I'm amazed that you are so convinced of the absolute truth of these theories that you are willing to kill hundreds of thousands of innocent people on the basis of them. Scary stuff. Also see this response: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=156041&cid=130 81022
"People are badgering a guy because he helped make a practical Atomic bomb, the simpering little boys on/. think "Oh what a bad man, Atomic Bombs are so bad that this man is tainted and is equal to the Nazis because he did"
Actually, everyone here is busy defending nukes and their use on Japan, the "simpering little boys" you refer to seem to not exist.
So you are saying that sometimes there is good reason to burn hundreds of thousands of civilians alive? That you can't really judge that act without knowing the context? Then this must also be true for gassing 6 million Jews, or "merely" gassing a few thousand villagers (as Saddam did). You can't really know if what the Nazis or Saddam did was wrong without carefully examining the context. Do you know why Saddam gassed those villagers? No? So then you don't know if it was wrong. Maybe the Nazis had a reason too, that deserves some examination before we pass judgment on them.
No, massacring innocent people is wrong, period. We don't need any other information to establish that. It is wrong in and of itself. To claim that context matters is the road toward moral relativism, and means you can't pass summary judgment on anyone who has committed atrocities though history, because there might be a context, a good reason, that you're not aware of.
Almost every post here is a defense of the nuclear attack on Japan or of atom bombs in general (while almost every one is written as if this was a very radical and unique position). It gets me a little worried. Slashdoters used to be computer nerds and computer nerds used to be humanitarians. Does everyone also believe that making "small, tactical nukes" is a good idea? After all, terrorists could make a devastating attack on a major city and kill millions, so according to that projection, killing a few tens of thousands of people to prevent that would be more than worth it. You can always conjure up some "projection" to defend any number of casualties...
"If they are fighting a war with us it is okay to kill them."
Nope. It's both immoral and illegal to kill civilians, even if you are at war with their country. That is sort of the first law of war.
"Whoever said it was better we had killed Iraqi civilians then Saddam?"
Someone from the Bush administration who was being interviewed in BBC's Hard Talk a few months after the Iraq war started said that, yes, thousands of civilians had been killed, but if America hadn't attacked those people might have been killed by Saddam anyway (so basically it doesn't matter). I realize that this excuse is so stupid it doesn't really demand or deserve a response, but since it appeared again in this thread ("if we hadn't killed hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians, their Emperor might have killed them anyway"), I thought it worth a mention.
So unless I can perform my own research project I must blindly believe everything someone else says? That's silly. If these theories had conformed to normal scientific standards (published sources etc.), if the authors hadn't had such a vested interest in the results, and if hundreds of thousands of lives hadn't been at stake, there might have been less reason to be sceptical...
Someone said, about killing hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians:
"Guess it's okay if their Emperor kills them, but not us."
That is an incredibly weird thing to say; the point is of course that it's not okay for anyone to kill them, but while we are directly responsible for our own actions, we are not directly responsible for the actions of others.
But anyway, that's the same defense as, "if we hadn't killed tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians, Saddam might have killed them anyway."
The difference is the difference between people being hypothetically dead and people being actually dead. Being actually dead is a much worse fate, and we actually killed them.
Every defense of the use of the atom bomb is built on "projections" of how many soldiers and civilians would have died otherwise, and on hypotheses about what the Japanese would have done.
These projections are made from unpublished source material, use unknown models, and those who make them have a strong need to publish projections that are at least a little worse than the actual reality that they themselves created (while sometimes not reminding people of the details of that reality).
The success of these defenses also depend on the dogmatic belief among their audience that since we are the Good Guys, when we burn thousands of children alive in their homes, we must be doing it for a good reason, while if the Bad Guys (e.g. Hitler, Saddam) were to do the same, there is no conceivable reason good enough to justify such actions.
I wish some people would be a little more critical and ask themselves were those projections come from, if their authors might have a strong bias toward a particular conclusion, how credible the theories about what the Japanese would have done are, and how good the moral defense of the mass murder of civilian families really is.
You're a little inconsistent too. What does it matter that development of the A-bomb was "inevitable" if using it was a good thing (that you would have done sooner)? Then its development was desireable, which makes its inevitability a moot point.
Anyway, as big a war crime as nuking Japanese civilians was, those crimes sort of get lost in the endless firebombing of civilian targets. After all, the reason Tokyo wasn't nuked was that it had already been obliterated by firebombs (which killed more people than the nukes did, as did the Dresden bombing). So the atomic bombs were only a small part of American war crimes during WWII.
Don't get your panties in a bunch now, deliberatly killing civilians is a war crime, regardless of what revisionist excuses one might conjure up. (Maybe it was America's "manifest destiny" to burn hundreds of thousands of civilian men, women, and children alive?)
I was about to post exactly the same. I might have been convinced that he actually felt he didn't do anything wrong if it hadn't been for that phrase. Very defensive.
"How is it democratic? I didn't vote for my representative to the UN. Neither did you."
UN representatives are appointed by whatever method each country chooses. This is the only way to make the UN inclusive, and it has to be inclusive if it is to function as a mediator between nations. If it only accepted members that had some particular type of government it would be rather useless since conflicts would be the least likely between those nations. The misunderstanding seems to be that the purpose of the UN is to go in and "take out the bad guys." That's not the principle. The principle is inclusiveness and communication, and if you don't believe that such things work then you can't have much faith in democracy at all, since that is a founding principle of democracy: everyone gets a vote, not just those who have the "right" opinions. The organization itself adopts policies in a democratic manner, through votes from the member state representatives. That is how the UN is democratic, and that is how it propagates democratic ideas even to those of its members who are not democratic countries.
"Why would we want to invade China?"
I have never said the US would invade China. My post was in response to your comment that "Besides, if the U.S. goes ahead and does what it wants, who is going to stop us?" Which implied that no nation could threat the US. I believe that this is a myth. If that's not what you meant, then I apologize and take it back.
"The only logical American action against China would be to use nuclear weapons against it in order to prevent their invasion of Taiwan..."
That is not logical in any way, especially considering that they would retaliate by nuking the US.
"Nuking China would also prevent them from being such a commercial rival."
Actually, since they would retaliate and obliterate much of the US, this would pretty much ensure European economic superiority for the next hundred years. Great plan.
"China too has nukes. But as long as their launchers were taken out, they could not hit the U.S."
You make it sound so simple. But maybe taking them out before they launch would not be quite that easy.
"That's an admirable opinion, but unfortunately, one that is not realistic until the majority of the planet lives under democratic regimes."
It makes me sad to hear someone buy into the transparent propaganda myths this easily. You have yourself attacked the only democratic international institution in our world in favor of American hegemony that bears not a trace of democracy. My UN representative may have been appointed indirectly by my elected government leaders, but I'm pretty sure I didn't get a vote in the US election. I'm sorry, but "freedum and democracy" are in current US just a pin to wear, a flag to wave in patriotic fervor. Those who wave it most fervently are the ones with the least understanding of real democratic principles and what they are good for.
"If the U.S. does nothing, then who will stop Kim Jong Il?"
The only working solution for North Korea is a solution that comes from its own people--which we can support in different ways. Are you suggesting invasion? Well, it worked for Iraq... (Not.) Contrary to popular opinion among your sympathisers, all democratic nations have gone from hegemony to democracy through an internal process of more or less peaceful reformation, and none have been invaded and "turned" into a democracy. (The only possible exception is Japan, but they had had a democratic movement for decades before WWII and were probably headed that way no matter what.) That is how stable democracies are formed, not by being invaded and "fixed." When you go in and try to "fix" countries with military force, you get... the Middle East. That mess is the result of when the Brits tried it the last time.
"The U.N. will stop him as much as the U.N. stopped Saddam Hussein."
You mean the dictator that the US supported, armed, and trained for a decade plus? Of course, he was just on
"No, its an attitude that is rooted in the fact that the United Nations is a spineless organization..."
No it isn't. It's a democratic organization, which means it's rather slow and decisions are consensus-based. Still, democracy is a good thing, no?
"And yes, the U.S. could take on China today."
lol No it couldn't. You could lob missiles at them from the coast but you would have no army to occupy it with. Yes, you could cause much death and destruction, but you couldn't invade. Anyone who thinks differently is a moron. If we have learned anything from Iraq it is how indispensable ground forces are to a successful conclusion of a war. And by the way, China has nukes too, so you would probably not use yours.
"One small war? Uhm, the U.S. has forces in Afghanistan and Iraq. We have forces in South Korea keeping the North in check. We have our Pacific fleet keeping the Chinese from invading Taiwan. [etc]"
The point was that the US army is stretched thin. Your list of engagements just makes it more likely that it is indeed stretched thin.
But the real problem with the US's military power is that there is no political capital for waging real, expensive (in human lives) war. A nation like China can deploy any number of poorly educated, oppressed farmers at you, while in the US a few thousand dead soldiers is a political disaster. That is a good thing. It means that the American society is more sane than that which could sacrifice millions without consequence. But it is also a weakness in war. What some Americans need to understand is that the US doesn't need military superiority to be a great nation. In fact it might be a better one without it.
"Besides, if the U.S. goes ahead and does what it wants, who is going to stop us?"
That is such a wonderful attitude. It adds a lot to the perception of America as the new bad guys.
Anyway, I suspect that the rumors of US military invincibility have been greatly exaggerated, seeing how its army has been "stretched thin" after one small war in Iraq. Ready to take on China or India now? Right...
Actually, I sort of realized that when I looked at the iCurve. I've never used a laptop stand, although I had a few docking stations in the mid-nineties. Oh well. Nice shelf, I guess.
"Invisible to the average user"? What does that mean? It's not invisible to superusers?
This person obviously doesn't use his computer a lot, at least not for typing. That position is like begging for back and a arm problems. I don't even understand what the problem is with having the computer on the desk, but then I'm sitting by a miditower and a 22" CRT monitor, so obviously I have other priorities.
> So...the cost of ruining the 'natural balance of forces in the universe' is $300 mil US. Wonder how she arrived at that figure...could we see a breakdown?
I don't know if she ever claimed that that's what it costs (it's just compensation for her "damages"), but if you adopt her position, it is what it did cost. Apparently, the cost of the project was around $300M. I'm sure NASA has a very detailed breakdown.
Actually, you also need a computer, a power outlet, and an Internet connection, none of which usuallly are free. But there is no cost for using this particular software.
But I, very unwillingly, take it all back and claim the opposite.
I used to love Map Quest as one of the few originally useful websites. Someone whined about the poor 3D graphics here, but really... It's not about making it look like Doom 3, but about compiling massive amounts of geographical data covering the whole goddamn planet.
I can see the roof of my house in Stockholm, Sweden. I can see the house of my friend in Absecon, NJ. I can see cars in the streets. I actually had to stick my head out my window and check that my backyard really looks the way it does in the application. It does of course.
This is about building a scalable infrastructure, that you can then stuff with information about not only streets and hotels, but all kinds of things. As image resolution improves and updates become more frequent, and people stuff more and more information about places in it, this will be a real step toward realizing Google's ultimate vision--to create an interface to all human knowledge (originally inspired by the ship computer on the USS Enterprise).
People who fear American-made cyborgs can rest easy...
But like with cloning, neural engineering, gene manipulation, etc. there is research going on in the rest of the world that is just as advanced as that in the US.
That said, I have to agree with the FDA that the AbiCor does not appear ready for primetime, seeing how everyone who had one has died within 17 months.
Eh, this is not flamebait, it's a fact. And it's perhaps the most important reason for MS's operating system monopoly. As long as you need MS Office to share documents, offices are going to have to run Windows or Mac OS. Microsoft knows this.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm amazed that you are so convinced of the absolute truth of these theories that you are willing to kill hundreds of thousands of innocent people on the basis of them. Scary stuff. Also see this response:0 81022
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=156041&cid=13
"People are badgering a guy because he helped make a practical Atomic bomb, the simpering little boys on /. think "Oh what a bad man, Atomic Bombs are so bad that this man is tainted and is equal to the Nazis because he did"
Actually, everyone here is busy defending nukes and their use on Japan, the "simpering little boys" you refer to seem to not exist.
Incredible. Do you have no sense of context?
So you are saying that sometimes there is good reason to burn hundreds of thousands of civilians alive? That you can't really judge that act without knowing the context? Then this must also be true for gassing 6 million Jews, or "merely" gassing a few thousand villagers (as Saddam did). You can't really know if what the Nazis or Saddam did was wrong without carefully examining the context. Do you know why Saddam gassed those villagers? No? So then you don't know if it was wrong. Maybe the Nazis had a reason too, that deserves some examination before we pass judgment on them.
No, massacring innocent people is wrong, period. We don't need any other information to establish that. It is wrong in and of itself. To claim that context matters is the road toward moral relativism, and means you can't pass summary judgment on anyone who has committed atrocities though history, because there might be a context, a good reason, that you're not aware of.
Nice post, thanks. (Where are those moderator points when you need'em?)
Almost every post here is a defense of the nuclear attack on Japan or of atom bombs in general (while almost every one is written as if this was a very radical and unique position). It gets me a little worried. Slashdoters used to be computer nerds and computer nerds used to be humanitarians. Does everyone also believe that making "small, tactical nukes" is a good idea? After all, terrorists could make a devastating attack on a major city and kill millions, so according to that projection, killing a few tens of thousands of people to prevent that would be more than worth it. You can always conjure up some "projection" to defend any number of casualties...
"If they are fighting a war with us it is okay to kill them."
Nope. It's both immoral and illegal to kill civilians, even if you are at war with their country. That is sort of the first law of war.
"Whoever said it was better we had killed Iraqi civilians then Saddam?"
Someone from the Bush administration who was being interviewed in BBC's Hard Talk a few months after the Iraq war started said that, yes, thousands of civilians had been killed, but if America hadn't attacked those people might have been killed by Saddam anyway (so basically it doesn't matter). I realize that this excuse is so stupid it doesn't really demand or deserve a response, but since it appeared again in this thread ("if we hadn't killed hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians, their Emperor might have killed them anyway"), I thought it worth a mention.
So unless I can perform my own research project I must blindly believe everything someone else says? That's silly. If these theories had conformed to normal scientific standards (published sources etc.), if the authors hadn't had such a vested interest in the results, and if hundreds of thousands of lives hadn't been at stake, there might have been less reason to be sceptical...
Someone said, about killing hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians:
"Guess it's okay if their Emperor kills them, but not us."
That is an incredibly weird thing to say; the point is of course that it's not okay for anyone to kill them, but while we are directly responsible for our own actions, we are not directly responsible for the actions of others.
But anyway, that's the same defense as, "if we hadn't killed tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians, Saddam might have killed them anyway."
The difference is the difference between people being hypothetically dead and people being actually dead. Being actually dead is a much worse fate, and we actually killed them.
Every defense of the use of the atom bomb is built on "projections" of how many soldiers and civilians would have died otherwise, and on hypotheses about what the Japanese would have done.
These projections are made from unpublished source material, use unknown models, and those who make them have a strong need to publish projections that are at least a little worse than the actual reality that they themselves created (while sometimes not reminding people of the details of that reality).
The success of these defenses also depend on the dogmatic belief among their audience that since we are the Good Guys, when we burn thousands of children alive in their homes, we must be doing it for a good reason, while if the Bad Guys (e.g. Hitler, Saddam) were to do the same, there is no conceivable reason good enough to justify such actions.
I wish some people would be a little more critical and ask themselves were those projections come from, if their authors might have a strong bias toward a particular conclusion, how credible the theories about what the Japanese would have done are, and how good the moral defense of the mass murder of civilian families really is.
Aggressive much?
You're a little inconsistent too. What does it matter that development of the A-bomb was "inevitable" if using it was a good thing (that you would have done sooner)? Then its development was desireable, which makes its inevitability a moot point.
Anyway, as big a war crime as nuking Japanese civilians was, those crimes sort of get lost in the endless firebombing of civilian targets. After all, the reason Tokyo wasn't nuked was that it had already been obliterated by firebombs (which killed more people than the nukes did, as did the Dresden bombing). So the atomic bombs were only a small part of American war crimes during WWII.
Don't get your panties in a bunch now, deliberatly killing civilians is a war crime, regardless of what revisionist excuses one might conjure up. (Maybe it was America's "manifest destiny" to burn hundreds of thousands of civilian men, women, and children alive?)
I was about to post exactly the same. I might have been convinced that he actually felt he didn't do anything wrong if it hadn't been for that phrase. Very defensive.
"How is it democratic? I didn't vote for my representative to the UN. Neither did you."
UN representatives are appointed by whatever method each country chooses. This is the only way to make the UN inclusive, and it has to be inclusive if it is to function as a mediator between nations. If it only accepted members that had some particular type of government it would be rather useless since conflicts would be the least likely between those nations. The misunderstanding seems to be that the purpose of the UN is to go in and "take out the bad guys." That's not the principle. The principle is inclusiveness and communication, and if you don't believe that such things work then you can't have much faith in democracy at all, since that is a founding principle of democracy: everyone gets a vote, not just those who have the "right" opinions. The organization itself adopts policies in a democratic manner, through votes from the member state representatives. That is how the UN is democratic, and that is how it propagates democratic ideas even to those of its members who are not democratic countries.
"Why would we want to invade China?"
I have never said the US would invade China. My post was in response to your comment that "Besides, if the U.S. goes ahead and does what it wants, who is going to stop us?" Which implied that no nation could threat the US. I believe that this is a myth. If that's not what you meant, then I apologize and take it back.
"The only logical American action against China would be to use nuclear weapons against it in order to prevent their invasion of Taiwan..."
That is not logical in any way, especially considering that they would retaliate by nuking the US.
"Nuking China would also prevent them from being such a commercial rival."
Actually, since they would retaliate and obliterate much of the US, this would pretty much ensure European economic superiority for the next hundred years. Great plan.
"China too has nukes. But as long as their launchers were taken out, they could not hit the U.S."
You make it sound so simple. But maybe taking them out before they launch would not be quite that easy.
"That's an admirable opinion, but unfortunately, one that is not realistic until the majority of the planet lives under democratic regimes."
It makes me sad to hear someone buy into the transparent propaganda myths this easily. You have yourself attacked the only democratic international institution in our world in favor of American hegemony that bears not a trace of democracy. My UN representative may have been appointed indirectly by my elected government leaders, but I'm pretty sure I didn't get a vote in the US election. I'm sorry, but "freedum and democracy" are in current US just a pin to wear, a flag to wave in patriotic fervor. Those who wave it most fervently are the ones with the least understanding of real democratic principles and what they are good for.
"If the U.S. does nothing, then who will stop Kim Jong Il?"
The only working solution for North Korea is a solution that comes from its own people--which we can support in different ways. Are you suggesting invasion? Well, it worked for Iraq... (Not.) Contrary to popular opinion among your sympathisers, all democratic nations have gone from hegemony to democracy through an internal process of more or less peaceful reformation, and none have been invaded and "turned" into a democracy. (The only possible exception is Japan, but they had had a democratic movement for decades before WWII and were probably headed that way no matter what.) That is how stable democracies are formed, not by being invaded and "fixed." When you go in and try to "fix" countries with military force, you get... the Middle East. That mess is the result of when the Brits tried it the last time.
"The U.N. will stop him as much as the U.N. stopped Saddam Hussein."
You mean the dictator that the US supported, armed, and trained for a decade plus? Of course, he was just on
"No, its an attitude that is rooted in the fact that the United Nations is a spineless organization..."
No it isn't. It's a democratic organization, which means it's rather slow and decisions are consensus-based. Still, democracy is a good thing, no?
"And yes, the U.S. could take on China today."
lol No it couldn't. You could lob missiles at them from the coast but you would have no army to occupy it with. Yes, you could cause much death and destruction, but you couldn't invade. Anyone who thinks differently is a moron. If we have learned anything from Iraq it is how indispensable ground forces are to a successful conclusion of a war. And by the way, China has nukes too, so you would probably not use yours.
"One small war? Uhm, the U.S. has forces in Afghanistan and Iraq. We have forces in South Korea keeping the North in check. We have our Pacific fleet keeping the Chinese from invading Taiwan. [etc]"
The point was that the US army is stretched thin. Your list of engagements just makes it more likely that it is indeed stretched thin.
But the real problem with the US's military power is that there is no political capital for waging real, expensive (in human lives) war. A nation like China can deploy any number of poorly educated, oppressed farmers at you, while in the US a few thousand dead soldiers is a political disaster. That is a good thing. It means that the American society is more sane than that which could sacrifice millions without consequence. But it is also a weakness in war. What some Americans need to understand is that the US doesn't need military superiority to be a great nation. In fact it might be a better one without it.
"Besides, if the U.S. goes ahead and does what it wants, who is going to stop us?"
That is such a wonderful attitude. It adds a lot to the perception of America as the new bad guys.
Anyway, I suspect that the rumors of US military invincibility have been greatly exaggerated, seeing how its army has been "stretched thin" after one small war in Iraq. Ready to take on China or India now? Right...
Actually, I sort of realized that when I looked at the iCurve. I've never used a laptop stand, although I had a few docking stations in the mid-nineties. Oh well. Nice shelf, I guess.
You can't really blame them. They're military. It's their job to be belligerent and simple-minded.
"Invisible to the average user"? What does that mean? It's not invisible to superusers?
This person obviously doesn't use his computer a lot, at least not for typing. That position is like begging for back and a arm problems. I don't even understand what the problem is with having the computer on the desk, but then I'm sitting by a miditower and a 22" CRT monitor, so obviously I have other priorities.
> So...the cost of ruining the 'natural balance of forces in the universe' is $300 mil US. Wonder how she arrived at that figure...could we see a breakdown?
I don't know if she ever claimed that that's what it costs (it's just compensation for her "damages"), but if you adopt her position, it is what it did cost. Apparently, the cost of the project was around $300M. I'm sure NASA has a very detailed breakdown.
Actually, you also need a computer, a power outlet, and an Internet connection, none of which usuallly are free. But there is no cost for using this particular software.
Are there clouds on Mars??
But I, very unwillingly, take it all back and claim the opposite.
I used to love Map Quest as one of the few originally useful websites. Someone whined about the poor 3D graphics here, but really... It's not about making it look like Doom 3, but about compiling massive amounts of geographical data covering the whole goddamn planet.
I can see the roof of my house in Stockholm, Sweden. I can see the house of my friend in Absecon, NJ. I can see cars in the streets. I actually had to stick my head out my window and check that my backyard really looks the way it does in the application. It does of course.
This is about building a scalable infrastructure, that you can then stuff with information about not only streets and hotels, but all kinds of things. As image resolution improves and updates become more frequent, and people stuff more and more information about places in it, this will be a real step toward realizing Google's ultimate vision--to create an interface to all human knowledge (originally inspired by the ship computer on the USS Enterprise).
People who fear American-made cyborgs can rest easy...
But like with cloning, neural engineering, gene manipulation, etc. there is research going on in the rest of the world that is just as advanced as that in the US.
That said, I have to agree with the FDA that the AbiCor does not appear ready for primetime, seeing how everyone who had one has died within 17 months.
What uncertainties? I know Dick quite well, he's one of my absolute favorite authors.
Eh, this is not flamebait, it's a fact. And it's perhaps the most important reason for MS's operating system monopoly. As long as you need MS Office to share documents, offices are going to have to run Windows or Mac OS. Microsoft knows this.
...can correctly open an MS Word document with two tables. :-)