Austria is heading down the Nanny State lane just as well, and our politicians are utterly fucked up (we have Nazi parties and we have socialist parties; no libertarians, no conservatives, no opposition); we have the draft (note: I'm pro-military, but a draft should be reserved for the most dire circumstances and not to keep something the government can spend money on so they can justify more taxes), we have hate speech laws, our self defense rights are almost nonexistant (and I'm not just talking right to bear arms here) and craptons of idiocy.
Nah, the US may certainly have it's problems, but I don't see it becoming a European-like Nanny State anytime soon.
On the other hand, they might not enjoy the rights to free speech or self defense. Or suffer from atrociously high taxes. Or maybe get told to bend over for the government in another way. There may be quite a lot of problems US citizens have to cope with, but it's certainly still better there than in lots of other "civilized" nations.
[smallprint]This review was commissioned by the US Federal Government.[/smallprint]
Now, whatever one may think about the post you are quoting...he certainly is right in saying that Austrian economists are *very* dogmatic people. Austria is a deeply "social-capitalist" (read: Socialism Light) country, we have no political or otherwise opposition (all our parties are either socialist or nationalsocialist, with the exception of the Young Liberals which only ran for the EU elections and got almost no votes because they couldn't afford an election campaign) to that dogma here, and it likely will stay in place for a long time.
Sufficient brainwashing and propaganda can turn every average human into a mindless slave to a cause. Human beings are irrational in their nature - they may ignore the harm done to their country and the world in general or deny it while launching the nuke just as well. I wouldn't put my fate in the hands of such humans.
Oh, but the average/.er knows *plenty* of them! They just all seem to come from the same families...their surnames always are something like.png or.jpg...
They never kill too many people at once, either. 9/11 was the big incident; you won't see the body count that high in one incident again for a long time.
A, 9/11 was an inside job, was it? And let me guess, next thing you're going to say is that they are dissecting aliens at Area 51, developing psychic weapons at Dulce and making sure Google Earth does not display the spaceship crashed onto Antarctica, and that Majestic 12 and the Illuminati are warring over who gets to control the world...
Conspiracy theories belong into books or awesome video games, not into the real world *rolls eyes*.
Which is a good thing, as it significantly rises the chance of a problem being solved without or with minimal use of violence. You wouldn't listen to some guy wearing a Barney suit telling you to stop throwing bricks at windows, or else, would you?
You don't even need to hop over to countries like Iran for that - Austria's already all you need. We once had a politician calling Mohammed a child molester; not necessarily a position I feel inclined to agree with, but it got her sued like hell. At the same time, you can (verbally) accuse people like the former US president of the same thing and probably even get applause. Not that I support either the political stances of Bush nor Winter (the name of the Austrian politician that got sued), but this is a great example of how censorship is used to silence members of political parties becoming inconvenient to the ruling ones...
I'd rather import or less-than-legally download a game than to have a censored game (with crappy voice acting - seriously, German voice actors are horrible, and the translation of the texts themselves rarely is done well either).
The difference is that in Germany, movies are accepted as an "art form" - video games however aren't (quite the contrary, they are often demonized by politicians for various reasons - Counter Strike for example is to blame for every school shooting that ever happened in Germany >_>).
There is still a lot to be said for a low-tech approach that is not vulnerable to power blackouts, viruses, malware or spyware.
I'm using a laptop at school (in a non-laptop-class, but hey, it's fine with the teachers). The only time this caused trouble for me that could have been avoided was when my power supply cable went kaput, and I lost a home exercise I've written at school. That was a minor hassle for me - but would avoiding it have been worth the major hassle of writing with pen and paper and dealing with a flood of messily written school books?
I've learned cursive writing back in elementary school - now I'm only using it during written tests in language courses where upper/lowercase writing is important and I can't use capitals only (capitals only is more readable than cursive writing, and imo also can be written just as fast). After I'm done with school I likely will never use cursive writing again, not because I dislike it, but because there's simply no reason to - so why is it so bad that cursive writing is a fading skill?
Not only is it a fairly decent way of calling each other, at least the older versions used to have a quite awesome chat function. I'm member of a community who extensively uses Skype for chatting, and prefers it over IRC for one reason - it has a logging function and messages will be delivered to you even if you aren't online when they get written.
To be fair though, it's performance is *nowhere* close to that of a nice IRC client...try opening a Skype chat with 2k+ unread messages >_> .
Re:Interesting
on
The Magicians
·
· Score: 5, Informative
As sad as it is, there is quite a lot of truth to gender stereotypes. Sure, they have changed in time, but there still is typically male and typically female behavior (hey, don't look at me, I'd love to see female engineers and scientists just as much as you do).
If the world could be completely disarmed, where all guns would cease to exist, and nobody would have them, period...Nobody. Then I might agree that it would be a good thing.
Then people would use knives and clubs (or, if these would be outlawed too, their bare hands). And the people who cannot use anything other than a gun for self defense (can you say Asthma?) would be further disadvantaged. It's not the guns that are the problem, it's the people who abuse them.
With the dawn of fast Internet connections and the Internet as something even ordinary people use, the recording industry is running on borrowed time anyways. Not necessarily because of piracy, but simply because artists will find better ways of selling their work, like online mp3 stores, which, unlike releasing CDs, is also rather cheap. There are few arguments supporting CDs as portable media storages already nowadays, and I feel inclined to believe that future developments will make CDs even more obsolete (why use CDs when you have mp3 players that you can plug into every radio around?).
I don't think software patents are overally bad - they are just bad as they are now. Patents are important. If I write software, I want to be able to sell it and to get paid for it, and that's just fair. On the other hand however, the patent system is horribly abused, especially since patents last half an eternity plus forever. I think the ideal solution would be to set patents for software at around 10 years...maybe even 5. This way, companies and developers would still get paid for their stuff, but they couldn't abuse their patents to create monopolies either.
Well, I can't find any citations, but I well recall a time when one German student was taken into custody by FBI agents for running a blog titled "Kill Bush!" with a shopjob of a stabbed president below. I can't say that I support what the girl did, but I certainly neither support the FBI's action here. Sure, investigating this is one thing, but when you find out it's a bloody college girl with rather, uh, "Anti-American" views, you don't have to drag her out of class like a terrorist.
Just because Conservatives (who actually are more left than they make themselves appear) do frequently try to increase the power of the government does not mean the Liberals or other left-wing groups are better. It's a matter of being authoritarian or not, and both sides tend towards authoritarianism, although in different fields.
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I hope he bombs Iran and North Korea before invading Pakistan together with India.
Ah, but you know, one of the things you can get a Peace Nobel Prize is for abolishing standing armies. Nobody said they need to be your own *whistles*
Too bad that importing uncut games is illegal.
There actually is a Teletubby L4D mod (don't ask me). Just google it.
Austria is heading down the Nanny State lane just as well, and our politicians are utterly fucked up (we have Nazi parties and we have socialist parties; no libertarians, no conservatives, no opposition); we have the draft (note: I'm pro-military, but a draft should be reserved for the most dire circumstances and not to keep something the government can spend money on so they can justify more taxes), we have hate speech laws, our self defense rights are almost nonexistant (and I'm not just talking right to bear arms here) and craptons of idiocy.
Nah, the US may certainly have it's problems, but I don't see it becoming a European-like Nanny State anytime soon.
They don't find a market, they abuse their OS monopoly to create one.
On the other hand, they might not enjoy the rights to free speech or self defense. Or suffer from atrociously high taxes. Or maybe get told to bend over for the government in another way. There may be quite a lot of problems US citizens have to cope with, but it's certainly still better there than in lots of other "civilized" nations.
[smallprint]This review was commissioned by the US Federal Government.[/smallprint]
Now, whatever one may think about the post you are quoting...he certainly is right in saying that Austrian economists are *very* dogmatic people. Austria is a deeply "social-capitalist" (read: Socialism Light) country, we have no political or otherwise opposition (all our parties are either socialist or nationalsocialist, with the exception of the Young Liberals which only ran for the EU elections and got almost no votes because they couldn't afford an election campaign) to that dogma here, and it likely will stay in place for a long time.
Sufficient brainwashing and propaganda can turn every average human into a mindless slave to a cause. Human beings are irrational in their nature - they may ignore the harm done to their country and the world in general or deny it while launching the nuke just as well. I wouldn't put my fate in the hands of such humans.
Oh, but the average /.er knows *plenty* of them! They just all seem to come from the same families...their surnames always are something like .png or .jpg...
They never kill too many people at once, either. 9/11 was the big incident; you won't see the body count that high in one incident again for a long time.
A, 9/11 was an inside job, was it? And let me guess, next thing you're going to say is that they are dissecting aliens at Area 51, developing psychic weapons at Dulce and making sure Google Earth does not display the spaceship crashed onto Antarctica, and that Majestic 12 and the Illuminati are warring over who gets to control the world...
Conspiracy theories belong into books or awesome video games, not into the real world *rolls eyes*.
Which is a good thing, as it significantly rises the chance of a problem being solved without or with minimal use of violence. You wouldn't listen to some guy wearing a Barney suit telling you to stop throwing bricks at windows, or else, would you?
You don't even need to hop over to countries like Iran for that - Austria's already all you need. We once had a politician calling Mohammed a child molester; not necessarily a position I feel inclined to agree with, but it got her sued like hell. At the same time, you can (verbally) accuse people like the former US president of the same thing and probably even get applause. Not that I support either the political stances of Bush nor Winter (the name of the Austrian politician that got sued), but this is a great example of how censorship is used to silence members of political parties becoming inconvenient to the ruling ones...
I'd rather import or less-than-legally download a game than to have a censored game (with crappy voice acting - seriously, German voice actors are horrible, and the translation of the texts themselves rarely is done well either).
The difference is that in Germany, movies are accepted as an "art form" - video games however aren't (quite the contrary, they are often demonized by politicians for various reasons - Counter Strike for example is to blame for every school shooting that ever happened in Germany >_>).
There is still a lot to be said for a low-tech approach that is not vulnerable to power blackouts, viruses, malware or spyware.
I'm using a laptop at school (in a non-laptop-class, but hey, it's fine with the teachers). The only time this caused trouble for me that could have been avoided was when my power supply cable went kaput, and I lost a home exercise I've written at school. That was a minor hassle for me - but would avoiding it have been worth the major hassle of writing with pen and paper and dealing with a flood of messily written school books?
I've learned cursive writing back in elementary school - now I'm only using it during written tests in language courses where upper/lowercase writing is important and I can't use capitals only (capitals only is more readable than cursive writing, and imo also can be written just as fast). After I'm done with school I likely will never use cursive writing again, not because I dislike it, but because there's simply no reason to - so why is it so bad that cursive writing is a fading skill?
Too bad that it's kinda hard to use the last box in most of Europe...
Not only is it a fairly decent way of calling each other, at least the older versions used to have a quite awesome chat function. I'm member of a community who extensively uses Skype for chatting, and prefers it over IRC for one reason - it has a logging function and messages will be delivered to you even if you aren't online when they get written.
To be fair though, it's performance is *nowhere* close to that of a nice IRC client...try opening a Skype chat with 2k+ unread messages >_> .
I put on my robe and wizard hat.
As sad as it is, there is quite a lot of truth to gender stereotypes. Sure, they have changed in time, but there still is typically male and typically female behavior (hey, don't look at me, I'd love to see female engineers and scientists just as much as you do).
If the world could be completely disarmed, where all guns would cease to exist, and nobody would have them, period...Nobody. Then I might agree that it would be a good thing.
Then people would use knives and clubs (or, if these would be outlawed too, their bare hands). And the people who cannot use anything other than a gun for self defense (can you say Asthma?) would be further disadvantaged. It's not the guns that are the problem, it's the people who abuse them.
Otherwise, I agree.
With the dawn of fast Internet connections and the Internet as something even ordinary people use, the recording industry is running on borrowed time anyways. Not necessarily because of piracy, but simply because artists will find better ways of selling their work, like online mp3 stores, which, unlike releasing CDs, is also rather cheap. There are few arguments supporting CDs as portable media storages already nowadays, and I feel inclined to believe that future developments will make CDs even more obsolete (why use CDs when you have mp3 players that you can plug into every radio around?).
I don't think software patents are overally bad - they are just bad as they are now. Patents are important. If I write software, I want to be able to sell it and to get paid for it, and that's just fair. On the other hand however, the patent system is horribly abused, especially since patents last half an eternity plus forever. I think the ideal solution would be to set patents for software at around 10 years...maybe even 5. This way, companies and developers would still get paid for their stuff, but they couldn't abuse their patents to create monopolies either.
No, because doing so is not exercising your right to free speech, but creating a public disturbance.
Citation needed.
Well, I can't find any citations, but I well recall a time when one German student was taken into custody by FBI agents for running a blog titled "Kill Bush!" with a shopjob of a stabbed president below. I can't say that I support what the girl did, but I certainly neither support the FBI's action here. Sure, investigating this is one thing, but when you find out it's a bloody college girl with rather, uh, "Anti-American" views, you don't have to drag her out of class like a terrorist.
Just because Conservatives (who actually are more left than they make themselves appear) do frequently try to increase the power of the government does not mean the Liberals or other left-wing groups are better. It's a matter of being authoritarian or not, and both sides tend towards authoritarianism, although in different fields.