Initial interest confusion is very, very, minimal when it comes to the internet. It takes what? 10 seconds to determine that VideoPod is not an iPod video online. Blockbuster should have been sued not for trademark infringement but for false advertising, it shouldn't make a difference -what- it was that Blockbuster was advertising, if it doesn't exist and they didn't have good faith to believe it existed (for example, a billboard still advertising a store that had gone out of business but the billboard was put up before the store was closed) should be charged with fraud and misleading advertisement rather than anything to do with trademark infringement.
The thing is, VideoPod didn't advertise to be like an iPod video, they simply have similar names. That is the only similarity. VideoPod isn't packaged like an iPod video, VideoPod doesn't make commercials that look like Apple's commercials, VideoPod isn't made by a company with a name similar to Apple's, etc.
The idea that initial interest confusion can occur without misleading advertisements is laughable, if you search for VideoPod online, or ask someone to see a VideoPod and they show you it, it takes all of 2 seconds to determine it is not an iPod video.
Trademark law should be about protecting consumers not about letting corporations be dicks to people with vaguely similar names.
The problem is though it keeps the control on the government. It matters not what the means of fiat currency is, but the fact it is fiat currency is the problem.
What is a "dollar" exactly? It used to be that a dollar was defined as approximately 1/20th of an ounce of gold. The dollars were backed up with gold and you couldn't issue more dollars than there was gold. Until 1964 there was a similar silver standard when it came to our change, (hence why the dime is so small, the dime was made out of silver and the penny was made out of copper, in fact older pennies were much larger than our standard penny today) while the silver wasn't on a 1:1 ratio, it was close enough to the point where your change was backed up with a real standard. But today our coins aren't even made of silver, our cent isn't even copper and even our nickel might be changed in composition soon.
The problem is a dollar has become an imaginary unit of currency developed only by the government. There is nothing stopping the federal reserve from right now adding 1,000,000,000 dollars to our currency base in paper money. Our paper money no longer is redeemable for any "real" money. Paper money is the equivalent in paying in "rare" baseball cards without any guarantee to rarity. For example a 1913 Fatima Premium New York Nationals card is pretty rare because they aren't making them anymore. But the problem is that the US is still printing dollars left and right with no sign of stopping. It doesn't matter if you have $1, $100, or even $10,000 in your billfold right now if the government inflates our currency to nothingness, which is what is happening. There are no checks to how much the government can expand the money base.
We have a lot of debt, expressed in US dollars, the government can simply print money to get rid of that debt right now and screw up our entire economy in the process like Germany did post WW-I, but that is where it is going to end up.
No matter how the US dollar is expressed, credit cards, paper notes, aluminum tokens, it is still only worth what the physical medium it is expressed in is worth when all is said and done. The US dollar is meaningless, it can be inflated and deflated at the government's whim unlike a currency that is backed with something, like gold, silver, oil, etc. which so long as it is full reserve, holds its value.
The rate of inflation that fiat currency has caused can be easily examined by looking at a $20 gold certificate when the dollar was approximately equal to 1/20 of an ounce of gold. That $20 which now won't even buy a dinner for two at a fancy restaurant, would be worth over $1,200 today had they redeemed it in Gold. And this is just over a portion of someone's lifetime, from 1930s-2010.
Consumers aren't required to investigate the product in determining likelihood of confusion for trademark infringement. That's called "initial interest confusion".
And that is why the law is broken. This is a video projector it doesn't mean crap if it uses a similar name to an iPod, a consumer should be able to figure it out. Trademark law is to protect consumers, not to stop idiots who think they are the same.
For example, a company selling a white game console as a Vii with a logo to make it look like it was a Nintendo Wii is trademark infringement because it was trying to mislead consumers. But if it was a TV called a Vii there was no misleading.
If we keep looking at the status quo, we don't get progress. Trademark, copyright and patent law all need reforming, fast.
The point of these, and other laws isn't to catch "terrorists" but to put the US in control of the 99.9% of US people who follow the law. Just like gun control isn't going to stop Bob over there from shooting up the neighborhood but does stop Joe from purchasing a handgun to protect himself against people like Bob and also to protect himself against the government.
Yep, there are two things which will signal the end has come to the US republic, hyperinflation and price controls. Hyper inflation has already started to a degree, we can't even afford to make our coins out of silver anymore or gold and even the penny/nickle cost more to make than they are worth! (Even the post 1982 Zinc cents which contain little copper still cost more than they are worth) When it becomes clear that the US economy is in a state of hyperinflation the next thing that will happen is price controls which will be widely ignored or protested, expect to see farmers setting their crops on fire, gas stations shutting down and people bartering with gold/silver/food/gas/etc once all this is done, people will use foreign currency for a while (Canadian near Canada, Mexican near Mexico) until the US government makes new currency that is tied to either the gold/silver standard and the cycle will repeat.
If the white house and the rest of the government want to continue to litigate our freedoms away, the least they could do is show how these programs actually have caught real terrorists. Because, quite frankly if they can't even show that, they are eroding our rights away for nothing other than more control. There are several reasons why we haven't had a terrorist attack since 9/11 and none of those are thanks to the government.
A) Natural stupidity. Terrorists aren't exactly smart, remember the "times square bomber" who used as his detonation device.... firecrackers? Yeah, it takes planning to pull off an attack and quite honestly the terrorists don't have that ability.
B) Passengers in public transit. If you look like you are going to blow up or hijack a plane, the passengers will take you down. Ever since 9/11 people associate hijacking = run into a building rather than the pre-9/11 mindset of "do nothing, wind up in Cuba, get on a plane back home".
C) Terrorists aren't common. This idea that there are millions of terrorists trying to kill you all the time is laughable and has no basis in fact.
Granted, these laws are pure BS no matter how many "terrorists" they've caught, but if the government can't even show a single terrorist caught using these, and a real terrorist that could actually cause serious harm, the citizens should strike these laws down even faster.
The point isn't about the origins but the actual product. It shouldn't matter if your mom thought that VideoPod was made by Apple or not, what should matter is whether she thought a VideoPod was an iPod video. THAT is the point of trademarks, not to give corporations the power to change the English language. If something was called a VideoPod and was a generic MP3 player, Apple might have a case, but if it was something like... a VHS player you hook up via USB to rip your old VHS tapes into a digital format, it doesn't matter what the name is, Apple has no offering similar to it so the name should stay.
Trademark law was not designed to give power to corporations to forbid competition, rather it was to prevent misleading claims. I don't see how this misleads consumers in any way.
The scenario that trademark law was designed to prevent is people walking into a store and walking out with a product that isn't what they expected. In none of these cases were people expecting to get an iPod and ended up not getting one.
Unions limit economic freedom and prevent progress. With collective bargaining, everyone is looked at as interchangeable when in reality they aren't. There are some people who need to be fired because they are bad at their job, while other people should be promoted because they are better at theirs. Unions prevent this from happening, and prevent the basic economic right of seeking employment wherever you see fit.
Collective bargaining fails because it fails to take into consideration everyone's strengths and weaknesses. It makes it impossible for people who do well to get ahead and to remove the people who do a sub-par job. Secondly, the union mentality leads to groupthink, people stop thinking for themselves and instead have devotion to their union which even influences how they vote. If the union head says to vote for X candidate, people will do it thinking that they will get a better result, but very, very few will actually pursue the candidate and look at his views to see if they agree with them.
Unions can use mob-like tactics to block decisions made by management while management is powerless to stop them. For example, if you walk out of the job and strike, you should be able to be fired, no questions asked, you broke your end of the contract.
Vietnam was a mistake to begin with, for one, what stake did the US have in Vietnam? Nothing. Vietnam was a pretty insignificant country, the idea that suddenly everyone would be communist was laughable. Instead, the Vietnamese people got screwed, just look at pictures from the My Lai Massacre (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:My_Lai_massacre.jpg , link is NSFW, no nudity just a lot of dead bodies). Yeah, we might have "won" Vietnam, but Vietnam was a mistake from the beginning, the bombs that killed US servicemen were the same bombs that we dropped on North Vietnamese forces that simply failed to detonate, we escalated the conflict beyond what was needed and we suffered for it. The "worst case scenario" in Vietnam happened, and what was the end result? Atomic war? No, just a few minor problems, nothing worth raping a country for and sending many unwilling young people to their certain deaths.
We didn't "fight back" against the Soviets, we diffused the situation using diplomacy and in the process managed to nearly annihilate life on the earth as we know it. The problem with the USSR was mutual suspicion and a lack of openness, neither the USSR or the US wanted to start a nuclear war, but because they weren't open about it, both sides built up large amounts of nuclear weapons and handled them carelessly endangering the lives of more people.
Had the US and USSR both been open and fully diplomatic about their goals, we wouldn't have had the cold war, and quite honestly the US should have lead the initiative by not keeping a buildup of atomic weapons, thus provoking the USSR into building theirs so we built our own, etc.
The hostilities of the cold war wasn't caused because Russia hated America or vice versa, rather America thought Russia could destroy the US, therefore they built up more weapons, so Russia saw that as threatening so they built up their weapon stockpile too.
We have a choice with China - we can accept their goods in whatever form they want to send them to us, or we can fight back economically, politically and in every other way that is needed. So far, we are forfeiting and accepting whatever poison they are sending this week. Really, how many people have to die before we wake up and decide that relying on the Chinese for all manufacturing is a huge risk. And it isn't just manufacturing - the Chinese now control enough debt to be able to effectively dictate policy to the US. Could the US stand up to the Chinese if they decided to take over Taiwan now? Probably not.
Of course, ever since the 1930s when FDR screwed the US economically and when Nixon cut the last tie to gold, our financial system has been based on nothingness and is unsustainable.
And the thing is, would the Chinese try to take over Taiwan? I doubt it. The thing is, the Taiwanese people wouldn't accept government from the Chinese. A capture of Taiwan would be a propaganda victory for China, but it would be a net loss in their diplomatic relations for an island with nothing really important and a hostile population. If you look at recent takeovers that haven't happened because of "the west" (such as the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan) they all were looked down upon in international circles and shunned so they had little reputation to lose. On the other hand, China has a lot to lose if they were to invade Taiwan and very little to gain.
We have a similar choice with Iran. They are going to build up until they have an unbeatable advantage in the Middle East. They have committed over and over to wiping out Israel and likely fighting a really nasty war with Saudia Arabia and anyone else not accepting their particular brand of Islam. The US can be Iran's friend and help them with this or we can be their enemy and try to stop them. There is no third alternative here.
Last time I checked, the US wasn't in the middle east and there was
As opposed to Google? As opposed to Microsoft? Lets face it, any company who makes the majority of their revenue on ads is not going to be privacy friendly because the less privacy friendly they are the more money they can make.
But if you look at -why- Germany went to extreme nationalism, you only need to look at what Germany's neighbors did to them via the treaty of Versailles.
Emulators simply make sense though as one of the first things ported. When you port a SNES emulator you are in essence allowing 785+ games to be played, port a NES emulator and you are letting 798+ games be played, etc. Original content is good, but an emulator is quick to port and pretty useful.
If you were going to write something for a console to be the first thing someone downloaded, do you want it to be an original game that would take a year or so to be fully playable, bug free, or would you rather do a quick port of a SNES emulator so people can -do- something with their newly cracked console?
I for one, think emulators are fantastic on consoles because just think about it, every game you've every played during your childhood you have on a single console. No more blinking red LED of the NES, no more swapping cartridges, no more scratched disks, lessened loading times, etc.
We also would save a ton of money in taxes. What a lot of people don't seem to understand is that we have military bases in almost every country in the world. Why? It doesn't make us safer if we have a large ground force in stable areas like Germany but it wastes a lot of money.
The problem with our foreign policy is it is based on this mythical idea that somehow we can keep information from everyone all the time. That if we restrict access to -insert "hostile" country here- they will never gain -insert military technology here- and the world will maintain its status quo. Rather than a foreign policy that makes sure that hostile countries aren't hostile to us.
The problem is that people see college as "success" and a tech program as "failure". And I think we can lay the blame squarely on high school administration. For example, at my school if you wanted to do anything that would qualify as vocational training, you had to sacrifice upper level classes, in the mind of the high school admins, someone who would take advance chemistry, calculus or college English had no place learning a skill. And so it became associated with "oh, you can't do academics, here do this program and take the 'stupid' classes and you will get your diploma" the idea that someone who did well academically would want to learn a skill never really crossed their minds. Tech programs were seen as a way to boost graduation rates of the stupider students, letting them get a "free pass" and only take a minimum of actual classes.
2-3 days if you get express shipping and don't manage to order on a "non business" day. Yeah, they might get the thing shipped off in 2 hours since you ordered it, but sometimes UPS/USPS/Fed-Ex takes a very long time to get it to you.
So your complaint is that shops in Japan sell tings to the Japanese market? That they sell things designed to work in Japan? That they sell computers with a Japanese-localized OS on it?
Wow, the shops in the US are crappy! I mean, this game is designed to work with NTSC consoles and not PAL consoles! This toaster only has a US outlet on it and won't work with UK power! And I mean, they spell colour without the U! Its like the people in the US are self-serving and cater to people who live in the US and not people visiting!
I really don't see your complaint, people in Japan sell to a Japanese market, people in the US sell to a US-centered market, people in the UK sell to a UK-centered market, etc.
Not only do you have to pay more for shipping it takes forever. Returns are also a pain, plus there is more of a chance that something could go wrong with shipping. Even with the best online retailers, returning a defective product could take a week or so, rather than just a few minutes with a physical store.
If my HDD suddenly dies in my desktop, I'd like to have a place to go to in order to pick one up that evening and be up and running by the next day rather than ordering online and waiting a week to have that machine in full working order.
We need to rethink our entire foreign policy, rather than rely on unsustainable, unworkable "solutions" of restricting access to information and then panicking if that information gets out there, we need to make sure that the world won't use that information against us.
Of course they didn't endorse them, they actually shot the students! Unless for some reason the National Guard isn't part of the US government anymore...
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Initial interest confusion is very, very, minimal when it comes to the internet. It takes what? 10 seconds to determine that VideoPod is not an iPod video online. Blockbuster should have been sued not for trademark infringement but for false advertising, it shouldn't make a difference -what- it was that Blockbuster was advertising, if it doesn't exist and they didn't have good faith to believe it existed (for example, a billboard still advertising a store that had gone out of business but the billboard was put up before the store was closed) should be charged with fraud and misleading advertisement rather than anything to do with trademark infringement.
The thing is, VideoPod didn't advertise to be like an iPod video, they simply have similar names. That is the only similarity. VideoPod isn't packaged like an iPod video, VideoPod doesn't make commercials that look like Apple's commercials, VideoPod isn't made by a company with a name similar to Apple's, etc.
The idea that initial interest confusion can occur without misleading advertisements is laughable, if you search for VideoPod online, or ask someone to see a VideoPod and they show you it, it takes all of 2 seconds to determine it is not an iPod video.
Trademark law should be about protecting consumers not about letting corporations be dicks to people with vaguely similar names.
The problem is though it keeps the control on the government. It matters not what the means of fiat currency is, but the fact it is fiat currency is the problem.
What is a "dollar" exactly? It used to be that a dollar was defined as approximately 1/20th of an ounce of gold. The dollars were backed up with gold and you couldn't issue more dollars than there was gold. Until 1964 there was a similar silver standard when it came to our change, (hence why the dime is so small, the dime was made out of silver and the penny was made out of copper, in fact older pennies were much larger than our standard penny today) while the silver wasn't on a 1:1 ratio, it was close enough to the point where your change was backed up with a real standard. But today our coins aren't even made of silver, our cent isn't even copper and even our nickel might be changed in composition soon.
The problem is a dollar has become an imaginary unit of currency developed only by the government. There is nothing stopping the federal reserve from right now adding 1,000,000,000 dollars to our currency base in paper money. Our paper money no longer is redeemable for any "real" money. Paper money is the equivalent in paying in "rare" baseball cards without any guarantee to rarity. For example a 1913 Fatima Premium New York Nationals card is pretty rare because they aren't making them anymore. But the problem is that the US is still printing dollars left and right with no sign of stopping. It doesn't matter if you have $1, $100, or even $10,000 in your billfold right now if the government inflates our currency to nothingness, which is what is happening. There are no checks to how much the government can expand the money base.
We have a lot of debt, expressed in US dollars, the government can simply print money to get rid of that debt right now and screw up our entire economy in the process like Germany did post WW-I, but that is where it is going to end up.
No matter how the US dollar is expressed, credit cards, paper notes, aluminum tokens, it is still only worth what the physical medium it is expressed in is worth when all is said and done. The US dollar is meaningless, it can be inflated and deflated at the government's whim unlike a currency that is backed with something, like gold, silver, oil, etc. which so long as it is full reserve, holds its value.
The rate of inflation that fiat currency has caused can be easily examined by looking at a $20 gold certificate when the dollar was approximately equal to 1/20 of an ounce of gold. That $20 which now won't even buy a dinner for two at a fancy restaurant, would be worth over $1,200 today had they redeemed it in Gold. And this is just over a portion of someone's lifetime, from 1930s-2010.
Consumers aren't required to investigate the product in determining likelihood of confusion for trademark infringement. That's called "initial interest confusion".
And that is why the law is broken. This is a video projector it doesn't mean crap if it uses a similar name to an iPod, a consumer should be able to figure it out. Trademark law is to protect consumers, not to stop idiots who think they are the same.
For example, a company selling a white game console as a Vii with a logo to make it look like it was a Nintendo Wii is trademark infringement because it was trying to mislead consumers. But if it was a TV called a Vii there was no misleading.
If we keep looking at the status quo, we don't get progress. Trademark, copyright and patent law all need reforming, fast.
The inventor is still alive and well, this guy was just who he sold his company to for big bucks.
I also hate them, I don't like the light they put out, I don't like the "warm up" time and they don't last any longer either.
The point of these, and other laws isn't to catch "terrorists" but to put the US in control of the 99.9% of US people who follow the law. Just like gun control isn't going to stop Bob over there from shooting up the neighborhood but does stop Joe from purchasing a handgun to protect himself against people like Bob and also to protect himself against the government.
Yep, there are two things which will signal the end has come to the US republic, hyperinflation and price controls. Hyper inflation has already started to a degree, we can't even afford to make our coins out of silver anymore or gold and even the penny/nickle cost more to make than they are worth! (Even the post 1982 Zinc cents which contain little copper still cost more than they are worth) When it becomes clear that the US economy is in a state of hyperinflation the next thing that will happen is price controls which will be widely ignored or protested, expect to see farmers setting their crops on fire, gas stations shutting down and people bartering with gold/silver/food/gas/etc once all this is done, people will use foreign currency for a while (Canadian near Canada, Mexican near Mexico) until the US government makes new currency that is tied to either the gold/silver standard and the cycle will repeat.
If the white house and the rest of the government want to continue to litigate our freedoms away, the least they could do is show how these programs actually have caught real terrorists. Because, quite frankly if they can't even show that, they are eroding our rights away for nothing other than more control. There are several reasons why we haven't had a terrorist attack since 9/11 and none of those are thanks to the government.
A) Natural stupidity. Terrorists aren't exactly smart, remember the "times square bomber" who used as his detonation device.... firecrackers? Yeah, it takes planning to pull off an attack and quite honestly the terrorists don't have that ability.
B) Passengers in public transit. If you look like you are going to blow up or hijack a plane, the passengers will take you down. Ever since 9/11 people associate hijacking = run into a building rather than the pre-9/11 mindset of "do nothing, wind up in Cuba, get on a plane back home".
C) Terrorists aren't common. This idea that there are millions of terrorists trying to kill you all the time is laughable and has no basis in fact.
Granted, these laws are pure BS no matter how many "terrorists" they've caught, but if the government can't even show a single terrorist caught using these, and a real terrorist that could actually cause serious harm, the citizens should strike these laws down even faster.
The point isn't about the origins but the actual product. It shouldn't matter if your mom thought that VideoPod was made by Apple or not, what should matter is whether she thought a VideoPod was an iPod video. THAT is the point of trademarks, not to give corporations the power to change the English language. If something was called a VideoPod and was a generic MP3 player, Apple might have a case, but if it was something like... a VHS player you hook up via USB to rip your old VHS tapes into a digital format, it doesn't matter what the name is, Apple has no offering similar to it so the name should stay.
Trademark law was not designed to give power to corporations to forbid competition, rather it was to prevent misleading claims. I don't see how this misleads consumers in any way.
The scenario that trademark law was designed to prevent is people walking into a store and walking out with a product that isn't what they expected. In none of these cases were people expecting to get an iPod and ended up not getting one.
Dear idiot mod.
please grow some balls and debate my points, otherwise, you are just proving yourself incapable of forming your own opinions.
Thanks
Ah, yes, a troll mod for pointing out obvious flaws in unions. Let me guess, your union told me to mod me troll?
Unions limit economic freedom and prevent progress. With collective bargaining, everyone is looked at as interchangeable when in reality they aren't. There are some people who need to be fired because they are bad at their job, while other people should be promoted because they are better at theirs. Unions prevent this from happening, and prevent the basic economic right of seeking employment wherever you see fit.
Collective bargaining fails because it fails to take into consideration everyone's strengths and weaknesses. It makes it impossible for people who do well to get ahead and to remove the people who do a sub-par job. Secondly, the union mentality leads to groupthink, people stop thinking for themselves and instead have devotion to their union which even influences how they vote. If the union head says to vote for X candidate, people will do it thinking that they will get a better result, but very, very few will actually pursue the candidate and look at his views to see if they agree with them.
Unions can use mob-like tactics to block decisions made by management while management is powerless to stop them. For example, if you walk out of the job and strike, you should be able to be fired, no questions asked, you broke your end of the contract.
Vietnam was a mistake to begin with, for one, what stake did the US have in Vietnam? Nothing. Vietnam was a pretty insignificant country, the idea that suddenly everyone would be communist was laughable. Instead, the Vietnamese people got screwed, just look at pictures from the My Lai Massacre (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:My_Lai_massacre.jpg , link is NSFW, no nudity just a lot of dead bodies). Yeah, we might have "won" Vietnam, but Vietnam was a mistake from the beginning, the bombs that killed US servicemen were the same bombs that we dropped on North Vietnamese forces that simply failed to detonate, we escalated the conflict beyond what was needed and we suffered for it. The "worst case scenario" in Vietnam happened, and what was the end result? Atomic war? No, just a few minor problems, nothing worth raping a country for and sending many unwilling young people to their certain deaths.
We didn't "fight back" against the Soviets, we diffused the situation using diplomacy and in the process managed to nearly annihilate life on the earth as we know it. The problem with the USSR was mutual suspicion and a lack of openness, neither the USSR or the US wanted to start a nuclear war, but because they weren't open about it, both sides built up large amounts of nuclear weapons and handled them carelessly endangering the lives of more people.
Had the US and USSR both been open and fully diplomatic about their goals, we wouldn't have had the cold war, and quite honestly the US should have lead the initiative by not keeping a buildup of atomic weapons, thus provoking the USSR into building theirs so we built our own, etc.
The hostilities of the cold war wasn't caused because Russia hated America or vice versa, rather America thought Russia could destroy the US, therefore they built up more weapons, so Russia saw that as threatening so they built up their weapon stockpile too.
We have a choice with China - we can accept their goods in whatever form they want to send them to us, or we can fight back economically, politically and in every other way that is needed. So far, we are forfeiting and accepting whatever poison they are sending this week. Really, how many people have to die before we wake up and decide that relying on the Chinese for all manufacturing is a huge risk. And it isn't just manufacturing - the Chinese now control enough debt to be able to effectively dictate policy to the US. Could the US stand up to the Chinese if they decided to take over Taiwan now? Probably not.
Of course, ever since the 1930s when FDR screwed the US economically and when Nixon cut the last tie to gold, our financial system has been based on nothingness and is unsustainable.
And the thing is, would the Chinese try to take over Taiwan? I doubt it. The thing is, the Taiwanese people wouldn't accept government from the Chinese. A capture of Taiwan would be a propaganda victory for China, but it would be a net loss in their diplomatic relations for an island with nothing really important and a hostile population. If you look at recent takeovers that haven't happened because of "the west" (such as the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan) they all were looked down upon in international circles and shunned so they had little reputation to lose. On the other hand, China has a lot to lose if they were to invade Taiwan and very little to gain.
We have a similar choice with Iran. They are going to build up until they have an unbeatable advantage in the Middle East. They have committed over and over to wiping out Israel and likely fighting a really nasty war with Saudia Arabia and anyone else not accepting their particular brand of Islam. The US can be Iran's friend and help them with this or we can be their enemy and try to stop them. There is no third alternative here.
Last time I checked, the US wasn't in the middle east and there was
As opposed to Google? As opposed to Microsoft? Lets face it, any company who makes the majority of their revenue on ads is not going to be privacy friendly because the less privacy friendly they are the more money they can make.
But if you look at -why- Germany went to extreme nationalism, you only need to look at what Germany's neighbors did to them via the treaty of Versailles.
Emulators simply make sense though as one of the first things ported. When you port a SNES emulator you are in essence allowing 785+ games to be played, port a NES emulator and you are letting 798+ games be played, etc. Original content is good, but an emulator is quick to port and pretty useful.
If you were going to write something for a console to be the first thing someone downloaded, do you want it to be an original game that would take a year or so to be fully playable, bug free, or would you rather do a quick port of a SNES emulator so people can -do- something with their newly cracked console?
I for one, think emulators are fantastic on consoles because just think about it, every game you've every played during your childhood you have on a single console. No more blinking red LED of the NES, no more swapping cartridges, no more scratched disks, lessened loading times, etc.
We also would save a ton of money in taxes. What a lot of people don't seem to understand is that we have military bases in almost every country in the world. Why? It doesn't make us safer if we have a large ground force in stable areas like Germany but it wastes a lot of money.
The problem with our foreign policy is it is based on this mythical idea that somehow we can keep information from everyone all the time. That if we restrict access to -insert "hostile" country here- they will never gain -insert military technology here- and the world will maintain its status quo. Rather than a foreign policy that makes sure that hostile countries aren't hostile to us.
The problem is that people see college as "success" and a tech program as "failure". And I think we can lay the blame squarely on high school administration. For example, at my school if you wanted to do anything that would qualify as vocational training, you had to sacrifice upper level classes, in the mind of the high school admins, someone who would take advance chemistry, calculus or college English had no place learning a skill. And so it became associated with "oh, you can't do academics, here do this program and take the 'stupid' classes and you will get your diploma" the idea that someone who did well academically would want to learn a skill never really crossed their minds. Tech programs were seen as a way to boost graduation rates of the stupider students, letting them get a "free pass" and only take a minimum of actual classes.
2-3 days if you get express shipping and don't manage to order on a "non business" day. Yeah, they might get the thing shipped off in 2 hours since you ordered it, but sometimes UPS/USPS/Fed-Ex takes a very long time to get it to you.
So your complaint is that shops in Japan sell tings to the Japanese market? That they sell things designed to work in Japan? That they sell computers with a Japanese-localized OS on it?
Wow, the shops in the US are crappy! I mean, this game is designed to work with NTSC consoles and not PAL consoles! This toaster only has a US outlet on it and won't work with UK power! And I mean, they spell colour without the U! Its like the people in the US are self-serving and cater to people who live in the US and not people visiting!
I really don't see your complaint, people in Japan sell to a Japanese market, people in the US sell to a US-centered market, people in the UK sell to a UK-centered market, etc.
The problem with online retailers is shipping.
Not only do you have to pay more for shipping it takes forever. Returns are also a pain, plus there is more of a chance that something could go wrong with shipping. Even with the best online retailers, returning a defective product could take a week or so, rather than just a few minutes with a physical store.
If my HDD suddenly dies in my desktop, I'd like to have a place to go to in order to pick one up that evening and be up and running by the next day rather than ordering online and waiting a week to have that machine in full working order.
We need to rethink our entire foreign policy, rather than rely on unsustainable, unworkable "solutions" of restricting access to information and then panicking if that information gets out there, we need to make sure that the world won't use that information against us.
Of course they didn't endorse them, they actually shot the students! Unless for some reason the National Guard isn't part of the US government anymore...