Yes, I didn't make that very clear. The OP's suggestion was to limit the corporate ownership, but my response was that given new rules for the game, they would simply hide the corporate ownership slightly more deeply. It is of course true that patents are issued in the names of the individuals who did the actual work.
However, in actual patent searching, people generally think of each patent in terms of the area of the invention and the corporate entity who owns it. For example, you might be looking at inkjet printing patents owned by Canon.
If it's a typical Congress-critter, the matter will be referred to some flunky who will match your name against the list of known campaign donors, and not finding it, your kind letter will be quickly filed in the appropriate file--the large circular one.
The idea isn't too bad, but it doesn't really solve the problem, because the large companies also have the resources to play games with any rules you put in place. For example, if they can't have their own names on the patents, they could put the creators' names on them, with all rights assigned. Or they could create shell companies in each patent niche. Perhaps I'm just too pessimistic, but I think it is really hard to devise any game that can't be beaten by the player with the most resources and sufficient determination to beat it.
Another comment noted that the term of patent is too long, but I think it should actually be a variable term. Maybe that's a non-solvable problem, however, because the dynamics seem to be backwards there. Some inventions become worthless quite quickly, while others have long-term value--but it's the long-term ones that tend to become barriers to future innovations. You really want the term of each patent to be long enough to fairly compensate the creator for the time and effort of the invention, but not so long that it becomes a barrier to other changes. On the other hand, sometimes an existing patent may motivate a different innovation to solve the same problem precisely so that someone can evade the other patent that has become a barrier... Messy.
I'm not ranting against corporate profits per se, but maximizing corporate profits has become an obstacle to encouraging innovation. It is not exactly a coincidence, however. The largest corporations are the ones with the most resources to dedicate to subverting patent laws in the pursuit of profits.
On the other hand, there's no requirement they do so. Some companies really try to use patents to encourage innovation--and they are usually penalized and often crushed by less scrupulous companies.
If you want the strong argument against large corporations as regards patents, it is actually that large corporations are naturally *AGAINST* innovation. When you're top dog, the only place to go is down--and there's always someone else trying to take your top slot. One of the results is that large companies tend to conservatism--but the critical result is that most innovations arise in small companies. However, if the innovation is good enough, then some large company will step in and buy the small company just to get the innovation.
Or maybe the strongest argument against large companies as regards patents is what happens to the small companies that refuse to sell out on acceptable terms. They are usually circumvented and crushed in those cases, and usually sooner than later.
If anything, patent law should be slanted in *FAVOR* of the small companies and individual inventors who actually create most of the innovations. There is no assembly line process for real innovation.
It's not a matter of psychiatry. It's a matter of remembering the principles that are supposed to justify patents in the first place. Patents are supposed to encourage innovation, but they are now used mostly in negative ways to block and control innovation. The "positive" goal is merely to maximize corporate profits with a special kind of monopoly, and the legal powers have been increased and focused on that objective. These days many good and innovative ideas are actually blocked either because people are afraid of infringing upon someone else's patent or because the idea is discarded as insufficiently profitable because it doesn't include any patentable aspects (with the resulting monopoly profits).
Monopoly IP profits was never intended to be the primary goal of the patent system.
There is a natural tendency for powers to become increasingly concentrated and self-destructive. Fortunately, such power systems finally break down. Unfortunately, the breakdowns are often disruptive, and sometimes even violent.
Anyway, as I've said eleventeen times, spam is an economic problem and non-economic solutions are not going to fix it. The fundamental assumption of SMTP is that email is free as in beer, and there is no such thing. Even the free beer was paid for by some method.
Actually, I think there should be two economic models incorporated into an opt-in improvement. (And it can be done while maintaining good compatibility with SMTP, too.) The first model should apply to normal correspondence on basically a mutual exchange basis. As long as you receive roughly the same amount of email as you are sending, then the accounting is just to make sure that things stay roughly in balance.
For advertising email, we need a separate economic model. My own goal for that model would be to soak the advertisers, but if they're legitimate businesses, then they can pay for it. Specifically, I want to specify how much advitising I'm willing to receive, say 15 minutes per day, and then the advertisers would bid for my time. Highest bidders would be allowed to deliver their email. The bidding should reflect such factors as what kinds of things I want to buy, my own economic situation, and past dealings with that company (good or bad).
That's hilarious. Even more funny that citing Wikipedia as a definitive source on a controversial topic. If you believe the moderation around here is worth paying much attention to, I have a lovely bridge you must be dying to buy.
Why don't you make yourself useful? Now you should set your scoring to add negative points to your foes and freaks, and my posts will disappear from your visibility. Honest, I won't miss you. I'm not writing for fools.
Not sure what you mean. You don't write very well, but I think I thank you in either case. I especially thank you if you mean that you are responding to my statement in defense of scientific truth by designating me as a foe. Do you care to clarify which candidate parse tree applies to your poorly worded statement?
I confess that my life goal is to write so clearly and so well that every person who hates the truth would be aware of my writing and regard me as a personal foe. Not a very realistic goal, however. Most of that is just my own limitations as an author, but it is also true that people who speak too much truth are rarely widely known. One of the primary tactics of haters of the truth is to actively suppress its dissemination.
Please don't waste everyone's time posting your mindless drivel in reply to my posts. I've already marked you as a foe, and on/. there is nothing stronger I can do to signify that I regard you as a fool and have no interest in wasting time on you. In case it's another aspect of your ignorance, RTFM about the icons.
You don't have to take it personal, even though I admit that I find your pround and aggressive ignorance quite offensive. Your brand of ideological slavery through the worship of ignorance seems fairly widespread in the States these days. The saddest part is that while the truth alone will not make you free, it is one of the prerequisites. As someone who really likes freedom and values my own, it really bothers me to watch little fools like you contribute to destroying a once great nation.
However, returning to the question at hand, how much of your *OWN* money do you want to bet against real science?
I didn't think so. However, that question is at least as substantive as anything you wrote.
P.S. Don't hold your breath waiting for any further response. Please take it as medical advice.
For some people, $10,000 is not significant. Perhaps these scientists are so rich, but my own guess is that the money is actually coming from somewhere else, and the real goal is to get some cheap publicity that there are "scientists" who don't believe in global warming. Do you need any hints to guess where to look for such people? I don't want to name any names, but the initials are TB as in Turd Blossum. Cheney wouldn't bother, since he won't be around in 10 years.
Actually, there's another question besides who is actually paying. How much extra they paid the "scientists" under the table (beyond the wager itself)?
... policymakers in Washington must change course.
Change course? Ha. That's rich. When has the current administration ever changed course? First they'd have to admit that they made a mistake. Something more substantive than saying "We didn't fire that guy soon enough."
What BushCo will actually do is redefine "universal" to be the people who have benefited from Dubya's economic policies. Remember how they keep telling you they are supposed to benefit everyone, right? By 2007, that group of "universal" beneficiaries will be limited to the people who are rich enough to have their own fiber optic cables run between their various houses. Presto, "universal" access!
Just because the truth is ugly, that doesn't make this post a troll--or lower the price of petrol (gasoline) for you moderators.
The only thing this settlement shows is Microsoft's total lack of any ethical concern beyond money. It's just a "business" expense for the spammer, and some extra pocket change for Microsoft. What I wanted to see was the spammer wearing a barrel on his way to prison. That's the kind of example the spammers need, and Microsoft has the legal resources to make that happen. But they settled for a few bucks. Money is the only thing that concerns Microsoft.
So you think I should just be amused or indifferent to watch my nation going down the tubes? I should go and watch the happy penguins?
Actually, I found Fahrenheit 9/11 rather boring. Precisely because I am interested in what is happening to my country and take it seriously, I had already investigated these issues quite a bit and was quite aware of everything in the movie. I did not find it informative, but just a repetition of tiring facts. The central fact is Dubya is a pretty feeble leader, but a nifty puppet for Rove and Cheney. Since I already knew that, the documentary wasn't interesting to me.
The interesting thing to me was the violence of the reaction against the movie. I regard worship of presidents as a kind of religious projection unto a "superior being" those people imagine to be more powerful and perfect than themselves. Suffice it to say I've never regarded any resident of the White House as worthy of worship.
Anyway, the truth alone will not make you free. However, it is one of the prerequsites.
In contrast, the truth about penguins is a very good example of something that will contribute very little to your freedom.
Why am I not surprised to see another example of fuzzy Bushevik "thinking"? Not sure whether to blame poor reading ability or poor writing, both at the/. end and in the original Yahoo article.
Anyway, to clarify the situation, this nice fuzzy penguin movie has not yet become #2, and has no chance at #1. The #1 documentary is Farenheit 9/11, which is completely out of the league of normal documentaries. However, it was the success of Michael Moore's previous documentary that created enough interest in documentaries to support this "more gentle" documentary with some serious marketing. Still peanuts on the Hollywood scale, but hopefully a profitable movie, though unusually expensive for a documentary.
I want to be optimistic about things, but the ugly bottom line is that freedom is not free in the "free beer" sense. There's some confusion because you can't buy freedom with money, either. However, one of the prerequisites to being free is knowing enough of the truth to make important choices.
In conclusion, the truths of penguin life are cute, safe, even rather interesting, but NOT important. I feel no moral obligation to see this movie, but it would be entertaining if a friend wants to see it.
Well, I actually think a second bomb was probably required to make it clear that it was not a one-off. However, as I already stated, I agree with you in thinking that they did not have to hit two cities. The military/civilian line is more blurry, because all of Japan was quite militarized, and everything was focused around supporting the increasingly futile war effort.
(However, even though it was a fuzzy line, Kyoto (mentioned elsewhere as an alternative target) was about as far as you could get on the non-military side. There is also some confusion around here regarding protecting non-military citizens. We can't really project our hindsight because they didn't even know how many civilians they would kill and because the legal definitions of war crimes were (and are) still evolving.)
However the idea (of the other poster) that the Japanese would trust anything the leader of their enemies said has to be dismissed as pretty silly. Of course the enemy is going to tell you you should surrender, and of course you're going to ignore that. To word it softly, Hiroshima was seriously messed up in a way that had never been seen before. As noted elsewhere, much of the initial response was just trying to help the dying, and plenty of people were trying to map the attack into something that made sense in relation to previous attacks, but it took them a while to really believe that it was a fundamentally new weapon.
In contrast, a demonstration blast on Mount Fuji would have been witnessed by a large number of scientists in the Kanto region, and there would have been immediate understanding that this was a new and really bad thing. After that, dropping the second bomb on a city would have been a crystal clear message. (The production schedule at the time was for one or two bombs a month over the next year or so.)
With regards to the original question of learning anything by it (touched upon in other branches), I feel that poster was quite mistaken. Many of the important decision makers in several countries do not regard nuclear weapons as a particularly serious threat to human survival, but merely as another aspect of might makes right. Law of the Jungle with bigger teeth. Amusingly enough, and in spite of my exposure to Japan, I actually agree. I really doubt we could exterminate ourselves completely using nuclear weapons, though our vigorous and continuing proliferation of those weapons makes it pretty much inevitable that they will be used again.
(Right now I think our most likely method for total self-destruction is actually biological. Perhaps a biological weapon, but we're actually getting to the point where we might do it by accident.)
I really can't understand why you think Fuji-san is such a wonderful thing. There are lots of volcanos, and Fuji-san is not a particularly nice one. However, most of the awkward parts are on the side that doesn't get much press, and the Japanese certainly make a big deal about it. The most distinctive thing about Fuji is simply that it's unusually isolated. I haven't climbed it, but most firsthand reports agree that it's pretty ugly when you get close enough, even ignoring the large scars from the last eruptions.
Also, I really don't understand why you think the personal connection thing is signficant. It's basically just a matter of age. My own father was a (disabled) veteran from WW II, but that just dates me. If I was younger, it would be a grandfather, and if not my father, then an uncle or great-uncle. Also I don't see what you admire from the Tokugawa Shogunate. It was a very rigid and repressive, even dictatorial regime. If Commodore Perry was "opening" Japan at the behest of the current administration, they'd probably be propping it up as convenient business partners.
Anyway, nothing in your reply that causes me not to question the decision to use the first bomb on a primarily human target, and we have to admit that we made a mistake before we can learn from it. There is a partial excuse in ignorance, but given what we know now, I think the "human" consensus would clearly regard such a use as a war crime.
Your response is basically incoherent and ignorant. You also apparently completely miss the major points of the post in favor of trivial sniping. To rub your nose in it, America did not have to use the first atomic bomb on a major population center.
However, just for the sake of addressing your ignorance, I'll point out some of the flaws. For example, your assessment of the psychological effects of the trauma is completely incorrect. The human damage was still being only roughly assessed long after the surrender, and in particular, the radiation effects were far from apparent for some weeks. They didn't even have a name for radiation sickness. It took the doctors years just to figure out how to calibrate the received dosages.
Your part about the monument is contradicting yourself, since it would obviously be even better to have a bigger monument. However, your interpretation of the actual damage is almost as far out of whack as the fantacists who imagine that you can trigger a volcanic eruption with a nuclear bomb. Nuclear bombs are bad, but not magic, and Fuji-san is a cinder cone, to boot. They could not have blown off the top of the mountain, though they could have made a visible crater and even disfigured the lip of the crater from certain perspectives. The part about the perfection of the volcano is just loony, in addition to being inaccurate (though most of the large flaws are not on the most-photographed Tokyo-facing side).
You seem to have completely missed the irony of the last part. However, additional deaths from fallout could at least have been seen as legitimate ignorance. Still, the exact fallout damage would have depended on the luck of the winds on that day.
I've thought a lot about this, and I've concluded that we could have achieved the same results just as quickly without killing so many people in the blasts. We could have put the first bomb on the tip of Mount Fuji. In the actual case, it took a while before anyone had any actual idea what was going on. In my reading on this topic, it seems there was only one survivor (a physicist) who actually understood what he had witnessed (an atomic bomb), and he could not manage to deliver any report for a while, but if America had hit Mount Fuji, many Japanese would have understood immediately. We possibly would have had to drop the second on a city to make it clear that we had more of them and how bad it was, but the days of confusion would have been reduced, and the surrender might have been quicker.
I'm basically convinced that we wanted to study the effects on real targets, and also implicitly threaten Stalin, and those factors were used to justify the targeting. We hated the Japanese enough to consider their use as human Guinnea pigs to be a trivial aspect.
Not sure how to file this aspect, though it's surely not amusing, but we might well have killed more Japanese and learned more about nuclear war by "humanely" hitting Mount Fuji first. A low-level blast planned to create the maximum visual scarring of Mount Fuji would have also kicked up an enormous amount of fallout, and the long-term fatalities would probably have been very high, though the immediate deaths would have been reduced. Of course, part of our ignorance at that time included ignorance of radiation sickness and fallout.
However, looking at the state of the world today, it doesn't seem like we learned much by it. At least nothing important.
By the way, I've lived in Japan for many years. On a clear day, I can see Mount Fuji from my train station.
Duh. It's consuming basically the same amount of oxygen from air.
However, the entire idea is remarkably inefficient. It would only make sense in some situation where you had lots of cheap electricity, lousy water, and only needed a small amount of pure water. (If you actually need lots of pure water, you set up an actual water purification plant.)
The REAL religious issue here is actually freedom. All "good Americans" are supposed to love it, and no matter what their political stripes, and they all say how wonderful it is. The politicians are especially loud about it Sadly, most of them are lying or projecting, or both.
Easier to start on the projection side. Most of the people who actually think deeply about these issues really do love their freedoms. However, they project that love to other people who actually don't love freedom. Eh? What's going on there? The problem is that being free is actually hard work, and the "sheeple" don't want to be bothered. The relevant example here is that it's much easier to listen to your preacher rather than to study genetics and natural selection. If you really want to be free, you have to resist the manipulations of people who want to limit your freedoms, and that takes actual effort. Here, it's just preachers after your money. However, it goes all the way up to politicians who use propaganda and relgious appeals to manipulate voters or to "sell" a war. It takes some work to find out the truth, and the sheeple just don't want to be bothered.
The lying side is the ugly part, and the place where Karl Rove shines out so far above all the other politicians. Here I think the most relevant example is how Rove mobilized religious homophobia to get votes in 2004.
The basic lie is that people like Rove regard freedom as a zero-sum game. They think that there's only so much freedom to go around, and they want as much as possible for themselves. Insofar as they "justify" their preaching about freedom while they attack it, they regard themselves as deserving all the freedom because they are "superior" to the sheeple. Of course they preach about freedom for the sheeple, but they don't really care what the sheeple think, as long as they can be manipulated suitably. Their REAL concern is with the competitors, and their REAL goal is to destroy them as utterly as possible.
Getting off topic, but this particular example is the most offensive one to me: Rove's deliberate outing of Valerie Plame to attack a "treasonous" ex-Republican. If Rove gets away with this treason, it will be the most frightening example of what has gone wrong in America.
The local (Japan) cellular phone companies will sell you unlimited "Internet" access for about 40 bucks/month. They do not mean that you can connect the phone to your computer with no limit, though many of the phones are technically capable of that. What they mean is you can read Web pages and send unlimited amounts of email on the phone. Anyone who stares at the small screens *THAT* much is guaranteed to go blind anyway--and they must have some customers for the service, or they wouldn't be offering it.
It's actually a good example of how bad service is in Japan once you get above the lowest levels of service. Sure, the service in most restaurants is pretty good, but it won't make you blind.
I've been trying to figure out why they even built several high speed wireless digital networks if they don't plan to use them for useful Internet services. For example, as far as I know, there are no streaming audio services that use those unlimited "Internet" connections. However, at least that wouldn't be blinding.
Oh, well. I suppose it's a transient problem. Once they have a few thousand documented cases of blindness caused by excessive portable phone use for the Internet, they'll pass some laws to limit it.
Yes, but I expect you to do the same idiotic thing. In fact, if there is any point here, it is to encourage idiots like to you to flaunt themselves in public. Are you trying to prove Einstein's theory about the certainly infinite thing?
You're the fool who is pretending there is some kind of substance here. I'm also offended by your assault on the reputation of a truly great man, though I'm not at all surprised by your lack of originality.
Yeah, I know I have the motive because I really do hate the spammers, but I have a rock solid alibi! You see I was in this castle with a bunch of nuns who absolutely insisted on being punished for their sins. It took HOURS to suitably deal with all of them! It's a long story, but believe me, it's a much better alibi than Karl Rove's. Not only don't I know any of their names, Wilson's wife wasn't anywhere in the nunnery! I checked everywhere! And then some!
On a more serious note, it makes me wonder about the honor among thieves. I don't approve of murder, but any professional spammer is high on the list of deserving candidates. If someone has to be murdered, I'm glad they took the spammer first. My own guess would be that anti-spam pressures were squeezing his income, and some of his "business associates" were somehow unwilling to reschedule his "loan" repayment installments.
It's kind of a shame there's no one around to witness your idiocy. You *STILL* haven't figured it out. You keep doing the same thing hoping for a different result. That is one of the classic definitions of insanity.
I'm expecting you to keep right on acting like an idiot. Were you the same idiot I suggested runs around his parents' basement waving the rubber chicken?
You're still ranting away? Trying to defend yourself by praising the/. moderation system? You probably posted a desperate appeal for help from your fellow 419-game morons, you're so desperate for credibility. You certainly need the help. Oh yeah, you're funny, too, and your momma wears army boots.
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However, in actual patent searching, people generally think of each patent in terms of the area of the invention and the corporate entity who owns it. For example, you might be looking at inkjet printing patents owned by Canon.
The idea isn't too bad, but it doesn't really solve the problem, because the large companies also have the resources to play games with any rules you put in place. For example, if they can't have their own names on the patents, they could put the creators' names on them, with all rights assigned. Or they could create shell companies in each patent niche. Perhaps I'm just too pessimistic, but I think it is really hard to devise any game that can't be beaten by the player with the most resources and sufficient determination to beat it.
Another comment noted that the term of patent is too long, but I think it should actually be a variable term. Maybe that's a non-solvable problem, however, because the dynamics seem to be backwards there. Some inventions become worthless quite quickly, while others have long-term value--but it's the long-term ones that tend to become barriers to future innovations. You really want the term of each patent to be long enough to fairly compensate the creator for the time and effort of the invention, but not so long that it becomes a barrier to other changes. On the other hand, sometimes an existing patent may motivate a different innovation to solve the same problem precisely so that someone can evade the other patent that has become a barrier... Messy.
On the other hand, there's no requirement they do so. Some companies really try to use patents to encourage innovation--and they are usually penalized and often crushed by less scrupulous companies.
If you want the strong argument against large corporations as regards patents, it is actually that large corporations are naturally *AGAINST* innovation. When you're top dog, the only place to go is down--and there's always someone else trying to take your top slot. One of the results is that large companies tend to conservatism--but the critical result is that most innovations arise in small companies. However, if the innovation is good enough, then some large company will step in and buy the small company just to get the innovation.
Or maybe the strongest argument against large companies as regards patents is what happens to the small companies that refuse to sell out on acceptable terms. They are usually circumvented and crushed in those cases, and usually sooner than later.
If anything, patent law should be slanted in *FAVOR* of the small companies and individual inventors who actually create most of the innovations. There is no assembly line process for real innovation.
Monopoly IP profits was never intended to be the primary goal of the patent system.
There is a natural tendency for powers to become increasingly concentrated and self-destructive. Fortunately, such power systems finally break down. Unfortunately, the breakdowns are often disruptive, and sometimes even violent.
Anyway, as I've said eleventeen times, spam is an economic problem and non-economic solutions are not going to fix it. The fundamental assumption of SMTP is that email is free as in beer, and there is no such thing. Even the free beer was paid for by some method.
Actually, I think there should be two economic models incorporated into an opt-in improvement. (And it can be done while maintaining good compatibility with SMTP, too.) The first model should apply to normal correspondence on basically a mutual exchange basis. As long as you receive roughly the same amount of email as you are sending, then the accounting is just to make sure that things stay roughly in balance.
For advertising email, we need a separate economic model. My own goal for that model would be to soak the advertisers, but if they're legitimate businesses, then they can pay for it. Specifically, I want to specify how much advitising I'm willing to receive, say 15 minutes per day, and then the advertisers would bid for my time. Highest bidders would be allowed to deliver their email. The bidding should reflect such factors as what kinds of things I want to buy, my own economic situation, and past dealings with that company (good or bad).
Why don't you make yourself useful? Now you should set your scoring to add negative points to your foes and freaks, and my posts will disappear from your visibility. Honest, I won't miss you. I'm not writing for fools.
I confess that my life goal is to write so clearly and so well that every person who hates the truth would be aware of my writing and regard me as a personal foe. Not a very realistic goal, however. Most of that is just my own limitations as an author, but it is also true that people who speak too much truth are rarely widely known. One of the primary tactics of haters of the truth is to actively suppress its dissemination.
You don't have to take it personal, even though I admit that I find your pround and aggressive ignorance quite offensive. Your brand of ideological slavery through the worship of ignorance seems fairly widespread in the States these days. The saddest part is that while the truth alone will not make you free, it is one of the prerequisites. As someone who really likes freedom and values my own, it really bothers me to watch little fools like you contribute to destroying a once great nation.
However, returning to the question at hand, how much of your *OWN* money do you want to bet against real science?
I didn't think so. However, that question is at least as substantive as anything you wrote.
P.S. Don't hold your breath waiting for any further response. Please take it as medical advice.
Actually, there's another question besides who is actually paying. How much extra they paid the "scientists" under the table (beyond the wager itself)?
What BushCo will actually do is redefine "universal" to be the people who have benefited from Dubya's economic policies. Remember how they keep telling you they are supposed to benefit everyone, right? By 2007, that group of "universal" beneficiaries will be limited to the people who are rich enough to have their own fiber optic cables run between their various houses. Presto, "universal" access!
Just because the truth is ugly, that doesn't make this post a troll--or lower the price of petrol (gasoline) for you moderators.
The Subject: is an extreme understatement.
Actually, I found Fahrenheit 9/11 rather boring. Precisely because I am interested in what is happening to my country and take it seriously, I had already investigated these issues quite a bit and was quite aware of everything in the movie. I did not find it informative, but just a repetition of tiring facts. The central fact is Dubya is a pretty feeble leader, but a nifty puppet for Rove and Cheney. Since I already knew that, the documentary wasn't interesting to me.
The interesting thing to me was the violence of the reaction against the movie. I regard worship of presidents as a kind of religious projection unto a "superior being" those people imagine to be more powerful and perfect than themselves. Suffice it to say I've never regarded any resident of the White House as worthy of worship.
Anyway, the truth alone will not make you free. However, it is one of the prerequsites.
In contrast, the truth about penguins is a very good example of something that will contribute very little to your freedom.
It always depresses me to notice happy slaves like you.
Anyway, to clarify the situation, this nice fuzzy penguin movie has not yet become #2, and has no chance at #1. The #1 documentary is Farenheit 9/11 , which is completely out of the league of normal documentaries. However, it was the success of Michael Moore's previous documentary that created enough interest in documentaries to support this "more gentle" documentary with some serious marketing. Still peanuts on the Hollywood scale, but hopefully a profitable movie, though unusually expensive for a documentary.
I want to be optimistic about things, but the ugly bottom line is that freedom is not free in the "free beer" sense. There's some confusion because you can't buy freedom with money, either. However, one of the prerequisites to being free is knowing enough of the truth to make important choices.
In conclusion, the truths of penguin life are cute, safe, even rather interesting, but NOT important. I feel no moral obligation to see this movie, but it would be entertaining if a friend wants to see it.
(However, even though it was a fuzzy line, Kyoto (mentioned elsewhere as an alternative target) was about as far as you could get on the non-military side. There is also some confusion around here regarding protecting non-military citizens. We can't really project our hindsight because they didn't even know how many civilians they would kill and because the legal definitions of war crimes were (and are) still evolving.)
However the idea (of the other poster) that the Japanese would trust anything the leader of their enemies said has to be dismissed as pretty silly. Of course the enemy is going to tell you you should surrender, and of course you're going to ignore that. To word it softly, Hiroshima was seriously messed up in a way that had never been seen before. As noted elsewhere, much of the initial response was just trying to help the dying, and plenty of people were trying to map the attack into something that made sense in relation to previous attacks, but it took them a while to really believe that it was a fundamentally new weapon.
In contrast, a demonstration blast on Mount Fuji would have been witnessed by a large number of scientists in the Kanto region, and there would have been immediate understanding that this was a new and really bad thing. After that, dropping the second bomb on a city would have been a crystal clear message. (The production schedule at the time was for one or two bombs a month over the next year or so.)
With regards to the original question of learning anything by it (touched upon in other branches), I feel that poster was quite mistaken. Many of the important decision makers in several countries do not regard nuclear weapons as a particularly serious threat to human survival, but merely as another aspect of might makes right. Law of the Jungle with bigger teeth. Amusingly enough, and in spite of my exposure to Japan, I actually agree. I really doubt we could exterminate ourselves completely using nuclear weapons, though our vigorous and continuing proliferation of those weapons makes it pretty much inevitable that they will be used again.
(Right now I think our most likely method for total self-destruction is actually biological. Perhaps a biological weapon, but we're actually getting to the point where we might do it by accident.)
Also, I really don't understand why you think the personal connection thing is signficant. It's basically just a matter of age. My own father was a (disabled) veteran from WW II, but that just dates me. If I was younger, it would be a grandfather, and if not my father, then an uncle or great-uncle. Also I don't see what you admire from the Tokugawa Shogunate. It was a very rigid and repressive, even dictatorial regime. If Commodore Perry was "opening" Japan at the behest of the current administration, they'd probably be propping it up as convenient business partners.
Anyway, nothing in your reply that causes me not to question the decision to use the first bomb on a primarily human target, and we have to admit that we made a mistake before we can learn from it. There is a partial excuse in ignorance, but given what we know now, I think the "human" consensus would clearly regard such a use as a war crime.
However, just for the sake of addressing your ignorance, I'll point out some of the flaws. For example, your assessment of the psychological effects of the trauma is completely incorrect. The human damage was still being only roughly assessed long after the surrender, and in particular, the radiation effects were far from apparent for some weeks. They didn't even have a name for radiation sickness. It took the doctors years just to figure out how to calibrate the received dosages.
Your part about the monument is contradicting yourself, since it would obviously be even better to have a bigger monument. However, your interpretation of the actual damage is almost as far out of whack as the fantacists who imagine that you can trigger a volcanic eruption with a nuclear bomb. Nuclear bombs are bad, but not magic, and Fuji-san is a cinder cone, to boot. They could not have blown off the top of the mountain, though they could have made a visible crater and even disfigured the lip of the crater from certain perspectives. The part about the perfection of the volcano is just loony, in addition to being inaccurate (though most of the large flaws are not on the most-photographed Tokyo-facing side).
You seem to have completely missed the irony of the last part. However, additional deaths from fallout could at least have been seen as legitimate ignorance. Still, the exact fallout damage would have depended on the luck of the winds on that day.
I'm basically convinced that we wanted to study the effects on real targets, and also implicitly threaten Stalin, and those factors were used to justify the targeting. We hated the Japanese enough to consider their use as human Guinnea pigs to be a trivial aspect.
Not sure how to file this aspect, though it's surely not amusing, but we might well have killed more Japanese and learned more about nuclear war by "humanely" hitting Mount Fuji first. A low-level blast planned to create the maximum visual scarring of Mount Fuji would have also kicked up an enormous amount of fallout, and the long-term fatalities would probably have been very high, though the immediate deaths would have been reduced. Of course, part of our ignorance at that time included ignorance of radiation sickness and fallout.
However, looking at the state of the world today, it doesn't seem like we learned much by it. At least nothing important.
By the way, I've lived in Japan for many years. On a clear day, I can see Mount Fuji from my train station.
However, the entire idea is remarkably inefficient. It would only make sense in some situation where you had lots of cheap electricity, lousy water, and only needed a small amount of pure water. (If you actually need lots of pure water, you set up an actual water purification plant.)
Easier to start on the projection side. Most of the people who actually think deeply about these issues really do love their freedoms. However, they project that love to other people who actually don't love freedom. Eh? What's going on there? The problem is that being free is actually hard work, and the "sheeple" don't want to be bothered. The relevant example here is that it's much easier to listen to your preacher rather than to study genetics and natural selection. If you really want to be free, you have to resist the manipulations of people who want to limit your freedoms, and that takes actual effort. Here, it's just preachers after your money. However, it goes all the way up to politicians who use propaganda and relgious appeals to manipulate voters or to "sell" a war. It takes some work to find out the truth, and the sheeple just don't want to be bothered.
The lying side is the ugly part, and the place where Karl Rove shines out so far above all the other politicians. Here I think the most relevant example is how Rove mobilized religious homophobia to get votes in 2004.
The basic lie is that people like Rove regard freedom as a zero-sum game. They think that there's only so much freedom to go around, and they want as much as possible for themselves. Insofar as they "justify" their preaching about freedom while they attack it, they regard themselves as deserving all the freedom because they are "superior" to the sheeple. Of course they preach about freedom for the sheeple, but they don't really care what the sheeple think, as long as they can be manipulated suitably. Their REAL concern is with the competitors, and their REAL goal is to destroy them as utterly as possible.
Getting off topic, but this particular example is the most offensive one to me: Rove's deliberate outing of Valerie Plame to attack a "treasonous" ex-Republican. If Rove gets away with this treason, it will be the most frightening example of what has gone wrong in America.
It's actually a good example of how bad service is in Japan once you get above the lowest levels of service. Sure, the service in most restaurants is pretty good, but it won't make you blind.
I've been trying to figure out why they even built several high speed wireless digital networks if they don't plan to use them for useful Internet services. For example, as far as I know, there are no streaming audio services that use those unlimited "Internet" connections. However, at least that wouldn't be blinding.
Oh, well. I suppose it's a transient problem. Once they have a few thousand documented cases of blindness caused by excessive portable phone use for the Internet, they'll pass some laws to limit it.
You're the fool who is pretending there is some kind of substance here. I'm also offended by your assault on the reputation of a truly great man, though I'm not at all surprised by your lack of originality.
Now it's your turn to flaunt yourself again:
On a more serious note, it makes me wonder about the honor among thieves. I don't approve of murder, but any professional spammer is high on the list of deserving candidates. If someone has to be murdered, I'm glad they took the spammer first. My own guess would be that anti-spam pressures were squeezing his income, and some of his "business associates" were somehow unwilling to reschedule his "loan" repayment installments.
I'm expecting you to keep right on acting like an idiot. Were you the same idiot I suggested runs around his parents' basement waving the rubber chicken?
That's your cue.
Should I remind you about the stupid part?