Here's my essay on the Time issue. I demonstrate how it saves nothing, and actually causes measurable harm. IT is a certainty that VCRs and Watches that are auto compensating to DST are not going to get the time right now for a month of the year. I live in SK, I know this, since I don't change my clocks anyway in the year I'm always on DST.
==
Time for a change? - USA changes their Daylight Savings Law
The USA has decided it's high time to take time by force. Just watch them, this time the US federal government is passing a bill that extends Daylight Savings Time into March and November, which gives American children about another 60 days to get up and go to school in the dark, while making sure business executives have more daylight hours on the golf course after dinner. "Supporters say extending daylight saving time would save about 100,000 barrels of oil a day because offices and stores would be open while it was still light outside and therefore use less energy." - boston.com "A government study [conducted in the mid-1970s] estimated the additional energy savings at the equivalent of 100,000 barrels of oil a day, or about half of 1 percent of the nation's daily oil consumption." - suntimes.com When was the last time you saw an open store not using their lights when it was high noon? What business turns off lights when it is bright outside? Besides professional sports I can't think of one.
OK, I guess you have to start somewhere, and every little bit can help right? Well let's take a look at their numbers and put them into perspective. 60 days of savings X 100,000 barrels of oil = 6 million barrels of oil saved. How does that amount compare to what is typically used in the USA in a day? "Gasoline demand has averaged almost 9.5 million barrels a day over the last four weeks, 2.5 percent more than the same period last year." " Oil prices today are 46 percent higher than a year ago." - bloomberg.com
What that means is that after 60 days, the USA will have saved less than 1 day's worth of oil [using the conservative 100,000 barrels/day estimate from the 1970s study]. Is it worth it? Maybe.
If you consider the wild media claims that billions of dollars are spent every year after cleaning up after a computer worm or virus attack, the expense at reprogramming everything computerized that is time sensitive is going to be astronomical. The man-hours to reprogram everything is going to be much greater than any time wasted on malware. It's like a self-imposed Y2K problem that has already been fixed, and we're going back to tinker with it in the guise of saving oil. You could say that the US legislative branch has put in motion a ticking time bomb. This bomb is going to blow this November, and is a potential cash cow for Microsoft [a heavy Bush supporter by the way], IBM, and many other computer programmers. Although it will leave your "smart" VCR or DVD player guessing the wrong time for two months out of the year thanks to its hard-wired clock programming. And it will burden airlines with yet another scheduling nightmare to worry about. And hurt the Canadian transportation industry if we don't standardize our time with the new American DST system.
So this boils down to a huge waste of time, over an obviously insignificant amount of oil. Before the US government decided to plunge North America [and their other trading partners] into temporal chaos, it'd be nice if they considered the negative consequences of their actions. And it would also be nice if they took meaningful steps to reducing oil consumption such as strict fuel milage laws for new cars. But they don't have time for that I guess.
"[1] It is G rated. I guess some people are sick of car chases, boobies and scary monsters - go figure! The "naughtiest" part is penguins doing "it" to make more penguins. I actually saw a parent take their child out of the theatre for this one. Felt sorry for the poor kid..."
That's sad. It's also sad to consider the mere sighting of a breast or animals having sex warrants a PG or higher rating. Why is it infants get to see boobies every day of their life, but as soon as they hit a certain age they must be protected from breasts? Reefer madness I guess.
Clippy asks: "You seem to be composing a bomb threat, would you like help?"
"You seem to be writing a terrorist agenda, would you like some pointers?"
On the Internet is where I hope terrorists try to connect, because it will sure make things easier for spies than it was for them to infiltrate Afghanistans training camps. They don't have broadband in Tora Bora.
I think scientists would have still discovered on paper that the bomb was attainable, and it would be a worse wold if the US hadn't pushed to develop it before the Nazis or Japanese [or a more recent threat]. What would the world be like today, if with our technology, someone mined enough uranium and there weren't guards on things like that because people weren't historically aware of the dangers that nukes pose to everyone?
I do think that the number of bombs that the US and USSR made, is what is going to cost us in the end. There's just no reason for more than a few hundreds to ever have been made, other than nationalistic greed.
They couldn't guess because it wasn't a multiple choice. The summary says that they need the person to look at different choices, and they can determine which choice has been chosen. So it's not really a useful interrogation means - yet, unless they show the suspect a list of pictures and can objectively determine what thoughts each picture invokes. And I have a feeling it would be a lot less accurate if the participant isn't a willing subject.
You keep saying 1946, but the war ended in 1945, started in 1939 [although Poland was invaded in 38 if I recall correctly], and America entered in 1941 officially even though they helped both sides in Europe before that.
It was a different time, and fortunately we have the luxury of history to know that we should take all reasonable measures to avoid war and reasons to use nukes.
The fact that large and powerful countries are still displacing people to get their resources, is a sad testament to the lack of progress after 60 years. We are in a really dangerous time, when most of the survivors of WWII are about to pass on, and I don't think it's a time in history that is being passed on to today's children, meaning in 20 years we'll probably be reliving it.
It was Egghead that Onsale turned into, I recall now, and then I guess[?] that Newegg was born out of egghead? I don't have any evidence that they are the same thing though, only that Onsale and Egghead were the same.
Even if the first shock and awe was required to get the fear into the mainstream population, they didn't need the second bomb to land in a place with so many tens of thousands of civilians. It was simply international terrorism, and revenge, enacted by men who were so powerful and so desperate to win, that they "ran up the score".
"And if that's not enough for you, why did it take TWO nukes to get them to surrender, if they "were ready to surrender"?" How can we ever know if less than 2 bombs would have done it. It took 6 DAYS AFTER the SECOND was dropped before the surrender. The span between the 2 bombs was only 3 days.
"Sixty years have passed since the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. It and the attack on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, killed 200,000 and 70,000 people respectively. The attack signified the end of the Second World War, and it was the first and last time atomic weapons were used in conflict." "The Enola Gay was then used as the advance weather reconnaissance aircraft for the follow-up attack on Nagasaki that killed 70,000+ people.
You are assuming that by TWICE bombing primary military instead of civilian targets, that Japan wouldn't have surrendered. I think you're wrong, but that doesn't make you an idiot. You calling me one is just short sightedness on your part though.
Just kidding, Slashdot isn't a flop obviously, but I wonder if ONSALE.com ever traded stock, because they sure flopped, then turned into newegg.com and now I don't even know what business they are. Everything lost to eBay sadly.
"Yes, nuking Hiroshima was horrible. Nuking Nagasaki was horrible as well. But I don't see a better way out of 1945 with less deaths. "
Since we'll never know no one can be "right", but I don't think the 2nd bombing was needed, and the first and second did not have to be in large cities, they could have picked military targets with fewer civilian losses, and been equally devastating.
Started what issue? WWII was already running for years before the USA finallly actively joined the fray because of the Pearl Harbour surprise attack. Or do you want to debate if Pearl Harbour was really a surprise, since there's been suggestions that it was actually an American mistake or conspiracy that lost the transmission of the coming attack.
The USA attacked Japan with nukes first, what issue did that start?
"And dont kid yourself, if we didnt do that, the war would have drug on a *lot* longer and a lot more of your precious civilians would have died, on both sides."
60 years later, that's not clear, and of course we'll never know what would have happened if the USA had first bombed a Japanese island with military targets, instead of massive cities with hundreds of thousands of civilians.
The reason is that killing civilians has, and always will be a cheap and dirty way to win a war. Why kill the people actively fighting when you can kill their families instead? Oh wait, the 9/11 terrorists tried that, and look at the reception it received around the world? You want to act like a terrorist nation instead of being honourable?
How exactly did murdering civilians exact a toll that wouldn't have been felt if they'd bombed military operations and wiped those out instead?
" The way we finished the war saved a lot more lives then would have been lost if we all kept fighting."
You're thinking like a propagandist, not a human being. There was no reason to incinerate an entire city of CIVILIANS, when there would have been military targets that could have served as an equally impressive example of the might that America wielded. The atrocities of the Japanese do not make those of America any less atrocious.
I have a feeling you'd cry foul if someone started rationalizing September 11th by saying, "America started it by occupying places in the Middle East, blah blah blah." So don't try to be a crime against humanity defender.
Does anyone know of a blog site written by a scammer? That would be quite the reading. I guess the P-P-P-Powerbook blogsite is sort of the other side of that, but what about the scammer's perspective? Blogging can't be considered serious journalism until the other side is given a chance to defend their actions.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm in the market for quiet PCs, and anyone who isn't has a desire to go deaf I guess.
I'd kill for quiet servers, as I sit here next to a room full of Xeons.
Here's my essay on the Time issue. I demonstrate how it saves nothing, and actually causes measurable harm. IT is a certainty that VCRs and Watches that are auto compensating to DST are not going to get the time right now for a month of the year. I live in SK, I know this, since I don't change my clocks anyway in the year I'm always on DST.
==
Time for a change? - USA changes their Daylight Savings Law
The USA has decided it's high time to take time by force. Just watch them, this time the US federal government is passing a bill that extends Daylight Savings Time into March and November, which gives American children about another 60 days to get up and go to school in the dark, while making sure business executives have more daylight hours on the golf course after dinner. "Supporters say extending daylight saving time would save about 100,000 barrels of oil a day because offices and stores would be open while it was still light outside and therefore use less energy." - boston.com "A government study [conducted in the mid-1970s] estimated the additional energy savings at the equivalent of 100,000 barrels of oil a day, or about half of 1 percent of the nation's daily oil consumption." - suntimes.com When was the last time you saw an open store not using their lights when it was high noon? What business turns off lights when it is bright outside? Besides professional sports I can't think of one.
OK, I guess you have to start somewhere, and every little bit can help right? Well let's take a look at their numbers and put them into perspective. 60 days of savings X 100,000 barrels of oil = 6 million barrels of oil saved. How does that amount compare to what is typically used in the USA in a day? "Gasoline demand has averaged almost 9.5 million barrels a day over the last four weeks, 2.5 percent more than the same period last year." " Oil prices today are 46 percent higher than a year ago." - bloomberg.com
What that means is that after 60 days, the USA will have saved less than 1 day's worth of oil [using the conservative 100,000 barrels/day estimate from the 1970s study]. Is it worth it? Maybe.
If you consider the wild media claims that billions of dollars are spent every year after cleaning up after a computer worm or virus attack, the expense at reprogramming everything computerized that is time sensitive is going to be astronomical. The man-hours to reprogram everything is going to be much greater than any time wasted on malware. It's like a self-imposed Y2K problem that has already been fixed, and we're going back to tinker with it in the guise of saving oil. You could say that the US legislative branch has put in motion a ticking time bomb. This bomb is going to blow this November, and is a potential cash cow for Microsoft [a heavy Bush supporter by the way], IBM, and many other computer programmers. Although it will leave your "smart" VCR or DVD player guessing the wrong time for two months out of the year thanks to its hard-wired clock programming. And it will burden airlines with yet another scheduling nightmare to worry about. And hurt the Canadian transportation industry if we don't standardize our time with the new American DST system.
So this boils down to a huge waste of time, over an obviously insignificant amount of oil. Before the US government decided to plunge North America [and their other trading partners] into temporal chaos, it'd be nice if they considered the negative consequences of their actions. And it would also be nice if they took meaningful steps to reducing oil consumption such as strict fuel milage laws for new cars. But they don't have time for that I guess.
==
"swearing their fealty to Linux"
With highbrow language like that, Linux is going to acquire a reputation as the OS of snobs. That's not good.
I guess swearing fealty is better than opening a sealed OEM package though, you retain more of your rights.
"[1] It is G rated. I guess some people are sick of car chases, boobies and scary monsters - go figure! The "naughtiest" part is penguins doing "it" to make more penguins. I actually saw a parent take their child out of the theatre for this one. Felt sorry for the poor kid..."
That's sad. It's also sad to consider the mere sighting of a breast or animals having sex warrants a PG or higher rating. Why is it infants get to see boobies every day of their life, but as soon as they hit a certain age they must be protected from breasts? Reefer madness I guess.
Clippy asks:
"You seem to be composing a bomb threat, would you like help?"
"You seem to be writing a terrorist agenda, would you like some pointers?"
On the Internet is where I hope terrorists try to connect, because it will sure make things easier for spies than it was for them to infiltrate Afghanistans training camps. They don't have broadband in Tora Bora.
I think scientists would have still discovered on paper that the bomb was attainable, and it would be a worse wold if the US hadn't pushed to develop it before the Nazis or Japanese [or a more recent threat]. What would the world be like today, if with our technology, someone mined enough uranium and there weren't guards on things like that because people weren't historically aware of the dangers that nukes pose to everyone?
I do think that the number of bombs that the US and USSR made, is what is going to cost us in the end. There's just no reason for more than a few hundreds to ever have been made, other than nationalistic greed.
I wonder how many people have tried to fly a kite with camera attached, near the Whitehouse in a nearby park?
"But if, unlike a polygraph, a brain scan could result in an accurate lie detector, well that would have a huge impact on society."
;-)
If you can trick people into getting an MRI
Better hope they don't have any metal in their bodies though, otherwise, oops...
They couldn't guess because it wasn't a multiple choice. The summary says that they need the person to look at different choices, and they can determine which choice has been chosen. So it's not really a useful interrogation means - yet, unless they show the suspect a list of pictures and can objectively determine what thoughts each picture invokes. And I have a feeling it would be a lot less accurate if the participant isn't a willing subject.
You keep saying 1946, but the war ended in 1945, started in 1939 [although Poland was invaded in 38 if I recall correctly], and America entered in 1941 officially even though they helped both sides in Europe before that.
So a black hole is like nature's garberator, and it's a good thing our solar system isn't charted to become part of one of their accretion disks?
It was a different time, and fortunately we have the luxury of history to know that we should take all reasonable measures to avoid war and reasons to use nukes.
The fact that large and powerful countries are still displacing people to get their resources, is a sad testament to the lack of progress after 60 years. We are in a really dangerous time, when most of the survivors of WWII are about to pass on, and I don't think it's a time in history that is being passed on to today's children, meaning in 20 years we'll probably be reliving it.
It was Egghead that Onsale turned into, I recall now, and then I guess[?] that Newegg was born out of egghead? I don't have any evidence that they are the same thing though, only that Onsale and Egghead were the same.
Even if the first shock and awe was required to get the fear into the mainstream population, they didn't need the second bomb to land in a place with so many tens of thousands of civilians. It was simply international terrorism, and revenge, enacted by men who were so powerful and so desperate to win, that they "ran up the score".
"And if that's not enough for you, why did it take TWO nukes to get them to surrender, if they "were ready to surrender"?"
How can we ever know if less than 2 bombs would have done it. It took 6 DAYS AFTER the SECOND was dropped before the surrender. The span between the 2 bombs was only 3 days.
"Sixty years have passed since the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. It and the attack on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, killed 200,000 and 70,000 people respectively. The attack signified the end of the Second World War, and it was the first and last time atomic weapons were used in conflict."
"The Enola Gay was then used as the advance weather reconnaissance aircraft for the follow-up attack on Nagasaki that killed 70,000+ people.
Six days later, Japan surrendered. "
"You sir are and[sic] idiot of the worst kind."
You are assuming that by TWICE bombing primary military instead of civilian targets, that Japan wouldn't have surrendered. I think you're wrong, but that doesn't make you an idiot. You calling me one is just short sightedness on your part though.
I know for a fact that my Dad's ONSALE.com account worked at Newegg after Onsale went flop in about 1999.
Just kidding, Slashdot isn't a flop obviously, but I wonder if ONSALE.com ever traded stock, because they sure flopped, then turned into newegg.com and now I don't even know what business they are. Everything lost to eBay sadly.
"Yes, nuking Hiroshima was horrible. Nuking Nagasaki was horrible as well. But I don't see a better way out of 1945 with less deaths. "
Since we'll never know no one can be "right", but I don't think the 2nd bombing was needed, and the first and second did not have to be in large cities, they could have picked military targets with fewer civilian losses, and been equally devastating.
Started what issue? WWII was already running for years before the USA finallly actively joined the fray because of the Pearl Harbour surprise attack. Or do you want to debate if Pearl Harbour was really a surprise, since there's been suggestions that it was actually an American mistake or conspiracy that lost the transmission of the coming attack.
The USA attacked Japan with nukes first, what issue did that start?
"And dont kid yourself, if we didnt do that, the war would have drug on a *lot* longer and a lot more of your precious civilians would have died, on both sides."
60 years later, that's not clear, and of course we'll never know what would have happened if the USA had first bombed a Japanese island with military targets, instead of massive cities with hundreds of thousands of civilians.
The reason is that killing civilians has, and always will be a cheap and dirty way to win a war. Why kill the people actively fighting when you can kill their families instead? Oh wait, the 9/11 terrorists tried that, and look at the reception it received around the world? You want to act like a terrorist nation instead of being honourable?
How exactly did murdering civilians exact a toll that wouldn't have been felt if they'd bombed military operations and wiped those out instead?
"
The way we finished the war saved a lot more lives then would have been lost if we all kept fighting."
You're thinking like a propagandist, not a human being. There was no reason to incinerate an entire city of CIVILIANS, when there would have been military targets that could have served as an equally impressive example of the might that America wielded. The atrocities of the Japanese do not make those of America any less atrocious.
I have a feeling you'd cry foul if someone started rationalizing September 11th by saying, "America started it by occupying places in the Middle East, blah blah blah." So don't try to be a crime against humanity defender.
Does anyone know of a blog site written by a scammer? That would be quite the reading. I guess the P-P-P-Powerbook blogsite is sort of the other side of that, but what about the scammer's perspective? Blogging can't be considered serious journalism until the other side is given a chance to defend their actions.
[yes I'm kidding]
I've heard that if you give a man fire, he'll cook for a day, but if you set a man on fire, he'll cook for the rest of his life.
I'd like to set a few spyware writers on fire.
http://archives.cbc.ca/IDD-1-71-1794/conflict_war/ hiroshima/
It's a sad day in the history of humanity. The cruelty that we visit upon each other should never be forgotten.