apple dictated design changes to create a processor for the Newton. The rest, of course, is history.
And it can do that because half its customers are blind zealots like yourself.
You really don't know what would happen to you if you pissed on the bible or torah on a Jerusalem street? Try it. I won't expect you to post results.
People wouldn't be happy, and I may even get beat up. But the Quran pissing would result in my death, and most likely Muslim riots around the world resulting in the deaths of many others.
There is no passage in the Quran nor any reliable Hadith to support FGM. It's as simple as that. There is one unreliable Hadith, and it says not to make it severe so as to hinder a woman's pleasure.
Where it exists, it is a cultural practice spreading under Islam, and outside of Islam too.
Yes, I do. And you are right, almost nobody was using it.
Until Apple came along and dumped their legacy ports for USB. There's a reason a huge number of early USB devices were translucent Bondi Blue (like my first USB scanner) or tanslucent striped white (like my first external USB hard drive).
The same thing is happening here. Apple is moving to Thunderbolt, which will instantly create a pool of millions of devices ready to use Thunderbolt peripherals. The PC world will follow.
Thankfully most moslems and christians (apart from some die-hard fundies) do not take everything written in the Quaran literally and implement every crazy thing that is written in scripture.
First, we need to separate personal choice from law or enforced custom.
A tiny percentage of Christians still practice strict biblical Christianity (believe gays should be put to death, women wear head covering in church, etc.), and NONE of them are able to put that into law to force others to obey their interpretation. In fact, they're generally laughed at or condemned by the society at large -- see the Westboro Baptists.
A large percentage of Muslims still practice strict Quranic Islam, and many of them have it in law and enforced custom to force others to obey their interpretation. People are constantly jailed, beaten and even executed for violating these religious laws.
There is a BIG difference in practice between Christianity and Islam.
Both the Quaran and the Bible were written in very different times long ago and that fact should kept in mind when reading either text.
People have been studying the Bible with this view for quite a long time. However, this has only recently started to happen with the Quran and Hadith, and such a thing should not be done in a Muslim country if you value your life. The Quran is still considered the absolute, unchanging, infallible Word of Allah by most adherents. That and Hadith form their law. If gays were to be put to death then, they are to be put to death now. Allah's law does not change.
Female circumcision is an African tribal custom, not Middle Eastern. It is now associated with Islam since most of the area was conquered by Muslims,. Muslim rulers generally let the locals continue their customs, and a lot of conversion was a converted king who told his populace to convert, but didn't dare risk rebellion by abolishing popular customs such as this. Arguments still continue as to whether it's an acceptable practice under Islam.
They're talking about a bloody race war, they're talking about a price on Zimmerman's head, making the "cracker" pay. They're pissed the blacks in that area of Florida are supposedly too scared of the police to rise up and start killing people. This is all in a recorded phone call.
Remember, "Kill a cracker for Trayvon." No kidding, that's a quote.
Crickets from Obama's Department of Justice of course, not going to do anything against Holder's "people."
My point was that the petroleum industry (like the motion picture industry) have become skilled at hiding their true margins.
They are publicly held companies, the US ones reporting to the SEC. Are you saying they are lying? Please provide the evidence. I'd love to see some crooked CEOs and lawyers go to jail.
I don't think pundits and politicians are calling for a windfall profit tax on the petroleum industry.
Not right now since Obama is in office. He himself was calling for such a tax before he was elected, when gas prices were less than they are in many places today.
No what I see is a reasonable request to quit subsidizing an industry with huge profits with tax payer money.
No disagreement there. Of course politicians were floating this idea back then, too.
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The ones offering surrender had no power to make it happen. The hardliners were in charge and were relying on the inevitable invasion to be so expensive for us that we'd lose the will to keep going. At the very least we envisioned having to conduct a years-long firebombing campaign to force Japan to surrender, should we decide not to lose the estimated hundreds of thousands of US lives in an invasion. Not just two bombs, but burning the whole fucking country to the ground. Dresden times a thousand.
In the balance, the atomic bombs saved Japanese lives, since millions were estimated otherwise. Publishing ineffectual offers for surrender may have resulted public outcry against the war as you say, and in Japan not losing.
The only thing that matters is that in the separation of powers, Congress gives its consent to military actions, regardless of what label you put on it. Given that Congress has given its clear consent to the "War on Terror," any such arguments are bunk. This has a history at least all the way back to President Jefferson and the First Barbary War, so arguments that the Founding Fathers would not agree are obviously wrong.
Here's a secret the government has: Everything known about you: your name, income, deductions, taxes, address, work history, and much more. I think we the people deserve to know that, don't you?
Even companies publishing financial statements don't publish trade secrets in them.
But it wasn't done your way, and it worked quite well.
The Germans had what they thought was a secure communications channel, and broadcast their movements and intents to us daily. Had they thought it was compromised, we wouldn't have had that intelligence.
We won battles, sunk ships and avoided submarines for two years, and got some major victories over the Japanese too, because of our UNKNOWN ability to break the enemy's codes.
You would throw all that away, and probably lose the war, over an nonexistent right to know.
Your source states nobody else in the US who is in jail for government whistleblowing.
But it does reference the fact that Manning could have communicated his concerns to a member of Congress and be covered by federal whistleblower law.
Some things we look at and think that people should know, and we may be right. However, information is often classified not because the information itself could damage national security, but because its release could reveal the identity of valuable intelligence sources to the enemy or could have other consequences not in our interest.
Much of it wasn't even related to military, such as the hundreds of thousands of State Department cables. The military could throw out charges based on anything that could even be remotely considered to be whistleblower material, and still have enough to send him away for life.
No, we don't. Imagine a leak resulting in a New York Times front page in 1943, "Allies Crack German Enigma Code Machine!" when the Germans thought it was secure in a practical sense through the end of the war. How many battles would we have lost? Maybe even the war.
If you're talking about Manning, only a tiny fraction of what he released could be even remotely considered potential whistleblower material. The vast majority was random classified material that he found, and it's enough to put him in jail for life.
It wouldn't make it to the artists.
Even if the law says it does, the labels will use creative accounting to keep the artists from finding out what they are owed. We had a big government investigation about that here a while back, and it turned out artists were owed millions.
Eliot Spitzer may be a corrupt, unethical, power-hungry liberal, but he did accomplish a few good things as New York's AG.
If the money goes to the MAFIAA, I consider that payment in advance for all the copyrighted content I can fit on it.
It's streamed directly to the one subscriber (renter) of that one antenna. Broadcasting by definition requres sending that signal to a dispersed audience, such as if they took that signal and put it up on a web site for viewing by all.
I took a driving safety course once, and part of it was standing on the brakes at 40 km/hr. Some of us took one try slamming on the brakes full-force and were done. Others for some reason wouldn't. For many it took a couple/few tries before the instructor could get them to actually slam on the brakes with all their strength.
For one woman it took seven tries, with the instructor riding with her, yelling and pushing on her leg. It wasn't a physical issue sinnce she was easily strong enough. She was just too timid to stand on the brakes.
For you automatic-oriented folks, there is still left-foot braking commonly used in sporty driving with automatics (racing), disabled by this "feature."
Normal cornering: Right foot off the gas, onto the brake going into the corner, foot off the brake, foot on the gas to accelerate out. With this the engine revs have gone down, especially bad with a turbo, and you have a lag before you have power again to come out of the corner.
Left foot breaking allows you to hit the brakes but keep pressure on the gas pedal. This keeps the revs up going into that corner so you can pull out faster.
No more doing that.
They're taking all the fun out of driving with their regulations. First ABS that can't be switched off to make sure you can't purposely lock up the brakes. I used to slide around on the ice like that, very fun.
Now they're banishing heel-toe for performance driving.
Next these electronic stability things, although most of those can be turned off since they're manufacturer choice. Not for much longer.
USB2 at 480 Mb/s was slower in real world use than the Firewire 400 that was already out due to inherent inefficiencies of USB, which was designed for low-speed connections. Firewire also used a superior P2P architecture and provided more much power for peripherals.
USB won because it was much cheaper to implement, but it is a technologically inferior product in every way for high-bandwidth connectivity. Within only a couple years of introduction, it was looking painfully slow compared to Firewire's second-generation 800 Mb/s.
Ditching the floppy, flat screen monitors, DVD writers as included equipment, EFI, machined cases, GUI (yes, Xerox made it originally, but Apple made it work in a low-cost consumer system), track pads in laptops (remember the scroll balls before that?), integrated wireless in laptops.
Since at least the early 90s. Kensington mice were popular with Mac users.
Standard on many Sony models under the name iLink. It's a very cheap way to transfer data as fast as the hard drive inside the enclosure could, not equalled until eSATA and USB3.
GeoPort was good for its day, but doomed for its purpose because of telecom vendor lock-in. Nobody wanted a universally compatible product. AAUI's problem was cost, but it was a good standard.
Apple has had failures, too. Remember the Macintosh Portable, the Pippin, the hockey puck mouse? They have been behind too. OS 9 was far technologically inferior to Windows 2000, and even to Windows 98 in some ways. They have other quasi-failures though. Newton was a failure due to PHB managment and lack of a cohesive vision for the product, but it did usher in the era of the PDA.
It was. Apple was difficult to work with, and IBM/Moto/Freescale didn't want to put development money into a product with such low volume compared to the competition, while Intel poured billions into R&D. It lives on though, powering many embedded applications including all three current-generation gaming consoles.
Killing old technologies is part of it, since the industry is very slow to adopt new until the old is killed.
It will probably kill you to know that ARM was supposed to be yet another low-cost processor in the form of Acorn RISC, which means it would have died by the early 90s. Back around 1990 Apple worked with Acorn to spin off ARM Ltd, and Apple dictated design changes to create a processor for the Newton. The rest, of course, is history.
That USB scanner and hard drive were for a PC.
People wouldn't be happy, and I may even get beat up. But the Quran pissing would result in my death, and most likely Muslim riots around the world resulting in the deaths of many others.
There is no passage in the Quran nor any reliable Hadith to support FGM. It's as simple as that. There is one unreliable Hadith, and it says not to make it severe so as to hinder a woman's pleasure.
Where it exists, it is a cultural practice spreading under Islam, and outside of Islam too.
If you piss on the Bible or Torah, please post results.
If you piss on the Quran, please designate someone to post results for you after your demise.
*Mainly* in Africa, as I said.
Wherever it goes, it's cultural. It is not part of the Quran or Hadith, but it has infected some other Muslim populations.
Of course, male genital mutilation is still required, but nobody seems to care.
Yes, I do. And you are right, almost nobody was using it.
Until Apple came along and dumped their legacy ports for USB. There's a reason a huge number of early USB devices were translucent Bondi Blue (like my first USB scanner) or tanslucent striped white (like my first external USB hard drive).
The same thing is happening here. Apple is moving to Thunderbolt, which will instantly create a pool of millions of devices ready to use Thunderbolt peripherals. The PC world will follow.
First, we need to separate personal choice from law or enforced custom.
A tiny percentage of Christians still practice strict biblical Christianity (believe gays should be put to death, women wear head covering in church, etc.), and NONE of them are able to put that into law to force others to obey their interpretation. In fact, they're generally laughed at or condemned by the society at large -- see the Westboro Baptists.
A large percentage of Muslims still practice strict Quranic Islam, and many of them have it in law and enforced custom to force others to obey their interpretation. People are constantly jailed, beaten and even executed for violating these religious laws.
There is a BIG difference in practice between Christianity and Islam.
People have been studying the Bible with this view for quite a long time. However, this has only recently started to happen with the Quran and Hadith, and such a thing should not be done in a Muslim country if you value your life. The Quran is still considered the absolute, unchanging, infallible Word of Allah by most adherents. That and Hadith form their law. If gays were to be put to death then, they are to be put to death now. Allah's law does not change.
Female circumcision is an African tribal custom, not Middle Eastern. It is now associated with Islam since most of the area was conquered by Muslims,. Muslim rulers generally let the locals continue their customs, and a lot of conversion was a converted king who told his populace to convert, but didn't dare risk rebellion by abolishing popular customs such as this. Arguments still continue as to whether it's an acceptable practice under Islam.
Guilty: Bunch of people bitching about a lynching
Not Guilty: This is where you get your flames, literally, during the murderous riot that will ensue.
They're talking about a bloody race war, they're talking about a price on Zimmerman's head, making the "cracker" pay. They're pissed the blacks in that area of Florida are supposedly too scared of the police to rise up and start killing people. This is all in a recorded phone call.
Remember, "Kill a cracker for Trayvon." No kidding, that's a quote.
Crickets from Obama's Department of Justice of course, not going to do anything against Holder's "people."
There is so much misinformation about such laws, and the media is perfectly happy to repeat it without checking facts. Or they just make it up.
Par for the course when it comes to gun-related topics.
They are publicly held companies, the US ones reporting to the SEC. Are you saying they are lying? Please provide the evidence. I'd love to see some crooked CEOs and lawyers go to jail.
Not right now since Obama is in office. He himself was calling for such a tax before he was elected, when gas prices were less than they are in many places today.
No disagreement there. Of course politicians were floating this idea back then, too.