No, the alternative was to wait.

It should be noted that:
  - The Japanese, like the Germans, had their own nuclear weapons program in progress. (That was how they were able to recognize the nuclear bombs for what they were: Bombs were SOME of the possibilities they were pursuing.)
  - While they thought nuclear-reaction bombs were hard but doable, they were actively working on the immanent bombardment of the West Coast of the Untied States with radiological weapons - "dirty bombs" spreading fatal levels of radioactive material. (Remember that much of the US war infrastructure, including nuclear laboratories such as Livermore and the Navy's Pacific fleet construction and supply lines, were on or very near the west coast. The prevailing winds are from the west and able to carry fallout blankets to them.)
  - The primary reason for using TWO bombs, only a few days apart, was to create the impression that the US could keep this up. The Japanese had an idea that making the bombs took so much resource that the US could only have a very few. And they were right.

As I understand it went something like this: There was enough material for no more than two or three more, then there'd have been about a year of infrastructure construction and ramp-up, after which the US could have started with monthly bombs and worked up to weekly or so. If the US could have gotten to that point unmolested, Japan was doomed. But a LOT can happen over that time in a total war - and big projects can get hamstrung when the bulk of the industrial output and manpower has to be used to fight off conventional attacks meanwhile. The idea was to give the Japanese the impression the US was ALREADY that far along.

12 grand with the air conditinoer and some unspecified options that don't prevent it from being stacked up like coffee cups?

For only a couple grand more I purchased, new, an 19 foot travel trailer, with kitchen, (propane stove, micrwave, propane/electric refrigerator) beds for five (if one is a kid) and two are friendlly - six if two are infants), which double as a daytime couch and bedding storage cabinet, TV antenna and prewire, air conditioner, bathroom with enclosed shower, closet, white grey and black water storage for two days if everybody showers daily, a week if they conserve, all hookablel to water and sewer if available, air conditinoier and furnace, lots of gear storage, two nights of battery power (though the microwave and air conditioner need shore power - the furnace runs on the batteries/power conditioner), hitch, dual-axle with tires, awning, etc.

This looks like a very pricey, very heavy, hardshell tent - with some lights, cots, and a big-brother computer monitoring system.

But I bet agencies would love the monitoring system.

My first unix box was an Altos. Don't recall exactly when I got it but it finally died in the late '80s.

The thing burned something like a kilowatt. It also had a four-inch muffin fan - blowing outward. While this sucked dust in all the openings, it was convenient for heat scavenging, AND exhaust. The latter was important in my non-air-conditioned college-town house.

I got a couple 4" drier vents, some drier vent hose, and a heat-scavenging diverter valve (which were big that year - for electric driers only!). Took the flapper valve and rain shield off one of the drier vents, yeilding a fitting that I mounted on the pancae fan's four mounting screws. It coupled the airflow nicely into the drier vent hose, which was essentially exactly the diameter of the fan blade shroud. A few 2x4s mad a wooden insert that went into the window in place of the screen unit, with the other vent in the middle of it. Hooked the two together with the hose, with the diverter in the middle of it, and the third hose segment feeding the hot air register.

In the summer the space-heater's-worth of hot air went out the window instead of into the house. In the winter the hot air fed the furnace distributon, providing a base heat supply to the house with the furnace coming on to "top it off" to the desired temperature.

No, they shouldn't, but some of them are going to anyway. Since your loved ones will therefore be just as injured/dead if they are the unlucky ones who get hit by a bad driver who was going too fast, dismissing technology that might help those bad drivers to be better, safer drivers seems uncalled for.

Overhead on the CPU and in terms of interconnect latency. Because USB is higher level, it incurs a decent amount of load on the CPU. No big deal for basic use, but you wouldn't want it for your main drive or the like. Also USB's latency isn't great, on the order of 100 microseconds or so. Fine for many uses, but high by SSD reckoning and not something you want time critical system components on. PCIe latency is so low you tend to measure it in cycles, not in time.

Also 20Gbit/sec doesn't cut it for some of the internal shit. Graphics and compute hang on 16x slots those are 16GByte/sec in the 3.0 spec (half that in 2.0) per direction (it is completely full duplex). That's 128gbits/sec. For all that it is still extremely performance limiting if you regularly have to use it to access system RAM.

Really interfaces usually are designed for purpose, and not everything is compatible. When you are trying to balance cost, speed, complexity of implementation, complexity of signaling, distance, etc, etc something has to give. There's reason to have PCIe for internal connections, USB for devices, and Ethernet for network, and not try to cram all that in to one bus that is not well suited to them.

The Bechdel test makes some (although not much) sense for a movie

The widespread failure of the test confirms that movies about women are boring box-office losers. You might think that the 51% of the population that is women might be interested in paying to see such movies, but apparently not.

The Bechdel test makes some (although not much) sense for a movie

It confirms that movies about women are boring box-office losers. You'd think that the 51% of the population that is women might be interested in paying for such movies, but apparently not.

If anything is too big to fail, you are usually better off making it fail anyway as soon as possible to minimise the damage. Some of the problems in the global financial industry today aren't because of inherent weaknesses in the system. Instead they have been caused precisely by allowing organisations to grow too big, or perhaps more accurately by allowing them to take on disproportionate levels of risk, and then supporting those organisations at government level instead of allowing them to go under when they should have.

But it won't, because plenty of other CAs are used and plenty of sites don't use HTTPS routinely yet. All the big sites, the Facebooks and Googles and Amazons of the world, would have switched to another CA within an hour. All the truly security-sensitive organisations like your bank or card company or government would update their certificates very quickly as well.

CAs determined to protect their reputation at a time when their industry would inevitably be seriously damaged in the credibility stakes might take longer to issue things like EV certificates as they made a point of fully validating the organisations requesting them. However, basic HTTPS access and the highly recognisable padlock symbol would be back on all the big sites almost immediately. The worst they would likely suffer would be a few minutes of downtime (assuming organisations on that scale don't routinely have back-up certificates with a completely independent chain on permanent stand-by anyway) and maybe a slight increase in customer support calls as genuinely security-conscious users noticed the lack of EV identity for a while.

Meanwhile, any browser that didn't remove a known-compromised CA from its trusted list very quickly would be vulnerable to justified criticism and no doubt plenty of rhetoric built on top about being insecure, and how users mustn't use that browser to visit safe sites like their bank or someone will empty their account. The geeks would get hold of the story first, of course, but as soon as it made front-page news (and something on this scale probably would) everyone would be talking about it that day.

Trusting any one of many different CAs has obvious vulnerabilities, as this case demonstrates (and it's not exactly the first time the problem of an untrustworthy CA has been observed in the wild). The current CA system isn't really a web of trust, because it ultimately depends on multiple potential single points of failure.

One way or another, in the absence of out-of-band delivery of appropriate credentials, you have to trust someone, so I suspect the pragmatic approach is to move to a true web-of-trust system, where you trust a combination of sources collectively but never trust any single source alone, and where mistrust can also be propagated through the system. Then at least you can still ship devices/operating systems/browsers seeded with a reasonable set of initial sources you trust, but any single bad actor can quickly be removed from the trust web by consensus later while no single bad actor can undermine the credibility of the web as a whole. Such a system could still allow you to independently verify that the identity of a system you're talking to via out-of-band details if required.

I urge you to consider that Occam's Razor does not apply in the social realm, where motives are often hidden. This makes "paranoia" difficult to distinguish from "foresight".

In my personal unqualified opinion, it's like using alcohol. If there is no sign that it harms your well-being or reduces the quality of your life, then you do not have a problem. If there are such signs, then you do. In the absence of such signs, I would call it "caution".

The Hacker's Diet is a permanent change in lifestyle. People don't always use the word "diet" to mean a temporary change. There are many diets that are permanent changes in lifestyle, and the word "diet" also has a technical definition in which it means what an organism eats - in that sense, everyone has a diet.

For those of us who do not always use the word "diet" to mean a temporary change, it is annoying to try to talk about a permanent change in diet and be corrected and contradicted by those who use the word diet to mean only a temporary change.

These M.2 drivers are PCIe. It is a different slot form factor, but it is just PCIe.

USB would not be desirable for internal system use, too much overhead. It is well designed for the purpose it has but you wouldn't want it for everything.

There are reasons to want multiple transports, different ones are good at different things.

It seems like we probably agree on the general idea here, but I was impressed on a recent visit to a museum where they had mobile apps you could download in advance and WiFi available on-site. Together these let you choose from a number of recommended tours based on duration and topic(s) and then guided you around with directions, highlights, and more in-depth background on various other exhibits you'd pass along the way if you were interested. It was a well made presentation that someone had obviously worked hard to put together, and the only thing that was a little awkward was walking around holding a tablet with headphones plugged in for the whole visit. That's an area where I could see an unintrusive headset might be an advantage.