"If a japanese kill someone in china, killing an innocent japanese in Nagasaki doesn't "cancel out" anything."
It cancels out future Chinese deaths. They didn't kill and stop, they continued to kill until they were stopped by the atomic bombs, one dropped on the headquarters of the IJA's fifth division, the other hitting a Mitsubishi munitions factory.
Japanese torture camps didn't shut down after the Hiroshima bombing. In some cases they didn't end after the Nagasaki bombing. Japan continued to make war on Chinese (et al) civillians until right on up until the very, absolute end.
Remember that the entire point of "island hopping" is not going through the Pacific, meticulously liberating each and every island taken by the Japanese, instead spending the least amount of resources to get within reach of the Japanese home islands as quickly as possible. Until the signing of the treaty, Japan still had most of what they had taken in the Pacific and mainland Asia, except for those few islands the US had taken in the Pacific and the land-grab the Soviets made in Asia after the Nagasaki bombing.
And as for what they were still doing in the lands they held...
From the blurb, it sounds like the problem wasn't that the story was too graphic, but not graphic enough. Notice the mention that the irradiation problem didn't seem to be as bad to the reporter as the US radio propoganda broadcasts were saying.
What's the point of building a new terror weapon if it doesn't cause lots of terror?
"This, of course, is why people decided that full-blown pacifism is the only way"
Um... how? In the example specified, how would "full-blown pacifism" have stopped the torture mentioned in the parent post?
This wasn't a one-time event, people were being put through this on a daily basis both within Japan as well as in Japanese holdings in China, before, during, and even after both atomic bombings. This is one of the reasons why Nagasaki was only three days after Hiroshima, to put a stop to the continual torture.
Of course, if no bombs were dropped and insteaed of forcing surrender out of Japan the US went "full-blown pacifist" and simply stopped prosecuting the war, things wouldn't have changed. There'd be no reason for Japan to release all its Chinese and Western prisoners (they were spoils of war gained "fair and square" as far as the IJA were concerned), they would have continued to be abused until their deaths, at which point they'd be replaced by even more Chinese slaves (and probably more Westerners, too, once Japan decided they needed even more natural resources). The violence wouldn't have ended, in many ways it would have gotten worse, the only difference is that, in your version, Pilate would have been able to wash his hands of it.
They had to be nuked. Sure, that's not something to be happy about, but simpy disliking something doesn't make it less necessary. Contrary to popular belief, violence does solve things, and this is a shining example of it.
And as for the civillian deaths, there was little (if any) difference between "civillian" and "soldier" in the eyes of Japan, both for their enemies as well as their own people. Many (if not most) of those civillians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were drafted by the government to work in factories making war materiel. With Japan prosecuting "total war" like that, it's very difficult to say who was really a civillian and who wasn't.
IANAL, but check kiting is illegal for anybody, especially when it comes to paychecks. You should be the one tying them up in court, not being afraid of them doing it to you.
Seriously, ambulance chasers live for this kind of stuff.
"Amazon's prices aren't so much better than brick and mortar stores (and being in WA state, I have to pay sales tax at Amazon like I would in a local store), and you don't have to pay shipping and handling if you buy locally."
The selection sucks. You can't get Maison Ikkoku DVDs or Video Girl Ai books around here, for example.
Of course, for those I'd go directly to Viz' website, but still, those are two examples where, if I could find them locally, would happily buy them locally.
"As one other poster noted, Einstein had a brain that only fell in the range of "normal", giving lie to the theory size alone is an indicator of likely intelligence."
Einstein is just a single data point, and possibly an outlier.
"Today, we might find this fantastic, but imagine if you will that no one has cell phones;"
They had telegraphs, telephones and even radio. Wires going through or near Hiroshima were noticed to be down within minutes of being destroyed, and radio queries went unanswered. It was clear that "something happened."
"there are not satelite images;"
There were airplanes.
"most people who try to survey the damage don't come back;"
According to Wikipedia, the person the Imperial Army sent in to investigate the situation was able to radio back just fine.
"you're in the middle of running a war;"
You give them too much credit. Thanks to the US blockade, the home islands were more spectators to the war at that point. They could talk to their forces still occupying mainland Asia, but they could neither offer nor expect relief thanks to American submarines. All there was left for them to do at that point was to shore up the islands' defenses and whip the civillians into a proper suicidal frenzy.
"It could have been that a large earthquake just struck,"
They had seismographs. Earthquakes and catastrophic explosions are very distinctive.
"It could be that the US was just using conventional explosives, and reports are wrong."
They had radar. A large bombing force would have been seen and reacted to long before they were within bombing range. They knew that there was no such massive air assault over Japan at the time.
"You need to confirm that before you hand the welfare of your citizens over to your enemy."
It was already in the hands of the US due to the submarine blockade I mentioned previously. The IJA was well aware of it by that point.
You seem to be forgetting that they weren't Western. The "welfare of their citizens" wasn't quite as high on their list of priorities as you seem to think it was. Many in the IJA wanted to fight to the last Japanese civillian, hence the attempted coup I mentioned.
"We should have waited a week and offered to test a second bomb with Japanese observers as a condition to surrender, "
As I tried to point out, the week after a second nuclear attack was almost not enough to bring about a Japanese surrender. Why do you believe that such a bloodless demonstration would have been as marginally effective?
"Fine" is one thing. "As easy as a floppy" is something else. I will continue to complain until making a CD-R bootable is as simple as sys a:.
I've got a slipstream CD-R of Windows XP, and I actually use boot floppies to install it because they're easier to make than trying to make that CD-R bootable.
In the US, you're legally allowed to create such a copy on your own, but downloading such a copy is very much in the grey area. The person uploading, however, is very much in violation of US copyright law.
Don't worry, with things like broadcast bits, the new HD-DVD standard and the general theme of DRM will make sure to fix these problems in the future. The only thing that will be missing then is the sticky floors!
"In the opening sequence of the new Star Wars movie, "Episode III: Revenge of the Sith," two Jedi knights fight their way through an enemy starship to rescue a hostage. Ever since I saw the movie, I have been annoying friends with a trivia question: "Who is the enemy? What organization owns this vessel?""
In the opening scene of Episode IV, the Empire attacks and boards a ship. Who owns the ship? Is it another impirial ship? A rebel ship? Some private, uninvolved vessel?
I'm not one to make apologies for Star Wars movies, but the whole point of a good deal of the prequels is that you're never quite sure who the real enemy is. It's a deliberately vague network of alliances and influences, to the point that the people who own the ship don't know they're ultimately being controlled by their captive.
It's hard to keep track of "The Bad Guy" because that's what Palpatine wants. Just as it's kinda tough to say who owns that ship in Ep IV, because they're sympathizers trying to pretend to be loyal impirialists.
"If you open random attachments and goto www.hotmenfuckingducks.com then you deserve all you get."
That was ten years ago. Today's email clients will open those attachments and access those URLs all by themselves, by default, without any user interaction.
Remember the good old days of the "Good Times" hoax when it really was impossible to get a virus simply by reading a message?
"It only truly works, when ala 1984 everyone is convinced that it isn't happening."
WTF? I haven't RTFB, but even I know that censorship in Nineteen Eighty-Four is not only known about but welcomed by the general populace. Fitting in with the whole "Freedom is Slavery!" line of the government, Big Brother wants you to know that he is doing all he can to protect you from harmful ideas and thoughts, working ever harder to remove even more words from the next Newspeak dictionary. "For your own protection" is the whole point of Big Brother, whose presence everybody was very well aware of.
And ultimately, that's why China gets away with it more often than the US, because Beijing is more than willing to admit that it censors content, and is often seen as proud of its efforts to protect the People from "confusing" and "seditious*" ideas that cause more harm than good. The problem Washington has is that it keeps saying it abides by the whole "Congress shall make no law" bit.
* After all nowadays most Chinese are more or less content with their government, they just want a little more access and a little less corruption. Few people in China today are seeking a revolutionn at the moment.
"AOL, the largest provider, had the most zombies but lower rates than others. "
I believe it's called "saturation." Probably not something you'll hear from the PHBs and marketing folks at AOL, but that's exactly what this looks like.
Slashdot Mirror
"If a japanese kill someone in china, killing an innocent japanese in Nagasaki doesn't "cancel out" anything."
It cancels out future Chinese deaths. They didn't kill and stop, they continued to kill until they were stopped by the atomic bombs, one dropped on the headquarters of the IJA's fifth division, the other hitting a Mitsubishi munitions factory.
Japanese torture camps didn't shut down after the Hiroshima bombing. In some cases they didn't end after the Nagasaki bombing. Japan continued to make war on Chinese (et al) civillians until right on up until the very, absolute end.
Remember that the entire point of "island hopping" is not going through the Pacific, meticulously liberating each and every island taken by the Japanese, instead spending the least amount of resources to get within reach of the Japanese home islands as quickly as possible. Until the signing of the treaty, Japan still had most of what they had taken in the Pacific and mainland Asia, except for those few islands the US had taken in the Pacific and the land-grab the Soviets made in Asia after the Nagasaki bombing.
And as for what they were still doing in the lands they held...
From the blurb, it sounds like the problem wasn't that the story was too graphic, but not graphic enough. Notice the mention that the irradiation problem didn't seem to be as bad to the reporter as the US radio propoganda broadcasts were saying.
What's the point of building a new terror weapon if it doesn't cause lots of terror?
"This, of course, is why people decided that full-blown pacifism is the only way"
Um... how? In the example specified, how would "full-blown pacifism" have stopped the torture mentioned in the parent post?
This wasn't a one-time event, people were being put through this on a daily basis both within Japan as well as in Japanese holdings in China, before, during, and even after both atomic bombings. This is one of the reasons why Nagasaki was only three days after Hiroshima, to put a stop to the continual torture.
Of course, if no bombs were dropped and insteaed of forcing surrender out of Japan the US went "full-blown pacifist" and simply stopped prosecuting the war, things wouldn't have changed. There'd be no reason for Japan to release all its Chinese and Western prisoners (they were spoils of war gained "fair and square" as far as the IJA were concerned), they would have continued to be abused until their deaths, at which point they'd be replaced by even more Chinese slaves (and probably more Westerners, too, once Japan decided they needed even more natural resources). The violence wouldn't have ended, in many ways it would have gotten worse, the only difference is that, in your version, Pilate would have been able to wash his hands of it.
They had to be nuked. Sure, that's not something to be happy about, but simpy disliking something doesn't make it less necessary. Contrary to popular belief, violence does solve things, and this is a shining example of it.
And as for the civillian deaths, there was little (if any) difference between "civillian" and "soldier" in the eyes of Japan, both for their enemies as well as their own people. Many (if not most) of those civillians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were drafted by the government to work in factories making war materiel. With Japan prosecuting "total war" like that, it's very difficult to say who was really a civillian and who wasn't.
"and their cheques continued to bounce"
IANAL, but check kiting is illegal for anybody, especially when it comes to paychecks. You should be the one tying them up in court, not being afraid of them doing it to you.
Seriously, ambulance chasers live for this kind of stuff.
Kinda like how Linux zealots here on Slashdot bash Windows yet try to make distros more like it.
The sword cuts both ways.
"Amazon's prices aren't so much better than brick and mortar stores (and being in WA state, I have to pay sales tax at Amazon like I would in a local store), and you don't have to pay shipping and handling if you buy locally."
The selection sucks. You can't get Maison Ikkoku DVDs or Video Girl Ai books around here, for example.
Of course, for those I'd go directly to Viz' website, but still, those are two examples where, if I could find them locally, would happily buy them locally.
It seems reasonable to believe that there's be an Dragon Quest/Warrior online game eventually, but nothing has officially been put in the pipe.
A convenient mindwipe, ala C3PO. A force trick, perhaps.
"As one other poster noted, Einstein had a brain that only fell in the range of "normal", giving lie to the theory size alone is an indicator of likely intelligence."
Einstein is just a single data point, and possibly an outlier.
The qualifier doesn't mean much when you consider that almost everybody uses Microsoft's email clients.
"Seven Nation Army"
Appropriately enough, we could probably find seven nations where she's the commander in chief of the army...
Yeah, if we wanted to hear that, we'd all be playing an FPS.
Why would anyone want a personal duplicate of Michael Jackson?
I'd be more interested in Lucy Liu, even if only for the obligatory Futurama reference.
"Today, we might find this fantastic, but imagine if you will that no one has cell phones;"
They had telegraphs, telephones and even radio. Wires going through or near Hiroshima were noticed to be down within minutes of being destroyed, and radio queries went unanswered. It was clear that "something happened."
"there are not satelite images;"
There were airplanes.
"most people who try to survey the damage don't come back;"
According to Wikipedia, the person the Imperial Army sent in to investigate the situation was able to radio back just fine.
"you're in the middle of running a war;"
You give them too much credit. Thanks to the US blockade, the home islands were more spectators to the war at that point. They could talk to their forces still occupying mainland Asia, but they could neither offer nor expect relief thanks to American submarines. All there was left for them to do at that point was to shore up the islands' defenses and whip the civillians into a proper suicidal frenzy.
"It could have been that a large earthquake just struck,"
They had seismographs. Earthquakes and catastrophic explosions are very distinctive.
"It could be that the US was just using conventional explosives, and reports are wrong."
They had radar. A large bombing force would have been seen and reacted to long before they were within bombing range. They knew that there was no such massive air assault over Japan at the time.
"You need to confirm that before you hand the welfare of your citizens over to your enemy."
It was already in the hands of the US due to the submarine blockade I mentioned previously. The IJA was well aware of it by that point.
You seem to be forgetting that they weren't Western. The "welfare of their citizens" wasn't quite as high on their list of priorities as you seem to think it was. Many in the IJA wanted to fight to the last Japanese civillian, hence the attempted coup I mentioned.
"We should have waited a week and offered to test a second bomb with Japanese observers as a condition to surrender, "
As I tried to point out, the week after a second nuclear attack was almost not enough to bring about a Japanese surrender. Why do you believe that such a bloodless demonstration would have been as marginally effective?
"Fine" is one thing. "As easy as a floppy" is something else. I will continue to complain until making a CD-R bootable is as simple as sys a:.
I've got a slipstream CD-R of Windows XP, and I actually use boot floppies to install it because they're easier to make than trying to make that CD-R bootable.
In the US, you're legally allowed to create such a copy on your own, but downloading such a copy is very much in the grey area. The person uploading, however, is very much in violation of US copyright law.
IANAL, yadda.
Don't worry, with things like broadcast bits, the new HD-DVD standard and the general theme of DRM will make sure to fix these problems in the future. The only thing that will be missing then is the sticky floors!
"In the opening sequence of the new Star Wars movie, "Episode III: Revenge of the Sith," two Jedi knights fight their way through an enemy starship to rescue a hostage. Ever since I saw the movie, I have been annoying friends with a trivia question: "Who is the enemy? What organization owns this vessel?""
In the opening scene of Episode IV, the Empire attacks and boards a ship. Who owns the ship? Is it another impirial ship? A rebel ship? Some private, uninvolved vessel?
I'm not one to make apologies for Star Wars movies, but the whole point of a good deal of the prequels is that you're never quite sure who the real enemy is. It's a deliberately vague network of alliances and influences, to the point that the people who own the ship don't know they're ultimately being controlled by their captive.
It's hard to keep track of "The Bad Guy" because that's what Palpatine wants. Just as it's kinda tough to say who owns that ship in Ep IV, because they're sympathizers trying to pretend to be loyal impirialists.
"Because, miss the true point of the story, you do."
Meesa thought the true point was selling merchandise! Yub-nub!
"If you open random attachments and goto www.hotmenfuckingducks.com then you deserve all you get."
That was ten years ago. Today's email clients will open those attachments and access those URLs all by themselves, by default, without any user interaction.
Remember the good old days of the "Good Times" hoax when it really was impossible to get a virus simply by reading a message?
You can have my floppy drive when you give me a new media that is as disgustingly easy to make bootable as a floppy is.
Optical doesn't do it, and so far for me key drives don't do it.
"It only truly works, when ala 1984 everyone is convinced that it isn't happening."
WTF? I haven't RTFB, but even I know that censorship in Nineteen Eighty-Four is not only known about but welcomed by the general populace. Fitting in with the whole "Freedom is Slavery!" line of the government, Big Brother wants you to know that he is doing all he can to protect you from harmful ideas and thoughts, working ever harder to remove even more words from the next Newspeak dictionary. "For your own protection" is the whole point of Big Brother, whose presence everybody was very well aware of.
And ultimately, that's why China gets away with it more often than the US, because Beijing is more than willing to admit that it censors content, and is often seen as proud of its efforts to protect the People from "confusing" and "seditious*" ideas that cause more harm than good. The problem Washington has is that it keeps saying it abides by the whole "Congress shall make no law" bit.
* After all nowadays most Chinese are more or less content with their government, they just want a little more access and a little less corruption. Few people in China today are seeking a revolutionn at the moment.
"This article comes on the heels of a consistently poor box office this year, even despite the presence of the new Star Wars film."
You misspelled "because of."
"AOL, the largest provider, had the most zombies but lower rates than others. "
I believe it's called "saturation." Probably not something you'll hear from the PHBs and marketing folks at AOL, but that's exactly what this looks like.