> > That would mean be able to get anywhere in the world in less then [sic] 1/2 of an Hr. > >
Your nuke will be delivered in 30 minutes or less, or it's free.
Fsck the nukes.
"When it gets down to it--talking trade balances here--once we've brain-drained all
our technology into other countries... there's only four things we do better than
anyone else: music, movies, microcode (software), high-speed pizza delivery."
> As cool as it is, it's hardware like this that will make it impossible to control our own computers - It will make content controll almost unbeatable, and turn personal computers into unfathomable black boxes.
Depends on the firmware, doesn't it?
I'd like to see hardware like this with field-programmable parts. Stick in a CD-ROM and a blank hard drive and boot.
I'd like to see it commoditized. You buy this box just like you'd buy a PC and an unformatted hard drive. The CD-ROM installs the OS and sets up everything through a series of dialogs.
I'd like to see such a box in every hax0r'z closet, effectively acting as a router with a big-ass cache, and hooked up by wire to another router, the other end of that router hooked up to a wireless link.
> a members-only group of users, with all traffic running strongly encrypted, with the source obscured via a mechanism like crowds. it's viable, and it's becoming neccessary.
And what - with the possible exception of wireless freenets - would prevent Them(tm), because They [control / have access to] the routers of every US-based ISP, from simply regarding any ISP user (logged, by definition) who transmits data in/out of the cloud, as a target for investigation.
All it'll take is one judge to say "Yes, because $BADSTUFF happens in the cloud, and because access to the cloud doesn't happen by accident, the act of interacting with the cloud constitutes probable cause."
Re:Wow... this should piss Russia off
on
Sklyarov Indicted
·
· Score: 2
> > Consider too that many of the best minds are not from America, and this sort of bullshit will easily dissuade them
from ever touching on American soil. > > Or how 'bout if America's best minds start emigrating?
Or both.
I know a couple of non-Americans who came here a few years ago lookin' to make a bundle off the dot-com boom. They did.
I met 'em for beer a couple of months ago, and we talked about the bust. They're not filthy rich anymore, but they've got green cards and managed to keep enough Silly Money that they can choose whether or not to stay here and found their own companies, or go back home and do it there.
Anyways, one of 'em said something that really struck home:
"I came here looking for the land of opportunity. A slow slide into a police state wasn't part of the bargain. Home doesn't look so bad anymore."
I feet sorry for the guy. But he has a point. Most of the geeks I know (myself included), once we passed our larval "20 GOTO 10" stage, got heavily into computers by reverse-engineering assembly code in the 8-bit days. We discovered that cracking the stuff was more fun than playing the games. We then discovered that writing games was more fun than cracking 'em or playing 'em.
I don't know if the same pattern holds for today's developers-to-be, but when it becomes illegal to learn how to develop software in the States, software development will move elsewhere.
"The 'net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."
It looks like we're reaching the stage where it's gonna route people around it as well as packets.
> Yes it is. I don't know the specifics, but I do know that PDF is simply Postscript with some extra stuff (maybe the ability to encode it in some sort of binary format instead of plain text is one of these extra features). But I also know that the ps2pdf (and pdf2ps) script doesn't do much at all, and the resulting PDFs are plain text and look very much like a regular postscript file.
PDFs also allow for things that postscript doesn't - like a table of contents off to the side, if you're publishing books. Like the ability to navigate cross-references by clicking on them like one would a URL.
(PDFs also allow for some far-out stuff, like filling out forms, some really dumb stuff like running Javascript in those forms, and things like image maps. I can live without those bloat^H^H^H^H^H features if I can generate PDFs out of FrameMaker-generated PostScript, and end up with PDFs that have "live" hyperlinks and nice tables of contents in the sidebar.)
I'm can live with using FrameMaker to create Postscript files with PDF metadata in 'em - IMNSHO it's the best tool for the job I'm doing.
But I'd be ecstatic if I could ditch Acrobat (or Distiller) for some sort of free-as-in-speech solution.
The next time my Adobe salesrep calls me to sell me another round of Acrobat and/or Distiller upgrades, I'd love to tell my him not just where to stick it, but why he should stick it. ("I've replaced your PDF-generation suite of tools with open source equivalents. They do the job better, for less money, and I sleep better at night knowing we've done our part to minimize the extent to which we fund what I believe to be your company's unethical behiavor.")
The only way to get ethical behavior out of a company is to hit 'em where it hurts when they step out of line.
> That all depends on if He planned for the universe to ever exit(). We will need to consult the prophets to find the answer.
Why bother? Aren't we pretty sure the halting problem isn't solvable?
(That is, even if you had the answer to the halting problem out of divine revelation from the Great Programmer, by Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, you'd never be able to prove it...)
> The Great Programmer really was probably a kid playing with Deity Basic his mom got him for christmas and now we're stuck living in his malformed world because he doesn't know proper techniques.
Hmm, maybe that explains the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. He was using FDIVs on a Pentium to model the particle positions and momentum vectors.
(Schrodinger's Cat is just the Excel spreadsheet that makes it show up in dollar amounts. Bell's Theorem is, uh... well, we're still trying to figure that one out. But it's pretty weird)
> In the First Disassembly of God church we seek to reverse engineer the nature of the cosmos and supply weekly diffs and patches at our worship services.
Actually, what you describe as the First Disassembly of God church goes back at least 2500 years.
Its members are called "physicists".
A guy in a bathtub started it. They named a screw after him. There was another guy who had an apple fall on his head. Another guy drew ellipses and shaded in sections of 'em. Then there was a bunch of devotees who played around with magnets and batteries, and following them, some folks with a thing for that glowing gunk that came out of pitchblende. Someone figured out that you can use the bits that fly off the glowing gunk to bash bits of non-glowing gunk, and that the non-glowing gunk is mostly empty space. You can even take the small bits of gunk that aren't empty space and bash 'em against each other, and see what they're made of. (Even if you can never measure precisely where the bits of gunk are, or how much momentum they have, at any given moment. Uh, we're still working on how God pulled that one off.)
By the way, if anyone knows what any of this "small-bits-of-gunk-that-you-can't-measure-where-i t-is-and-sometimes-it-acts-like-a-wave hack" has to do with God's other weird hack - the one that makes heavy stuff like apples, move towards other heavy stuff like planets (unless some church member's head is in the way), please apply for membership ASAP. We're pretty stumped on this bit.
> Significantly better PNG support? Wow, CSS implementation that actually works? Less rendering bugs? Million times better bookmark manager? Search capabilities with configurable search engines? Save dialogs that work while Motif's save dialogs still don't work? And it doesn't crash every 5 minutes (I haven't yet got 0.9.3 to crash)? Themability to combat the general ugliness of Motif? Progressive rendering of pages (No freezes when some New Media Guru used tables dishonorably)?
All very good reasons why Mozilla on non-Windows platforms beats Netscape on non-Windows platforms.
But the original user started by saying:
> > IE has it all: speed, rendering, functionality, footprint, etc.
You're right when you say Moz has come a long way since NS4.
But NS4 isn't the competition anymore, is it?
With respect to the Mozilla team - nobody asked for an XUL-wowzers-skinnable application platform to replace the desktop. All we wanted was a web browser. And when it took over 2.5 years for you to develop it, most of us got tired of waiting and went with IE on our Windoze boxen.
> I was going to quote one section, but can't narrow it down.
Thanks for saying it better than I could. (Moderators, please consider the parent of this post...)
There's a world of difference between stuff like Carnivore (which I regard as an abhorrent evil), and an officer in a potentially life-threatening situation doing his job.
Had I been the cop in question, I, too, would have done the same thing. Had I been the "guy in the wrong place at the wrong time", I'd have been scared shitless, but once the mistaken identity issue had been clarified, and assuming the officer had acted professionally (and as it appears in this case, he did), I'd have complimented him on being safe and wished him good luck in catching the perp.
Nothin' personal... hey, we see it all the time when a thousand Joe Slashdotters write feedback emails to authors pro-MS news articles - "d00d! j00 sux0r! L1nux r00lz!".
I'm sure Joe AOLer, writing on behalf of MSFT, in his own words, would be similarly articulate. Like I said, there are good reasons why lobbyists pre-write letters.
My beef with astroturfing is that it tries to blur the distinction between grassroots and a petition. IMHO, "We, the undersigned, endorse MSFT's position as shown above" is the honest way to do it.
> That's exactly why he asked that question. Nobody can tell me that he doesn't know how to do it correct: Make the bomb explode low level out at sea or on a small island. Or, use a glide bomb. The brits had the before the war (and stoped R&D), the Germans had them and I would be very surprised if the Americans didn't have any or were unable to produce one. Or, simply use another, unmanned plane and fly it to shortly before the target with a manned plane (this was known as "Mistel")
(reposted because the moderators'll never see your post this late in the thread).
I'm no expert, but I see two big problems here:
1) Low-level *boom* out at sea or island -- hard to get the Japanese to see it in action. Also, a surface burst at sea would have made a bigger mess in terms of fallout -- as it was, there was relatively little fallout at Hiroshima and Nagasaki; it could have been much worse.
2) Glide bombs. I see a big problem here, which was the weight of the bomb itself. The B-29, IIRC, was the only aircraft that could carry the bombs. A B-29 towing a glider would never have have made it because it would have run out of fuel (remember, no mid-air refueling!) before reaching Japan. (Maybe they could have turned around and ditched in the sea, to be picked up by a Catalina seaplane later, but it doesn't sound like my idea of a good time...)
For that matter, building a glider that could carry the weight of the bomb would have been an extremely difficult task, even with a suitable towplane.
> The Germans and Japanese attacked. Therefore, it is right for the allied to kill 10 or even 100 axis persons to save one of their own. But is it right to kill 200000+ people to show your strength, to test the effects on masses of people and for private reasons?
There are no easy answers. I think Truman and the others had to deal with that for the rest of their lives.
For what it's worth, we knew that the V-1 and V-2 and conventional bombing of London didn't sap British resolve. We knew that the firebombing of Dresden didn't sap German resolve. We knew that the Japanese military could (and often did) fight to the last man as we island-hopped through the Pacific. We knew that killing 100,000 Japanese overnight during one of the firebombings of Tokyo hadn't brought about surrender.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki weren't, from the standpoint of destruction of men and materiel, that much worse than what we'd been dishing out all along -- what was different was that it was "one plane, one bomb, one city", and the unspoken implication "...for however many cities you have left, until you give it up." The new types of injuries (flash/radiation burns/blindness) from the new weapon were also something that could not be demonstrated in a nonlethal "demonstration".
And given that there was no unconditional surrender after the first bomb, I can see why they went for #2.
I'm not saying that dropping the second bomb was "right", nor that all the motives for the second bombing were "pure" - only that the decision was understandable.
One good thing came out of it. After the entire world had seen the horror of two small bombs in 1945, the combatants on both sides of the Cold War knew they had damn good reasons never to use the weapons again -- reasons that might not have looked as strong had they only been numbers on paper. Sometimes man has to learn from his experience, and in this sense, we all got off pretty lucky.
> I'm fully aware of the implications, but I have a feeling that it will always be profitable to make drugs that save people's lives.
I admire your optimism.
Personally, I don't think we'll ever see a vaccine for AIDS, or a cure for cancer. Ever.
If polio were still around, we'd see plenty of drugs to "manage" the condition, maybe even a portable "iron lung" breathing-assistance apparatus using "smart wire" that changes shape when electrical current is passed through it.
But what we would not see is a vaccine, a'la Sabin or Salk, that costs less than a dollar per dose.
Teach a man to fish, and thank you tomorrow. Feed a man a regimen of three different species of fish every eight hours, and he's a revenue source for life.
> > "Patents == People Dying of AIDS" > > No, patents == Possibility to put down billions in research and development to fight the decease.
Let's get it right, once and for all:
Patients == People Dying of AIDS.
Patents == Temporary, legally-granted, monopolies on production of drugs to fight the disease.
As for the "decease", personally, I have nothing against the decease[d], other than that they keep writing letters in favor of Microsoft's not-so-temporary, and very much not-legal, monopoly. But that's the last Slashdot story and doesn't have much to do with AIDS.
> in a buissness sence, [... ] law sueits [... ] plane arrogence [... ] arrogent [... ] supreem court
And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why lobbying organizations pre-write letters of support for those who support them.
(If a guy who's smart enough to see through MS's FUD writes like this, what do you think Microsoft's supporters would write like if they didn't have Bill and "Dance, Monkeyboy!" Ballmer to write their letters for them?)
> Would have been funnier with Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini signing.
Maah, maybe Mussolini could protest, but I think Hitler would be writing the USPTO, claiming royalties on every Microsoft sale.
After all, "One World, One Net, One Program" is clearly infringing on the NSDAP's patent on both the idea and the implementation of "Ein Reich, Ein Volk, Ein Fuhrer."
> what was the actual answer to Mr. Teller's question? [about whether or not the crew of a B-29 doing a high-altitude demonstration burst over Tokyo Bay would have been survivable]
We removed our glasses after the first flash but the light still lingered on, a bluish-green light
that illuminated the entire sky all around. A tremendous blast wave struck our ship and made
it tremble from nose to tail. This was followed by four more blasts in rapid succession, each
resounding like the boom of cannon fire hitting our plane from all directions.
If that's what a bomb at 1640 feet feels like from 30000 feet and after turning away and hauling ass out of there as fast as possible, then there's... well... to be blunt, I see no effing way a B-29 could deliver a high-altitude demonstration burst and have survived, slide rule or not.
(By way of reference, the service ceiling of a B-29 is around 33000 feet. Flying to 60000 feet simply wasn't an option with the technology at the time - and the B-29 was the only aircraft capable of lifting something as heavy as a nuke and flying it the required distance.)
War isn't pretty. War isn't supposed to be pretty. The day war becomes pretty, we've all got problems.
/me raises a glass to all veterans and all who supported them for jobs well done. Thanks.
> I wonder what the legal issues would be if you rented a movie and dumped it to videotape using your computer's TV output, then erased the tape within the 30-day rental window. Would that be considered the same thing as taping a TV show (protected by the Supreme Court) or would it be like renting a video, copying it, and returning the original? It might not be a DMCA issue in this case, since you wouldn't be using a protection-circumvention technology.
Actually, it would be.
1) Macrovision is almost certainly enabled on whatever output device is involved. You'd have to disable (circumvent) this protection technology.
2) Even without Macrovision, you'd have created a device (a VCR/TV hookup) to circumvent (even if you erase the tape, you've changed the power balance - you choose to erase the tape after 30 days, and in so doing, you've gotten around the restriction they built in - the restriction which is clearly...) a protection technology (the one that automatically wipes out the content after 30 days or after first viewing, rather than relying on you to erase the tape yourself).
It'd be an interesting test case - I think the Supremes would decide that your activity (time-shifting) was indeed not a copyright violation because it's fair use... but that they'd also decide that you still violated anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA in order to exercise those fair use rights, and you'd wind up in jail anyways.
This is, of course, the crux of the DMCA debate -- you still have your fair use rights; it's just a crime to exercise them.
The Supremes may or may not decide that this is unconstitutional. It'd be a good test case. I wouldn't want to be the defendant.
> > We don't really need internet bandwidth sucked so much by having movies sent around - I'd rather see more streaming
sources personally. > This is what I'd really like to see. [... ]
Eh? I don't get it. A movie is 500M.
Whether those 500M get sent to your box, saved on a hard drive, and deleted 24 hours later, or whether they get sent to your box, rendered onto your screen, and vanish into the ether, is irrelevant.
You've still "sucked" the same bandwidth.
I'd argue against streaming services for this very reason -- transit costs (especially at prime time, which is when most users are likely to be watching movies) aren't for data aren't "too cheap to meter", and dumping the bits into the ether is, IMHO, a far bigger waste than saving them to a hard drive, where they no longer have to be downloaded again. Download 500M movies when the pipes aren't in use. Not when everyone else is.
Ignoring the DRM problems introduced by streaming (streaming is far more friendly to "pay-per-use" model than download-and-playback), it's a hell of a lot easier to rewind/fast-forward through a movie that's sitting on your hard drive, than it is to rewind/fast-forward a "stream".
And if we really can ignore the DRM issues - as in, h4x0r the world - I might spend 7 hours downloading a movie if I could burn it to CD and keep it forever, but I still wouldn't be interested in streaming it.
(I guess that's the "Damnit, I spent 7 hours downloading this FPOS, and I'm not just gonna delete the file! It took too much work to get it!" excuse;-)
Slashdot Mirror
"OK, we can handle 10000Gs acceleration. The million Gs on landing were a bitch!"
>
> Your nuke will be delivered in 30 minutes or less, or it's free.
Fsck the nukes.
"When it gets down to it--talking trade balances here--once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries... there's only four things we do better than anyone else: music, movies, microcode (software), high-speed pizza delivery."
- Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash
Depends on the firmware, doesn't it?
I'd like to see hardware like this with field-programmable parts. Stick in a CD-ROM and a blank hard drive and boot.
I'd like to see it commoditized. You buy this box just like you'd buy a PC and an unformatted hard drive. The CD-ROM installs the OS and sets up everything through a series of dialogs.
I'd like to see such a box in every hax0r'z closet, effectively acting as a router with a big-ass cache, and hooked up by wire to another router, the other end of that router hooked up to a wireless link.
I'd like to see Freenet scale.
And what - with the possible exception of wireless freenets - would prevent Them(tm), because They [control / have access to] the routers of every US-based ISP, from simply regarding any ISP user (logged, by definition) who transmits data in/out of the cloud, as a target for investigation.
All it'll take is one judge to say "Yes, because $BADSTUFF happens in the cloud, and because access to the cloud doesn't happen by accident, the act of interacting with the cloud constitutes probable cause."
>
> Or how 'bout if America's best minds start emigrating?
Or both.
I know a couple of non-Americans who came here a few years ago lookin' to make a bundle off the dot-com boom. They did.
I met 'em for beer a couple of months ago, and we talked about the bust. They're not filthy rich anymore, but they've got green cards and managed to keep enough Silly Money that they can choose whether or not to stay here and found their own companies, or go back home and do it there.
Anyways, one of 'em said something that really struck home:
"I came here looking for the land of opportunity. A slow slide into a police state wasn't part of the bargain. Home doesn't look so bad anymore."
I feet sorry for the guy. But he has a point. Most of the geeks I know (myself included), once we passed our larval "20 GOTO 10" stage, got heavily into computers by reverse-engineering assembly code in the 8-bit days. We discovered that cracking the stuff was more fun than playing the games. We then discovered that writing games was more fun than cracking 'em or playing 'em.
I don't know if the same pattern holds for today's developers-to-be, but when it becomes illegal to learn how to develop software in the States, software development will move elsewhere.
"The 'net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."
It looks like we're reaching the stage where it's gonna route people around it as well as packets.
PDFs also allow for things that postscript doesn't - like a table of contents off to the side, if you're publishing books. Like the ability to navigate cross-references by clicking on them like one would a URL. (PDFs also allow for some far-out stuff, like filling out forms, some really dumb stuff like running Javascript in those forms, and things like image maps. I can live without those bloat^H^H^H^H^H features if I can generate PDFs out of FrameMaker-generated PostScript, and end up with PDFs that have "live" hyperlinks and nice tables of contents in the sidebar.)
I'm can live with using FrameMaker to create Postscript files with PDF metadata in 'em - IMNSHO it's the best tool for the job I'm doing.
But I'd be ecstatic if I could ditch Acrobat (or Distiller) for some sort of free-as-in-speech solution.
The next time my Adobe salesrep calls me to sell me another round of Acrobat and/or Distiller upgrades, I'd love to tell my him not just where to stick it, but why he should stick it. ("I've replaced your PDF-generation suite of tools with open source equivalents. They do the job better, for less money, and I sleep better at night knowing we've done our part to minimize the extent to which we fund what I believe to be your company's unethical behiavor.")
The only way to get ethical behavior out of a company is to hit 'em where it hurts when they step out of line.
Why bother? Aren't we pretty sure the halting problem isn't solvable?
(That is, even if you had the answer to the halting problem out of divine revelation from the Great Programmer, by Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, you'd never be able to prove it...)
Hmm, maybe that explains the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. He was using FDIVs on a Pentium to model the particle positions and momentum vectors.
(Schrodinger's Cat is just the Excel spreadsheet that makes it show up in dollar amounts. Bell's Theorem is, uh... well, we're still trying to figure that one out. But it's pretty weird)
Actually, what you describe as the First Disassembly of God church goes back at least 2500 years.
Its members are called "physicists".
A guy in a bathtub started it. They named a screw after him. There was another guy who had an apple fall on his head. Another guy drew ellipses and shaded in sections of 'em. Then there was a bunch of devotees who played around with magnets and batteries, and following them, some folks with a thing for that glowing gunk that came out of pitchblende. Someone figured out that you can use the bits that fly off the glowing gunk to bash bits of non-glowing gunk, and that the non-glowing gunk is mostly empty space. You can even take the small bits of gunk that aren't empty space and bash 'em against each other, and see what they're made of. (Even if you can never measure precisely where the bits of gunk are, or how much momentum they have, at any given moment. Uh, we're still working on how God pulled that one off.)
By the way, if anyone knows what any of this "small-bits-of-gunk-that-you-can't-measure-where-i t-is-and-sometimes-it-acts-like-a-wave hack" has to do with God's other weird hack - the one that makes heavy stuff like apples, move towards other heavy stuff like planets (unless some church member's head is in the way), please apply for membership ASAP. We're pretty stumped on this bit.
Serves you right for running strings() on the results of a KERNEL32.EXE XOR'ed with a dump of vmlinux, doesn't it?
There are Things that Man Was Not Meant To Know.
(And now you know why there's that no-reverse-engineering, no-disassembly, no-lookee-at-the-executable clause in your EULA.)
Neither is Netscape 4.7.
Only Mozilla folks could create a website that's unreadable by both IE and Netscape 4
All very good reasons why Mozilla on non-Windows platforms beats Netscape on non-Windows platforms.
But the original user started by saying:
> > IE has it all: speed, rendering, functionality, footprint, etc.
You're right when you say Moz has come a long way since NS4.
But NS4 isn't the competition anymore, is it?
With respect to the Mozilla team - nobody asked for an XUL-wowzers-skinnable application platform to replace the desktop. All we wanted was a web browser. And when it took over 2.5 years for you to develop it, most of us got tired of waiting and went with IE on our Windoze boxen.
Thanks for saying it better than I could. (Moderators, please consider the parent of this post...)
There's a world of difference between stuff like Carnivore (which I regard as an abhorrent evil), and an officer in a potentially life-threatening situation doing his job.
Had I been the cop in question, I, too, would have done the same thing. Had I been the "guy in the wrong place at the wrong time", I'd have been scared shitless, but once the mistaken identity issue had been clarified, and assuming the officer had acted professionally (and as it appears in this case, he did), I'd have complimented him on being safe and wished him good luck in catching the perp.
But wouldn't building such a network be in violation of CALEA, the act that requires network providers to be wiretap-friendly?
If that was MP3s to USENET, @home did a Good Thing. The 75M/d posting cap in the absmp3.* hierarchy is there for a reason.
I'm sure Joe AOLer, writing on behalf of MSFT, in his own words, would be similarly articulate. Like I said, there are good reasons why lobbyists pre-write letters.
My beef with astroturfing is that it tries to blur the distinction between grassroots and a petition. IMHO, "We, the undersigned, endorse MSFT's position as shown above" is the honest way to do it.
(reposted because the moderators'll never see your post this late in the thread).
I'm no expert, but I see two big problems here:
1) Low-level *boom* out at sea or island -- hard to get the Japanese to see it in action. Also, a surface burst at sea would have made a bigger mess in terms of fallout -- as it was, there was relatively little fallout at Hiroshima and Nagasaki; it could have been much worse.
2) Glide bombs. I see a big problem here, which was the weight of the bomb itself. The B-29, IIRC, was the only aircraft that could carry the bombs. A B-29 towing a glider would never have have made it because it would have run out of fuel (remember, no mid-air refueling!) before reaching Japan. (Maybe they could have turned around and ditched in the sea, to be picked up by a Catalina seaplane later, but it doesn't sound like my idea of a good time...)
For that matter, building a glider that could carry the weight of the bomb would have been an extremely difficult task, even with a suitable towplane.
> The Germans and Japanese attacked. Therefore, it is right for the allied to kill 10 or even 100 axis persons to save one of their own. But is it right to kill 200000+ people to show your strength, to test the effects on masses of people and for private reasons?
There are no easy answers. I think Truman and the others had to deal with that for the rest of their lives.
For what it's worth, we knew that the V-1 and V-2 and conventional bombing of London didn't sap British resolve. We knew that the firebombing of Dresden didn't sap German resolve. We knew that the Japanese military could (and often did) fight to the last man as we island-hopped through the Pacific. We knew that killing 100,000 Japanese overnight during one of the firebombings of Tokyo hadn't brought about surrender.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki weren't, from the standpoint of destruction of men and materiel, that much worse than what we'd been dishing out all along -- what was different was that it was "one plane, one bomb, one city", and the unspoken implication "...for however many cities you have left, until you give it up." The new types of injuries (flash/radiation burns/blindness) from the new weapon were also something that could not be demonstrated in a nonlethal "demonstration".
And given that there was no unconditional surrender after the first bomb, I can see why they went for #2.
I'm not saying that dropping the second bomb was "right", nor that all the motives for the second bombing were "pure" - only that the decision was understandable.
One good thing came out of it. After the entire world had seen the horror of two small bombs in 1945, the combatants on both sides of the Cold War knew they had damn good reasons never to use the weapons again -- reasons that might not have looked as strong had they only been numbers on paper. Sometimes man has to learn from his experience, and in this sense, we all got off pretty lucky.
I admire your optimism.
Personally, I don't think we'll ever see a vaccine for AIDS, or a cure for cancer. Ever.
If polio were still around, we'd see plenty of drugs to "manage" the condition, maybe even a portable "iron lung" breathing-assistance apparatus using "smart wire" that changes shape when electrical current is passed through it.
But what we would not see is a vaccine, a'la Sabin or Salk, that costs less than a dollar per dose.
Teach a man to fish, and thank you tomorrow. Feed a man a regimen of three different species of fish every eight hours, and he's a revenue source for life.
>
> No, patents == Possibility to put down billions in research and development to fight the decease.
Let's get it right, once and for all:
Patients == People Dying of AIDS.
Patents == Temporary, legally-granted, monopolies on production of drugs to fight the disease.
As for the "decease", personally, I have nothing against the decease[d], other than that they keep writing letters in favor of Microsoft's not-so-temporary, and very much not-legal, monopoly. But that's the last Slashdot story and doesn't have much to do with AIDS.
Everybody clear now?
And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why lobbying organizations pre-write letters of support for those who support them.
(If a guy who's smart enough to see through MS's FUD writes like this, what do you think Microsoft's supporters would write like if they didn't have Bill and "Dance, Monkeyboy!" Ballmer to write their letters for them?)
Maah, maybe Mussolini could protest, but I think Hitler would be writing the USPTO, claiming royalties on every Microsoft sale.
After all, "One World, One Net, One Program" is clearly infringing on the NSDAP's patent on both the idea and the implementation of "Ein Reich, Ein Volk, Ein Fuhrer."
From the pilot's own account of the Nagasaki bombing:
If that's what a bomb at 1640 feet feels like from 30000 feet and after turning away and hauling ass out of there as fast as possible, then there's... well... to be blunt, I see no effing way a B-29 could deliver a high-altitude demonstration burst and have survived, slide rule or not.
(By way of reference, the service ceiling of a B-29 is around 33000 feet. Flying to 60000 feet simply wasn't an option with the technology at the time - and the B-29 was the only aircraft capable of lifting something as heavy as a nuke and flying it the required distance.)
War isn't pretty. War isn't supposed to be pretty. The day war becomes pretty, we've all got problems.
Actually, it would be.
1) Macrovision is almost certainly enabled on whatever output device is involved. You'd have to disable (circumvent) this protection technology.
2) Even without Macrovision, you'd have created a device (a VCR/TV hookup) to circumvent (even if you erase the tape, you've changed the power balance - you choose to erase the tape after 30 days, and in so doing, you've gotten around the restriction they built in - the restriction which is clearly...) a protection technology (the one that automatically wipes out the content after 30 days or after first viewing, rather than relying on you to erase the tape yourself).
It'd be an interesting test case - I think the Supremes would decide that your activity (time-shifting) was indeed not a copyright violation because it's fair use... but that they'd also decide that you still violated anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA in order to exercise those fair use rights, and you'd wind up in jail anyways.
This is, of course, the crux of the DMCA debate -- you still have your fair use rights; it's just a crime to exercise them.
The Supremes may or may not decide that this is unconstitutional. It'd be a good test case. I wouldn't want to be the defendant.
X-Fry: I'm flattered, really. If I was gonna do it with a big freaky mud bug, you'd be way up the list.
Note to self: Write a Netscape or Mozilla plug-in that renders these. I love it!
> This is what I'd really like to see. [
Eh? I don't get it. A movie is 500M.
Whether those 500M get sent to your box, saved on a hard drive, and deleted 24 hours later, or whether they get sent to your box, rendered onto your screen, and vanish into the ether, is irrelevant.
You've still "sucked" the same bandwidth.
I'd argue against streaming services for this very reason -- transit costs (especially at prime time, which is when most users are likely to be watching movies) aren't for data aren't "too cheap to meter", and dumping the bits into the ether is, IMHO, a far bigger waste than saving them to a hard drive, where they no longer have to be downloaded again. Download 500M movies when the pipes aren't in use. Not when everyone else is.
Ignoring the DRM problems introduced by streaming (streaming is far more friendly to "pay-per-use" model than download-and-playback), it's a hell of a lot easier to rewind/fast-forward through a movie that's sitting on your hard drive, than it is to rewind/fast-forward a "stream".
And if we really can ignore the DRM issues - as in, h4x0r the world - I might spend 7 hours downloading a movie if I could burn it to CD and keep it forever, but I still wouldn't be interested in streaming it.
(I guess that's the "Damnit, I spent 7 hours downloading this FPOS, and I'm not just gonna delete the file! It took too much work to get it!" excuse ;-)