I'm not sure if people would lose their taste for drone strikes. The reason people were upset about Vietnam had nothing to do with how many NVA or VC were killed (despite the fact that more than 10 times as many North Vietnamese soldiers died as did Americans, and often in much less palatable ways) but everything to do with the number of Americans slaughtered in living color for what seemed like no good reason.
With drone strikes, the harm only happens to the other guy (and yes, civilians can be "other guys"), and currently the other guy is pretty widely reviled in the US. There is already widespread guncam footage of drone strikes, as well as helicopter rocket attacks, gunship strafing, and bombing runs which give you pretty much the best seat in the house to view them. The aftermath can frequently be seen in mainstream news sources. I think the American public likes drone strikes just as much as "the current regime" and more videos won't really change that.
Could not agree with this more. American establishment has so successfully managed to utterly caricaturize the victims that they dont register as people to the average populace.
And excuse my awkward historical observation: USA has had no trouble bombing the crap out of a non-white populations. Its only when some of that killing comes near home that it becomes an issue for debate. I dont think it would be drastically different this time.
Just the other day I was in a cab, the driver was American. He suggested one should carve up a nuke in the shape of Iran and Iraq and then set it off there, end of problem. Of course this is an extreme position and just an anecdote, but just that its not as fringe a belief as I think it should be. Such a view enjoys more sympathy than it should.
Microsoft already has the .chm format, so there might be a patent, but I'm no expert. I don't really know how their format works though. It might be compiled as in "obfuscated".
But I don't think there's any existing, open format like that. Plain text html has the advantage of being easily diagnosed and immediatly readable, but you could easily make a binary format decompilable. I guess most programmers prefer having plain text because it's right before their eyes, it also sort of is "open", but that's not what open source really means.
It's not a new idea, but when I think about it, compiled html is a good solution to speed up web browsers. Now the .CHM format is not what you would want, as it's more targeted towards documentation, and is not extensible with CSS like html is now. It's an abandoned format I guess. Lighter than PDF I think.
By the way, when I say compiled HTML, I mean a binary version of a webpage that is already parsed. Would be a tree structured file. The goal is to remove the parsing phase.
But indeed, that could be a good opportunity for big tech firms to push that format. As long as it's open it might be a big success.
Don't put all your eggs in one basket. Keep all the same data stored on another service, as well as on a physical backup that you keep yourself. If it's really important data you might keep a copy in a safe deposit box.
I'm a big Heinlein Fan. I strongly recommend you read his other big famous works, "Starship Troopers" and "Stranger in a Strange Land." After that you can dig deeper into his bibliography, but I'd consider those three to be essential reading.
I recently finished "Roadside Picnic" by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky and I loved it. Makes me curious to read other sci fi from the Soviet world.
Look for Macmillan's Best of Soviet Science Fiction series, published in the early 1980s. It's a mix of novels and short story collections. For shorts, I particularly recommend World's Spring, New Soviet Science Fiction, and Ballad of the Stars.
A long time ago, I read that Asimov's short story 'Nightfall' was considered the finest short SF of all time, but I respectfully disagree. Nine Minutes, by Genrikh Altov, is that story for me. Link: http://www.altshuller.ru/world/eng/science-fiction4.asp
Also - a truly awesome novel - 'Self Discovery', by Vladimir Savchenko (also in the Macmillan series). (Link: http://lib.ru/RUFANT/SAWCHENKO/savchenko_selfdiscovery_ok-en...) It has one of the most compelling, and fascinating, descriptions of AI I've ever come across. As Theodore Sturgeon writes in the introduction, 'described with such realism that one is tempted to apply for a grant, build it, and check it out.'
Imo forever war is amazing, but stranger in a strange land devolves into bizarre fantasy. I'd strongly recommend the former if you're more interested in hard sci fi and the implications of real accurate (ish) relativistic travel.
Seconding this... Forever War is probably some of the most readable, non-America-Fuck-Yeah military sci-fi I've read--another good one is Armor.
If you want more military sci-fi, check out the Hammer's Slammers series by David Drake (tank company in spaaaaaace, but not the stupid Bolo stuff); he also had one anthology that was very nearly solid cyberpunk surveillance dystopia, Lacy and His Friends.
Very fair point! Though, a single-word revision would reconcile both your statements:
> Never in human history, even modern times, fresh meat was served daily, in mass
The Inuit diet contains many heavily preserved or fermented meats. That, and their prey is often very large, sufficient to feed numerous humans for months.
With drone strikes, the harm only happens to the other guy (and yes, civilians can be "other guys"), and currently the other guy is pretty widely reviled in the US. There is already widespread guncam footage of drone strikes, as well as helicopter rocket attacks, gunship strafing, and bombing runs which give you pretty much the best seat in the house to view them. The aftermath can frequently be seen in mainstream news sources. I think the American public likes drone strikes just as much as "the current regime" and more videos won't really change that.