Yeah, it's a long read and it's all in there, including Debate over the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
For example:
Those who argue that the bombings were unnecessary on military grounds hold that Japan was already essentially defeated and ready to surrender.
One of the most notable individuals with this opinion was then-General Dwight D. Eisenhower. He wrote in his memoir The White House Years:
"In 1945 Secretary of War Stimson, visiting my headquarters in Germany, informed me that our government was preparing to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act. 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."
and
"The Japanese had, in fact, already sued for peace. The atomic bomb played no decisive part, from a purely military point of view, in the defeat of Japan." Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, Commander in Chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet.[35]
"The use of [the atomic bombs] at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender." Admiral William D. Leahy, Chief of Staff to President Truman.
We used them TWICE over a half century ago in a war against another nation state, and only when we were in the most dire of need to find a solution that wouldn't have slaughtered countless millions of not just our own soldiers, but Japanese as well. I guess what the rest of the world hates is that we're able to do the math. 100,000 or 10 million? And we're not afraid to make those kinds of decisions when we have to. Suggested reading: Humanity by Jonathan Glover.
What I found funny was that some Chinese students were smuggling international editions in and selling them for $10-20 after they were done with them. I bought my copy of The C Programming Language from a Chinese girl years ago. She had a whole bag of them, all new ones. I was suspicious at first, but since then I've learned to regard it as a treasure, both the content and the size, which is smaller than the original. Check out the nice cover of the Chinese edition.
So I'd say there are good reasons for your desktop environment controlling power management. Definitely. I'll bet GNOME developers have read this comic.
What's the difference between possession with intent to expose someone and possession with intent to masturbate? It's still possession, right? "I plead not guilty, your honor. I had no intent to masturbate."
So, are there really useful or computationally practical reasons for a graphing calulator, or does everyone just want them because they are "cool"? Games...?
I suppose it depends on the field of study, but for my M.Sc. in electrical engineering I never needed my calculator to graph anything. Maybe I tried it a few times because the calculator could do it, but that's it.
On the other hand, the big screen was very useful for checking what I had typed and allowed me to edit the formulas etc.
I still have the TI-85, which has served me well for 10+ years. Most other ee geeks had HP-48's, but somehow I found TI to be more to my liking. To RPN or not to RPN is the question, and there's no objective answer to that. YMMV.
Leftover pizza slice from the day before, fridge cold, with lots of coffee (milk, no sugar). Especially the fact that I love to eat the pizza cold, straight out of the fridge, seems to get other people at the breakfast table going... This also works very well for hangovers, although that's a rare occasion these days.
Anyway, since I don't eat pizza that often, on most mornings I resort to coffee, rye bread with cheese and occasionally turkey. Or cereal (with minimum amount of sugar) and müsli with yoghurt. Scrambled eggs and toast on weekends.
By your definition, all the English units are metric units as well, because they are nowadays defined through the SI units, as mentioned in another comment. Anyway, Joule is the SI derived unit for energy. Lookitup.
As a sidenote, I once saw an ad in the U.S. that said, "High on energy, low on calories."
It's fun to bash the backward Americans, but while doing so, we should keep in mind that horsepower and calories are still very much alive in daily parlance in Europe. Gradually people are beginning to compare car power in kW, but I've yet to hear anyone talking about consuming so-and-so Joule per day when dieting.
In 1994, what was the size of the EEPROM on the chip you used? 8 KiB? 16 KiB? What portion of that was used for the mugshot? The contact protocols have not evolved since, so the bps is still the same. EEPROM and picture size are not the same.
There are a number of reasons why contactless/RFID smart card chips are used instead of contact chips. In decreasing order of importance:
The standard protocols for contact cards (ISO 7816) have significantly lower communication speeds than the protocols for contactless cards (ISO 14443). Reading the facial image from the chip is the single most time consuming operation during the session. Once fingerprint/iris images come along in the future, this matters even more.
There are no standardized locations for contacts in passport form factor. Which means there are no readers available off the shelf.
Not all countries use a hard polycarbonate data sheet for embedding the chip. It's technically difficult to have the contacts on the soft covers of the passport book.
In heavy use, the contact readers have failures due to dirt, etc.
So effectively the UK (including me) have spent money on snake oil because it was mandated by the US?
Yes and no. I'll make some educated guesses here. (Against/. tradition, I'll base my guesses on facts instead of FUD.)
The governments are trying to make the new passports more difficult to forge than before. This process started long ago, the US has just speeded up the process. Currently, it is indeed possible to clone the chip, but you will still need to come up with an authentic looking passport book, which will have to contain data identical to that in the chip. As the data on the chip is digitally signed, it is really difficult to forge. In this respect, the new passports really are more secure than the ones before.
The personal information printed on the passport and also on the chip is regarded as "less-sensitive", considering that currently the only form of biometric information is your facial image. I don't think the governments really care that much if your information is leaked. The basic access control makes it just slightly more difficult than without it. They just needed to make some compromise between privacy and how much effort it takes to launch the new system. But that's not the point of the new passports, the point is the digital signature of the contents of the passport. (Note that I'm not saying it's okay that there are privacy and cloning issues.)
I do not know about the rest of the world, but when EU member countries start issuing passports with fingerprint or iris images on them, the passports will have substantially stronger security features to restrict access to biometric data. There will be Diffie-Hellman key agreement for session keys and a world wide PKI system for terminal authentication. The passport chips are required to be evaluated by independent labs according to the so called Common Criteria. It will be extremely difficult to crack them, but of course, given enough time and resources, anything can be broken.
The BSI EAC spec I referred to in grandparent actually contains some analysis of the basic access control, and an approximation of the maximum key strength for passports valid for 10 years. It's 56 bits for documents with random numeric passport number, and 73 bits for documents with random alphanumeric passport numbers. But the passport numbers are, as you said, usually sequential.
Even so, the spec goes on to mention that cracking the key still requires more effort than obtaining the less-sensitive information from other sources.
The machine readable zone, specified by ICAO, is widely used, also by countries that aren't rushing into electronic passports. Which means that the contents of the zone are difficult to change. And if you read the specs, you realize there's hardly any space left for adding key entropy. Which is why they started using information that is already there, and of that information, only passport number, date of birth, and expiry date have a check digit.
Basically, what you suggest could've been done, but not within the time frame set by the U.S.
Slashdot Mirror
One of the most notable individuals with this opinion was then-General Dwight D. Eisenhower. He wrote in his memoir The White House Years:
"In 1945 Secretary of War Stimson, visiting my headquarters in Germany, informed me that our government was preparing to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act. 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."
and "The Japanese had, in fact, already sued for peace. The atomic bomb played no decisive part, from a purely military point of view, in the defeat of Japan." Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, Commander in Chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet.[35]"The use of [the atomic bombs] at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender." Admiral William D. Leahy, Chief of Staff to President Truman.
And if that guy really is a geek, what do you think he was doing the night he got his stolen laptop back? Huh? HUH?!
I hereby declare March 2007 the March that never ended, in spirit of September that never ended.
For me, the question will be "Why didn't I patent that?"
I suppose it depends on the field of study, but for my M.Sc. in electrical engineering I never needed my calculator to graph anything. Maybe I tried it a few times because the calculator could do it, but that's it.
On the other hand, the big screen was very useful for checking what I had typed and allowed me to edit the formulas etc.
I still have the TI-85, which has served me well for 10+ years. Most other ee geeks had HP-48's, but somehow I found TI to be more to my liking. To RPN or not to RPN is the question, and there's no objective answer to that. YMMV.
Anyway, since I don't eat pizza that often, on most mornings I resort to coffee, rye bread with cheese and occasionally turkey. Or cereal (with minimum amount of sugar) and müsli with yoghurt. Scrambled eggs and toast on weekends.
As a sidenote, I once saw an ad in the U.S. that said, "High on energy, low on calories."
It's fun to bash the backward Americans, but while doing so, we should keep in mind that horsepower and calories are still very much alive in daily parlance in Europe. Gradually people are beginning to compare car power in kW, but I've yet to hear anyone talking about consuming so-and-so Joule per day when dieting.
Besides, he could afford to buy an *actual* country.
There's a whole world of slashdotters very much awake at timezones other than EST, you insensitive clod!
In all likelyhood Mr. Reiser has merely realized he needs to get the best lawyer all his money can buy.
So I married a kernel programmer
I think this bash.org quote sums it up pretty well.
In 1994, what was the size of the EEPROM on the chip you used? 8 KiB? 16 KiB? What portion of that was used for the mugshot? The contact protocols have not evolved since, so the bps is still the same. EEPROM and picture size are not the same.
The governments are trying to make the new passports more difficult to forge than before. This process started long ago, the US has just speeded up the process. Currently, it is indeed possible to clone the chip, but you will still need to come up with an authentic looking passport book, which will have to contain data identical to that in the chip. As the data on the chip is digitally signed, it is really difficult to forge. In this respect, the new passports really are more secure than the ones before.
The personal information printed on the passport and also on the chip is regarded as "less-sensitive", considering that currently the only form of biometric information is your facial image. I don't think the governments really care that much if your information is leaked. The basic access control makes it just slightly more difficult than without it. They just needed to make some compromise between privacy and how much effort it takes to launch the new system. But that's not the point of the new passports, the point is the digital signature of the contents of the passport. (Note that I'm not saying it's okay that there are privacy and cloning issues.)
I do not know about the rest of the world, but when EU member countries start issuing passports with fingerprint or iris images on them, the passports will have substantially stronger security features to restrict access to biometric data. There will be Diffie-Hellman key agreement for session keys and a world wide PKI system for terminal authentication. The passport chips are required to be evaluated by independent labs according to the so called Common Criteria. It will be extremely difficult to crack them, but of course, given enough time and resources, anything can be broken.
Even so, the spec goes on to mention that cracking the key still requires more effort than obtaining the less-sensitive information from other sources.
Basically, what you suggest could've been done, but not within the time frame set by the U.S.