The Vietnam War caused a lot of changes politically and militarily in the US because the US is a democracy. We make a lot more effort not to go around slaughtering civilians these days. Nobody wants to be a babykiller.
War has never been nice, but peace is supposed to be. It wasn't some foreign invader that killed that 4% of China's population, it was their own government - the organization whose primary purpose is to look out for their welfare.
Are you sure? The US still killed a lot of civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq, not to mention the unconditional support for Israel's intentional murder of civilians and children.
Yep. It's an order of magnitude difference. Civilian casualties happen with any non-trivial war, but the US set policies and added training for military members to try to minimize it. You can thank the hippies for that.
Israel is a different matter, and it's all a political mess.
But bear in mind that these are foreign deaths. A government is responsible for its own people, not those of other countries. I realize hating on US is the popular thing these days, but at least we don't let large percentages of our own people starve.
Sounds to me like the US still doesn't care enough about civilians yet. More than in Vietnam, but still less than many other countries, who also don't let their own people starve, but also don't let them die from preventable disease or school shootings.
"Better than China" is too low a bar for a democracy.
Not exactly. It’s just that much more effort is put into making crimes acceptable to the general public. Embedded 'independent' journalists, collateral damage, precission weapons, 'mistakes’ everywhere, and the usual ‘but we are a democracy' - along with a bunch of similar justifications. It still results in over a million deaths, but now it’s perfectly acceptable to the majority of people.
Well, I suppose we should start killing our own civilians then, since that seems to be what people approve of these days. "Only 4%" should be about right, yes?
> We make a lot more effort not to go around slaughtering civilians these days. Nobody wants to be a babykiller.
Citation needed.
The only effort US is making, is for hiding its crimes. Killing all people at a wedding because there is a "terrorist" (which was earlier trained by US) present there, is no excuse.
A democratic leader remains democratic throughout their term. W did his time and bowed out at the end of it. Another party stepped in peacefully afterward.
The only way Hitler could have gone out was in a pine box. That's the difference. He may have been democratically elected, but he wasn't a democratic leader.
You and me both. I did some web dev back in the early days, and noped out when IE was dragging everyone down with its refusal to change. I have never had a reason to regret that decision.
One document == one HTML page was never the idea. Documents are often way too long to comfortably read and navigate that way. Breaking them into sections and linking between them was part of the core idea of HTML.
Includes are a standard part of many document systems. Headers and footers are a perfect example - if I update a document I certainly don't want to update the document revision number on every single page! It also allows you to add navigation between documents in a way that is easy to maintain.
LaTeX can do it. Microsoft Word can do it (in a typically horrible Microsoftian way). Why not HTML?
A general reason: they take up a lot of space. Not a problem in most of America, but that'd be a deal killer in Japan. If you're not familiar with Japanese neighborhoods, I'd recommend spending some time on street view - it's actually kinda cool. Make note of the parabolic mirrors at the intersections.
For America specifically: they're not a great fit for places where everything is spread out and the road system is sensibly designed. I can drive from one side of Tulsa to the other (on streets, not freeways) in a fraction of the time I could drive across a similarly-sized European city. That's because the city itself is designed for cars. It has straight major streets with 40-45 mph speed limits that form a grid. Neighborhoods sit inside the grid and the streets in them curve with the landscape. In most of the city you have maybe 3-5 traffic lights per mile on the major streets, so unless it's rush hour you get minimal slowdowns. Sometimes I can drive several miles without hitting a red light.
The ideal situation is to have a straight road with no traffic directly between you and where you want to go. Obviously, that's not possible. So you have to compromise. Roundabouts suck, but they're better than almost any other option in places that have twisty narrow streets and lots of pedestrians. Many (most?) American cities aren't like that (at least to the extent European cities are), so roundabouts don't make as much sense here.
QMODEM didn't connect to the Internet. It had no IP stack.
It could connect you to a machine that had Internet access. Some ISPs offered that as a service (you'd get some kind of BBS-like interface or - if you were lucky - a UNIX shell), but that's not the same thing.
QMODEM was essentially just a terminal emulator that used a serial port and understood how to control a modem.
Indeed, I was there, I know. As a starving college student, using QModem for part of it.
> that's not the same thing.
I think your definition of "connect to the internet" make sense today, but would be ridiculously narrow when applied to the QModem era given the computing landscape at the time. Where do you draw the line? Using a tty style terminal connected via serial to a unix box connected via ethernet? How about SLIP/PPP?
I guess my problem with your definition is that you end up saying that a very large percentage of people who were online at the time were using the internet through computers that were not "connected to the internet".
Until the mid-90s the internet was predominantly text anyway, so it's not like you were missing out on a whole lot if you were "only" using a terminal.
My definition of a computer being on the Internet is the computer has an IP stack that can route directly to other networks. In this scenario, the Linux box at the other end of the serial cable was on the Internet. The machine running QModem was not.
However, the user running QModem was on the Internet.
After all this discussion here my conclusion is that "connecting to the internet" is an ambiguous term.
It can mean "have IP connectivity, i.e., IP packets routed to and from the internet" in which case the described PC was not "connected to the internet with QMODEM". It didn't do anything IP.
It can mean "have a terminal that can interact with information from/to the internet" in which case the PC was indeed "connected to the internet with QMODEM".
To me, the second meaning is quite the stretch, but apparently to others it's fine.
My problem with your definition is that it doesn't take into account the reality of connectivity at the time (at least in my experience of the early 90s) - not a whole lot of machines had IP stacks that were connected via ethernet/isdn/t1/etc and online all the time. Certainly you'd have to be pretty special to actually own one or have one at home. Connecting over some kind of tty or dialup was extremely common.
So using your definition, a sizeable percentage (possibly even a majority?) of people who were online and doing things on the internet during the QModem era were doing it through computers that were not "connected to the internet". Which seems obviously silly.
Most network software for DOS was LAN-oriented, like Novell or NetBIOS. Just drive mapping and printer redirection. I'm not aware of a TCP/IP connectivity suite being available for DOS in that era, and I'm not sure how it would have worked given that DOS provided no networking libraries to hook into.
QModem ran on DOS, so the AT wasn't running UNIX. It's almost certainly being used as a terminal.
I can confirm that they did run Minix OK, although I remember the network support was iffy at best. We never got it to work at any rate. XENIX would have been hard to get your hands on. I think QNX would run on an AT as well, although my memory might be playing tricks on me there.
Pascal was poised to be the de facto language for microcomputers back in the 80s and early 90s. It really could have gone either way.
I'm not sure what tipped the balance to C/C++. Maybe the Microsoft compilers? Maybe the merge of the minicomputer world into microcomputers? Either way, Pascal held on (via Delphi) into the early 2000s.
War has never been nice, but peace is supposed to be. It wasn't some foreign invader that killed that 4% of China's population, it was their own government - the organization whose primary purpose is to look out for their welfare.
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