Wrong. It may "revoke control" from the power user. But, the general public will view the iPad, like the iPod, as a simpler, more friendly way to get things done. It gives them control.
That's giving the general public "convenience" not "control". There are other ways of delivering convenience. e.g. Steam is quite convenient for buying games. It's a well organised store, but I still have control over my machine.
I take it you missed yesterday where Apple disclosed in their financials that they don't make a profit from the app store directly, only through increased hardware sales?
If they are not making a profit from locking people into buying approved apps from their store, then why not allow people to run any apps they chose from any source? Openness is a valuable feature that will also increase hardware sales. Many people, myself included, will not buy such locked-down systems like the Iphone.
I also hate the trend of computing devices becoming locked down. It really is a massive step backwards. I certainly won't be buying a locked down Apple iSlate, but would certainly consider buying a similar open product from a competitor. I think that companies need to make more of the fact that their products are open. In a world of locked down systems, openness should be marketed as a selling point and also used to tarnish closed products.
The fun part is that the (UK) cops can demand a decryption key for that, and lock me up when I inevitably fail to provide one....
In the UK, local councils can view your phone and email records, unbelievable as that is. It is a power granted to them under the RIPA Act and it's not just a theoretical power either. They have used it to spy on people for all manner of reasons. Due to these intrusive powers, public usage of encryption etc should be much more common than it is.
Because terrorists that hide behind civilians and refuse to obey the laws of war aren't entitled to the same treatment as soldiers who fight under a flag and officers?
Do you include the "terrorists" who actually turned out to be completely innocent. e.g. Khalid El-Masri . Who gets to decide who is a terrorist or or unlawful combatant? The victor? If those "soldiers and flag officers" are captured as reclassified as unlawful combatants,does it suddenly become ok to torture them?
What if some "military contractors" are captured? Is it ok to torture them because they are not official soldiers? The problem is, when a country starts torturing people in this way and deciding who's a legitimate soldier or not, it sets a dangerous example. The same game can be played by anyone. e.g. US Special forces caught in Iran? With no official war declared, Iran could claim they are unlawful combatants and have no rights. It's a very dangerous path.
Since you brought up WWII, why don't you do a little research and find out what happened to unlawful combatants who violated the laws of war. Start by researching the German troops that fought behind the line in Allied uniforms during the Battle of the Bulge. When we captured them they were subject to summary execution.
WWII saw it's own version of the reclassification of POWs. Just after the war German POWs were reclassified as Disarmed Enemy Forces (DEFs). This was so that their Geneva Convention rights could be denied. Yet again, the victor gets to decide who is allowed to be treated as a proper POW. Any soldier serving in the US army should be angry over this kind of practice since they may end up as a POW themselves at some point.
So I'm wondering as to why this is an issue for you. Did everything stop running when you switched to Windows2008? Or did you write client-server apps (that was a no-no even in 1997)? I'm curious:)
If you have invested a lot of money in a language and it's dumped, it certainly is an issue. Things may not stop running completely, but you get issues and those issues will no longer be patched. More than this, if you were selling commercial VB apps (as we were), customers tend to be quite concerned about buying an application written in a defunct language. Our main application was in VB. It was big and a lot of money had gone into it. You can't just ignore that and hope things will keep working. What happens when you want to write some new module for your large system? Throw money at writing it in defunct VB6? Or go down the hellish path of writing new modules in C# and use interop?
If you just had some little in-house tools in VB6, its dumping by Microsoft may not have been so much of an issue. For companies whose main product was in VB6, I can't understand it not being a major issue.
Visual Basic is a good example, all sorts of geeks liked to hate on VB as being stupid. While they were on to something in that VB wasn't powerful like C/C++, they missed that the reason was that VB was a managed language back before such a thing was popular. It allowed you to easily churn out UIs and things like that with minimal effort and without the need to check for the gotchas you got with something like C. Hence it was quite popular.
It was very popular. Millions upon millions of lines of code were written in VB. The company I used to work for had invested a lot of money over many years in their VB apps. Then microsoft dumped VB6. We tried upgrading to VB.NET (using various wizards) but it proved virtually impossible. Basically we were screwed. The company that made the language we depended on had totally shafted us. We just didn't have the finances to rewrite everything in.NET and at the time I left the company, they still had no real way forward. I suspect similar stories have occurred in small software houses all over the world.
This is a real danger when using a proprietary language. If they stop making it, you're screwed.
the evidence suggests they were using it the way everyone else does, as flares at night to light up targets so the wrong building/person isn't shot
Oh really? Take a look at this image http://www.geenstijl.nl/archives/images/fosforgroot.jpg . It's just one of many examples of white phosphorus being used in densely populated urban areas. The Israelis were using them in an air-burst mode, maximizing the risk to civilians, rather than the safer ground burst. If the goal was smoke cover, then there were far less dangerous alternatives available.
As is the question of whether an errant bomb/missile hit a school in a war zone (mistakes happen and collateral damage is tragic, but it's not like it's done on purpose).
The IDF has a long track record of doing very nasty things quite on purpose. The whole strategy of dealing with the Palestinians is one of collective punishment. A few years back some Palestinian protesters were killed by a tank shell and the Israeli spokeswoman told the media that they were only firing tank shells near to the crowd to warn them (she managed to keep a straight face too). When a country starts firing tank shells for crowd control, you have to seriously question whether they care about civilian lives at all. If you listen to the testimonies of ex-Israeli soldiers (e.g. Breaking the Silence) you will hear many counts of how innocent civilians are targeted. Palestinian lives are viewed as worthless.
There seems to be a huge gap between these kind of academic projects and the commercial available programs.
Indeed. Check out the work of Volker Blanz . He was producing amazing 3D models of celebrities from photographs a decade ago. Yet you can't get anything remotely that good today (I've used Facegen etc).
Let's take a step back from the idea of contact lens displays to the lower-tech idea of wearable Head Mounted Displays. Where are they? It's been 20 or more years since the promise of Virtual Reality and yet I still can't go into the average computer store and by some VR goggles. You can buy them on-line of course but frankly they are awful. Most of them have low resolution and a field of view equivalent to a 14 inch monitor on your desk (cunningly advertised as being equivalent to 70 inch screen at 10 feet).
Field of view is really the most important thing for an immersive experience, not the 3D aspect. Imagine the impressive view you would get looking out from the top of a mountain. There is no useful 3D information in the scene since everything is too far away, but it certainly wouldn't feel fake despite the lack of 3D. If you look at the same mountain view through a tiny window though, suddenly you are now longer "there", and it just becomes a picture of a mountain view. That's the dire experience you get from today's narrow field of view. Even the super expensive HMDs that cost as much as a house do not provide a normal human field of view.
I think the problem is that there is no real drive to bring virtual reality to the consumer market. Companies are far too comfortable making games designed to be played on a low field of view window on the world that never moves. If one of the major console makers pushed the idea of VR, it might change things. I won't hold my breath though. I've been waiting 20 years for VR and there is just no will there to go with the idea despite all the technical advances we have made.
"And then within half a minute -- bloggers being what they are -- the news gets repeated and repeated until it becomes fact."
So what happens when Reuters sends out inaccurate information? It gets reproduced around the world very quickly and they certainly do make mistakes. As for editorial feedback, large media organisations seem to be far worse at taking any notice of their readers than bloggers are. For example, if you write to the BBC pointing out some howling mistake, you might be really lucky and get a reply. If they correct it at all, they will simply quietly correct it without any visible admission to the readers that a mistake was made.
...is the underlying complaint that big business makes across a range of issues. Most recently over the issue of Health Care in the US. When you think about it, it's pretty outrageous that corporations lobby governments to prevent us from using our own money for our own benefit. Yet it goes on all the time and is often successful.
The goto statement is very useful. Your dislike of it is irrational. Do you even know why you do not like it? Often, goto is the best solution to given problem.
The point of avoiding goto statements is that it decreases readability. Things can rapidly descend into spaghetti code if the flow jumps all over the place because of gotos. Usually a rethink can eliminate your need for a goto statement. For example, if there is a section of your code you need to jump out of, put that code in a function instead and return from the function instead of jumping out.
I'd be interested in seen an example of when you have used goto, because there usually tends to be a better way.
Breaking out of a deeply-nested loop, as can happen when you're looking for a specific element in a multidimensional array. The alternative involves adding state variables and complicating the logic terribly.
But then you can surely just have your array search as a function and return the information you need from the function. So in the function itself when you find the element you want, you can just return the index. I don't think I've ever had to use a goto in my code, and when I've been tempted it tends to be an indication that I need to rethink things.
Where MAD falls apart is when the leaders don't give a rat's ass about the civilian population.
That statement would cover the UK's (and probably many other countries) attitude toward public nuclear shelters. There aren't any. They didn't spend a penny on it. The feeble argument they made was that a shelter can't take a direct strike, so you really only need to protect people from fallout, which they can do by preparing their homes appropriately. This is a thoroughly specious argument though. There certainly is a zone of destruction where a shelter won't save you, but there is also a wide zone where a shelter will save you. What it really comes down to of course is cost. They didn't want to spend the money. They public are not worth it. Bank's are of course a different category. There's always money to bail them out.
But now they are bring them in more slower over a long time scale, at first voluntary. Its bring them in by exploiting feature creep.
Exactly. They did the same thing with the criminal DNA database. At first they said it was just for serious violent criminals etc. Who could argue with keeping their DNA on file? But of course pretty soon they started extending it. Now, years later, even if you just get arrested by mistake, they keep your DNA on file permanently. One of the consequences of this is that the threat of having your DNA on file has become a deterrent to people taking part in protests (as if the truncheon deterrent isn't enough).
It's not sufficient to just evaluate a particular piece of legislation on its own, you have to see where its leading. The safest thing is to never give them a single inch.
The virtual retinal display (which Microvision has been working on for seemingly aeons) potentially allows for the focus of each pixel to be varied. So your eyes would actually have to focus to different depths as in the real world.
Remember Jurassic Park? How fricking old is that movie? How can it be that it looked more realistic than newer movies?
Because good directors film around the inherent limitations of the technology and their budgets. A good example of this is Ridley Scott (at least in his earlier films). In Alien he knew the creature would look stupid if it was shown in the light too much, so he made sure we never see it very much. Problem solved. A lesser director would have shown the alien a lot, just like crappy sci-fi B-Movies of the time.
Then there is Bladerunner. Ridley Scott knew the cityscape they built would look crappy in the daylight, so he set it at night, and obscured things even more by making it rain perpetually. Again, a lesser director would not have taken that simple step and today we would all be talking about how crappy Bladerunner looked.
Which is nothing compared to the war crimes the Japanese themselves managed to commit.
War crimes committed by the Japanese armed forces do not justify war crimes committed by the US. It's a very bad road to travel. These sorts of justifications for war crimes suddenly look far less attractive when the situation is reversed. Many of the military top brass considered the bombings to be unnecessary and also a heinous act.
e.g.
During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of 'face'. The Secretary was deeply perturbed by my attitude...
- Dwight Eisenhower, Mandate For Change, pg. 380
"...the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing."
- Ike on Ike, Newsweek, 11/11/63
It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons.
"The lethal possibilities of atomic warfare in the future are frightening. My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.
- Admiral William Leahy, I Was There, pg. 441.
The atomic weapons used on Japan saved millions and millions of lives, and prevented even greater Japanese atrocities. Indeed, we still have purple hearts left over today from the supply ordered before the invasion of Japan, as the estimated casualties approached 1 million Americans, and nearly all the Japanese.
With Russia entering the war against Japan, they were already going to surrender pretty soon and the US knew it. The US military casualty estimates were originally nowhere near the 1 million level. The figures were being inflated in an attempt to justify the atomic bombings. However, even if the casualty estimates were right, it still does not justify the bombings. If it's ok for the US to murder several hundred thousand civilians in order to keep its own military casualties down, then it's also ok for anyone else. Would you accept Russia nuking Georgian cities in a future conflict in order to save the lives of Russian soldiers? If an enemy used similar tactics in order to cut down its military casualties, there would be virtually no-one arguing that it was justified (other than in the enemy country).
I agree wholeheartedly. It's quite outrageous that a company should have control over what applications we are permitted to use. We should boycott all closed systems. I steadfastly refuse to buy any consoles because of their closed nature.
The BBC has it's own reader's comments section called "Have Your Say". It's moderated by a BBC team and it's notorious for censoring completely valid and non-abusive opinion. For example, when they had a topic on Google's participation in censorship in China, some posters pointed out that the BBC also censors things. The BBC responded to this by removing their posts (the topic that day had pre-moderation switched off, something that virtually never happens now). This prompted other people to point out the irony of the BBC removing posted about BBC censorship on a topic about censorship. The BBC then quickly pulled those posts. This prompted more similar responses and eventually the BBC gave up.
These days all of the topics are premoderated and if they don't like your opinion, it won't go up. Those posts pointing out cases of BBC censorship would never have made it onto the website. For example, I made a recent post on the topic of How should the police handle protests?
(coming after a protester died after being assaulted by the riot police). I pointed out that assaults on unarmed and non-violent protesters are routine, that the media knows it and that they are only writing about it this time because someone died. The post was rejected without explanation (as all rejections are).
I firmly believe that members of the public should be able to make posts on news stories without being pre-moderated by some faceless team of people with rather nebulous posting rules. I think if we could make posts on any news topic (e.g. each news item could have a discuss button) on the BBC (or any other outlet) it could really affect the way they report. For example, during the massive Israeli military assault on Gaza earlier in the year, the BBC website was plastered with images clearly showing the use of white Phosphorus. The problem was that despite these clear images, and despite people writing in and pointing it out, the BBC refused to use the term "white phosphorus" for a whole week. Would they have been able to get away with that if the top-rated post under their Gaza news stories was about White Phosphorus being used?
Slashdot Mirror
Wrong. It may "revoke control" from the power user. But, the general public will view the iPad, like the iPod, as a simpler, more friendly way to get things done. It gives them control.
That's giving the general public "convenience" not "control". There are other ways of delivering convenience. e.g. Steam is quite convenient for buying games. It's a well organised store, but I still have control over my machine.
I take it you missed yesterday where Apple disclosed in their financials that they don't make a profit from the app store directly, only through increased hardware sales?
If they are not making a profit from locking people into buying approved apps from their store, then why not allow people to run any apps they chose from any source? Openness is a valuable feature that will also increase hardware sales. Many people, myself included, will not buy such locked-down systems like the Iphone.
I also hate the trend of computing devices becoming locked down. It really is a massive step backwards. I certainly won't be buying a locked down Apple iSlate, but would certainly consider buying a similar open product from a competitor. I think that companies need to make more of the fact that their products are open. In a world of locked down systems, openness should be marketed as a selling point and also used to tarnish closed products.
The fun part is that the (UK) cops can demand a decryption key for that, and lock me up when I inevitably fail to provide one....
In the UK, local councils can view your phone and email records, unbelievable as that is. It is a power granted to them under the RIPA Act and it's not just a theoretical power either. They have used it to spy on people for all manner of reasons. Due to these intrusive powers, public usage of encryption etc should be much more common than it is.
Quite right. There is an excellent Book called Flat Earth News on how news is collected/created these days.
For another angle on the issue, read "Manufacturing Consent" by Herman and Chomsky. There is also a documentary on youtube.
Because terrorists that hide behind civilians and refuse to obey the laws of war aren't entitled to the same treatment as soldiers who fight under a flag and officers?
Do you include the "terrorists" who actually turned out to be completely innocent. e.g. Khalid El-Masri . Who gets to decide who is a terrorist or or unlawful combatant? The victor? If those "soldiers and flag officers" are captured as reclassified as unlawful combatants,does it suddenly become ok to torture them?
What if some "military contractors" are captured? Is it ok to torture them because they are not official soldiers? The problem is, when a country starts torturing people in this way and deciding who's a legitimate soldier or not, it sets a dangerous example. The same game can be played by anyone. e.g. US Special forces caught in Iran? With no official war declared, Iran could claim they are unlawful combatants and have no rights. It's a very dangerous path.
Since you brought up WWII, why don't you do a little research and find out what happened to unlawful combatants who violated the laws of war. Start by researching the German troops that fought behind the line in Allied uniforms during the Battle of the Bulge. When we captured them they were subject to summary execution.
WWII saw it's own version of the reclassification of POWs. Just after the war German POWs were reclassified as Disarmed Enemy Forces (DEFs). This was so that their Geneva Convention rights could be denied. Yet again, the victor gets to decide who is allowed to be treated as a proper POW. Any soldier serving in the US army should be angry over this kind of practice since they may end up as a POW themselves at some point.
So I'm wondering as to why this is an issue for you. Did everything stop running when you switched to Windows2008? Or did you write client-server apps (that was a no-no even in 1997)? I'm curious :)
If you have invested a lot of money in a language and it's dumped, it certainly is an issue. Things may not stop running completely, but you get issues and those issues will no longer be patched. More than this, if you were selling commercial VB apps (as we were), customers tend to be quite concerned about buying an application written in a defunct language. Our main application was in VB. It was big and a lot of money had gone into it. You can't just ignore that and hope things will keep working. What happens when you want to write some new module for your large system? Throw money at writing it in defunct VB6? Or go down the hellish path of writing new modules in C# and use interop?
If you just had some little in-house tools in VB6, its dumping by Microsoft may not have been so much of an issue. For companies whose main product was in VB6, I can't understand it not being a major issue.
Visual Basic is a good example, all sorts of geeks liked to hate on VB as being stupid. While they were on to something in that VB wasn't powerful like C/C++, they missed that the reason was that VB was a managed language back before such a thing was popular. It allowed you to easily churn out UIs and things like that with minimal effort and without the need to check for the gotchas you got with something like C. Hence it was quite popular.
It was very popular. Millions upon millions of lines of code were written in VB. The company I used to work for had invested a lot of money over many years in their VB apps. Then microsoft dumped VB6. We tried upgrading to VB.NET (using various wizards) but it proved virtually impossible. Basically we were screwed. The company that made the language we depended on had totally shafted us. We just didn't have the finances to rewrite everything in .NET and at the time I left the company, they still had no real way forward. I suspect similar stories have occurred in small software houses all over the world.
This is a real danger when using a proprietary language. If they stop making it, you're screwed.
the evidence suggests they were using it the way everyone else does, as flares at night to light up targets so the wrong building/person isn't shot
Oh really? Take a look at this image http://www.geenstijl.nl/archives/images/fosforgroot.jpg . It's just one of many examples of white phosphorus being used in densely populated urban areas. The Israelis were using them in an air-burst mode, maximizing the risk to civilians, rather than the safer ground burst. If the goal was smoke cover, then there were far less dangerous alternatives available.
As is the question of whether an errant bomb/missile hit a school in a war zone (mistakes happen and collateral damage is tragic, but it's not like it's done on purpose).
The IDF has a long track record of doing very nasty things quite on purpose. The whole strategy of dealing with the Palestinians is one of collective punishment. A few years back some Palestinian protesters were killed by a tank shell and the Israeli spokeswoman told the media that they were only firing tank shells near to the crowd to warn them (she managed to keep a straight face too). When a country starts firing tank shells for crowd control, you have to seriously question whether they care about civilian lives at all. If you listen to the testimonies of ex-Israeli soldiers (e.g. Breaking the Silence) you will hear many counts of how innocent civilians are targeted. Palestinian lives are viewed as worthless.
There seems to be a huge gap between these kind of academic projects and the commercial available programs.
Indeed. Check out the work of Volker Blanz . He was producing amazing 3D models of celebrities from photographs a decade ago. Yet you can't get anything remotely that good today (I've used Facegen etc).
It's interesting that all parties have moved towards the right (neo-liberalism) and simultaneously to towards authoritarianism. Not a pleasant trend.
Let's take a step back from the idea of contact lens displays to the lower-tech idea of wearable Head Mounted Displays. Where are they? It's been 20 or more years since the promise of Virtual Reality and yet I still can't go into the average computer store and by some VR goggles. You can buy them on-line of course but frankly they are awful. Most of them have low resolution and a field of view equivalent to a 14 inch monitor on your desk (cunningly advertised as being equivalent to 70 inch screen at 10 feet).
Field of view is really the most important thing for an immersive experience, not the 3D aspect. Imagine the impressive view you would get looking out from the top of a mountain. There is no useful 3D information in the scene since everything is too far away, but it certainly wouldn't feel fake despite the lack of 3D. If you look at the same mountain view through a tiny window though, suddenly you are now longer "there", and it just becomes a picture of a mountain view. That's the dire experience you get from today's narrow field of view. Even the super expensive HMDs that cost as much as a house do not provide a normal human field of view.
I think the problem is that there is no real drive to bring virtual reality to the consumer market. Companies are far too comfortable making games designed to be played on a low field of view window on the world that never moves. If one of the major console makers pushed the idea of VR, it might change things. I won't hold my breath though. I've been waiting 20 years for VR and there is just no will there to go with the idea despite all the technical advances we have made.
The last Adobe flash update installed McAfee Security Scan without my even noticing. So watch out for those pre-check boxes.
"And then within half a minute -- bloggers being what they are -- the news gets repeated and repeated until it becomes fact." So what happens when Reuters sends out inaccurate information? It gets reproduced around the world very quickly and they certainly do make mistakes. As for editorial feedback, large media organisations seem to be far worse at taking any notice of their readers than bloggers are. For example, if you write to the BBC pointing out some howling mistake, you might be really lucky and get a reply. If they correct it at all, they will simply quietly correct it without any visible admission to the readers that a mistake was made.
...is the underlying complaint that big business makes across a range of issues. Most recently over the issue of Health Care in the US. When you think about it, it's pretty outrageous that corporations lobby governments to prevent us from using our own money for our own benefit. Yet it goes on all the time and is often successful.
The goto statement is very useful. Your dislike of it is irrational. Do you even know why you do not like it? Often, goto is the best solution to given problem.
The point of avoiding goto statements is that it decreases readability. Things can rapidly descend into spaghetti code if the flow jumps all over the place because of gotos. Usually a rethink can eliminate your need for a goto statement. For example, if there is a section of your code you need to jump out of, put that code in a function instead and return from the function instead of jumping out.
I'd be interested in seen an example of when you have used goto, because there usually tends to be a better way.
Breaking out of a deeply-nested loop, as can happen when you're looking for a specific element in a multidimensional array. The alternative involves adding state variables and complicating the logic terribly.
But then you can surely just have your array search as a function and return the information you need from the function. So in the function itself when you find the element you want, you can just return the index. I don't think I've ever had to use a goto in my code, and when I've been tempted it tends to be an indication that I need to rethink things.
Where MAD falls apart is when the leaders don't give a rat's ass about the civilian population.
That statement would cover the UK's (and probably many other countries) attitude toward public nuclear shelters. There aren't any. They didn't spend a penny on it. The feeble argument they made was that a shelter can't take a direct strike, so you really only need to protect people from fallout, which they can do by preparing their homes appropriately. This is a thoroughly specious argument though. There certainly is a zone of destruction where a shelter won't save you, but there is also a wide zone where a shelter will save you. What it really comes down to of course is cost. They didn't want to spend the money. They public are not worth it. Bank's are of course a different category. There's always money to bail them out.
But now they are bring them in more slower over a long time scale, at first voluntary. Its bring them in by exploiting feature creep.
Exactly. They did the same thing with the criminal DNA database. At first they said it was just for serious violent criminals etc. Who could argue with keeping their DNA on file? But of course pretty soon they started extending it. Now, years later, even if you just get arrested by mistake, they keep your DNA on file permanently. One of the consequences of this is that the threat of having your DNA on file has become a deterrent to people taking part in protests (as if the truncheon deterrent isn't enough).
It's not sufficient to just evaluate a particular piece of legislation on its own, you have to see where its leading. The safest thing is to never give them a single inch.
The virtual retinal display (which Microvision has been working on for seemingly aeons) potentially allows for the focus of each pixel to be varied. So your eyes would actually have to focus to different depths as in the real world.
Remember Jurassic Park? How fricking old is that movie? How can it be that it looked more realistic than newer movies?
Because good directors film around the inherent limitations of the technology and their budgets. A good example of this is Ridley Scott (at least in his earlier films). In Alien he knew the creature would look stupid if it was shown in the light too much, so he made sure we never see it very much. Problem solved. A lesser director would have shown the alien a lot, just like crappy sci-fi B-Movies of the time.
Then there is Bladerunner. Ridley Scott knew the cityscape they built would look crappy in the daylight, so he set it at night, and obscured things even more by making it rain perpetually. Again, a lesser director would not have taken that simple step and today we would all be talking about how crappy Bladerunner looked.
Which is nothing compared to the war crimes the Japanese themselves managed to commit.
War crimes committed by the Japanese armed forces do not justify war crimes committed by the US. It's a very bad road to travel. These sorts of justifications for war crimes suddenly look far less attractive when the situation is reversed. Many of the military top brass considered the bombings to be unnecessary and also a heinous act.
e.g.
During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of 'face'. The Secretary was deeply perturbed by my attitude...
- Dwight Eisenhower, Mandate For Change, pg. 380
"...the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing."
- Ike on Ike, Newsweek, 11/11/63
It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons.
"The lethal possibilities of atomic warfare in the future are frightening. My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.
- Admiral William Leahy, I Was There, pg. 441.
The atomic weapons used on Japan saved millions and millions of lives, and prevented even greater Japanese atrocities. Indeed, we still have purple hearts left over today from the supply ordered before the invasion of Japan, as the estimated casualties approached 1 million Americans, and nearly all the Japanese.
With Russia entering the war against Japan, they were already going to surrender pretty soon and the US knew it. The US military casualty estimates were originally nowhere near the 1 million level. The figures were being inflated in an attempt to justify the atomic bombings. However, even if the casualty estimates were right, it still does not justify the bombings. If it's ok for the US to murder several hundred thousand civilians in order to keep its own military casualties down, then it's also ok for anyone else. Would you accept Russia nuking Georgian cities in a future conflict in order to save the lives of Russian soldiers? If an enemy used similar tactics in order to cut down its military casualties, there would be virtually no-one arguing that it was justified (other than in the enemy country).
I agree wholeheartedly. It's quite outrageous that a company should have control over what applications we are permitted to use. We should boycott all closed systems. I steadfastly refuse to buy any consoles because of their closed nature.
...look at your phone and email records? I remember a crazy time when only the Police could do that, and only then with a court order.
The BBC has it's own reader's comments section called "Have Your Say". It's moderated by a BBC team and it's notorious for censoring completely valid and non-abusive opinion. For example, when they had a topic on Google's participation in censorship in China, some posters pointed out that the BBC also censors things. The BBC responded to this by removing their posts (the topic that day had pre-moderation switched off, something that virtually never happens now). This prompted other people to point out the irony of the BBC removing posted about BBC censorship on a topic about censorship. The BBC then quickly pulled those posts. This prompted more similar responses and eventually the BBC gave up.
These days all of the topics are premoderated and if they don't like your opinion, it won't go up. Those posts pointing out cases of BBC censorship would never have made it onto the website. For example, I made a recent post on the topic of How should the police handle protests? (coming after a protester died after being assaulted by the riot police). I pointed out that assaults on unarmed and non-violent protesters are routine, that the media knows it and that they are only writing about it this time because someone died. The post was rejected without explanation (as all rejections are).
I firmly believe that members of the public should be able to make posts on news stories without being pre-moderated by some faceless team of people with rather nebulous posting rules. I think if we could make posts on any news topic (e.g. each news item could have a discuss button) on the BBC (or any other outlet) it could really affect the way they report. For example, during the massive Israeli military assault on Gaza earlier in the year, the BBC website was plastered with images clearly showing the use of white Phosphorus. The problem was that despite these clear images, and despite people writing in and pointing it out, the BBC refused to use the term "white phosphorus" for a whole week. Would they have been able to get away with that if the top-rated post under their Gaza news stories was about White Phosphorus being used?