The Galaxy Tab is a fine tablet and Android 2.2 works great on it; Samsung didn't customize it much. You don't need Honeycomb for tablets.
Archos just didn't do a good job. And there's no reason to believe that they're going to be doing a better job with Honeycomb. Archos's problems are Archos's, not Android's.
I think the sooner H.264 dies, the better: it's a piece of proprietary software that nobody needs given that there are good open alternatives.
However, sometimes for the adoption of FOSS, it's important to support proprietary standards. Ubuntu works so well for many people because it support a few proprietary components, like nVidia. The result of the uptake of such successful Linux distributions is that vendors don't think you're completely crazy anymore when you ask about Linux support.
One has to watch out that incorporating some proprietary components doesn't become a slippery slope. But usually, things go the other way: proprietary components get replaced with open ones as vendors start seeing the benefits, and patents expire, turning patented standards into open ones.
Chrome should encourage the use of WebM and other open standards. Maybe Chrome could even go as far and pop up a dialog first time H.264 is used to alert users, and from then on show a little scary logo on the player controls for proprietary codecs. But it should be able to play H.264 fairly unencumbered because otherwise, it will make the life in FOSS environments unnecessarily harder.
It seems to me some OSS types get a little hypocritical in that they talk about OSS being all about openness as in source.
The analogy is quite straightforward:
Open source = you get the source, you can compile it, run it, and distribute the source and the binaries you create without paying anybody (however, you can charge people if you like)
Open standard = you get the specification, you can implement it, run it, and distribute your implementations without paying anybody (however, you can charge people if you like).
If either the source or the standard is patent-encumbered, i.e., if you can't use it or distribute it without patent restrictions, the thing ceases to be open.
So, the meaning of the term "open" is used quite consistently. And just like software under "shared source", "non-commercial", or "research" licenses is not considered open source, so standards under RAND terms (like H.264) haven't traditionally been considered "open standards".
Since people pretty quickly realized that open standards were better than proprietary standards, a number of companies have been trying to muddy the waters and redefine "open standard" to mean "formal standard with RAND licensing terms". But that's like oil companies trying to project a "green" image; it's marketing fluff.
Only things which cost nothing are acceptable, for some reason "open but not zero cost," isn't ok anymore.
Money isn't the issue. You are free to charge for the distribution of open source software, and many people do. What you cannot do is restrict the ability of other people to redistribute. That's the defining characteristic of "open source". A consequence of that is that you can't derive a mandatory licensing fee from downstream distribution. But that's not because people begrudge you the money, it's because that would give you control over downstream distribution, and that is incompatible with openness.
And H.264 is an example of how dangerous such restrictions get, because H.264 licenses don't just say "you have to pay us $1 for every instance", they impose a complex set of restrictions on the content you can create with the technology. That's what makes H.264 lack of openness dangerous in a way that goes beyond just a little money.
One, H.264 is an open standard, where "open" needs to be read in the context of standards, and none of the other are (though they are "open" in other senses of the word)
That's wrong. Bright wrote:
The specification was devised collaboratively, with its final ratification dependent on the agreement of the individuals, corporations, and national standards bodies that variously make up ISO and ITU. This makes H.264 an open standard in the same way as, for example, JPEG still images, or the C++ programming language, or the ISO 9660 filesystem used on CD-ROMs. H.264 is unambiguously open.
That distinction has nothing to do with "open"; H.264 is a formal standard, like JPEG and C++. The opposite of that is a de facto standard.
H.264 is a proprietary standard because what it standardizes is owned by some companies and you have to pay them. That is the opposite of an open standard, which anybody can implement without paying anything. C++ is an open standard, H.264 is a proprietary standard, and JPEG was unclear until the patents expired.
People quickly realized that open standards were a good thing. As a consequence, some companies started to hijack the term for their own proprietary standards with hand-waving and hair-raising arguments. MPEGLA and Sun were some of the biggest corruptors of the term.
Somebody doesn't understand how the US legal system works:
The lack of an identified illegal act and of a judicial enquiry in the US casts a shadow on the whole process of lifting the protection of citizens' privacy for the sake of national security through such subpoena orders,"
Subpoenas get issues by courts, so there is a "judicial enquiry" and judicial oversight. And there is a potentially illegal act, namely the release of classified information; the prosecutor had to convince the judge of that. The order was by a US court to a US company. Furthermore, the individuals targeted were informed and given an opportunity to object.
In Europe, police would be able to get this information without any judicial oversight, without anybody being informed, and without anybody being able to object.
The complaints by these MEP are unfounded and apparently just being made to score political points; beating up on America is a politically successful strategy in Europe.
That's not the right question. The right question is, do they want it changed if so many of them die in the process?
"How many?" Probably far fewer Iraqis are dead today because of US intervention than would have been otherwise.
To figure out if they really wanted it, you'd need a proper poll, with a properly asked question
So you are saying that military action to liberate people from a brutal oppressor shouldn't happen unless one can hold a "proper poll" to ask for their permission? Or what? What about all the people that are threatened by their government?
Yeah, mathematicians tend to like C++. They also tend to be pretty poor at building good abstractions, which is probably why they aren't bothered so much by the type system limitations of C++.
Either way, none of the anti-trust actions had any significant effects on either the market at large or Apple specifically. You have some very strange notions of computing industry history.
It's just too bad that democratic politicians aren't also nervous about wasting tax payer dollars on proprietary software, becoming dependent on the capricious whims of software companies, and become concerned about backdoors in their software.
Perhaps this difference in nervousness can be explained by the fact that democratic politicians are more susceptible to the financial and political pressures of corporations, while autocrats don't have to give a damn?
In any case, the whole article sounds like a smear campaign, trying to associate open source software with communism and "autocrats"; in fact, a number of democracies have also seen the light on open source software and also mandated its use there.
Except that the Iraqi people didn't consent to paying the price. They weren't even asked if they want to.
It's kind of the hallmark of totalitarian societies that you can't ask their citizens whether they want their government changed.
But we can ask them after the fact. Have you? I have, and while they didn't like the way the war went down, they seemed relieved that Saddam was gone and that Iraq had a chance at a better future.
You can program using Python syntax and semantics in Lisp thanks to the CLPython implementation,
Great! That lets you combine the poor libraries of CommonLisp with the syntactic limitations of Python.
The performance is comparable to using C libraries,
It is possible to get C-like performance out of a CommonLisp compiler, but you have to jump through hoops to do it, and the necessary declarations are different from compiler to compiler (and sometimes even between versions).
But numerous C++ programming techniques (mainly template mechanism) makes it much easier to program.
Efficient template-based algorithm and data structures often become extremely complex to implement and modify, condemning many users to just instantiating existing classes and algorithms. Even then, they are affected by poor error messages and debugging difficulties. In addition, you cannot be certain that your reusable algorithms actually are efficient (small constants, not just low complexity) if you compose them from templates.
Or you could use inheritance but will pay the cost at runtime.
Actually, not true. Some compilers perform global program analysis and will give you template-like efficiency with inheritance-like simplicity. And JIT compilers perform inlining and optimization on the fly, giving you template-like efficiency even for dynamically composed data structures.
In the end, when performance really matters, you have to drill down deep no matter what and can't rely on any automated mechanism, whether it's C++ templates or JITs. And when performance isn't quite so critical, there are many alternatives to C++ templates that work at least as well and are less hassle.
If you do professional software development, you write unit tests; with unit tests, the issue of static vs. dynamic typing pretty much goes away. If you do rapid development or prototyping, then static type systems frequently get in the way; the amount of time you save in hunting down type errors is made up for by the complexities of trying to work around limitations of the static type system (static type systems often hinder design in ways that the designers don't even notice).
While there are reasons to use static type systems, and even C++, those tend not to be related to static typing and its supposed benefits itself, but rather to things like good code generation or ability to interface easily with other statically typed languages.
We're talking about language standards here, not what specific compilers do. Current C++ support for Unicode and wide character sets is totally broken and unusable.
It looks like C++0x tries to improve things, but it's too little too late, since we now have a mess of incompatible, vendor-specific solutions in place, and since almost no third party libraries support it. In addition, C++0x waffles on its support, so that there are now a handful of different, incompatible character types to choose from, pretty much guaranteeing massive incompatibilities.
It will take years before the dust settles over Unicode strings in C++ (if it ever does), and that's too late for something as fundamental as decent string support.
Broken Unicode support in C++ was the last straw for my company and the reason we basically don't use the language anymore for new projects.
Can you please cite which specific anti-trust law enforcement was the only reason Apple has "a market to sell to"?
Geez, look for the anti-trust enforcement against IBM and Microsoft. There are volumes upon volumes describing its origins and its consequences.
You just don't buy Apple products.
And then you have to live with not having access to a whole variety of services that are available nowhere else. That circumstance makes Apple a potential and legitimate target for anti-trust enforcement, just like Microsoft and IBM before it.
After the two world wars, in both cases the US entered from a position of originally not wanting to get involved in foreign conflicts, the US went to Vietnam, the debarkle that was Iran/Iraq, Central America, Libya, Iraq again twice. Oh and Isreal.
Vietnam was the aftermath of French colonialism, Iran, Iraq, and Israel were messes left by the British, and Libya by Italy. The US had to try to deal with these messes because Europe was in shambles and incapable of doing so itself after WWII.
I'm not saying Saddam Hussien was a good man, I just think the evil fuckwit puppeteers of Bush are worse. Certainly responsible for far more innocent deaths in the name of a buck.
Bush was a liar and a sleazeball. But Saddam killed half a million people in the decade before the US came; in the same period since then, far fewer people have died, and most of them have been internal Iraqi violence.
At the moment, yes Chinese growth would stagnate, but not for much longer. The middle class is growing. If they were to insist on balancing trade, the US would be bankrupt. Does your assessment of debt include balance of trade figures?
Are you kidding? The US would love to balance trade; it's the Chinese and Europeans who are insisting on the current system.
Balancing trade would mean reducing European exports to the US and increasing US exports to Europe. What do you think that would do to European and US jobs, respectively? Balancing US trade would also mean devaluing the US dollar, I'd guess to about $2-3/Euro (the two are inextricably linked). Since US foreign debt is largely in US dollars, that would wipe out half of US foreign debt. It would also wipe out a large part of Europe's foreign account holdings--retirement funds and all. From the narrow, short-term interests of the US, balancing its trade and devaluing the dollar are very attractive: get rid of unemployment and wipe out a large part of the debt.
What isn't attractive is that other economies would likely collapse and may even become politically unstable as people see their savings and retirement benefits wiped out.
The US trade deficit isn't an expression of US profligacy; rather, it is what the US does in order to keep the world economy chugging along.
It's been 70 years since WWII and Europe needs to start fending for itself again, militarily and economically, rather than leaving the dirty work to the US, handing themselves large government benefits, and patting themselves on the back for how wonderful they are. The current system isn't sustainable, and Americans are really getting tired of the negative consequences it has for the US.
but then for someone who sucks up the propaganda it might be hard to objectively determine what is ignorance...
Yeah, you obviously have been blindly sucking up propaganda instead of thinking things through for yourself. Use your head, man.
China traditionally has an inward looking defence strategy and does not invade unless it sees the territory it is invading as part of China (Taiwan) or as a direct threat to it's own stability (Tibet)
Yes, after subjugating much of Asia, they stopped; they couldn't have run any bigger empire than that. They got their asses kicked by the British in the 19th century and have been in turmoil ever since.
The US on the other hand has a long history of criminal activity all over the world for the sake of fleecing American taxpayers for the profit of a few large companies. Which is more dangerous?
For most of the 20th century, US military action was focused on keeping Europe free, keeping the USSR from taking over the world, and clearning up some of the messes that European colonialism caused. Sorry, I don't see anything "criminal about that.
The United States economy is only the biggest economy thanks to smoke and mirrors.
And that statement is based on... what? The US has much lower debt (per capita, %GDP), higher per capita GDP, and faster growth than Europe. And without US importing like it does, European economies would collapse and Chinese growth would stagnate.
The US has such an enormous population of whack jobs who believe propaganda, be it religious or political, in ignorance of objectivity or reason that I fear a bankrupt US would be the most likely to use them out of spite.
I've spent many years in Europe. Let me tell you: Europeans are much more ignorant of history, economics, and politics than Americans. France, Germany, and the UK are xenophobic and their political systems are tearing themselves up between communists, socialists, theocrats, and ultra right-wingers. Worry about Europe, not the US.
How so? Apple was established quite independently of IBM and Microsoft, and had nothing to do with anti-trust litigation against those companies. Are you just making stuff up here?
Apple only had a market to sell to because anti-trust enforcement created the market. And their offenses? Tying of hardware and software sales, and attempts to control distribution channels--just like Apple is doing now.
And how does Apple deny them that choice? Apple products are available to buy at the purchaser's discretion. There is nothing forcing people to buy them.
Many apps are only available for iOS; it is becoming increasingly difficult to avoid iOS.
In addition, in many places, there are interoperability requirements on operating system providers; Apple may be violating them.
My only hope is the the Australian Government has the balls and brains to stop sucking up to the falling empire. How is it in our interests to be good friends with a country with no real economic power who has pissed off every other country in our region?
You're totally out of touch with reality. The US has the biggest economy in the world by far. And this "failing empire" is what keeps Australia, Japan, and Europe relatively free, because without the US military and the US nuclear deterrent, China, Russia, and the Middle Eastern nations would be asserting themselves.
Is this grand jury also investigating any of the major news outlets publishing information from these leaks?
I doubt it. Why should they? What are you getting at? What difference does it make?
I agree. EU is not much better. They're learning from the best it seems;)
You know, I really wonder what's going on in the heads of people like you. Do you know anything about European history in the 20th century? Dictatorships, civil wars, genocides, totalitarian regimes, police states, religious discrimination, colonialism? And, I'm not even talking of the Nazis--they were in a category all of their own.
There is no evidence yet that Wikileaks have broken any laws,
There is enough evidence for a grand jury and a judge to approve proceeding. You do know what a grand jury is?
yet people in their network is being treated as criminals.
They are not being "treated as criminals"; a grand jury and a judge have looked at the facts and decided to give a limited amount of information to a prosecutor for building his case against Assange.
I agree. EU is not much better.
In fact, the EU is so much worse that it is in a category by itself: many of the safeguards that exist in the US (grand jury, judicial review, notification, ability to object, few data retention requirements) do not exist at all in Europe. In Europe, police get this data secretly and routinely without anybody ever finding out about it.
They're learning from the best it seems;)
The EU has always had far fewer safeguards against abuse of police powers.
But some other poster mentioned, just because it's in the law, then it's acceptable.
You still haven't explained what you consider "unacceptable" about this. This is standard investigative procedure, with the only difference being that in the US, it's actually public and has tons more safeguards. Do you seriously think European police and prosecutors haven't already looked at all the records they can get on Assange?
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The Galaxy Tab is a fine tablet and Android 2.2 works great on it; Samsung didn't customize it much. You don't need Honeycomb for tablets.
Archos just didn't do a good job. And there's no reason to believe that they're going to be doing a better job with Honeycomb. Archos's problems are Archos's, not Android's.
I think the sooner H.264 dies, the better: it's a piece of proprietary software that nobody needs given that there are good open alternatives.
However, sometimes for the adoption of FOSS, it's important to support proprietary standards. Ubuntu works so well for many people because it support a few proprietary components, like nVidia. The result of the uptake of such successful Linux distributions is that vendors don't think you're completely crazy anymore when you ask about Linux support.
One has to watch out that incorporating some proprietary components doesn't become a slippery slope. But usually, things go the other way: proprietary components get replaced with open ones as vendors start seeing the benefits, and patents expire, turning patented standards into open ones.
Chrome should encourage the use of WebM and other open standards. Maybe Chrome could even go as far and pop up a dialog first time H.264 is used to alert users, and from then on show a little scary logo on the player controls for proprietary codecs. But it should be able to play H.264 fairly unencumbered because otherwise, it will make the life in FOSS environments unnecessarily harder.
It seems to me some OSS types get a little hypocritical in that they talk about OSS being all about openness as in source.
The analogy is quite straightforward:
Open source = you get the source, you can compile it, run it, and distribute the source and the binaries you create without paying anybody (however, you can charge people if you like)
Open standard = you get the specification, you can implement it, run it, and distribute your implementations without paying anybody (however, you can charge people if you like).
If either the source or the standard is patent-encumbered, i.e., if you can't use it or distribute it without patent restrictions, the thing ceases to be open.
So, the meaning of the term "open" is used quite consistently. And just like software under "shared source", "non-commercial", or "research" licenses is not considered open source, so standards under RAND terms (like H.264) haven't traditionally been considered "open standards".
Since people pretty quickly realized that open standards were better than proprietary standards, a number of companies have been trying to muddy the waters and redefine "open standard" to mean "formal standard with RAND licensing terms". But that's like oil companies trying to project a "green" image; it's marketing fluff.
Only things which cost nothing are acceptable, for some reason "open but not zero cost," isn't ok anymore.
Money isn't the issue. You are free to charge for the distribution of open source software, and many people do. What you cannot do is restrict the ability of other people to redistribute. That's the defining characteristic of "open source". A consequence of that is that you can't derive a mandatory licensing fee from downstream distribution. But that's not because people begrudge you the money, it's because that would give you control over downstream distribution, and that is incompatible with openness.
And H.264 is an example of how dangerous such restrictions get, because H.264 licenses don't just say "you have to pay us $1 for every instance", they impose a complex set of restrictions on the content you can create with the technology. That's what makes H.264 lack of openness dangerous in a way that goes beyond just a little money.
One, H.264 is an open standard, where "open" needs to be read in the context of standards, and none of the other are (though they are "open" in other senses of the word)
That's wrong. Bright wrote:
That distinction has nothing to do with "open"; H.264 is a formal standard, like JPEG and C++. The opposite of that is a de facto standard.
H.264 is a proprietary standard because what it standardizes is owned by some companies and you have to pay them. That is the opposite of an open standard, which anybody can implement without paying anything. C++ is an open standard, H.264 is a proprietary standard, and JPEG was unclear until the patents expired.
People quickly realized that open standards were a good thing. As a consequence, some companies started to hijack the term for their own proprietary standards with hand-waving and hair-raising arguments. MPEGLA and Sun were some of the biggest corruptors of the term.
Then Europe will send over its vast and powerful army to the US, conquer it, and finally bring democracy to its... er... colonies.
Somebody doesn't understand how the US legal system works:
Subpoenas get issues by courts, so there is a "judicial enquiry" and judicial oversight. And there is a potentially illegal act, namely the release of classified information; the prosecutor had to convince the judge of that. The order was by a US court to a US company. Furthermore, the individuals targeted were informed and given an opportunity to object.
In Europe, police would be able to get this information without any judicial oversight, without anybody being informed, and without anybody being able to object.
The complaints by these MEP are unfounded and apparently just being made to score political points; beating up on America is a politically successful strategy in Europe.
That's not the right question. The right question is, do they want it changed if so many of them die in the process?
"How many?" Probably far fewer Iraqis are dead today because of US intervention than would have been otherwise.
To figure out if they really wanted it, you'd need a proper poll, with a properly asked question
So you are saying that military action to liberate people from a brutal oppressor shouldn't happen unless one can hold a "proper poll" to ask for their permission? Or what? What about all the people that are threatened by their government?
I am a mathematician by profession,
Yeah, mathematicians tend to like C++. They also tend to be pretty poor at building good abstractions, which is probably why they aren't bothered so much by the type system limitations of C++.
Either way, none of the anti-trust actions had any significant effects on either the market at large or Apple specifically. You have some very strange notions of computing industry history.
I lived through that history; you're wrong.
Common Lisp declarations for type and optimization are part of the ANSI standard, and generally do the same thing across different compilers.
I was a CommonLisp user for many years and that's not true. CommonLisp had a lot of potential, but it never quite got it right.
It's just too bad that democratic politicians aren't also nervous about wasting tax payer dollars on proprietary software, becoming dependent on the capricious whims of software companies, and become concerned about backdoors in their software.
Perhaps this difference in nervousness can be explained by the fact that democratic politicians are more susceptible to the financial and political pressures of corporations, while autocrats don't have to give a damn?
In any case, the whole article sounds like a smear campaign, trying to associate open source software with communism and "autocrats"; in fact, a number of democracies have also seen the light on open source software and also mandated its use there.
Except that the Iraqi people didn't consent to paying the price. They weren't even asked if they want to.
It's kind of the hallmark of totalitarian societies that you can't ask their citizens whether they want their government changed.
But we can ask them after the fact. Have you? I have, and while they didn't like the way the war went down, they seemed relieved that Saddam was gone and that Iraq had a chance at a better future.
You can program using Python syntax and semantics in Lisp thanks to the CLPython implementation,
Great! That lets you combine the poor libraries of CommonLisp with the syntactic limitations of Python.
The performance is comparable to using C libraries,
It is possible to get C-like performance out of a CommonLisp compiler, but you have to jump through hoops to do it, and the necessary declarations are different from compiler to compiler (and sometimes even between versions).
But numerous C++ programming techniques (mainly template mechanism) makes it much easier to program.
Efficient template-based algorithm and data structures often become extremely complex to implement and modify, condemning many users to just instantiating existing classes and algorithms. Even then, they are affected by poor error messages and debugging difficulties. In addition, you cannot be certain that your reusable algorithms actually are efficient (small constants, not just low complexity) if you compose them from templates.
Or you could use inheritance but will pay the cost at runtime.
Actually, not true. Some compilers perform global program analysis and will give you template-like efficiency with inheritance-like simplicity. And JIT compilers perform inlining and optimization on the fly, giving you template-like efficiency even for dynamically composed data structures.
In the end, when performance really matters, you have to drill down deep no matter what and can't rely on any automated mechanism, whether it's C++ templates or JITs. And when performance isn't quite so critical, there are many alternatives to C++ templates that work at least as well and are less hassle.
I couldn't live without static typing,
If you do professional software development, you write unit tests; with unit tests, the issue of static vs. dynamic typing pretty much goes away. If you do rapid development or prototyping, then static type systems frequently get in the way; the amount of time you save in hunting down type errors is made up for by the complexities of trying to work around limitations of the static type system (static type systems often hinder design in ways that the designers don't even notice).
While there are reasons to use static type systems, and even C++, those tend not to be related to static typing and its supposed benefits itself, but rather to things like good code generation or ability to interface easily with other statically typed languages.
We're talking about language standards here, not what specific compilers do. Current C++ support for Unicode and wide character sets is totally broken and unusable.
It looks like C++0x tries to improve things, but it's too little too late, since we now have a mess of incompatible, vendor-specific solutions in place, and since almost no third party libraries support it. In addition, C++0x waffles on its support, so that there are now a handful of different, incompatible character types to choose from, pretty much guaranteeing massive incompatibilities.
It will take years before the dust settles over Unicode strings in C++ (if it ever does), and that's too late for something as fundamental as decent string support.
Broken Unicode support in C++ was the last straw for my company and the reason we basically don't use the language anymore for new projects.
There are many uses of literal Unicode strings besides showing them to users.
C++ jumped the shark some time in the early 90's; it's been going downhill ever since, becoming more and more bizarre and bloated.
Can you please cite which specific anti-trust law enforcement was the only reason Apple has "a market to sell to"?
Geez, look for the anti-trust enforcement against IBM and Microsoft. There are volumes upon volumes describing its origins and its consequences.
You just don't buy Apple products.
And then you have to live with not having access to a whole variety of services that are available nowhere else. That circumstance makes Apple a potential and legitimate target for anti-trust enforcement, just like Microsoft and IBM before it.
After the two world wars, in both cases the US entered from a position of originally not wanting to get involved in foreign conflicts, the US went to Vietnam, the debarkle that was Iran/Iraq, Central America, Libya, Iraq again twice. Oh and Isreal.
Vietnam was the aftermath of French colonialism, Iran, Iraq, and Israel were messes left by the British, and Libya by Italy. The US had to try to deal with these messes because Europe was in shambles and incapable of doing so itself after WWII.
I'm not saying Saddam Hussien was a good man, I just think the evil fuckwit puppeteers of Bush are worse. Certainly responsible for far more innocent deaths in the name of a buck.
Bush was a liar and a sleazeball. But Saddam killed half a million people in the decade before the US came; in the same period since then, far fewer people have died, and most of them have been internal Iraqi violence.
At the moment, yes Chinese growth would stagnate, but not for much longer. The middle class is growing. If they were to insist on balancing trade, the US would be bankrupt. Does your assessment of debt include balance of trade figures?
Are you kidding? The US would love to balance trade; it's the Chinese and Europeans who are insisting on the current system.
Balancing trade would mean reducing European exports to the US and increasing US exports to Europe. What do you think that would do to European and US jobs, respectively? Balancing US trade would also mean devaluing the US dollar, I'd guess to about $2-3/Euro (the two are inextricably linked). Since US foreign debt is largely in US dollars, that would wipe out half of US foreign debt. It would also wipe out a large part of Europe's foreign account holdings--retirement funds and all. From the narrow, short-term interests of the US, balancing its trade and devaluing the dollar are very attractive: get rid of unemployment and wipe out a large part of the debt.
What isn't attractive is that other economies would likely collapse and may even become politically unstable as people see their savings and retirement benefits wiped out.
The US trade deficit isn't an expression of US profligacy; rather, it is what the US does in order to keep the world economy chugging along.
It's been 70 years since WWII and Europe needs to start fending for itself again, militarily and economically, rather than leaving the dirty work to the US, handing themselves large government benefits, and patting themselves on the back for how wonderful they are. The current system isn't sustainable, and Americans are really getting tired of the negative consequences it has for the US.
but then for someone who sucks up the propaganda it might be hard to objectively determine what is ignorance...
Yeah, you obviously have been blindly sucking up propaganda instead of thinking things through for yourself. Use your head, man.
China traditionally has an inward looking defence strategy and does not invade unless it sees the territory it is invading as part of China (Taiwan) or as a direct threat to it's own stability (Tibet)
Yes, after subjugating much of Asia, they stopped; they couldn't have run any bigger empire than that. They got their asses kicked by the British in the 19th century and have been in turmoil ever since.
The US on the other hand has a long history of criminal activity all over the world for the sake of fleecing American taxpayers for the profit of a few large companies. Which is more dangerous?
For most of the 20th century, US military action was focused on keeping Europe free, keeping the USSR from taking over the world, and clearning up some of the messes that European colonialism caused. Sorry, I don't see anything "criminal about that.
The United States economy is only the biggest economy thanks to smoke and mirrors.
And that statement is based on... what? The US has much lower debt (per capita, %GDP), higher per capita GDP, and faster growth than Europe. And without US importing like it does, European economies would collapse and Chinese growth would stagnate.
The US has such an enormous population of whack jobs who believe propaganda, be it religious or political, in ignorance of objectivity or reason that I fear a bankrupt US would be the most likely to use them out of spite.
I've spent many years in Europe. Let me tell you: Europeans are much more ignorant of history, economics, and politics than Americans. France, Germany, and the UK are xenophobic and their political systems are tearing themselves up between communists, socialists, theocrats, and ultra right-wingers. Worry about Europe, not the US.
How so? Apple was established quite independently of IBM and Microsoft, and had nothing to do with anti-trust litigation against those companies. Are you just making stuff up here?
Apple only had a market to sell to because anti-trust enforcement created the market. And their offenses? Tying of hardware and software sales, and attempts to control distribution channels--just like Apple is doing now.
And how does Apple deny them that choice? Apple products are available to buy at the purchaser's discretion. There is nothing forcing people to buy them.
Many apps are only available for iOS; it is becoming increasingly difficult to avoid iOS.
In addition, in many places, there are interoperability requirements on operating system providers; Apple may be violating them.
My only hope is the the Australian Government has the balls and brains to stop sucking up to the falling empire. How is it in our interests to be good friends with a country with no real economic power who has pissed off every other country in our region?
You're totally out of touch with reality. The US has the biggest economy in the world by far. And this "failing empire" is what keeps Australia, Japan, and Europe relatively free, because without the US military and the US nuclear deterrent, China, Russia, and the Middle Eastern nations would be asserting themselves.
Is this grand jury also investigating any of the major news outlets publishing information from these leaks?
I doubt it. Why should they? What are you getting at? What difference does it make?
I agree. EU is not much better. They're learning from the best it seems ;)
You know, I really wonder what's going on in the heads of people like you. Do you know anything about European history in the 20th century? Dictatorships, civil wars, genocides, totalitarian regimes, police states, religious discrimination, colonialism? And, I'm not even talking of the Nazis--they were in a category all of their own.
There is no evidence yet that Wikileaks have broken any laws,
There is enough evidence for a grand jury and a judge to approve proceeding. You do know what a grand jury is?
yet people in their network is being treated as criminals.
They are not being "treated as criminals"; a grand jury and a judge have looked at the facts and decided to give a limited amount of information to a prosecutor for building his case against Assange.
I agree. EU is not much better.
In fact, the EU is so much worse that it is in a category by itself: many of the safeguards that exist in the US (grand jury, judicial review, notification, ability to object, few data retention requirements) do not exist at all in Europe. In Europe, police get this data secretly and routinely without anybody ever finding out about it.
They're learning from the best it seems ;)
The EU has always had far fewer safeguards against abuse of police powers.
But some other poster mentioned, just because it's in the law, then it's acceptable.
You still haven't explained what you consider "unacceptable" about this. This is standard investigative procedure, with the only difference being that in the US, it's actually public and has tons more safeguards. Do you seriously think European police and prosecutors haven't already looked at all the records they can get on Assange?