I'm a huge fan of a Melbourne (Australia) 3-piece punk/rock/rockabilly band, and I copied their CDs several times to give them to friends overseas. When I met the lead singer/guitarist of this band at a pub, I told him about it and offered to give him $20 AUD, or at least buy him a drink. He politely declined, and told me he was happier that I was spreading good word-of-mouth for the band.
I've bought enough merch and been to enough concerts that my conscience is fine with giving my mates copies of this band's music - and, having spoken to the other band members of several occasions, they don't mind either - but I got the impression that small-scale copying of CDs isn't a huge deal for relatively-sucessful artists.
Maybe these guys are unusually generous, or maybe they get more dosh from tours than from CD sales, so I can't condone my course of action for _all_ artists... but, hell, if illegally copying one CD leads to one new fan (who would otherwhise not exist, such as in the case of my international friends), isn't that a net win for the band/artist?
What on earth prompted the inclusion of Skaven (rats, basically, for those of you playing at home) as a 'core' race over Orcs? Unless there's been a significant change since I last visited my local GW, Orcs have a far bigger following. For the non-wargamers, this is akin to FIFA 2007 letting you play with Manchester City instead of Manchester United.
I'm not against the idea (of dropping either Orcs or Man U. *grin*), I just find it curious. Won't they have the same problem as with Warhammer 40k: Dawn of War, when all the Imperial Guard players had a sook about not getting to play their army (except as a "Dog of War" in one mission)? Or is the percentage of people buying this game who actually come from the tabletop version so low that it just doesn't matter?
Pareto efficiency seems to be a method for defending the status quo, i.e. we can't make any changes that would make anyone less happy.
Rubbish. Pareto efficiency only defends the status quo, where the status quo is Pareto optimal. It's not about avoiding making anyone less happy, but more about increasing the total sum of happiness.
it (Pareto efficiency) seems to ignore the possiblity that maybe some greedy fuckers deserve to be made a little less happy so the rest of us can be a little more happy.
Only if the amount by which everyone else's happiness increases is greater than the amount by which the individuals happiness decreases. Otherwise the total sum of happiness in the world is decreased.
(this analysis leaves questions of egalitarianism, the transferrance losses, and problems of measurement aside)
If I remember my Duesenberry correctly, people base their happiness not on their standard of living in absolute terms, but instead in comparison with their peer group. It doesn't matter that they have much higher life expectancy, less disease, or leisure their forebearers could only dream of, relative status is measured by - amongst other things - possessions.
Conspicious consumption is a means of broadcasting to your peer group that yes, you can afford this item, and oh, if they can't, that's allright - you're obviously just a little better off than them. The increased relative standing makes you happy, and everyone else unhappy.. up until the point where everyone has gaudy item #1. Then the cycle repeats (does anyone excitedly clamour to go next door to watch colour television any more? No, but perhaps to check out the home theatre system..).
When your resources start to deviate significantly from the mean, the set of items you can buy that will impress your peer group necessarily shrink. Ipod Nano? Yeah, well mine's diamond encrusted, with a hot grits dispenser and a Natalie Portman background. The gaudier and less useful the item is, the more it says 'I have so much money that I can afford to waste it on things like this, because I am better than you.'
The reason, I suspect, that the conspicious consumption of celebrities has such an effect is precisely because they are celebrities. Their lives are well-documented, so you have a sort of one-way peer group thing going on: we compare ourselves to them, but they don't compare themselves to us.
And that, artifex, is why people strive for the gaudiest, most expensive and wasteful things they can('t) afford:-)
You are kidding, right? Who do you think buys the crap manufactured pop acts puts out? It isn't the discerning 20-something, no; it's the 14-year old teenybopper with "pester power". Young children and teenagers have an incredible amount of control over purchasing decision, even if they don't make the purchases themselves.
Who buys those god-awful ringtones and associated bollocks for their mobiles? Who racks up (their parents') phone bills voting on reality shows? Who floods in to the formulaic summer movies every year? It's not the post-teens, no-sirree. It's the teens with their young, malleable minds that are open to simple suggestive techniques and mass marketing - as applied by CD and Movie distributors.
A valid point in relation to the article would be that the owners of most shops are anti-teenager, because teens don't frequent Bob's Bait Store or Tyrone's Kitchen Emporium with any intent to buy. But CD's and movies? No way.
Vast minority - not an oxymoron; simply indicates that the minority is a minority by a vast amount. 49% vs 51% is a minority. 0.001% vs 99.999% is a vast minority. Jeez.
Virtually everyone At the risk of repeating myself, consider the target audience of the ad. Now consider the target audience of the porn site. Do they overlap? Maybe - but at an incredibly small level; remember it was only BigPond customers that were affected.
Best Interests - It is clearly in the best interests of the ad's viewers to be redirected; this is, I think, indisputable. It against the interest of porn viewers to be directed away from the site; however, they were still able to access the site by clicking a link on the redirect page; 3 seconds hassle.
So when you weigh up on one side, (Lots-of-good x lots-of-people) + Exceptional Circumstances vs (little hassle x very few people) + Possible Precedent, I don't think the scales are going to fall in favour of the totalitarianist viewpoint.
The Age newspaper reports that Telstra/BigPond lodged the complaint primarily so "to enable it to advise web-content filtering providers about the site's content and to have it blocked for customers who subscirbed to filtering services. Because the site is R-rated, instead of X-rated, and hosted in the United States, it cannot be taken down or blocked."
Egg on Telstra's face & damage limitation, that's all I'm drawing from this at the moment.
Considering the target audience of the Idol shows (young children to teenagers mostly), many would argue that BigPond were acting in virtually everyone's* best interests by re-directing traffic.
Sure, there may have been a handful of people denied their man-porn for a few hours, but they will have been in the vast minority. These were exceptional circumstances, and seeing this as a step towards BigBrother-dom is overreacting IMO.
Basically BigPond stopped little kiddies from being exposed to pr0n (as well as saving their own faces, see my earlier post), which is Good Thing (TM); though one could debate the relative qualities of what they viewed instead:->
*Casey Donovan (the man)'s estate excluded, perhaps
It's worth noting that the incorrect URL was published in an advertisement run by telecommunications giant Telsta, who, as well as being an Idol sponsor, also own BigPond.
Hence it's less suprising that the ISP arm of their company reacts to minimise the damage, rather than an independent ISP doing this out of goodwill.
But they can; everyone's heard statistics be rubbished, but anybody with any sort of analytical backround will tell you it's all contextual. Statistics can quite cleary prove (correct) things, but they can also quite easy "prove" incorrect things if the people reading them aren't using their noggins.
It's like the different plenty of other posts have talked about between causation and correlation; simply because bad statistician (or politicians) have twisted facts and figures in the past to mislead people, don't mean those same facts and figures can't be used to draw correct conclusions.
In any case, I'm not sure why Wal-Mart would want to pretend hurricanes cause strawberry pop-tart sales to increase if they don't actually do so; what's the point?
It didn't take them that much data to "figure it out".
Using only a fraction of that data allows statisticians to prove that hurricanes cause an increase in the sales of certain goods, and by how much. Any schmuck can tell you non-perishables will sell more before a hurricane. Can he tell you how much? Wal-Mart's predictions will be quantitative rather than qualitative, and they'll be able to make more money (at no-one's expense) as a result.
It's not incredibly complicated, either. Given the amount of data you'd need a something more sophisticated than just Excel to analyse it, but on small scale I could do the analysis with just a few basic Data Modelling notes from University and a PC
Activity of the cards is ACTUALLY monitored for discrepencies in buying habits to find abusive employees who buy things for their friends?
That's not such an uncommon practice amongst large companies, credit card providers in particular. Five'll get you ten that Visa/Mastercard/AMEX/Diners/etc have a spending profile built up for you, and any gross deviations will prompt a call just to make sure your card hasn't been swiped.
My mother had her card stolen a few months ago; the thief made several big-ticket purchases (electronics, jewellery) within minutes of each other, and security had my mum on the phone before she even knew that the card was gone.
It may look a little stingy on Walmart's part, but complaining about not being able to abuse your privilges is a little like complaing about not getting as many christmas presents as you'd like.
Be cautious with the base alert settings - if it is set to red alert, minions will automatically attack all agents; if it is set to yellow, minions will arm themselves, and an armed minion is regarded as more of a threat by the agents.
If the minion escorting the thief (for interrogation) sees an agent at red alert, he'll abandon the interrogation in favour of attacking the intruder.
It's about taking from those with an overabundance and giving to those who lack.
Where did the grandparent say anything about overabundance? If you steal from rich people that's alright, is it, but stealing from the poor is not on? While from a moral viewpoint that may seem defensible, it implies that those who are rich deserve what they have less than others would. While it may increase the social good to redistribute income, you cannot do this on an arbitrary, ad hoc basic (i.e. theft). Such behaviour destroys the capitalistic system and benefits no-one in the long run.
Even if you believe socialism is a better system (and that's a different argument), the way to achieve it is not by sabotaging the fundaments of the current system.
In the case of stealing to live / to feed addiction, the courts have the power to show leniency. But justifying the former outright, with no regard for the moral foundation behind it (stealing is bad, mmkay) weakens any arguements against the second.
This ties in perfectly with what the original poster said: what this kid has done is a crime. Yes, it may not be as bad as other crimes, but it is still against the rules of his society. If you don't like the rules, go somewhere else. Breaking rules because you believe they are bad is no excuse - who are you to decide whether they are just or not? Once you have broken a bad rule, of course, I'm all in favour of the courts recognising it as such and showing leniency (this is where I differ from the original poster), but we differ on the *amount* of punishment, not its occurence.
I'm sure no-one would notice if a farmer bought a load of fertilizer and diesel fuel, and no one would notice if he drove a van into the centre of some large city, but that's all he'd need to do to blow up a lot of people.
Sure, but people don't just go and do that kind of thing without any prior planning. The intent has to be there first, manifesting itself in deviations from regular patterns of activity and other abnormalities in the lead-up to the act. Abnormalities which the government relies upon noticing, because tracking everyone 24/7 is impossible even for them. Anyway, increased tracking capabilities just makes the task of picking up irregularities simpler, because they have more data to work with. More data = better predictions
the IPO could be a way for Google the company to... free itself from its obligation to its initial VCs, then turn its back on wall street and never pay attention to its stock price again.
Which is, as it happens, the whole point of an IPO
just the fact of someone WANTING to hear it would make me happy
Make you happy, yes. Provide you with a means of subsistence, no.
People want money for dedicating themselves to playing music for the same reason that they want money for dedicating themselves to playing sport; it requires a lot of dedication and input to attain the level of skill to set them apart from recreational players, which (usually) precludes them from having other jobs.
Patronage is a means around the problem, though it is rare, but in my mind anybody who has given as much (if not more) time to hone their musical/sporting talents as I give to my job, then they are deserving of recompense*
*Provided, of course, that I value the fruit of their labours.
Why in the world is this moderated insightful? Any first year economics student will tell you that increasing the amount of money in an economy without also increasing the value of the goods and services in that economy will lead to a devaluation of the currency i.e. Inflation.
The parent was quite deliberately joking, but it appears there are a few inflation impaired moderators out there. Were the programmers to actually create 1,000,000,000,000 platinum pieces, the value of each piece would fall by 1,000,000,000,000/(1,000,000,000,000 + original money supply)
the U.S. is far less likely to repeat slavery (or Native American genocide), than Germany is to oppress its Turkish or other minorities
I think entirely the opposite is true - due precisely to their country's history, the German people are far less likely to oppress or otherwhise mistreat ethnic minorities than other countries (i.e. the US).
Germans suffer greatly under an (often subconscious) apprehension over how they appear to be treating other cultures. Germany is much more likely than most countries to be scrutinised for it's actions concerning minorities, for as soon it makes a controvesial move there will instantly be cries about how it is reverting to form. Austria elects a right-wing government and no-one blinks an eye, Germany has the world's eye upon them and thus adopts a far less forceful approach in it's international relations.
To be frank, Germans have a much more tolerant and open-minded view towards foreigners than most Americans - and I've never heard anyone refer to the Gastarbeiter as "Germany's Niggers". The comparison is apt only in the sense that both groups are one of largest minorities in their respective countries - at least virtually all african-americans speak English. This is getting off topic, but the problem with the Turkish peoples in Germany lies in equal parts with them and us. Some have a tendency to form enclaves and refuse to assimilate or even learn German. When you walk down streets where every shop sign is both in German and Turkish (except for the pub/social club, which is just in Turkish), all the kids on the street are Turks, and nary a word of German is spoken between the teenagers on street corners, you wonder whether the Regierung (Government) might not have a case for denying citizenships to those who aren't making an effort to become part of the German community.
Unlike in 1935, the German government of today (for all their flaws) makes plenty of effort to try and integrate the immigrants currently living here into mainstream society. Stronger border controls just mean they can focus on the problem at hand, rather than having a growing pool of people who have to be adressed.
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I actually tried this, and got knocked back!
I'm a huge fan of a Melbourne (Australia) 3-piece punk/rock/rockabilly band, and I copied their CDs several times to give them to friends overseas. When I met the lead singer/guitarist of this band at a pub, I told him about it and offered to give him $20 AUD, or at least buy him a drink. He politely declined, and told me he was happier that I was spreading good word-of-mouth for the band.
I've bought enough merch and been to enough concerts that my conscience is fine with giving my mates copies of this band's music - and, having spoken to the other band members of several occasions, they don't mind either - but I got the impression that small-scale copying of CDs isn't a huge deal for relatively-sucessful artists.
Maybe these guys are unusually generous, or maybe they get more dosh from tours than from CD sales, so I can't condone my course of action for _all_ artists... but, hell, if illegally copying one CD leads to one new fan (who would otherwhise not exist, such as in the case of my international friends), isn't that a net win for the band/artist?
What on earth prompted the inclusion of Skaven (rats, basically, for those of you playing at home) as a 'core' race over Orcs? Unless there's been a significant change since I last visited my local GW, Orcs have a far bigger following.
For the non-wargamers, this is akin to FIFA 2007 letting you play with Manchester City instead of Manchester United.
I'm not against the idea (of dropping either Orcs or Man U. *grin*), I just find it curious. Won't they have the same problem as with Warhammer 40k: Dawn of War, when all the Imperial Guard players had a sook about not getting to play their army (except as a "Dog of War" in one mission)? Or is the percentage of people buying this game who actually come from the tabletop version so low that it just doesn't matter?
Rubbish. Pareto efficiency only defends the status quo, where the status quo is Pareto optimal. It's not about avoiding making anyone less happy, but more about increasing the total sum of happiness.
Only if the amount by which everyone else's happiness increases is greater than the amount by which the individuals happiness decreases. Otherwise the total sum of happiness in the world is decreased.
(this analysis leaves questions of egalitarianism, the transferrance losses, and problems of measurement aside)
If I remember my Duesenberry correctly, people base their happiness not on their standard of living in absolute terms, but instead in comparison with their peer group. It doesn't matter that they have much higher life expectancy, less disease, or leisure their forebearers could only dream of, relative status is measured by - amongst other things - possessions.
:-)
Conspicious consumption is a means of broadcasting to your peer group that yes, you can afford this item, and oh, if they can't, that's allright - you're obviously just a little better off than them. The increased relative standing makes you happy, and everyone else unhappy.. up until the point where everyone has gaudy item #1. Then the cycle repeats (does anyone excitedly clamour to go next door to watch colour television any more? No, but perhaps to check out the home theatre system..).
When your resources start to deviate significantly from the mean, the set of items you can buy that will impress your peer group necessarily shrink. Ipod Nano? Yeah, well mine's diamond encrusted, with a hot grits dispenser and a Natalie Portman background. The gaudier and less useful the item is, the more it says 'I have so much money that I can afford to waste it on things like this, because I am better than you.'
The reason, I suspect, that the conspicious consumption of celebrities has such an effect is precisely because they are celebrities. Their lives are well-documented, so you have a sort of one-way peer group thing going on: we compare ourselves to them, but they don't compare themselves to us.
And that, artifex, is why people strive for the gaudiest, most expensive and wasteful things they can('t) afford
You are kidding, right? Who do you think buys the crap manufactured pop acts puts out? It isn't the discerning 20-something, no; it's the 14-year old teenybopper with "pester power". Young children and teenagers have an incredible amount of control over purchasing decision, even if they don't make the purchases themselves.
Who buys those god-awful ringtones and associated bollocks for their mobiles? Who racks up (their parents') phone bills voting on reality shows? Who floods in to the formulaic summer movies every year? It's not the post-teens, no-sirree. It's the teens with their young, malleable minds that are open to simple suggestive techniques and mass marketing - as applied by CD and Movie distributors.
A valid point in relation to the article would be that the owners of most shops are anti-teenager, because teens don't frequent Bob's Bait Store or Tyrone's Kitchen Emporium with any intent to buy. But CD's and movies? No way.
From the same story in The Age:
Mr Stapleton chose a noise "which can be broadcast at 75 decibels, within government safety limits" (emphasis added)
I have all my buttons mapped to F5
;)
Then I just tap my fingers incessantly until the site comes up
Vast minority - not an oxymoron; simply indicates that the minority is a minority by a vast amount. 49% vs 51% is a minority. 0.001% vs 99.999% is a vast minority. Jeez.
Virtually everyone At the risk of repeating myself, consider the target audience of the ad. Now consider the target audience of the porn site. Do they overlap? Maybe - but at an incredibly small level; remember it was only BigPond customers that were affected.
Best Interests - It is clearly in the best interests of the ad's viewers to be redirected; this is, I think, indisputable. It against the interest of porn viewers to be directed away from the site; however, they were still able to access the site by clicking a link on the redirect page; 3 seconds hassle.
So when you weigh up on one side, (Lots-of-good x lots-of-people) + Exceptional Circumstances vs (little hassle x very few people) + Possible Precedent, I don't think the scales are going to fall in favour of the totalitarianist viewpoint.
The Age newspaper reports that Telstra/BigPond lodged the complaint primarily so "to enable it to advise web-content filtering providers about the site's content and to have it blocked for customers who subscirbed to filtering services.
Because the site is R-rated, instead of X-rated, and hosted in the United States, it cannot be taken down or blocked."
Egg on Telstra's face & damage limitation, that's all I'm drawing from this at the moment.
Considering the target audience of the Idol shows (young children to teenagers mostly), many would argue that BigPond were acting in virtually everyone's* best interests by re-directing traffic.
:->
Sure, there may have been a handful of people denied their man-porn for a few hours, but they will have been in the vast minority. These were exceptional circumstances, and seeing this as a step towards BigBrother-dom is overreacting IMO.
Basically BigPond stopped little kiddies from being exposed to pr0n (as well as saving their own faces, see my earlier post), which is Good Thing (TM); though one could debate the relative qualities of what they viewed instead
*Casey Donovan (the man)'s estate excluded, perhaps
It's worth noting that the incorrect URL was published in an advertisement run by telecommunications giant Telsta, who, as well as being an Idol sponsor, also own BigPond.
Hence it's less suprising that the ISP arm of their company reacts to minimise the damage, rather than an independent ISP doing this out of goodwill.
I didn't actually say they did.
But they can; everyone's heard statistics be rubbished, but anybody with any sort of analytical backround will tell you it's all contextual. Statistics can quite cleary prove (correct) things, but they can also quite easy "prove" incorrect things if the people reading them aren't using their noggins.
It's like the different plenty of other posts have talked about between causation and correlation; simply because bad statistician (or politicians) have twisted facts and figures in the past to mislead people, don't mean those same facts and figures can't be used to draw correct conclusions.
In any case, I'm not sure why Wal-Mart would want to pretend hurricanes cause strawberry pop-tart sales to increase if they don't actually do so; what's the point?
It didn't take them that much data to "figure it out".
Using only a fraction of that data allows statisticians to prove that hurricanes cause an increase in the sales of certain goods, and by how much. Any schmuck can tell you non-perishables will sell more before a hurricane. Can he tell you how much?
Wal-Mart's predictions will be quantitative rather than qualitative, and they'll be able to make more money (at no-one's expense) as a result.
It's not incredibly complicated, either. Given the amount of data you'd need a something more sophisticated than just Excel to analyse it, but on small scale I could do the analysis with just a few basic Data Modelling notes from University and a PC
That's not such an uncommon practice amongst large companies, credit card providers in particular. Five'll get you ten that Visa/Mastercard/AMEX/Diners/etc have a spending profile built up for you, and any gross deviations will prompt a call just to make sure your card hasn't been swiped.
My mother had her card stolen a few months ago; the thief made several big-ticket purchases (electronics, jewellery) within minutes of each other, and security had my mum on the phone before she even knew that the card was gone.
It may look a little stingy on Walmart's part, but complaining about not being able to abuse your privilges is a little like complaing about not getting as many christmas presents as you'd like.
From the FAQ
Be cautious with the base alert settings - if it is set to red alert, minions will automatically attack all agents; if it is set to yellow, minions will arm themselves, and an armed minion is regarded as more of a threat by the agents.
If the minion escorting the thief (for interrogation) sees an agent at red alert, he'll abandon the interrogation in favour of attacking the intruder.
Where did the grandparent say anything about overabundance? If you steal from rich people that's alright, is it, but stealing from the poor is not on? While from a moral viewpoint that may seem defensible, it implies that those who are rich deserve what they have less than others would. While it may increase the social good to redistribute income, you cannot do this on an arbitrary, ad hoc basic (i.e. theft). Such behaviour destroys the capitalistic system and benefits no-one in the long run.
Even if you believe socialism is a better system (and that's a different argument), the way to achieve it is not by sabotaging the fundaments of the current system.
In the case of stealing to live / to feed addiction, the courts have the power to show leniency. But justifying the former outright, with no regard for the moral foundation behind it (stealing is bad, mmkay) weakens any arguements against the second.
This ties in perfectly with what the original poster said: what this kid has done is a crime. Yes, it may not be as bad as other crimes, but it is still against the rules of his society. If you don't like the rules, go somewhere else. Breaking rules because you believe they are bad is no excuse - who are you to decide whether they are just or not? Once you have broken a bad rule, of course, I'm all in favour of the courts recognising it as such and showing leniency (this is where I differ from the original poster), but we differ on the *amount* of punishment, not its occurence.
I'm sure no-one would notice if a farmer bought a load of fertilizer and diesel fuel, and no one would notice if he drove a van into the centre of some large city, but that's all he'd need to do to blow up a lot of people.
Sure, but people don't just go and do that kind of thing without any prior planning. The intent has to be there first, manifesting itself in deviations from regular patterns of activity and other abnormalities in the lead-up to the act. Abnormalities which the government relies upon noticing, because tracking everyone 24/7 is impossible even for them.
Anyway, increased tracking capabilities just makes the task of picking up irregularities simpler, because they have more data to work with. More data = better predictions
/Devil's Advocate
Read the poor man's closing words before you mod him into oblivion, please?
Being highbrow doesn't deserve to be punished (even on Slashdot ^_^)
the IPO could be a way for Google the company to ... free itself from its obligation to its initial VCs, then turn its back on wall street and never pay attention to its stock price again.
Which is, as it happens, the whole point of an IPO
just the fact of someone WANTING to hear it would make me happy
Make you happy, yes. Provide you with a means of subsistence, no.
People want money for dedicating themselves to playing music for the same reason that they want money for dedicating themselves to playing sport; it requires a lot of dedication and input to attain the level of skill to set them apart from recreational players, which (usually) precludes them from having other jobs.
Patronage is a means around the problem, though it is rare, but in my mind anybody who has given as much (if not more) time to hone their musical/sporting talents as I give to my job, then they are deserving of recompense*
*Provided, of course, that I value the fruit of their labours.
Why in the world is this moderated insightful? Any first year economics student will tell you that increasing the amount of money in an economy without also increasing the value of the goods and services in that economy will lead to a devaluation of the currency i.e. Inflation.
The parent was quite deliberately joking, but it appears there are a few inflation impaired moderators out there.
Were the programmers to actually create 1,000,000,000,000 platinum pieces, the value of each piece would fall by 1,000,000,000,000/(1,000,000,000,000 + original money supply)
Oh, and yes, IAAEM (I am an economics major)
I keep getting 2 + 2 = 5, I think my value of 2 is too large
You're a Radiohead fan, aren't you?
Don't worry about that late assignment - you've been granted special exemption.
From everything.
Espescially using university servers!
Snow?
the U.S. is far less likely to repeat slavery (or Native American genocide), than Germany is to oppress its Turkish or other minorities
I think entirely the opposite is true - due precisely to their country's history, the German people are far less likely to oppress or otherwhise mistreat ethnic minorities than other countries (i.e. the US).
Germans suffer greatly under an (often subconscious) apprehension over how they appear to be treating other cultures. Germany is much more likely than most countries to be scrutinised for it's actions concerning minorities, for as soon it makes a controvesial move there will instantly be cries about how it is reverting to form. Austria elects a right-wing government and no-one blinks an eye, Germany has the world's eye upon them and thus adopts a far less forceful approach in it's international relations.
To be frank, Germans have a much more tolerant and open-minded view towards foreigners than most Americans - and I've never heard anyone refer to the Gastarbeiter as "Germany's Niggers". The comparison is apt only in the sense that both groups are one of largest minorities in their respective countries - at least virtually all african-americans speak English. This is getting off topic, but the problem with the Turkish peoples in Germany lies in equal parts with them and us. Some have a tendency to form enclaves and refuse to assimilate or even learn German. When you walk down streets where every shop sign is both in German and Turkish (except for the pub/social club, which is just in Turkish), all the kids on the street are Turks, and nary a word of German is spoken between the teenagers on street corners, you wonder whether the Regierung (Government) might not have a case for denying citizenships to those who aren't making an effort to become part of the German community.
Unlike in 1935, the German government of today (for all their flaws) makes plenty of effort to try and integrate the immigrants currently living here into mainstream society. Stronger border controls just mean they can focus on the problem at hand, rather than having a growing pool of people who have to be adressed.