Man, I hate that a company can exist just to own patents and sue people.
Under the current patent system, this company type is likely to be the most profitable. By not actually utilising any patents, they are free from any claims of patent infringement. This means that all of those companies which have built up huge patent war chests with the aim of a "mutually assured destruction" if they are ever sued suddenly become vulnerable. There is no "patent war" defense against a company that doesn't make anything. If you don't make anything, you can't be countersued. From a business perspective it's an awesome idea. If Nokia were to set up an independent legal entity and assign ownership of their patents to that entity, that legal entity could then sue Apple without any fear of being countersued. Apple could do the same. I'm surprised we haven't seen any large companies doing this earlier, but if IV is successful, I bet we'll see a lot more of this company type in the future.
First off - the right to bear arms is in the US Constitution and is not the law around the world.
You were talking about Iraq, where it is perfectly legal to bear arms, and where there are many neighbourhood militias, private security forces, bodyguards etc. who openly and legally carry weapons.
Secondly, we're talking a war zone
Baghdad was not a war zone, it was an occupied city with 5.5 million citizens, several years after the end of hostilities was announced. For it to be a zone of war, there would have to be at least two opposing military forces engaging in war, and if that were the case, then all of the fighters would be lawful combatants.
Assange is Wikileaks. He created the organisation from nothing. He controls the finances He is the public face that thousands love to hate. It is impossible to claim that one could have credibility without the other.
he told a reporter that he was too busy to talk to them because he "too busy ending two wars." That kind of narcissism is profoundly stupid.
And you believe this - because a single reporter said it?
The Johnson administration said the same thing about Daniel Ellsberg.
The Chinese administration is saying the same things about Liu Xiaobo.
Maybe it is true. Maybe the stuff the Johnson administration said about Ellsberg was true. And maybe the stuff the Chinese administration are saying about Xiaobo is true. But for the moment, I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt - that maybe, possibly, what they have said has been misreported, bent and twisted into presenting something that is not... to pick one sentence, from one media report, and to use that to condemn a man or an organisation, is irresponsible.
Judge a person by their actions, not by what others tell you to think.
No, that is a different thing. An eyewitness writes about events through firsthand experience. A journalist can do that to, but can also write about events as experienced and reported by others.
Simply pushing stuff to the web is not the definition of a journalist. By your definition, EVERYONE who has access to pen/pencil and paper, and especially anyone with a blog, is a journalist. Total bullshit.
That's the same argument made by the Chinese government...
... if you actually believe that bloggers recording a journal of events are not in fact journalists (which literally means "one who keeps a journal"), then tell me, how would you define "journalist"? Must a journalist have some government issued "journalist" ID card? Obtain a full-time income from their activities (which would, in fact, qualify some bloggers)? Does having another job disqualify you from being a journalist? Must you write for a government-approved newspaper or magazine? What?
The reality is- we changed it because it doesn't work.
The system worked well enough to make the British Empire the largest empire the world has ever seen, and to give a relatively small nation dominance and influence above it's weight for several centuries.
The system has worked so far in propelling China towards becoming the world's largest economy, and in urbanising and significantly raising the standard of living for hundreds of millions of people who previously lived as subsistence farmers.
This is not a question of being "statist" or "not statist", as the terms are too simple... some people would say that the legal authority of the Federal Reserve to print notes is statist. Using the military to enact social and political goals through both war and plain old "defense spending"? Statist. Building highways and railroads? Statist. Even the Wikipedia article fails to give some actual measurable attributes of what makes a thing "statist". All governments must plan growth by investing in infrastructure and technologies, but at what level does this get labelled "statist"?
The more interesting question is - what exactly is it that has given China this competitive advantage now? Does removing human rights protection (and hence democracy, as people would not vote for this) result in huge economic growth? Or is it just the natural result of having a billion-person common market with wages massively below the rest of the world? In response to the recession both the U.S. and China announced the creation of high-speed rail networks - the result being that China will have created the world's largest network in just over a decade, whilst Americans will have spent that decade arguing in the courts. China has flattened entire towns, to be paved over and replaced with newly built cities - this may be more efficient development, but would we be willing to give the government the right to do this in order to remain competitive in the global economy? If democracy and personal freedom (or greed) really is a less efficient way to manage a large national economy, then what do we choose - less democracy, less individual power, more government/corporate power, or stay the same? Which way do you think the powers that be are trying to drive our society in order to become more competitive in this new global age?
John Young is accusing Wikileaks of being backed by George Soros (who is apparently a billionaire liberal) and the Koch brothers (who are apparently billionaire right-wing anti-Obama Libertarians). Interesting conspiracy theory!
According to accounts the women gave to the police and friends, they each had consensual sexual encounters with Mr. Assange that became nonconsensual. One woman said that Mr. Assange had ignored her appeals to stop after a condom broke.
And she was so upset, that she allowed him to continue to stay in her flat, and threw a party for him the next day? During which she apparently tweeted: ‘Sitting outside... nearly freezing, with the world’s coolest people. It’s pretty amazing!’ That doesn't sound like a woman who has been raped.
The other woman said that she and Mr. Assange had begun a sexual encounter using a condom, but that Mr. Assange did not comply with her appeals to stop when it was no longer in use.
And she was so upset, that she took him out to breakfast the next morning, and paid for his train ticket back into Stockholm? That doesn't sound like a woman who has been raped either.
Calling things that aren't rape "rape" diminishes the act, and is grossly offensive to the many women who have been subjected to real physical violence and forced sexual intercourse. Regretting you had unprotected sex is not the same thing as being a rape victim.
The patents in question were related to implementing a global standard for wireless communication (GSM) which Nokia has an obligation to offer on RAND terms to all comers.
Not true. There are two different patent cases going on between Apple and Nokia. Only one relates to essential wireless patents (Delaware case). The other case (Wisconsin) is for patents that cover many modern technologies that Nokia is not obligated to offer to all comers, e.g. camera phone technology, internal antennas etc.. Camera phones and internal antenna cell phones hadn't been invented when the GSM wireless specs were standardised. Neither had multi-touch phone interfaces. If Apple insists that Nokia can't use multi-touch, then Nokia is going to insist that Apple can't put a camera or internal antenna in the phone. All are obvious technologies, and Star Trek predates them, but that's the stupidity of patents for you.
If you want to build a phone then we are literally allowed to make identical clones to the iPhone and sell it with a Nokia brand.
A literal, identical clone? You think that Nokia wants to create pirate iPhones like some kind of cheap HK knockoff? Or do they just want to use obvious advances like multi-touch in their own phones? Apple's position is that the user interface - which we've had several decades of various designs, layouts, haptics etc. - is unique and ought to be protected, and yet every other patented technology in the phone ought to be licensed on RAND terms. Apple knows that it's share of the smartphone market will be eroded by cheaper Android products as surely as the PC won over the world. It's just another instance of Apple using the courts to try and stop competing products. Instead of "look and feel" and copyright law, now they're trying "look and feel" and patent law. Motorola has over 9,000 patents. Nokia has over 10,000. How many do you think cover non-RAND licensed technology? Thousands. Even if Apple manage to win some, they are going to lose eventually. It's worth pointing out that many of Apple's patents in these cases are pretty generic:
She was non-official cover. Local informants aren't undercover, either (they do not disguise or assume new identities).
And the idea that the Army can protect anyone from assassination is a bit starry-eyed.
I didn't say anything about direct military protection. I merely pointed out that, statistically speaking, we can be pretty certain that if millions of people have access to information about informants, then some of those people are going to sell the data to foreign intelligence services. Part of the deal with protecting your sources is to ensure that you protect records of those sources and their communications. The U.S. didn't do that. If an unpaid amateur volunteer organisation could obtain the data, then so could the Russian and Chinese intelligence services with their billion dollar budgets. It is an almost certainty that this already happened - they just haven't bragged about it.
Cracking one chip doesn't mean that they all are cracked.
Whilst it is true that future updates might be harder to crack, this doesn't diminish the impact of this particular hack - the image authentication on every Canon EOS camera that has already been sold is now untrustable, and can be challenged in court.
From TFA: "Under the tourism law, developers can recover up to 25 percent of the cost of a project. The state returns to developers the sales tax paid by visitors on admission tickets, food, gift sales and lodging costs. Developers have 10 years to reach the 25 percent threshold."
So, it looks like this is a tax refund for tourism projects on the tax the final attraction actually pays. It's difficult to tell whether it's a loophole or legitimate when the tourism project is religious in nature. Assuming the legislation does not mention religion at all, then this may well not be a violation of the Constitution. Analogy: city gives tax breaks for building projects on recovered swampland, someone builds a mosque, claims tax break. Obviously if the city only gave tax breaks to mosque builders, then this would be dubious, but if the tax break is for any building, regardless of religious orientation, then is it really a Constitutional violation?
the type of person who is anti-American tends to be rabidly so, and will go on and on while totally ignoring truly egregious cases like China, North Korea etc.
The type of person who would defend immoral behaviour by saying "but we are not as bad as China, North Korea etc." is just as bad as the kind of person you are complaining about. How many times have we heard the phrase "we may do bad things, but we're not as bad as Al-Qaeda"? Too many to be worth crediting, unfortunately...
frankly I suspect in some cases it may be a kind of mental illness, as that's the same symptom you see with rabid anti-Semites.
Yes, people who are against American foreign policy are mentally ill, and probably racist and Nazis, too... or maybe not? Maybe there are legitimate criticisms to be made of U.S. foreign policy?.. "a true friend is one who tells you the things you don't want to hear". Being anti-U.S. foreign policy is not the same thing as being anti-American. Much of the world is the former, but not the latter, and you would do well to distinguish the two.
Really? Have you spoken with Bradly Manning lately?
You do know how and why he was caught, right? Because if you did, you'd know that it was through no fault of Wikileaks, but through him being burned by a reporter that he trusted.
Revealing an intelligence source is killing that person as directly as hiring a hitman, and the moral culpabilty is very real.
By that logic, Donald Rumsfeld should be prosecuted for premeditated murder for outing Valerie Plame.
In reality, intelligence sources can be protected or not... the U.S. government chose not to protect these sources, since communications with them were not classified secret, and around 3 million people were given access to their detailed reports. Statistically speaking, at least a few of those people would've been spies for Russian, Chinese etc. foreign intelligence services.
Wikileaks caused the deaths of many Afghanis who had been working with US troops
No, Amnesty International etc. said that this was possible, but had no confirmation that it had happened. The CIA confirmed that there have been no killings attributable to the Wikileaks leaks.
revealing a few letters from diplomats confirming things we already knew in less than diplomatic language.
Ah, the old "Wikileaks didn't tell us anything we didn't already know" line. Repeat it enough times, and people may believe it. Did you really know that Iran's Arab neighbours have been pressuring the U.S. into a preemptive strike, despite telling their citizens the opposite? Did you really know that U.S. diplomats had been ordered to gather DNA samples of U.N. officials? Did you really know that China is about ready to drop support for North Korea, and sees Korean unification as inevitable? What are the chances of you knowing that already - it was certainly news for the Korean people... But you knew it all already, right?
Then again, didn't the PS3 and Xbox 360 cost more to make at launch time than they were selling for?
Exactly this. Each PS3 originally cost an estimated $690.23 New technology is expensive. Over time, economies of scale and other cost reductions take hold, and products get cheaper. Having paid $x billions of dollars for design+factories+retooling+manufacturing, yes, it costs, and initial sales do not meet costs - that's why we have the economics concept of a breakeven point.
Presumably, you want your government (whatever government that might be) to have strong diplomacy and the ability to influence its region of the world.
I've posted this before, but it's worth repeating. Thomas Jefferson quotes on Foreign Policy. Replace "Europe" with "the Middle East" (or, indeed, most regions of the world) and the sentiment is the complete opposite of current U.S. foreign policy.
"We wish not to meddle with the internal affairs of any country, nor with the general affairs of Europe. Peace with all nations, and the right which that gives us with respect to all nations, are our object."
"I have ever deemed it fundamental for the United States never to take active part in the quarrels of Europe. Their political interests are entirely distinct from ours. Their mutual jealousies, their balance of power, their complicated alliances, their forms and principles of government, are all foreign to us. They are nations of eternal war. All their energies are expended in the destruction of the labor, property and lives of their people."
"Peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations--entangling alliances with none, I deem [one of] the essential principles of our government, and consequently [one of] those which ought to shape its administration."
The last quote is particularly telling. Current U.S. foreign policy has allied and entangled the United States with dictatorial monarchies throughout the Middle East. Why is it that unelected Kings urge one of the most powerful nations on Earth to bomb and invade a Middle Eastern country that poses no military threat to North America? And the right-wingers lap it all up. In one hand they wave the Constitution, and decry anything that the government does which isn't explicitly listed there. Does the Constitution of the United States say that one of the responsibilities of the Federal government is to meddle in the affairs of other nations? Did the Founding Fathers envisage that this would be one of the main responsibilities of the government of the United States? Did they even give the President the power to start a war?
"[The President's power]. . . in substance much inferior to it [The power of the British King]. It would amount to nothing more than the supreme command and direction of the land and naval forces . . . while that of the British King extends to the declaring of war and to the raising and regulating of fleets and armies; all of which by the Constitution would appertain of the legislature."
When the MI6 operatives list was being mirrored by American citizens, MI6 said that it would "endanger the lives of agents", and yet the U.S. government did not take down any web sites, and American citizens were not threatened with prosecution for publishing the list. Now an Australian citizen releases data that the U.S. government would rather didn't see the light of day, and U.S. politicians are calling for censorship, internet kill switches, and executions and assassinations of everybody involved. If China or Russia did the same, these politicians would be crying crocodile tears for the death of freedom. Hypocrites.
Slashdot Mirror
Man, I hate that a company can exist just to own patents and sue people.
Under the current patent system, this company type is likely to be the most profitable. By not actually utilising any patents, they are free from any claims of patent infringement. This means that all of those companies which have built up huge patent war chests with the aim of a "mutually assured destruction" if they are ever sued suddenly become vulnerable. There is no "patent war" defense against a company that doesn't make anything. If you don't make anything, you can't be countersued. From a business perspective it's an awesome idea. If Nokia were to set up an independent legal entity and assign ownership of their patents to that entity, that legal entity could then sue Apple without any fear of being countersued. Apple could do the same. I'm surprised we haven't seen any large companies doing this earlier, but if IV is successful, I bet we'll see a lot more of this company type in the future.
First off - the right to bear arms is in the US Constitution and is not the law around the world.
You were talking about Iraq, where it is perfectly legal to bear arms, and where there are many neighbourhood militias, private security forces, bodyguards etc. who openly and legally carry weapons.
Secondly, we're talking a war zone
Baghdad was not a war zone, it was an occupied city with 5.5 million citizens, several years after the end of hostilities was announced. For it to be a zone of war, there would have to be at least two opposing military forces engaging in war, and if that were the case, then all of the fighters would be lawful combatants.
You want to walk around Baghdad (one of the most densely populated cities on Earth) when law and order has broken down without carrying a gun?
you'll find that there were weapons in the group
That's right, because the government should have the right to kill anyone who stands next to a person exercising their right to bear arms.
Wikileaks has credibility; Assange does not
Assange is Wikileaks. He created the organisation from nothing. He controls the finances He is the public face that thousands love to hate. It is impossible to claim that one could have credibility without the other.
he told a reporter that he was too busy to talk to them because he "too busy ending two wars." That kind of narcissism is profoundly stupid.
And you believe this - because a single reporter said it?
The Johnson administration said the same thing about Daniel Ellsberg.
The Chinese administration is saying the same things about Liu Xiaobo.
Maybe it is true. Maybe the stuff the Johnson administration said about Ellsberg was true. And maybe the stuff the Chinese administration are saying about Xiaobo is true. But for the moment, I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt - that maybe, possibly, what they have said has been misreported, bent and twisted into presenting something that is not... to pick one sentence, from one media report, and to use that to condemn a man or an organisation, is irresponsible.
Judge a person by their actions, not by what others tell you to think.
Its called an eye witness.
No, that is a different thing. An eyewitness writes about events through firsthand experience. A journalist can do that to, but can also write about events as experienced and reported by others.
Which journalists?
Simply pushing stuff to the web is not the definition of a journalist. By your definition, EVERYONE who has access to pen/pencil and paper, and especially anyone with a blog, is a journalist. Total bullshit.
That's the same argument made by the Chinese government...
... if you actually believe that bloggers recording a journal of events are not in fact journalists (which literally means "one who keeps a journal"), then tell me, how would you define "journalist"? Must a journalist have some government issued "journalist" ID card? Obtain a full-time income from their activities (which would, in fact, qualify some bloggers)? Does having another job disqualify you from being a journalist? Must you write for a government-approved newspaper or magazine? What?
the US has refused to ratify their latest extradition treaty with the UK for fear it'll allow terrorists to be extradited.
If you're talking about the Extradition Act 2003, then the U.S. ratified it in 2006.
The reality is- we changed it because it doesn't work.
The system worked well enough to make the British Empire the largest empire the world has ever seen, and to give a relatively small nation dominance and influence above it's weight for several centuries.
The system has worked so far in propelling China towards becoming the world's largest economy, and in urbanising and significantly raising the standard of living for hundreds of millions of people who previously lived as subsistence farmers.
This is not a question of being "statist" or "not statist", as the terms are too simple... some people would say that the legal authority of the Federal Reserve to print notes is statist. Using the military to enact social and political goals through both war and plain old "defense spending"? Statist. Building highways and railroads? Statist. Even the Wikipedia article fails to give some actual measurable attributes of what makes a thing "statist". All governments must plan growth by investing in infrastructure and technologies, but at what level does this get labelled "statist"?
The more interesting question is - what exactly is it that has given China this competitive advantage now? Does removing human rights protection (and hence democracy, as people would not vote for this) result in huge economic growth? Or is it just the natural result of having a billion-person common market with wages massively below the rest of the world? In response to the recession both the U.S. and China announced the creation of high-speed rail networks - the result being that China will have created the world's largest network in just over a decade, whilst Americans will have spent that decade arguing in the courts. China has flattened entire towns, to be paved over and replaced with newly built cities - this may be more efficient development, but would we be willing to give the government the right to do this in order to remain competitive in the global economy? If democracy and personal freedom (or greed) really is a less efficient way to manage a large national economy, then what do we choose - less democracy, less individual power, more government/corporate power, or stay the same? Which way do you think the powers that be are trying to drive our society in order to become more competitive in this new global age?
John Young is accusing Wikileaks of being backed by George Soros (who is apparently a billionaire liberal) and the Koch brothers (who are apparently billionaire right-wing anti-Obama Libertarians). Interesting conspiracy theory!
According to accounts the women gave to the police and friends, they each had consensual sexual encounters with Mr. Assange that became nonconsensual. One woman said that Mr. Assange had ignored her appeals to stop after a condom broke.
And she was so upset, that she allowed him to continue to stay in her flat, and threw a party for him the next day? During which she apparently tweeted: ‘Sitting outside ... nearly freezing, with the world’s coolest people. It’s pretty amazing!’ That doesn't sound like a woman who has been raped.
The other woman said that she and Mr. Assange had begun a sexual encounter using a condom, but that Mr. Assange did not comply with her appeals to stop when it was no longer in use.
And she was so upset, that she took him out to breakfast the next morning, and paid for his train ticket back into Stockholm? That doesn't sound like a woman who has been raped either.
Calling things that aren't rape "rape" diminishes the act, and is grossly offensive to the many women who have been subjected to real physical violence and forced sexual intercourse. Regretting you had unprotected sex is not the same thing as being a rape victim.
The patents in question were related to implementing a global standard for wireless communication (GSM) which Nokia has an obligation to offer on RAND terms to all comers.
Not true. There are two different patent cases going on between Apple and Nokia. Only one relates to essential wireless patents (Delaware case). The other case (Wisconsin) is for patents that cover many modern technologies that Nokia is not obligated to offer to all comers, e.g. camera phone technology, internal antennas etc.. Camera phones and internal antenna cell phones hadn't been invented when the GSM wireless specs were standardised. Neither had multi-touch phone interfaces. If Apple insists that Nokia can't use multi-touch, then Nokia is going to insist that Apple can't put a camera or internal antenna in the phone. All are obvious technologies, and Star Trek predates them, but that's the stupidity of patents for you.
If you want to build a phone then we are literally allowed to make identical clones to the iPhone and sell it with a Nokia brand.
A literal, identical clone? You think that Nokia wants to create pirate iPhones like some kind of cheap HK knockoff? Or do they just want to use obvious advances like multi-touch in their own phones? Apple's position is that the user interface - which we've had several decades of various designs, layouts, haptics etc. - is unique and ought to be protected, and yet every other patented technology in the phone ought to be licensed on RAND terms. Apple knows that it's share of the smartphone market will be eroded by cheaper Android products as surely as the PC won over the world. It's just another instance of Apple using the courts to try and stop competing products. Instead of "look and feel" and copyright law, now they're trying "look and feel" and patent law. Motorola has over 9,000 patents. Nokia has over 10,000. How many do you think cover non-RAND licensed technology? Thousands. Even if Apple manage to win some, they are going to lose eventually. It's worth pointing out that many of Apple's patents in these cases are pretty generic:
All of this is obvious stuff and I wouldn't be surprised if there's prior art.
Valerie Plame was never undercover, is the thing.
She was non-official cover. Local informants aren't undercover, either (they do not disguise or assume new identities).
And the idea that the Army can protect anyone from assassination is a bit starry-eyed.
I didn't say anything about direct military protection. I merely pointed out that, statistically speaking, we can be pretty certain that if millions of people have access to information about informants, then some of those people are going to sell the data to foreign intelligence services. Part of the deal with protecting your sources is to ensure that you protect records of those sources and their communications. The U.S. didn't do that. If an unpaid amateur volunteer organisation could obtain the data, then so could the Russian and Chinese intelligence services with their billion dollar budgets. It is an almost certainty that this already happened - they just haven't bragged about it.
Cracking one chip doesn't mean that they all are cracked.
Whilst it is true that future updates might be harder to crack, this doesn't diminish the impact of this particular hack - the image authentication on every Canon EOS camera that has already been sold is now untrustable, and can be challenged in court.
From TFA: "Under the tourism law, developers can recover up to 25 percent of the cost of a project. The state returns to developers the sales tax paid by visitors on admission tickets, food, gift sales and lodging costs. Developers have 10 years to reach the 25 percent threshold."
So, it looks like this is a tax refund for tourism projects on the tax the final attraction actually pays. It's difficult to tell whether it's a loophole or legitimate when the tourism project is religious in nature. Assuming the legislation does not mention religion at all, then this may well not be a violation of the Constitution. Analogy: city gives tax breaks for building projects on recovered swampland, someone builds a mosque, claims tax break. Obviously if the city only gave tax breaks to mosque builders, then this would be dubious, but if the tax break is for any building, regardless of religious orientation, then is it really a Constitutional violation?
also, no ddos attacks (supposedly over 10gbps) were ever confirmed by their upstreams (bahnhof/ovh).
The ddos attacks have been confirmed by Arbor Networks.
This image released by Arbor clearly shows a spike of over 10Gbps.
the type of person who is anti-American tends to be rabidly so, and will go on and on while totally ignoring truly egregious cases like China, North Korea etc.
The type of person who would defend immoral behaviour by saying "but we are not as bad as China, North Korea etc." is just as bad as the kind of person you are complaining about. How many times have we heard the phrase "we may do bad things, but we're not as bad as Al-Qaeda"? Too many to be worth crediting, unfortunately...
frankly I suspect in some cases it may be a kind of mental illness, as that's the same symptom you see with rabid anti-Semites.
Yes, people who are against American foreign policy are mentally ill, and probably racist and Nazis, too... or maybe not? Maybe there are legitimate criticisms to be made of U.S. foreign policy?.. "a true friend is one who tells you the things you don't want to hear". Being anti-U.S. foreign policy is not the same thing as being anti-American. Much of the world is the former, but not the latter, and you would do well to distinguish the two.
Really? Have you spoken with Bradly Manning lately?
You do know how and why he was caught, right? Because if you did, you'd know that it was through no fault of Wikileaks, but through him being burned by a reporter that he trusted.
Trust can be misplaced...
Revealing an intelligence source is killing that person as directly as hiring a hitman, and the moral culpabilty is very real.
By that logic, Donald Rumsfeld should be prosecuted for premeditated murder for outing Valerie Plame.
In reality, intelligence sources can be protected or not... the U.S. government chose not to protect these sources, since communications with them were not classified secret, and around 3 million people were given access to their detailed reports. Statistically speaking, at least a few of those people would've been spies for Russian, Chinese etc. foreign intelligence services.
Wikileaks caused the deaths of many Afghanis who had been working with US troops
No, Amnesty International etc. said that this was possible, but had no confirmation that it had happened. The CIA confirmed that there have been no killings attributable to the Wikileaks leaks.
revealing a few letters from diplomats confirming things we already knew in less than diplomatic language.
Ah, the old "Wikileaks didn't tell us anything we didn't already know" line. Repeat it enough times, and people may believe it. Did you really know that Iran's Arab neighbours have been pressuring the U.S. into a preemptive strike, despite telling their citizens the opposite? Did you really know that U.S. diplomats had been ordered to gather DNA samples of U.N. officials? Did you really know that China is about ready to drop support for North Korea, and sees Korean unification as inevitable? What are the chances of you knowing that already - it was certainly news for the Korean people... But you knew it all already, right?
Then again, didn't the PS3 and Xbox 360 cost more to make at launch time than they were selling for?
Exactly this. Each PS3 originally cost an estimated $690.23 New technology is expensive. Over time, economies of scale and other cost reductions take hold, and products get cheaper. Having paid $x billions of dollars for design+factories+retooling+manufacturing, yes, it costs, and initial sales do not meet costs - that's why we have the economics concept of a breakeven point.
Presumably, you want your government (whatever government that might be) to have strong diplomacy and the ability to influence its region of the world.
I've posted this before, but it's worth repeating. Thomas Jefferson quotes on Foreign Policy. Replace "Europe" with "the Middle East" (or, indeed, most regions of the world) and the sentiment is the complete opposite of current U.S. foreign policy.
"We wish not to meddle with the internal affairs of any country, nor with the general affairs of Europe. Peace with all nations, and the right which that gives us with respect to all nations, are our object."
"I have ever deemed it fundamental for the United States never to take active part in the quarrels of Europe. Their political interests are entirely distinct from ours. Their mutual jealousies, their balance of power, their complicated alliances, their forms and principles of government, are all foreign to us. They are nations of eternal war. All their energies are expended in the destruction of the labor, property and lives of their people."
"Peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations--entangling alliances with none, I deem [one of] the essential principles of our government, and consequently [one of] those which ought to shape its administration."
The last quote is particularly telling. Current U.S. foreign policy has allied and entangled the United States with dictatorial monarchies throughout the Middle East. Why is it that unelected Kings urge one of the most powerful nations on Earth to bomb and invade a Middle Eastern country that poses no military threat to North America? And the right-wingers lap it all up. In one hand they wave the Constitution, and decry anything that the government does which isn't explicitly listed there. Does the Constitution of the United States say that one of the responsibilities of the Federal government is to meddle in the affairs of other nations? Did the Founding Fathers envisage that this would be one of the main responsibilities of the government of the United States? Did they even give the President the power to start a war?
"[The President's power]. . . in substance much inferior to it [The power of the British King]. It would amount to nothing more than the supreme command and direction of the land and naval forces . . . while that of the British King extends to the declaring of war and to the raising and regulating of fleets and armies; all of which by the Constitution would appertain of the legislature."
Correct link: MI6 operatives list.
When the MI6 operatives list was being mirrored by American citizens, MI6 said that it would "endanger the lives of agents", and yet the U.S. government did not take down any web sites, and American citizens were not threatened with prosecution for publishing the list. Now an Australian citizen releases data that the U.S. government would rather didn't see the light of day, and U.S. politicians are calling for censorship, internet kill switches, and executions and assassinations of everybody involved. If China or Russia did the same, these politicians would be crying crocodile tears for the death of freedom. Hypocrites.
The Taliban... governed Afghanistan from 1996 until it was overthrown in late 2001.