Hmmm. Why is it then that a nation as wealthy as ours is so often at war, and so violent internally?
Because our nation seems to think that being involved in every little thing is the only way not to be taken by surprise. For example, after Pearl Harbor the US was shaken out of isolationism, a lot of people thought that if we had been at war earlier, we could have stopped it from happening. After 9/11, many people thought we should have went and destroyed the terror cells earlier to prevent 9/11. In the cold war we had the irrational paranoia of the Domino theory thinking that the Soviet Union had enough spare cash to outfit third-world countries with arms to cause a threat to the US.
As for violent internally, that is highly subjective. How many peaceful protests have taken place in the US? How many of those would be peaceful in other countries?
Many of the reasons why the US is more violent than some other countries include A) Lower population densities B) Lack of religious condemnation of violence C) Clashes of cultures and D) prohibition of drugs.
The US has some areas that are scarcely populated, in those areas its possible to commit a violent crime without being seen, without having any witnesses and its quite possible to get away with it.
In many other countries, this is not the case, high population densities help to eliminate the ability to commit crimes without being seen.
In the US, most religions do not openly condemn violence, saying rather that there is a place for violence in some situations. Part of this is culture based, it is generally taboo to condemn the military and anti-culture to say that the revolutionary war was unnecessary.
In most cities, people of different cultures live side by side, this leads to heightened racial tensions and violence.
And drugs cause violence, not that drugs are inherently violent, but by forbidding the open sale of some drugs, it leads to people going to shady dealers to buy drugs at inflated prices, this does not sit well with some people so they get violent. Also, due to the sigma around drugs, even having a small amount can lead to people being arrested, a show of violence proves that if that person would tell the authorities about the drugs, they would be hurt. The prohibition of drugs cannot work if there is a supply of drugs, a supply of drugs is inevitable with a large border with Mexico, so naturally violence occurs.
When wealth is built by a handful by exploiting the many, when trade is unfair because of deep inequalities of power, then, no, peace will not be preserved.
Peace will be preserved by one of two ways. Either the people with a lot of wealth will maintain control giving peace, or a faction of the poor will rise up and create peace. The more wealth involved, the more often one of the two scenarios will play out.
I say, do no localization. Most localization, especially for low budget games is -terrible- unless you actually have a studio there. The thing is A) Its a low budget game, if it doesn't sell well in some countries, chances are you lost less than if you hired a good localization expert. B) its downloadable, this means no one is going to really be offended, if its not sold at a retail store, the idiots who censor generally don't even have the console the game is on to try to find "offensive" online games, let alone try to play them. Just look at how many RPGs have been killed with sub-par localization, even if the translation is spot-on, the substitution of jokes, changes to characters and scenes all make for a lousy experience. Translate? Yes. Localize? No.
Are localizations for downloadable games -really- that important? Usually people who download games from a different region generally know what to expect in the game. I can see localization being an issue for high-budget games, but for low budget indie games, its more or less just another expense. How many of us have played J-RPGs that have been "localized" and made terrible either by censorship or by forcing us to listen to sub-par English voice actors?
No, the entire point of patents is to encourage innovation. If you patent something so basic it can't be worked around, it is too obvious. How does blocking all innovation encourage innovation? It is an oxymoron. When you patent small advancements, small improvements, they allow for innovation. Most software and many hardware patents are akin to patenting "using a spring to trap a mouse", they have no specific outlines, no implementation and only serve as a hindrance to any innovators. Now, patenting a standard mousetrap, may be worthy of patenting, because it allows for others to trap mice differently using some of the same materials, thus encouraging innovation. When someone patents something basic, no work can be done without paying extortion... I mean, patent royalties decreasing a lot of potential innovation.
The entire point of patents is to increase innovation by A) Giving documentation to people and B) Encourage multiple ways of doing something. For example, lets say I have patented a push lawn mower (the type without gas/electricity) I would get the patent for that device, then someone else could change it to do the same task but better (make a motorized push lawn mower) and then someone could take that and make it be better (make a ride on lawn mower) and then someone could take that and make it better (zero-turn radius mower), but I wouldn't get a patent for "thing that cuts grass". Effectively, what these patents are doing is patenting "cutting grass" without specifying a device and then suing everyone.
You should have to prove that at least some people didn't come to your restaurant because of it and then start from there. For example, if you can find 3 people who no longer come and will testify, you can sue from there and then increase it a reasonable number based on their testimony. If you can't find anyone, and you don't have any proof, the court case should be thrown out. Otherwise I can say anything and accuse people of libel and slander. There needs to be actual, measurable harm. When you find 3 people and no more and the people say that other people know it, you can say that you lost 10 customers, you figure that every customer comes in about once every month and orders $5 of food, you only lost $300 in half a year. So you could sue for say, $500 with deterrence. If you have no proof, then everything is hearsay and it is not justice, it is tyranny by the court.
Well, I wouldn't think that for one the RIAA would want to bring these agencies to the light of law, a lot of times they use illegal methods to take down torrents and track people. Would a physical store want to hire thieves to break into homes to re-steal the items and then sue for them?
although Plaintiffs were not required to prove their actual damages
Plaintiffs should, without a doubt, be required to prove actual damages. If they can't, their case gets thrown out. That is how it should be. I don't think it would work this way with anything physical. If someone stole a CD from a music store, that cost $10, they cost $200 in labor, and $150 in court costs, they shouldn't have to pay anything more than $500 (assuming we are inflating the price for deterrence). If I said that I shouldn't have to prove what the CD costs and say that the CD is worth $10,000, the court should throw out the case or very, very, very much reduce the value because I didn't do my homework. The same thing should happen with imaginary property.
Sure, but their revenue has dropped. In the past year they have lost billions of Euros, have only recently came out with a good competitor phone to Android, the iPhone and the Pre and really, "dumb" phones are on the way out. Think about it, 5 years ago, unless you were a corporate user, you didn't get a smartphone. Today, almost everyone wants a smartphone, and prices for the phones are sharply declining. Eventually, non-smartphones will fade away. Saying that their smartphone marketshare is going down and the rest doesn't matter is akin to saying that computer sales have declined, but hey, we're still selling typewriters.
The problem is, will Nokia keep on updating their free directions? Generally, when you have a large company that seems to be losing money and marketshare left and right they will release a lot of paid things for free in order to not have to update them or maintain them as much as a paid product.
MS has actually made their search engine better than Google (the different categories and combining them together shows this, and it's greatly improved over Live search).
Citation needed. Live search was crap, being better than crap doesn't make something great. And I've compared the search results, 80% of the time I prefer Google's results (there was this site that compared Bing/Google/Yahoo and had you pick your favorite and then told you what it was, don't know the URL at the time)
And now Bing keeps gaining marketshare faster than ever before.
And I would imagine that most of that growth is caused by people using the default IE search option which uses Bing.
It is actually a good product,
Again, Citation needed. Is there really anything that Bing does better than Google for the general user?
and actually something MS has left alone from their other marketing efforts (for example, they use flash instead of silverlight, because flash is installed on so many machines, and do not try to promote silverlight on cost of their search engine).
Isn't that how -all- Microsoft's products start? First as nice, good projects with open standards, etc. Then they release that one program that breaks the standard and suddenly that becomes the new standard and then close it off to non-MS products.
Google pulls out from China market.
Um, not exactly sure what you meant by this statement, but assuming its anti-Google, I don't really see your point. Basically Google said that they are sick of being the pawns of the Chinese government which is a -good thing-, I really don't think Microsoft would have the guts to say that.
This shows competition is good. It surely leads to innovations.
Competition is good, but corrupt competition is not. Both Microsoft and Google use software patents to discourage competition, both don't care about privacy, and both are willing to be tossed along and won't fight for their user's rights.
Every country has an excess of networking engineers, and the last thing people need during a disaster is Deanna Troi.
Not really. Networking, particularly telephone and internet networking is very important during a disaster. Think about it this way, if you were in, say, Katrina and somehow had cell service, it would be easy to call in your address and get help if you needed it, if you didn't have cell service or a way to communicate, the chances of being rescued go down.
I really don't see the point of this. Perhaps back in 1998 when it took a lot of effort to get Linux up and running this might have a market, today, I can buy almost any laptop/desktop and install Ubuntu on it with little to no problems. Why should I have to pay $400+ more for a computer that gets me less? For $600 I can get a Core i7 gamer rig and not a crappy "nettop". For $150? I'd buy it in a heartbeat. For $250, I might consider it. For more than the price of a Mac Mini? No way.
You also have to add in that Verizon enjoys screwing with their customers phone far more than AT&T, T-Mobile or Sprint does. Their "dumb" phones are locked down to where you can do almost nothing more than call, text and take pictures with almost no customization and they replaced Blackberry user's search engine with Bing (see http://jkontherun.com/2009/12/17/verizon-bing-make-google-go-boom-on-blackberry/ ).
Outside of cities though, AT&T has pretty good coverage. Verizon is going to get you the best cell service, but like you said, its Verizon. T-Mobile would be the company that I would reccomend, but sadly their coverage isn't too great.
Its impossible to say though what is within the bounds of the law. For example, if someone gave you the specs of a new graphics card how do you know if it was under an NDA or not? So either way, it wouldn't work.
Um, have you read the BSD license? It basically says "Do whatever the hell you want with this software just say I wrote it", I'd hardly call that restrictive and I don't see how a third party would really care. The terms of the BSD license are basically like someone publishing a public domain book, they really have little to no restrictions other than to put the name of the author on it (yes, I realize that in the public domain it doesn't matter, but most put down where its from already).
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...And chances are your lawmakers actually read the fucking bill and not just trying to push it through without any regard for what people think.
And of course, mix this in with more government involvement in health care and you have a recipe for disaster.
Hmmm. Why is it then that a nation as wealthy as ours is so often at war, and so violent internally?
Because our nation seems to think that being involved in every little thing is the only way not to be taken by surprise. For example, after Pearl Harbor the US was shaken out of isolationism, a lot of people thought that if we had been at war earlier, we could have stopped it from happening. After 9/11, many people thought we should have went and destroyed the terror cells earlier to prevent 9/11. In the cold war we had the irrational paranoia of the Domino theory thinking that the Soviet Union had enough spare cash to outfit third-world countries with arms to cause a threat to the US.
As for violent internally, that is highly subjective. How many peaceful protests have taken place in the US? How many of those would be peaceful in other countries?
Many of the reasons why the US is more violent than some other countries include A) Lower population densities B) Lack of religious condemnation of violence C) Clashes of cultures and D) prohibition of drugs.
The US has some areas that are scarcely populated, in those areas its possible to commit a violent crime without being seen, without having any witnesses and its quite possible to get away with it.
In many other countries, this is not the case, high population densities help to eliminate the ability to commit crimes without being seen.
In the US, most religions do not openly condemn violence, saying rather that there is a place for violence in some situations. Part of this is culture based, it is generally taboo to condemn the military and anti-culture to say that the revolutionary war was unnecessary.
In most cities, people of different cultures live side by side, this leads to heightened racial tensions and violence.
And drugs cause violence, not that drugs are inherently violent, but by forbidding the open sale of some drugs, it leads to people going to shady dealers to buy drugs at inflated prices, this does not sit well with some people so they get violent. Also, due to the sigma around drugs, even having a small amount can lead to people being arrested, a show of violence proves that if that person would tell the authorities about the drugs, they would be hurt. The prohibition of drugs cannot work if there is a supply of drugs, a supply of drugs is inevitable with a large border with Mexico, so naturally violence occurs.
When wealth is built by a handful by exploiting the many, when trade is unfair because of deep inequalities of power, then, no, peace will not be preserved.
Peace will be preserved by one of two ways. Either the people with a lot of wealth will maintain control giving peace, or a faction of the poor will rise up and create peace. The more wealth involved, the more often one of the two scenarios will play out.
Trade and wealth are essential for preserving peace which is needed to transition to a more free government without massive loss of life.
I say, do no localization. Most localization, especially for low budget games is -terrible- unless you actually have a studio there. The thing is A) Its a low budget game, if it doesn't sell well in some countries, chances are you lost less than if you hired a good localization expert. B) its downloadable, this means no one is going to really be offended, if its not sold at a retail store, the idiots who censor generally don't even have the console the game is on to try to find "offensive" online games, let alone try to play them. Just look at how many RPGs have been killed with sub-par localization, even if the translation is spot-on, the substitution of jokes, changes to characters and scenes all make for a lousy experience. Translate? Yes. Localize? No.
Are localizations for downloadable games -really- that important? Usually people who download games from a different region generally know what to expect in the game. I can see localization being an issue for high-budget games, but for low budget indie games, its more or less just another expense. How many of us have played J-RPGs that have been "localized" and made terrible either by censorship or by forcing us to listen to sub-par English voice actors?
No, the entire point of patents is to encourage innovation. If you patent something so basic it can't be worked around, it is too obvious. How does blocking all innovation encourage innovation? It is an oxymoron. When you patent small advancements, small improvements, they allow for innovation. Most software and many hardware patents are akin to patenting "using a spring to trap a mouse", they have no specific outlines, no implementation and only serve as a hindrance to any innovators. Now, patenting a standard mousetrap, may be worthy of patenting, because it allows for others to trap mice differently using some of the same materials, thus encouraging innovation. When someone patents something basic, no work can be done without paying extortion... I mean, patent royalties decreasing a lot of potential innovation.
The entire point of patents is to increase innovation by A) Giving documentation to people and B) Encourage multiple ways of doing something. For example, lets say I have patented a push lawn mower (the type without gas/electricity) I would get the patent for that device, then someone else could change it to do the same task but better (make a motorized push lawn mower) and then someone could take that and make it be better (make a ride on lawn mower) and then someone could take that and make it better (zero-turn radius mower), but I wouldn't get a patent for "thing that cuts grass". Effectively, what these patents are doing is patenting "cutting grass" without specifying a device and then suing everyone.
You should have to prove that at least some people didn't come to your restaurant because of it and then start from there. For example, if you can find 3 people who no longer come and will testify, you can sue from there and then increase it a reasonable number based on their testimony. If you can't find anyone, and you don't have any proof, the court case should be thrown out. Otherwise I can say anything and accuse people of libel and slander. There needs to be actual, measurable harm. When you find 3 people and no more and the people say that other people know it, you can say that you lost 10 customers, you figure that every customer comes in about once every month and orders $5 of food, you only lost $300 in half a year. So you could sue for say, $500 with deterrence. If you have no proof, then everything is hearsay and it is not justice, it is tyranny by the court.
Well, I wouldn't think that for one the RIAA would want to bring these agencies to the light of law, a lot of times they use illegal methods to take down torrents and track people. Would a physical store want to hire thieves to break into homes to re-steal the items and then sue for them?
although Plaintiffs were not required to prove their actual damages
Plaintiffs should, without a doubt, be required to prove actual damages. If they can't, their case gets thrown out. That is how it should be. I don't think it would work this way with anything physical. If someone stole a CD from a music store, that cost $10, they cost $200 in labor, and $150 in court costs, they shouldn't have to pay anything more than $500 (assuming we are inflating the price for deterrence). If I said that I shouldn't have to prove what the CD costs and say that the CD is worth $10,000, the court should throw out the case or very, very, very much reduce the value because I didn't do my homework. The same thing should happen with imaginary property.
Sure, but their revenue has dropped. In the past year they have lost billions of Euros, have only recently came out with a good competitor phone to Android, the iPhone and the Pre and really, "dumb" phones are on the way out. Think about it, 5 years ago, unless you were a corporate user, you didn't get a smartphone. Today, almost everyone wants a smartphone, and prices for the phones are sharply declining. Eventually, non-smartphones will fade away. Saying that their smartphone marketshare is going down and the rest doesn't matter is akin to saying that computer sales have declined, but hey, we're still selling typewriters.
The problem is, will Nokia keep on updating their free directions? Generally, when you have a large company that seems to be losing money and marketshare left and right they will release a lot of paid things for free in order to not have to update them or maintain them as much as a paid product.
MS has actually made their search engine better than Google (the different categories and combining them together shows this, and it's greatly improved over Live search).
Citation needed. Live search was crap, being better than crap doesn't make something great. And I've compared the search results, 80% of the time I prefer Google's results (there was this site that compared Bing/Google/Yahoo and had you pick your favorite and then told you what it was, don't know the URL at the time)
And now Bing keeps gaining marketshare faster than ever before.
And I would imagine that most of that growth is caused by people using the default IE search option which uses Bing.
It is actually a good product,
Again, Citation needed. Is there really anything that Bing does better than Google for the general user?
and actually something MS has left alone from their other marketing efforts (for example, they use flash instead of silverlight, because flash is installed on so many machines, and do not try to promote silverlight on cost of their search engine).
Isn't that how -all- Microsoft's products start? First as nice, good projects with open standards, etc. Then they release that one program that breaks the standard and suddenly that becomes the new standard and then close it off to non-MS products.
Google pulls out from China market.
Um, not exactly sure what you meant by this statement, but assuming its anti-Google, I don't really see your point. Basically Google said that they are sick of being the pawns of the Chinese government which is a -good thing-, I really don't think Microsoft would have the guts to say that.
This shows competition is good. It surely leads to innovations.
Competition is good, but corrupt competition is not. Both Microsoft and Google use software patents to discourage competition, both don't care about privacy, and both are willing to be tossed along and won't fight for their user's rights.
Ok, that makes sense. I thought it was simply referring to people torrenting Star Trek.
It just worked perfectly fine for me on my bottom-line cheap-as-free Toshiba L305-S5995 I got for $300 at best buy using the latest stable Ubuntu.
Every country has an excess of networking engineers, and the last thing people need during a disaster is Deanna Troi.
Not really. Networking, particularly telephone and internet networking is very important during a disaster. Think about it this way, if you were in, say, Katrina and somehow had cell service, it would be easy to call in your address and get help if you needed it, if you didn't have cell service or a way to communicate, the chances of being rescued go down.
http://www.walmart.com/catalog/product.do?product_id=13031301#ProductDetail Not really more powerful, but for $300 less, you could buy 2 or upgrade the RAM/HDD/etc
http://www.walmart.com/catalog/product.do?product_id=13023166
I really don't see the point of this. Perhaps back in 1998 when it took a lot of effort to get Linux up and running this might have a market, today, I can buy almost any laptop/desktop and install Ubuntu on it with little to no problems. Why should I have to pay $400+ more for a computer that gets me less? For $600 I can get a Core i7 gamer rig and not a crappy "nettop". For $150? I'd buy it in a heartbeat. For $250, I might consider it. For more than the price of a Mac Mini? No way.
You also have to add in that Verizon enjoys screwing with their customers phone far more than AT&T, T-Mobile or Sprint does. Their "dumb" phones are locked down to where you can do almost nothing more than call, text and take pictures with almost no customization and they replaced Blackberry user's search engine with Bing (see http://jkontherun.com/2009/12/17/verizon-bing-make-google-go-boom-on-blackberry/ ).
Outside of cities though, AT&T has pretty good coverage. Verizon is going to get you the best cell service, but like you said, its Verizon. T-Mobile would be the company that I would reccomend, but sadly their coverage isn't too great.
Its impossible to say though what is within the bounds of the law. For example, if someone gave you the specs of a new graphics card how do you know if it was under an NDA or not? So either way, it wouldn't work.
This study doesn't take into account that people aren't going to be searching the background, but instead look for threats in the foreground.
The 10 patents it accuses Apple of violating are related to making phones able to run on GSM, 3G, and Wi-Fi networks
which sounds like a trivial thing to patent to begin with. How again are patents really contributing to the general good?
Um, have you read the BSD license? It basically says "Do whatever the hell you want with this software just say I wrote it", I'd hardly call that restrictive and I don't see how a third party would really care. The terms of the BSD license are basically like someone publishing a public domain book, they really have little to no restrictions other than to put the name of the author on it (yes, I realize that in the public domain it doesn't matter, but most put down where its from already).