The patent will be more specific than that, and will typically cover one or more specific implementations.
What planet are you from? A patent covering "a specific implementation"? Whoever heard of such a thing!
If your attorney draws up a patent that's not vague enough to cover any competing products, it's time for a new attorney. Even I know to paste the magic boilerplate: "The specifications are to be considered as illustrations rather than restrictions, and alternative embodiments shall not be considered as outside present scope"
You almost sound like you expect the patent sytem to make sense!
(Seriously, read the patent itself. It is NOT more specific)
in the 1994 timeframe doesn't exactly strike me as "obvious."
On the contrary, it's entirely obvious. Even if you know nothing about software, the fact that Netscape published an implementation in 95 should strongly suggest that someone over there had considered the idea in 94 or earlier.
And from a perspective of basic computer science, splitting a piece of software into separate modules (plugins) is a fundamental transformation you can apply at any time. It changes only the development and distribution methodologies, not the functionality of the product.
Seeing the words "with a plugin" or "from the web" in any patent should should flag it as invalid by obviousness.
If you page through uspto.gov, it's not hard to find at least two software patents PER DAY that projects like Linux or GIMP infringe on. There's a couple Sun patents which apply to almost any software written in C...
If programmers start trying to avoid software patents before the rightsholders even contact them, pretty soon it's all they'll accomplish.
Knowingly infringing a patent could cost the Mozilla developers a LOT of money
Which is why they should completely ignore it. Don't even read the patent abstract, unless a lawyer asks you to.
You give the corporation too much credit. We've already observed they make stupid legal decisions. Why do you suppose they can make intelligent choices about human resources?
It's only fair, since most of the supposed rampant security holes in Windows lamented here on Slashdot are actually the result of insecure third-party software, and NOT the operating system itself.
What do you mean? The most common complaints against Windows(r) security are IIS and Outlook holes, followed by some kind of DOM and netpopup things. All written by 100% Microsoft programmers. That's first party.
What 3rd party applications create security holes on Windows? (And please show me a Slashdot comment complaining about one)
What kinds of 3rd party software even runs on a Windows server? JVM? ColdFusion? Websphere? I never hear about exploits in products like that, only the official Microsoft stuff seems highly vulernable.
The point is that this report handily debunks the myth that a Linux server is inherantly more secure than a Windows server.
How do you know that? Have you actually read or even seen the report?
The only thing I've seen is a tiny newspaper blurb that's too short to contain any real content (What is their definition of "successful"? DoS, escalation, remote-root, what? And "verifiable"? If Linux-intrusions turn out to be more verifiable than Windows, that could be a benefit for the platform)
Do you think the silly GPL license stops EVERY company from stealing open source code and using it in their products without telling anyone about it?
What stops them is the fear that one of their own programmers will turn out to be a Slashdot-head who will blow the whistle on them, and that after 6 months of litigation Richard Stallman will own their company.
If your evil company is run by evil businessmen with evil agenda and you are a drone carrying out those evil agendas, than you are also EVIL.
If you're a lowly programmer at SCO, you've probably seen enough of their source code to know that the case against Linux is absolutely baseless and will inevitably fail.
This means that any action you take cannot really hurt Linux. So what's wrong with punching the timeclock, drawing your paycheck, and draining a little money away from an evil corporation?
BT does other things. One "idiot in legal" doesn't reflect on the company as a whole, which still performs services for customers.
SCO has no function at all except as a lawsuit-factory. All of their employees are either plaintiffs, litigators, or techies waiting to be a witness in litigation.
Any technical person still working at SCO has one job: to claim that Linux is an infringing copy of SCO Unix.
If a person has decided that such a claim is absolutely untrue, then he must view anyone making it as a liar. And believing someone to be dishonest is a perfect reason to show him the door.
1) The argument that "the Japanese didn't have a great industrial infrastructure" and therefore an invasion of mainland Japan would have been relatively bloodless does not hold water.
Nice for you to mention that. But who are you responding to? Nobody on this page has made that argument.
Total victory was a political, not a military requirement, and it was justified by ref
That's the second time someone has made that claim on this page- that WWI was a "minor" victory, but WWII was a "major" one, and that the difference was somehow important.
The difference between the aftermaths of those two wars came not from the degree of capitulation achieved, but by the actions of the winners. After WWI, the Allied demanded money from the losers. After WWII they gave them money.
Give people money, and they become your friends. Take their money, and they develop plans to strike back.
Ahem, circular logic anyone? The Indianapolis was lost BECAUSE of the atomic bombing of Japan. If not for the Hiroshima mission, it never would've travelled that far from sub-hunting escorts.
By 1945 US pilots were well practiced in detecting and destroying submarines in the Pacific. That ship's deviation from protocol was so extreme and so obviously dangerous that its commander was court martialed (even though he was just following orders).
The other thing you don't realize is that at the time, the USSR was very eager to "help" us finish off the Japanese.
That was exactly my first comment that opened this whole thread!
The atomic bombings on Japan weren't truely directed at Japan, but at the USSR. Both the US and USSR already knew that WWII was winding down, and both were looking ahead to dividing up international influence amoung the two of them for the next few decades.
And how exactly would they have accomplished that? By marching their armies across the pond????
They could've eventually got ships from somewhere- something the Japanese could never do.
First, there were still numerous Japanese occupying forces in other countries and on several Pacific islands.
They were unsupplied, uncommanded, and just plain weak. The US Naval and Aerial superiority was total, and no resupply would ever reach those units. Time would defeat them. But even granting them a tenacious ability to hold out in their positions, they presented no threat to the US. Infantry on a Pacific Island is not a threat.
The lessons of World War I were too fresh to ignore.
The victory in WWI was total enough for the winners to subject the vanquished states to severe, ceaseless reparations. It was that punishment inflicted on the fallen which was the mistake of WWI- a postconflict political/economic descision, not a military one.
Looking from a resources standpoint, Japan presented no threat in 1941.
No. In 41 they had accumulated material from around the world, and had many productive colonies.
Yet they did. Left to themselves in 1945, the most likely result would have been a rearmament,
No. The most likely result would be the ex-slaves from all those formly productive colonies mutilating any Japanese who steps foot on the Asia mainland.
Erm, wrong. That's not what we're talking about. In my parent post I defined the term "nuke" to be an atomic explosive like a warhead on a Cold War missile, not a "dirty bomb" like you are proposing.
If you read my last post again, you'll see that I stated that a dirty bomb would be easy to make, but that was not the topic of discussion.
However, from a the perspective of a rational terrorist wishing to maximize civilian deaths, distributing chemical or biological agents into a food supply is the way to go. A fission bomb, however, has the advantage of killing a well-protected target (like 1600 Pennsylvania) just by reaching the outskirts of town.
tie a few hundred kilo of semtex to it,
That by itself could kill around 3000 people if you know where to plant it.
Clinton didn't do "nothing". His misguided and illegal assasination attempt against Osama Bin Laden in 1998 was the direct motivation for the retaliatory WTC attacks 2 years ago today.
They still had operating submarines and they still had an operating air force, most notably the kamikazes. The U.S. sustained quite heavy casualties during the Okinawa campaign from these and other forces.
The submarines were undirected, unfueled, and helpless. The kamikazes left in the "air force" were Tsurugi, a kind of wooden plane built after running out of steel. They were never known to hit a single target- they rarely had enough petrol to take off.
The losses on Okinawa were serious, but they were from light-infantry attacks- the kind of thing that could be avoided entirely by prudently deciding against occupying enemy territory with ground troops.
There was no way that we could end the war without elminating the Japanese military completely,
Well that really depends on your perspective. The US could've stopped fighting and gone home at any time, and the war would've been over for them. (Various nations from Southeast Asia would've eagerly volunteered to invade Japan within a year or two).
The only reason they couldn't stop fighting is the US public wanted a conclusive, total victory. If you accept that mental state as a given, then it's true they couldn't stop fighting.
But going down the path of "I was powerless to do anything besides what I wanted to do" seems silly (although it is more valid when looking at a nation than for discussing individual motivation).
Once the option of withdrawing to an anticlimatic technical victory is eliminated, then the only choice left for the US President was overwhelming force- the atomic bomb. Truman couldn't have withstood counting the families that would be sundered by pouring American troops into Japan for a whole other year of violent invasion, while knowing he'd possesed a resource that hadn't been used. Not only would US casulties be high, but the Japanese dead would quickly outnumber the populations of Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
Their defense of their homeland would have been formidable indeed, and without the atomic bombs, we would have paid a steep price to conquer them.
My whole point is that the US had no military need to conquer them. Japan had been knocked out of the fight; it presented no threat. Occupying the islands had to be evaluted as an opportunity for future profit, not as a defense measure against an attack.
(But it wasn't logically "evaluated" at all- as I said, the US public had long since decided that only a total victory would satisfy them. They were in no mood to think of pros and cons)
Your last comment is not up to the standards of the rest of your commentary.
"The enemy has guns, so we could buy bulletproof vests for our soldiers, but if we did that the enemy would just sneak up on them and use knives or bombs instead, so let's not bother with the bulletproof vests and let our soldiers get shot to pieces."
There's a rule of thumb about analogies and slashdot. You've illustrated it excellently. Not only are guns and nukes completely different, but so are soldiers and cities, and ballistic vests and antimissile shields (hint: one of them can be bought, the other is impossible)
If the US had an antimissile shield on the other hand,
Then N.Korea doesn't waste any cash on missiles, so they can built more bombs, and have a little leftover to bribe the border guards who think they're bargaining with drug-dealers.
Why on earth would you ship from China when all the stuff is already available where you want to build the bomb?
Technical, engineering risk. You have no guarantee the manufacturing process will work, unless you've carried it out already and tested the result. (Nothing's more embarrassing than reading about a "dirty bomb" attack in the headlines when you had planned for a mushroom cloud!) And if you've done that in some other country, it's simpler and safer to ship the finished device than to risk starting up a munitions factory near the target.
The US could get lucky and local-law enforcement might inspect that little manufacturing project for OSHA compliance and noise ordinances. They're much less likely to exhaustively search every motorhome rolling south from Canada. (And if you do run into difficulty and murder a border guard, fleeing the scene won't leave much evidence behind to point the investigators to the target city, or the nature of the plot. Mobility is the terrorist infiltrator's best friend.)
Talk about taking coals to Newcastle.
Scrounging up uranium in Manhattan is a good way to get some jumpy PATRIOT enforcers all over you. The dealers for nuke-quality components have gotten into a habit of phoning the FBI whenever a new customer shows up. Far safer to collect the materials in a neutral country and then ship them over.
One advantage of bringing in a finished bomb is that it's much easier to recruit operatives with the right skill-sets. It takes one kind of person to infiltrate an infidel nation and coldly kill a million sleeping civilians. It takes different talents to improvise an explosive device capable of inducing atomic fission. Finding a crew that can handle both jobs (and also speak inconspicuous English) will be a big headache for Human Resources. And increasing the staffing level will just raise the chance of someone screwing up and spilling the beans.
dont forget who attacked whom while their diplomats were still in the capital crying war can be avoided,
That's mostly true. Even though the Admiral who carried out the attack mistakenly believed that war had been formally declared some hours before the strike, it was still a violation of the era's martial codes.
However, we can go back to the question of what "honor" means. Does it mean doing everything in your power to preserve the lives of your citizens? If so, then a sneak attack can be honorable if it's the safest way to win. "All's fair"
(Of course, that definition would place not antagonizing the USA as the best choice of all)
The Japanese were still a formidable threat, and it was essential that we defeat them utterly. To allow them to regroup and rebuild without eliminating the elements that led them into the war would have been utter folly.
No they were not formidable. They had no Navy left at all. Japan has zero natural resources (iron, coal, oil), and had no stockpiles left. There is no way to "rebuild" a 20th century army from rice and wood. They could not have harmed any American serviceman unless he set foot on their island and got stabbed.
The only thing separating them from utter defeat was a thousand heirloom swords and a million sharp pieces of bamboo.
I assure you that there were very few tears shed by the peoples they butchered when those bombs exploded.
I concur that humans quickly lose the ability to cry after being butchered.
Truman and his cabinet debated the merits of various approaches and concluded that the best approach was the one they followed. I think history has shown them to have been right.
If you think it's effect on the USSR was valuable, then that's true. The argument that such a spectacular defeat lead to better rebuilding has merit, but I won't go into that here.
The bombing was irrelevant for purposes of defeating Japan however. The Japanese ability to wage offensive war had been completely destroyed. If the US Navy had simply turned around and gone home in July 1945, Japan wouldn't have troubled them again.
Even given 200 years to work on it, they couldn't have put together another destroyer- there simply wasn't enough iron on the whole archipelago. The best they could've made were wooden ships to sail to Korea with... and the Koreans would've been ready with a nasty greeting party. Before long every other country occupied by Japan would've come back for revenge, and they'd probably be a poor Chinese protectorate today.
The difference between an A-Bomb and systematic firebombing is that panicked civilians can outrun fires and huddle together to starve in crowded suburban ruins.
One does not outrun a gamma ray.
Numerically, twice as many people died in 1 second at Hiroshima as did in one day at Dresden. Some people might say the amount of pain they suffered makes some difference; I don't.
Slashdot Mirror
Thus it won't have an effect on Opera.
Until they try to sell it to someone in the US. Or any WIPO-attached nation, like China and the whole EU.
But hey, if someone's content to go to Norway for web-browsing, that's fine.
The patent will be more specific than that, and will typically cover one or more specific implementations.
What planet are you from? A patent covering "a specific implementation"? Whoever heard of such a thing!
If your attorney draws up a patent that's not vague enough to cover any competing products, it's time for a new attorney. Even I know to paste the magic boilerplate: "The specifications are to be considered as illustrations rather than restrictions, and alternative embodiments shall not be considered as outside present scope"
You almost sound like you expect the patent sytem to make sense!
(Seriously, read the patent itself. It is NOT more specific)
in the 1994 timeframe doesn't exactly strike me as "obvious."
On the contrary, it's entirely obvious. Even if you know nothing about software, the fact that Netscape published an implementation in 95 should strongly suggest that someone over there had considered the idea in 94 or earlier.
And from a perspective of basic computer science, splitting a piece of software into separate modules (plugins) is a fundamental transformation you can apply at any time. It changes only the development and distribution methodologies, not the functionality of the product.
Seeing the words "with a plugin" or "from the web" in any patent should should flag it as invalid by obviousness.
We can't really sit around and wait
Why not? That's what Open Sourcers do about ALL patents.
If you page through uspto.gov, it's not hard to find at least two software patents PER DAY that projects like Linux or GIMP infringe on. There's a couple Sun patents which apply to almost any software written in C...
If programmers start trying to avoid software patents before the rightsholders even contact them, pretty soon it's all they'll accomplish.
Knowingly infringing a patent could cost the Mozilla developers a LOT of money
Which is why they should completely ignore it. Don't even read the patent abstract, unless a lawyer asks you to.
Otherwise, they would've been laid off.
You give the corporation too much credit. We've already observed they make stupid legal decisions. Why do you suppose they can make intelligent choices about human resources?
It's only fair, since most of the supposed rampant security holes in Windows lamented here on Slashdot are actually the result of insecure third-party software, and NOT the operating system itself.
What do you mean? The most common complaints against Windows(r) security are IIS and Outlook holes, followed by some kind of DOM and netpopup things. All written by 100% Microsoft programmers. That's first party.
What 3rd party applications create security holes on Windows? (And please show me a Slashdot comment complaining about one)
What kinds of 3rd party software even runs on a Windows server? JVM? ColdFusion? Websphere? I never hear about exploits in products like that, only the official Microsoft stuff seems highly vulernable.
The point is that this report handily debunks the myth that a Linux server is inherantly more secure than a Windows server.
How do you know that? Have you actually read or even seen the report?
The only thing I've seen is a tiny newspaper blurb that's too short to contain any real content (What is their definition of "successful"? DoS, escalation, remote-root, what? And "verifiable"? If Linux-intrusions turn out to be more verifiable than Windows, that could be a benefit for the platform)
Do you think the silly GPL license stops EVERY company from stealing open source code and using it in their products without telling anyone about it?
What stops them is the fear that one of their own programmers will turn out to be a Slashdot-head who will blow the whistle on them, and that after 6 months of litigation Richard Stallman will own their company.
If your evil company is run by evil businessmen with evil agenda and you are a drone carrying out those evil agendas, than you are also EVIL.
If you're a lowly programmer at SCO, you've probably seen enough of their source code to know that the case against Linux is absolutely baseless and will inevitably fail.
This means that any action you take cannot really hurt Linux. So what's wrong with punching the timeclock, drawing your paycheck, and draining a little money away from an evil corporation?
BT does other things. One "idiot in legal" doesn't reflect on the company as a whole, which still performs services for customers.
SCO has no function at all except as a lawsuit-factory. All of their employees are either plaintiffs, litigators, or techies waiting to be a witness in litigation.
Any technical person still working at SCO has one job: to claim that Linux is an infringing copy of SCO Unix.
If a person has decided that such a claim is absolutely untrue, then he must view anyone making it as a liar. And believing someone to be dishonest is a perfect reason to show him the door.
1) The argument that "the Japanese didn't have a great industrial infrastructure" and therefore an invasion of mainland Japan would have been relatively bloodless does not hold water.
Nice for you to mention that. But who are you responding to? Nobody on this page has made that argument.
Total victory was a political, not a military requirement, and it was justified by ref
That's the second time someone has made that claim on this page- that WWI was a "minor" victory, but WWII was a "major" one, and that the difference was somehow important.
The difference between the aftermaths of those two wars came not from the degree of capitulation achieved, but by the actions of the winners. After WWI, the Allied demanded money from the losers. After WWII they gave them money.
Give people money, and they become your friends. Take their money, and they develop plans to strike back.
Tell that to the crew of the USS Indianapolis.
Ahem, circular logic anyone? The Indianapolis was lost BECAUSE of the atomic bombing of Japan. If not for the Hiroshima mission, it never would've travelled that far from sub-hunting escorts.
By 1945 US pilots were well practiced in detecting and destroying submarines in the Pacific. That ship's deviation from protocol was so extreme and so obviously dangerous that its commander was court martialed (even though he was just following orders).
The other thing you don't realize is that at the time, the USSR was very eager to "help" us finish off the Japanese.
That was exactly my first comment that opened this whole thread!
The atomic bombings on Japan weren't truely directed at Japan, but at the USSR. Both the US and USSR already knew that WWII was winding down, and both were looking ahead to dividing up international influence amoung the two of them for the next few decades.
And how exactly would they have accomplished that? By marching their armies across the pond????
They could've eventually got ships from somewhere- something the Japanese could never do.
First, there were still numerous Japanese occupying forces in other countries and on several Pacific islands.
They were unsupplied, uncommanded, and just plain weak. The US Naval and Aerial superiority was total, and no resupply would ever reach those units. Time would defeat them. But even granting them a tenacious ability to hold out in their positions, they presented no threat to the US. Infantry on a Pacific Island is not a threat.
The lessons of World War I were too fresh to ignore.
The victory in WWI was total enough for the winners to subject the vanquished states to severe, ceaseless reparations. It was that punishment inflicted on the fallen which was the mistake of WWI- a postconflict political/economic descision, not a military one.
Looking from a resources standpoint, Japan presented no threat in 1941.
No. In 41 they had accumulated material from around the world, and had many productive colonies.
Yet they did. Left to themselves in 1945, the most likely result would have been a rearmament,
No. The most likely result would be the ex-slaves from all those formly productive colonies mutilating any Japanese who steps foot on the Asia mainland.
Erm, wrong. That's not what we're talking about. In my parent post I defined the term "nuke" to be an atomic explosive like a warhead on a Cold War missile, not a "dirty bomb" like you are proposing.
If you read my last post again, you'll see that I stated that a dirty bomb would be easy to make, but that was not the topic of discussion.
However, from a the perspective of a rational terrorist wishing to maximize civilian deaths, distributing chemical or biological agents into a food supply is the way to go. A fission bomb, however, has the advantage of killing a well-protected target (like 1600 Pennsylvania) just by reaching the outskirts of town.
tie a few hundred kilo of semtex to it,
That by itself could kill around 3000 people if you know where to plant it.
Doing nothing (Clinton 8 years)
Clinton didn't do "nothing". His misguided and illegal assasination attempt against Osama Bin Laden in 1998 was the direct motivation for the retaliatory WTC attacks 2 years ago today.
more people were killed by the absolutely unnecessary bombing of Dresden (done with conventional bombs)than in Hiroshima.
If you count slow death by radiation poisoning, then the Hiroshima deathcount surpassed Dresden's within 10 years.
They still had operating submarines and they still had an operating air force, most notably the kamikazes. The U.S. sustained quite heavy casualties during the Okinawa campaign from these and other forces.
The submarines were undirected, unfueled, and helpless. The kamikazes left in the "air force" were Tsurugi, a kind of wooden plane built after running out of steel. They were never known to hit a single target- they rarely had enough petrol to take off.
The losses on Okinawa were serious, but they were from light-infantry attacks- the kind of thing that could be avoided entirely by prudently deciding against occupying enemy territory with ground troops.
There was no way that we could end the war without elminating the Japanese military completely,
Well that really depends on your perspective. The US could've stopped fighting and gone home at any time, and the war would've been over for them. (Various nations from Southeast Asia would've eagerly volunteered to invade Japan within a year or two).
The only reason they couldn't stop fighting is the US public wanted a conclusive, total victory. If you accept that mental state as a given, then it's true they couldn't stop fighting.
But going down the path of "I was powerless to do anything besides what I wanted to do" seems silly (although it is more valid when looking at a nation than for discussing individual motivation).
Once the option of withdrawing to an anticlimatic technical victory is eliminated, then the only choice left for the US President was overwhelming force- the atomic bomb. Truman couldn't have withstood counting the families that would be sundered by pouring American troops into Japan for a whole other year of violent invasion, while knowing he'd possesed a resource that hadn't been used. Not only would US casulties be high, but the Japanese dead would quickly outnumber the populations of Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
Their defense of their homeland would have been formidable indeed, and without the atomic bombs, we would have paid a steep price to conquer them.
My whole point is that the US had no military need to conquer them. Japan had been knocked out of the fight; it presented no threat. Occupying the islands had to be evaluted as an opportunity for future profit, not as a defense measure against an attack.
(But it wasn't logically "evaluated" at all- as I said, the US public had long since decided that only a total victory would satisfy them. They were in no mood to think of pros and cons)
Your last comment is not up to the standards of the rest of your commentary.
Just being a literalist-nazi.
"The enemy has guns, so we could buy bulletproof vests for our soldiers, but if we did that the enemy would just sneak up on them and use knives or bombs instead, so let's not bother with the bulletproof vests and let our soldiers get shot to pieces."
There's a rule of thumb about analogies and slashdot. You've illustrated it excellently. Not only are guns and nukes completely different, but so are soldiers and cities, and ballistic vests and antimissile shields (hint: one of them can be bought, the other is impossible)
If the US had an antimissile shield on the other hand,
Then N.Korea doesn't waste any cash on missiles, so they can built more bombs, and have a little leftover to bribe the border guards who think they're bargaining with drug-dealers.
Why on earth would you ship from China when all the stuff is already available where you want to build the bomb?
Technical, engineering risk. You have no guarantee the manufacturing process will work, unless you've carried it out already and tested the result. (Nothing's more embarrassing than reading about a "dirty bomb" attack in the headlines when you had planned for a mushroom cloud!) And if you've done that in some other country, it's simpler and safer to ship the finished device than to risk starting up a munitions factory near the target.
The US could get lucky and local-law enforcement might inspect that little manufacturing project for OSHA compliance and noise ordinances. They're much less likely to exhaustively search every motorhome rolling south from Canada. (And if you do run into difficulty and murder a border guard, fleeing the scene won't leave much evidence behind to point the investigators to the target city, or the nature of the plot. Mobility is the terrorist infiltrator's best friend.)
Talk about taking coals to Newcastle.
Scrounging up uranium in Manhattan is a good way to get some jumpy PATRIOT enforcers all over you. The dealers for nuke-quality components have gotten into a habit of phoning the FBI whenever a new customer shows up. Far safer to collect the materials in a neutral country and then ship them over.
One advantage of bringing in a finished bomb is that it's much easier to recruit operatives with the right skill-sets. It takes one kind of person to infiltrate an infidel nation and coldly kill a million sleeping civilians. It takes different talents to improvise an explosive device capable of inducing atomic fission. Finding a crew that can handle both jobs (and also speak inconspicuous English) will be a big headache for Human Resources. And increasing the staffing level will just raise the chance of someone screwing up and spilling the beans.
dont forget who attacked whom while their diplomats were still in the capital crying war can be avoided,
That's mostly true. Even though the Admiral who carried out the attack mistakenly believed that war had been formally declared some hours before the strike, it was still a violation of the era's martial codes.
However, we can go back to the question of what "honor" means. Does it mean doing everything in your power to preserve the lives of your citizens? If so, then a sneak attack can be honorable if it's the safest way to win. "All's fair"
(Of course, that definition would place not antagonizing the USA as the best choice of all)
The Japanese were still a formidable threat, and it was essential that we defeat them utterly. To allow them to regroup and rebuild without eliminating the elements that led them into the war would have been utter folly.
No they were not formidable. They had no Navy left at all. Japan has zero natural resources (iron, coal, oil), and had no stockpiles left. There is no way to "rebuild" a 20th century army from rice and wood. They could not have harmed any American serviceman unless he set foot on their island and got stabbed.
The only thing separating them from utter defeat was a thousand heirloom swords and a million sharp pieces of bamboo.
I assure you that there were very few tears shed by the peoples they butchered when those bombs exploded.
I concur that humans quickly lose the ability to cry after being butchered.
Truman and his cabinet debated the merits of various approaches and concluded that the best approach was the one they followed. I think history has shown them to have been right.
If you think it's effect on the USSR was valuable, then that's true. The argument that such a spectacular defeat lead to better rebuilding has merit, but I won't go into that here.
The bombing was irrelevant for purposes of defeating Japan however. The Japanese ability to wage offensive war had been completely destroyed. If the US Navy had simply turned around and gone home in July 1945, Japan wouldn't have troubled them again.
Even given 200 years to work on it, they couldn't have put together another destroyer- there simply wasn't enough iron on the whole archipelago. The best they could've made were wooden ships to sail to Korea with... and the Koreans would've been ready with a nasty greeting party. Before long every other country occupied by Japan would've come back for revenge, and they'd probably be a poor Chinese protectorate today.
The difference between an A-Bomb and systematic firebombing is that panicked civilians can outrun fires and huddle together to starve in crowded suburban ruins.
One does not outrun a gamma ray.
Numerically, twice as many people died in 1 second at Hiroshima as did in one day at Dresden. Some people might say the amount of pain they suffered makes some difference; I don't.