North Korea has far less power, but at the same time they are far more likely to use it simply because they have less reasons not to start a war (their economy, as terrible as it is, is not tied to the west like China or Russia's) and a leader that seems far crazier than anything China or Russia has had since the '60s.
One should also not forget that their army did once inflict a lot of casualties on the US, and while it would do far less today, we have trouble with mere groups of fanatics with guns like those in Iraq or Afghanistan. Not to mention the US feels compelled to keep a division stationed there just for deterrence. Not a whole lot of countries merit that treatment.
I've always thought teaching a good understanding of statistics should be a requirement for high schools, since statistics are so often (mis)used to justify public policies and legislation. We need a citizenry that can see through the bullshit, or at least think a bit critically on the subject.
I think a firm understanding of statistics is more useful than the entry level calculus and the entry-level science courses like chemistry and biology(not that those aren't good too, just not as relevant to citizenship).
Here's a nice book on statistics called "How To Lie With Statistics" that covers a lot of the ways statistics are misused. (not a referrer link or anything like that)
Am I reading this right? You get "a half dozen requests per year on average" - or 1 every couple of months - to take down photos, and that's too much work for you?
If you can't take that much time to admin your site, which is minimal, you shouldn't be posting them up in the first place.
Funny, when I go to forums or sites frequented by military or ex-military guys, they are often frustrated at the rules prohibiting arming of civilian ships with even light machine guns. To them, arming ships transiting hostile waters is not a 'macho Rambo' thing, it's a 'no shit, Sherlock' thing.
>I'd imagine many people have this vision of the crews being able to see the pirates coming and just gunning them down with a chaingun, but the reality is the pirates often manage to sneak up on vessels either using bad weather, blind spots or the cover of night, so many firefights would involve close quarter combat on the decks of the ship itself.
It's called keeping watch, sailors have been doing it on ships since the 18th century at least. Honestly, if you can't keep a overnight watch over your vessel in hostile waters, you shouldn't be sailing there in the first place.
This is not even counting the times people have successfully fought back against the pirates after they've boarded, such as the time they hit a North Korean freighter.
>This is especially important to note also when you realise that against crews of 15 you're sometimes seeing as many as 80 pirates- even if you catch them before they board the ship do you really want to put yourself in the line of fire of even 50+ pirates and start trying to pick them off under fire of 80 or so AK-47s and the odd RPG being returned at you?
I'd rather have an M-2 or even an AK in that situation than not, that's for sure.
>The mentality of many people online of "just shoot them" as a solution to many problems is rather ignorant to the difficulties of the reality of the situation.
The pirates have been stopped from boarding vessels before, when they mistakenly attack supply(freighter) ships from various navies. Do you think the navy vessels run up a flag that says "We are navy, and therefore immune from piracy"? No, they man their guns (usually.50 caliber machine guns) and fire back, as well as maneuver as much as a old freighter can.
>People sailing the boats are civilians, they do not have military training, they have never been in combat, by putting them up there against the pirates you're risking far more people getting shot, whilst being hijacked sucks, it's better than having the crew killed.
I do not understand why people think "military training" is some magic held in some sacred grimore that must be kept away from the masses. Many merchant sailors are former military from 3rd world nations, and the operation and maintenance of a ship is far more complicated than that of a machine gun, or manning it. If they can run a ship without setting it on fire or running into Antarctica, they can work a machine gun. See the Somalis for example.
>The legal barriers are the least of problems, because if it was a real solution to just arm crews then as this is a problem that basically has unilateral agreement from the world's major nations including the 5 permanent security council members then an exception for ships passing through Somali waters would be no big deal.
You underestimate how PC the world's major nations have become. Here's some documentary of a Danish ship capturing some pirates, and letting them go because they couldn't find a court to hand them off to. They even fixed their boat!
Too bad this isn't a imageboard, or else I'd have a big *facepalm* pic right here...
I'd say the principal was right for trying to set right a brat who thinks quizzing Holocaust survivors on modern conflict is an appropriate thing to do.
I know geeks like to pretend they have Asperger's to excuse their poor social skills, but who the hell does that?
This is an absurd argument. We all know that contributing upstream bandwidth that you're already paying for anyways is NOT the same as paying $10 for a DVD, otherwise we would be doing that. And that an encoding and seeding job can be done by one person or a small team but lead to thousands of people getting it, so yes it is a "tiny subset" that contributes meaningful work (time and effort to encode and edit), while most 'contribute' something that requires no effort on their part.
And while I think copyright laws are too strict and prosecuting for reverse-engineering is horrible, I have to rage a bit at the "evil corporations pay only a small % of sales to artists, so it's okay to copy" argument. What percentage of money from P2P downloads go to the artist? What is 1% of zero?
Hi, I'm in Japan atm, and people here would say that having nuclear weapons is far more barbaric than killing a few murderers.
IIRC, two EU states still hold mass civilian genocide over the heads of the world's nations in order to feel secure.
This whole discussion is stupid, when its predicated on claiming that something that's less than a century old (the abolishing of the death penalty in western nations) is the very definition of 'civilization'. What next, Civilization = gay rights, not whaling, veganism, secular humanism, or other late-20th century movement?
No wonder the Muslims and immigrants in Europe are angry about cultural chauvinism, if you're willing to trash even an advanced western democracy over something basically the whole world outside of Europe does.
While I don't want to stir up any more on the topic of the atomic bombs in particular and potential casualties from an invasion of Japan, I do want to state that your post is incorrect.
If Truman ever seriously considered NOT invading if Japan had not surrendered, then he never told anyone about it. And his "all his generals" were certainly planning for the invasion of Japan. Except Le May and the Army Air Force, who thought firebombing and the atom bombs would do it. Certainly McArthur was planning on leading the invasion, with admiral Nimitz commanding the fleet carrying them there.
Really, I'd like to see sources given for any of the statements in your post.
As for me, I got most of my knowledge on Downfall, the plan to invade Japan, from a book by Richard Frank called "Downfall".
To Summarize: An entire Field Army (13 Divisions) would have landed in southern Japan, with about 5 million men including the naval fleet supporting it. The British, Canadians and Australians would also have sent divisions, and I don't think Truman ever told them there wouldn't be an invasion. All this would have been done with forces already in the Pacific, but the second landings near Tokyo were scheduled to use units rotated in from the European theater as well.
It's true that the army was demobilizing many people by then, but that was to give those who had been in war the longest a rest because of public pressure. About 500,000 had been demobilized, often the most experienced and best men in their units, and that is partly responsible for the high casualty estimates for the invasion. Many units had been seriously undermined by having their best men taken out, and the army feared that the quality of the units was low. But the plans for the invasion went forward, and all the logistics (ships, supplies, men, planes) were being prepared just as the Japanese surrendered.
Refactor 200+ years of code written by a constantly changing development team with no central management, revision control, scope checking, flowcharting let alone UML diagrams, and text editor consisting of a feather and some ink?
Yes. (Though I am not the person you are replying to)
Other countries that are "less free" have lower incarceration rates. The US has the highest incarceration rate in the world, but its laws are nowhere near the harshest.
For example, Japan has a far lower incarceration rate despite its laws usually being stricter than the USA's. Those nonviolent drug offenders in the USA would be jailed in Japan as well. But the population doesn't do drugs as much, and the police are probably not as good at catching them because the level of counter-drug training and experience isn't as high.
And that is for a generally free country like Japan, not a paranoid regimes like Singapore.
I'm just speculating now, but countries that are "less free" than the USA may be able to deter people from committing crimes in the first place. But the USA despite its incarceration rate is unable to deter people from crime, so they end up in jail.
On a purely technical note, I don't see why the Chinese gov't couldn't simply ban all encrypted traffic that does not go through a gov't proxy or middleman similar to the "key escrow" idea from the Clinton era. Tor and services like it rely on the idea that encrypted traffic is useful for other things like e-commerce, and that gov'ts won't simply ban them outright.
>china is supposed to be emerging world power? when chinese raised in the hermetically sealed climate controlled media environment of modern china interact with their compatriots from india, brazil, japan, usa, germany... what are these dunderheads going to be like? when they encounter the slightest bit of provocation or contrasting opinion to the almighty sense of "harmony" what are their social skills for that resistance? censor? ignore? run away?
While it may be comforting to think that, I suspect it will not be the case. The vast majority of Chinese will probably never need to interact with foreigners.
I'm in Japan at the moment, and it's interesting how closed off the society is from the outside world. Sure, there are lots of tourists here and Japanese travel overseas too, but the level of foreigners living and working in the country is so low that you can probably live your entire life without having any deep interactions(like political dialogue) with foreigners.
Obviously that's because of the strict immigration laws, but the point is that Japan can do this because they have a population large enough and developed enough that individuals don't need to interact with foreigners much. The domestic market is large enough to sustain companies' product development and research, and their economy is based on exporting those products and importing materials, not the immigration of people to/from Japan.
The population is also well educated so that there is no need to look for guidance from foreign people. There is enough talented people in important fields like engineering or medicine that native Japanese can fill those roles. Good ideas from overseas get imported, but the Japanese can choose not to import ideas they don't like. This happens without any centralization or government intervention, due simply to market factors - the media has no reason to try to convince the Japanese that there is something wrong with them, much like how American mainstream media tend to be patriotic and flag-waving.
If Japan can do this with a population of 140 million, I imagine China can do much the same with a population of ten times that, 1.4 billion. Not to mention a much more intrusive government.
The main difference I see is that China has a larger expatriate community that could clue in the mainlanders on what world opinion and ideas are like, and Taiwan as well. But it wouldn't surprise me if China ends up as 'walled-off' as Japan, if not more so.
It seems no one in the thread has one yet, but there are other people complaining about the poor Japanese support of other ebook readers like SonyReader. Japanese, as well as using different characters often uses vertical-orientation writing with the lines and pages going right to left. Other ebook readers put page divides in the wrong places, etc.
Plus people are worried that 600x800 is too small for the kanji characters... but I guess that's not a problem if they're not going to do it at all >:-(
I would say Japan has higher levels of corruption than the US. It is far more endemic and accepted than in the US, to the point that it's just the way people do business here.
Japan's public construction budget is larger than the US defense budget, and most of that is just absolute corruption. Americans complain about bridges to nowhere, but Japan takes it to an even further extreme. And all so that construction companies can get money, then make jobs in the countryside, so that politicians can get votes.
And don't get me started on "amakudari", the semi-official system of corruption where retired civil servants get jobs at the companies they gave contracts to.
The scientists though that, and they were wrong. The scientists had basically no clue as to the psychology and politics at play in the Japanese Empire. This is not surprising, someone like the scientists who came from a liberal, humane religious or secular background would not be able to understand why the Empire kept at war for so long. Had they been in charge of Japan, they likely would have surrendered a year or more earlier, when any rational person would have decided Japan had no hope of winning the war.
The leaders of Japan, on the other hand, continued the war until the summer of 1945. Those in Tokyo leading the country personally saw the firebombings of Tokyo starting in February of that year, with the raid in March, 5 months before the atom bombings, killing more people than either atom bomb and burning down a quarter of the city. They saw this, and still continued the war. In fact they continued it after the first atom bomb was dropped and only after the second bomb and the Soviet invasion did they stop.
I think we have to conclude that something other than rational thought or concern for the ordinary citizenry was what motivated the Japanese leadership.
>So the excuse of saving lives is bullshit. As most of the - we are using disproportionate force to save lives - excuses generally are.
That's probably correct, I'm sure saving the lives of Japanese civilians did not factor into US war plans either. But you must remember that China suffered greater civilian casualties from Japan during the war, and it was only after Japan's surrender that it stopped.
I don't know about you, but the networking class I took 5 years ago used the term "cloud". Both the teacher and the textbook used it to refer to networks like the internet, which you send data through but are outside of one's control and whose layout is not relevant to you.
I think "rain" might be taking the analogy too far, though.
1. Because Dave from HR might not always remain Dave from HR. Being a writer, or any kind of artist, rarely brings fast success, and one must pay your bills somehow until then. He could be an aspiring novelist for all you know.
2. Dave might not end up as a writer, but being in class means he's paying tuition, keeping the college funded and the professor at his job. Especially so if he's from out of state or overseas. Who knows what the professor or his other students might end up doing?
3. Having an educated populace means more arts and high culture around due to higher consumption of them. If you don't like art, this might not be a benefit to you.
It should be added that part of the reason for all the cramming is that Japanese colleges each have different entrance tests, unlike in the US where the SAT or ACT will do for most. Also, school entrance is more competitive in Japan starting from an earlier level.
I'm curious what you thought of the English education system in Japan.
I don't think so. I am not a fan of federal power, but when two different levels of government have different laws regarding one matter, it is not right that one openly break the law.
I would think the same if the state had prosecuted the marijuana grower, or if a local jurisdiction had prosecuted someone for something that is legal federally and done by the federal gov't.
For example, the Army corps of engineers generally has to work within the environmental laws of the state they work in.
I think medical marijuana should be legal, too, but the fact is that the federal law as not changed on the issue, and doing something illegal should result in a conviction. I don't see why having a city government give their blessing to the breaking of a federal law makes it not a crime. The US is a (representative) democracy, and if you couldn't convince enough people to overturn the law regarding something, maybe you shouldn't be working to subvert it by other means.
Though I think the person that should be punished more is the person who ordered city employees to break federal law, not the workers doing it.
Slashdot Mirror
North Korea has far less power, but at the same time they are far more likely to use it simply because they have less reasons not to start a war (their economy, as terrible as it is, is not tied to the west like China or Russia's) and a leader that seems far crazier than anything China or Russia has had since the '60s.
One should also not forget that their army did once inflict a lot of casualties on the US, and while it would do far less today, we have trouble with mere groups of fanatics with guns like those in Iraq or Afghanistan. Not to mention the US feels compelled to keep a division stationed there just for deterrence. Not a whole lot of countries merit that treatment.
I've always thought teaching a good understanding of statistics should be a requirement for high schools, since statistics are so often (mis)used to justify public policies and legislation. We need a citizenry that can see through the bullshit, or at least think a bit critically on the subject.
I think a firm understanding of statistics is more useful than the entry level calculus and the entry-level science courses like chemistry and biology(not that those aren't good too, just not as relevant to citizenship).
Here's a nice book on statistics called "How To Lie With Statistics" that covers a lot of the ways statistics are misused. (not a referrer link or anything like that)
http://www.amazon.com/How-Lie-Statistics-Darrell-Huff/dp/0393310728
Am I reading this right? You get "a half dozen requests per year on average" - or 1 every couple of months - to take down photos, and that's too much work for you?
If you can't take that much time to admin your site, which is minimal, you shouldn't be posting them up in the first place.
Please practice responsible web administration.
Funny, when I go to forums or sites frequented by military or ex-military guys, they are often frustrated at the rules prohibiting arming of civilian ships with even light machine guns. To them, arming ships transiting hostile waters is not a 'macho Rambo' thing, it's a 'no shit, Sherlock' thing.
>I'd imagine many people have this vision of the crews being able to see the pirates coming and just gunning them down with a chaingun, but the reality is the pirates often manage to sneak up on vessels either using bad weather, blind spots or the cover of night, so many firefights would involve close quarter combat on the decks of the ship itself.
It's called keeping watch, sailors have been doing it on ships since the 18th century at least. Honestly, if you can't keep a overnight watch over your vessel in hostile waters, you shouldn't be sailing there in the first place.
This is not even counting the times people have successfully fought back against the pirates after they've boarded, such as the time they hit a North Korean freighter.
>This is especially important to note also when you realise that against crews of 15 you're sometimes seeing as many as 80 pirates- even if you catch them before they board the ship do you really want to put yourself in the line of fire of even 50+ pirates and start trying to pick them off under fire of 80 or so AK-47s and the odd RPG being returned at you?
I'd rather have an M-2 or even an AK in that situation than not, that's for sure.
>The mentality of many people online of "just shoot them" as a solution to many problems is rather ignorant to the difficulties of the reality of the situation.
The pirates have been stopped from boarding vessels before, when they mistakenly attack supply(freighter) ships from various navies. Do you think the navy vessels run up a flag that says "We are navy, and therefore immune from piracy"? No, they man their guns (usually .50 caliber machine guns) and fire back, as well as maneuver as much as a old freighter can.
>People sailing the boats are civilians, they do not have military training, they have never been in combat, by putting them up there against the pirates you're risking far more people getting shot, whilst being hijacked sucks, it's better than having the crew killed.
I do not understand why people think "military training" is some magic held in some sacred grimore that must be kept away from the masses. Many merchant sailors are former military from 3rd world nations, and the operation and maintenance of a ship is far more complicated than that of a machine gun, or manning it. If they can run a ship without setting it on fire or running into Antarctica, they can work a machine gun. See the Somalis for example.
>The legal barriers are the least of problems, because if it was a real solution to just arm crews then as this is a problem that basically has unilateral agreement from the world's major nations including the 5 permanent security council members then an exception for ships passing through Somali waters would be no big deal.
You underestimate how PC the world's major nations have become. Here's some documentary of a Danish ship capturing some pirates, and letting them go because they couldn't find a court to hand them off to. They even fixed their boat!
http://watch.discoverychannel.ca/mighty-ships-/mighty-ships-season-2/mighty-ships-hdms-absalon/
Too bad this isn't a imageboard, or else I'd have a big *facepalm* pic right here...
I'd say the principal was right for trying to set right a brat who thinks quizzing Holocaust survivors on modern conflict is an appropriate thing to do.
I know geeks like to pretend they have Asperger's to excuse their poor social skills, but who the hell does that?
This is an absurd argument. We all know that contributing upstream bandwidth that you're already paying for anyways is NOT the same as paying $10 for a DVD, otherwise we would be doing that. And that an encoding and seeding job can be done by one person or a small team but lead to thousands of people getting it, so yes it is a "tiny subset" that contributes meaningful work (time and effort to encode and edit), while most 'contribute' something that requires no effort on their part.
And while I think copyright laws are too strict and prosecuting for reverse-engineering is horrible, I have to rage a bit at the "evil corporations pay only a small % of sales to artists, so it's okay to copy" argument. What percentage of money from P2P downloads go to the artist? What is 1% of zero?
Before anyone chips in with "US is corrupt too", a report by Transparency International on worldwide corruption: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8363599.stm
TL;DR US ranked 19th least corrupt, New Zealand #1. Russia seems to be among the worst corrupt states.
Hi, I'm in Japan atm, and people here would say that having nuclear weapons is far more barbaric than killing a few murderers.
IIRC, two EU states still hold mass civilian genocide over the heads of the world's nations in order to feel secure.
This whole discussion is stupid, when its predicated on claiming that something that's less than a century old (the abolishing of the death penalty in western nations) is the very definition of 'civilization'. What next, Civilization = gay rights, not whaling, veganism, secular humanism, or other late-20th century movement?
No wonder the Muslims and immigrants in Europe are angry about cultural chauvinism, if you're willing to trash even an advanced western democracy over something basically the whole world outside of Europe does.
While I don't want to stir up any more on the topic of the atomic bombs in particular and potential casualties from an invasion of Japan, I do want to state that your post is incorrect.
If Truman ever seriously considered NOT invading if Japan had not surrendered, then he never told anyone about it. And his "all his generals" were certainly planning for the invasion of Japan. Except Le May and the Army Air Force, who thought firebombing and the atom bombs would do it. Certainly McArthur was planning on leading the invasion, with admiral Nimitz commanding the fleet carrying them there.
Really, I'd like to see sources given for any of the statements in your post.
As for me, I got most of my knowledge on Downfall, the plan to invade Japan, from a book by Richard Frank called "Downfall".
To Summarize: An entire Field Army (13 Divisions) would have landed in southern Japan, with about 5 million men including the naval fleet supporting it. The British, Canadians and Australians would also have sent divisions, and I don't think Truman ever told them there wouldn't be an invasion. All this would have been done with forces already in the Pacific, but the second landings near Tokyo were scheduled to use units rotated in from the European theater as well.
It's true that the army was demobilizing many people by then, but that was to give those who had been in war the longest a rest because of public pressure. About 500,000 had been demobilized, often the most experienced and best men in their units, and that is partly responsible for the high casualty estimates for the invasion. Many units had been seriously undermined by having their best men taken out, and the army feared that the quality of the units was low. But the plans for the invasion went forward, and all the logistics (ships, supplies, men, planes) were being prepared just as the Japanese surrendered.
While not as good, here is a wikipedia article on the planned invasion:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Downfall
Really, I'd like to know where you heard that Truman wasn't going to invade.
Refactor 200+ years of code written by a constantly changing development team with no central management, revision control, scope checking, flowcharting let alone UML diagrams, and text editor consisting of a feather and some ink?
Sign me the fuck up!
Yes. (Though I am not the person you are replying to)
Other countries that are "less free" have lower incarceration rates. The US has the highest incarceration rate in the world, but its laws are nowhere near the harshest.
For example, Japan has a far lower incarceration rate despite its laws usually being stricter than the USA's. Those nonviolent drug offenders in the USA would be jailed in Japan as well. But the population doesn't do drugs as much, and the police are probably not as good at catching them because the level of counter-drug training and experience isn't as high.
And that is for a generally free country like Japan, not a paranoid regimes like Singapore.
I'm just speculating now, but countries that are "less free" than the USA may be able to deter people from committing crimes in the first place. But the USA despite its incarceration rate is unable to deter people from crime, so they end up in jail.
On a purely technical note, I don't see why the Chinese gov't couldn't simply ban all encrypted traffic that does not go through a gov't proxy or middleman similar to the "key escrow" idea from the Clinton era. Tor and services like it rely on the idea that encrypted traffic is useful for other things like e-commerce, and that gov'ts won't simply ban them outright.
>china is supposed to be emerging world power? when chinese raised in the hermetically sealed climate controlled media environment of modern china interact with their compatriots from india, brazil, japan, usa, germany... what are these dunderheads going to be like? when they encounter the slightest bit of provocation or contrasting opinion to the almighty sense of "harmony" what are their social skills for that resistance? censor? ignore? run away?
While it may be comforting to think that, I suspect it will not be the case. The vast majority of Chinese will probably never need to interact with foreigners.
I'm in Japan at the moment, and it's interesting how closed off the society is from the outside world. Sure, there are lots of tourists here and Japanese travel overseas too, but the level of foreigners living and working in the country is so low that you can probably live your entire life without having any deep interactions(like political dialogue) with foreigners.
Obviously that's because of the strict immigration laws, but the point is that Japan can do this because they have a population large enough and developed enough that individuals don't need to interact with foreigners much. The domestic market is large enough to sustain companies' product development and research, and their economy is based on exporting those products and importing materials, not the immigration of people to/from Japan.
The population is also well educated so that there is no need to look for guidance from foreign people. There is enough talented people in important fields like engineering or medicine that native Japanese can fill those roles. Good ideas from overseas get imported, but the Japanese can choose not to import ideas they don't like. This happens without any centralization or government intervention, due simply to market factors - the media has no reason to try to convince the Japanese that there is something wrong with them, much like how American mainstream media tend to be patriotic and flag-waving.
If Japan can do this with a population of 140 million, I imagine China can do much the same with a population of ten times that, 1.4 billion. Not to mention a much more intrusive government.
The main difference I see is that China has a larger expatriate community that could clue in the mainlanders on what world opinion and ideas are like, and Taiwan as well. But it wouldn't surprise me if China ends up as 'walled-off' as Japan, if not more so.
Am I the only one who thought that the obvious solution to this is to simply shit in the aisle?
If enough people do it, I'm sure the airlines will change their minds ;-) --you
XP
X(
X(
^^^ The people in the next seats
So al-Qaeda is now Open Source? What's their license, and do I have to publicly release my patches to their bombs?
That's pretty disappointing, and also a bit WTF. 'Internationalization' with only Latin fonts?!
Note that Amazon Japan is also selling this, and story on this at Slashdot Japan.
It seems no one in the thread has one yet, but there are other people complaining about the poor Japanese support of other ebook readers like SonyReader. Japanese, as well as using different characters often uses vertical-orientation writing with the lines and pages going right to left. Other ebook readers put page divides in the wrong places, etc.
Plus people are worried that 600x800 is too small for the kanji characters... but I guess that's not a problem if they're not going to do it at all >:-(
I would say Japan has higher levels of corruption than the US. It is far more endemic and accepted than in the US, to the point that it's just the way people do business here.
Japan's public construction budget is larger than the US defense budget, and most of that is just absolute corruption. Americans complain about bridges to nowhere, but Japan takes it to an even further extreme. And all so that construction companies can get money, then make jobs in the countryside, so that politicians can get votes.
And don't get me started on "amakudari", the semi-official system of corruption where retired civil servants get jobs at the companies they gave contracts to.
The scientists though that, and they were wrong. The scientists had basically no clue as to the psychology and politics at play in the Japanese Empire. This is not surprising, someone like the scientists who came from a liberal, humane religious or secular background would not be able to understand why the Empire kept at war for so long. Had they been in charge of Japan, they likely would have surrendered a year or more earlier, when any rational person would have decided Japan had no hope of winning the war.
The leaders of Japan, on the other hand, continued the war until the summer of 1945. Those in Tokyo leading the country personally saw the firebombings of Tokyo starting in February of that year, with the raid in March, 5 months before the atom bombings, killing more people than either atom bomb and burning down a quarter of the city. They saw this, and still continued the war. In fact they continued it after the first atom bomb was dropped and only after the second bomb and the Soviet invasion did they stop.
I think we have to conclude that something other than rational thought or concern for the ordinary citizenry was what motivated the Japanese leadership.
>So the excuse of saving lives is bullshit. As most of the - we are using disproportionate force to save lives - excuses generally are.
That's probably correct, I'm sure saving the lives of Japanese civilians did not factor into US war plans either. But you must remember that China suffered greater civilian casualties from Japan during the war, and it was only after Japan's surrender that it stopped.
I don't know about you, but the networking class I took 5 years ago used the term "cloud". Both the teacher and the textbook used it to refer to networks like the internet, which you send data through but are outside of one's control and whose layout is not relevant to you.
I think "rain" might be taking the analogy too far, though.
1. Because Dave from HR might not always remain Dave from HR. Being a writer, or any kind of artist, rarely brings fast success, and one must pay your bills somehow until then. He could be an aspiring novelist for all you know.
2. Dave might not end up as a writer, but being in class means he's paying tuition, keeping the college funded and the professor at his job. Especially so if he's from out of state or overseas. Who knows what the professor or his other students might end up doing?
3. Having an educated populace means more arts and high culture around due to higher consumption of them. If you don't like art, this might not be a benefit to you.
I know I'm out of the loop regarding games, but when I read the article I thought, "Delicious Large Chest...?"
I know, I know, too much anime.
It should be added that part of the reason for all the cramming is that Japanese colleges each have different entrance tests, unlike in the US where the SAT or ACT will do for most. Also, school entrance is more competitive in Japan starting from an earlier level.
I'm curious what you thought of the English education system in Japan.
I think his point was that we no longer have the world wars, not that there were no small wars before nukes.
I don't think so. I am not a fan of federal power, but when two different levels of government have different laws regarding one matter, it is not right that one openly break the law.
I would think the same if the state had prosecuted the marijuana grower, or if a local jurisdiction had prosecuted someone for something that is legal federally and done by the federal gov't.
For example, the Army corps of engineers generally has to work within the environmental laws of the state they work in.
Japan just started having a jury system, so I'm wondering if any of you have advice to give people there, like those at Slashdot Japan?
Except the conviction was the correct decision.
I think medical marijuana should be legal, too, but the fact is that the federal law as not changed on the issue, and doing something illegal should result in a conviction. I don't see why having a city government give their blessing to the breaking of a federal law makes it not a crime. The US is a (representative) democracy, and if you couldn't convince enough people to overturn the law regarding something, maybe you shouldn't be working to subvert it by other means.
Though I think the person that should be punished more is the person who ordered city employees to break federal law, not the workers doing it.