Have you ever lived in the US for a longer time? German CSU extremist could easaly pass a Democrats there. The whole political spectrum in the states is far more right.
Tell me a name of any prominent CDU/CSU guy who didn't at least give lip service to protecting the environment.
Didn't mean to misrepresent the American people in my earlier posting. I have very strong sympathies for Americans, who I think are indeed (exceptions on individual basis non-withstanding) an extraordinarily friendly and supportive people.
Yet, this does not necessarily translate to foreign politics mirroring these characteristics. The only explanation that I have for this is that there is a break-down of the democratic feedback loop when it comes to foreign policy.
I think that since WWII the quality of American foreign policies decreased at an alarming rate. From my point of view there is one major culprit: The quality of American media. If you compare it to the Pre-WWII and WWII times it is now at the utmost low. American journalism used to be a beacon for the free world. Nowadays it'll doesn't even qualify as joke because it's just too sad an affair.
I find it interesting that if you conduct studies in Muslim countries even there a large majority of people draw a clear distinction between Americans and the politics of the US (this finding is quite astounding given that they are certainly exposed to an extreme media bias). It goes without saying that this distinction does not carry over to extremist fringes. But even Osama himself apparently felt the need to justify the attacks on civilians in saying that the US taxpayer's dollars go into the funding of Israel and military oppression.
It is indeed telling that North Korea does not seemed to be bothered in the least that the EU stopped funding a substantial relief program after they announced to reinitiate the work on their nuclear facilities. In this case the reason is quite simple: North Korea was included in "the axis of evil" next to Iraq. The US did not sign a treaty that guarantees that North Korea won't be attacked. The US military is the only military force in this region that North Korea has to be afraid of. Iraq will be attacked. They are very afraid now. Being paranoid and afraid is the hallmark of this regime. But every psychologist will tell you that a paranoia follows a certain logic. If Bush did not include them in his "axis of evil" speech the world would be a safer place now. Politicians have to watch their words carefully. It looks to me as this is a completely alien concept to the people that make up the current US administration.
To wrap this up I am totally with you: "There is more than one way to run a country, and what is right for one, is not right for the other." Funny thing is (I do not make this up) that I just read somebody saying the very same thing in an interview. A Muslim fundamentalist who currently seeks political asylum in Norway. He is on the US terrorist suspect list, but he made a very plausible case that he doesn't care how people live in the US or Europe but that he wants to see a Muslim fundamentalist regime in power in his own country.
P.S.: Skipped the health care bit, because this comment has to come to an end eventually. Just one tidbit: I have a private health insurance at a reasonable cost. Me and my wife plan to return to the states and I would like to keep it (the rational is: Since my parents and my sister a doctors I'd rather seek medical treatment back home in case some serious ill befalls me). What really upsets me is that I could go anywhere but the states without having to pay more. In the states I will have to pay a significant higher amount to keep my insurance than in any other country in the world. The costs for medical treatments in the US are just so much higher than anywhere else. Can't tell you how much that annoys me.
P.P.S.: Won't be going into the American race issue, although I think you should keep in mind that many things that people love about America outside America (especially music) wouldn't be there without African Americans. A colleague told me once that he can't stand the stuffy British English accent, he thought American pronunciation sounds so much better, but only the African American pronunciation he believed to be truly cool. Does affirmative action work and is it justified? I have no clue. What I know, and there I think we are in perfect agreement, is that racism breeds racism and as such the racism of African Americans towards "Caucasians" is reactionary in every sense of the word.
Thank you for this link. That was truely informative. Of course you can read it more than one way. After all Blix also said:
"While the inspection is not built on the premise of confidence, but may lead to confidence if it is successful, there must nevertheless be a measure of mutual confidence from the very beginning in running the operation of inspection. Iraq has, on the whole, cooperated rather well so far with UNMOVIC in this field.
The most important point to make is that access has been provided to all sites we have wanted to inspect. And with one exception, it has been [without] problems. We have further had a great help in building up the infrastructure of our office in Baghdad and the field office in Mosul. Arrangements and services for our plane and our helicopters have been good.
"The environment has been workable. Our inspections have included universities, military bases, presidential sites and private residences. Inspections have also taken place on Fridays, the Muslim day of rest, on Christmas Day and New Year's Day. These inspections have been conducted in the same manner as all other inspections. We seek to be both effective and correct."
There is no doubt that this level of cooperation stems solely from the military pressure on Iraq and I very much welcome this pressure. Yet, reading this transcript just reaffirms my earlier assumption that half a year more patience could truely help the cause.
Please provide me with a link that quotes Blix or an IAEA official stating that Iraq has been obstructive the last couple of months.
It still very much looks to me as if the inspectors could get a handle on this.
If the states were willing to dig in untill fall I'd bet that many countries were inclined to help them finance the operating cost of keeping so many troops stationed on Iraq's borders. Half a year more patience would send a strong message, that this is not about oil nor retribution but about international justice. (On a side note: By than the Venezuela strike will hopefully be over making this whole endavour less risky for the world economy).
Can't tell you how much I wished that Saddam would have been taken out 1991. Unfortunately history never repeats. This Gulf war will operate in a very different environment.
There are a lot of good reason to not oppose the coming war, mainly because the removal of Saddam is a noble goal (best summarized here).
Yet, the current administration and Blair for all their combined talents did not motivate this well enough. If the majority of Europeans (not talking governments here but polls) think that this is about Oil, the Muslim media (most of them government controlled) will never buy into it.
That is why many European governments take the stance that more patience could very well pay off. It's not like only many Europeans see it that way, some former CIA analysts put together this open letter to Bush very much advising the same.
The UN is by its very design a fragile entity with one simple objective: Keep the status quo, try to make open war on a world wide scale impossible. Its design as a result of the collective experience of the death toll of WWII. This framework worked pretty well for a very long time. To scrap it just to hasten to get Saddam removed is ill conceived. The UN will have to become something else over time or perish, but such processes take a long time and have to be managed carefully. It'll take many little steps and compromises. The EU process has shown how different countries can merge to something bigger and better. In essence such a process could serve as a template to truely unite all civilized countries.
I lived in the states and I lived (mostly) in Germany (for my wife it's the other way around).
I do nor share you view regarding our politics. The EU is an achievement of many generations of European politicians. The economic integration has worked for a long time, even the euro seems to do just fine, there are no borders any longer, a EU constitution is on the horizon, and if Rumsfeld continues his rants we will have a EU army much quicker than I anticipated.
Please do not confuse communism with socialism or social-democracy. The latter is about well balanced welfare, and this balance will continuously have to be adjusted. In an open society these adjustments are always a political struggle and cause some friction and bad press. The welfare societies have managed for more than half a century. The concept as such is deeply ingrained in Europe, well across the political spectrum. In fact what qualifies as conservative in my country would be considered a die heart liberal in the states.
I always wondered about this differences. The only explanation that I came up with is somewhat sad: Americans don't like the idea that their tax money goes to support other American's in need, because in an country of such diverse ethnic mix the solidarity between the citizens is just way lower than in older more homogeneous nation states.
Same logic applies to North Korea. Cease Fire for an even longer time but no peace treaty. The fact that this is so and that they were located on the axis of evil is what makes them so aggravated lately. I regard them as a much greater threat to world peace then Saddam these days.
From my point of view I can still not see how exactly Iraq is in violation of the terms of the cease fire and 1441. The inspectors are on the ground and the cooperation is probably as good as it gets in a 3rd world country like Iraq. Saddam was dangerous in 1991 I don't see that he is anymore.
I admit that he's an awful bastard and if there ever was a case for assassination, Saddam is it's poster boy. Yet, I have not heard any arguments that justfy a war that will kill many innocent civilians and enrage the Muslim world.
You may want to read this "reoslution" again. It does not sanction a pre-emptive war. Actually the UN charta explicitly states that military action against another country is only in accordance with international law if either world peace is at stake or your country has been attacked by the other country. On both accounts I do not see how Iraq qualifies.
Introducing the concept of a pre-emptive war is ludicrous. Already North Korea entertains the idea to start their own.
Afganistan was borderline, there has been no internationally accepted government, but Iraq is a whole different story. It will send a strong signal to the world that we left the stable post WWII area. Now it's a free-for-all, may the militarily fittest one survive.
This looks like this administration is just using the Iraq conflict as a pre-text to push yet another hidden agenda.
We already have Echolon it is not like the US does not have a history of spying on their allies. These days it is also easy to have your nation's standing with the US reversed at breathtaking speed. Rumsfeld just compared Germany with Lybia and Kuba (at a time when German special forces fight alongside US troops in Afghanistan!).
Be not mistaken: This policy is not about Iraq, it is about the 1st world rest of us.
I think at this point it is really a matter of tast. I simply hate the candy default look of XP. Guess you could change the look and feel but certainly not to the degree as in KDE or Gnome. Fortunatelly I don't have to bother. I use Windows 2000 at work and it is fairly OK. At home I only run Linux. Sometimes with KDE sometimes with Afterstep. Can't say that I am truely missing anything MS at home.
Can not remember a single incident of fraud. It'll be pretty tricky, at the ballot you need the registration postcard as well as your ID (I guess the only US equivalent to our federal ID is a US passport).
There was a minor scandal at the last election when somebody tried to action of his vote on ebay i.e. he'd vote for whatever party the highest bidder wants him to. Our attorney general put an end to this folly rather quickly.
Bush is betting the world economy on taking out Saddam without setting the middle east aflame. This is more than doing a lot of stuff wrong. This is lunacy.
Well, I don't want this to sound all patronizing and arrogant, but this sorry state of affaires is truly unworthy for such a great country.
When I move within my country I am required to register with the city administration which in turn will send me a postcard well in advance of any election. I can return this postcard if I want to get a ballot to cast my vote in absence or I take it to the ballot on election day.
Our turn out is usually between 70% to 90% depending on the kind of election.
But let's just assume that Gates was to run. I have hated M$ for almost as long as I encountered their first product. And I am sick to you have to wittnes their stron-arm tactics over and over again.
Yet, given the track record of the current administration a Gates lead government couldn't be worse.
Unfortunately as was already pointed out in another reply the USA have a very bad track record when it comes to nation building. Correct me if I am wrong, but wasn't the last time it worked post-WWII Germany? And there you were able to count on some surviving democrats from the 1st German republic.
The 1st Gulf war offered a golden opportunity to remove Saddam from power. You can not recreate this historic opportunity. The former rebel fractions have not forgotten that the USA abandoned them after they were made to believe that the US force were to assist their struggle.
The strong anti-American sentiments of the vast majority of Arabs stems from how the US handles or rather doesn't handle the Palestine/Israel conflict. US forces would have been regarded as liberators (at least by a large percentage of Iraqi people) if they had occupied Iraq in the 1st Gulf war. This time around this is very unlikely to happen.
It looks like Bush jr. will move in. I think it will be a disaster. I desperatly hope that I am wrong.
If companies do not aggressively enforce their trademark they run the risk of loosing it.
That is why we have to witness appalling things like this over and over again.
If the trademark laws were a little bit less restive in this area, companies would not behave like school-yard bullies all the time. Then again observing M$ success most companies executives probably already concluded that this is just the way to success.
Alan's radical prognosis was very much a forward looking statement. China is a future power to reckon with I just hope that they will find their own path towards democratic structures without further blood shed. I also hope that the IP pendelum will swing back before it causes too much harm to the people inside and outside the US.
Currently I live in Germany before that for a couple of years in Rochester, NY just across from Canada.
I highly recommend Canada, for my wife (she's American) and me (I am German) it is the perfect blend between European and American culture. To me the people feel roughly European:) Also an older colleague of mine (Ph.D. in physics - must be in his late 50s now) migrated from the US to Canada about ten years ago and told me that he never regretted it once.
My wife and I also really like the south of France, Montpellier especially (lot's of High Tec jobs there) and of course Spain, but my wife really struggles with French and I can not role an R from the tip of the tongue (as required in Italian and Spanish ) to save my live. So the south of Europe does not make for a good destination for us.
Can't say much about Australia other than that a Russian guy who graduated with me the same year in Rochester considered it to be the perfect country, but I don't know if he lived anywhere for a longer stretch of time than Russia and the states.
Haven't checked out New Zealand yet, but I think it could be a top candidate.
I guess it's bad style to start an email with a disclaimer, yet here it is: I haven't made up my mind on hate laws as they are implemented in Germany and France.
Just like to point out, that they are not about what you feel and think, but rather where and how you express certain feelings and thoughts i.e. in Germany it is a crime to publicly indorse a capital crime like murder or to pretend that they never happened (e.g. Auschwitz).
The idea behind this kind of law is that - while in general any public expression of opinion is constitutionally protected - there are instances in which the people have to be concerned about what you express in public because it may cause future harm.
Hate can be infectious and some (democratically elected) governments wanted to make sure that certain expressions of hate can not be circulated especially to make sure that "impressionable youth" are not getting "infected" by it.
Now that I think about it, this concern looks rather silly, our societies should be mature enough to not need this kind of "parental governance", but it's what people voted for.
Think of it that way: A society has to be pretty mature i.e. comprised by very responsible people in order to allow everybody to say what they want and carry guns.
The legislature in Germany and France expresses a distrust that our societies have this level of maturity and this distrust is endorsed by the majority of the electorate.
Shouldn't waste time feeding trolls, especially since I have to be off to a meeting, so do your own research. All charges against the German guy this BBC article is refering to have been dropped. He did not see a single day in jail. All he had to do was show up to court.
I admit a very embarressing scene for the German judicial system (you can read all about it in the CT magzine http://www.heise.de/ct that is if you happen to speak German).
Slashdot Mirror
Have you ever lived in the US for a longer time? German CSU extremist could easaly pass a Democrats there. The whole political spectrum in the states is far more right.
Tell me a name of any prominent CDU/CSU guy who didn't at least give lip service to protecting the environment.
Didn't mean to misrepresent the American people in my earlier posting. I have very strong sympathies for Americans, who I think are indeed (exceptions on individual basis non-withstanding) an extraordinarily friendly and supportive people.
Yet, this does not necessarily translate to foreign politics mirroring these characteristics. The only explanation that I have for this is that there is a break-down of the democratic feedback loop when it comes to foreign policy.
I think that since WWII the quality of American foreign policies decreased at an alarming rate. From my point of view there is one major culprit: The quality of American media. If you compare it to the Pre-WWII and WWII times it is now at the utmost low. American journalism used to be a beacon for the free world. Nowadays it'll doesn't even qualify as joke because it's just too sad an affair.
I find it interesting that if you conduct studies in Muslim countries even there a large majority of people draw a clear distinction between Americans and the politics of the US (this finding is quite astounding given that they are certainly exposed to an extreme media bias). It goes without saying that this distinction does not carry over to extremist fringes. But even Osama himself apparently felt the need to justify the attacks on civilians in saying that the US taxpayer's dollars go into the funding of Israel and military oppression.
It is indeed telling that North Korea does not seemed to be bothered in the least that the EU stopped funding a substantial relief program after they announced to reinitiate the work on their nuclear facilities. In this case the reason is quite simple: North Korea was included in "the axis of evil" next to Iraq. The US did not sign a treaty that guarantees that North Korea won't be attacked. The US military is the only military force in this region that North Korea has to be afraid of. Iraq will be attacked. They are very afraid now. Being paranoid and afraid is the hallmark of this regime. But every psychologist will tell you that a paranoia follows a certain logic. If Bush did not include them in his "axis of evil" speech the world would be a safer place now. Politicians have to watch their words carefully. It looks to me as this is a completely alien concept to the people that make up the current US administration.
To wrap this up I am totally with you: "There is more than one way to run a country, and what is right for one, is not right for the other." Funny thing is (I do not make this up) that I just read somebody saying the very same thing in an interview. A Muslim fundamentalist who currently seeks political asylum in Norway. He is on the US terrorist suspect list, but he made a very plausible case that he doesn't care how people live in the US or Europe but that he wants to see a Muslim fundamentalist regime in power in his own country.
P.S.: Skipped the health care bit, because this comment has to come to an end eventually. Just one tidbit: I have a private health insurance at a reasonable cost. Me and my wife plan to return to the states and I would like to keep it (the rational is: Since my parents and my sister a doctors I'd rather seek medical treatment back home in case some serious ill befalls me). What really upsets me is that I could go anywhere but the states without having to pay more. In the states I will have to pay a significant higher amount to keep my insurance than in any other country in the world. The costs for medical treatments in the US are just so much higher than anywhere else. Can't tell you how much that annoys me.
P.P.S.: Won't be going into the American race issue, although I think you should keep in mind that many things that people love about America outside America (especially music) wouldn't be there without African Americans. A colleague told me once that he can't stand the stuffy British English accent, he thought American pronunciation sounds so much better, but only the African American pronunciation he believed to be truly cool. Does affirmative action work and is it justified? I have no clue. What I know, and there I think we are in perfect agreement, is that racism breeds racism and as such the racism of African Americans towards "Caucasians" is reactionary in every sense of the word.
Thank you for this link. That was truely informative. Of course you can read it more than one way. After all Blix also said:
"While the inspection is not built on the premise of confidence, but may lead to confidence if it is successful, there must nevertheless be a measure of mutual confidence from the very beginning in running the operation of inspection. Iraq has, on the whole, cooperated rather well so far with UNMOVIC in this field.
The most important point to make is that access has been provided to all sites we have wanted to inspect. And with one exception, it has been [without] problems. We have further had a great help in building up the infrastructure of our office in Baghdad and the field office in Mosul. Arrangements and services for our plane and our helicopters have been good.
"The environment has been workable. Our inspections have included universities, military bases, presidential sites and private residences. Inspections have also taken place on Fridays, the Muslim day of rest, on Christmas Day and New Year's Day. These inspections have been conducted in the same manner as all other inspections. We seek to be both effective and correct."
There is no doubt that this level of cooperation stems solely from the military pressure on Iraq and I very much welcome this pressure. Yet, reading this transcript just reaffirms my earlier assumption that half a year more patience could truely help the cause.
Please provide me with a link that quotes Blix or an IAEA official stating that Iraq has been obstructive the last couple of months.
It still very much looks to me as if the inspectors could get a handle on this.
If the states were willing to dig in untill fall I'd bet that many countries were inclined to help them finance the operating cost of keeping so many troops stationed on Iraq's borders. Half a year more patience would send a strong message, that this is not about oil nor retribution but about international justice. (On a side note: By than the Venezuela strike will hopefully be over making this whole endavour less risky for the world economy).
Can't tell you how much I wished that Saddam would have been taken out 1991. Unfortunately history never repeats. This Gulf war will operate in a very different environment.
There are a lot of good reason to not oppose the coming war, mainly because the removal of Saddam is a noble goal (best summarized here).
Yet, the current administration and Blair for all their combined talents did not motivate this well enough. If the majority of Europeans (not talking governments here but polls) think that this is about Oil, the Muslim media (most of them government controlled) will never buy into it.
That is why many European governments take the stance that more patience could very well pay off. It's not like only many Europeans see it that way, some former CIA analysts put together this open letter to Bush very much advising the same.
The UN is by its very design a fragile entity with one simple objective: Keep the status quo, try to make open war on a world wide scale impossible. Its design as a result of the collective experience of the death toll of WWII. This framework worked pretty well for a very long time. To scrap it just to hasten to get Saddam removed is ill conceived. The UN will have to become something else over time or perish, but such processes take a long time and have to be managed carefully. It'll take many little steps and compromises. The EU process has shown how different countries can merge to something bigger and better. In essence such a process could serve as a template to truely unite all civilized countries.
I lived in the states and I lived (mostly) in Germany (for my wife it's the other way around).
I do nor share you view regarding our politics. The EU is an achievement of many generations of European politicians. The economic integration has worked for a long time, even the euro seems to do just fine, there are no borders any longer, a EU constitution is on the horizon, and if Rumsfeld continues his rants we will have a EU army much quicker than I anticipated.
Please do not confuse communism with socialism or social-democracy. The latter is about well balanced welfare, and this balance will continuously have to be adjusted. In an open society these adjustments are always a political struggle and cause some friction and bad press. The welfare societies have managed for more than half a century. The concept as such is deeply ingrained in Europe, well across the political spectrum. In fact what qualifies as conservative in my country would be considered a die heart liberal in the states.
I always wondered about this differences. The only explanation that I came up with is somewhat sad: Americans don't like the idea that their tax money goes to support other American's in need, because in an country of such diverse ethnic mix the solidarity between the citizens is just way lower than in older more homogeneous nation states.
Same logic applies to North Korea. Cease Fire for an even longer time but no peace treaty. The fact that this is so and that they were located on the axis of evil is what makes them so aggravated lately. I regard them as a much greater threat to world peace then Saddam these days.
From my point of view I can still not see how exactly Iraq is in violation of the terms of the cease fire and 1441. The inspectors are on the ground and the cooperation is probably as good as it gets in a 3rd world country like Iraq. Saddam was dangerous in 1991 I don't see that he is anymore.
I admit that he's an awful bastard and if there ever was a case for assassination, Saddam is it's poster boy. Yet, I have not heard any arguments that justfy a war that will kill many innocent civilians and enrage the Muslim world.
You may want to read this "reoslution" again. It does not sanction a pre-emptive war. Actually the UN charta explicitly states that military action against another country is only in accordance with international law if either world peace is at stake or your country has been attacked by the other country. On both accounts I do not see how Iraq qualifies.
Introducing the concept of a pre-emptive war is ludicrous. Already North Korea entertains the idea to start their own.
Afganistan was borderline, there has been no internationally accepted government, but Iraq is a whole different story. It will send a strong signal to the world that we left the stable post WWII area. Now it's a free-for-all, may the militarily fittest one survive.
This looks like this administration is just using the Iraq conflict as a pre-text to push yet another hidden agenda.
We already have Echolon it is not like the US does not have a history of spying on their allies. These days it is also easy to have your nation's standing with the US reversed at breathtaking speed. Rumsfeld just compared Germany with Lybia and Kuba (at a time when German special forces fight alongside US troops in Afghanistan!).
Be not mistaken: This policy is not about Iraq, it is about the 1st world rest of us.
Good to know. Eventually I guess I will have to deal with XP. My point was that I don't think that I am missing anything by not working with it.
I think at this point it is really a matter of tast. I simply hate the candy default look of XP. Guess you could change the look and feel but certainly not to the degree as in KDE or Gnome. Fortunatelly I don't have to bother. I use Windows 2000 at work and it is fairly OK. At home I only run Linux. Sometimes with KDE sometimes with Afterstep. Can't say that I am truely missing anything MS at home.
Please do vote that way.
Can not remember a single incident of fraud. It'll be pretty tricky, at the ballot you need the registration postcard as well as your ID (I guess the only US equivalent to our federal ID is a US passport).
There was a minor scandal at the last election when somebody tried to action of his vote on ebay i.e. he'd vote for whatever party the highest bidder wants him to. Our attorney general put an end to this folly rather quickly.
Worse than a president who will start an unprovoked war. How odd ...
Do you seriously believe that with Gore in the Whitehouse America was about to invade Iraq now?
I call this a major difference especially for all the people who will die in this conflict.
Bush is betting the world economy on taking out Saddam without setting the middle east aflame. This is more than doing a lot of stuff wrong. This is lunacy.
Well, I don't want this to sound all patronizing and arrogant, but this sorry state of affaires is truly unworthy for such a great country.
When I move within my country I am required to register with the city administration which in turn will send me a postcard well in advance of any election. I can return this postcard if I want to get a ballot to cast my vote in absence or I take it to the ballot on election day.
Our turn out is usually between 70% to 90% depending on the kind of election.
Don't forget he also founded Pixar. A fantastic success, that brought you Toy Story, Bug's Life and Monster's Inc.
Any venture capital fund would love to have his track record. They usually consider 1 success out of ten failures a good quota.
mod parent up.
He nails exactly what the current US administration looks like to an outsider, couldn't have described it any better.
Of course this whole subject is a joke.
But let's just assume that Gates was to run. I have hated M$ for almost as long as I encountered their first product. And I am sick to you have to wittnes their stron-arm tactics over and over again.
Yet, given the track record of the current administration a Gates lead government couldn't be worse.
Unfortunately as was already pointed out in another reply the USA have a very bad track record when it comes to nation building. Correct me if I am wrong, but wasn't the last time it worked post-WWII Germany? And there you were able to count on some surviving democrats from the 1st German republic.
The 1st Gulf war offered a golden opportunity to remove Saddam from power. You can not recreate this historic opportunity. The former rebel fractions have not forgotten that the USA abandoned them after they were made to believe that the US force were to assist their struggle.
The strong anti-American sentiments of the vast majority of Arabs stems from how the US handles or rather doesn't handle the Palestine/Israel conflict. US forces would have been regarded as liberators (at least by a large percentage of Iraqi people) if they had occupied Iraq in the 1st Gulf war. This time around this is very unlikely to happen.
It looks like Bush jr. will move in. I think it will be a disaster. I desperatly hope that I am wrong.
If companies do not aggressively enforce their trademark they run the risk of loosing it.
That is why we have to witness appalling things like this over and over again.
If the trademark laws were a little bit less restive in this area, companies would not behave like school-yard bullies all the time. Then again observing M$ success most companies executives probably already concluded that this is just the way to success.
Actually that only holds for less qualified Chinese. The trend is already reversing (none Chinese source)
Alan's radical prognosis was very much a forward looking statement. China is a future power to reckon with I just hope that they will find their own path towards democratic structures without further blood shed. I also hope that the IP pendelum will swing back before it causes too much harm to the people inside and outside the US.
Currently I live in Germany before that for a couple of years in Rochester, NY just across from Canada.
:) Also an older colleague of mine (Ph.D. in physics - must be in his late 50s now) migrated from the US to Canada about ten years ago and told me that he never regretted it once.
I highly recommend Canada, for my wife (she's American) and me (I am German) it is the perfect blend between European and American culture. To me the people feel roughly European
My wife and I also really like the south of France, Montpellier especially (lot's of High Tec jobs there) and of course Spain, but my wife really struggles with French and I can not role an R from the tip of the tongue (as required in Italian and Spanish ) to save my live. So the south of Europe does not make for a good destination for us.
Can't say much about Australia other than that a Russian guy who graduated with me the same year in Rochester considered it to be the perfect country, but I don't know if he lived anywhere for a longer stretch of time than Russia and the states.
Haven't checked out New Zealand yet, but I think it could be a top candidate.
I guess it's bad style to start an email with a disclaimer, yet here it is: I haven't made up my mind on hate laws as they are implemented in Germany and France.
Just like to point out, that they are not about what you feel and think, but rather where and how you express certain feelings and thoughts i.e. in Germany it is a crime to publicly indorse a capital crime like murder or to pretend that they never happened (e.g. Auschwitz).
The idea behind this kind of law is that - while in general any public expression of opinion is constitutionally protected - there are instances in which the people have to be concerned about what you express in public because it may cause future harm.
Hate can be infectious and some (democratically elected) governments wanted to make sure that certain expressions of hate can not be circulated especially to make sure that "impressionable youth" are not getting "infected" by it.
Now that I think about it, this concern looks rather silly, our societies should be mature enough to not need this kind of "parental governance", but it's what people voted for.
Think of it that way: A society has to be pretty mature i.e. comprised by very responsible people in order to allow everybody to say what they want and carry guns.
The legislature in Germany and France expresses a distrust that our societies have this level of maturity and this distrust is endorsed by the majority of the electorate.
Shouldn't waste time feeding trolls, especially since I have to be off to a meeting, so do your own research. All charges against the German guy this BBC article is refering to have been dropped. He did not see a single day in jail. All he had to do was show up to court.
I admit a very embarressing scene for the German judicial system (you can read all about it in the CT magzine http://www.heise.de/ct that is if you happen to speak German).