Several replies have mentioned bouncing bombs to target dams, but it also worked against ships. And it didn't really need to be a special bomb, just a normal one with a timed fuse (so it won't explode on the first water impact, but 10-15 seconds later)
Dirty bombs do not kill anyone quickly except those hit by conventional explosion.
And also anyone who loiters in the target area before the centuries of half-life are over...
Aiming at a defended position and making it permanently uninhabitable can be militarily valuable. Acute radiation poisoning can kill almost as quickly as anthrax.
If you tool the time to talk to some Veterans (those who are still alive now, anyway) who served in the Pacific Ocean nearing the end of World War II, you would know the following:
Nope. How could talking to veterans help any? Shooting a few Japanese soldiers inside a tunnel on Iwo Jima teaches you exactly nothing about how their political structure works! Unless you meant veterans of some OSS spy mission going on inside wartime Japan, they are not in any better position to tell what it was like than anyone else.
* Emperor Hirohito had no real command or influence over the the Japanese Army, the Generals were fully in charge and answerable to no one but each other
That is false propaganda. Japan has a long tradition of underlings taking the blame for a crime. It is considered a traditional honor to say "Oh, I did the crime all by myself, my yakuza boss was unaware of the details". Even in defeat, the generals could still do one thing to serve their lord: accept guilt.
General MacArthur helped support that lie, because leaving the Emperor alive in his palace helped make the occupation go smoother, because Japanese civilians were more willing to be cooperative that way.
* Despite increasing losses, Japan showed little sign of surrendering (to save it's Honor).
It showed every sign of surrendering. They had already offered to surrender, if the Emperor and his family would be left alive.
* In considering wether or not to drop "The Bomb," President Truman, with the advice and assistance of the Army, took a good hard look at how many American (and to some extent Japanese) lives would be lost if the US had to press all the way to the mainland and deep into the Heart of Japan to force a surrender. Seeing the numbers, he ultimately gave the go-ahead.
As you already noticed, the Kamikaze flights were not effective, and were getting worse all the time. Japan has no natural resources of iron or oil, so by the end of the war, it could not effectively produce ships or airplanes.
If the USA had simply stopped fighting and pulled back to Hawaii instead of dropping the bomb, no Japanese would be able to harm them at all. And within a year or two, Japan would be crushed by Soviet ground troops.
Or, if the USA had simply asked Japan to surrender and place the Emperor under permanent house arrest, they would have immediately accepted, and an unresisted occupation could begin.
True. There is no need to intercept something that diplomats tell you straight to your face.
The Japananese were willing to fight to the last woman and child as long they were taking Americans with them.
It would've been possible to complete an infantry invasion of Japan with exactly ZERO American fatalities. There was no rule that any Americans had to be part of the invading force, and Stalin was quite eager to invade Japan all on his own.
In order to compare against Chernobyl, you'd need to have Germans drop a working nuclear reactor on London.
No. Any two things can be compared if they are measured in the same units, such as Curies per square meter. This comparison is quite easy, since the Federation of Atomic Scientists has already done the work for you. In the link I gave (which was presented to the USA Congress), the effects of a bomb on NYC are drawn in units of Chernobyl-equivalencies.
Just because the total radioactive mass of the Chernobyl was so much larger than any reasonable bomb doesn't mean it's threat is incomparably greater. Only a little of the material drifted away from the reactor, but an intentionally weaponized release would mean 100% of the substance is dispersed on the target.
The Chernobyl release covered an area of about 70 km length with a radation level of 40+ Ci/km*km, while a hypothetical terrorist Cobalt bomb used in the FAS analysis would spread the same radioactivity level over a 7 km length. So a small bomb is 1% as powerful as the Chernobyl release, but of course, it can be positioned on a high-population target for maximum damage.
There, that wasn't so hard. Now remember that the 100s of cases of acute radiation poisoning occured at Chernobyl mainly amoung people who were unaware of the radiation risk. They were evacuated within the day, which is something that 1945 victims of a dirty bomb attack would not have understood to do.
14 out of 16 being lost on one mission over the Mediterranean.
Any large plane is vulnerable if the opposition is decoding your radio messages faster than you are. Its not hard to shoot something down with it's complete flight itinerary in hand. (Even a V-2 could be intercepted with that intel)
If, hypothetically, Nazi Germany had an atom bomb, they certainly wouldn't broadcast it's travel time over the radio- even if they were unsuspecting of the cryptographic weakness. There's just something about atomic warheads that brings out the paranoia in any leader (consider the disasterous end of the USS Indianapolis)
in a single engine fighter was dangerous enough without strapping a Ju88 to your underside.
The sneaky part is, you can disconnect the Ju88 with one button, and then are left with a powerful fighter capable of defeating any bomber and most other fighters too.
I don't know where you get your information
From a place where everyone knows 30800 > 11610.
Anyway, my point is not complicated and these details don't matter. The simple summation is that Nazi Germany was much, much closer to building ICBMs and heavy bombers than they were to creating an atomic warhead. There is no way to argue otherwise. Which is more impressive? An operational V-2 missile, or a rough sketch of a plutonium gun?
In any alternate-history scenario where the Allied invasion was delayed enough to allow Germany the time and resources to complete an atomic bomb, they would also have been able to construct the means to deliver it.
If used in '45, no one would have noticed and things would have gone along fine. Years later there would have been a spike in birth defect and cancer.
Eh? That's like worrying about smoke inhalation when someone has just doused you in burning napalm.
Cancer and birth defects are rather meaningless in comparison to the mass dieoffs from radition poisoning within two weeks of the attack. That's the main effect!
Do not be confused by the threat estimates produced by modern analyses of dirty bomb attacks, because they both assume a small, amateurishly improvised weapon, and a victim population that flees the target area within one day. Instead, compare against the Chernobyl disaster.
If someone in Nazi Germany had had the bright idea to drop a half dozen 500 lb dirty bombs from submarine-launched rockets, the combination of the large radioactive mass and the total ignorance about it's hazard would've been sufficient to kill the 90% of the populations of London, NYC, Washington DC, and Pearl Harbor.
(The crews of those submarines, however, would surely experience heightened cancer incidence...)
I think the asumption that tasks where sucess can be meansured are easier then tasks when successs can't be measured has some weight?
Oh, it has weight. The ability to measure completion helps a little. But the fact is, that in the consideration of WMD experts, decontamination of a dirty bomb blast would take (at best) years longer than removing chemical or biological materials.
The B-29 Superfortress was over twice as large as he Me-323.
No. The Me-323 was larger. It couldn't carry as much weight, but strength is different from size. "Weight" isn't size either. The Me-323 took up more space than a B-29, which is what "large" really means. It was taller, wider, thicker, and nearly as long. Just multiplying l*w*h we get 15400 m^3 versus 11610 m^3, and that's ignoring the thinner B-29 hull.
Although never deployed as a bomber, the Me-323 had completed test drops of 17-ton practice bombs, nearly as large as the 21 ton MOAB from GW2, and plenty big for an atomic warhead.
It is certainly true that the Me-262 was the best jet fighter of WW2.
"Best"? Try ONLY. It was the only jet fighter to be marginally successful, and the runners up were also German planes. The only Allied entry that might compare is the YP-80, but it was virtually too late to count as being part of the war- it certainly never saw combat.
The -262 was a superior performer primarily for its swept wings -
No, the Me-262 was superior primarily for it's JET ENGINES, which NONE of the opposing planes had.
Nor was the Mistel the most advanced bomber. Though it might have qualified as the most advanced cruise-missile. Again, the B-29 seems to have been faster, longer-ranged, had a heavier bomb load, and been more accurate as a bombing platform.
Bigger is not "more advanced", it just means you have more construction resources to build with (including luxuries like aerospace factories that get bombed fewer than twice per month). In terms of successful engineering innovation, the B-29 doesn't even begin to compare with the Mistel.
Again, the B-29 seems to have been faster
The top speed of a Mistel was 686 km/h, while the B-29's max speed was 574 km/h. Of course, those are outbound speeds.
Also, a Mistel could defeat a B-29 in air-to-air combat.
And yet, the Germans did not ever manage to build even a halfway decent long-range heavy bomber. Obviously not so trivial a problem as all that.
Nope. They didn't build one because they didn't need one. In their military situation, it would've been a waste of resources.
If such planes had existed at the outset of the war, such as for the battle of Britain or the first year of the USSR incursion, then they would've been important. But by the time the USA had decent heavy bombers, it would've been meaningless for the Germans to build something similar. Air superiority had already turned too much against them.
There are many strategic reasons for this, mainly that Allied air superiority would turn heavy bombers into merely bigger targets, and that the USA's presence on another continent meant their manufacturing bases were safe from any kind of bombing attack (unlike Germany, Japan, and Britain's, whose capitals could be overflown by hostile forces early in the fighting)
If the Germans had hypothetically had time to build new bombing aircraft (but not had an atomic bomb), then they should've tried to duplicate a small plane like the IL-2 Sturmovik. Something like that would've been far more useful in their situation.
If Hitler was a spiteful bastard he would have firebomed London into the ground in 1941
He tried, and because he tried, Germany lost the Battle of Britain worse than it otherwise would've.
Bombers were diverted from attacking military targets like fighter airstrips and instead sent to smash London. It was militarily stupid, but the kind of thing a "spiteful bastard" does.
The GP post's point was that a dirty bomb during WWII would have been useless because the population would not know of the risk,
But, that point is completely backwards. Today a dirty bomb would be mostly useless, because everyone nearby will immediately evacuate after the first click of a geiger counter.
If hypothetically a German U-Boat had launched a dirty bomb over Manhattan in 1945, there would've been no detection and residents would continue exposing themselves for days or weeks.
c) the easiest to clean up (because of A, it would be far easier to know you've finished the job then with biological or chemical).
False. Just because success can be measured doesn't make it easy.
You're talking about different things. Killing helpless civilians is not a "battlefield". "Battle" implies that two sides are fighting each other- that was no more a battle than what goes on inside a chicken slaughterhouse.
Not every kind of organized violence counts as warfare.
PS. As late as last year, the USA police was killing its own citizens with chemical weapons...
Combining those excellent starting points into an effective long-range heavy bomber would take far less time than designing and manufacturing the hypothetical bomb itself. Even the unimproved Me-323 could carry an Hiroshima-like weapon.
Idiot. I can curl a 70 pound dumbell, and never go to a gym. But 66 pounds monitors means they're not "getting lighter". They are getting HEAVIER than in the past.
In the old days, when 15 inch was considered spacious, monitors weighed maybe half what they do today. CRTs haven't gotten noticably lighter.
Re:This is why I come to slasdot. Expert opinions!
on
A Gamer's Manifesto
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· Score: 1
AC: How bout understanding before answering next time, eh?
Sorry, you seem to have accidently replied to me instead of to danro, who is the one who (intentionally?) misunderstood what was meant by "The enemy soldiers in Iraq are not very good fighers".
I choose to misunderstand in an identical way, as a means of pointing out danro's error. (Whether or not it was a true mistake, or just a joke, I didn't care)
Wrong. The very definition of addiction mandates that it is a harmful behavior.
Wrong. Prehaps you need a lesson in how to read a dictionary.
In the entry you used, it gives TWO meanings for "addiction". Only ONE of them mentions that the substance is harmful. That means "addiction" can be validly used for EITHER of those two definitions.
Your claim is no more accurate that stating "Yellow is not a color! It is a cowardly nature."- to point to one part of a dictionary definition and claim that the other ones right next to it are untrue is simply stupid.
The "addiction" entry even provides the example usage "addiction to reading". Do you seriously think that the authors of a dictionary were using reading as an example of an intrinsicly harmful behavior?
I haven't RTFA, and since it's been reported as stupid, I won't be responding too it. Instead, I'll just point out a few facts about the fundamental nature of unions.
Unions get their power from monopolization. A traditional trade-union is an effort to monopolize the market for skilled labor in a certain field and geographic area. Notice the parallels:
In a free market for products, each vendor competes against each other, giving the customers lower prices- until monopolization assembles the vendors into one unit, which can then demand higher prices.
In a free market for labor, each worker competes against each other, giving the employers lower wages- until unionization assembles the workers into one unit, which can then demand higher wages
So, unions are similar to monopolies, and what do we know about Free/Open software and monopolies, kids? That's right: they don't go together. Monopolies in software rely on legal barriers-to-entry, such as copyrights restricting duplication of code, or broad patents prohibiting all competitive efforts. And Open Source projects disdain all those barriers.
Computer programmers working with Free Software simply cannot unionize or monopolize; they will be instantly out-competed by scabs either in India, or right next door. It is vaguely possible that a union of proprietary software developers will arise, but Linux could never be part of such a thing.
(Traditional unions use social pressure and geographic proximity as barriers-to-entry, enabling their localized monopolization. Digital workers are basically immune to those methods)
That completely off-topic comment what probably the work of a hostile script (or "bot"?), which grabs a comment from one topic and randomly reposts it somewhere else.
If you try logging out and then posting, you will see a CAPTCHA field appear. It is apparently an effort to combat this form of tampering, and it is apparently failing.
The FSF recommends that free software developers assign their copyrights to the FSF, so that they can deal with violations.
They absolutely do not recommend that.
They suggest that people who modify GNU software hand the copyright to the FSF, but GNU software itself is just a tiny fraction of Free software (and an even smaller fraction of free software).
Major Free software like Linux, Mozilla, and Openoffice.org has never had the FSF suggest giving over the copyright.
Most of what a silencer does is slow the bullet to subsonic,
Wrong. They don't significantly slow the bullet. They absorb the explosive sound from the point of detonation, but only slow the projectile by a minor fraction. Only a bullet which was just barely exceeding Mach 1 could be slowed to subsonic by the small amount of efficiency loss brought on by a silencer.
If you want the bullet to be subsonic (and for tactical stealth, you should want this), then you must intentionally reduce the powder load yourself- the silencer won't slow the round all by itself.
That's why it's generally ineffective to put a silencer on a rifle or any other powerful gun- the sonic boom will still be audible along the whole trajectory. The shooter's ears are a little more comfortable, but the targets are still alerted to the gunfire.
Read about the DeLisle carbine: "working the bolt to chamber the next round makes a louder noise than firing a round." Note the 250 m/s muzzle velocity, well under the speed of sound.
The many people who protest "silencers don't work like you see on TV" probably just don't know how to use them correctly for covert assasinations, and haven't seen a real De Lisle or silenced Sten in action.
And I believe the law of the land is still "innocent 'til proven guilty."
No! Copyright infringement is a civil matter, meaning you are guilty when it appears more probable than not. It need not be proven.
It's as if the requirement is 51% certainty, rather than the 99.99% desired in criminal cases. A criminal jury must be unanimous, while a civil one may just take a majority vote.
Look back at the O.J. Simpson verdict. He was found not guilty of criminal murder, but then the civil case found him liable for wrongful death, because it used lower standards of proof.
Anonymity as legit uses too. It helps protect against DOS attacks because you don't know the source of a file so you can't attack it as easily.
That's completely backwards. Anonymity helps protect DOS attackers because you don't know the source of an attack, so you cannot possibly tell them apart from legitimate users. You can't ban them or sue them. Anyone is free to send millions of anonymous requests for your data, and the actual genuinely interested downloaders will be lost in the flood. All the proposed "distributed P2P anonymizer" systems are tremendously vulnerable to unidentifiable DOS.
It helps protect against DOS attacks because you don't know the source of a file so you can't attack it as easily.
You don't need to know the source of a file. Just request it, and then attack whatever intermediaries offer to bounce it to you.
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Several replies have mentioned bouncing bombs to target dams, but it also worked against ships. And it didn't really need to be a special bomb, just a normal one with a timed fuse (so it won't explode on the first water impact, but 10-15 seconds later)
Dirty bombs do not kill anyone quickly except those hit by conventional explosion.
And also anyone who loiters in the target area before the centuries of half-life are over...
Aiming at a defended position and making it permanently uninhabitable can be militarily valuable. Acute radiation poisoning can kill almost as quickly as anthrax.
If you tool the time to talk to some Veterans (those who are still alive now, anyway) who served in the Pacific Ocean nearing the end of World War II, you would know the following:
Nope. How could talking to veterans help any? Shooting a few Japanese soldiers inside a tunnel on Iwo Jima teaches you exactly nothing about how their political structure works! Unless you meant veterans of some OSS spy mission going on inside wartime Japan, they are not in any better position to tell what it was like than anyone else.
* Emperor Hirohito had no real command or influence over the the Japanese Army, the Generals were fully in charge and answerable to no one but each other
That is false propaganda. Japan has a long tradition of underlings taking the blame for a crime. It is considered a traditional honor to say "Oh, I did the crime all by myself, my yakuza boss was unaware of the details". Even in defeat, the generals could still do one thing to serve their lord: accept guilt.
General MacArthur helped support that lie, because leaving the Emperor alive in his palace helped make the occupation go smoother, because Japanese civilians were more willing to be cooperative that way.
* Despite increasing losses, Japan showed little sign of surrendering (to save it's Honor).
It showed every sign of surrendering. They had already offered to surrender, if the Emperor and his family would be left alive.
* In considering wether or not to drop "The Bomb," President Truman, with the advice and assistance of the Army, took a good hard look at how many American (and to some extent Japanese) lives would be lost if the US had to press all the way to the mainland and deep into the Heart of Japan to force a surrender. Seeing the numbers, he ultimately gave the go-ahead.
As you already noticed, the Kamikaze flights were not effective, and were getting worse all the time. Japan has no natural resources of iron or oil, so by the end of the war, it could not effectively produce ships or airplanes.
If the USA had simply stopped fighting and pulled back to Hawaii instead of dropping the bomb, no Japanese would be able to harm them at all. And within a year or two, Japan would be crushed by Soviet ground troops.
Or, if the USA had simply asked Japan to surrender and place the Emperor under permanent house arrest, they would have immediately accepted, and an unresisted occupation could begin.
Complete BS. There were no such intercepts.
True. There is no need to intercept something that diplomats tell you straight to your face.
The Japananese were willing to fight to the last woman and child as long they were taking Americans with them.
It would've been possible to complete an infantry invasion of Japan with exactly ZERO American fatalities. There was no rule that any Americans had to be part of the invading force, and Stalin was quite eager to invade Japan all on his own.
That tactical nukes are nonsense, because using even a tactical nuke is a political decision, which makes this nuke a strategical weapon?
That's only true semantically, insofar as the boundary between tactical and strategic affairs is fuzzy and imprecise.
Using a missle or bullet is a political decision too, if the target is important enough.
In order to compare against Chernobyl, you'd need to have Germans drop a working nuclear reactor on London.
No. Any two things can be compared if they are measured in the same units, such as Curies per square meter. This comparison is quite easy, since the Federation of Atomic Scientists has already done the work for you. In the link I gave (which was presented to the USA Congress), the effects of a bomb on NYC are drawn in units of Chernobyl-equivalencies.
Just because the total radioactive mass of the Chernobyl was so much larger than any reasonable bomb doesn't mean it's threat is incomparably greater. Only a little of the material drifted away from the reactor, but an intentionally weaponized release would mean 100% of the substance is dispersed on the target.
The Chernobyl release covered an area of about 70 km length with a radation level of 40+ Ci/km*km, while a hypothetical terrorist Cobalt bomb used in the FAS analysis would spread the same radioactivity level over a 7 km length. So a small bomb is 1% as powerful as the Chernobyl release, but of course, it can be positioned on a high-population target for maximum damage.
There, that wasn't so hard. Now remember that the 100s of cases of acute radiation poisoning occured at Chernobyl mainly amoung people who were unaware of the radiation risk. They were evacuated within the day, which is something that 1945 victims of a dirty bomb attack would not have understood to do.
14 out of 16 being lost on one mission over the Mediterranean.
Any large plane is vulnerable if the opposition is decoding your radio messages faster than you are. Its not hard to shoot something down with it's complete flight itinerary in hand. (Even a V-2 could be intercepted with that intel)
If, hypothetically, Nazi Germany had an atom bomb, they certainly wouldn't broadcast it's travel time over the radio- even if they were unsuspecting of the cryptographic weakness. There's just something about atomic warheads that brings out the paranoia in any leader (consider the disasterous end of the USS Indianapolis)
in a single engine fighter was dangerous enough without strapping a Ju88 to your underside.
The sneaky part is, you can disconnect the Ju88 with one button, and then are left with a powerful fighter capable of defeating any bomber and most other fighters too.
I don't know where you get your information
From a place where everyone knows 30800 > 11610.
Anyway, my point is not complicated and these details don't matter. The simple summation is that Nazi Germany was much, much closer to building ICBMs and heavy bombers than they were to creating an atomic warhead. There is no way to argue otherwise. Which is more impressive? An operational V-2 missile, or a rough sketch of a plutonium gun?
In any alternate-history scenario where the Allied invasion was delayed enough to allow Germany the time and resources to complete an atomic bomb, they would also have been able to construct the means to deliver it.
It could be an interesting jumping-off point for an alternative history story:
Been done. Trinity Paradox by Anderson and Beason. An adequately entertaining book, quite worth the $0.98 Amazon.com quotes right now.
If used in '45, no one would have noticed and things would have gone along fine. Years later there would have been a spike in birth defect and cancer.
Eh? That's like worrying about smoke inhalation when someone has just doused you in burning napalm.
Cancer and birth defects are rather meaningless in comparison to the mass dieoffs from radition poisoning within two weeks of the attack. That's the main effect!
Do not be confused by the threat estimates produced by modern analyses of dirty bomb attacks, because they both assume a small, amateurishly improvised weapon, and a victim population that flees the target area within one day. Instead, compare against the Chernobyl disaster.
If someone in Nazi Germany had had the bright idea to drop a half dozen 500 lb dirty bombs from submarine-launched rockets, the combination of the large radioactive mass and the total ignorance about it's hazard would've been sufficient to kill the 90% of the populations of London, NYC, Washington DC, and Pearl Harbor.
(The crews of those submarines, however, would surely experience heightened cancer incidence...)
I think the asumption that tasks where sucess can be meansured are easier then tasks when successs can't be measured has some weight?
Oh, it has weight. The ability to measure completion helps a little. But the fact is, that in the consideration of WMD experts, decontamination of a dirty bomb blast would take (at best) years longer than removing chemical or biological materials.
The B-29 Superfortress was over twice as large as he Me-323.
No. The Me-323 was larger. It couldn't carry as much weight, but strength is different from size. "Weight" isn't size either. The Me-323 took up more space than a B-29, which is what "large" really means. It was taller, wider, thicker, and nearly as long. Just multiplying l*w*h we get 15400 m^3 versus 11610 m^3, and that's ignoring the thinner B-29 hull.
Although never deployed as a bomber, the Me-323 had completed test drops of 17-ton practice bombs, nearly as large as the 21 ton MOAB from GW2, and plenty big for an atomic warhead.
It is certainly true that the Me-262 was the best jet fighter of WW2.
"Best"? Try ONLY. It was the only jet fighter to be marginally successful, and the runners up were also German planes. The only Allied entry that might compare is the YP-80, but it was virtually too late to count as being part of the war- it certainly never saw combat.
The -262 was a superior performer primarily for its swept wings -
No, the Me-262 was superior primarily for it's JET ENGINES, which NONE of the opposing planes had.
Nor was the Mistel the most advanced bomber. Though it might have qualified as the most advanced cruise-missile. Again, the B-29 seems to have been faster, longer-ranged, had a heavier bomb load, and been more accurate as a bombing platform.
Bigger is not "more advanced", it just means you have more construction resources to build with (including luxuries like aerospace factories that get bombed fewer than twice per month). In terms of successful engineering innovation, the B-29 doesn't even begin to compare with the Mistel.
Again, the B-29 seems to have been faster
The top speed of a Mistel was 686 km/h, while the B-29's max speed was 574 km/h. Of course, those are outbound speeds.
Also, a Mistel could defeat a B-29 in air-to-air combat.
And yet, the Germans did not ever manage to build even a halfway decent long-range heavy bomber. Obviously not so trivial a problem as all that.
Nope. They didn't build one because they didn't need one. In their military situation, it would've been a waste of resources.
If such planes had existed at the outset of the war, such as for the battle of Britain or the first year of the USSR incursion, then they would've been important. But by the time the USA had decent heavy bombers, it would've been meaningless for the Germans to build something similar. Air superiority had already turned too much against them.
There are many strategic reasons for this, mainly that Allied air superiority would turn heavy bombers into merely bigger targets, and that the USA's presence on another continent meant their manufacturing bases were safe from any kind of bombing attack (unlike Germany, Japan, and Britain's, whose capitals could be overflown by hostile forces early in the fighting)
If the Germans had hypothetically had time to build new bombing aircraft (but not had an atomic bomb), then they should've tried to duplicate a small plane like the IL-2 Sturmovik. Something like that would've been far more useful in their situation.
If Hitler was a spiteful bastard he would have firebomed London into the ground in 1941
He tried, and because he tried, Germany lost the Battle of Britain worse than it otherwise would've.
Bombers were diverted from attacking military targets like fighter airstrips and instead sent to smash London. It was militarily stupid, but the kind of thing a "spiteful bastard" does.
The GP post's point was that a dirty bomb during WWII would have been useless because the population would not know of the risk,
But, that point is completely backwards. Today a dirty bomb would be mostly useless, because everyone nearby will immediately evacuate after the first click of a geiger counter.
If hypothetically a German U-Boat had launched a dirty bomb over Manhattan in 1945, there would've been no detection and residents would continue exposing themselves for days or weeks.
c) the easiest to clean up (because of A, it would be far easier to know you've finished the job then with biological or chemical).
False. Just because success can be measured doesn't make it easy.
Google "warsaw ghetto gas" or somesuch.
You're talking about different things. Killing helpless civilians is not a "battlefield". "Battle" implies that two sides are fighting each other- that was no more a battle than what goes on inside a chicken slaughterhouse.
Not every kind of organized violence counts as warfare.
PS. As late as last year, the USA police was killing its own citizens with chemical weapons...
They lacked the heavy aircraft which the USA used.
No. Germany had the largest plane used in WWII. They also had the most advanced bomber of the time. And of course, their mastery of jet engines was a decade ahead of the Allies.
Combining those excellent starting points into an effective long-range heavy bomber would take far less time than designing and manufacturing the hypothetical bomb itself. Even the unimproved Me-323 could carry an Hiroshima-like weapon.
AC: If you can't lift 66 pounds, hit the gym.
Idiot. I can curl a 70 pound dumbell, and never go to a gym. But 66 pounds monitors means they're not "getting lighter". They are getting HEAVIER than in the past.
In the old days, when 15 inch was considered spacious, monitors weighed maybe half what they do today. CRTs haven't gotten noticably lighter.
AC: How bout understanding before answering next time, eh?
Sorry, you seem to have accidently replied to me instead of to danro, who is the one who (intentionally?) misunderstood what was meant by "The enemy soldiers in Iraq are not very good fighers".
I choose to misunderstand in an identical way, as a means of pointing out danro's error. (Whether or not it was a true mistake, or just a joke, I didn't care)
Wrong. The very definition of addiction mandates that it is a harmful behavior.
Wrong. Prehaps you need a lesson in how to read a dictionary.
In the entry you used, it gives TWO meanings for "addiction". Only ONE of them mentions that the substance is harmful. That means "addiction" can be validly used for EITHER of those two definitions.
Your claim is no more accurate that stating "Yellow is not a color! It is a cowardly nature."- to point to one part of a dictionary definition and claim that the other ones right next to it are untrue is simply stupid.
The "addiction" entry even provides the example usage "addiction to reading". Do you seriously think that the authors of a dictionary were using reading as an example of an intrinsicly harmful behavior?
Unions get their power from monopolization. A traditional trade-union is an effort to monopolize the market for skilled labor in a certain field and geographic area. Notice the parallels:
So, unions are similar to monopolies, and what do we know about Free/Open software and monopolies, kids? That's right: they don't go together. Monopolies in software rely on legal barriers-to-entry, such as copyrights restricting duplication of code, or broad patents prohibiting all competitive efforts. And Open Source projects disdain all those barriers.
Computer programmers working with Free Software simply cannot unionize or monopolize; they will be instantly out-competed by scabs either in India, or right next door. It is vaguely possible that a union of proprietary software developers will arise, but Linux could never be part of such a thing.
(Traditional unions use social pressure and geographic proximity as barriers-to-entry, enabling their localized monopolization. Digital workers are basically immune to those methods)
wtf?
That completely off-topic comment what probably the work of a hostile script (or "bot"?), which grabs a comment from one topic and randomly reposts it somewhere else.
If you try logging out and then posting, you will see a CAPTCHA field appear. It is apparently an effort to combat this form of tampering, and it is apparently failing.
The FSF recommends that free software developers assign their copyrights to the FSF, so that they can deal with violations.
They absolutely do not recommend that.
They suggest that people who modify GNU software hand the copyright to the FSF, but GNU software itself is just a tiny fraction of Free software (and an even smaller fraction of free software).
Major Free software like Linux, Mozilla, and Openoffice.org has never had the FSF suggest giving over the copyright.
Most of what a silencer does is slow the bullet to subsonic,
Wrong. They don't significantly slow the bullet. They absorb the explosive sound from the point of detonation, but only slow the projectile by a minor fraction. Only a bullet which was just barely exceeding Mach 1 could be slowed to subsonic by the small amount of efficiency loss brought on by a silencer.
If you want the bullet to be subsonic (and for tactical stealth, you should want this), then you must intentionally reduce the powder load yourself- the silencer won't slow the round all by itself.
That's why it's generally ineffective to put a silencer on a rifle or any other powerful gun- the sonic boom will still be audible along the whole trajectory. The shooter's ears are a little more comfortable, but the targets are still alerted to the gunfire.
Read about the DeLisle carbine: "working the bolt to chamber the next round makes a louder noise than firing a round." Note the 250 m/s muzzle velocity, well under the speed of sound.
The many people who protest "silencers don't work like you see on TV" probably just don't know how to use them correctly for covert assasinations, and haven't seen a real De Lisle or silenced Sten in action.
Just like every other icon on the desktop.
Then rename the "Recycle Bin" for me, smart guy.
And I believe the law of the land is still "innocent 'til proven guilty."
No! Copyright infringement is a civil matter, meaning you are guilty when it appears more probable than not. It need not be proven.
It's as if the requirement is 51% certainty, rather than the 99.99% desired in criminal cases. A criminal jury must be unanimous, while a civil one may just take a majority vote.
Look back at the O.J. Simpson verdict. He was found not guilty of criminal murder, but then the civil case found him liable for wrongful death, because it used lower standards of proof.
Anonymity as legit uses too. It helps protect against DOS attacks because you don't know the source of a file so you can't attack it as easily.
That's completely backwards. Anonymity helps protect DOS attackers because you don't know the source of an attack, so you cannot possibly tell them apart from legitimate users. You can't ban them or sue them. Anyone is free to send millions of anonymous requests for your data, and the actual genuinely interested downloaders will be lost in the flood. All the proposed "distributed P2P anonymizer" systems are tremendously vulnerable to unidentifiable DOS.
It helps protect against DOS attacks because you don't know the source of a file so you can't attack it as easily.
You don't need to know the source of a file. Just request it, and then attack whatever intermediaries offer to bounce it to you.