Carbon dioxide posted:

Aren't magnetic tapes commonly used by large internet companies for data backups, because while they're slow as hell, they last way way longer than discs of any kind, and are a relatively compact way of storing data? I think Google has these huge warehoused of tapes with robots automatically loading/unloading them into a data recorder.

If what you said is true, that sounds like a serious problem for those backup solutions.

Your Gay Uncle posted:

After reading about all the Mongolian shenanigans I wouldn't be surprised if one day China just rolled carpet bombed the entire country one day , just to make sure they don't ever try that poo poo again.

Snapchat A Titty posted:

Yeah inside a mountain they're solid. They're not solid at all in a pile on the floor and on top of an old crt TV.

Snapchat A Titty posted:

One time in my life I recovered stuff off a CD that literally had a hole punched in it. It was a small hole, but it was stable enough to spin without blowing up. ISO9660 had the directory first so i could recoever everything that wasn't in the path of the hole. Not worth it btw.

Alhazred posted:

The word "molotov cocktail" was originally a joke. During the winter war Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov claimed that the bombs they were dropping on the FInns were actually airborne humanitarian food deliveries. The Finns called these bombs for "molotov bread baskets". When they hurled the homemade firebombs at the Soviet forces they called them "molotov cocktalis", a drink to go with the "food".

As Nero Danced posted:

Speaking of Molotov and Finland, At one point in late 1939 he, his German counterpart Ribbentrop, and Hitler himself were meeting in Berlin and came up with the idea to propose the Soviet Union joining the Tripartite pact (basically the Axis powers). Got so far as to telegram a proposed treaty to Stalin, but the whole thing fell apart when Hitler didn't want to let the Soviets have Finland.

People like to imagine what WW2 would have been like if Hitler hadn't broken the nonaggression pact and invaded the USSR, imagine what would have happened if they had been actual allies.

LostCosmonaut posted:

Hitler's entire racial policy hinged on declaring the Slavs subhuman and taking their land for Germans to colonize. Him making a permanent alliance with the Soviets is about as likely as him deciding the Jews are totally cool.

Carbon dioxide posted:

Aren't magnetic tapes commonly used by large internet companies for data backups, because while they're slow as hell, they last way way longer than discs of any kind, and are a relatively compact way of storing data? I think Google has these huge warehoused of tapes with robots automatically loading/unloading them into a data recorder.

If what you said is true, that sounds like a serious problem for those backup solutions.

ToxicSlurpee posted:

If you damage a physical part of a tape you can generally read the rest of it. I think so, at least.

As Nero Danced posted:

Speaking of Molotov and Finland, At one point in late 1939 he, his German counterpart Ribbentrop, and Hitler himself were meeting in Berlin and came up with the idea to propose the Soviet Union joining the Tripartite pact (basically the Axis powers). Got so far as to telegram a proposed treaty to Stalin, but the whole thing fell apart when Hitler didn't want to let the Soviets have Finland.

FreudianSlippers posted:

Strangely enough back in the day movies in color were seen as being less realistic than black and white films because since color was quite expensive it was mostly reserved for epics and musicals while more realistic, and cheaper, films usually used black and white. Battle of Algiers(1966) even purposefully used the grainiest black and white film they could find to imitate raw newsreel footage. The film starts with text telling you that not a single shot of news or stock footage was used for the film, it really is just that realistic.

Everyone should watch Battle of Algiers, it's fantastic and also deals with the dickishness of the French. Also some of the heroes are literally Muslim suicide bombers.

hard counter posted:

Are you sure? I know the situation was more complex than usually presented but it's always been my understanding that Hitler was definitely willing to put Finland in the Soviet Sphere, though viewing the Soviets as inevitable competition down the line, but later it was the Soviet's extremely poor performance on their end of the attempted conquest of Finland that swayed Germany otherwise. During the initial stages Germany was willing to honor co-operative blockades against Finland and Sweden was strongly encouraged to not intervene more directly even if Germany was otherwise unimpressed by the sudden Baltic invasions. As a side note Finns, by the estimates of eugenicists and the like, were definitely not Aryan/Germanic/Scandinavian but rather a lesser people so there were no objections based on nazi ideology (though Finns were given honorary status when the two became co-belligerents later on iirc). Nonetheless it seemed from their sour performance like the USSR was 'a rotten door waiting to be kicked down' so Germany adjusted its long-term/short-term plans accordingly, incorrectly anticipating a USSR that would collapse faster than Britain.

As Nero Danced posted:

They had agreed previously that Finland belonged to the Soviets, but they kept finding German troops in Finland. The proposal that the Soviets sent back to Berlin November 17 said in article one that German troops should be withdrawn immediately from Finland. Operation Barbarossa was drafted less than a month later. Another thing that didn't help was Stalin's purges of military officers during the 30s, so by the time the Red Army had to do anything it was in lovely shape.

Granted, I really doubt Hitler would have never invaded Russia, but he was definitely making plans to push it further down the road.

bongwizzard posted:

The thing we cant loose sight of is that the Finns were fuckin nazi lovers, and we can never let them forget that.

Mr. Belpit posted:

I imagine such an agreement would have, at best, merely staved off war between the two a little longer. They deffo wouldn't have acted like buddies or helped each other out in any meaningful way. Hitler was mad hell-bent on smashing the USSR and kinda staked a lot on that.

bongwizzard posted:

The thing we cant loose sight of is that the Finns were fuckin nazi lovers, and we can never let them forget that.

A White Guy posted:

Had it been over in just a few weeks, the Finns would've ended up being an SSR of the Soviet Union.

Babe Magnet posted:

not if Simo Hayha had anything to say about it

A White Guy posted:

With good reason. The Germans were to the Finns, prior to the end of WW2, what the French are to the Americans.

Babe Magnet posted:

not if Simo Hayha had anything to say about it

FruitNYogurtParfait posted:

the war ended a week later, the day he woke up so i guess technically?

rock rock posted:

Why did the Finns think the Germans were dirty?

Byzantine posted:

Then Germany goes up in nuclear fireballs.

duckmaster posted:

duckmaster posted:

The only way an atomic raid would have worked against a far stronger Germany would have been a large scale bombing raid, using B29s and specially constructed runways (which would be harassed constantly by German raids during their construction). You then run the risk of the plane carrying the bomb being shot down or crashing, either detonating the bomb in the air - and wiping out a few hundred B29s in the process - or potentially gifting an atomic bomb to the Germans. And the more raids that are undertaken the greater the risk of either of those things happening.

duckmaster posted:

Germanys air defence capabilities were so much more advanced than Japans that it was never going to be a viable target. Germanys policy on hostile aircraft was to scramble fighters and intercept immediately, and if that failed to use ground based air defences to down the aircraft. They wanted any sort of information or equipment (in the form of captured pilots/aircraft) that might give them an 'edge' and were prepared to do anything to obtain it. If they hadn't been at war with the Soviet Union those air defences would have been even stronger.

Japan on the other hand, particularly in 1945, had such little aviation fuel that fighters were only scrambled to attack incoming bombing raids and almost never for recon aircraft. In the weeks leading up to the bombing of Hiroshima the USAAF flew dozens of sorties over various Japanese cities consisting of only 2 - 4 aircraft and never dropping any bombs, partly to test Japanese reactions but also to trick them into thinking these missions weren't 'hostile'. Even on the day of the first bomb being dropped air raid warnings went off in several Japanese cities but in most were simply turned off again as these aircraft weren't deemed to be a threat. Even air raid gunners didn't bother firing on them to conserve their ammunition. When Japanese intelligence officers reached Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the days after the bombings they were astounded by how many eye witnesses could correctly identify the number and type of aircraft, having assumed that it must have been a raid by a far larger number of aircraft.

The aircraft itself (the B29) was far better suited to the Pacific theatre than the Japanese one as well. Few airfields in England could accommodate a B29 being mostly WW1-era grass fields, absolutely fine for a Spitfire or a Mosquito but not much use for anything bigger. The flat ground of Guam made the construction of a paved runway relatively straightforward, it's other advantages being more favourable weather and being more or less out of range of enemy attack. That's not to say that B29s didn't operate in Europe as they did, but not in large numbers as in the Pacific.

The bomb itself was an issue as well. Although the tests in the Nevada Desert had showed that the concept worked Hiroshima was the first time the bomb would be dropped over a plane, potentially whilst being attacked, and over territory vastly different to a desert. There were such serious concerns that it would simply fail to go off that the target they were originally planning to attack was a Japanese naval base in New Guinea. The plan was that if the bomb didn't detonate it would sink into deep water and make salvage more or less impossible for the Japanese, and the USAAF would flatten the place with conventional bombs afterwards anyway.

So in a nutshell: an atomic raid against Germany in the summer of 1945 would have been possible as the Allies had complete air superiority. If the Germans hadn't been at war with the Soviet Union it would be unlikely that they would have had the same dominance in the same time period; combine that with Germanys policy of trying to shoot down anything that flew and a far more sophisticated observation network (it's far easier to spot aircraft coming over a thousand miles of land than a thousand miles of sea) and it becomes a very tricky prospect, to say the least.

The only way an atomic raid would have worked against a far stronger Germany would have been a large scale bombing raid, using B29s and specially constructed runways (which would be harassed constantly by German raids during their construction). You then run the risk of the plane carrying the bomb being shot down or crashing, either detonating the bomb in the air - and wiping out a few hundred B29s in the process - or potentially gifting an atomic bomb to the Germans. And the more raids that are undertaken the greater the risk of either of those things happening.

A White Guy posted:

With good reason. The Germans were to the Finns, prior to the end of WW2, what the French are to the Americans. The Germans armed, trained, and organized the Whites against the Reds. Without German intervention, Finland would've ended up as a ASSR of the Soviet Union before WW2.