Let me clarify with blunter language. I called Europeans wusses who jump at their own shadow, and Americans schizophrenic nut jobs.
Europeans are wusses
don't think this needs much clarification. I can just run down the laundry list of things that Europe has failed to do since the Cold War ended. Top on the list would be their utter failure to intervene in Kosovo until the American strong armed NATO into doing something and the UN meekly stamped on approval AFTER the US and Britain were busy pounding the piss out of the Serbs. The pathetic response from Lebanon's pleading for Europeans to send a few peacekeeper to just watch the border (no one was even asking them to fight) that finally got filled in a half-assed way only after the Italians (of all people) shamed the French into sending more than a couple of squads.
Finally, you have the sad state of Afghanistan. This is a war that pretty much everyone agrees was an a-okay thing. It was clear, cut, and dry. Osama attacks one NATO member (US), Taliban refuses to hand him over, and latter Osama hits two more NATO members (Spain and Britain) with serious but thwarted plots in at least a fourth (Germany). What does NATO do? While the US is fighting TWO wars at once, European NATO members do everything humanly possible to avoid sending troops. When they do they opt for glorified sheep guarding in the safest possible parts of Afghanistan while Americans and the occasional Brit wad in neck deep in blood while fighting an even bloodier war a couple countries over at the same frigging time.
Conclusion? Europe's thirst for blood and human sacrifice is meek, even when there is a damn good reason for it. If they can't suffer the thought of a handful of professional warriors fighting and possibly dying, I have a hard time swallowing that they will opt for a few pencil necked scientist (which for the record I proudly am) getting killed for some sweet scientific data.
Americans are psychotic
Americans clearly have a taste for blood and human sacrifice. Granted, they really don't even touch the scale that they did in World War II and would have their ass kicked for being total whining pansies by their 1940's era selves, but they sure do look manly next to Europeans at times when it comes to letting blood. The Americans are not above cleaning up Europe's mess (Kosovo) with a sword when the president needs a good distraction from bad personal news (Monica). Ahh, but here comes the rub. If the Americans were just shedding a little blood (including their own) they would be planting the red, white, and blue on all sorts of heavenly objects (cash permitting, but they do have a pretty hefty amount of cash) in the name proving the size of their penis as they did in the Cold War days.
For better or for worse though, the US has developed a split personality. One one hand you have a raving mad blood thirsty killer itching to chop someone in two for looking at them funny, and on the other hand they have developed the personality of a hypochondriac Jewish mother. These two identities live totally separate lives but exist in the same person.
The psychotic killer The blood thirsty killer came flying out in a murderous rage after 9/11 looking to basically kick the shit out of anyone who might of been responsible for a mild pin prick to the hand. This killers first response was to chop his own hand off in rage at the attack (Homeland security bans clothing on all airplanes, institutes mandatory anal cavity searches for 90 year old grandmothers, and sneaks into your sons room at night to read his diary while watching your daughter undress). After realizing that it had chopped its own hand off, the US really flew off the handled promptly went into a frenzy against the guilt party (Afghanistan). Still kind of pissed, the US continued to slice off bits of its own arm (which only served the piss the US off even more) and then whacked someone that looked kind of like that Afganistan dude if you squinted
Cuil's claim to fame is that it indexes more pages than Google, not that it will give you more hits (though you would think that it would). That said, you are right in that it doesn't matter. So what if it is indexing 3x more pages. Are those pages worth indexing? I am really skeptical that a page that Google doesn't index for whatever reason is the page I am after when I search something.
There are only two things that matter when it comes to what happens after you hit the search button, the interface and the results in the first 1-5 pages. The rest is junk. Telling me that I got three trillion hits is like my computer reporting that it took seven billion calculations to open a program. Great. That is a fun fact, but I don't give a shit.
If you want to beat Google, you need something new. Natural language searches, search engines that act as agents continuously looking for things for you, whatever. Doing what Google does but supposedly slightly better just isn't enough. Google already does it good enough for most people. If you want to beat Google, you need to do something innovative that Google doesn't do... and then rest the temptation to not take the dump truck of money they offer you should they recognize you as competition worthy of being bought out.
There are two very large problems with a manned Mars mission.
1) It cost a shit ton of money. Don't give me "but it just costs X days of Iraq war!!!" crap. That might be true, but Americans will open up their pocket books for "making the world a safer place". They lynch presidents that spend a few trillion on science experiments. Sure, we did it with Apollo, but that fell into the "making the world a safer place... by kick the ass of the communist in a metaphorical sense". If it Apollo had been pure science, it would have never of flown. Because Apollo was about one upping the commies, we were okay with it.
2) It is a suicide mission. Sure, there are plenty of people that would sign up for a suicide mission if it meant they got to stick their boot print on Mars first. That doesn't change the fact that it would never fly. Americans, and even more extreme, Europeans, are extraordinarily risk adverse to the point of absurdity. Pools kill thousands of kids and no one really cars. Unhealthy food kills an absurd number of Americans (millions) and we just shrug it off. Toss an airplane into a building and kill a couple thousand and all of a sudden it is OMG OMG LETS CHANGE SOCIETY AND TOSS OUT CIVIL LIBERTIES TO MAKE SURE THAT THIS MINOR AMOUNT OF DEATH NEVER HAPPENS AGAIN!!!11!!! KILL ALL THE ARABS!!!! NEVER AGAIN!!!1!!!! Europeans are even sillier these days where NATO and UN have to beg plead and extort to get a handful of European soldiers to come within a few hundred miles of a place where they might possibly get shot at. NASA blows up a shuttle filled with adrenaline junkies every quarter of a century, and now we can't fly the foolish things if a bird happens to fly by and drop a shit on one before it takes off.
Our (western) priorities are so far out of whack and screwed up that this will never happen. The monetary argument is at least logical and something I can get behind. The utter terror at letting someone willingly sacrifice themselves doing something they want to do is a sign that our lives are way the hell too comfy.
Space exploration is dead to humans until someone finds a cheap way for individuals to get into space, governments to damned. The second you can head west, hit the California coast, and go up a few thousand miles, you will have the US population drop by 10% as the crazy pioneer genes that are still floating around from the crazy immigrants that pushed into the US over the past few hundred years reassert themselves and people throw themselves into space.
Until that day, the pragmatic and rational folks are going to tell you to fuck off once they see the price tag, and the people begging for a nanny state will break down into tears cry about the inhumanity of it all to let a person willing sacrifice themselves.
I agree that my example is an extreme, but these EULAs where you hit an "I agree!" button have a very shaky legal history. In general, no one has ever proved one way or the other that they are legal in a court of law. At best, people have challenged terms within EULAs with very mixed results.
EULAs are on shaky legal grounding in it of themselves. Now, imagine that Apple goes after this company. What do they go after them for? Conspiracy to help someone violate a EULA that no one has yet agreed to? You are going from a sketchy gray area and building an even sketchier legal case on top of it. I wouldn't put it past Apple to try, but they are entering a legal black hole. If they jump into it, it isn't because they have a solid case and strong legal backing, it is because they have a shit ton of money and hope to bury the company in question with high priced lawyers.
No they are not the same, but they compete for roughly the same thing: ears in the car. Like I said, it would be one thing if satellite radio had a huge market penetration. It doesn't. It is relatively rare, unprofitable, and in general getting trashed by the alternatives. So, if we have a small and unpopular service getting ruined by the competition, why exactly would you seek to keep companies from merging in a desperate attempt to stay afloat?
They know, and everyone agrees, that their niche is so small that two companies can't survive it. They have already thrown up their hands in surrender and now want to cooperate in an attempt to form some entity that can carry on and compete with the alternatives that are trashing them. By joining the two companies they can cobble together a better product, slash some redundant infrastructure, and hopefully make something that is profitable.
The point of monopoly rules isn't to see how many companies you can sink while government regulators laugh with malevolent glee. The point is to keep the consumer from getting the shaft when a single player dominates a large market. The point of monopoly regulations is to make it such that monopolies can't charge massively outrageous prices while cutting off all the viable alternatives. Satellite radio isn't dominating any market, and consumers are not getting the shafted. In fact, Satellite radio is charging consumers LESS than it costs to run their operation because they are so desperate to get a few more ears and break into a market utterly dominated by other alternatives.
The government is rightfully stepping out of the way. If the two companies merge and satellite radio still is unprofitable, the company will sink and that will be the end. If they don't merge, one of the companies will sink, and you will still be left with just a single player in the market. Maybe though, through the action of the government getting out of the way and not regulating this dying market to death, they can cobble together a new company that at least has the capacity to compete with the alternatives that are currently kicking their ass.
If 10 years from now everyone ones a satellite radio and terrestrial radio is getting pwned, maybe it will be time to look at how to kill the monopoly and open it up for competition. Until then, absolutely nothing is served by keeping these two companies apart. Consumer will get the shaft if one of the companies dies a painful bankrupt death, and it is pretty clear that competition is so harsh right now that merging into a single company is very unlikely to result in anything bad for current consumers. Other than some twisted malevolent glee at watching already struggling companies get regulated to death, there is no reason to NOT let them merge.
If they are not installing the software, they are not violating any laws. The only "law" that you would have to break to make a Mac clone would be violating the EULA that you hit "I agree" to when you install the OS. The equipment manufacture never hits the "I agree" button in this case. The only people violating the "law" would be the consumer that installs the OS.
Further, you need to realize that EULA's are on extraordinarily sketchy legal terms. You can slap into an EULA that by hitting "I agree" you agree to transfer all of your assets to me, but that sure as hell won't fly in court. No, what they are doing is perfectly legal and reminiscent of IBM clones that poured onto the market back in ye oldin' days despite attempts to prevent it.
Apple will whine and moan about the loss of total control over their products, but short of hunting down every person who bought one of these and suing them (though, to be honest I really wouldn't put that past them) and trying to argue that they can claim your soul with a EULA in court, I think they are pretty much SOL.
I think that you could make a pretty solid argument that a single cable operator would be a approaching a monopoly in its area. The reason why this would be is that cable has extremely high infiltration (at least in the US). It is almost viewed as "needed" with minimal alternatives That said, there are many spots in the US where there really only is one cable company. In my area, I have two to pick from. I have chosen to use neither exactly because I think it is a rip off. My world hasn't ended.
In the case of Sirius/XM they own a very small hunk of the market. It would be one thing if nearly every single person had a satellite receiver in their car, like the way nearly everyone has a cable box, and the companies wanted to merge. That simply isn't the case. Satellite radio has a small penetration to the market, both companies are hemorrhaging money as they get kicked around by the competition, and pretty much everyone agrees that one of the companies will go bankrupt in the next couple of years unless action is taken.
There will be one satellite radio provider no matter what is done. Satellite radio is facing an end game. The companies are on the verge of collapse, and once one collapses they are going to go to the FCC anyways to get a thumbs up to try and sweep up the pieces. They are just preempting the inevitable.
I wouldn't be against reexamining the issue if satellite one day took up a huge amount of the market share... but they aren't. They are small boats in a big sea trying desperately to stay afloat. They make no profit and have a small customer base. There is no monopoly here, just two companies looking to cooperate instead of dragging each other down into bankruptcy.
You miss the point entirely. Honda has a monopoly on Honda Civics. Only Honda is allowed to make a Civic by law. Despite this, we don't consider Honda a monopoly, simply because there are lots of other cars by other companies that we consider "civic like" such that you can easily find an alternative. If Honda was to double the price of a Civic tomorrow, you would just by a different car and feel only mildly annoyed.
On the other hand, if Honda was the only one allowed to build cars in general, we would call them a monopoly. Many people need a car and have no real alternative to a car. Sure, airplanes, trains, and buses compete with cars, but they compete poorly in many instances. Only a car is going to drive you 25 miles through a New England winter from one small town to another.
The Sirius and XM merger is not a big deal for two reasons.
1) There are lots of alternatives. If the price of cars doubled, many people would simply shell out double the cash to get one. If the price of XM/Sirius doubles without a quality improvement that people find fair, they will simply stop using the service. Free AM/FM radio are direct competitors with satellite radio. MP3 players are also direct competition for satellite radio. I can't substitute riding the bus for buy a car in many instances, but it is pretty trivial to substitute an iPod for satellite radio.
2) There is going to be only one satellite company, like it or not. Neither Sirius or XM are profitable. One of them WILL go bankrupt in the next couple of years. Once that happens you will be left with... one satellite radio station. They are begging to be allowed to merge because they want the destruction of the companies to be productive, rather then have one scattered to the wind while the other scrambles to pick up the pieces.
Like it or not, there will be only one satellite radio station. The only question is if it is going to happen in a couple of years when one finally throws in the towel, or because they merged and combined programing in an attempt to better compete with AM/FM and MP3 players.
Yeah? And Ford has a monopoly on cars made by Ford. w00t. Someone call the lawyers.
All companies are monopolies if you narrow the 'slice' of what you are looking at down far enough. You need to look at the big picture though. Sure, Sirius and XM have a monopoly on satellite radio, but satellite radio sure as hell doesn't have a monopoly on ears. I happily listen to an MP3 player or free radio on my way into work without feeling the slightest pressure to go dump however much it costs for bad satellite radio.
Monopolies only work when there are no or few other viable option. If there is a simple substitution, the monopoly is broken, even if it isn't exactly the same product. It is like if Apple all of a sudden started to charge even higher prices for that silly little MP3 players. You couldn't cry foul over their "monopoly" on iPods. Sure, iPods might not be available at a reasonable price, but a smart person would just pick up another MP3 player that is cheaper.
The reason why they two are being allowed to merge is because one is going to tank if they don't merge. One is going to tank because satellite radio is getting murdered by the competition. If one is going to go bust, it is better to let them do it in a less destructive manner. It would be one thing if satellite radio was dominating and people were clawing at each other to break into the market. That isn't the case though, satellite radio is just barely hanging on. Letting the two companies merge is far more likely to result in quality improvements and price drops as they consolidate their infrastructure and struggle to compete in the less than profitable radio market.
I am not defending the head of the EPA. Their enforcement in particular (or lack there of) has been crap. Their opposition to California regulating its own emissions was also utterly absurd. That said, some times even idiots and ass holes get something right.
You have to stretch the wording of the clean air act more than a little to try and apply it to global warming. The truth is that it is a different problem. If I dump a toxin into the environment, the impact is relatively clear and the economic balance is generally pretty easy. You find a PPM level that is safe, declare that the level, and then check to make sure everyone is doing it.
Global warming is a different beast. What is a "safe" level of global warming? Forget for a moment that our prediction models are, crude, inaccurate, contradictory, and trying to model an impossibly complex system. Let's say that we could perfectly predict the effects of more or less carbon effectively. Even if we could do this we would still be left with a question of trade offs. CO2 in the quantities we are talking about is not toxic. The damage that excess level of CO2 does is global economic and ecological damage. In tackling global warming you are trading one type of economic pain for another. You are trading the economic pain of taking the steps it takes to adjust to a warmer world to the economic pain of cutting carbon emissions. The EPA doesn't know where to draw the line. This is WAY out of the realm of the EPA.
Further, consider for a moment that this is a global problem. The EPA doesn't have a global reach. The EPA, at best, can tell companies in the US not to dump CO2 into the atmosphere. The EPA can't prevent companies from moving to say China or Mexico and dumping the CO2 there. It really takes an act of congress in order to find solution. The EPA will certainly have its part to play in whatever the solution is, but it will be just one part of many. Congress is actually going to have to get off their collective ass, get their hands dirty, and provide clear direction. They are going to have to decide the level of pain that the American people are going to endure. They are going to have to provide compensation/retraining/whatever for the people that feel the pain the worst. They are going to need to work with corporate law in order to prevent companies from simply leaving and dumping the CO2 in China. They are going to have to work with international organizations because CO2 is a global problem that doesn't respect country boundaries.
There is a lot of work to be done, and congress is the one that is going to have to do it. The head of the EPA might be a dick, but he is right in throwing up his hands and abjecting himself of responsibility while congress fails to take a little leadership. This is a problem that goes well beyond the EPA. This is a global problem for our elected congress to deal with. Think they are doing a shitty job? I suggest letting them know either through the mailbox or the ballot box.
Personally, I think that the EPA was right to claim that they can't regulate carbon emissions. The reasoning they stated was absolutely and 100% valid. Regulation of carbon emissions (and other heat trapping gases) is a big deal. You are talking about going from open seasons to something much more restrictive. The vast majority of companies don't even know how much they are dumping out because it is currently unregulated. The EPA regulating carbon emissions would be a very very big deal. It would have some very dramatic effects upon the price and have an effect upon the economy.
I am not against regulating such emissions, but it isn't up to a government bureaucrat to make such a significant decision. This truly is the role of elected officials. Congress needs to get up off their collective asses and decide what the law of the land should be in terms of green house gas emissions. Congress needs to decide what the balance between the economy and the environment is, and they need to be held responsible if they screw it up. The head of the EPA is absolutely correct in throwing up his hands and saying that this is for congress to sort out, not him.
The "fix it later" mentality is the death of an MMORPG. Pirates of the Burning Sea is a great example of this. PotBS is one of the more unique games in existence. Combat is actually challenging and fun. It has the potential for one of the most kick ass economies in MMORPG history. The PvP potential is so good you can almost taste it. What happened?
They blew it.
The economy was launched with features that border between too stupid to contemplate and utterly missing (no sell orders, dumb "bidding" system, etc). Game balance was initially horribly out of whack (better these days). PvP quickly and very predictably devolved to the point where there is really one one type of regular PvP (6 level 50 vs 6 level 50).
The game has so much potential, it just isn't finished. It kills me to see games with so much potential be horrible wastes.
If there is any consolation in all of this, I never really thought that Warhammer had any potential. Other than it being the awesome original setting of the Warcraft universe without the Disney glossing that Blizzard gave it, it always sounded to me like Warhammer was just rehashing traditional EQ/WoW style game play and tossing in some revamped and uninteresting Dark Age of Camelot style RvR.
Personally, I think Warhammer online is DOA. My impression of Warhammer is that it is just basically WoW with some turning and a few PvP game mechanic differences. In other words, it was a copy and paste from WoW that they tried to tune up a little. This is wonderfully ironic, because the entire World of Warcraft setting was basically stolen verbatim from Warhammer (and Starcraft a rip off of Warhammer 40K).
Warhammer had a real potential to strike out a new path and reclaim the setting that they once owned. Instead, they have fumbled along in WoWs foot steps. Whatever minor improvements they make are offset by the fact that WoW has a few years lead a few million people already bought in. No one is going to jump ship for minor improvements. Warhammer could have challenged the entire MMORPG gameplay style. Instead, they are going to plod along in the footsteps of WoW and get crushed.
The only consolation is that at least they are only making a bad Warhammer MMORPG instead of a Warhammer 40K MMORPG. The Warhammer universe, and especially the 40k universe are made for dominating the more Disneyfied Blizzard settings, they just need to get their shit together and offer game play worth playing.
If your goal is to feel good about yourself, you are doing the right thing and probably making some small difference in the world. Personal sacrifice certainly contributes to the nobility of charity. Giving up half your savings is certainly a greater act of sacrifice altuism than a rich man giving up 1%, irregardless if that 1% is more than your entire savings.
That said, if your goal is to cure AIDS and hunger in Africa, a few billion dollars that regenerates itself continuously through financial investment allowing for a continuous supply of cash is probably more effective. Good feelings for rich men aside, I imagine that the scientist and aid workers don't care if the money came as some great act of noble sacrifice or compound interest so long as they have the money in hand to make a difference and continue their work.
Re:An open letter to all the paranoid freaks...
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TrueCrypt 6.0 Released
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I think you miss the point of things like multiple passwords with volumes hidden in volumes, and it doesn't involve being able to resist torture. Resisting an audit, legal threat, or annoying security agent is a more likely scenario.
I would be willing to bet that a non-trivial number of people who something illegal on their computer from pirated versions of software, "hacking tools", pirated entertainment, pr0n illegal in one country or another, etc. The ability to effectively resist being compelled (with legal threats, not hot irons) to prove you have it is a valuable thing.
Even something as simple as not wanting to show a border agent your pr0n collection or hiding sensitive data (corporate, personal, embarrassing foot fetish videos) is enough reason to have two passwords. Instead of putting up a stink about how it is unfair or you can't give up customer information, you shrug, give them a password to a clean drive, and even if they were paranoid enough to clone the entire thing they get nothing but a clean system with data hidden in noise that the NSA would struggle to decrypt. Eh, you could fight it out with the border agent, but I personally would rather smile, comply, and feel secure in knowing my companies data and pr0n of my girlfriend is still sitting snuggling amongst some random noise unknown to the border agent.
If you want to venture off into the slightly more paranoid realm, realize that you might not be encrypting for today. You might be encrypting to defend against an entity (government, corporate, UFOs, whatever) in the future. Forget applying laws retroactively, just imagine over the course of your life, how many computer laws have you broken. If someone was to go back and nail you for each and every single one, how many years in jail and millions of dollars would you be on the hook for? What laws have you violated that are legal in one places and illegal in another? A 16 year old kid who has watched two girls and one cup, has a 2 gig MP3 collection, a foot fetish pr0n collection, and a pirated version of Half Life is probably technically on the hook somewhere for a stoning and a 2 billion dollar fine.
There are good solid paranoid (OMG the black helicopters) and non-paranoid (I really don't want this border agent to see client information and my wife's nude pictures) reasons to go for crypto. Personally, I think that if you are crossing national borders and have anything on your computer you wouldn't feel happy showing to any client or any security agent of any nation you travel to, you are being a little foolish.
Your proposal is also not going to happen. So lets come back to reality, eh? What TrueCrypt offers is a way to ensure that no one can ever be sure you have given up "all" of your passwords. They can't even tell how many you have. You could have one or you could have a dozen. Maybe you might crack under torture, but under a legal threat (a little more plausible for most people than being tortured to reveal their foot fetish pr0n or MP3 collection) you are pretty safe.
An authority might be able to make a successful argument that because you have crypto, you must be hiding something and thus MUST give up your password. Fair enough, you give up your password and reveal your financial records. They authorities can then make the slightly less concrete argument that you MUST be hiding something else, because if that was what you were REALLY hiding, you would have given a false password that leads to something other than the thing you really want to hide. Again, you can shrug and offer up the password to your foot fetish collection.
At this point, their arguments break down. You can make a fair argument you must be hiding something. You can make a flimsier argument that you must be hiding the thing that you are hiding with a false thing that you are hiding. Beyond that, you could have any number of fake passwords. A dozen passwords is just as plausible as three. In the end, there is no way to prove that you downloaded a 10 second MP3 clip from Madonna that the RIAA storm troopers swear you have (well... at least your hard drive won't give you away).
So yes, crypto fall all might be nice, but baring that piece of fantasy, crypto for me is good enough.
I am pretty damn sure that screaming something about Allah and then trying to take over a plan is going to be a good solid way to be torn limb from limb for a couple of decades. The only way I could possibly conceive of hijacking a plan in the US now would be actually be the plane's pilot from the beginning. Even if you could overcome the passengers by having enough men armed with guns to kill the majority of able bodied people before they tear you limb from limb, that still won't save you from the fact that US pilots are now taught to do very unpleasant things if some asshole tries to break into the reinforced doors or starts shooting a gun (the only conceivable way of subduing an airplane full of people).
Even if you had half a dozen men with guns they slipped by security, the pilot is going to have you sitting on the ceiling the second he hears a gun go off. If he wants to be a real dick, he can also see how long you can go without oxygen by depressurizing the airplane, all the while tossing you from one end of the airplane to the other.
Can planes be blown up? Sure. Can they be used as cruise missiles? Sure, but it isn't going to happen on a commercial airliner any time soon. If it happens again, it will be because someone smuggled themselves aboard a FedEx plane and shot the pilots before they knew what was happening.
I think you give people far too much credit for being rational. It is far less than suddenly realizing that they are not safe. It would be one thing if 9/11 proved that we are not safe.
Freaking your shit out when Sputnik flew over was rational. It meant that a nation you really should be afraid of can drop nukes on your head that really and truly do have a very solid chance of leaving you dead. Your chances of dying in a nuclear war are far from trivial.
9/11 was no such event. If you own a pool, your children stand a radically higher chance of dying by drowning than by terrorism. Your boring daily commute is so much more dangerous than terrorism that they don't hit on the same scale. Put terrorism up against a heart disease or cancer, and you are taking a orders of magnitude more terror. Despite this, I bet we have dumped more government funding into fighting "terrorism" than cancer. I would bet my heathen soul that we spend piss loads more on "terrorism" than pool safety.
The only abnormal damage done during 9/11 was self inflicted. The loss of lives, while sad and regrettable didn't even cause a blip in US death rates for that year. The cost in physical property was pocket change next a mild hurricane. The economic damage and the damage to civil liberties was entirely self inflicted. If people had shrugged off 9/11 and said, "Hrm, that sucks, lets reinforce planes doors in the future and end our policy of passengers not attacking hijackers", 9/11 would have been a non-event that result in no damage to the US economy, no massive increase in government spending, and no erosion of civil liberties.
Terrorist attacks don't do any real damage. A terrorist attack is a pin prick on a giant, especially for the US which is a particularly large giant in the world. They don't even compare to such horrors as pools and mild hurricanes. What hurts about a terrorist attack is not the attack, it is when we chop our own hand off in response to a pin prick on the finger.
It isn't an end-run around the Constitution. It is a touch of common sense and nothing else. Yes, people have a right to determine how people use their services. MySpace can kick off pedophiles, Flickr can dump whatever it is they find offensive, and I can delete Viagra ads from my blog's comment section without violating the 1st.
The Internet of all places is where private censorship actually makes the most sense. It is hard and costly to avoid physical areas that don't conform to what you think is proper expression (be that free or restricted). What makes the Internet so wonderful is that you can easily bypass the areas that you find distasteful.
It takes no effort to avoid a right wing religious website that heavily censors their forms in a manner I find repulsive. It takes no effort to drop into a place like Slashdot that offers mild optional self mild self censoring options (karma and user ratings).
The Internet is better than a democracy in that it isn't majority rules, it is YOU rule. You pick the rules you want to live by. Feeling a little anarchist? Merrily only log into place that support your style. Feel like your eyes will bleed if you see a naughty word? Head on over to something safe and sanitized. Want to go some places where BDSM is the ONLY allowable topic of discussion and distracting things like politics are not allowed? I bet my soul that there is a place on the Internet for you. If you really can't find a place that fits you (you probably are not trying), you can make your own with a very small barrier to entry.
The Internet offers up something better than democracy. I want "free speech" on the Internet only in so far that nothing is made illegal by law. If Disney wants to ban sex stories on their forums, more power to them, so long as it is the website owners making the decision and not the government.
So long as the "gates" of the Internet remain open and website operators are given free reign over their tiny little domain of the Internet, I am happy. So long as Time Warner or the government can't hose my packets without my consent because they think I am about to see something offensive, great. If Time Warner wants to police their own personal website like the customer hating bastards they are, more power to them.
The "gates" to the Internet are what need to be protected. Preventing carriers and the government from deciding where you are allowed to go and deciding what packets are can be sent or delayed is where the fight is. Flickr though? Let Flickr set the rules for Flickr. Don't like their rules? I bet you can find another photo sharing website. Don't like that your comment got deleted off a blog? Find another one. Offended that Slashdot doesn't delete offensive posts? Brows at a different level or find a new website. So long as the gates remain open, the Internet is something better than democracy.
The point of a charity investing a hunk of its money is so that it can exist beyond its initial contributions. If the charity just blows all of its money, its life will last as long as people contribute to it and die the day that stops. On the other hand, if you dump a shit-ton of money into it, have that money start making a healthy interest rate, and just spend the interest, the charity continues on basically forever with its supply of cash always building, or at least remaining the same.
That is my point. In the US you wouldn't call them "far right". Anyone in the far right of the US who declared himself a socialist (nationalist or not) would be laughed at. In Europe, "far right" corresponds more to the party being a nationalist party, irregardless of whatever other crazy policies they advocate. In the US, "right" implies economic liberalism and social conservatism. Nationalism isn't apart of the equation.
In simpler terms, in Europe, "far right" basically boils down xenophobic fascist. In the US it means bible wielding free marketers. You might not like either group, but they are dramatically different from each other. Hence my original point, don't try and toss American and European parties on the same bland right/left scale, as they mean entirely different things.
I'll admit to some level of ignorance about the UK's far right, but I can safely say that France, Austria, Germany, and Italy's far right couldn't be put in the same room as the American right without fists being raised. What defines a lot of the European right is a type of nationalism that doesn't get much play in the US. That isn't to say that the US right doesn't have their nationalist or anti-immigration supporters, just that their voices are much more quieted, and far out of the mainstream.
European ultra-right parties tend to have their core centered around paranoia about immigration that is pretty off the charts on the US political scale. A couple of border senators in the US might try and make a stink over illegal immigration, but in the grand scheme of things it is a small issue. The most extreme positions on immigration advocate better border controls. No one is talking about restricting the already fairly liberal influx of legal immigrants because very few seem them as a problem. The US has a pretty liberal immigration policy and no one is trying to make the paths towards legal immigration any harder.
Many ultra-right European parties on the other hand center entirely around immigration policy with other âoeright wingâ policies being tossed in as after thoughts. They tend to have a flat out anti-immigrant stance, and not just an anti-illegal immigration stance. In fact some parties that are âoeultra rightâ would be view as some crazy concoction of nationalistic socialist in the US, not âoeright-wingâ in the American sense.
My point is that the US and the EU have pretty radically different political landscapes. Trying to compare them on a left/right scale is just going to lead to confusion unless you have a pretty solid grasp of political climate of the nations in question. The worries and concerns that get play in the US can be pretty radically different from say Italy, and as a result you have an entirely different definition of âoeleftâ and âoerightâ in these nations that donâ(TM)t necessarily line up with each other.
It is all about context. When we say left and right on a US centric site (and yes, Slashdot has a disproportionate number of America readers), they are talking about the American system of politics. It is true that it is a large mistake to think that the American system has ANYTHING to do rest of the world's "left" and "right", but that doesn't mean that it isn't internally consistent.
The entire left/right scale is a tad silly simply because it stuffs a whole bunch of utterly unrelated ideals into a binary system. You can have a free market capitalist who believes in gay marriage, abortions, and a lack of sex and drug regulation. You can also have someone who advocates socialist economics want to outlaw those very same things.
Tossing American parties on a European left/right scale is pointless. The American right is absolutely nothing like the European right or ultra-right. The European ultra-right would likely be quickly slapped with a label of fascist or crazy ass ultra nationalist label in the US. The American right doesn't have the ultra-nationalistic tendencies that the European far right has. Le Penn and other such ultra-nationalist would get the cold shoulder in the US for their frantic obsession over immigration. Other European ultra-right parties would get the cold shoulder for being viewed as being far to socialistic in terms of economic issues.
My point? You are better off trying to understand parties, both in the US and Europe, as they are, not trying to slap them on a left-right scale. American and European parties don't belong on the same binary scale together. What makes Republican's "ultra right" in European eyes is that they are not left and not that they have any commonality to European ultra right parties.
If you desperately want to plot them on the same scale, I would suggest looking at the libertarians favorite scale, the two axis "social liberty" and "economic liberty" scale. The American right will appear in the right corner, the American left and European right in the center, the European left on the left, and the European ultra-right on the bottom.
The entire article was fluff. Those might have been 10 examples of polluted cities, but they were certainly not the top 10. Not that the US and the EU don't have their share of polluted cities, but I am pretty sure not a single one of them even comes close to hitting the top 100 list. Travel a little in "developing" Asia and you will quickly realize that as a westerner, you have never even begun to contemplate how bad pollution can get.
I am not saying that west should be complacent about the environment, just realize that you have it REALLY good compared to some other places in the world. There are places in the world that would make you thankful to suck on the tailpipes of cars stuck in an LA traffic jam.
They WILL pass on the cost. That is the entire point. The point is to make it so that the environmental cost is tossed into the cost of the product. Companies that compete on price won't go looking for "low carbon" methods. They will just go for the cheapest method. If two companies build a part, and one has a lower cost because it pays less in carbon emissions, buyers (be they corporations or consumers) will opt for the cheaper of the two. They "pick" the low carbon part simply because it is cheaper.
The advantage of a cap and trade system is that it tries to make us "use" our pollution in the most efficient manner possible.
Think of it this way. Imagine if all companies have a cap on how much pollution they can toss up. If I am running a business and I fall under the cap, I have no good reason to try reduce my output. Under a cap and trade system, any reduction in my output results in lower costs. Further, because markets set the price of carbon, the people who emit the pollution are in theory the ones that can get the most benefit from it.
I am not saying that a cap and trade system is perfect. Enforcement and "offset" raise serious questions. That said, the idea, in theory, is very sound. It is easily the best way to set an acceptable limit on pollution and ensure that the people who do the polluting pay the price and put that pollution to the best possible use. The real challenge is implementing such a system well.
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Let me clarify with blunter language. I called Europeans wusses who jump at their own shadow, and Americans schizophrenic nut jobs.
Europeans are wusses
don't think this needs much clarification. I can just run down the laundry list of things that Europe has failed to do since the Cold War ended. Top on the list would be their utter failure to intervene in Kosovo until the American strong armed NATO into doing something and the UN meekly stamped on approval AFTER the US and Britain were busy pounding the piss out of the Serbs. The pathetic response from Lebanon's pleading for Europeans to send a few peacekeeper to just watch the border (no one was even asking them to fight) that finally got filled in a half-assed way only after the Italians (of all people) shamed the French into sending more than a couple of squads.
Finally, you have the sad state of Afghanistan. This is a war that pretty much everyone agrees was an a-okay thing. It was clear, cut, and dry. Osama attacks one NATO member (US), Taliban refuses to hand him over, and latter Osama hits two more NATO members (Spain and Britain) with serious but thwarted plots in at least a fourth (Germany). What does NATO do? While the US is fighting TWO wars at once, European NATO members do everything humanly possible to avoid sending troops. When they do they opt for glorified sheep guarding in the safest possible parts of Afghanistan while Americans and the occasional Brit wad in neck deep in blood while fighting an even bloodier war a couple countries over at the same frigging time.
Conclusion? Europe's thirst for blood and human sacrifice is meek, even when there is a damn good reason for it. If they can't suffer the thought of a handful of professional warriors fighting and possibly dying, I have a hard time swallowing that they will opt for a few pencil necked scientist (which for the record I proudly am) getting killed for some sweet scientific data.
Americans are psychotic
Americans clearly have a taste for blood and human sacrifice. Granted, they really don't even touch the scale that they did in World War II and would have their ass kicked for being total whining pansies by their 1940's era selves, but they sure do look manly next to Europeans at times when it comes to letting blood. The Americans are not above cleaning up Europe's mess (Kosovo) with a sword when the president needs a good distraction from bad personal news (Monica). Ahh, but here comes the rub. If the Americans were just shedding a little blood (including their own) they would be planting the red, white, and blue on all sorts of heavenly objects (cash permitting, but they do have a pretty hefty amount of cash) in the name proving the size of their penis as they did in the Cold War days.
For better or for worse though, the US has developed a split personality. One one hand you have a raving mad blood thirsty killer itching to chop someone in two for looking at them funny, and on the other hand they have developed the personality of a hypochondriac Jewish mother. These two identities live totally separate lives but exist in the same person.
The psychotic killer
The blood thirsty killer came flying out in a murderous rage after 9/11 looking to basically kick the shit out of anyone who might of been responsible for a mild pin prick to the hand. This killers first response was to chop his own hand off in rage at the attack (Homeland security bans clothing on all airplanes, institutes mandatory anal cavity searches for 90 year old grandmothers, and sneaks into your sons room at night to read his diary while watching your daughter undress). After realizing that it had chopped its own hand off, the US really flew off the handled promptly went into a frenzy against the guilt party (Afghanistan). Still kind of pissed, the US continued to slice off bits of its own arm (which only served the piss the US off even more) and then whacked someone that looked kind of like that Afganistan dude if you squinted
Cuil's claim to fame is that it indexes more pages than Google, not that it will give you more hits (though you would think that it would). That said, you are right in that it doesn't matter. So what if it is indexing 3x more pages. Are those pages worth indexing? I am really skeptical that a page that Google doesn't index for whatever reason is the page I am after when I search something.
There are only two things that matter when it comes to what happens after you hit the search button, the interface and the results in the first 1-5 pages. The rest is junk. Telling me that I got three trillion hits is like my computer reporting that it took seven billion calculations to open a program. Great. That is a fun fact, but I don't give a shit.
If you want to beat Google, you need something new. Natural language searches, search engines that act as agents continuously looking for things for you, whatever. Doing what Google does but supposedly slightly better just isn't enough. Google already does it good enough for most people. If you want to beat Google, you need to do something innovative that Google doesn't do... and then rest the temptation to not take the dump truck of money they offer you should they recognize you as competition worthy of being bought out.
There are two very large problems with a manned Mars mission.
1) It cost a shit ton of money. Don't give me "but it just costs X days of Iraq war!!!" crap. That might be true, but Americans will open up their pocket books for "making the world a safer place". They lynch presidents that spend a few trillion on science experiments. Sure, we did it with Apollo, but that fell into the "making the world a safer place... by kick the ass of the communist in a metaphorical sense". If it Apollo had been pure science, it would have never of flown. Because Apollo was about one upping the commies, we were okay with it.
2) It is a suicide mission. Sure, there are plenty of people that would sign up for a suicide mission if it meant they got to stick their boot print on Mars first. That doesn't change the fact that it would never fly. Americans, and even more extreme, Europeans, are extraordinarily risk adverse to the point of absurdity. Pools kill thousands of kids and no one really cars. Unhealthy food kills an absurd number of Americans (millions) and we just shrug it off. Toss an airplane into a building and kill a couple thousand and all of a sudden it is OMG OMG LETS CHANGE SOCIETY AND TOSS OUT CIVIL LIBERTIES TO MAKE SURE THAT THIS MINOR AMOUNT OF DEATH NEVER HAPPENS AGAIN!!!11!!! KILL ALL THE ARABS!!!! NEVER AGAIN!!!1!!!! Europeans are even sillier these days where NATO and UN have to beg plead and extort to get a handful of European soldiers to come within a few hundred miles of a place where they might possibly get shot at. NASA blows up a shuttle filled with adrenaline junkies every quarter of a century, and now we can't fly the foolish things if a bird happens to fly by and drop a shit on one before it takes off.
Our (western) priorities are so far out of whack and screwed up that this will never happen. The monetary argument is at least logical and something I can get behind. The utter terror at letting someone willingly sacrifice themselves doing something they want to do is a sign that our lives are way the hell too comfy.
Space exploration is dead to humans until someone finds a cheap way for individuals to get into space, governments to damned. The second you can head west, hit the California coast, and go up a few thousand miles, you will have the US population drop by 10% as the crazy pioneer genes that are still floating around from the crazy immigrants that pushed into the US over the past few hundred years reassert themselves and people throw themselves into space.
Until that day, the pragmatic and rational folks are going to tell you to fuck off once they see the price tag, and the people begging for a nanny state will break down into tears cry about the inhumanity of it all to let a person willing sacrifice themselves.
I agree that my example is an extreme, but these EULAs where you hit an "I agree!" button have a very shaky legal history. In general, no one has ever proved one way or the other that they are legal in a court of law. At best, people have challenged terms within EULAs with very mixed results.
EULAs are on shaky legal grounding in it of themselves. Now, imagine that Apple goes after this company. What do they go after them for? Conspiracy to help someone violate a EULA that no one has yet agreed to? You are going from a sketchy gray area and building an even sketchier legal case on top of it. I wouldn't put it past Apple to try, but they are entering a legal black hole. If they jump into it, it isn't because they have a solid case and strong legal backing, it is because they have a shit ton of money and hope to bury the company in question with high priced lawyers.
No they are not the same, but they compete for roughly the same thing: ears in the car. Like I said, it would be one thing if satellite radio had a huge market penetration. It doesn't. It is relatively rare, unprofitable, and in general getting trashed by the alternatives. So, if we have a small and unpopular service getting ruined by the competition, why exactly would you seek to keep companies from merging in a desperate attempt to stay afloat?
They know, and everyone agrees, that their niche is so small that two companies can't survive it. They have already thrown up their hands in surrender and now want to cooperate in an attempt to form some entity that can carry on and compete with the alternatives that are trashing them. By joining the two companies they can cobble together a better product, slash some redundant infrastructure, and hopefully make something that is profitable.
The point of monopoly rules isn't to see how many companies you can sink while government regulators laugh with malevolent glee. The point is to keep the consumer from getting the shaft when a single player dominates a large market. The point of monopoly regulations is to make it such that monopolies can't charge massively outrageous prices while cutting off all the viable alternatives. Satellite radio isn't dominating any market, and consumers are not getting the shafted. In fact, Satellite radio is charging consumers LESS than it costs to run their operation because they are so desperate to get a few more ears and break into a market utterly dominated by other alternatives.
The government is rightfully stepping out of the way. If the two companies merge and satellite radio still is unprofitable, the company will sink and that will be the end. If they don't merge, one of the companies will sink, and you will still be left with just a single player in the market. Maybe though, through the action of the government getting out of the way and not regulating this dying market to death, they can cobble together a new company that at least has the capacity to compete with the alternatives that are currently kicking their ass.
If 10 years from now everyone ones a satellite radio and terrestrial radio is getting pwned, maybe it will be time to look at how to kill the monopoly and open it up for competition. Until then, absolutely nothing is served by keeping these two companies apart. Consumer will get the shaft if one of the companies dies a painful bankrupt death, and it is pretty clear that competition is so harsh right now that merging into a single company is very unlikely to result in anything bad for current consumers. Other than some twisted malevolent glee at watching already struggling companies get regulated to death, there is no reason to NOT let them merge.
If they are not installing the software, they are not violating any laws. The only "law" that you would have to break to make a Mac clone would be violating the EULA that you hit "I agree" to when you install the OS. The equipment manufacture never hits the "I agree" button in this case. The only people violating the "law" would be the consumer that installs the OS.
Further, you need to realize that EULA's are on extraordinarily sketchy legal terms. You can slap into an EULA that by hitting "I agree" you agree to transfer all of your assets to me, but that sure as hell won't fly in court. No, what they are doing is perfectly legal and reminiscent of IBM clones that poured onto the market back in ye oldin' days despite attempts to prevent it.
Apple will whine and moan about the loss of total control over their products, but short of hunting down every person who bought one of these and suing them (though, to be honest I really wouldn't put that past them) and trying to argue that they can claim your soul with a EULA in court, I think they are pretty much SOL.
I think that you could make a pretty solid argument that a single cable operator would be a approaching a monopoly in its area. The reason why this would be is that cable has extremely high infiltration (at least in the US). It is almost viewed as "needed" with minimal alternatives That said, there are many spots in the US where there really only is one cable company. In my area, I have two to pick from. I have chosen to use neither exactly because I think it is a rip off. My world hasn't ended.
In the case of Sirius/XM they own a very small hunk of the market. It would be one thing if nearly every single person had a satellite receiver in their car, like the way nearly everyone has a cable box, and the companies wanted to merge. That simply isn't the case. Satellite radio has a small penetration to the market, both companies are hemorrhaging money as they get kicked around by the competition, and pretty much everyone agrees that one of the companies will go bankrupt in the next couple of years unless action is taken.
There will be one satellite radio provider no matter what is done. Satellite radio is facing an end game. The companies are on the verge of collapse, and once one collapses they are going to go to the FCC anyways to get a thumbs up to try and sweep up the pieces. They are just preempting the inevitable.
I wouldn't be against reexamining the issue if satellite one day took up a huge amount of the market share... but they aren't. They are small boats in a big sea trying desperately to stay afloat. They make no profit and have a small customer base. There is no monopoly here, just two companies looking to cooperate instead of dragging each other down into bankruptcy.
You miss the point entirely. Honda has a monopoly on Honda Civics. Only Honda is allowed to make a Civic by law. Despite this, we don't consider Honda a monopoly, simply because there are lots of other cars by other companies that we consider "civic like" such that you can easily find an alternative. If Honda was to double the price of a Civic tomorrow, you would just by a different car and feel only mildly annoyed.
On the other hand, if Honda was the only one allowed to build cars in general, we would call them a monopoly. Many people need a car and have no real alternative to a car. Sure, airplanes, trains, and buses compete with cars, but they compete poorly in many instances. Only a car is going to drive you 25 miles through a New England winter from one small town to another.
The Sirius and XM merger is not a big deal for two reasons.
1) There are lots of alternatives. If the price of cars doubled, many people would simply shell out double the cash to get one. If the price of XM/Sirius doubles without a quality improvement that people find fair, they will simply stop using the service. Free AM/FM radio are direct competitors with satellite radio. MP3 players are also direct competition for satellite radio. I can't substitute riding the bus for buy a car in many instances, but it is pretty trivial to substitute an iPod for satellite radio.
2) There is going to be only one satellite company, like it or not. Neither Sirius or XM are profitable. One of them WILL go bankrupt in the next couple of years. Once that happens you will be left with... one satellite radio station. They are begging to be allowed to merge because they want the destruction of the companies to be productive, rather then have one scattered to the wind while the other scrambles to pick up the pieces.
Like it or not, there will be only one satellite radio station. The only question is if it is going to happen in a couple of years when one finally throws in the towel, or because they merged and combined programing in an attempt to better compete with AM/FM and MP3 players.
Yeah? And Ford has a monopoly on cars made by Ford. w00t. Someone call the lawyers.
All companies are monopolies if you narrow the 'slice' of what you are looking at down far enough. You need to look at the big picture though. Sure, Sirius and XM have a monopoly on satellite radio, but satellite radio sure as hell doesn't have a monopoly on ears. I happily listen to an MP3 player or free radio on my way into work without feeling the slightest pressure to go dump however much it costs for bad satellite radio.
Monopolies only work when there are no or few other viable option. If there is a simple substitution, the monopoly is broken, even if it isn't exactly the same product. It is like if Apple all of a sudden started to charge even higher prices for that silly little MP3 players. You couldn't cry foul over their "monopoly" on iPods. Sure, iPods might not be available at a reasonable price, but a smart person would just pick up another MP3 player that is cheaper.
The reason why they two are being allowed to merge is because one is going to tank if they don't merge. One is going to tank because satellite radio is getting murdered by the competition. If one is going to go bust, it is better to let them do it in a less destructive manner. It would be one thing if satellite radio was dominating and people were clawing at each other to break into the market. That isn't the case though, satellite radio is just barely hanging on. Letting the two companies merge is far more likely to result in quality improvements and price drops as they consolidate their infrastructure and struggle to compete in the less than profitable radio market.
I am not defending the head of the EPA. Their enforcement in particular (or lack there of) has been crap. Their opposition to California regulating its own emissions was also utterly absurd. That said, some times even idiots and ass holes get something right.
You have to stretch the wording of the clean air act more than a little to try and apply it to global warming. The truth is that it is a different problem. If I dump a toxin into the environment, the impact is relatively clear and the economic balance is generally pretty easy. You find a PPM level that is safe, declare that the level, and then check to make sure everyone is doing it.
Global warming is a different beast. What is a "safe" level of global warming? Forget for a moment that our prediction models are, crude, inaccurate, contradictory, and trying to model an impossibly complex system. Let's say that we could perfectly predict the effects of more or less carbon effectively. Even if we could do this we would still be left with a question of trade offs. CO2 in the quantities we are talking about is not toxic. The damage that excess level of CO2 does is global economic and ecological damage. In tackling global warming you are trading one type of economic pain for another. You are trading the economic pain of taking the steps it takes to adjust to a warmer world to the economic pain of cutting carbon emissions. The EPA doesn't know where to draw the line. This is WAY out of the realm of the EPA.
Further, consider for a moment that this is a global problem. The EPA doesn't have a global reach. The EPA, at best, can tell companies in the US not to dump CO2 into the atmosphere. The EPA can't prevent companies from moving to say China or Mexico and dumping the CO2 there. It really takes an act of congress in order to find solution. The EPA will certainly have its part to play in whatever the solution is, but it will be just one part of many. Congress is actually going to have to get off their collective ass, get their hands dirty, and provide clear direction. They are going to have to decide the level of pain that the American people are going to endure. They are going to have to provide compensation/retraining/whatever for the people that feel the pain the worst. They are going to need to work with corporate law in order to prevent companies from simply leaving and dumping the CO2 in China. They are going to have to work with international organizations because CO2 is a global problem that doesn't respect country boundaries.
There is a lot of work to be done, and congress is the one that is going to have to do it. The head of the EPA might be a dick, but he is right in throwing up his hands and abjecting himself of responsibility while congress fails to take a little leadership. This is a problem that goes well beyond the EPA. This is a global problem for our elected congress to deal with. Think they are doing a shitty job? I suggest letting them know either through the mailbox or the ballot box.
Personally, I think that the EPA was right to claim that they can't regulate carbon emissions. The reasoning they stated was absolutely and 100% valid. Regulation of carbon emissions (and other heat trapping gases) is a big deal. You are talking about going from open seasons to something much more restrictive. The vast majority of companies don't even know how much they are dumping out because it is currently unregulated. The EPA regulating carbon emissions would be a very very big deal. It would have some very dramatic effects upon the price and have an effect upon the economy.
I am not against regulating such emissions, but it isn't up to a government bureaucrat to make such a significant decision. This truly is the role of elected officials. Congress needs to get up off their collective asses and decide what the law of the land should be in terms of green house gas emissions. Congress needs to decide what the balance between the economy and the environment is, and they need to be held responsible if they screw it up. The head of the EPA is absolutely correct in throwing up his hands and saying that this is for congress to sort out, not him.
The "fix it later" mentality is the death of an MMORPG. Pirates of the Burning Sea is a great example of this. PotBS is one of the more unique games in existence. Combat is actually challenging and fun. It has the potential for one of the most kick ass economies in MMORPG history. The PvP potential is so good you can almost taste it. What happened?
They blew it.
The economy was launched with features that border between too stupid to contemplate and utterly missing (no sell orders, dumb "bidding" system, etc). Game balance was initially horribly out of whack (better these days). PvP quickly and very predictably devolved to the point where there is really one one type of regular PvP (6 level 50 vs 6 level 50).
The game has so much potential, it just isn't finished. It kills me to see games with so much potential be horrible wastes.
If there is any consolation in all of this, I never really thought that Warhammer had any potential. Other than it being the awesome original setting of the Warcraft universe without the Disney glossing that Blizzard gave it, it always sounded to me like Warhammer was just rehashing traditional EQ/WoW style game play and tossing in some revamped and uninteresting Dark Age of Camelot style RvR.
I wish I had my mod points.
Personally, I think Warhammer online is DOA. My impression of Warhammer is that it is just basically WoW with some turning and a few PvP game mechanic differences. In other words, it was a copy and paste from WoW that they tried to tune up a little. This is wonderfully ironic, because the entire World of Warcraft setting was basically stolen verbatim from Warhammer (and Starcraft a rip off of Warhammer 40K).
Warhammer had a real potential to strike out a new path and reclaim the setting that they once owned. Instead, they have fumbled along in WoWs foot steps. Whatever minor improvements they make are offset by the fact that WoW has a few years lead a few million people already bought in. No one is going to jump ship for minor improvements. Warhammer could have challenged the entire MMORPG gameplay style. Instead, they are going to plod along in the footsteps of WoW and get crushed.
The only consolation is that at least they are only making a bad Warhammer MMORPG instead of a Warhammer 40K MMORPG. The Warhammer universe, and especially the 40k universe are made for dominating the more Disneyfied Blizzard settings, they just need to get their shit together and offer game play worth playing.
If your goal is to feel good about yourself, you are doing the right thing and probably making some small difference in the world. Personal sacrifice certainly contributes to the nobility of charity. Giving up half your savings is certainly a greater act of sacrifice altuism than a rich man giving up 1%, irregardless if that 1% is more than your entire savings.
That said, if your goal is to cure AIDS and hunger in Africa, a few billion dollars that regenerates itself continuously through financial investment allowing for a continuous supply of cash is probably more effective. Good feelings for rich men aside, I imagine that the scientist and aid workers don't care if the money came as some great act of noble sacrifice or compound interest so long as they have the money in hand to make a difference and continue their work.
I think you miss the point of things like multiple passwords with volumes hidden in volumes, and it doesn't involve being able to resist torture. Resisting an audit, legal threat, or annoying security agent is a more likely scenario.
I would be willing to bet that a non-trivial number of people who something illegal on their computer from pirated versions of software, "hacking tools", pirated entertainment, pr0n illegal in one country or another, etc. The ability to effectively resist being compelled (with legal threats, not hot irons) to prove you have it is a valuable thing.
Even something as simple as not wanting to show a border agent your pr0n collection or hiding sensitive data (corporate, personal, embarrassing foot fetish videos) is enough reason to have two passwords. Instead of putting up a stink about how it is unfair or you can't give up customer information, you shrug, give them a password to a clean drive, and even if they were paranoid enough to clone the entire thing they get nothing but a clean system with data hidden in noise that the NSA would struggle to decrypt. Eh, you could fight it out with the border agent, but I personally would rather smile, comply, and feel secure in knowing my companies data and pr0n of my girlfriend is still sitting snuggling amongst some random noise unknown to the border agent.
If you want to venture off into the slightly more paranoid realm, realize that you might not be encrypting for today. You might be encrypting to defend against an entity (government, corporate, UFOs, whatever) in the future. Forget applying laws retroactively, just imagine over the course of your life, how many computer laws have you broken. If someone was to go back and nail you for each and every single one, how many years in jail and millions of dollars would you be on the hook for? What laws have you violated that are legal in one places and illegal in another? A 16 year old kid who has watched two girls and one cup, has a 2 gig MP3 collection, a foot fetish pr0n collection, and a pirated version of Half Life is probably technically on the hook somewhere for a stoning and a 2 billion dollar fine.
There are good solid paranoid (OMG the black helicopters) and non-paranoid (I really don't want this border agent to see client information and my wife's nude pictures) reasons to go for crypto. Personally, I think that if you are crossing national borders and have anything on your computer you wouldn't feel happy showing to any client or any security agent of any nation you travel to, you are being a little foolish.
Your proposal is also not going to happen. So lets come back to reality, eh? What TrueCrypt offers is a way to ensure that no one can ever be sure you have given up "all" of your passwords. They can't even tell how many you have. You could have one or you could have a dozen. Maybe you might crack under torture, but under a legal threat (a little more plausible for most people than being tortured to reveal their foot fetish pr0n or MP3 collection) you are pretty safe.
An authority might be able to make a successful argument that because you have crypto, you must be hiding something and thus MUST give up your password. Fair enough, you give up your password and reveal your financial records. They authorities can then make the slightly less concrete argument that you MUST be hiding something else, because if that was what you were REALLY hiding, you would have given a false password that leads to something other than the thing you really want to hide. Again, you can shrug and offer up the password to your foot fetish collection.
At this point, their arguments break down. You can make a fair argument you must be hiding something. You can make a flimsier argument that you must be hiding the thing that you are hiding with a false thing that you are hiding. Beyond that, you could have any number of fake passwords. A dozen passwords is just as plausible as three. In the end, there is no way to prove that you downloaded a 10 second MP3 clip from Madonna that the RIAA storm troopers swear you have (well... at least your hard drive won't give you away).
So yes, crypto fall all might be nice, but baring that piece of fantasy, crypto for me is good enough.
I am pretty damn sure that screaming something about Allah and then trying to take over a plan is going to be a good solid way to be torn limb from limb for a couple of decades. The only way I could possibly conceive of hijacking a plan in the US now would be actually be the plane's pilot from the beginning. Even if you could overcome the passengers by having enough men armed with guns to kill the majority of able bodied people before they tear you limb from limb, that still won't save you from the fact that US pilots are now taught to do very unpleasant things if some asshole tries to break into the reinforced doors or starts shooting a gun (the only conceivable way of subduing an airplane full of people).
Even if you had half a dozen men with guns they slipped by security, the pilot is going to have you sitting on the ceiling the second he hears a gun go off. If he wants to be a real dick, he can also see how long you can go without oxygen by depressurizing the airplane, all the while tossing you from one end of the airplane to the other.
Can planes be blown up? Sure. Can they be used as cruise missiles? Sure, but it isn't going to happen on a commercial airliner any time soon. If it happens again, it will be because someone smuggled themselves aboard a FedEx plane and shot the pilots before they knew what was happening.
I think you give people far too much credit for being rational. It is far less than suddenly realizing that they are not safe. It would be one thing if 9/11 proved that we are not safe.
Freaking your shit out when Sputnik flew over was rational. It meant that a nation you really should be afraid of can drop nukes on your head that really and truly do have a very solid chance of leaving you dead. Your chances of dying in a nuclear war are far from trivial.
9/11 was no such event. If you own a pool, your children stand a radically higher chance of dying by drowning than by terrorism. Your boring daily commute is so much more dangerous than terrorism that they don't hit on the same scale. Put terrorism up against a heart disease or cancer, and you are taking a orders of magnitude more terror. Despite this, I bet we have dumped more government funding into fighting "terrorism" than cancer. I would bet my heathen soul that we spend piss loads more on "terrorism" than pool safety.
The only abnormal damage done during 9/11 was self inflicted. The loss of lives, while sad and regrettable didn't even cause a blip in US death rates for that year. The cost in physical property was pocket change next a mild hurricane. The economic damage and the damage to civil liberties was entirely self inflicted. If people had shrugged off 9/11 and said, "Hrm, that sucks, lets reinforce planes doors in the future and end our policy of passengers not attacking hijackers", 9/11 would have been a non-event that result in no damage to the US economy, no massive increase in government spending, and no erosion of civil liberties.
Terrorist attacks don't do any real damage. A terrorist attack is a pin prick on a giant, especially for the US which is a particularly large giant in the world. They don't even compare to such horrors as pools and mild hurricanes. What hurts about a terrorist attack is not the attack, it is when we chop our own hand off in response to a pin prick on the finger.
It isn't an end-run around the Constitution. It is a touch of common sense and nothing else. Yes, people have a right to determine how people use their services. MySpace can kick off pedophiles, Flickr can dump whatever it is they find offensive, and I can delete Viagra ads from my blog's comment section without violating the 1st.
The Internet of all places is where private censorship actually makes the most sense. It is hard and costly to avoid physical areas that don't conform to what you think is proper expression (be that free or restricted). What makes the Internet so wonderful is that you can easily bypass the areas that you find distasteful.
It takes no effort to avoid a right wing religious website that heavily censors their forms in a manner I find repulsive. It takes no effort to drop into a place like Slashdot that offers mild optional self mild self censoring options (karma and user ratings).
The Internet is better than a democracy in that it isn't majority rules, it is YOU rule. You pick the rules you want to live by. Feeling a little anarchist? Merrily only log into place that support your style. Feel like your eyes will bleed if you see a naughty word? Head on over to something safe and sanitized. Want to go some places where BDSM is the ONLY allowable topic of discussion and distracting things like politics are not allowed? I bet my soul that there is a place on the Internet for you. If you really can't find a place that fits you (you probably are not trying), you can make your own with a very small barrier to entry.
The Internet offers up something better than democracy. I want "free speech" on the Internet only in so far that nothing is made illegal by law. If Disney wants to ban sex stories on their forums, more power to them, so long as it is the website owners making the decision and not the government.
So long as the "gates" of the Internet remain open and website operators are given free reign over their tiny little domain of the Internet, I am happy. So long as Time Warner or the government can't hose my packets without my consent because they think I am about to see something offensive, great. If Time Warner wants to police their own personal website like the customer hating bastards they are, more power to them.
The "gates" to the Internet are what need to be protected. Preventing carriers and the government from deciding where you are allowed to go and deciding what packets are can be sent or delayed is where the fight is. Flickr though? Let Flickr set the rules for Flickr. Don't like their rules? I bet you can find another photo sharing website. Don't like that your comment got deleted off a blog? Find another one. Offended that Slashdot doesn't delete offensive posts? Brows at a different level or find a new website. So long as the gates remain open, the Internet is something better than democracy.
The point of a charity investing a hunk of its money is so that it can exist beyond its initial contributions. If the charity just blows all of its money, its life will last as long as people contribute to it and die the day that stops. On the other hand, if you dump a shit-ton of money into it, have that money start making a healthy interest rate, and just spend the interest, the charity continues on basically forever with its supply of cash always building, or at least remaining the same.
That is my point. In the US you wouldn't call them "far right". Anyone in the far right of the US who declared himself a socialist (nationalist or not) would be laughed at. In Europe, "far right" corresponds more to the party being a nationalist party, irregardless of whatever other crazy policies they advocate. In the US, "right" implies economic liberalism and social conservatism. Nationalism isn't apart of the equation.
In simpler terms, in Europe, "far right" basically boils down xenophobic fascist. In the US it means bible wielding free marketers. You might not like either group, but they are dramatically different from each other. Hence my original point, don't try and toss American and European parties on the same bland right/left scale, as they mean entirely different things.
I'll admit to some level of ignorance about the UK's far right, but I can safely say that France, Austria, Germany, and Italy's far right couldn't be put in the same room as the American right without fists being raised. What defines a lot of the European right is a type of nationalism that doesn't get much play in the US. That isn't to say that the US right doesn't have their nationalist or anti-immigration supporters, just that their voices are much more quieted, and far out of the mainstream.
European ultra-right parties tend to have their core centered around paranoia about immigration that is pretty off the charts on the US political scale. A couple of border senators in the US might try and make a stink over illegal immigration, but in the grand scheme of things it is a small issue. The most extreme positions on immigration advocate better border controls. No one is talking about restricting the already fairly liberal influx of legal immigrants because very few seem them as a problem. The US has a pretty liberal immigration policy and no one is trying to make the paths towards legal immigration any harder.
Many ultra-right European parties on the other hand center entirely around immigration policy with other âoeright wingâ policies being tossed in as after thoughts. They tend to have a flat out anti-immigrant stance, and not just an anti-illegal immigration stance. In fact some parties that are âoeultra rightâ would be view as some crazy concoction of nationalistic socialist in the US, not âoeright-wingâ in the American sense.
My point is that the US and the EU have pretty radically different political landscapes. Trying to compare them on a left/right scale is just going to lead to confusion unless you have a pretty solid grasp of political climate of the nations in question. The worries and concerns that get play in the US can be pretty radically different from say Italy, and as a result you have an entirely different definition of âoeleftâ and âoerightâ in these nations that donâ(TM)t necessarily line up with each other.
It is all about context. When we say left and right on a US centric site (and yes, Slashdot has a disproportionate number of America readers), they are talking about the American system of politics. It is true that it is a large mistake to think that the American system has ANYTHING to do rest of the world's "left" and "right", but that doesn't mean that it isn't internally consistent.
The entire left/right scale is a tad silly simply because it stuffs a whole bunch of utterly unrelated ideals into a binary system. You can have a free market capitalist who believes in gay marriage, abortions, and a lack of sex and drug regulation. You can also have someone who advocates socialist economics want to outlaw those very same things.
Tossing American parties on a European left/right scale is pointless. The American right is absolutely nothing like the European right or ultra-right. The European ultra-right would likely be quickly slapped with a label of fascist or crazy ass ultra nationalist label in the US. The American right doesn't have the ultra-nationalistic tendencies that the European far right has. Le Penn and other such ultra-nationalist would get the cold shoulder in the US for their frantic obsession over immigration. Other European ultra-right parties would get the cold shoulder for being viewed as being far to socialistic in terms of economic issues.
My point? You are better off trying to understand parties, both in the US and Europe, as they are, not trying to slap them on a left-right scale. American and European parties don't belong on the same binary scale together. What makes Republican's "ultra right" in European eyes is that they are not left and not that they have any commonality to European ultra right parties.
If you desperately want to plot them on the same scale, I would suggest looking at the libertarians favorite scale, the two axis "social liberty" and "economic liberty" scale. The American right will appear in the right corner, the American left and European right in the center, the European left on the left, and the European ultra-right on the bottom.
The entire article was fluff. Those might have been 10 examples of polluted cities, but they were certainly not the top 10. Not that the US and the EU don't have their share of polluted cities, but I am pretty sure not a single one of them even comes close to hitting the top 100 list. Travel a little in "developing" Asia and you will quickly realize that as a westerner, you have never even begun to contemplate how bad pollution can get.
I am not saying that west should be complacent about the environment, just realize that you have it REALLY good compared to some other places in the world. There are places in the world that would make you thankful to suck on the tailpipes of cars stuck in an LA traffic jam.
They WILL pass on the cost. That is the entire point. The point is to make it so that the environmental cost is tossed into the cost of the product. Companies that compete on price won't go looking for "low carbon" methods. They will just go for the cheapest method. If two companies build a part, and one has a lower cost because it pays less in carbon emissions, buyers (be they corporations or consumers) will opt for the cheaper of the two. They "pick" the low carbon part simply because it is cheaper.
The advantage of a cap and trade system is that it tries to make us "use" our pollution in the most efficient manner possible.
Think of it this way. Imagine if all companies have a cap on how much pollution they can toss up. If I am running a business and I fall under the cap, I have no good reason to try reduce my output. Under a cap and trade system, any reduction in my output results in lower costs. Further, because markets set the price of carbon, the people who emit the pollution are in theory the ones that can get the most benefit from it.
I am not saying that a cap and trade system is perfect. Enforcement and "offset" raise serious questions. That said, the idea, in theory, is very sound. It is easily the best way to set an acceptable limit on pollution and ensure that the people who do the polluting pay the price and put that pollution to the best possible use. The real challenge is implementing such a system well.