Apple is already branching out. They now sell music and gadgets like the ipod. Maybe if those and other similar ventures take off then they can let go of the hardware market for good.
Could you please tell me the name of the company you work for? I want to make sure I don't hold any stock in a company that thinks it can get accountability from Microsoft or Oracle.
" I have a real hard time believing less than 300,000 people would die in the invasion of the home islands."
Once again they were ready to surrender, there was no real need to invade.
"The US wasn't going to accept conditional surrender, not without occupation and "regime change"."
It is unethical to kill people who are willing to surrender and lay down their arms. Do you need me to repeat that for you a few times? In warfare you are not supposed to kill soldiers wawing a white flag. It's evil to do so. If we had entered into negotiations with them we might have found a way to get all that we wanted without committing slaughter. Japan knew it was a defeated army, they were ready to surrender. We did not even attempt such a thing, we simply committed genocide without ever considering an alternative. I don't know what your definition of evil is but to me if a country is given a series of options and it chooses the one that kills the most people then it's evil.
Once again you keep skirting the real issues. You keep insisting that japan would not surrender unless we dropped nuclear bombs on their cities. This is pure nonsense. Like I said we could have dropped the bomb in the bay, we could have dropped the bomb in less populated areas, we could have dropped the bomb on the north island on top of some mountain. We could have demostrated our ability to kill them by the millions without actually doing so. It was an evil act to drop nuclear bombs on cities when there were alternatives.
And of course you completely ignored the espcially henious act of dropping the second bomb.
"If the war had continued, the Japanese people would have endured a winter with no fuel, no transport, and no food. Millions would have starved or died from exposure and sickness."
The war was not going to continue. The japanese were looking to surrender. They had already talked to several nations who were going to act as mediators for a negotiated surrender. That nullifies you entire "millions would have been killed argument".
"And, of course, even if the US had never had the Manhattan Project, Hiroshima and Nagasaki would have been burned to the ground by B-29 bombers anyway, just like every other city in Japan"
No matter how you kill civillians it's unethical.
"Sure, the Japanese were trying to surrender. Just not unconditionally. The military leaders wanted to stay in power and get the chance to rearm. Imagine those psychopaths running Japan in the '50s. In a world with nukes."
They could have been disarmed and kept under control. At the time the russians were our allies and the chinese and the koreans hated the japanese. We could have easily held them in check. Not to mention we ended up setting up military bases on japan. It's evil to murder people in order to exact an unconditional surrender if they were willing to lay down their arms.
"Let's do a little thought experiment. "
Let's not. It's a silly exercise and your suppositions are plain on stupid.
"Also, Japanese culture made it impossible for them to surrender to American military superiority."
Bullshit. You yourself said they were looking to surrender.
"And if we had the bomb, and didn't use it, Truman would have been carried off by a mob and hung from the nearest lamppost. "
Nonsense. If the japanese surrendered then everybody would have been happy. Also we could have dropped the bomb in tokyo bay thsu demonstrating our ability to wipe out the nation without actually killing people.
Finally. Even if you were right in 100% of what you said (and you are not) that might have justified the first bomb.
Maybe you are right but then again maybe you are wrong. I don't think you can even pretend to know what others would have done if they had the chance. Certainly it wasn't long after we dropped our bombs that other countries obtained theirs, they had many chances to use them since then and did not do so.
"When Japan or Germany were facing their ultimate demise do you think that they would have hesitated to use a nuclear weapons if they had them?"
When Saddam Hussein was facing his ultimate demise he did not use weapons of mass destruction even though he is a madmen.
"However I don't think that a case can be made that the US is somehow "worse" or "different" than anyone else for using nuclear weapons."
I think the case can be made. Japan was looking to surrender when we bombed them. They had let the US know of that fact too. We decided to bomb them anyway because we wanted an unconditional surrender and we wanted to humilitate them. Also we chose to bomb a city. We could have dropped a bomb on tokyo bay to demonstrate our power but we wiped out a city instead.
Finally after seeing what our bomb could do, and before giving them a chance to surrender we bombed another city. Now that act was an inexcusable crime against humanity. Maybe you can hem, haw, rationalize, and finagle an excuse for the first bomb but there is no rational case for the second one.
"And yet, you think I would want to put all my trust the sanity of other world leaders to not fire nuclear weapons at the U.S.?"
I think I may be able to ease your mind about this a bit. Here try this exercize.
Take a piece of paper and draw a line going down the middle (vertically). On the left hand side make a list of all the countries that have nuclear weapons. On the right hand list all the countries that have actually used nuclear weapons in war.
Now state at that paper for a few minutes till it sinks in.
"Of course, since white people in the U.S. on average have more money than their minority counterparts they can afford a lawyer who can get them out of trouble without jail."
If you are a typical white suburban teenager in high school you drink and smoke pot with your friends out in the woods. Or perhaps you sneak into the park at night. The reason you do this is because those places are not heavily partolled by the cops and your chances of getting caught are pretty slim.
If you are young black teenager growing up in the inner city you don't have that luxury. You have to smoke dope in the alley in a very heavily patrolled part of the city. Your chances of getting caught are much higher.
Also the chances of a cop letting a white teen off with a warning are pretty good. The cop sees the teen as basically a "good kid" who maybe needs a little scare. The black kid OTOH is seen by the cops as a future criminal who needs to kept off the streets so the cops haul them off to jail.
Of course once you have been busted once and have a record the rest of your life is made much harder for you. Nobody wants to hire felons.
In windows you have to find the program you want to install. Apt knows where the program is.
In windows you have to inswall winzip first (I know windows users don't have any ethical problems with stealing winzip so I am not saying pay for winzip).
So in windows you have to find the program, save it to your hard drive, unzip the archive, install the software.
In debian you just apt-get install the software, all the rest is taken care of for you.
You complain about the age of debian packages but that's a false argument too. You can always subscribe to testing and unstable if you want to run bleeding edge software. Also in windows YOU HAVE TO PAY FOR THE UPGRADES. That's right. If you are running office 97 windows update does not magically upgrade you to office XP when it's available.
I have been reading a lot of these threads, please complain but the answer is already out there. Have you looked at encap?. The macosx/stepwise platforms are also excellant systems, and of course there is always the debian system.
The problem has already been solved it's just that the big players refuse to use them.
Wake up. Your government is fully subject to the will of the american people and president.
Exactly what you are going to do when the US govt threatens you with economic sanctions or a bombing campaign? Can you stop the US military from invading your country? I thought not.
Keep buying american products, keep watching american movies, keep listening to american music suckers and continue to fund our military.
"Training. Pilots live (and sometimes die) by the number of hours they've accumulated. Those runs to Korea (which is a weird place to go shopping if you're already in Japan) do serve a purpose, even if it's not obvious."
Things in korea are much cheaper then Japan. I am sure those pilots put those flights under the "training" column and not "screwing the american taxpayer so I can get a cheap leather jacket" column.
"What is the cost involved in flying an f-16 sortie?"
When I was in the military I was told that it cost thousands of dollars per minute.
"It's so expensive to fly a plane for a reason, it's not just some imaginary number dreamed up to "waste" money."
"See above on how those costs are passed on rather than thrown into some pit of fire."
The general is perfectly capable of flying on commercial aircraft, or even military cargo flights that already fly those routes. It's a waste of taxpeyers money to fly the generals on their own freaking plane.
When I was in the military the pilots would often fly the planes for "personal" errands. For example pilots based in japan would fly to korea to go shopping. It was a waste of money.
"And you have one general in an unemployment line."
You start with the spinoff one. Sure spinoffs happen but that does not mean these innovations will never happen outside of defense spending. A brief look at the commercial sector ought to dispel this illusion. Also if the govt (even your beloved federal govt) spent the entire funds on research and development we would get even more technology into the public sector.
The second arguments is that it's better to let the federal govt waste the money then to have the state govt waste it. This one leaves me a bit puzzled. The state governments are always more responsive then the federal govt. They are also easier to influence by the citizens.
You list a few hundred thousand wasted (in your opinion anyway) by oregon. The feds waste that much money every second. It probably costs that much to fly an f-16 on one sortie. Whenever a general travels from one place to another an entire entourage is flown on a military aircraft (usually a modified c-135). Each flight costs tens of thousands of dollars to the taxpayer. Take away one general and all that money "wasted" by your state could be put back into your pocket.
"Throwing money at a problem caused by bad fiscal policy doesn't fix the problem."
You are not arguing for cutting the funding, you are arguing that the money should be given to the military instead of fixing roads. Apparently you are under some delusion that the federal govt and the military are fiscally responsible organizations who don't ever waste money. Let me assure that this is most certainly not the case.
" I predict that, if this kind of thing becomes popular, future browser releases will include disabling of JS window resizing and JS foreground/background control"
You know I am not convinced of this. You seem to presume that the purpose of the browser is to deliver a pleasant user experience. Companies like M$ have a different prespective on what the purpose of a browser is. For MS the purpose of a browser is to redirect you to MSN, get you to use hotmail, deliver advertising to you, get you to sign up for passport, get you to use Xbox live, get you do download and install the.NET runtime etc.
Why would MS add any functionality into IE that would help you block their ads?
Slashdot Mirror
Apple is already branching out. They now sell music and gadgets like the ipod. Maybe if those and other similar ventures take off then they can let go of the hardware market for good.
Could you please tell me the name of the company you work for? I want to make sure I don't hold any stock in a company that thinks it can get accountability from Microsoft or Oracle.
Take a look at this
" I have a real hard time believing less than 300,000 people would die in the invasion of the home islands."
Once again they were ready to surrender, there was no real need to invade.
"The US wasn't going to accept conditional surrender, not without occupation and "regime change"."
It is unethical to kill people who are willing to surrender and lay down their arms. Do you need me to repeat that for you a few times? In warfare you are not supposed to kill soldiers wawing a white flag. It's evil to do so. If we had entered into negotiations with them we might have found a way to get all that we wanted without committing slaughter. Japan knew it was a defeated army, they were ready to surrender. We did not even attempt such a thing, we simply committed genocide without ever considering an alternative. I don't know what your definition of evil is but to me if a country is given a series of options and it chooses the one that kills the most people then it's evil.
Once again you keep skirting the real issues. You keep insisting that japan would not surrender unless we dropped nuclear bombs on their cities. This is pure nonsense. Like I said we could have dropped the bomb in the bay, we could have dropped the bomb in less populated areas, we could have dropped the bomb on the north island on top of some mountain. We could have demostrated our ability to kill them by the millions without actually doing so. It was an evil act to drop nuclear bombs on cities when there were alternatives.
And of course you completely ignored the espcially henious act of dropping the second bomb.
Opponents of open source frequently argue that proprietary products are better then open source because "you can sue somebody".
Here somebody is suing MS. Let's see how that works out.
I am sure some can be planted along with faked documents.
I guess it takes longer then expected to plant chemical weapons in iraq.
I guess this is what passes for education in america these days.
"If the war had continued, the Japanese people would have endured a winter with no fuel, no transport, and no food. Millions would have starved or died from exposure and sickness."
The war was not going to continue. The japanese were looking to surrender. They had already talked to several nations who were going to act as mediators for a negotiated surrender. That nullifies you entire "millions would have been killed argument".
"And, of course, even if the US had never had the Manhattan Project, Hiroshima and Nagasaki would have been burned to the ground by B-29 bombers anyway, just like every other city in Japan"
No matter how you kill civillians it's unethical.
"Sure, the Japanese were trying to surrender. Just not unconditionally. The military leaders wanted to stay in power and get the chance to rearm. Imagine those psychopaths running Japan in the '50s. In a world with nukes."
They could have been disarmed and kept under control. At the time the russians were our allies and the chinese and the koreans hated the japanese. We could have easily held them in check. Not to mention we ended up setting up military bases on japan. It's evil to murder people in order to exact an unconditional surrender if they were willing to lay down their arms.
"Let's do a little thought experiment. "
Let's not. It's a silly exercise and your suppositions are plain on stupid.
"Also, Japanese culture made it impossible for them to surrender to American military superiority."
Bullshit. You yourself said they were looking to surrender.
"And if we had the bomb, and didn't use it, Truman would have been carried off by a mob and hung from the nearest lamppost. "
Nonsense. If the japanese surrendered then everybody would have been happy. Also we could have dropped the bomb in tokyo bay thsu demonstrating our ability to wipe out the nation without actually killing people.
Finally. Even if you were right in 100% of what you said (and you are not) that might have justified the first bomb.
Now justify the second one.
Maybe you are right but then again maybe you are wrong. I don't think you can even pretend to know what others would have done if they had the chance. Certainly it wasn't long after we dropped our bombs that other countries obtained theirs, they had many chances to use them since then and did not do so.
"When Japan or Germany were facing their ultimate demise do you think that they would have hesitated to use a nuclear weapons if they had them?"
When Saddam Hussein was facing his ultimate demise he did not use weapons of mass destruction even though he is a madmen.
"However I don't think that a case can be made that the US is somehow "worse" or "different" than anyone else for using nuclear weapons."
I think the case can be made. Japan was looking to surrender when we bombed them. They had let the US know of that fact too. We decided to bomb them anyway because we wanted an unconditional surrender and we wanted to humilitate them. Also we chose to bomb a city. We could have dropped a bomb on tokyo bay to demonstrate our power but we wiped out a city instead.
Finally after seeing what our bomb could do, and before giving them a chance to surrender we bombed another city. Now that act was an inexcusable crime against humanity. Maybe you can hem, haw, rationalize, and finagle an excuse for the first bomb but there is no rational case for the second one.
"And yet, you think I would want to put all my trust the sanity of other world leaders to not fire nuclear weapons at the U.S.?"
I think I may be able to ease your mind about this a bit. Here try this exercize.
Take a piece of paper and draw a line going down the middle (vertically). On the left hand side make a list of all the countries that have nuclear weapons. On the right hand list all the countries that have actually used nuclear weapons in war.
Now state at that paper for a few minutes till it sinks in.
I wonder if the christians will ever get tired of killing muslims.
"Of course, since white people in the U.S. on average have more money than their minority counterparts they can afford a lawyer who can get them out of trouble without jail."
If you are a typical white suburban teenager in high school you drink and smoke pot with your friends out in the woods. Or perhaps you sneak into the park at night. The reason you do this is because those places are not heavily partolled by the cops and your chances of getting caught are pretty slim.
If you are young black teenager growing up in the inner city you don't have that luxury. You have to smoke dope in the alley in a very heavily patrolled part of the city. Your chances of getting caught are much higher.
Also the chances of a cop letting a white teen off with a warning are pretty good. The cop sees the teen as basically a "good kid" who maybe needs a little scare. The black kid OTOH is seen by the cops as a future criminal who needs to kept off the streets so the cops haul them off to jail.
Of course once you have been busted once and have a record the rest of your life is made much harder for you. Nobody wants to hire felons.
Yes they seem very similar. Another case of duplicate projects.
" your just jealous because we have more freedom than you."
For now. Wait till an american general is in charge of your country and american companies are rebuilding your bombed out schools and bridges.
Apt is easier then downloading files on windows.
In windows you have to find the program you want to install. Apt knows where the program is.
In windows you have to inswall winzip first (I know windows users don't have any ethical problems with stealing winzip so I am not saying pay for winzip).
So in windows you have to find the program, save it to your hard drive, unzip the archive, install the software.
In debian you just apt-get install the software, all the rest is taken care of for you.
You complain about the age of debian packages but that's a false argument too. You can always subscribe to testing and unstable if you want to run bleeding edge software. Also in windows YOU HAVE TO PAY FOR THE UPGRADES. That's right. If you are running office 97 windows update does not magically upgrade you to office XP when it's available.
"'Yes, it could be much easier. Software Update pops up a window every so often with a list of software for which I don't have the latest versions. "
This only works for Microsoft software. apt works for thousands of software packages.
BTW there is nothing preventing you from putting apt-get update && apt-get upgrade in cron.
I have been reading a lot of these threads, please complain but the answer is already out there. Have you looked at encap?. The macosx/stepwise platforms are also excellant systems, and of course there is always the debian system.
The problem has already been solved it's just that the big players refuse to use them.
Wake up. Your government is fully subject to the will of the american people and president.
Exactly what you are going to do when the US govt threatens you with economic sanctions or a bombing campaign? Can you stop the US military from invading your country? I thought not.
Keep buying american products, keep watching american movies, keep listening to american music suckers and continue to fund our military.
All your base are belong to us.
"Training. Pilots live (and sometimes die) by the number of hours they've accumulated. Those runs to Korea (which is a weird place to go shopping if you're already in Japan) do serve a purpose, even if it's not obvious."
Things in korea are much cheaper then Japan. I am sure those pilots put those flights under the "training" column and not "screwing the american taxpayer so I can get a cheap leather jacket" column.
"What is the cost involved in flying an f-16 sortie?"
When I was in the military I was told that it cost thousands of dollars per minute.
"It's so expensive to fly a plane for a reason, it's not just some imaginary number dreamed up to "waste" money."
"See above on how those costs are passed on rather than thrown into some pit of fire."
The general is perfectly capable of flying on commercial aircraft, or even military cargo flights that already fly those routes. It's a waste of taxpeyers money to fly the generals on their own freaking plane.
When I was in the military the pilots would often fly the planes for "personal" errands. For example pilots based in japan would fly to korea to go shopping. It was a waste of money.
"And you have one general in an unemployment line."
All and all not a bad thing.
Interesting set of arguments here. Let's see now.
You start with the spinoff one. Sure spinoffs happen but that does not mean these innovations will never happen outside of defense spending. A brief look at the commercial sector ought to dispel this illusion. Also if the govt (even your beloved federal govt) spent the entire funds on research and development we would get even more technology into the public sector.
The second arguments is that it's better to let the federal govt waste the money then to have the state govt waste it. This one leaves me a bit puzzled. The state governments are always more responsive then the federal govt. They are also easier to influence by the citizens.
You list a few hundred thousand wasted (in your opinion anyway) by oregon. The feds waste that much money every second. It probably costs that much to fly an f-16 on one sortie. Whenever a general travels from one place to another an entire entourage is flown on a military aircraft (usually a modified c-135). Each flight costs tens of thousands of dollars to the taxpayer. Take away one general and all that money "wasted" by your state could be put back into your pocket.
"Throwing money at a problem caused by bad fiscal policy doesn't fix the problem."
You are not arguing for cutting the funding, you are arguing that the money should be given to the military instead of fixing roads. Apparently you are under some delusion that the federal govt and the military are fiscally responsible organizations who don't ever waste money. Let me assure that this is most certainly not the case.
"Even President Bush was laughing at him."
Bettet that then a torture chamber in guantanamo. He should consider himself lucky.
Besides it would be bad PR to arrest him because he is somewhat of a celebirty.
A mil per year on support just for the database!. Why is it that the most moronic people always end up in management.
Where is the option to turn off popups? All you can do is to turn off all the javascript. Who wants that?
" I predict that, if this kind of thing becomes popular, future browser releases will include disabling of JS window resizing and JS foreground/background control"
.NET runtime etc.
You know I am not convinced of this. You seem to presume that the purpose of the browser is to deliver a pleasant user experience. Companies like M$ have a different prespective on what the purpose of a browser is. For MS the purpose of a browser is to redirect you to MSN, get you to use hotmail, deliver advertising to you, get you to sign up for passport, get you to use Xbox live, get you do download and install the
Why would MS add any functionality into IE that would help you block their ads?