For many things, you can't avoid closed-source software. There's more than games that can be abandonware; there's books, music, videos, and more, and losing them can have cultural impact. It wasn't as bad back when we had reasonable copyright duration, since if you had a copy of something and couldn't find the copyright holder you could wait for 14 or 28 years from the copyright date (and I believe the copyright extension would be a matter of public record, if you cared to check). Nowadays we have ridiculous copyright lengths and short-lived formats.
I did see a proposal to fix abandonware by making it OK to use something if a due-diligence search was made for the copyright holder. I have some familiarity with how due-diligence searches go: occasionally, there used to be a newspaper ad for unclaimed money. Legally, whoever had the money had to do a due-diligence search for the owner. It was interesting to see what a due-diligence search can fail to find, like the University of Minnesota. What the proposal would have done is allowed someone to take something copyrighted, look in the wrong phone book for the copyright holder, and made copies freely, to the likely detriment of the copyright holder.
Jobs gave the customer what the customer didn't know he or she wanted, and was spectacularly successful in his later years. If he had made an apparently stupid change, it would most likely have wound up being brilliant. Cook can't do that.
Epsom actually did come out with a GUI computer being run by a Z80A instead of a 68000, shortly after the Lisa (I think it was called the QX-10). And now you know why you never heard of it.
I have a 5S, and according to my usual pattern it's time to upgrade. The way I use my phone, larger than the 5S is a dealbreaker, and I'm not keen on losing the headphone jack. The SE looks like it was deliberately designed as a second-rate phone, and while it would be a significant improvement over my 5S it isn't enough of an improvement to make me upgrade. Nothing else that came out after the 5S will work for me.
I don't expect Apple to produce phones to my specs, but if they continue to not produce phones I like I may have to switch to Android. We're not talking high tragedy here, but Apple has lost two sales by not having what my wife and I want.
The costs of coal never seem to include the health effects and its contribution to global warming. If the externalities were to be internalized, coal would cost a lot more.
Clinton wasn't prosecuted for negligence with classified materials because nobody faces serious charges for just being negligent with them. If you don't agree, please find a counterexample, because I haven't found one and nobody's shown me one. There was one guy who agreed to plead guilty to a misdemeanor, and in the end he didn't have to.
People who deliberately put classified material where it shouldn't be are frequently prosecuted, and can wind up serving years in prison. That is where the line is drawn. You may think it should be otherwise, but Clinton's treatment was in no way special.
I've seen popular histories, the type you might find in public schools, for both sides. The US ones tend to describe the Soviet contribution as "disaster in 1941...Stalingrad...mumble...Berlin". The Soviet ones tend to describe how useless the West was until they stop mentioning the West much, mention how the Red Army saved the West in the Battle of the Bulge. Cover the Pacific by talking about the disasters of December 1941, and then skip it until the Red Army is needed in Manchuria at the end of the war.
I'm not aware of a significant role for suicide bombers on either side (the Japanese were into them big-time in 1945). The Germans put their best stuff on the Eastern Front, in addition to Romanians and others. They'd have done better by helping out the minor Axis armies, but there was something of a self-fulfilling belief that Germans were great and everybody else wasn't German.
The main Allied drive on the continent started in June 1944 with an amphibious assault and ended in May 1945, not a full year later, with troops in Prague and overrunning the agreed-on demarcation line. That's impressive.
Lend-Lease played more of a role in the East than some people think. About 20% of the Red Army tanks were Lend-Lease, and a good chunk of the combat aircraft. The main impact came in things like logistics and support equipment. The speed of the Soviet advance west after 1943 was primarily due to Lend-Lease. Clearly, the Soviets had the war mostly won before LL had all that much impact, but it played a considerable part afterwards.
Do NOT rely on memoirs to learn the history. They're worth reading, but they're always biased. In particular, Germany lost the war, and so German generals wanted a reason why they lost that didn't implicate their abilities. Their rule was to blame everything possible on Hitler.
Hitler wasn't worse than other heads of state (and better than Churchill) until Germany was definitely losing. At that point, there was a big rift in the thinking of Hitler (defeat meant the destruction of the Aryan race, and therefore any chance at victory must be pursued at all costs), and the generals (losing the war slowly will make our peace terms better when we finally end this war, and we don't want to take stupid risks with a small chance of winning and a large chance of losing faster).
You're underestimating the Soviet leadership. The war started very poorly for the Soviets, since most officers had been promoted beyond their level of competence because of their political alignment, not ability (there was an order to division commanders that it was forbidden to just put anti-tank guns evenly along the divisional front), the Party had too much influence, and Soviet mobile warfare doctrine was in the middle of a massive change. The Soviets then had to remake their army while in the middle of a desperate war, after having lost well over a million soldiers and much of their land, which means that tactical proficiency was pretty miserable until 1943 but improved after that.
Given such a blunt instrument, and the removal of some high-level Soviet generals in 1941, the Soviets did pretty well. They frequently surprised the Germans but were not often surprised themselves..They showed a good deal of proficiency in conducting operations in most places in 1944. The Soviets never had the manpower to defeat the Germans in the way you suggest, running at no more than about 2-1 in manpower (offset to some extent by better German tactics) until late 1944.
Hitler's role in losing was deliberately exaggerated by the German generals when they were writing memoirs after the war. In fact, he was no more of a problem than other national leaders until Germany was already clearly losing, at which point Hitler and his generals had very different goals.
Some Soviet equipment was very good. The artillery was good, and the T-34/85 was arguably the best tank of the war (earlier T-34s suffered from bad ergonomics).
Censoring people is preventing them from saying anything, which isn't as far as I can tell happening on Facebook. There is a section on trending stories, which has been accused of being pro-Clinton, and may well be so, but that isn't censorship. That's opinion, like you'll find pretty much everywhere in media. If you want to call that manipulation, then every media player I know of manipulates, and the word loses meaning.
In other words, you have your pre-formed doctrine, and aren't willing to look at evidence and speculate about what it means.
The leaks aren't from Russia, since then you'd have to wonder if you were Putin's dupe. They're correct and authentic, because if they weren't you wouldn't have things to hate Clinton about, such as politics as usual and the fact that some CEOs support her. You need to back off and think for a while.
Scale is important. Also, I'd suspect that Clinton and Obama had some reason to believe that they were attacking valid targets. The invasion of Iraq is arguably a major war crime in itself.
The Soviets invaded Poland, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania before WWII. Considering their economic and military problems, this wasn't a record of peace. They took advantage of WWII to impose what they called Communism on several other countries. I think you can compare what went on in those countries with what went on in US-dominated countries. US-dominated countries were often treated well, sometimes very poorly, but it doesn't seem to compare with what the Soviets did to Poland, East Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Romania. The Soviets were at least as ruthless as the US in dealing with Third World countries.
Roosevelt was slowly pushing the US into war with Germany, and was also (from 1940 on) trying to build up the US Armed Forces to be ready to fight a large war.
In September 1941, we were de facto at war with Germany in the Atlantic. We didn't do very well in this period, but we were fighting the U-boats (not sinking any, mind you, but we tried). We were unsuccessfully trying to avoid a war against Japan.
The entry of the US had some immediate bad effects for the Allies, as the desire to build up US forces for later use cut down on what we were sending to the countries actually fighting. The USAAF conducted its first European bombing raid in July 1942, using US-built bombers borrowed from the Brits. The US Army didn't get into action until November 1942 in North Africa, where it found a considerable number of shortcomings. In 1944, the US was waging war on multiple fronts, with extremely effective air power, and supplying other Allies with plenty of stuff, but the first year or so of US participation was awfully rough.
I'm not sure how things would have gone with US entry earlier. Chamberlain, the British Prime Minister for the first nine or ten months of the war, preferred to keep the US out if possible. He was succeeded by Churchill, who wanted the US in badly, completely failing to recognize that the US was not out to save the British Empire. US preparations started in earnest after the fall of France, and ten months earlier preparation would have helped to some extent.
Compared to, say Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt, Hitler was a reasonably good strategist. His problem was that his generals didn't agree with him about what sort of war it was. The generals, as a group, thought that the best thing to do was to try for some sort of 1918-style peace terms - harsh, but livable. Hitler thought that losing would be the end of the German race.
Therefore, Hitler saw his generals as planning to slowly lose the war that must be won, while the generals saw Hitler as doing increasingly risky and wasteful things in pursuit of an unattainable victory. Since Hitler's generals weren't doing what he saw as necessary, he fired lots of them and started micromanaging the others.
In actual fact, they were both wrong. Germany was overrun and the government destroyed, but the German people were mostly treated sort of OK, at least in the Western occupation zones.
More to the point, Spain was a neutral in WWII, not an ally. (Franco had allowed Germany to recruit a division to serve on the Eastern Front. Franco figured he was against the Soviet Union, wanted to look sympathetic with Fascists, and thought sending the hard-core fascists to die in the East solved some of his problems also.) Spain wasn't screwed over by WWII, but by the Spanish Civil War just before it.
There is publicly available evidence that Russia was behind it. It's not nearly conclusive evidence. There is a plausible motive for messing in US elections. So, are you stupid enough to dismiss the possibility? Or stupid enough to trust the Russians not to make changes in what they leak?
When was it last 1000 ppm, and how much has the Sun warmed up since then? On a geological time scale, the Sun is getting hotter, and in less than a billion years it will boil off all Earth's water (unless somebody does something about it, which could involve something developed quite soon in geological time).
It's a tragedy of the commons. No matter whether I work hard to reduce my CO2 emissions or don't give a crap, global warming is going to happen the same to within any conceivable measurement. One ppm of CO2 is something over seven billion tons, and burning an extra hundred pounds a day isn't going to make a difference. If three hundred million of my best friends conserve along with me, there will be a noticeable difference.
Humans don't do well at cooperating in circumstances like this, and government intervention is normally necessary.
Slashdot Mirror
For many things, you can't avoid closed-source software. There's more than games that can be abandonware; there's books, music, videos, and more, and losing them can have cultural impact. It wasn't as bad back when we had reasonable copyright duration, since if you had a copy of something and couldn't find the copyright holder you could wait for 14 or 28 years from the copyright date (and I believe the copyright extension would be a matter of public record, if you cared to check). Nowadays we have ridiculous copyright lengths and short-lived formats.
I did see a proposal to fix abandonware by making it OK to use something if a due-diligence search was made for the copyright holder. I have some familiarity with how due-diligence searches go: occasionally, there used to be a newspaper ad for unclaimed money. Legally, whoever had the money had to do a due-diligence search for the owner. It was interesting to see what a due-diligence search can fail to find, like the University of Minnesota. What the proposal would have done is allowed someone to take something copyrighted, look in the wrong phone book for the copyright holder, and made copies freely, to the likely detriment of the copyright holder.
Jobs gave the customer what the customer didn't know he or she wanted, and was spectacularly successful in his later years. If he had made an apparently stupid change, it would most likely have wound up being brilliant. Cook can't do that.
Eventually, Apple sold off what it had left as Macintosh XLs, at a massive discount. The people who bought them seem to have liked them a lot.
Epsom actually did come out with a GUI computer being run by a Z80A instead of a 68000, shortly after the Lisa (I think it was called the QX-10). And now you know why you never heard of it.
I have a 5S, and according to my usual pattern it's time to upgrade. The way I use my phone, larger than the 5S is a dealbreaker, and I'm not keen on losing the headphone jack. The SE looks like it was deliberately designed as a second-rate phone, and while it would be a significant improvement over my 5S it isn't enough of an improvement to make me upgrade. Nothing else that came out after the 5S will work for me.
I don't expect Apple to produce phones to my specs, but if they continue to not produce phones I like I may have to switch to Android. We're not talking high tragedy here, but Apple has lost two sales by not having what my wife and I want.
Whose grid? Last I checked, the US had three grids: eastern, western, and (of course) Texas.
The costs of coal never seem to include the health effects and its contribution to global warming. If the externalities were to be internalized, coal would cost a lot more.
Clinton wasn't prosecuted for negligence with classified materials because nobody faces serious charges for just being negligent with them. If you don't agree, please find a counterexample, because I haven't found one and nobody's shown me one. There was one guy who agreed to plead guilty to a misdemeanor, and in the end he didn't have to.
People who deliberately put classified material where it shouldn't be are frequently prosecuted, and can wind up serving years in prison. That is where the line is drawn. You may think it should be otherwise, but Clinton's treatment was in no way special.
Bear in mind that, while reporters and editors are heavy left-wing, the people who tell them what to do are mostly Republicans.
If you live in the US, it's "we". In a conflict, you don't get special consideration by insisting that you didn't vote for the leaders.
Both Obama and Clinton are too smart to provoke an actual war with Russia. We may be in for more brinkmanship.
I've seen popular histories, the type you might find in public schools, for both sides. The US ones tend to describe the Soviet contribution as "disaster in 1941 ...Stalingrad...mumble...Berlin". The Soviet ones tend to describe how useless the West was until they stop mentioning the West much, mention how the Red Army saved the West in the Battle of the Bulge. Cover the Pacific by talking about the disasters of December 1941, and then skip it until the Red Army is needed in Manchuria at the end of the war.
I'm not aware of a significant role for suicide bombers on either side (the Japanese were into them big-time in 1945). The Germans put their best stuff on the Eastern Front, in addition to Romanians and others. They'd have done better by helping out the minor Axis armies, but there was something of a self-fulfilling belief that Germans were great and everybody else wasn't German.
The main Allied drive on the continent started in June 1944 with an amphibious assault and ended in May 1945, not a full year later, with troops in Prague and overrunning the agreed-on demarcation line. That's impressive.
Lend-Lease played more of a role in the East than some people think. About 20% of the Red Army tanks were Lend-Lease, and a good chunk of the combat aircraft. The main impact came in things like logistics and support equipment. The speed of the Soviet advance west after 1943 was primarily due to Lend-Lease. Clearly, the Soviets had the war mostly won before LL had all that much impact, but it played a considerable part afterwards.
Do NOT rely on memoirs to learn the history. They're worth reading, but they're always biased. In particular, Germany lost the war, and so German generals wanted a reason why they lost that didn't implicate their abilities. Their rule was to blame everything possible on Hitler.
Hitler wasn't worse than other heads of state (and better than Churchill) until Germany was definitely losing. At that point, there was a big rift in the thinking of Hitler (defeat meant the destruction of the Aryan race, and therefore any chance at victory must be pursued at all costs), and the generals (losing the war slowly will make our peace terms better when we finally end this war, and we don't want to take stupid risks with a small chance of winning and a large chance of losing faster).
You're underestimating the Soviet leadership. The war started very poorly for the Soviets, since most officers had been promoted beyond their level of competence because of their political alignment, not ability (there was an order to division commanders that it was forbidden to just put anti-tank guns evenly along the divisional front), the Party had too much influence, and Soviet mobile warfare doctrine was in the middle of a massive change. The Soviets then had to remake their army while in the middle of a desperate war, after having lost well over a million soldiers and much of their land, which means that tactical proficiency was pretty miserable until 1943 but improved after that.
Given such a blunt instrument, and the removal of some high-level Soviet generals in 1941, the Soviets did pretty well. They frequently surprised the Germans but were not often surprised themselves. .They showed a good deal of proficiency in conducting operations in most places in 1944. The Soviets never had the manpower to defeat the Germans in the way you suggest, running at no more than about 2-1 in manpower (offset to some extent by better German tactics) until late 1944.
Hitler's role in losing was deliberately exaggerated by the German generals when they were writing memoirs after the war. In fact, he was no more of a problem than other national leaders until Germany was already clearly losing, at which point Hitler and his generals had very different goals.
Some Soviet equipment was very good. The artillery was good, and the T-34/85 was arguably the best tank of the war (earlier T-34s suffered from bad ergonomics).
Censoring people is preventing them from saying anything, which isn't as far as I can tell happening on Facebook. There is a section on trending stories, which has been accused of being pro-Clinton, and may well be so, but that isn't censorship. That's opinion, like you'll find pretty much everywhere in media. If you want to call that manipulation, then every media player I know of manipulates, and the word loses meaning.
In other words, you have your pre-formed doctrine, and aren't willing to look at evidence and speculate about what it means.
The leaks aren't from Russia, since then you'd have to wonder if you were Putin's dupe. They're correct and authentic, because if they weren't you wouldn't have things to hate Clinton about, such as politics as usual and the fact that some CEOs support her. You need to back off and think for a while.
Scale is important. Also, I'd suspect that Clinton and Obama had some reason to believe that they were attacking valid targets. The invasion of Iraq is arguably a major war crime in itself.
The Soviets invaded Poland, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania before WWII. Considering their economic and military problems, this wasn't a record of peace. They took advantage of WWII to impose what they called Communism on several other countries. I think you can compare what went on in those countries with what went on in US-dominated countries. US-dominated countries were often treated well, sometimes very poorly, but it doesn't seem to compare with what the Soviets did to Poland, East Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Romania. The Soviets were at least as ruthless as the US in dealing with Third World countries.
Roosevelt was slowly pushing the US into war with Germany, and was also (from 1940 on) trying to build up the US Armed Forces to be ready to fight a large war.
In September 1941, we were de facto at war with Germany in the Atlantic. We didn't do very well in this period, but we were fighting the U-boats (not sinking any, mind you, but we tried). We were unsuccessfully trying to avoid a war against Japan.
The entry of the US had some immediate bad effects for the Allies, as the desire to build up US forces for later use cut down on what we were sending to the countries actually fighting. The USAAF conducted its first European bombing raid in July 1942, using US-built bombers borrowed from the Brits. The US Army didn't get into action until November 1942 in North Africa, where it found a considerable number of shortcomings. In 1944, the US was waging war on multiple fronts, with extremely effective air power, and supplying other Allies with plenty of stuff, but the first year or so of US participation was awfully rough.
I'm not sure how things would have gone with US entry earlier. Chamberlain, the British Prime Minister for the first nine or ten months of the war, preferred to keep the US out if possible. He was succeeded by Churchill, who wanted the US in badly, completely failing to recognize that the US was not out to save the British Empire. US preparations started in earnest after the fall of France, and ten months earlier preparation would have helped to some extent.
Compared to, say Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt, Hitler was a reasonably good strategist. His problem was that his generals didn't agree with him about what sort of war it was. The generals, as a group, thought that the best thing to do was to try for some sort of 1918-style peace terms - harsh, but livable. Hitler thought that losing would be the end of the German race.
Therefore, Hitler saw his generals as planning to slowly lose the war that must be won, while the generals saw Hitler as doing increasingly risky and wasteful things in pursuit of an unattainable victory. Since Hitler's generals weren't doing what he saw as necessary, he fired lots of them and started micromanaging the others.
In actual fact, they were both wrong. Germany was overrun and the government destroyed, but the German people were mostly treated sort of OK, at least in the Western occupation zones.
More to the point, Spain was a neutral in WWII, not an ally. (Franco had allowed Germany to recruit a division to serve on the Eastern Front. Franco figured he was against the Soviet Union, wanted to look sympathetic with Fascists, and thought sending the hard-core fascists to die in the East solved some of his problems also.) Spain wasn't screwed over by WWII, but by the Spanish Civil War just before it.
There is publicly available evidence that Russia was behind it. It's not nearly conclusive evidence. There is a plausible motive for messing in US elections. So, are you stupid enough to dismiss the possibility? Or stupid enough to trust the Russians not to make changes in what they leak?
The only point I see in your post is an attempt to delay doing anything until it's too late.
And we're turning previously productive areas into deserts by changing the climate.
When was it last 1000 ppm, and how much has the Sun warmed up since then? On a geological time scale, the Sun is getting hotter, and in less than a billion years it will boil off all Earth's water (unless somebody does something about it, which could involve something developed quite soon in geological time).
It's a tragedy of the commons. No matter whether I work hard to reduce my CO2 emissions or don't give a crap, global warming is going to happen the same to within any conceivable measurement. One ppm of CO2 is something over seven billion tons, and burning an extra hundred pounds a day isn't going to make a difference. If three hundred million of my best friends conserve along with me, there will be a noticeable difference.
Humans don't do well at cooperating in circumstances like this, and government intervention is normally necessary.