instead move to 20th Century technology (aka SkyTran) with autonomous 1-2 person vehicles.
Which looks like something that Disney would install in their theme parks (and nowhere else). Never happen.
And no, the US is not a rural nation. Wake up and move to any of the dozens of metro areas with > 1 million people, or countless other smaller cities with >100k people.
Which are not urban in the same way that New York, San Francisco, Detroit, Houston, etc...are. Most of these smaller cities are interconnected connected to the concentrated population centers via large swaths of existing ex-urban sprawl, the "exurbs", that are poorly served by any mode of transportation other than the private automobile. They are "urban" in the technical sense of the term, but many people living in these sprawl areas have to drive 45 minutes or longer to get to anything. I wouldn't call that "urban" by way of comparison to living in a downtown loft and taking the subway. To suggest that these are similar "urban" situations is an apples and oranges comparison.
Are you going to make some moronic argument that a public transit system somehow isn't viable if it doesn't serve every address in the country, no matter how rural?
No. But you public transportation boosters cannot simply ignore the fact that many Americans today live in sprawl areas that can never be effectively served by centralized mass transit. They're too spread out.
I guess, according to your idiot logic, the MTA in NYC should just shut down the subways because they don't work for rural Alaska.
Right, because it would make a ton of sense to shut down the subways in a city where just about the only cars on the streets are yellow or black. NYC in general and Manhattan in particular are special cases. They're niche and not representative of the living situation of most Americans. There are 313 million people living in the US as of 2012. Maybe 30 million live in NYC (and that's being generous) so that's what ~1%?
First Solar, which also received tax payer "investment" from the DOE, is also in trouble. They missed earnings estimates by a substantial margin and there are now questions about the efficacy of their products. First Solar could end up being another black eye for the Obama administration and its green energy policies.
The other thing our dumb government should be pushing
The government shouldn't be pushing anything. Has it escaped your notice that sales of the Volt and the Leaf have been crap compared to conventional gasoline powered vehicles? Almost nobody wants to buy either the Volt or the Leaf. Sales of both have been slow compared to other vehicles and show little sign of improvement. As for public transportation, forget about it. Public transportation in the United States, with the exception of highly concentrated urban areas, just doesn't make much sense. The United States has been and mostly still is a rural nation. Try holding down a middle class or better job and lifestyle without owning a personal fossil-fuel powered vehicle. In many parts of the US, it's just not possible. Even the State of California acknowledges that lack of a personal automobile is a serious impediment to finding and keeping a decent job.
Do you know if the trucks have specially made engines, or do they have a good method of processing/filtering the gas?
If filtering the gas is expensive and difficult then they probably design or modify the engine to account of the use of the contaminated gas. A larger upfront capital investment on a modified or purpose built engine in what's already a purpose built garbage hauling truck is likely to be economical over the lifetime of the vehicle when fuel savings are accounted for.
It's good to see that CBS put the time and money into doing this properly.
If any television franchise is solid gold in re-runs or boxed re-issues, it's Star Trek. The CBS executives know the value of what they've got in Star Trek and are willing to invest what's necessary to maximize it's future marketability.
Enterprise took place in an alternate universe created when the Borg went back in time in First Contact and changed the past.
It wasn't an alternate universe. If you'll recall, the Borg in First Contact were unsuccessful in changing the past or more precisely the changes were minor, versus what would have happened anyway had the Borg not interfered, and didn't ultimately prevent the first warp flight. It can probably also be assumed that any further attempts by the Borg to alter key events in human history would be stopped by the 31st century humans who continuously monitor the timeline and work to
prevent serious continuity breaking changes. So, unless the 31st century Borg manage to defeat the 31st century humans (seems unlikely), further attempts by any pre-31st century Borg to alter the past in any significant way are pretty much doomed to failure. Indeed, that may be why the 24th century and later Borg don't continuously attempt to alter the past because they know that since humans exist in the 31st century, any further attempts to assimilate the entire species will be automatic fails. In other words, the survival of humanity in the Star Trek universe, at least until the 31st century, is inevitable.
I didn't like the way the Voyager ended either. It would have been far more realistic if they had done it like the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica with the ship getting more and more run down, supplies running short, characters being killed off a few at a time and finally the entire ship being destroyed and the remnants scattered and mostly not making it out alive. At least that would have been realistic and if done right, it could have been interesting and entertaining too.
TNG and the Borg. DSP and the dominion. Enterprise and the confusing and arbitrary Xindi. Peaceful explorations simply does not sell laundry detergent.
The history of Earth's explorations has always been one of violence and conquest. The insistence of Rodenberry that humans had magically "evolved" beyond wars, petty disagreements and cultural misunderstandings always struck me as being unrealistic. The Dominion War episodes of DS9 are among the best that the franchise has to offer IMHO. I always enjoyed the more acerbic and mercurial characters and while Q was entertaining at times, Elim Garik of DS9 was definitely my favorite. As for science fiction in general I have always preferred the gritty and realistic: Aliens, Battlestar Galactica (the re-imagined series not the campy 70s version) and the Terminator to the idealistic and optimistic futures that are too often presented in the various Star Trek series (mirror universe episodes being a stand out exception).
It should be noted that the saying implies great difficulty, but not necessarily impossibility. Take for example Luke 12:48:
"But he that knew not, and did commit things worthy of stripes, shall be beaten with few stripes. For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required: and to whom men have committed much, of him they will ask the more."
Again, higher standards for those with wealth and talents, but not necessarily impossible to meet. Bill Gates would probably qualify and he's one of the richest men currently living.
However, there is no evidence for the existence of such a gate.
Was it not common for fortified cities in those days to have a smaller gate, either embedded within the larger one or beside it and exiting into the same archway, that could be more easily attended and opened by a night watch? Also, aren't there several gates in the old walls of Jerusalem that have long since been filled in to become part of the walls? Indeed, if the walls were subsequently thickened then all evidence of the old gate would be contained within the wall and not visible. So, it's possible that such a gate once existed but is now either destroyed, Jerusalem was sacked several times in the intervening millennia. or buried somewhere within the old city walls.
I'm sick and tired of seeing self-righteous, inconsiderate pricks with their head in their phone doing 75 down the highway.
Try driving a Volvo. The steel panels are thicker, the body and passenger compartment are reinforced and the doors all seem to be about 7 inches thick. In a Volvo you outweigh all similar vehicles in your class by a hefty margin. The gas mileage is somewhat lessened as a result, but compared to those tin-can Toyotas I see crushed like accordions on the sides of the road that doesn't seem like such a bad tradeoff. The Volvo has a long running and well deserved reputation for being a "tank" when it comes to safety. Just Google and you will find many real stories of people who swear that their lives were saved in an accident by their Volvos.
I don't recall Picard ever using the enterprise when he had a PADD handy
Well, Picard was always billed as being a bit old fashioned and traditional, even by 24th century standards. The other characters, but not so much data and the other engineers, DID use the voice interface more often. It's interesting that among the TNG bridge crew, Data probably used the voice interface least. He was so blindingly fast on the keypad that he mainly used that or just plugged his positronic brain directly into the computer (ala the "decker" in Shadowrun, for those of you pprpg geeks out there).
Um, They own the wires, routers and tubes. There's no question of 'victory'.
In the face of obfuscation, onion routing, encryption and darknets there is nothing short of complete shutdown of all Internet traffic to prevent people from sharing information. If the Chinese and Iranian governments cannot completely stop it, how much less can the copyright cartels? Indeed, the ongoing cat and mouse games between repressive governments and the hackers of this world only ups the ante, increasing both the quality and sophistication of free communication tools against even the most determined censorship efforts.
It really bugs me when a webpage take forever to load because it's waiting on ad servers to dish up a new ad
You still put up with advertisers on the web? Have you not heard of Ghostery, AdBlock Plus and NoScript? It's been years now since I've seen ads on webpages except in those rare cases where a site runs their own ads (which almost nobody does anymore because of Google AdWords).
Why can't they write there pages to load the ads last so you can read the page while the ads load?
They could, but that would take extra work AND you might navigate away before the ad finished loading anyway, resulting in no credit for an "impression". Plus, anyone not using JavaScript or using an extension which limits JavaScript (NoScript) would never load the ads (hence the need for AdBlock and Ghostery in addition to NoScript).
The problem is, and always has been, that providing parity between the web and native applications, especially complex ones like WOW, invariably ends badly. How can the web duplicate WOW without granting a similar level of access to the local resources of the machine? The browser, or even the OS itself, cannot be all things to all people as a single monolithic program. Attempts to make the browser or the web into the OS are doomed to fail. At best what you end up with a second class OS, lacking only a decent web browser. For an informative description of a similar and related problem, see the Inner-Platform effect anti-pattern definition.
First of all, this was submitted by someone from Infoworld, and the article is on Infoworld, so nice spam.
Infoworld is routinely fed "press hits" by public relations firms looking to advance the interests of paying clients. Like most trade rags, Infoworld is a tool for spreading marketing hype and PR bullshit. The engineers amongst us usually see through these "technical articles". However, the IT managers, whom trade rags target with flatery, sadly often do not. It's because of Infoworld and others like them that we engineers have to waste time defending mature, proven and well defined technologies against marketing bullshit and unicorn farts like "cloud computing". The PR firms and their hack writers, who actually know nothing about what they're writing, make our jobs as engineers harder and we hate them for it.
Of course, with twice as many people stuck in rural poverty while seeing a growing bourgeoisie, there's another potential road to political change
A shrewd opponent would be working clandestinely to fan the flames of social unrest in China, slowing their growth. Unfortunately for us, our President is not shrewd but merely glib and so nothing towards that end is being accomplished. Hopefully our next President will not fail to grasp that the Chinese are dangerous rivals and ought to be treated as such.
"They" would be those corporations who received bailout "loans" and whose shares I wouldn't choose to own were I investing my own money at my own discretion. For example, the US Government now owns substantial equity shares in both General Motors (GM) and American International Group (AIG) in lieu of actually having the original bailout "loans" repaid. I don't generally invest in insurance companies and I've never been interested in owning shares of General Motors (either before the financial crisis and especially not now). These are examples of companies which should have been liquidated if they couldn't successfully reorganize in bankruptcy. The whole point of the bankruptcy process is to balance the competing interests of different creditors, borrowers and society as fairly and impartially as possible. By interfering in that process for political reasons, and thereby upsetting that carefully crafted balance, the government virtually ensured the unfairness of any alternative extra-judicial settlement. We the taxpayers wouldn't have shared in any potential profits from these businesses so why should we now be asked to share in their losses? It's hard to think of a less involved party than us taxpayers and yet again we've been handed the bill so that union auto workers can keep their pensions and executives at AIG can receive their bonuses at our expense.
It can only be used in certain circumstances, including armed forced medical personnel.
A battalion equipped with picks, shovels and earth movers probably doesn't qualify.
I would think that responding to a bombing to rescue anybody still inside would be considered a legitimate use of the Red Cross symbol.
Perhaps, but all of the exits are sealed remember? (see above).
The Geneva Conventions weren't really designed with the facilitation of the assassination of specific individuals in mind.
They also weren't designed to protect those who hadn't also signed. I may be mistaken, but I don't think that Iran is a signatory. In other words, if a nation wants consideration for their armed forces then they must also submit themselves to the same rules. For example we don't accord these courtesies to terrorist organizations, such as Al-Qaeda, in part because they don't accord them to us.
The concept was that combat is more about capturing ground and blowing things up, and the people guarding both are not really the targets of war.
I have never heard anyone else put forward that interpretation, but that's never been true in warfare. Destroying the ability of the enemy to continue fighting, including killing of enemy personnel and destruction of his equipment, has always been central to the practice and strategy of warfare. In the case of total wars, WWII being the canonical example, the mobilization of entire societies into the war effort makes almost everyone a legitimate target including those guarding and working in industrial targets.
If you're hitting a bunker specifically with the goal of killing the people inside and no so much the bunker itself then the Conventions actually work against you somewhat
That depends upon who's interpreting it. The winner gets to decide who was in violation of what provisions and naturally the winner himself is always excused. That's the nature of war, to the victor go the spoils.
they don't prevent you from hitting the bunker, but they do prevent you from attacking rescuers
That's the trouble with those cluster bombs, they always wait around for whoever is coming next. Darn.
and you are required to accept the surrender of anybody inside
And the Germans in WWII were required to accept the surrender of every ship before sinking it, except that didn't happen did it? And you know what? The Allies did the exact same things. The only difference was that we won and the Axis lost. The Geneva conventions are full of fine principles, but the grim reality is that war makes savages of us all.
Then again, that's just a different kind of specialization.
And a lucrative one, provided that one can tolerate the frustration of working with obsolete 1960s and 70s era techs with all the charm of bear skins and stone knives.
Slashdot Mirror
instead move to 20th Century technology (aka SkyTran) with autonomous 1-2 person vehicles.
Which looks like something that Disney would install in their theme parks (and nowhere else). Never happen.
And no, the US is not a rural nation. Wake up and move to any of the dozens of metro areas with > 1 million people, or countless other smaller cities with >100k people.
Which are not urban in the same way that New York, San Francisco, Detroit, Houston, etc...are. Most of these smaller cities are interconnected connected to the concentrated population centers via large swaths of existing ex-urban sprawl, the "exurbs", that are poorly served by any mode of transportation other than the private automobile. They are "urban" in the technical sense of the term, but many people living in these sprawl areas have to drive 45 minutes or longer to get to anything. I wouldn't call that "urban" by way of comparison to living in a downtown loft and taking the subway. To suggest that these are similar "urban" situations is an apples and oranges comparison.
Are you going to make some moronic argument that a public transit system somehow isn't viable if it doesn't serve every address in the country, no matter how rural?
No. But you public transportation boosters cannot simply ignore the fact that many Americans today live in sprawl areas that can never be effectively served by centralized mass transit. They're too spread out.
I guess, according to your idiot logic, the MTA in NYC should just shut down the subways because they don't work for rural Alaska.
Right, because it would make a ton of sense to shut down the subways in a city where just about the only cars on the streets are yellow or black. NYC in general and Manhattan in particular are special cases. They're niche and not representative of the living situation of most Americans. There are 313 million people living in the US as of 2012. Maybe 30 million live in NYC (and that's being generous) so that's what ~1%?
That did not work out so well with Solyndra
First Solar, which also received tax payer "investment" from the DOE, is also in trouble. They missed earnings estimates by a substantial margin and there are now questions about the efficacy of their products. First Solar could end up being another black eye for the Obama administration and its green energy policies.
The other thing our dumb government should be pushing
The government shouldn't be pushing anything. Has it escaped your notice that sales of the Volt and the Leaf have been crap compared to conventional gasoline powered vehicles? Almost nobody wants to buy either the Volt or the Leaf. Sales of both have been slow compared to other vehicles and show little sign of improvement. As for public transportation, forget about it. Public transportation in the United States, with the exception of highly concentrated urban areas, just doesn't make much sense. The United States has been and mostly still is a rural nation. Try holding down a middle class or better job and lifestyle without owning a personal fossil-fuel powered vehicle. In many parts of the US, it's just not possible. Even the State of California acknowledges that lack of a personal automobile is a serious impediment to finding and keeping a decent job.
Do you know if the trucks have specially made engines, or do they have a good method of processing/filtering the gas?
If filtering the gas is expensive and difficult then they probably design or modify the engine to account of the use of the contaminated gas. A larger upfront capital investment on a modified or purpose built engine in what's already a purpose built garbage hauling truck is likely to be economical over the lifetime of the vehicle when fuel savings are accounted for.
It's good to see that CBS put the time and money into doing this properly.
If any television franchise is solid gold in re-runs or boxed re-issues, it's Star Trek. The CBS executives know the value of what they've got in Star Trek and are willing to invest what's necessary to maximize it's future marketability.
Enterprise took place in an alternate universe created when the Borg went back in time in First Contact and changed the past.
It wasn't an alternate universe. If you'll recall, the Borg in First Contact were unsuccessful in changing the past or more precisely the changes were minor, versus what would have happened anyway had the Borg not interfered, and didn't ultimately prevent the first warp flight. It can probably also be assumed that any further attempts by the Borg to alter key events in human history would be stopped by the 31st century humans who continuously monitor the timeline and work to prevent serious continuity breaking changes. So, unless the 31st century Borg manage to defeat the 31st century humans (seems unlikely), further attempts by any pre-31st century Borg to alter the past in any significant way are pretty much doomed to failure. Indeed, that may be why the 24th century and later Borg don't continuously attempt to alter the past because they know that since humans exist in the 31st century, any further attempts to assimilate the entire species will be automatic fails. In other words, the survival of humanity in the Star Trek universe, at least until the 31st century, is inevitable.
I didn't like the way the Voyager ended either. It would have been far more realistic if they had done it like the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica with the ship getting more and more run down, supplies running short, characters being killed off a few at a time and finally the entire ship being destroyed and the remnants scattered and mostly not making it out alive. At least that would have been realistic and if done right, it could have been interesting and entertaining too.
TNG and the Borg. DSP and the dominion. Enterprise and the confusing and arbitrary Xindi. Peaceful explorations simply does not sell laundry detergent.
The history of Earth's explorations has always been one of violence and conquest. The insistence of Rodenberry that humans had magically "evolved" beyond wars, petty disagreements and cultural misunderstandings always struck me as being unrealistic. The Dominion War episodes of DS9 are among the best that the franchise has to offer IMHO. I always enjoyed the more acerbic and mercurial characters and while Q was entertaining at times, Elim Garik of DS9 was definitely my favorite. As for science fiction in general I have always preferred the gritty and realistic: Aliens, Battlestar Galactica (the re-imagined series not the campy 70s version) and the Terminator to the idealistic and optimistic futures that are too often presented in the various Star Trek series (mirror universe episodes being a stand out exception).
So, why do you sound so sure?
Just playing the Devil's advocate.
It should be noted that the saying implies great difficulty, but not necessarily impossibility. Take for example Luke 12:48:
"But he that knew not, and did commit things worthy of stripes, shall be beaten with few stripes. For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required: and to whom men have committed much, of him they will ask the more."
Again, higher standards for those with wealth and talents, but not necessarily impossible to meet. Bill Gates would probably qualify and he's one of the richest men currently living.
However, there is no evidence for the existence of such a gate.
Was it not common for fortified cities in those days to have a smaller gate, either embedded within the larger one or beside it and exiting into the same archway, that could be more easily attended and opened by a night watch? Also, aren't there several gates in the old walls of Jerusalem that have long since been filled in to become part of the walls? Indeed, if the walls were subsequently thickened then all evidence of the old gate would be contained within the wall and not visible. So, it's possible that such a gate once existed but is now either destroyed, Jerusalem was sacked several times in the intervening millennia. or buried somewhere within the old city walls.
and have brought themselves many miniseries
Aha! At last we know where Hallmark "Hall of Fame" gets their ideas...
I'm sick and tired of seeing self-righteous, inconsiderate pricks with their head in their phone doing 75 down the highway.
Try driving a Volvo. The steel panels are thicker, the body and passenger compartment are reinforced and the doors all seem to be about 7 inches thick. In a Volvo you outweigh all similar vehicles in your class by a hefty margin. The gas mileage is somewhat lessened as a result, but compared to those tin-can Toyotas I see crushed like accordions on the sides of the road that doesn't seem like such a bad tradeoff. The Volvo has a long running and well deserved reputation for being a "tank" when it comes to safety. Just Google and you will find many real stories of people who swear that their lives were saved in an accident by their Volvos.
I don't recall Picard ever using the enterprise when he had a PADD handy
Well, Picard was always billed as being a bit old fashioned and traditional, even by 24th century standards. The other characters, but not so much data and the other engineers, DID use the voice interface more often. It's interesting that among the TNG bridge crew, Data probably used the voice interface least. He was so blindingly fast on the keypad that he mainly used that or just plugged his positronic brain directly into the computer (ala the "decker" in Shadowrun, for those of you pprpg geeks out there).
Um, They own the wires, routers and tubes. There's no question of 'victory'.
In the face of obfuscation, onion routing, encryption and darknets there is nothing short of complete shutdown of all Internet traffic to prevent people from sharing information. If the Chinese and Iranian governments cannot completely stop it, how much less can the copyright cartels? Indeed, the ongoing cat and mouse games between repressive governments and the hackers of this world only ups the ante, increasing both the quality and sophistication of free communication tools against even the most determined censorship efforts.
I have to wonder why government keeps coming up with schemes that essentially require monitoring by the ISP.
Governments cannot abide anyone but themselves with secrets.
Are they maybe just trying to get some kind of monitoring in place, so that they can expand it later?
Yes. It's like the amphibian in the pot. Turn up the heat gradually and it will remain even after the water is boiling.
It really bugs me when a webpage take forever to load because it's waiting on ad servers to dish up a new ad
You still put up with advertisers on the web? Have you not heard of Ghostery, AdBlock Plus and NoScript? It's been years now since I've seen ads on webpages except in those rare cases where a site runs their own ads (which almost nobody does anymore because of Google AdWords).
Why can't they write there pages to load the ads last so you can read the page while the ads load?
They could, but that would take extra work AND you might navigate away before the ad finished loading anyway, resulting in no credit for an "impression". Plus, anyone not using JavaScript or using an extension which limits JavaScript (NoScript) would never load the ads (hence the need for AdBlock and Ghostery in addition to NoScript).
The problem is, and always has been, that providing parity between the web and native applications, especially complex ones like WOW, invariably ends badly. How can the web duplicate WOW without granting a similar level of access to the local resources of the machine? The browser, or even the OS itself, cannot be all things to all people as a single monolithic program. Attempts to make the browser or the web into the OS are doomed to fail. At best what you end up with a second class OS, lacking only a decent web browser. For an informative description of a similar and related problem, see the Inner-Platform effect anti-pattern definition.
First of all, this was submitted by someone from Infoworld, and the article is on Infoworld, so nice spam.
Infoworld is routinely fed "press hits" by public relations firms looking to advance the interests of paying clients. Like most trade rags, Infoworld is a tool for spreading marketing hype and PR bullshit. The engineers amongst us usually see through these "technical articles". However, the IT managers, whom trade rags target with flatery, sadly often do not. It's because of Infoworld and others like them that we engineers have to waste time defending mature, proven and well defined technologies against marketing bullshit and unicorn farts like "cloud computing". The PR firms and their hack writers, who actually know nothing about what they're writing, make our jobs as engineers harder and we hate them for it.
The only business that desperately needs the anal-probe level of intrusive personal monitoring is Facebook.
And even knowing this people continue to submit, willingly, to that probing. Disturbing and yet fascinating at the same time.
I'm not familiar with the properties of plaster of Paris. What are the results of this particular act?
Well, there's one sure way to find out isn't there?
Of course, with twice as many people stuck in rural poverty while seeing a growing bourgeoisie, there's another potential road to political change
A shrewd opponent would be working clandestinely to fan the flames of social unrest in China, slowing their growth. Unfortunately for us, our President is not shrewd but merely glib and so nothing towards that end is being accomplished. Hopefully our next President will not fail to grasp that the Chinese are dangerous rivals and ought to be treated as such.
Who is this "they" you speak of? Careful now...
"They" would be those corporations who received bailout "loans" and whose shares I wouldn't choose to own were I investing my own money at my own discretion. For example, the US Government now owns substantial equity shares in both General Motors (GM) and American International Group (AIG) in lieu of actually having the original bailout "loans" repaid. I don't generally invest in insurance companies and I've never been interested in owning shares of General Motors (either before the financial crisis and especially not now). These are examples of companies which should have been liquidated if they couldn't successfully reorganize in bankruptcy. The whole point of the bankruptcy process is to balance the competing interests of different creditors, borrowers and society as fairly and impartially as possible. By interfering in that process for political reasons, and thereby upsetting that carefully crafted balance, the government virtually ensured the unfairness of any alternative extra-judicial settlement. We the taxpayers wouldn't have shared in any potential profits from these businesses so why should we now be asked to share in their losses? It's hard to think of a less involved party than us taxpayers and yet again we've been handed the bill so that union auto workers can keep their pensions and executives at AIG can receive their bonuses at our expense.
It can only be used in certain circumstances, including armed forced medical personnel.
A battalion equipped with picks, shovels and earth movers probably doesn't qualify.
I would think that responding to a bombing to rescue anybody still inside would be considered a legitimate use of the Red Cross symbol.
Perhaps, but all of the exits are sealed remember? (see above).
The Geneva Conventions weren't really designed with the facilitation of the assassination of specific individuals in mind.
They also weren't designed to protect those who hadn't also signed. I may be mistaken, but I don't think that Iran is a signatory. In other words, if a nation wants consideration for their armed forces then they must also submit themselves to the same rules. For example we don't accord these courtesies to terrorist organizations, such as Al-Qaeda, in part because they don't accord them to us.
The concept was that combat is more about capturing ground and blowing things up, and the people guarding both are not really the targets of war.
I have never heard anyone else put forward that interpretation, but that's never been true in warfare. Destroying the ability of the enemy to continue fighting, including killing of enemy personnel and destruction of his equipment, has always been central to the practice and strategy of warfare. In the case of total wars, WWII being the canonical example, the mobilization of entire societies into the war effort makes almost everyone a legitimate target including those guarding and working in industrial targets.
If you're hitting a bunker specifically with the goal of killing the people inside and no so much the bunker itself then the Conventions actually work against you somewhat
That depends upon who's interpreting it. The winner gets to decide who was in violation of what provisions and naturally the winner himself is always excused. That's the nature of war, to the victor go the spoils.
they don't prevent you from hitting the bunker, but they do prevent you from attacking rescuers
That's the trouble with those cluster bombs, they always wait around for whoever is coming next. Darn.
and you are required to accept the surrender of anybody inside
And the Germans in WWII were required to accept the surrender of every ship before sinking it, except that didn't happen did it? And you know what? The Allies did the exact same things. The only difference was that we won and the Axis lost. The Geneva conventions are full of fine principles, but the grim reality is that war makes savages of us all.
Then again, that's just a different kind of specialization.
And a lucrative one, provided that one can tolerate the frustration of working with obsolete 1960s and 70s era techs with all the charm of bear skins and stone knives.