The UN is nothing more and nothing less than the collective wishes of the world's nations.
It is the collective wishes of the world's governments, most of which are run by crooks, corrupt politicians, and dictators. It is about representative of the people of this world as the Supreme Soviet was representative of the will of the people unfortunate enough to live in the USSR.
The UN was never intended to be a representative or democratic government. It is a body of international diplomacy in which even the worst of the worst have a voice, for the purely practical reason that those people also have guns and bombs.
Kim DotCom cannot get rich with Freenet or other such technologies. Whatever he (or anybody else) comes up with as a business automatically has a single point of failure: the people running it.
Yes, the US is embarking on another campaign to piss off the planet by causing trouble in other countries to push their agenda. We were willing to abandon all our principles when it came to fighting communism. Then again with the war on drugs.
Should we do less of this? By all means. But don't imagine for a moment that any other nation would do better.
The good thing is that once the US figures out the right thing to do on IP, drugs, terrorism, etc., the rest of the world is forced to follow. And unlike other nations, sooner or later, we actually do the right thing on our own accord.
Guys, the UN has no power whatsoever, it cannot dictate laws to member states, much less enforce them.
There are tons of bad treaties that come out of the UN and that are nearly impossible for member nations to leave. For example, the US couldn't legalize drugs however much it may want to. These treaties often represent policy laundering and are imposed undemocratically by the executive branch. Furthermore, the UN has something much stronger than military, namely the power to punish states through trade penalties, and those penalties are imposed on any nation that steps out of line, including the US.
The UN isn't all powerful, but it is also far from powerless. And we should never forget that the UN is not a democracy and has no moral authority; the majority of its members are undemocratic or worse. The UN is merely a body where states can try to work out their differences, nothing more.
If you just want to feel happy, you can take drugs. I don't see how meditation is any better, other than that it doesn't damage your health as much and is self-limiting.
Really - you want to discard a system designed by Adams and Jefferson and their peers for one designed by the Koch brothers and theirs?
Wow, you really think in very simplistic terms. In fact, Jefferson was what you today would call a wealthy libertarian, like many of the nation's founders and authors of the Constitution.
To answer your question, I'd much rather live in a system designed by the Koch brothers than in a system designed by Noam Chomsky.
Rs and Ds don't behave like the caricatures you have of them. Clinton deregulated and produced a balanced budget. Bush increased regulation greatly. Obama has been one of the worst presidents in recent memory in the area of civil liberties. And Romney ran Massachusetts for years and he isn't the demon you imagine him to be.
Obama does not deserve a second term: he broke his promises on the economy and has been a bad president in many ways. I understand if you don't want to vote for Romney, there are plenty of things to dislike about him as well and I wouldn't vote for him either, but you do have several other choices.
Google doesn't fix their maps by only hand, they have lots of smart, custom AI software that cuts down the workload and integrates thousands of data sources. Apple doesn't have this.
US GSM carriers also use your IMEI number to determine whether they want your phone on their network and what rates to charge you. It is not as simple as just inserting a SIM card.
GSM carriers in the US can (and do) discriminate based on devices. For example, some Verizon GSM-capable devices simply cannot be activated on AT&T because AT&T doesn't want it. They also charge different rates depending on whether their system thinks your phone is a smart phone, a dumb phone, or a tablet. So, just because they use a SIM card and run on the right frequencies doesn't mean it will work.
The lack of a standard in the U.S. (and Japan/Korea) is what gave us 3G speeds.
HSPA+ and LTE development and deployment was not dependent on CDMA deployment in the US: people understood CDMA perfectly fine whether Sprint built a network around it or not. Furthermore, nowhere did I say that the US should have standardized on GSM, I just said that it should have picked a standard, that could have been CDMA.
Nevertheless, in the real world, wireless data in major European nations has always been cheaper and faster than in the US even despite using supposedly inferior technology. Today, even with Verizon LTE, you get 6 Mbps if you're lucky. That's worse than you get with HSPA+ in many places in Europe.
In the US, carriers have full control over which devices they allow on their networks, and even if they didn't, the lack of a single wireless standard means that effectively you are locked in anyway. We need uniform wireless standards and a requirement to let people move freely between carriers.
The newspapers WANT to be republished . . . AND they want to be paid for it.
But this law won't accomplish that either. If this becomes law, Google will simply not republish any newspaper that doesn't agree on its own accord to allow Google to do so without charge.
The Maps issues aren't related to anything but the quality of data as far as I'm aware.
Yes, and Apple is unable to create the complex software needed to fix those quality issues, just like Apple is unable to create the complex software needed to make Siri work better. Apple simple doesn't have the people or talent.
Please don't put 100k lines of code in one file, even if you're writing non-OO C.
If you're forced to write in languages without a decent module system, and to compile using compilers that can't do decent inter-module optimizations, that may be your best of a number of lousy options.
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Turned on, the iPhone looks a whole lot like a old Palm or Windows Mobile phone. It also syncs the same way to the desktop.
Apple's iPhone is largely a rip-off of other people's designs and ideas.
It is the collective wishes of the world's governments, most of which are run by crooks, corrupt politicians, and dictators. It is about representative of the people of this world as the Supreme Soviet was representative of the will of the people unfortunate enough to live in the USSR.
The UN was never intended to be a representative or democratic government. It is a body of international diplomacy in which even the worst of the worst have a voice, for the purely practical reason that those people also have guns and bombs.
Kim DotCom cannot get rich with Freenet or other such technologies. Whatever he (or anybody else) comes up with as a business automatically has a single point of failure: the people running it.
Should we do less of this? By all means. But don't imagine for a moment that any other nation would do better.
The good thing is that once the US figures out the right thing to do on IP, drugs, terrorism, etc., the rest of the world is forced to follow. And unlike other nations, sooner or later, we actually do the right thing on our own accord.
There are tons of bad treaties that come out of the UN and that are nearly impossible for member nations to leave. For example, the US couldn't legalize drugs however much it may want to. These treaties often represent policy laundering and are imposed undemocratically by the executive branch. Furthermore, the UN has something much stronger than military, namely the power to punish states through trade penalties, and those penalties are imposed on any nation that steps out of line, including the US.
The UN isn't all powerful, but it is also far from powerless. And we should never forget that the UN is not a democracy and has no moral authority; the majority of its members are undemocratic or worse. The UN is merely a body where states can try to work out their differences, nothing more.
I'm sick of publishers and rich folks from the world over lobbying US Congress and messing with US politics.
I'm also sick of Europeans passing bad laws, letting the US do their dirty work, and then blaming Americans for the mess.
I suspect Motorola wants no money and instead just patent cross licensing. Seems FRAND to me.
If you just want to feel happy, you can take drugs. I don't see how meditation is any better, other than that it doesn't damage your health as much and is self-limiting.
"Even" atheists???
Get politically active and change it. Political change takes a while, but we overcame slavery, McCarthyism, prohibition, and other ills.
Wow, you really think in very simplistic terms. In fact, Jefferson was what you today would call a wealthy libertarian, like many of the nation's founders and authors of the Constitution.
To answer your question, I'd much rather live in a system designed by the Koch brothers than in a system designed by Noam Chomsky.
Rs and Ds don't behave like the caricatures you have of them. Clinton deregulated and produced a balanced budget. Bush increased regulation greatly. Obama has been one of the worst presidents in recent memory in the area of civil liberties. And Romney ran Massachusetts for years and he isn't the demon you imagine him to be.
Obama does not deserve a second term: he broke his promises on the economy and has been a bad president in many ways. I understand if you don't want to vote for Romney, there are plenty of things to dislike about him as well and I wouldn't vote for him either, but you do have several other choices.
Google Maps fuses hundreds of data sources. No amount of error reporting is going to let Apple even come close.
Siri's speech recognition doesn't come from Apple, and the rest of Siri is as much of a toy as it has always been.
Google doesn't fix their maps by only hand, they have lots of smart, custom AI software that cuts down the workload and integrates thousands of data sources. Apple doesn't have this.
Frequencies are part of "wireless standards".
US GSM carriers also use your IMEI number to determine whether they want your phone on their network and what rates to charge you. It is not as simple as just inserting a SIM card.
GSM carriers in the US can (and do) discriminate based on devices. For example, some Verizon GSM-capable devices simply cannot be activated on AT&T because AT&T doesn't want it. They also charge different rates depending on whether their system thinks your phone is a smart phone, a dumb phone, or a tablet. So, just because they use a SIM card and run on the right frequencies doesn't mean it will work.
HSPA+ and LTE development and deployment was not dependent on CDMA deployment in the US: people understood CDMA perfectly fine whether Sprint built a network around it or not. Furthermore, nowhere did I say that the US should have standardized on GSM, I just said that it should have picked a standard, that could have been CDMA.
Nevertheless, in the real world, wireless data in major European nations has always been cheaper and faster than in the US even despite using supposedly inferior technology. Today, even with Verizon LTE, you get 6 Mbps if you're lucky. That's worse than you get with HSPA+ in many places in Europe.
The point is: Google behaved properly. If Apple is screwed, they only have themselves to blame.
In the US, carriers have full control over which devices they allow on their networks, and even if they didn't, the lack of a single wireless standard means that effectively you are locked in anyway. We need uniform wireless standards and a requirement to let people move freely between carriers.
But this law won't accomplish that either. If this becomes law, Google will simply not republish any newspaper that doesn't agree on its own accord to allow Google to do so without charge.
Yes, and Apple is unable to create the complex software needed to fix those quality issues, just like Apple is unable to create the complex software needed to make Siri work better. Apple simple doesn't have the people or talent.
Yes, because designing minimalist looking containers is such a great qualification for developing an operating system.
Well, I suppose for Apple it is.
If you're forced to write in languages without a decent module system, and to compile using compilers that can't do decent inter-module optimizations, that may be your best of a number of lousy options.
If you code in Java or C++, you definitely do need an IDE, because those are really badly designed language.