What they have never done, though, is throw nuclear bombs on two cities just because their opponent didn't immediately drop everything in their hands and throw themselves on their faces at your feet. Doing that was evil, simply.
Evil is in the eye of the beholder. I find it interesting that you single out the atomic bombings but don't even mention the conventional bombings that claimed a much higher death toll. Is dying from a conventional explosion somehow less evil than dying from a nuclear one?
The US government knew at the time that Japan were going to capitulate very shortly
Historians have debated this point ad nauseum without reaching consensus. Most would agree that the US was aware that the Japanese were considering surrender. Whether or not they actually would and whether or not they would do so with terms that were acceptable to the Allies was unknown. Even after both atomic bombings and the Soviet Union's declaration of war there were elements in the Japanese military that still refused to surrender. They even attempted a coup against the Emperor to prevent it from happening.
so eradicating two cities full of nothing but civilians was nothing more than an unnnecessary, cruel self-indulgence
A) The cities weren't "eradicated"
B) Every single major power in WW2 bombed civilians. It was total war, remember?
C) "Nothing more than civilians"? Both cities had their share of military targets and munitions plants.
The US government decided to commit an act of pure evil
Again, evil is in the eye of the beholder. Some would see the Japanese treatment of Allied POWs and Chinese civilians as far more evil than anything the Allies did. We never systemically raped an entire city. We never used gas on civilians (or troops for that matter...)
Nuclear weapons have never really been anything but a dick-swinging contest
Eh, I'll take that "dick-swinging contest" over another World War any day of the week. Mutually Assured Destruction isn't pretty but it kept the peace during the Cold War.
except, that is, for the Americans, and that against civil targets
As opposed to all those civil targets bombed (gassed in the case of Japan) by the Axis forces?
Good thing the Chinese and the Russians haven't followed your example
Indeed. They have created theirown example. The United States isn't perfect by any means but looking to Russia and China to be your savior seems a little short-sighted to me.
Eh, I don't think you can blame the UN for that. I can think of lots of different countries (Israel, China, the United States and Russia to name a few) that don't even pay lip service to UN rules/resolutions/etc.
If you want to blame something for dropping all laws to the lowest common denominator blame "free trade". IMHO, we abandoned our moral authority when we started doing business with regimes like the one in Beijing. Now it's a race to the bottom in every respect -- laws, labor, freedoms, etc. I find this very ironic because even Adam Smith argued that free trade takes a back seat to national security. Did we forget about that somewhere along the line of trying to make a quick buck?
Your post is quite sensible and certainly does not sound like it came from a "PBS mind"...with the exception of this little piece of nonsense:-)
Eh, I'm not some 'Hippie Liberal Douche' (to borrow from South Park). I didn't say we shouldn't be using any and all means to protect ourselves from people who want to kill us. All I intended to point out was we probably haven't been following the spirit of the Declaration of Human Rights the last few years.
Given the fact that we are fighting people who refuse to follow the laws of war I don't think we should be held to them either. Not when they murdered 3,000 American civilians.
There is no way this idea will be able to get past any open UN boards. Kind of goes against the human rights charter of the UN.
I was with you until you said this. You clearly have much more faith in the UN than I do. The organization that gave us the Universal Declaration of Human Rights now deems it appropriate to make Libya the chair of the Human Rights Commission.
The UN has no principles. If it did it would kick members out of the General Assembly who refuse to follow the Declaration of Human Rights. At the very least this would include China, Libya, Israel and half of the Arab World. Hell, it'd probably include my own country (the United States) as well, given our actions in the last seven years.
The UN is useless. The only reason it hasn't gone the way of the League of Nations is because of nuclear weapons. Mutually assured destruction has done more to prevent another World War than the UN ever did.
Saying all Asians pirate software is racist, in the same way that saying all people with black skin have some undesirable characteristic.
It's highly offensive to suggest that all Asians are dishonest when I've experienced some of them being conspicuously honest
Time out for a second. Where did I say that all Asians are dishonest? You are putting words in my mouth to support your argument that I'm some sort of racist. If I had made the off-hand remark about piracy in Russia instead of Asia would you now be accusing me of being anti-Slavic?
You strike me as one of those types that looks for reasons to be offended. You have my pity.
Yes, and when that field accelerates thousands of tons of steel and concrete at 9.8 m/s2 it shouldn't come as a surprise that the structure in question fails.
This experiment can be repeated by curious 3rd parties and the aluminum doesn't scrub the pillars to well at about 150MPH - 175MPH
That might actually mean something if that was the speed that the airplanes were traveling. Flight 11 hit at 466mph and Flight 175 hit at 545mph. Care to do the calculations to figure out how much kinetic energy that is?
A couple of floors may weaken but you aren't actually explaining the failures outside of a few floors above and below the impact point
Again, a calculator and some basic engineering knowledge will explain this. The structure was designed to support the static loads of the floors above it. It was not designed to withstand the kinetic energy of those floors crashing down on it with the full force of gravity.
If they were largely intact (which they should have been) then the pancaking effect would've slowed the fall quite a bit.
The NIST report addressed this. The floors were designed to support the static load of the floors above them. They were not designed to resist the kinetic energy of the floors above them slamming into them as they collapsed.
Yeah, I didn't think you were blaming the US for all that troubles that part of the world. The GP seemed to be doing so though.
Oh, we're to blame for jumping right in the middle and taking advantage of it, and our relationship with Israel makes our lives harder. (Note that I support that relationship and believe it has been the right thing to do overall, but that doesn't make our lives any easier)
I would agree. I don't approve of everything that Israel does but at the end of the day it is a democracy. More to the point I can usually see the reasons for the decisions that they make -- it's not so easy to play the game by the rules when you are a nation of 7 million surrounded by 700 million who want to push you into the sea.
Your boss is your boss. Unless there's the chance that somebody could be physically hurt, your employer's passwords are NOT yours, no matter how stupid you think your boss is.
My obligation to my employer (in this case the city of San Francisco) trumps my obligation to my PHB. If I think my PHB is a moron and is going to cause a shitload of damage to my employer then I think I could make a good case for refusing to give him the passwords.
Of course that's not where it would end.... I would have to explain to his boss what the problem was -- or go even further up the chain of command if he was also a moron.
Assuming that they have wireless on their network, there's no way to find wireless devices
Wireless devices still have MAC addresses. By tracing the MAC address you'd get a switch port. If that switch port has an AP plugged into it then you know it's a wireless device and probably know it's general location (the AP doesn't have limitless range).
there's no real way to find exactly where wireless devices are, as far as I know
Oh, there's a way.... it's just out of the reach of most of us.
No it didn't. Oh, the land existed, and the House of Saud existed, but the entity we call Saudi Arabia exists solely because of the oil under their feet
Saudi Arabia gained it's modern borders in 1932. Oil wasn't discovered until 1939. It wasn't actively exploited until the late 40s due to WW2. You can argue that oil helps prop them up but the idea that we created these theocracies to get that oil strains creditability when they existed prior to the discovery of that oil.
Furthermore, blaming the United States as the GP did doesn't tell the whole story either. The United States didn't draw the lines on the map in the Middle East. The French, British and Turks did. The United States didn't conspire with Israel to seize the Siez Canal -- the French and British did. The United States never invaded Iran -- but the Russians and British have.
Our hands aren't clean by any means but this knee-jerk anti-Americanism that places all of the blame at our feet doesn't even survive a casual reading of history.
No, Just the one that supposedly crashed into the Pentagon
"Supposedly"? Give me a break. What else do you think happened to Flight 77? The Government shot it down after firing a cruise missile into the pentagon? Did the Government also plant the two black boxes and airplane parts that were found at the site?
NIST recommended a new type of fire-resistant material that is applied differently (all of the material in the Twin Towers was the spray-on type) and more resistant to impact events. The problem is that it's much more expensive it's hard to justify the cost vs. the threat level.
It's doubtful that even this material would have saved the towers though. As you pointed out it's really only good for buying time. Unless the NYFD could have obtained access to the floors and extinguished the fires the buildings still would have come down.
Yeah, they had a neat animation that showed how it failed.
Basically the support beams for each floor started to sag as a result of the heat and the load that they were supposed to carry. As they sagged they pulled the outside walls (where most of the support for the building was) further and further inwards. Eventually the outside walls failed and the floors started to pancake onto each other. Once all of that kinetic energy was released there really wasn't a way to stop it -- hence the failure of the whole structure.
Better fire-proofing material probably would have bought more time before the buildings failed. Whether or not this would have saved many lives is questionable -- most of the non-firefighter casualties happened above the impact zones because escape routes were cut off.
One of the many recommendations NIST made was better stairwells. They should be protected with reinforced concrete and made wider. Reinforced stairwells would have provided an escape route for those trapped above the impact zones. Wider stairwells would have aided the traffic flow -- which was badly disrupted when the fire-fighters needed to go up as the civilians were going down.
The "Truthers" (as they call themselves) are trying to cope with this in a unique way where they will relentlessly seek the truth--to a fault. They won't ever be satisfied because the attacks were so inconceivable
I don't think it's just a matter of the attacks being 'inconceivable'. Look at the many conspiracy theories that revolved around TWA 800. Hardly an 'inconceivable' event (airliner crashes have been around as long as we've had airlines) but a large number of people refused to accept the official conclusions and had all manner of alternative theories.
My favorite was the idea that the US Navy shot down TWA 800. Yeah, a ship with a crew of several hundred fired the missiles that brought down an American airliner and somehow it never leaked out......
Slashdot Mirror
They want to make royalties not just on the content but also the the broadcasting hardware
What's to stop me from using my choice of broadcasting hardware if I was in the terrestrial radio business?
Both China and Russia have done their fair share of bad things.
That's putting it mildly.
What they have never done, though, is throw nuclear bombs on two cities just because their opponent didn't immediately drop everything in their hands and throw themselves on their faces at your feet. Doing that was evil, simply.
Evil is in the eye of the beholder. I find it interesting that you single out the atomic bombings but don't even mention the conventional bombings that claimed a much higher death toll. Is dying from a conventional explosion somehow less evil than dying from a nuclear one?
The US government knew at the time that Japan were going to capitulate very shortly
Historians have debated this point ad nauseum without reaching consensus. Most would agree that the US was aware that the Japanese were considering surrender. Whether or not they actually would and whether or not they would do so with terms that were acceptable to the Allies was unknown. Even after both atomic bombings and the Soviet Union's declaration of war there were elements in the Japanese military that still refused to surrender. They even attempted a coup against the Emperor to prevent it from happening.
so eradicating two cities full of nothing but civilians was nothing more than an unnnecessary, cruel self-indulgence
A) The cities weren't "eradicated"
B) Every single major power in WW2 bombed civilians. It was total war, remember?
C) "Nothing more than civilians"? Both cities had their share of military targets and munitions plants.
The US government decided to commit an act of pure evil
Again, evil is in the eye of the beholder. Some would see the Japanese treatment of Allied POWs and Chinese civilians as far more evil than anything the Allies did. We never systemically raped an entire city. We never used gas on civilians (or troops for that matter...)
Nuclear weapons have never really been anything but a dick-swinging contest
Eh, I'll take that "dick-swinging contest" over another World War any day of the week. Mutually Assured Destruction isn't pretty but it kept the peace during the Cold War.
except, that is, for the Americans, and that against civil targets
As opposed to all those civil targets bombed (gassed in the case of Japan) by the Axis forces?
Good thing the Chinese and the Russians haven't followed your example
Indeed. They have created their own example. The United States isn't perfect by any means but looking to Russia and China to be your savior seems a little short-sighted to me.
Or maybe that one country that actually used Atomic Weapons on civilians back in '45
As opposed to the millions who would have died during an invasion? Or the millions who were starving to death each month the war went on?
Bridges to nowhere for all my friends!
Fixed that for you.
Eh, I don't think you can blame the UN for that. I can think of lots of different countries (Israel, China, the United States and Russia to name a few) that don't even pay lip service to UN rules/resolutions/etc.
If you want to blame something for dropping all laws to the lowest common denominator blame "free trade". IMHO, we abandoned our moral authority when we started doing business with regimes like the one in Beijing. Now it's a race to the bottom in every respect -- laws, labor, freedoms, etc. I find this very ironic because even Adam Smith argued that free trade takes a back seat to national security. Did we forget about that somewhere along the line of trying to make a quick buck?
Your post is quite sensible and certainly does not sound like it came from a "PBS mind"...with the exception of this little piece of nonsense :-)
Eh, I'm not some 'Hippie Liberal Douche' (to borrow from South Park). I didn't say we shouldn't be using any and all means to protect ourselves from people who want to kill us. All I intended to point out was we probably haven't been following the spirit of the Declaration of Human Rights the last few years.
Given the fact that we are fighting people who refuse to follow the laws of war I don't think we should be held to them either. Not when they murdered 3,000 American civilians.
There is no way this idea will be able to get past any open UN boards. Kind of goes against the human rights charter of the UN.
I was with you until you said this. You clearly have much more faith in the UN than I do. The organization that gave us the Universal Declaration of Human Rights now deems it appropriate to make Libya the chair of the Human Rights Commission.
The UN has no principles. If it did it would kick members out of the General Assembly who refuse to follow the Declaration of Human Rights. At the very least this would include China, Libya, Israel and half of the Arab World. Hell, it'd probably include my own country (the United States) as well, given our actions in the last seven years.
The UN is useless. The only reason it hasn't gone the way of the League of Nations is because of nuclear weapons. Mutually assured destruction has done more to prevent another World War than the UN ever did.
Saying all Asians pirate software is racist, in the same way that saying all people with black skin have some undesirable characteristic.
It's highly offensive to suggest that all Asians are dishonest when I've experienced some of them being conspicuously honest
Time out for a second. Where did I say that all Asians are dishonest? You are putting words in my mouth to support your argument that I'm some sort of racist. If I had made the off-hand remark about piracy in Russia instead of Asia would you now be accusing me of being anti-Slavic?
You strike me as one of those types that looks for reasons to be offended. You have my pity.
That's racist
You've got to be kidding me.....
it is a field that exerts a force
Yes, and when that field accelerates thousands of tons of steel and concrete at 9.8 m/s2 it shouldn't come as a surprise that the structure in question fails.
a PC with an inferior interface marketed as a game console
Fixed that for you ;)
but still sell you preinstalled linux if buying in asia.
Pffft, if your buying in Asia they just "sell" you a pirated copy of XP ;)
This experiment can be repeated by curious 3rd parties and the aluminum doesn't scrub the pillars to well at about 150MPH - 175MPH
That might actually mean something if that was the speed that the airplanes were traveling. Flight 11 hit at 466mph and Flight 175 hit at 545mph. Care to do the calculations to figure out how much kinetic energy that is?
A couple of floors may weaken but you aren't actually explaining the failures outside of a few floors above and below the impact point
Again, a calculator and some basic engineering knowledge will explain this. The structure was designed to support the static loads of the floors above it. It was not designed to withstand the kinetic energy of those floors crashing down on it with the full force of gravity.
If they were largely intact (which they should have been) then the pancaking effect would've slowed the fall quite a bit.
The NIST report addressed this. The floors were designed to support the static load of the floors above them. They were not designed to resist the kinetic energy of the floors above them slamming into them as they collapsed.
Is it really that fucking hard to type a few words into [search engine] and find out for yourself?
Is it really that fucking hard for the person making the claim to provide the links to begin with?
Yeah, I didn't think you were blaming the US for all that troubles that part of the world. The GP seemed to be doing so though.
Oh, we're to blame for jumping right in the middle and taking advantage of it, and our relationship with Israel makes our lives harder. (Note that I support that relationship and believe it has been the right thing to do overall, but that doesn't make our lives any easier)
I would agree. I don't approve of everything that Israel does but at the end of the day it is a democracy. More to the point I can usually see the reasons for the decisions that they make -- it's not so easy to play the game by the rules when you are a nation of 7 million surrounded by 700 million who want to push you into the sea.
Your boss is your boss. Unless there's the chance that somebody could be physically hurt, your employer's passwords are NOT yours, no matter how stupid you think your boss is.
My obligation to my employer (in this case the city of San Francisco) trumps my obligation to my PHB. If I think my PHB is a moron and is going to cause a shitload of damage to my employer then I think I could make a good case for refusing to give him the passwords.
Of course that's not where it would end.... I would have to explain to his boss what the problem was -- or go even further up the chain of command if he was also a moron.
Assuming that they have wireless on their network, there's no way to find wireless devices
Wireless devices still have MAC addresses. By tracing the MAC address you'd get a switch port. If that switch port has an AP plugged into it then you know it's a wireless device and probably know it's general location (the AP doesn't have limitless range).
there's no real way to find exactly where wireless devices are, as far as I know
Oh, there's a way.... it's just out of the reach of most of us.
No it didn't. Oh, the land existed, and the House of Saud existed, but the entity we call Saudi Arabia exists solely because of the oil under their feet
Saudi Arabia gained it's modern borders in 1932. Oil wasn't discovered until 1939. It wasn't actively exploited until the late 40s due to WW2. You can argue that oil helps prop them up but the idea that we created these theocracies to get that oil strains creditability when they existed prior to the discovery of that oil.
Furthermore, blaming the United States as the GP did doesn't tell the whole story either. The United States didn't draw the lines on the map in the Middle East. The French, British and Turks did. The United States didn't conspire with Israel to seize the Siez Canal -- the French and British did. The United States never invaded Iran -- but the Russians and British have.
Our hands aren't clean by any means but this knee-jerk anti-Americanism that places all of the blame at our feet doesn't even survive a casual reading of history.
No, Just the one that supposedly crashed into the Pentagon
"Supposedly"? Give me a break. What else do you think happened to Flight 77? The Government shot it down after firing a cruise missile into the pentagon? Did the Government also plant the two black boxes and airplane parts that were found at the site?
A more accurate term would be "fire-resistant".
True enough.
NIST recommended a new type of fire-resistant material that is applied differently (all of the material in the Twin Towers was the spray-on type) and more resistant to impact events. The problem is that it's much more expensive it's hard to justify the cost vs. the threat level.
It's doubtful that even this material would have saved the towers though. As you pointed out it's really only good for buying time. Unless the NYFD could have obtained access to the floors and extinguished the fires the buildings still would have come down.
Yeah, they had a neat animation that showed how it failed.
Basically the support beams for each floor started to sag as a result of the heat and the load that they were supposed to carry. As they sagged they pulled the outside walls (where most of the support for the building was) further and further inwards. Eventually the outside walls failed and the floors started to pancake onto each other. Once all of that kinetic energy was released there really wasn't a way to stop it -- hence the failure of the whole structure.
Better fire-proofing material probably would have bought more time before the buildings failed. Whether or not this would have saved many lives is questionable -- most of the non-firefighter casualties happened above the impact zones because escape routes were cut off.
One of the many recommendations NIST made was better stairwells. They should be protected with reinforced concrete and made wider. Reinforced stairwells would have provided an escape route for those trapped above the impact zones. Wider stairwells would have aided the traffic flow -- which was badly disrupted when the fire-fighters needed to go up as the civilians were going down.
Well, first I'd ask you for a citation (preferably one with pictures and/or video) because I've never heard that.
Hahahaha, touche :)
The "Truthers" (as they call themselves) are trying to cope with this in a unique way where they will relentlessly seek the truth--to a fault. They won't ever be satisfied because the attacks were so inconceivable
I don't think it's just a matter of the attacks being 'inconceivable'. Look at the many conspiracy theories that revolved around TWA 800. Hardly an 'inconceivable' event (airliner crashes have been around as long as we've had airlines) but a large number of people refused to accept the official conclusions and had all manner of alternative theories.
My favorite was the idea that the US Navy shot down TWA 800. Yeah, a ship with a crew of several hundred fired the missiles that brought down an American airliner and somehow it never leaked out......