No, it is you who are wrong, we were in quite a rush to beat the russkies. FDR & Churchill and realized full well that the glory of being the first to Berlin would translate directly to how Europe would be shaped afterwards.
You can't shuffle blame onto the citizens for this one. No fucking way. Before the war, Bush claimed that it was not the role of the United States to "police around the world telling people this is the way it has to be."
Bit testy aren't you? Voted for him and now feeling some guilt perhaps?
Those of us who didn't vote for him in 2000 knew that he was incompetent. We weren't aware exactly how far the depths of his useless extended, but we knew it wouldn't be good.
Lengthen a war to save a city? It depends on the situation.
In the case of Dresden probably.
There are other people with good perspectives on history than war afficianados. That you would classify them all as unknowledgeable bleeding hearts speaks volumes as to your attitude. I'm pleased to disagree with you.
A war is won when the enemy surrenders. Until that point happens, operations should continue as normal
Yes, they should.
But they don't and that's a fact. Forgive my assumption, but you sound like the sort who gets too much of your input about the conduct of wars from war afficianados who are often obssessed with presenting the conduct of military as that of clockwork machinery.
I'm sure there are all sorts of strategic justifications that can be, but the simple truth is that a city and many of her civilian inhabitants were destroyed to expedite a war that was already won.
Near the end of a war, attitudes change rapidly and bad decisions are made. Soldiers start obssessing with a fear of death. Generals start thinking about "what next" including what can be done to ensure their career is successful.
There's the truth of it, by the time time Dresden happened, Germany had become a political football. The focus had shifted from winning the war, to beating the Russians. Under this time pressure, some slighly unethical decisions were made.
Inflicting unnecessary harm on another country always comes back to bite you in the ass, even when they are "paying the price".
Germany paid the price after WWI, and that basically led to WWII.
The army gets their orders from untrained civilians (in this case). They knew Iraq was a bad idea and being poorly planned, but they took their orders and executed them like good soldiers ought to.
And before you blame them for following stupid orders blindly, the people who are truly at fault are the US citizens for willfully putting such incompetence in charge of such a powerful weapon.
People are so obsessed with the concept of nuclear that it throws all rational thought out the window.
Millions of small weapons are still as deadly as one big one.
Would you be as upset over a firebombing of Nagasaki that resulted in exactly as many deaths (and make no mistake, slowly dying from burn wounds without sufficient medical attention is probably as painful as radiation sickness, if such things can be measured)?
There is a difference between media making us aware of something we should know about, and media making us obssessed with something that is going to make it money.
Too often media focusses on the latter, and we wring our hands about the deaths of 5 in location X, while ignoring the deaths of 5 million in location Y.
When it comes to the deaths of people, Math Matters. Just because something pulls at our heart strings does not make it a a significant effect. Yes, Nagasaki and Hiroshima were bad and the victims suffered terribly, but they were a drop in a huge bucket of human misery that resulted from that war. And there were far larger atrocities that were glossed over completely.
Starvation, for example, is probably a worse way to go than radiation sickness. And when things go bad, it often happens by the 10's of millions, not 10's of thousands.
I would expect that these convertables have trouble with the LCD linkage. On laptops, this can often break, and these problems will be many times worse here...
Show them that they can use computers to make everything in their life more interesting and fun.
Go geo-caching! I don't do it myself, but I have a friend who's a new father and he says it's a great way to get the family outdoors.
Fire up googlemaps and track down your target, let them type waypoints into the computer, upload them into the GPS and go hunting. Take pictures, upload the pictures into the computer, make an album.
Then track your Geo-caching offerings online, keep a database of where that toy truck you put into a box near your house ends up (geo-caching uses encrypted serial ID's so that you can follow your contributions as they move around the world). Then get a (real)globe and put pushpins into it to chart its progress.
In short, break down the barriers between the real world and the information world. Let him/her see that it's all one big world, computers and the outside rolled into one.
Agree. Kids have enormous flexibility at a young age to mold the way their brain works. This flexibility disappears in the mid-late teen years.
It's obvious that computers are here to stay, if you keep them luddites until they are 15, they'll be somewhat crippled in their ability to use computers for the rest of their life, in the same way that non-native speakers are rarely able to achieve quite the same level of language proficiency and accent as natives. And if they do, it comes at the expense of great effort, equivalent to 3 years of passive exposure as kids.
Slashdot Mirror
Some people spend all day waiting for someone to post something that will allow them to launch into a diatribe about their favorite subject.
If it's been a slow day, they can get trigger happy.
And you need to learn how to write with less spittle and venom if you want anyone to care about what you have to say.
You just wasted 10 minutes.
We're talking about Dresden.
And what I'm talking about regarding the race to Berlin is common knowledge.
We are better off that people who don't know how to do professional work and have no professional training are gone.
So I've been out of the country for 2 years, ummm these people are not "gone" are they?
I know the Bush administration has been unusual, but I'd like to hope the unemployed still.. you know... exist.
No, it is you who are wrong, we were in quite a rush to beat the russkies. FDR & Churchill and realized full well that the glory of being the first to Berlin would translate directly to how Europe would be shaped afterwards.
So can the fire, starvation and disease of a normal bomb.
Stop kidding yourself that radiation sickness is special in some way. Dying from the aftermath of war really sucks. Surviving isn't a picnic either.
You can't shuffle blame onto the citizens for this one. No fucking way. Before the war, Bush claimed that it was not the role of the United States to "police around the world telling people this is the way it has to be."
Bit testy aren't you? Voted for him and now feeling some guilt perhaps?
Those of us who didn't vote for him in 2000 knew that he was incompetent. We weren't aware exactly how far the depths of his useless extended, but we knew it wouldn't be good.
Boy I've really put my foot in the beehive of war-nuts haven't I?
Neither V-1's or V-2's were a serious threat to the sanctity of the British Empire. You cannot invade and destroy a country with rockets alone.
Lengthen a war to save a city? It depends on the situation.
In the case of Dresden probably.
There are other people with good perspectives on history than war afficianados. That you would classify them all as unknowledgeable bleeding hearts speaks volumes as to your attitude. I'm pleased to disagree with you.
A war is won when the enemy surrenders. Until that point happens, operations should continue as normal
Yes, they should.
But they don't and that's a fact. Forgive my assumption, but you sound like the sort who gets too much of your input about the conduct of wars from war afficianados who are often obssessed with presenting the conduct of military as that of clockwork machinery.
The reality is always far different.
I'm sure there are all sorts of strategic justifications that can be, but the simple truth is that a city and many of her civilian inhabitants were destroyed to expedite a war that was already won.
Near the end of a war, attitudes change rapidly and bad decisions are made. Soldiers start obssessing with a fear of death. Generals start thinking about "what next" including what can be done to ensure their career is successful.
I wonder how many of those programming jobs 'lost' were actually promotions to managerial positions, and the vacancies left behind were farmed out?
Dresden would have been over run by the Russians,
There's the truth of it, by the time time Dresden happened, Germany had become a political football. The focus had shifted from winning the war, to beating the Russians. Under this time pressure, some slighly unethical decisions were made.
Inflicting unnecessary harm on another country always comes back to bite you in the ass, even when they are "paying the price".
Germany paid the price after WWI, and that basically led to WWII.
The Top Brass have a clue.
The Administration doesn't.
The army gets their orders from untrained civilians (in this case). They knew Iraq was a bad idea and being poorly planned, but they took their orders and executed them like good soldiers ought to.
And before you blame them for following stupid orders blindly, the people who are truly at fault are the US citizens for willfully putting such incompetence in charge of such a powerful weapon.
To be fair to the high-ups in the US military, the general public knows jack and shit about how to successfully conduct a war.
The UK was not under serious threat when Dresden was bombed. Those days had long passed.
There is no good excuse.
People are so obsessed with the concept of nuclear that it throws all rational thought out the window.
Millions of small weapons are still as deadly as one big one.
Would you be as upset over a firebombing of Nagasaki that resulted in exactly as many deaths (and make no mistake, slowly dying from burn wounds without sufficient medical attention is probably as painful as radiation sickness, if such things can be measured)?
There is a difference between media making us aware of something we should know about, and media making us obssessed with something that is going to make it money.
Too often media focusses on the latter, and we wring our hands about the deaths of 5 in location X, while ignoring the deaths of 5 million in location Y.
When it comes to the deaths of people, Math Matters. Just because something pulls at our heart strings does not make it a a significant effect. Yes, Nagasaki and Hiroshima were bad and the victims suffered terribly, but they were a drop in a huge bucket of human misery that resulted from that war. And there were far larger atrocities that were glossed over completely.
Starvation, for example, is probably a worse way to go than radiation sickness. And when things go bad, it often happens by the 10's of millions, not 10's of thousands.
The country is democratic, peaceful and stable
Well, it *was*...
I would expect that these convertables have trouble with the LCD linkage. On laptops, this can often break, and these problems will be many times worse here...
In fact, we know that we know almost nothing about the fundamental nature of this Universe,
If we hadn't thrown the goddamned manual out with the wrapping paper on Christmas morning we'd be much better off.
Show them that they can use computers to make everything in their life more interesting and fun.
Go geo-caching! I don't do it myself, but I have a friend who's a new father and he says it's a great way to get the family outdoors.
Fire up googlemaps and track down your target, let them type waypoints into the computer, upload them into the GPS and go hunting. Take pictures, upload the pictures into the computer, make an album.
Then track your Geo-caching offerings online, keep a database of where that toy truck you put into a box near your house ends up (geo-caching uses encrypted serial ID's so that you can follow your contributions as they move around the world). Then get a (real)globe and put pushpins into it to chart its progress.
In short, break down the barriers between the real world and the information world. Let him/her see that it's all one big world, computers and the outside rolled into one.
Agree. Kids have enormous flexibility at a young age to mold the way their brain works. This flexibility disappears in the mid-late teen years.
It's obvious that computers are here to stay, if you keep them luddites until they are 15, they'll be somewhat crippled in their ability to use computers for the rest of their life, in the same way that non-native speakers are rarely able to achieve quite the same level of language proficiency and accent as natives. And if they do, it comes at the expense of great effort, equivalent to 3 years of passive exposure as kids.
If these bots have any kind of generalized means to execute commands on the local machine, there should be a way to force them to self destruct.
Bot flexibility is presumably valuable, giving their owners the ability to upgrade them in unforseen ways.