I believe that they could have quickly confirmed the ship's identity by measuring the chrysanthemum seal that is mounted on its prow and checking to see if it's dimensions match those of the one found on her sister ship Yamato. (More information: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/supership/producer.html)
A few hours before their second date, my father dropped the tray containing his final project in statistical programming down a stairwell. My mother stayed up all night helping him sort and resort all of the punch cards and get everything back into order. They have been married for 38 years.
This practice was not unique to the City of Chicago.
The city of Naples was rebuilt at great expense after the a terrible cholera epidemic in 1884 carried off a large number of victims. In response the government funded major effort to raise the city's streets as proscribed by the then current Miasmatic Theory of Disease. The thinking was along of the lines of low lying 'bad air' caused illnesses and thus the raising of the city's infrastructure would improve the general health.
I believe Iron Dome is designed to deal with what would be traditionally termed short range weapons like mortars and light-rockets. These weapons are light weight, can be fabricated in comparatively primitive conditions and can be deployed by irregular forces.
The conventional weapons that North Korea could use against Seoul are from the other end of the spectrum. Nearly all of them are patterned after Soviet versions which were designed to fit in a doctrine that favored the deployment and use of large numbers of heavy tube and rocket artillery. North Korea possesses large numbers of 153mm and 170mm guns and 240mm multiple unguided rocket launchers. Many of these are in fortified positions that are within range of Seoul.
This gets even more attractive when you factor in the possibility of taking an overnight train and booking a sleeper berth.
When I worked in Beijing, trips to Shanghai were greatly improved by booking sleeper berths and catching a night express trains out and back. The entire experience was generally extremely low stress and utterly reliable.
If someone cites some of your programming work 50 years after you finished working on it then you must have done something right.
From what I have heard from my father and others, editing punch cards was hell itself. The fact that TECO managed to bridge the punch card and hard disk storage eras could be viewed as some sort of miracle.
On another note, it it seems that Dan Murphy, who created TECO at DEC in 1962 - 1963, is still going strong. In 2009 The IEEE Annals of Computing History published this article authored by him (warning: pdf): http://tenex.opost.com/anhc-31-4-anec.pdf and earlier this year he updated his personal website: http://www.opost.com/dlm/
I live and work in Manhattan. The blasting on the second avenue subway project is so regular that I recently caught myself unconsciously timing my work day by the shaking of the building.
In running similar events in the past, I have found adding a single checkbox to the sign up form labeled 'Please include my name and contact information in the official attendee list' is both simple and effective.
Perhaps this feature or one like it could be incorporated in to a future colony by sealing up the hole and artificially stabilizing the interior structure? I know similar ideas have been floated in the past for the conversion of lunar lava tubes into habitable space.
It should be noted that nuclear weapons weapons were used twice during a war that is almost universally thought of as 'conventional'. Furthermore, they were used against a state that arguably had ceased to act as a rational entity quite some time before August 6, 1945.
Later the increasing quantity and quality of nuclear weapons combined with the de-fusion of the underlaying technologies to a growing number of international actors in the 1950's and 1960's lead to the Soviets and Americans backing of the Non-Proliferation Treaty regiem. This was done to avoid an August 1914 Nuclear-Redux in which the super powers would be pulled into a full scale nuclear exchange. Thus the situation in the middle east today can be traced back to actions taken almost 50 years ago.
Do you have any reading material that you could point to in regards to your comment about "the situation in the middle east"?
I'm not saying you are incorrect - actually the opposite is true (I believe this to be the case). I'm not much of a student of history and would like to educate myself.
Frist, the NPT is part of a larger system of treaties, alliances and agreements that grew during the Cold War and its aftermath. 'Cornerstones of Security: Arms Control Treaties in the Nuclear Era' (2003) by Thomas Graham and Damien J. Lavera is somewhat dry but exhaustive.
Secondly, here is an interesting over view of US Government thinking on weapons of mass destruction at the end of the cold war:
Finally, Nigel Ashton's 'The Cold War in the Middle East: Regional Conflict and the Superpowers 1967-73' covers the actions of many international actors in the middle east during the critical years during which the Non-Proliferation Treaty was put into effect.
With luck both of these books should be available via inter-library loan.
I intentionally left out WW2 because only one nation on earth had nukes, and only at the end of the war. It's not a valid reference in a discussion about multiple countries having nukes and that acting as a form of peaceful standoff.
The point about conventional war is, for example, if India were stomping Pakistan in a conventional war, there would be an inflection point at which Pakistan would be willing to unleash nuclear war to stop India. History is a pretty consistent reminder about how irrational nations can be, there's nothing about nukes that prevents that.
Japan had not acted rationally for a very long time. They invaded China and slaughtered civilians by the tens of thousands. They initiated war against the the Ally powers and joined with Adolph Hitler. I'm not sure what your point in referring to that is however.
I think the biggest propaganda coup of the US in recent years is convincing the world that "rogue", "terrorist" etc. groups are irrational. It justifies so much.
