Custom protocols and standards wreck the web, which originally got large in part because of its inherent interoperability.
It's why we bothered to put things in HTML in the first place, instead of linking Gopher trees to LaTex and.doc files.
I have never liked Flash for this reason. It's a hog on Opera, and unstable as well on Firefox. It encourages the worst kind of contentless web site creation. Finally, it's a giant sieve of securityholesandvulnerabilities.
At the same time, intra-race variations usualy are a lot more signifigant then inter-race ones. I recall a study showing that the Scott's and Irish on average, show much lower IQ scores then the English. Yet racists tend to ignore that.
Unfortunately, they do not separate out Scots and Irish from the UK total, so I don't know the answer to your question.
I'm not sure what I think about this IQ research. The fact that Korea and some Chinese top out the list, and African countries bottom out the list, makes me suspicious.
WikiPedia has a more in-depth view of race and intelligence here:
Again, this is not something I originally came here to discuss, but if you're going to cite, and I quote, "a study" you "recall" but cannot name, we should at least find some common ground on the data we're going to use.
However, yes, OP was using sources which don't really back up what he was trying to say.
Really?
Huntington specifically talks about nationalities as united by religion and culture in his book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, which Quanxi admits he has not read (nor did he read the other book cited, the Cavalli-Sforza).
Huntington seems to fall in the primordialist school, believing that culturally defined groups are ancient and natural, however his early work would suggest he is a Structural Functionalist. His view that nation states would remain the most powerful actors is in line with realism. Finally, his warning that the Western civilization may decline is inspired by Arnold J. Toynbee, Carroll Quigley, and Oswald Spengler.
Regarding Cavalli-Sforza, he specifically states his work is not political, because he (like I!) did not want to get into the race debate, but only to chronicle population motion.
Can we do that, please, without having internet monkeys fling poo labeled RACIST at us?
âoeTrolling is basically Internet eugenics,â he said, his voice pitching up like a jet engine on the runway. âoeI want everyone off the Internet. Bloggers are filth. They need to be destroyed. Blogging gives the illusion of participation to a bunch of retards. . . . We need to put these people in the oven!â
I listened for a few more minutes as Weev held forth on the Federal Reserve and about Jews.
I think everyone who wants to know about trolls should read this article. I didn't know that debates like this got Godwin's law applied to them so regularly, even by the trolls themselves.
I have to say that if Quanxi is at roll, or a counter-troll, I've never encountered such paranoid rudeness in my life and had it so tacitly accepted. I don't think the problem is Slashdot, because this must happen on other parts of the net. In general, Slashdot has less trolly activity than any other forum I've been on, but then again I browse at +2 normally.
Made up, that is, that the original post was "racist," probably because he's afraid of something in it.
The original post (that I made) was about the ethnic differences between European groups. I'm not sure how he went off on this jeremiad about race, but it wasn't a logical conclusion. It was a fearful, reactionary, dramatic one, and I think he's in error.
My intent was never to talk about "race," a term which badly needs a definition for us to even discuss it. I find it more sensible to discuss ethnicities because those we can reasonably define. Does race mean, in the ancient meaning, any group that evolved in a fixed area, for example "Lydians" to the ancient Greeks? Or do we mean the four "root races" which are Euripids, Africans, Asians and the indigenous people of Australia? Guanxi wants to talk about race; I posted an article about European ethnicities and only discussed ethnicities.
The more I think about it, the more it's ludicrous and insane that anyone took his response seriously. He did not read the Huntington book, nor did he read Cavalli-Sforza. What kind of internet drama is that? The only reason people put up with him is that he pulled out the modern equivalent of blasphemy, which is the debate over race, in which you can apparently call someone a "racist" and everyone else panics and mods him down, for fear that they'll be called racists next.
For the sake of ending this, I have found several sources on race for those who want to debate it -- I do not.
* The Race FAQ, specifically "Isnâ(TM)t there actually more genetic distance between populations within the traditional human races than between the major races themselves?"
* The New York Times had a story on how dangerous uninformed discussion about race can be:
At the same time, genetic information is slipping out of the laboratory and into everyday life, carrying with it the inescapable message that people of different races have different DNA. Ancestry tests tell customers what percentage of their genes are from Asia, Europe, Africa and the Americas.
Read the full thing, Guanxi, before you call them "racists."
* There's also a lively discussion on race, genetics and culture in various blog posts at Gene Expression blog.
Again, it was not my intent to come here to debate race, but to discuss the differences between European ethnicities, which is something I find interesting. I also find the coming clash between ethnicities and nation-states, as concepts for the basis of the legitimacy of government, to be interesting.
Listen to reason, and ignore hateful, bigoted people like guanxi who want to stifle any discussion on this issue out of fear. You wouldn't put up with censorship from your government, and you wouldn't put up with it from the RIAA or Comcast, so don't do it to yourselves out of fear of saying the "wrong" thing.
I'm not the AC, but I don't have negative feelings toward PETA except for their drama mongering.
You make a fundamental mistake: you assume that modern political groupings (Ohioans and Indianans) conflate to ancestral groupings, which as the original article pointed out, is not correct.
There are significant ethnic differences among Europeans, and we are now able to identify where someone's ancestors came from.
In my view, and in my intent, this was never a debate about race, but about the importance of recognizing ethnic origins and preserving ethnic self-determination.
I don't know why you've turned it into a jihad against a position of mine you imagine. You didn't even read the books I cited, but you felt free to call me a racist. You didn't even pay attention to what I wrote, or post any counter evidence, but you flail on with your anger.
Is it possible that as someone displaced from your heritage (common reasons: drug use, abusive parents, failures in life, etc) you have anger at anyone who does possess and enjoy heritage?
Your response to my post was not only uncalled for but it was radically disproportionate AND misinterpreted what I said. You're so angry you can't even think straight. Are you sure your beef is with me, or are you angry at life?
If so, posting on the internet and making slanders isn't going to help you. You need to fix whatever it is that actually upsets you so much. I don't think it's me.
Wait a minute, isn't this the 21st? Chronologically, it is. But last Friday, Russia -- like the mad scientist Emmett Brown in "Back to the Future" -- thrust us backward by about 150 years in the Caucasus: into the age of imperialism and geopolitics, resource wars and spheres of influence.
It was strictly 19th-century when Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin casually announced that "war has started." In the old days, such pronunciamentos were routine; war, to recall Clausewitz, was just the "continuation of politics with the admixture of other means." (For the specifics, look up: the Crimean War, Prussia's conquest of Germany, the Balkan Wars; then go farther afield to the Spanish-American and Russo-Japanese wars.)
Huntington seems to fall in the primordialist school, believing that culturally defined groups are ancient and natural, however his early work would suggest he is a Structural Functionalist. His view that nation states would remain the most powerful actors is in line with realism. Finally, his warning that the Western civilization may decline is inspired by Arnold J. Toynbee, Carroll Quigley, and Oswald Spengler.
I am afraid "quanxi" has not read any of these thinkers, and has no idea that they, too, write of the organic state.
It is not "racism" to note historical trends. Please stop trying to be thought police. You slander me, disrespect yourselves, and block yourselves from any possibility of truth, like religious zealots who hate science.
I think we should approach this situation with honest and open eyes, and not rule ourselves with fear and slander.
The point was that ethnoculturalism is on the rise, and Huntington and Cavalli-Sforza document it.
My point was that racism is not correlative to it, if we think clearly, and in that Cavalli-Sforza and I agree: nationalism and the tracking of culture through ethnicity is NOT racism.
It is, however, a view of history that is becoming increasingly prominent, as Huntington argues. Notice how he describes the organic states he analyzes in the course of the book. It is conflatable to my definition above, although his is more eloquently worded.
I think you are making accusations that are not borne out by the evidence, and I question your agenda.
You can find a good summary of pre-WWII and thereabouts European ethnic knowledge summarized in Carleton Coon's The Origin of Races (1962) which used previous knowledge and later archaelogy to derive conclusions. Included a number of photographic plates showing different European archetypes.
Good luck finding death metal information except in the underground. No one has heard of it.
The genre probably started 1983-1985, and other than a few standouts that sell over 100,000 albums -- Bathory, Morbid Angel, Deicide, Slayer -- it's mostly small bands that sell 1,000 CDs and conclude it's a smashing success.
Its heyday was probably 1985-1994, and at this point, it's mostly a tribute genre.
Sweden basically reinvented the genre after its first wave, pioneered by Americans (Deicide, Morbid Angel, Master) and Brazilians (Sarcofago, Sepultura), after the Germans, Swiss and Swedes invented a proto-death-metal as seen in Bathory, Hellhammer/Celtic Frost, Sodom and Merciless. Huge influences came from UK/Scottland hardcore punk (Discharge, The Exploited) and American speed metal (Slayer).
Swedish death metal of note: Dismember, Therion, Carnage, Unleashed, At the Gates/Grotesque, Entombed and Uncanny.
The Norwegians almost single-handedly renovated black metal in the early 1990s, with Emperor, Burzum, Mayhem, Gorgoroth, Immortal, Enslaved and Darkthrone.
Canada's produced quite a lot of influential metal music.
Probably the most common mentions would be Sacrifice, Voivod, Gorguts and Cryptopsy.
Gorguts helped define early technical death metal, along with Atheist, Pestilence, Obliveon, Demilich and others.
Interestingly, the French Canadian portion of Canada produces the best death metal, which is not mirrored in France itself, except through Massacra and Loudblast; however, the French band Supuration sounds similar to Voivod.
Although people are always trying to redraw these boundaries for political reasons, many consider Russia, the Ukraine, et al, to be part of "Eurasia" and not "Europe." Your politics may differ and I doubt some God is going to descend and declare one right and not the other.
I think this one will be under debate for some time. Japanese inherits from multiple sources; whether it once had an Altaic root or contributing source is still under debate among some linguists, as far as I know.
A better explanation:
There is no such thing as a Finno-Ugro-Ural-Altaic language group.
There are Uralic and Altaic language families, and the Uralic family divides up into two stocks, Finno-Ugric and Samoyed. The limits of Altaic remain controversial, with Turkic, Mongolian, and Tungusic constituting the core group, and Korean, and possibly Japanese being outliers.
The Uralic, and particularly the Finno-Ugric languages within them, are closely related enough that the relationship can be demonstrated by application of the traditional methods of comparative linguisics based on systematic sound correspondences in basic inherited vocabulary. Within Altaic the number of putative cognates is far smaller, and the distinction between inherited words and *WanderwÃrter* is not always clear. The relationship between them is based more on typological similarities than on the presence of inherited morphemes exhibiting systematic phonological correspondences. Japanese, and particularly Korean, although undoubtedly demonstrating some Altaic-like structural features, are both strongly mixed languages with elements of Sinetic (Chinese) and, particularly in the case of Japanese, Malayo-Polynesian in their core structures.
Finland is an interesting convergence of east and west. Their language is most closely related to Japanese and Hungarian; their population seems to be halfway between Swedes, Baltics and an Asian precursor.
Max Muller classified the Turanian language family into different sub-branches. The Northern or Ural-Altaic division branch compromised Tungusic, Mongolic, Turkic, Samoyedic, and Finnic. The Southern branch consisted of Dravidian languages like Tamil, Kannada, Telugu, Malayalam, and other Dravidian languages. The languages of the Caucasus were classified as the scattered languages of the Turanian family. Muller also began to muse whether Chinese belonged to the Northern branch or Southern branch.[31]
The language record does not mirror the genetic record, necessarily, but it provides a useful clue.
I'm not sure how this is related to their ability to create quality death metal bands like Amorphis, Demigod, Abhorrence, Demilich, Belial and Sentenced. However, all of Scandinavia is a death metal powerhouse, so it may be "cultural."
Once humans evolved from apes, they went through several stages to create modern humans.
After that, modern humans underwent more aggressive development. This differentiated population groups.
Much like different programming languages are optimized for different tasks, but you can create just about anything in just about any language, human populations are different based on the optimizations that came about through their branch divergence.
This creates ethnicities, nationalities, and clines as mapped by Cavalli-Sforza.
Huntington points out that most of our modern wars have been caused by the nation-state, or an "imperial" grouping by politics that crosses these optimization lines, and suggests that as the superpower age winds down, people will identify with their optimization more than abstract and often illusory political concepts.
This is especially useful in understanding the difference between Georgia, Ossetia and Russia. For those who live in nation-states of an imperial nature, like the United States, Canada, Russia or UK, it's hard to grasp this, but not every country views itself as composed of generic people.
They view themselves as an organic nation, a notion which we may quaintly call "tribalism" yet seems to unite people with values more solidly than financial or political motivations.
The future will be determined by the struggle for these organic nations to define themselves.
If you take society at face value, you assume that institutions and rules actually control this place.
In reality, values and economics and demographics do.
They can increase penalties all they want, but that's not addressing the economic role of piracy and the new demographic that sees it as normal.
In my view, record labels, software firms and book publishers all had it easy with record profits on super-popular hits, and so they ignored the rest as "niche topics."
Now that everyone can publish, the market is flooded with material, reducing its value. Labels and publishers need to compete more aggressively, not spend money lobbying for laws.
Not all crimes are solved, so using "solved crimes," as you suggest, as the measurement would artificially lower it.
I don't think I'm creating anything other than a less trusting view of the world. I am not fostering an environment that suggests The Man is hostile; on the other hand, I'm suggesting the real truth that most people fear:
The problem is humanity itself, and cannot be handled by institutional changes.
Now THAT is a challenging thought, one which goes against centuries of dominant theories which have turned out to be error. What if instead of trying to fix the problem on the SURFACE, we had to actually look INSIDE of ourselves for valuation?
The people who make disaster on this planet are the ones who tell us that easy solutions exist by transferring power to central goverments, religious authorities, celebrities, etc. I'm telling you the opposite.
For every 100 people, almost 4 crimes have been REPORTED, and estimates range as much as 10x for unreported crimes relative to reported.
You may call it paranoid, but for many of us, it's obvious that crime is rising, as is passive criminal behavior. Cities covered in graffiti? Check. Corruption in politics and in businesses? Check. Tons of petty crime not worth reporting but prevalent? Check.
It's not paranoid to note that "my fellow man" is not a uniform quantity. Some people are good, and some are bad news. If that offends you, I have to ask which group you're from;)
They're cheap and easy to make in part because all the hardware is known.
The thing to remember is that they are trying to make a *teaching computer* to teach basic OS and programming concepts, not a first computer to enter the modern world.
Slashdot Mirror
Custom protocols and standards wreck the web, which originally got large in part because of its inherent interoperability.
It's why we bothered to put things in HTML in the first place, instead of linking Gopher trees to LaTex and .doc files.
I have never liked Flash for this reason. It's a hog on Opera, and unstable as well on Firefox. It encourages the worst kind of contentless web site creation. Finally, it's a giant sieve of security holes and vulnerabilities.
At the same time, intra-race variations usualy are a lot more signifigant then inter-race ones. I recall a study showing that the Scott's and Irish on average, show much lower IQ scores then the English. Yet racists tend to ignore that.
I found a list of nations and IQs:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ_and_the_Wealth_of_Nations
Unfortunately, they do not separate out Scots and Irish from the UK total, so I don't know the answer to your question.
I'm not sure what I think about this IQ research. The fact that Korea and some Chinese top out the list, and African countries bottom out the list, makes me suspicious.
WikiPedia has a more in-depth view of race and intelligence here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_intelligence
Again, this is not something I originally came here to discuss, but if you're going to cite, and I quote, "a study" you "recall" but cannot name, we should at least find some common ground on the data we're going to use.
However, yes, OP was using sources which don't really back up what he was trying to say.
Really?
Huntington specifically talks about nationalities as united by religion and culture in his book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, which Quanxi admits he has not read (nor did he read the other book cited, the Cavalli-Sforza).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clash_of_Civilizations
I think you are mistaken.
Regarding Cavalli-Sforza, he specifically states his work is not political, because he (like I!) did not want to get into the race debate, but only to chronicle population motion.
Can we do that, please, without having internet monkeys fling poo labeled RACIST at us?
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/03/magazine/03trolls-t.html?pagewanted=4&_r=1
I think everyone who wants to know about trolls should read this article. I didn't know that debates like this got Godwin's law applied to them so regularly, even by the trolls themselves.
I have to say that if Quanxi is at roll, or a counter-troll, I've never encountered such paranoid rudeness in my life and had it so tacitly accepted. I don't think the problem is Slashdot, because this must happen on other parts of the net. In general, Slashdot has less trolly activity than any other forum I've been on, but then again I browse at +2 normally.
Made up, that is, that the original post was "racist," probably because he's afraid of something in it.
The original post (that I made) was about the ethnic differences between European groups. I'm not sure how he went off on this jeremiad about race, but it wasn't a logical conclusion. It was a fearful, reactionary, dramatic one, and I think he's in error.
My intent was never to talk about "race," a term which badly needs a definition for us to even discuss it. I find it more sensible to discuss ethnicities because those we can reasonably define. Does race mean, in the ancient meaning, any group that evolved in a fixed area, for example "Lydians" to the ancient Greeks? Or do we mean the four "root races" which are Euripids, Africans, Asians and the indigenous people of Australia? Guanxi wants to talk about race; I posted an article about European ethnicities and only discussed ethnicities.
The more I think about it, the more it's ludicrous and insane that anyone took his response seriously. He did not read the Huntington book, nor did he read Cavalli-Sforza. What kind of internet drama is that? The only reason people put up with him is that he pulled out the modern equivalent of blasphemy, which is the debate over race, in which you can apparently call someone a "racist" and everyone else panics and mods him down, for fear that they'll be called racists next.
It must be a variant of Godwin's law.
For the sake of ending this, I have found several sources on race for those who want to debate it -- I do not.
* The Race FAQ, specifically "Isnâ(TM)t there actually more genetic distance between populations within the traditional human races than between the major races themselves?"
* The New York Times had a story on how dangerous uninformed discussion about race can be:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/11/us/11dna.html
Read the full thing, Guanxi, before you call them "racists."
* There's also a lively discussion on race, genetics and culture in various blog posts at Gene Expression blog.
Again, it was not my intent to come here to debate race, but to discuss the differences between European ethnicities, which is something I find interesting. I also find the coming clash between ethnicities and nation-states, as concepts for the basis of the legitimacy of government, to be interesting.
Listen to reason, and ignore hateful, bigoted people like guanxi who want to stifle any discussion on this issue out of fear. You wouldn't put up with censorship from your government, and you wouldn't put up with it from the RIAA or Comcast, so don't do it to yourselves out of fear of saying the "wrong" thing.
I'm not the AC, but I don't have negative feelings toward PETA except for their drama mongering.
You make a fundamental mistake: you assume that modern political groupings (Ohioans and Indianans) conflate to ancestral groupings, which as the original article pointed out, is not correct.
There are significant ethnic differences among Europeans, and we are now able to identify where someone's ancestors came from.
In my view, and in my intent, this was never a debate about race, but about the importance of recognizing ethnic origins and preserving ethnic self-determination.
I don't know why you've turned it into a jihad against a position of mine you imagine. You didn't even read the books I cited, but you felt free to call me a racist. You didn't even pay attention to what I wrote, or post any counter evidence, but you flail on with your anger.
Is it possible that as someone displaced from your heritage (common reasons: drug use, abusive parents, failures in life, etc) you have anger at anyone who does possess and enjoy heritage?
Your response to my post was not only uncalled for but it was radically disproportionate AND misinterpreted what I said. You're so angry you can't even think straight. Are you sure your beef is with me, or are you angry at life?
If so, posting on the internet and making slanders isn't going to help you. You need to fix whatever it is that actually upsets you so much. I don't think it's me.
He's speaking of the Foreign Affairs ESSAY not the WHOLE BOOK, which is what I was speaking of.
Others don't like it either:
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20011022/said
It's interesting how history repeats itself. Most notably, the Russia-Ossetia-Georgia chaos reminds me of the start of the first World War.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clash_of_civilizations
I am afraid "quanxi" has not read any of these thinkers, and has no idea that they, too, write of the organic state.
It is not "racism" to note historical trends. Please stop trying to be thought police. You slander me, disrespect yourselves, and block yourselves from any possibility of truth, like religious zealots who hate science.
I think we should approach this situation with honest and open eyes, and not rule ourselves with fear and slander.
Good point. Someone else mentioned Opeth and Meshuggah, both of which have made some popular inroads.
As a genre, however, death metal remains small.
I'm sorry, where was there racism?
The point was that ethnoculturalism is on the rise, and Huntington and Cavalli-Sforza document it.
My point was that racism is not correlative to it, if we think clearly, and in that Cavalli-Sforza and I agree: nationalism and the tracking of culture through ethnicity is NOT racism.
It is, however, a view of history that is becoming increasingly prominent, as Huntington argues. Notice how he describes the organic states he analyzes in the course of the book. It is conflatable to my definition above, although his is more eloquently worded.
I think you are making accusations that are not borne out by the evidence, and I question your agenda.
You can find a good summary of pre-WWII and thereabouts European ethnic knowledge summarized in Carleton Coon's The Origin of Races (1962) which used previous knowledge and later archaelogy to derive conclusions. Included a number of photographic plates showing different European archetypes.
Good luck finding death metal information except in the underground. No one has heard of it.
The genre probably started 1983-1985, and other than a few standouts that sell over 100,000 albums -- Bathory, Morbid Angel, Deicide, Slayer -- it's mostly small bands that sell 1,000 CDs and conclude it's a smashing success.
Its heyday was probably 1985-1994, and at this point, it's mostly a tribute genre.
For more information, I would use period sources:
http://www.anus.com/metal
http://www.bnrmetal.com/
Sweden basically reinvented the genre after its first wave, pioneered by Americans (Deicide, Morbid Angel, Master) and Brazilians (Sarcofago, Sepultura), after the Germans, Swiss and Swedes invented a proto-death-metal as seen in Bathory, Hellhammer/Celtic Frost, Sodom and Merciless. Huge influences came from UK/Scottland hardcore punk (Discharge, The Exploited) and American speed metal (Slayer).
Swedish death metal of note: Dismember, Therion, Carnage, Unleashed, At the Gates/Grotesque, Entombed and Uncanny.
The Norwegians almost single-handedly renovated black metal in the early 1990s, with Emperor, Burzum, Mayhem, Gorgoroth, Immortal, Enslaved and Darkthrone.
A useful document is The History of Underground Heavy Metal.
Canada's produced quite a lot of influential metal music.
Probably the most common mentions would be Sacrifice, Voivod, Gorguts and Cryptopsy.
Gorguts helped define early technical death metal, along with Atheist, Pestilence, Obliveon, Demilich and others.
Interestingly, the French Canadian portion of Canada produces the best death metal, which is not mirrored in France itself, except through Massacra and Loudblast; however, the French band Supuration sounds similar to Voivod.
Although people are always trying to redraw these boundaries for political reasons, many consider Russia, the Ukraine, et al, to be part of "Eurasia" and not "Europe." Your politics may differ and I doubt some God is going to descend and declare one right and not the other.
I think this one will be under debate for some time. Japanese inherits from multiple sources; whether it once had an Altaic root or contributing source is still under debate among some linguists, as far as I know.
A better explanation:
Apologies if I did not make that clear.
Finland is an interesting convergence of east and west. Their language is most closely related to Japanese and Hungarian; their population seems to be halfway between Swedes, Baltics and an Asian precursor.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turan
The language record does not mirror the genetic record, necessarily, but it provides a useful clue.
I'm not sure how this is related to their ability to create quality death metal bands like Amorphis, Demigod, Abhorrence, Demilich, Belial and Sentenced. However, all of Scandinavia is a death metal powerhouse, so it may be "cultural."
I recommend two books here:
The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, by Samuel Huntington
The Great Human Diasporas: The History of Diversity and Evolution, by Luigi Cavalli-Sforza et al
Once humans evolved from apes, they went through several stages to create modern humans.
After that, modern humans underwent more aggressive development. This differentiated population groups.
Much like different programming languages are optimized for different tasks, but you can create just about anything in just about any language, human populations are different based on the optimizations that came about through their branch divergence.
This creates ethnicities, nationalities, and clines as mapped by Cavalli-Sforza.
Huntington points out that most of our modern wars have been caused by the nation-state, or an "imperial" grouping by politics that crosses these optimization lines, and suggests that as the superpower age winds down, people will identify with their optimization more than abstract and often illusory political concepts.
This is especially useful in understanding the difference between Georgia, Ossetia and Russia. For those who live in nation-states of an imperial nature, like the United States, Canada, Russia or UK, it's hard to grasp this, but not every country views itself as composed of generic people.
They view themselves as an organic nation, a notion which we may quaintly call "tribalism" yet seems to unite people with values more solidly than financial or political motivations.
The future will be determined by the struggle for these organic nations to define themselves.
All IMHO.
If you take society at face value, you assume that institutions and rules actually control this place.
In reality, values and economics and demographics do.
They can increase penalties all they want, but that's not addressing the economic role of piracy and the new demographic that sees it as normal.
In my view, record labels, software firms and book publishers all had it easy with record profits on super-popular hits, and so they ignored the rest as "niche topics."
Now that everyone can publish, the market is flooded with material, reducing its value. Labels and publishers need to compete more aggressively, not spend money lobbying for laws.
All IMHO.
I help administer this domain:
http://www.anus.com/
It has been around since 1995, had addresses posted to newsgroups, thousands of fake addresses, etc.
We have experienced a 56% drop in spam volume since last Thursday.
Reported crimes are verified crimes.
Not all crimes are solved, so using "solved crimes," as you suggest, as the measurement would artificially lower it.
I don't think I'm creating anything other than a less trusting view of the world. I am not fostering an environment that suggests The Man is hostile; on the other hand, I'm suggesting the real truth that most people fear:
The problem is humanity itself, and cannot be handled by institutional changes.
Now THAT is a challenging thought, one which goes against centuries of dominant theories which have turned out to be error. What if instead of trying to fix the problem on the SURFACE, we had to actually look INSIDE of ourselves for valuation?
The people who make disaster on this planet are the ones who tell us that easy solutions exist by transferring power to central goverments, religious authorities, celebrities, etc. I'm telling you the opposite.
http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm
For every 100 people, almost 4 crimes have been REPORTED, and estimates range as much as 10x for unreported crimes relative to reported.
You may call it paranoid, but for many of us, it's obvious that crime is rising, as is passive criminal behavior. Cities covered in graffiti? Check. Corruption in politics and in businesses? Check. Tons of petty crime not worth reporting but prevalent? Check.
It's not paranoid to note that "my fellow man" is not a uniform quantity. Some people are good, and some are bad news. If that offends you, I have to ask which group you're from ;)
Car insurance, purchasing habits, criminal record, credit score: all of these things are now available.
Why do we need them?
Well... for starters, we're awash in people of criminal behavior.
If you want to be free from crazy companies judging you, work hard to eliminate the real abusers of the system.
Their actions do have an impact on you -- it's the fractional distribution of socialized cost.
They've already made a version of this for about $30 that plays Commodore 64 games:
http://www.amazon.com/Commodore-64-Games-One-Joystick/dp/B000701CSM
They're cheap and easy to make in part because all the hardware is known.
The thing to remember is that they are trying to make a *teaching computer* to teach basic OS and programming concepts, not a first computer to enter the modern world.