* Upon arriving at Nagasaki, Bock's Car has enough fuel for only one pass over the city even with an emergency landing at Okinawa. Nagasaki is covered with clouds, but one gap allows a drop several miles from the intended aimpoint. * 11:02 (Nagasaki time) Fat Man explodes at 1650 +/- 33 feet (503 m) near the perimeter of the city with a yield of 22+/-2 kt. Due to the hilly terrain around ground zero, five shock waves were felt in the aircraft (the initial shock, and four reflections).
Although Fat Man fell on the border of an uninhabited area, the eventual casualties still exceeded 70,000. Also ground zero turned out to be the Mitsubishi Arms Manufacturing Plant, the major military target in Nagasaki. It was utterly destroyed.
1. That's as may be. It's entirely possible our intervention in WWI turned out to be a mistake. That still does not speak to my question, which was "How was our that intervention the work of nothing more than a bully?"
Nagasaki wasnt the primary intended target. The intended target was Kokura, but the spotter planes that went ahead found it to be completely socked in with clouds, so the bomb plane diverted to their secondary target, Nagasaki.
How does that make it not deliberate? Having secondary targets was standard practice for conventional bombing raids as well. They were planned just like the primary targets were, it's not like they decided to just drop the bomb on some random city just because their primary was visually obscured.
, so they aimed by using radar, which was very poor in those days, and they were WAY OFF, like miles from the intended aiming point.
What? The bomb detonated pretty much right between the two principal targets in the city, both Mitsubishi armaments factories. That's about the best place they could have hoped to put it. And the bomb was placed visually, through a break in the clouds, not with radar.
Most of this info was casually surpressed at the time.
America always has been, and still is, nothing more than an overgrown bully.
How do you explain Omaha Beach as the action of nothing more than an overgrown bully?
Or for that matter, US intervention in WWI?
Or when the US came to the aid of South Korea when it was invaded by Communist armies?
I look around the world, and I see a lot of dead Americans buried in a lot of graves on foreign soil, and I'm afraid I don't see how most of those dead could possibly be construed as the result of the actions of nothing more than an overgrown bully.
Perhaps you could explain this to me.
The Former Soviet Union used to have a technical word, called, 'Neutral.' 'Neutral' was anyone who could not possibly hurt the Soviet Union.
Little Boy, the first bomb, was a gun-type device using highly-enriched uranium. It was so simple, and so overengineered, that they felt they didn't need to test it at all.
It was the plutonium implosion-triggered bomb that was considerably more complex that it required a test first.
There is always some risk in machine readable data.
There is always some risk, period. If I keep stacks of negatives in boxes in my house, then in 20 or 30 years time my house might catch fire and burn to the ground.
Okay, *I* might be clued up enough to always keep my negatives in a fireproof safe, but Joe Public is one day going to use a penny as a fuse replacement and find that he can't look at the photos on all that celluloid ash.
Any Hardcore gamer can adapt to the learning curve of any input device.
The issue isn't the learning curve, it's the capabilities of the device.
Back in the day, I was playing 4-person Doom deathmatch on a dialup BBS. I was a keyboarder, and I was a damned good keyboarder. I had, in your parlance, "adapted to the learning curve" of that particular input device. I could circle strafe, I had the keybind to instantly do 180s, and so forth.
Then my friend convinced me to try the mouse. After "adapting to the learning curve" of that input device, I was amazed at how much more finesse and control it gave me than the keyboard.
Learning curve, whatever. Doesn't mean that all input devices are equally suited to any particular task. I would want to play Super Mario Brothers with my mouse, either.
Efficiency. If you need to deliver 20% more power to reach the same volume level with one pair of headphones as another pair of headphones, you're going to drain the battery 20% faster.
All speakers are not equally efficient, and not even all 8-ohm speakers are equally efficient. The given resistance of a speaker is simply a minimum value, as the speaker is really a reactive load whose reactance varies according to the input frequency. Take one pair of 8-ohm speakers, compare it to another pair of 8-ohm speakers, and you'll find that for a given input power, they provide two different output volumes.
In either case, the consumers pay. Computers that are sold in Maryland will mean additional costs for those manufacturers, and they will simply pass that cost along to the buyer. Of course, since they can't simply raise the cost on boxes sold in Maryland (well, they could, but that would simply drive more people away from retail stores and to online sales), they'll slightly raise the costs on all the boxes they sell, resulting in all consumers paying additional money to make the Maryland government happy.
California, on the other hand, raises the cost to the specific end user. You want to buy 5 computers, you pay the same amount, but you're stuck with the cleanup fees. This doesn't impact anyone other than you.
This is a very rare case of California making a decision that's saner than other states in the nation.
So you're saying a dirty bomb's physcological impact on the populace would be exactly the same as now, because a handful of people in top secret labs knew of the dangers back in WWII?
Um, no, I certainly wasn't saying that. I don't think I said anything that any reasonable person could even construe as saying that.
If you wish to have a discussion, starting off by erecting an enormous strawman isn't the best way to go about it.
None of the observors was closer than 9 kilometers, and they damned well knew enough not to run right up to the tower afterwards and grab trinitite souveneirs.
Nobody knew about those properties of radioactive materials in WWII.
Nonsense. If that were the case, there would have been no radiation safety precautions during the project, and all the scientists and workers at Los Alamos, Hanford, and other Manhattan sites would have rapidly died of acute radiation poisoning.
Long-term effects of varying levels of exposure were not understood, but it was certainly known that neutron activation will render materials radioactive, and that the bomb would produce significant amounts of radioactive debris, and that people would die from it.
When you've just spent all that money and time to build a single bomb, that bomb is crucially important, and you're not going to trust it to some one-off jerry-rigged (heh) design that might come apart on *your* side of the Channel.
While it's true that optimum penetration from a HEAT round depends upon optimum standoff distance, it's *not* true at all that defeating HEAT rounds is as easy to just putting sandbags on your tank. Current diameter HEAT rounds are capable of defeating simply absurd amounts of RHA, so much so that reducing their penetration even by a large percentage isn't likely to save you. Sure, detonate them further away than the optimum standoff distance, and it might only be able to penetrate 14" of steel plate instead of 24", but that's not going to be much of a consolation if you're only protected by 4" of armor.
The PG-7VL RPG warhead can penetrate over 600mm of RHA, the tandem-warhead -7VR warhead can penetrate 750, *after* ERA. So you put those sandbags or that spaced armor out there (note that modern MBTs don't use spaced armor, 'cause it might as well not be there at all if you get hit with a kinetic penetrator.), the tandem warhead blows right through it, and the remaining warhead *still* punches through 24 inches of armor.
And the warhead doesn't melt the armor. A HEAT warhead defeats armor by approximately the same method as a kinetic penetrator: it exerts insane pressures on a tiny surface area, causing the armor to undergo plastic deformation and eventually yield. The timescales we're talking about here are too short for anything to melt, but at the pressures we're talking about, solid metal still flows like a fluid. Heck, at the pressures we're talking about, the behavior of the metal approximates that of a dense gas.
The sabot rounds we use aren't tipped with uranium, they *are* uranium. They're a solid metal depleted uranium alloy with a density of around 18g/cc.
I do agree with you that using a laser as an anti-tank weapon is a silly idea.
Meanwhile, this call for legislation has scared off many potential users of your shareware program, so there are now thousands of people not downloading your software. If your asked-for legislation passes, that means you've robbed yourself of hundreds of thousands of dollars in income.
I've wanted Spielberg to direct one of these things FOREVER... Lucas is a fine director and all, but he doesn't have a line of Oscars across his wall for one of virtually every type of movie there is for a good reason.
Neither does Spielberg. He has an Oscar for Saving Private Ryan, and another for Schindler's List. Who were you thinking of, John Ford?
*Air* is very efficient at blocking gamma radiation. Why do you think x-ray and gamma-ray observatories need to be located above the atmosphere for them to work?
There's so much incompetence at so many High Schools it wouldn't surprise me if it was something as simple as a server that hadn't been patched in ages.
Imagine how much incompetence there is at universities.
During my senior year, my school's network was being brought to its knees on a regular basis by Napster. It wasn't students downloading that was the problem, it's that they'd go home for the weekends, leave their connections running, and everyone uploading god-knows-what from all over campus would just bring the T1 to its knees (Yeah, that's right: a single T1 for the entire university).
Roommates and I decided to do something about this. Turned out that this was pretty easy; most of the routers on campus had never been changed from their default password. So we just mapped the network status, and every time the network went to shit, we'd just check to see what dorm was causing the problem, and then we'd just shut it down. Campus radio station trying to stream some ridiculously high-bitrate live broadcast? No router for you, either!
My roommate once witnessed the head of the IT company the school contracted the network administration to type the string 'C:\' while logged in as root.
And I wonder what they mean by 'proven' technology. I guess it has been proven...to be a bad idea. SSN-75, the Seawolf, had an experimental metal-cooled reactor, which proved so problematic they ripped it out and replaced it with a PWR. The Soviets had I think 2 classes of submarine powered by lead-bismuth cooled reactors, the Alphas and the Papas; there was only ever one built of the latter class, and they lost a few Alphas because the shore-based heaters broke down when the subs were dockside, and the coolant solidified inside the reactors and heat exchangers.
If this were such a proven technology, someone would be using it for something. They're not.
(that the car was fired upon by a tank, for example).
That's entirely plausible.
Tanks do not only have big honking cannon. Tanks also have smaller-caliber machine guns, things like.50 and 7.62mm. If a tank's stationed at a checkpoint, it's entirely plausible that it would fire at hostile-behaving vehicles with this weaponry, instead of its main gun.
Sgrena's obviously full of shit (photos of her car show a vehicle remarkably lightly-damaged for all the thousands of rounds of ammunition she claims were fired at it), but if her actual claim was that her car was fired on by a tank, that's entirely plausible.
Who are you to dictate how a foreign country is supposed to handle kidnappings?
Someone from a country who bears the cost of that foreign country's choice to further enrich the insurgents with an inflow of cash.
If Italy wasn't getting a hostage back, their giving money to the insurgents would be an obvious hostile act. I'm not sure how much less hostile the fact that they get a hostage back makes it.
What would you trust your life to? An insulated copper wire run between stations? You don't get simpler than that, but it's also hardly the most reliable thing on a battlefield.
Slashdot Mirror
1. That's as may be. It's entirely possible our intervention in WWI turned out to be a mistake. That still does not speak to my question, which was "How was our that intervention the work of nothing more than a bully?"
2. Churchill was not always right.
Nagasaki wasnt the primary intended target. The intended target was Kokura, but the spotter planes that went ahead found it to be completely socked in with clouds, so the bomb plane diverted to their secondary target, Nagasaki.
How does that make it not deliberate? Having secondary targets was standard practice for conventional bombing raids as well. They were planned just like the primary targets were, it's not like they decided to just drop the bomb on some random city just because their primary was visually obscured.
, so they aimed by using radar, which was very poor in those days, and they were WAY OFF, like miles from the intended aiming point.
What? The bomb detonated pretty much right between the two principal targets in the city, both Mitsubishi armaments factories. That's about the best place they could have hoped to put it. And the bomb was placed visually, through a break in the clouds, not with radar.
Most of this info was casually surpressed at the time.
Misinformation should be suppressed, yes.
America always has been, and still is, nothing more than an overgrown bully.
How do you explain Omaha Beach as the action of nothing more than an overgrown bully?
Or for that matter, US intervention in WWI?
Or when the US came to the aid of South Korea when it was invaded by Communist armies?
I look around the world, and I see a lot of dead Americans buried in a lot of graves on foreign soil, and I'm afraid I don't see how most of those dead could possibly be construed as the result of the actions of nothing more than an overgrown bully.
Perhaps you could explain this to me.
The Former Soviet Union used to have a technical word, called, 'Neutral.' 'Neutral' was anyone who could not possibly hurt the Soviet Union.
Nations like Hungary and Czechoslovakia?
The Rest of the World will not deal with our stupidy much longer.
I'm more concerned about having to deal with yours.
Wrong.
Little Boy, the first bomb, was a gun-type device using highly-enriched uranium. It was so simple, and so overengineered, that they felt they didn't need to test it at all.
It was the plutonium implosion-triggered bomb that was considerably more complex that it required a test first.
ObRTFA: RTFA.
They're timeslicing, using one laser to build multiple traps. So they trap one sphere, then switch to another, then back to the first before it drops.
There is always some risk in machine readable data.
There is always some risk, period. If I keep stacks of negatives in boxes in my house, then in 20 or 30 years time my house might catch fire and burn to the ground.
Okay, *I* might be clued up enough to always keep my negatives in a fireproof safe, but Joe Public is one day going to use a penny as a fuse replacement and find that he can't look at the photos on all that celluloid ash.
Any Hardcore gamer can adapt to the learning curve of any input device.
The issue isn't the learning curve, it's the capabilities of the device.
Back in the day, I was playing 4-person Doom deathmatch on a dialup BBS. I was a keyboarder, and I was a damned good keyboarder. I had, in your parlance, "adapted to the learning curve" of that particular input device. I could circle strafe, I had the keybind to instantly do 180s, and so forth.
Then my friend convinced me to try the mouse. After "adapting to the learning curve" of that input device, I was amazed at how much more finesse and control it gave me than the keyboard.
Learning curve, whatever. Doesn't mean that all input devices are equally suited to any particular task. I would want to play Super Mario Brothers with my mouse, either.
Efficiency. If you need to deliver 20% more power to reach the same volume level with one pair of headphones as another pair of headphones, you're going to drain the battery 20% faster.
All speakers are not equally efficient, and not even all 8-ohm speakers are equally efficient. The given resistance of a speaker is simply a minimum value, as the speaker is really a reactive load whose reactance varies according to the input frequency. Take one pair of 8-ohm speakers, compare it to another pair of 8-ohm speakers, and you'll find that for a given input power, they provide two different output volumes.
I must confess that at this point I haven't a fucking clue what you're arguing with me about. In case you missed it, what I said was:
What, exactly, are you disagreeing with me about?
In either case, the consumers pay. Computers that are sold in Maryland will mean additional costs for those manufacturers, and they will simply pass that cost along to the buyer. Of course, since they can't simply raise the cost on boxes sold in Maryland (well, they could, but that would simply drive more people away from retail stores and to online sales), they'll slightly raise the costs on all the boxes they sell, resulting in all consumers paying additional money to make the Maryland government happy.
California, on the other hand, raises the cost to the specific end user. You want to buy 5 computers, you pay the same amount, but you're stuck with the cleanup fees. This doesn't impact anyone other than you.
This is a very rare case of California making a decision that's saner than other states in the nation.
So you're saying a dirty bomb's physcological impact on the populace would be exactly the same as now, because a handful of people in top secret labs knew of the dangers back in WWII?
Um, no, I certainly wasn't saying that. I don't think I said anything that any reasonable person could even construe as saying that.
If you wish to have a discussion, starting off by erecting an enormous strawman isn't the best way to go about it.
None of the observors was closer than 9 kilometers, and they damned well knew enough not to run right up to the tower afterwards and grab trinitite souveneirs.
Nobody knew about those properties of radioactive materials in WWII.
Nonsense. If that were the case, there would have been no radiation safety precautions during the project, and all the scientists and workers at Los Alamos, Hanford, and other Manhattan sites would have rapidly died of acute radiation poisoning.
Long-term effects of varying levels of exposure were not understood, but it was certainly known that neutron activation will render materials radioactive, and that the bomb would produce significant amounts of radioactive debris, and that people would die from it.
When you've just spent all that money and time to build a single bomb, that bomb is crucially important, and you're not going to trust it to some one-off jerry-rigged (heh) design that might come apart on *your* side of the Channel.
Wow. There's so much wrong here.
While it's true that optimum penetration from a HEAT round depends upon optimum standoff distance, it's *not* true at all that defeating HEAT rounds is as easy to just putting sandbags on your tank. Current diameter HEAT rounds are capable of defeating simply absurd amounts of RHA, so much so that reducing their penetration even by a large percentage isn't likely to save you. Sure, detonate them further away than the optimum standoff distance, and it might only be able to penetrate 14" of steel plate instead of 24", but that's not going to be much of a consolation if you're only protected by 4" of armor.
The PG-7VL RPG warhead can penetrate over 600mm of RHA, the tandem-warhead -7VR warhead can penetrate 750, *after* ERA. So you put those sandbags or that spaced armor out there (note that modern MBTs don't use spaced armor, 'cause it might as well not be there at all if you get hit with a kinetic penetrator.), the tandem warhead blows right through it, and the remaining warhead *still* punches through 24 inches of armor.
And the warhead doesn't melt the armor. A HEAT warhead defeats armor by approximately the same method as a kinetic penetrator: it exerts insane pressures on a tiny surface area, causing the armor to undergo plastic deformation and eventually yield. The timescales we're talking about here are too short for anything to melt, but at the pressures we're talking about, solid metal still flows like a fluid. Heck, at the pressures we're talking about, the behavior of the metal approximates that of a dense gas.
The sabot rounds we use aren't tipped with uranium, they *are* uranium. They're a solid metal depleted uranium alloy with a density of around 18g/cc.
I do agree with you that using a laser as an anti-tank weapon is a silly idea.
Meanwhile, this call for legislation has scared off many potential users of your shareware program, so there are now thousands of people not downloading your software. If your asked-for legislation passes, that means you've robbed yourself of hundreds of thousands of dollars in income.
I've wanted Spielberg to direct one of these things FOREVER... Lucas is a fine director and all, but he doesn't have a line of Oscars across his wall for one of virtually every type of movie there is for a good reason.
Neither does Spielberg. He has an Oscar for Saving Private Ryan, and another for Schindler's List. Who were you thinking of, John Ford?
*Air* is very efficient at blocking gamma radiation. Why do you think x-ray and gamma-ray observatories need to be located above the atmosphere for them to work?
There's so much incompetence at so many High Schools it wouldn't surprise me if it was something as simple as a server that hadn't been patched in ages.
Imagine how much incompetence there is at universities.
During my senior year, my school's network was being brought to its knees on a regular basis by Napster. It wasn't students downloading that was the problem, it's that they'd go home for the weekends, leave their connections running, and everyone uploading god-knows-what from all over campus would just bring the T1 to its knees (Yeah, that's right: a single T1 for the entire university).
Roommates and I decided to do something about this. Turned out that this was pretty easy; most of the routers on campus had never been changed from their default password. So we just mapped the network status, and every time the network went to shit, we'd just check to see what dorm was causing the problem, and then we'd just shut it down. Campus radio station trying to stream some ridiculously high-bitrate live broadcast? No router for you, either!
My roommate once witnessed the head of the IT company the school contracted the network administration to type the string 'C:\' while logged in as root.
Lead-bismuth alloy, actually.
And I wonder what they mean by 'proven' technology. I guess it has been proven...to be a bad idea. SSN-75, the Seawolf, had an experimental metal-cooled reactor, which proved so problematic they ripped it out and replaced it with a PWR. The Soviets had I think 2 classes of submarine powered by lead-bismuth cooled reactors, the Alphas and the Papas; there was only ever one built of the latter class, and they lost a few Alphas because the shore-based heaters broke down when the subs were dockside, and the coolant solidified inside the reactors and heat exchangers.
If this were such a proven technology, someone would be using it for something. They're not.
(that the car was fired upon by a tank, for example).
.50 and 7.62mm. If a tank's stationed at a checkpoint, it's entirely plausible that it would fire at hostile-behaving vehicles with this weaponry, instead of its main gun.
That's entirely plausible.
Tanks do not only have big honking cannon. Tanks also have smaller-caliber machine guns, things like
Sgrena's obviously full of shit (photos of her car show a vehicle remarkably lightly-damaged for all the thousands of rounds of ammunition she claims were fired at it), but if her actual claim was that her car was fired on by a tank, that's entirely plausible.
Who are you to dictate how a foreign country is supposed to handle kidnappings?
Someone from a country who bears the cost of that foreign country's choice to further enrich the insurgents with an inflow of cash.
If Italy wasn't getting a hostage back, their giving money to the insurgents would be an obvious hostile act. I'm not sure how much less hostile the fact that they get a hostage back makes it.
What would you trust your life to? An insulated copper wire run between stations? You don't get simpler than that, but it's also hardly the most reliable thing on a battlefield.
An accident?
When you're manning a checkpoint, and car comes speeding towards you at 60 miles per hour, you shoot it. That's not an 'accident,' that's prudence.
And from the other side, speeding towards a checkpoint in a war zone at 60 miles per hour, isn't an accident either. It's idiocy.