Why would you respect a country you're occupying? If you really respected it, you wouldn't be there in the first place. Otherwise, you've obviously shown you have no respect for it by barging in with guns blasting, killing civilians left and right (and calling them "insurgents"), and using force to push your country's policy. It's really quite hypocritical.
Note, however, this does not apply in the case of a Navy ship that's just stopping by some friendly port for some shore leave or whatever, but it's pretty obvious from the article that we're not talking about, for instance, a US Navy ship docking at some nice Italian port for a short time during peacetime before it resumes its normal patrols of international waters, like every country with a blue-water navy does, we're talking about a ship that's officially deployed at some middle-eastern country's port in support of the ongoing military operations in that area.
I thought the function of Marines was twofold: 1) security as you say, and 2) attacks on ports. They even go as far back as the Romans; from Wikipedia: "The Roman Navy used regular infantry as marines. Naval personnel were trained for raiding and also provided the troops for at least two legions (I Adiutrix and II Adiutrix) for service on land. The various provincial fleets were usually provided with marines from the adjacent legions."
Hmm.. that's rather odd. And actually, that points to a severe infrastructural problem, if a country can't even manage to supply a vital utility (electricity) to its own citizens, and has to get it from a foreign country. It wouldn't be quite as bad if the locals were getting their power from a local utility (which managed the transmission lines and substations), which in turn was buying power from generators in the foreign country, but if you have to send your monthly payments to a foreign company for your electric power, and you have to call that foreign company when a tree falls on your power line, there's something seriously wrong.
Actually, if you read between the lines, I'm advocating for non-interventionism. Militaries are a necessity I'll agree, but they should only be used as a last resort, and when that point comes, then everything else goes out the window. Until that point comes, soldiers should be kept at home, and never deployed anywhere (except for the Navy of course, whose job is to sail around and always has been, but even so, they shouldn't be docking at other countries for very long, maybe long enough for a brief shore leave, and shouldn't be dependent on any resources in those foreign countries). The model the US uses, where it established bases in foreign countries to push US policy but then doesn't actually bother to conquer that country, and even follows the local laws, is just wrong, as it's obviously only being used to help out US-based corporations and not being used to defend US citizens from any actual threat that requires the use of violence.
I don't get it; why would your soldiers "go native" if you encouraged them to rape and pillage as much as they wanted? Maybe I should have used the Huns or Mongols for my example. I'm pretty sure Genghis Khan wasn't too keen on following local customs or laws, and in fact is famous for raping local women.
That's a little bit different. Just look at the names: "Kentucky Fried Chicken" implies that it's fried chicken from Kentucky, or at least made in a style that originated in Kentucky (which is exactly what it is; "Colonel" Sanders was a Kentuckian and invented his famous recipe for friend chicken). "British Petroleum" implies either that it's petroleum from Britain, or it's a British company that supplies petroleum (of course, the latter is exactly what it is).
"America Online" implies that it's a service for Americans to get online, which is exactly what it started out as, and why it was named that way. When they expanded overseas, the name suddenly made no sense whatsoever. Remember, chicken and petroleum are a little different from online access: the former two are goods, whereas the latter is a service. People buy foreign-made goods all the time; if they're not doing it for cheapness (like with Chinese-made stuff), it's frequently because the foreign-made good has some extra cachet: Italian-made sports cars, for instance, have a certain reputation and certain qualities which make people want them, as do French wines and cheeses, Cuban cigars, etc. People don't normally search overseas for a service, especially one that gives them access to a global network, they look locally, just like they do for phone service, electric service, water/sewer service, etc. No one in Germany is going to contact the Tennessee Valley Authority to try to get electricity, for instance, because they think it's better than their locally-supplied electricity. Of course, internet service is a little different, but I can't imagine anyone in the USA signing up for internet service with "Germany Online", they'd probably think it's a joke or something if it were offered here. I really can't imagine why AOL didn't simple create a new division with a different name for overseas customers like that, much like T-mobile did. T-mobile is really Deutsche Telekom (German Telecom), and they rightly realized trying to set up shop in the USA and other countries with a name like that wasn't going to go over very well, so they changed their name (at least for the foreign operations) to "T-mobile", which is quite neutral.
Oh please. Since when did any fucking CEO invent anything at all? That's the most idiotic statement I've seen on here in a while about patents.
I have an idea: how about we change the law so patents can't be transferred to anyone, and can't be owned by a company? Make it so they can only be owned by the people who actually invented the thing, not their employer, and they can't be sold or transferred to anyone else. Then people really will have an incentive to invent things, and companies will greatly value the people who do the inventing, rather than just give them $500 and make millions on the patents.
Oh please. The macrobrews ARE "American beer"; they're by far the most popular, that's why you just called them "macrobrews". So it's still entirely reasonable to bash "American beer" based on the qualities of the macrobrews.
Your argument is like trying to defend some criticism of "American cars" because the Tesla is different from all the Detroit cars. A tiny little niche maker with vanishingly small volumes is not representative of the industry.
When Bud Light, Miller, Coors, and all that other crap go the way of the Dodo, then you can tell people their American beer jokes are out of date. But not while they're easily the most popular thing out there.
Does your patent for rectangular boxes have them with rounded corners? If not, then it's totally irrelevant. Apple's enormous innovation is rounding the corners of the rectangle!
As I said in another post here, the situation strongly resembles the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. Wikipedia has a great article about it here. There's a lot of parallels with the bloated military machine, and the decrease in technical innovation.
This really needs to be done internally, under the control of the military, not farmed out.
One of the problems with the US military these days is that they farm out everything they can, usually to expensive no-bid contractors; they're even farming out security and combat work now to mercenaries. I'm really surprised they haven't gone ahead and farmed out even the postal service.
The whole situation is looking a lot like the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, where the empire spent so much money on their bloated military that it basically went broke. At one point, they even had to recruit Barbarians into the ranks of the Roman Army, just to defend against other Barbarian tribes. They also experienced massive inflation by reducing the value of their currency by cutting it with cheaper metals, making people move to the barter system. While during the Pax Romana period they had a highly prosperous economy thanks to an incredible trade network around the entire European and Mediterranean region and impressive (for the time) technological capabilities, during the decline, specialization of labor disappeared, the Empire stopped making any goods of real value and lived by conquering other places and looting them. Sound familiar?
Soldiers need rest and relaxation time between their murdering sprees in the pursuit of imperialism. But what's really pathetic is that they actually bother to follow the laws of local countries, instead of just barging in and doing whatever the fuck they want. What's the point of having a big military to go around and project force, murder people, and seize control of resources, if you're then going to bow down to locals and follow their idiotic little laws? I'm sure the Roman Army never did anything like that; if they wanted something, they just took it. If there was some stupid local law that inconvenienced them, they ignored it and slaughtered anyone who got in the way. When the British Empire during their peak in the 16-1700s sent their Navy ships into foreign ports, do you think they bothered to follow local laws? Hell no. If the locals got mad about the activities of their sailors, the ships would just blast the town with their cannons. The whole point of a military is to use brute force and violence to get your way; if you've decided to take this step, and thus send your military to foreign locales in this pursuit, what is the point of following local laws? Either do it 100% or don't do it at all.
Since when did government requirements have anything to do with reality? They probably just keep using 12-year-old systems because of the requirements.
Anyway, to add to the above, the answer to this is simple: send the Marines (this is a Navy ship, right? Navy ships are supposed to have Marines for attacking towns) in, and have them take over the local internet infrastructure by force, and then do what you want with it. You have a military, use it. If you're not going to use it for what militaries are meant to be used for, then send them home and disband it.
What's really pathetic is that they even allow these "guest" countries to force stupid laws on military personnel stationed in those countries. For instance, female soldiers in Saudi Arabia still have to abide by the local laws there which are restrictive against women. What's the point of sending your military to foreign countries if you're going to follow the laws there, instead of doing things however you want? Do you think the Roman Legionnaires followed local laws they disagreed with in the many lands they conquered? Of course not, they did whatever the fuck they wanted, and anyone who stood against them was slaughtered.
If you respect these other countries and their stupid laws, then you shouldn't be sending your military there to do your dirty work; ask the other country to do it for you. If you have to resort to sending your military out (which is people whose sole job is to kill people on command and use deadly force for political goals), then respecting laws not your own is utterly idiotic.
Honestly, I don't know. I have a plan for about $3/month for a small website I own, but it doesn't have or need secure logins (other than sftp for file transfer of course) so it's not really a factor for me. Seems to me I remember seeing they supported SSL but maybe there was an additional fee for the certificate or something.
Most people evaluate new products based on the 5 minutes they play with the demo, and a flashy UI with serious usability problems often does better than a simple UI where common actions are all trivial in this sort of test.
I'm not so sure about this. The new Gmail UI, for instance, is rather ugly IMO compared to the old one. Similarly, I tried out a Lumia with Windows Phone 7 in a phone shop for a minute or so, and the biggest turn-off to me was how butt-ugly it was. I don't think either of these new UIs are "flashy". This might apply to Gnome3 and Unity though.
Yes, because mega-wealthy people like Larry Ellison and Steve Jobs are such selfless, caring, family-loving people who are more interested in being good grandfathers than doing whatever makes them happy, and if they were 75 wouldn't dare risk their lives and deprive their grandchildren of another 10 years of their warm presence.
Has its UI changed significantly in the last couple of years? If not, expect the worst; some "UI designer" is going to decide that its UI is "too old" and "too unlike mobile device UIs" and that it needs to be "improved" and "simplified".
You have to realize, however, that Russia (where any such space missions would be flown from) and Australia are incredibly different countries. Australia isn't much different than the US or UK as far as the court system goes. Russia's legal system is probably more similar to some random subsaharan African country.
However, in your example, also remember the guy never signed a waiver saying he knew the risks (even though it should have been obvious). At least here in the US, any time you do something inherently extremely risky, you have to sign a waiver, and while waivers aren't iron-clad in court, they do count for a lot. Skydiving is probably one place where these are used, and (I know from experience) surgery. It's pretty hard to sue a doctor for complications arising from surgery, unless you can show that the surgeon was truly negligent; getting an infection because you didn't follow the post-op instructions and then suing over it isn't going to go very far. (However, suing because the surgeon left some tools inside your body or amputated the wrong foot is a pretty easy case to win.)
You won't have better service with Hover. I haven't tried their domain services, but I have used their email services, and they're famous for having week-long outages.
Gmail's labels are easy; think of them like folders, except that you can put a single email into multiple folders. They even have hierarchies set up now, so your labels can be nested like: Work, Work/CompanyA, Work/CompanyB, Work/CompanyA/CustomerA, etc.
$20/month isn't exactly cheap. A Netflix membership costs less than half of that, and most people probably don't pay more than 2.5 times that ($50) for internet service. Heck, you can get web hosting for $4/month these days easily. With the crappy economy, everyone's looking to cut costs, and $20/month really isn't pocket change, for something that you really don't need to do when free email accounts are so easy to get.
AOL isn't US only, though I have no idea why anyone else would use it. As I said in another post here, I have a small business with about 1000 customers, and of my ~40 AOL addresses in my customer list, 2 of them are in the UK.
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Why would you respect a country you're occupying? If you really respected it, you wouldn't be there in the first place. Otherwise, you've obviously shown you have no respect for it by barging in with guns blasting, killing civilians left and right (and calling them "insurgents"), and using force to push your country's policy. It's really quite hypocritical.
Note, however, this does not apply in the case of a Navy ship that's just stopping by some friendly port for some shore leave or whatever, but it's pretty obvious from the article that we're not talking about, for instance, a US Navy ship docking at some nice Italian port for a short time during peacetime before it resumes its normal patrols of international waters, like every country with a blue-water navy does, we're talking about a ship that's officially deployed at some middle-eastern country's port in support of the ongoing military operations in that area.
I thought the function of Marines was twofold: 1) security as you say, and 2) attacks on ports. They even go as far back as the Romans; from Wikipedia: "The Roman Navy used regular infantry as marines. Naval personnel were trained for raiding and also provided the troops for at least two legions (I Adiutrix and II Adiutrix) for service on land. The various provincial fleets were usually provided with marines from the adjacent legions."
Hmm.. that's rather odd. And actually, that points to a severe infrastructural problem, if a country can't even manage to supply a vital utility (electricity) to its own citizens, and has to get it from a foreign country. It wouldn't be quite as bad if the locals were getting their power from a local utility (which managed the transmission lines and substations), which in turn was buying power from generators in the foreign country, but if you have to send your monthly payments to a foreign company for your electric power, and you have to call that foreign company when a tree falls on your power line, there's something seriously wrong.
Actually, if you read between the lines, I'm advocating for non-interventionism. Militaries are a necessity I'll agree, but they should only be used as a last resort, and when that point comes, then everything else goes out the window. Until that point comes, soldiers should be kept at home, and never deployed anywhere (except for the Navy of course, whose job is to sail around and always has been, but even so, they shouldn't be docking at other countries for very long, maybe long enough for a brief shore leave, and shouldn't be dependent on any resources in those foreign countries). The model the US uses, where it established bases in foreign countries to push US policy but then doesn't actually bother to conquer that country, and even follows the local laws, is just wrong, as it's obviously only being used to help out US-based corporations and not being used to defend US citizens from any actual threat that requires the use of violence.
I don't get it; why would your soldiers "go native" if you encouraged them to rape and pillage as much as they wanted? Maybe I should have used the Huns or Mongols for my example. I'm pretty sure Genghis Khan wasn't too keen on following local customs or laws, and in fact is famous for raping local women.
That's a little bit different. Just look at the names: "Kentucky Fried Chicken" implies that it's fried chicken from Kentucky, or at least made in a style that originated in Kentucky (which is exactly what it is; "Colonel" Sanders was a Kentuckian and invented his famous recipe for friend chicken). "British Petroleum" implies either that it's petroleum from Britain, or it's a British company that supplies petroleum (of course, the latter is exactly what it is).
"America Online" implies that it's a service for Americans to get online, which is exactly what it started out as, and why it was named that way. When they expanded overseas, the name suddenly made no sense whatsoever. Remember, chicken and petroleum are a little different from online access: the former two are goods, whereas the latter is a service. People buy foreign-made goods all the time; if they're not doing it for cheapness (like with Chinese-made stuff), it's frequently because the foreign-made good has some extra cachet: Italian-made sports cars, for instance, have a certain reputation and certain qualities which make people want them, as do French wines and cheeses, Cuban cigars, etc. People don't normally search overseas for a service, especially one that gives them access to a global network, they look locally, just like they do for phone service, electric service, water/sewer service, etc. No one in Germany is going to contact the Tennessee Valley Authority to try to get electricity, for instance, because they think it's better than their locally-supplied electricity. Of course, internet service is a little different, but I can't imagine anyone in the USA signing up for internet service with "Germany Online", they'd probably think it's a joke or something if it were offered here. I really can't imagine why AOL didn't simple create a new division with a different name for overseas customers like that, much like T-mobile did. T-mobile is really Deutsche Telekom (German Telecom), and they rightly realized trying to set up shop in the USA and other countries with a name like that wasn't going to go over very well, so they changed their name (at least for the foreign operations) to "T-mobile", which is quite neutral.
Oh please. Since when did any fucking CEO invent anything at all? That's the most idiotic statement I've seen on here in a while about patents.
I have an idea: how about we change the law so patents can't be transferred to anyone, and can't be owned by a company? Make it so they can only be owned by the people who actually invented the thing, not their employer, and they can't be sold or transferred to anyone else. Then people really will have an incentive to invent things, and companies will greatly value the people who do the inventing, rather than just give them $500 and make millions on the patents.
Oh please. The macrobrews ARE "American beer"; they're by far the most popular, that's why you just called them "macrobrews". So it's still entirely reasonable to bash "American beer" based on the qualities of the macrobrews.
Your argument is like trying to defend some criticism of "American cars" because the Tesla is different from all the Detroit cars. A tiny little niche maker with vanishingly small volumes is not representative of the industry.
When Bud Light, Miller, Coors, and all that other crap go the way of the Dodo, then you can tell people their American beer jokes are out of date. But not while they're easily the most popular thing out there.
Does your patent for rectangular boxes have them with rounded corners? If not, then it's totally irrelevant. Apple's enormous innovation is rounding the corners of the rectangle!
As I said in another post here, the situation strongly resembles the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. Wikipedia has a great article about it here. There's a lot of parallels with the bloated military machine, and the decrease in technical innovation.
This really needs to be done internally, under the control of the military, not farmed out.
One of the problems with the US military these days is that they farm out everything they can, usually to expensive no-bid contractors; they're even farming out security and combat work now to mercenaries. I'm really surprised they haven't gone ahead and farmed out even the postal service.
The whole situation is looking a lot like the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, where the empire spent so much money on their bloated military that it basically went broke. At one point, they even had to recruit Barbarians into the ranks of the Roman Army, just to defend against other Barbarian tribes. They also experienced massive inflation by reducing the value of their currency by cutting it with cheaper metals, making people move to the barter system. While during the Pax Romana period they had a highly prosperous economy thanks to an incredible trade network around the entire European and Mediterranean region and impressive (for the time) technological capabilities, during the decline, specialization of labor disappeared, the Empire stopped making any goods of real value and lived by conquering other places and looting them. Sound familiar?
Soldiers need rest and relaxation time between their murdering sprees in the pursuit of imperialism. But what's really pathetic is that they actually bother to follow the laws of local countries, instead of just barging in and doing whatever the fuck they want. What's the point of having a big military to go around and project force, murder people, and seize control of resources, if you're then going to bow down to locals and follow their idiotic little laws? I'm sure the Roman Army never did anything like that; if they wanted something, they just took it. If there was some stupid local law that inconvenienced them, they ignored it and slaughtered anyone who got in the way. When the British Empire during their peak in the 16-1700s sent their Navy ships into foreign ports, do you think they bothered to follow local laws? Hell no. If the locals got mad about the activities of their sailors, the ships would just blast the town with their cannons. The whole point of a military is to use brute force and violence to get your way; if you've decided to take this step, and thus send your military to foreign locales in this pursuit, what is the point of following local laws? Either do it 100% or don't do it at all.
Since when did government requirements have anything to do with reality? They probably just keep using 12-year-old systems because of the requirements.
Anyway, to add to the above, the answer to this is simple: send the Marines (this is a Navy ship, right? Navy ships are supposed to have Marines for attacking towns) in, and have them take over the local internet infrastructure by force, and then do what you want with it. You have a military, use it. If you're not going to use it for what militaries are meant to be used for, then send them home and disband it.
What's really pathetic is that they even allow these "guest" countries to force stupid laws on military personnel stationed in those countries. For instance, female soldiers in Saudi Arabia still have to abide by the local laws there which are restrictive against women. What's the point of sending your military to foreign countries if you're going to follow the laws there, instead of doing things however you want? Do you think the Roman Legionnaires followed local laws they disagreed with in the many lands they conquered? Of course not, they did whatever the fuck they wanted, and anyone who stood against them was slaughtered.
If you respect these other countries and their stupid laws, then you shouldn't be sending your military there to do your dirty work; ask the other country to do it for you. If you have to resort to sending your military out (which is people whose sole job is to kill people on command and use deadly force for political goals), then respecting laws not your own is utterly idiotic.
Honestly, I don't know. I have a plan for about $3/month for a small website I own, but it doesn't have or need secure logins (other than sftp for file transfer of course) so it's not really a factor for me. Seems to me I remember seeing they supported SSL but maybe there was an additional fee for the certificate or something.
Most people evaluate new products based on the 5 minutes they play with the demo, and a flashy UI with serious usability problems often does better than a simple UI where common actions are all trivial in this sort of test.
I'm not so sure about this. The new Gmail UI, for instance, is rather ugly IMO compared to the old one. Similarly, I tried out a Lumia with Windows Phone 7 in a phone shop for a minute or so, and the biggest turn-off to me was how butt-ugly it was. I don't think either of these new UIs are "flashy". This might apply to Gnome3 and Unity though.
Yes, because mega-wealthy people like Larry Ellison and Steve Jobs are such selfless, caring, family-loving people who are more interested in being good grandfathers than doing whatever makes them happy, and if they were 75 wouldn't dare risk their lives and deprive their grandchildren of another 10 years of their warm presence.
You clueless idiot.
Has its UI changed significantly in the last couple of years? If not, expect the worst; some "UI designer" is going to decide that its UI is "too old" and "too unlike mobile device UIs" and that it needs to be "improved" and "simplified".
You have to realize, however, that Russia (where any such space missions would be flown from) and Australia are incredibly different countries. Australia isn't much different than the US or UK as far as the court system goes. Russia's legal system is probably more similar to some random subsaharan African country.
However, in your example, also remember the guy never signed a waiver saying he knew the risks (even though it should have been obvious). At least here in the US, any time you do something inherently extremely risky, you have to sign a waiver, and while waivers aren't iron-clad in court, they do count for a lot. Skydiving is probably one place where these are used, and (I know from experience) surgery. It's pretty hard to sue a doctor for complications arising from surgery, unless you can show that the surgeon was truly negligent; getting an infection because you didn't follow the post-op instructions and then suing over it isn't going to go very far. (However, suing because the surgeon left some tools inside your body or amputated the wrong foot is a pretty easy case to win.)
You won't have better service with Hover. I haven't tried their domain services, but I have used their email services, and they're famous for having week-long outages.
Gmail's labels are easy; think of them like folders, except that you can put a single email into multiple folders. They even have hierarchies set up now, so your labels can be nested like: Work, Work/CompanyA, Work/CompanyB, Work/CompanyA/CustomerA, etc.
$20/month isn't exactly cheap. A Netflix membership costs less than half of that, and most people probably don't pay more than 2.5 times that ($50) for internet service. Heck, you can get web hosting for $4/month these days easily. With the crappy economy, everyone's looking to cut costs, and $20/month really isn't pocket change, for something that you really don't need to do when free email accounts are so easy to get.
AOL isn't US only, though I have no idea why anyone else would use it. As I said in another post here, I have a small business with about 1000 customers, and of my ~40 AOL addresses in my customer list, 2 of them are in the UK.
Unfortunately, not many entities are better than that these days. Royally fucking up perfectly-good UIs is all the rage right now.
Gmail is NOT "getting better every week". It hit its peak about a year or so ago, before they forced this idiotic new UI change on us.