Who really got hurt by this verdict are consumers and innovation. What's the point of developing new technologies like multitouch when Apple is just going to rip you off and monopolize the market anyway? When juries are swayed by superficial appearances and give credit to the successful IP thief instead of the people who actually invented the technologies?
Anyway, what does this all have to do with first-past-the-post vs proportional representation?
In a "proportional representation system", necessarily, you have very strong parties, because in the end, the only thing that can really be proportional to voting percentages is the number of candidates belonging to a party and they ultimately get to pick those. And the whole point of proportional representation is to represent all viewpoints in parliament, but 5-10% of the population just always seem to vote for extremist parties, either because they believe in them or because they don't know any better. So, proportional representation leads pretty much to European-style democracy, with extremists in parliaments, extremely strong "party discipline" (=politicians being puppets of their parties), and far more nebulous and devious horse trading than goes on in the US. The US system avoids these ills and still finds a reasonable compromise between the viewpoints represented in society.
I can assure you that out of the countries that I lived in, US has by far the most party rule and career politician
Europe's parliamentary systems are frequently organized around parties who groom their career politicians starting in high school and provide jobs for them as long as those politicians remain faithful to the party line. The equivalents of senators are often not elected at all. And the great majority of US representatives have had other careers and jobs outside politics and government, while the same is usually not true in Europe: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Members_of_the_111th_United_States_Congress
It's certainly so, but it's still better than when discrimination is written into law itself, which is what happens when you don't have gay marriage or an equivalent. Also, since you're considering societal discrimination as part of one's freedom, surely you realize that there's a great deal of that in US, as well - and on some topics (like gay marriage again, but also e.g. religion) it is in fact far more intense than in many other countries?
Maybe you get that impression if you hang out in Berlin or London, but large parts of Europe are full of xenophobic rednecks, just like large parts of the US. Unlike the US, in Europe, their views are often advanced by law and funded by taxes. For example, the homophobe-in-chief in the Vatican received decades of lush salaries for preaching his homophobia and insulting non-Christians paid for by all German taxpayers (straight and gay, Catholic or atheist).
One can meaningfully talk about a lot of things without mathematical scores or aggregation. You seem to think of all these issues of liberty and representation in terms of check lists and theories. But in reality, proportional representation systems produce government that's less representative than the US system; they produce party rule, career politicians, and political apathy. Nor do check-list items like "gay marriage" translate into more liberty: after you get married to your same-sex partner, society can (and does) go right back discriminating against you in many of these places.
First we're currently in a "warm period" (interglacial) that began around 11,500-13,300 years ago (the last ice age began around 26,000 years ago).
No, your numbers are all wrong. An ice age is any age during which large continental ice shelves exist. We have been in a continuous ice age for at least 2.6 million years. During an ice age, there are glacial (colder) and interglacial (warmer) periods. The last glacial period began maybe 100000 years ago and ended about 20000 years ago.
and Milankovitch-type calculations indicate that the present interglacial would probably continue for tens of thousands of years naturally
That statement is simply false. The correct statement would be that "Milankovitch-type calculations raise the possibility that the current interglacial period _might_ continue for tens of thousands of years". You can see that in your own references if you read them carefully.
Milankovitch cycles by themselves are insufficient to account for an extended warm period; there have to be positive feedback effects. Nobody knows whether the other required conditions that led to an extended warm period back then still exist today.
So, while there is a reasonable possibility that it will stay warm another 20000 years, the default assumption should still be that the cycles will continue as they usually do.
It depends on one's criteria. US is certainly not a freer society on all counts - its political system is pretty fucked up, for example, compared to any country with proportional representation.
You mean systems so complicated that half the representatives are appointed by party committees? Systems so complicated that the supreme court of Germany just declared Germany's system to be unconstitutional? Systems that regularly put right and left wing extremists in power and allowed large parts of Europe to become fascist? Proportional representation sounds good in theory, but the US winner-take-all system has definite advantages in practice.
Depending on one's state of residence, it can also be considerably less free for various personal matters, such as sexual orientation (yes, being able to marry and enjoy the associated benefits is a freedom, too).
None of the big nations (UK, Germany, France) in Europe have gay marriage either.
Pretty much the only two items on which US is more free than any other country
That's a lousy comparison. The question is: overall, where do you have the most freedom and where does the political system work best overall, and for all its fault, the US is pretty much at the top there.
There's quite a bit more known. Since about 7 million years ago, we have been in a continuous ice age, with rapid cycling between warmer and colder periods. We're currently towards the end of a warm period, which started about 20000 years ago.
Unless man-made global warming is strong enough, within somewhere between a few hundred and a few thousand years, temperatures are going to start dropping rapidly, and within another few thousand years, large parts of Europe and North America will be covered by ice sheets again.
The pilot doesn't need to "justify his actions"; unless he discriminates against one of those "protected minorities", it's his choice who to accept as passengers, and the only people he has to answer to are his management.
No, people simply disagree about what "helping" means. Does helping mean creating a lifetime dependency on government handouts, as in Obama's The Life of Julia? Is that the kind of life you want for yourself and your children, a life in which other people decide where and how you go to school, how you insure yourself, how you receive medical care, how you retire?
The conclusioon at hands is: it favours the USA government to use that term. I take it you did not read that wikipedia article and figured how the median is calculated?
It's OECD numbers, not American numbers. The mean disposable household income in the US is even higher relative to Gemany.
Regarding your numbers, I don't get from where you pick such nonsens numbers. Even as this is in german you should easy be able to pick the tables with "export" and "import" mentioned... http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energiemarkt
The numbers on the page you point to is about electrictiy. The numbers I stated are about energy. I'll leave it to you to verify my numbers on Wikipedia.
First off all your conception of poor is very wiered. It is well known that the lower classes of the USA are far far more than in any other first world country.
Percentage living below the national poverty line in Germany: 15.5%, percentage living below the national poverty line in the US: 15.1%.
Of course, that's relative poverty; if you ask about how many Germans live below the US poverty line, the picture becomes worse.
In one older post you used the median to compare "poverty" or "wealth" of the USA with Europe
I used median disposable household income in terms of PPP, the right measure to use in this case. If you don't understand why, you can always look at the raw income distributions; they tell you the same thing.
Do you even have any clue since when the last war is over?
The last totalitarian German government ended little more than 20 years ago and communists are an active part of Germany politics. Germany has a massive problem with neo-Nazi extremists, and the current governing party is the successor to the party that installed Hitler as dictator. Pardon me for not having much confidence in the German political system. Do you even know what's going on in your own country?
Many people can treat a $270 laptop as "disposable". Treating a $2700 Apple MacBook Pro as "disposable" is only an option for people with too much money.
No, I'm not. $40 Android tablets are a heck of a lot more useful to the world than Apple's overpriced toy.
I guess that's why something like 85 percent of hospitals are testing or piloting iPads [imedicalapps.com], and 94% of Fortune 500 companies and 70% of the Global 500 companies [macobserver.com] already use, or are looking into, iPads?
Contrary to Apple lore, tablets are nothing new, and both hospitals and Fortune 500 companies have been using Windows-based tablets for many years. Is iPad an improvement over those? Definitely, but that's hardly a ringing endorsement. And if those companies can get the same functionality at 1/10th the price, we're all better off.
Also, if you want more products like the iPad, the last thing you want to do is give Apple a virtual monopoly, because Apple doesn't spend a dime on developing new technologies. They just rip off the ideas of others and rush to market.
However, Apple really has no choice. If they don't sue, then that would be the "green light" for the "Allwinners" of the world to come in and just crank out $40 blister-pack 'ePads',
And the harm in that would be what?
absolutely indistinguishable-from-iPad (until you actually tried to use them!) tablets. Not only would that eat into Apple's sales/profits, but it would eventually (and wrongly) leak into the consumer mindset that ALL tablets are shit. And that could make the iPad market dry up as quickly as it was created.
The iPad is doing a good job at planting the idea in people's minds that tablets are overpriced toys for kids.
Unlike the USA germany for instance produces more energy and consumes more energy than ever, however more and more of it is green energy. Well, production got cut now recently while the nuke plants get decommissioned.
In 2009, Germany emitted 750 Mt CO2 to produce 1478 TWh of energy, or 0.5 Mt CO2/TWh (and imports another 2360 TWh). The US emitted 5195 Mt CO2 to produce 19613 TWh of energy, or 0.26 Mt CO2/TWh (and imports 6501 TWh). That not only makes US energy production more efficient than Germany's, it also shows that Germany is fond of exporting its problems elsewhere and then pretending it didn't cause them.
Your idea that reducing CO2 emissions is reducing economic activity is debunked all over the world
I'm sorry, I didn't put that well: I was talking about productive economic activity. Naturally, there are tons of things you can do to create unproductive economic activity. One of the reasons Germany's unemployment is nominally so low is because lots of people are engaged in unproductive activities in order to keep them off the streets. That's one of the reasons Germans are poorer than Americans. Of course, given Germany's violent history, this is still probably a good arrangement.
If you're willing to pay as much (in constant dollars) as people paid decades ago, you can fly business or first class, or even hire an air taxi. What you can't do is get 1950's style at 2012 prices. And once something becomes as cheap as air travel has become, people wearing flip-flops will use it. You'll just have to live with it, or pay the price of exclusivity.
Quite extraordinary that national governments are making threats about violating the embassies of other nations over extraditing a guy who kept going after the condom broke, especially when murderers and war criminals have been in the same position. It's almost like there's more to it than the official reasons isn't it?
You mean reasons other than that European criminal justice is a mess? That Europe is still a bunch of squabbling nation states who can't agree on anything? That political correctness is so out of control in parts of Europe that you can be convicted of rape for what Assange did? I think a simple look at the political and judicial mess in Europe is ample explanation.
You need conspiracy theories to explain this only if you start with the incorrect assumption that Europe is intrinsically perfect and just, and all problems must therefore be America's fault. That's really the same kind of thinking that used to blame all of Europe's problems on "the Jews".
Any others who have been accused of espionage, and threatened with the death penalty by the US' elected representatives, yes.
US representatives don't speak for the legal system. European communist or fascist MPs say stupid things all the time too and nobody pays any attention either. No, the US government doesn't go around making assurances that it won't do stupid things that US representatives of the opposing party want it to do, any more than European governments do.
Assange will have to live with the fact that he won't get assurances. If he chooses to rot in the Ecuadorean embassy out of paranoia, that's his choice. I think it's poetic justice.
...and totally wouldn't end up locked up for years without trial like Bradley Manning.
Manning is getting a trial. It's pretty clear that he is guilty, and he should go to prison for at least some time.
For Assange, it's not clear whether he is guilty. If the Obama justice department brought charges, the case would go through the courts all the way up to SCOTUS. Jail is a possibility, but unlikely. More likely, they'd just not let Assange travel to the US anymore and that would be the end of it.
Nothing's going to happen. Why bother imprison Assange if he has done it himself already? And how exactly do you the the US executive branch is going to get the judicial branch to do its political dirty work, even if Obama wanted to? What examples of unjust extradition and conviction by the US can you actually give?
What Assange should do is try to travel to the US and if he gets arrested, take his case all the way up to the SCOTUS. Groups like the ACLU would have a field day with the case and it would bring some legal clarity for future whistle blowers. Assange would actually be respected for his backbone, instead of sounding like a nutcase.
Of course, what would actually happen is that the US would just deny his visa and that would be the end of it.
The US killed people in the Iraq war, including civilians. That's part of war and if what Assange "revealed" was anything new to you, you were pretty naive.
Is that OK? Given the large number of people Saddam Hussein was killing, the war probably overall saved lives. However, it wasn't America's responsibility to get its hands dirty in this war. We should have stayed out of it out of simple self-interest. Let the people in the Middle East take care of their own problems.
Right now, Assange is charged with sexual misconduct by Sweden. The idea that there is some grand master plan by which the US is pulling the strings to have Assange extradited to Sweden in order to nab him, charge him with espionage, and then execute him exists only in Assange's head.
In different words, there is no "witch hunt" that could possibly be ended. For now, it's just Assange and the rape charges he faces in Sweden.
Slashdot Mirror
Who really got hurt by this verdict are consumers and innovation. What's the point of developing new technologies like multitouch when Apple is just going to rip you off and monopolize the market anyway? When juries are swayed by superficial appearances and give credit to the successful IP thief instead of the people who actually invented the technologies?
In a "proportional representation system", necessarily, you have very strong parties, because in the end, the only thing that can really be proportional to voting percentages is the number of candidates belonging to a party and they ultimately get to pick those. And the whole point of proportional representation is to represent all viewpoints in parliament, but 5-10% of the population just always seem to vote for extremist parties, either because they believe in them or because they don't know any better. So, proportional representation leads pretty much to European-style democracy, with extremists in parliaments, extremely strong "party discipline" (=politicians being puppets of their parties), and far more nebulous and devious horse trading than goes on in the US. The US system avoids these ills and still finds a reasonable compromise between the viewpoints represented in society.
Europe's parliamentary systems are frequently organized around parties who groom their career politicians starting in high school and provide jobs for them as long as those politicians remain faithful to the party line. The equivalents of senators are often not elected at all. And the great majority of US representatives have had other careers and jobs outside politics and government, while the same is usually not true in Europe: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Members_of_the_111th_United_States_Congress
Maybe you get that impression if you hang out in Berlin or London, but large parts of Europe are full of xenophobic rednecks, just like large parts of the US. Unlike the US, in Europe, their views are often advanced by law and funded by taxes. For example, the homophobe-in-chief in the Vatican received decades of lush salaries for preaching his homophobia and insulting non-Christians paid for by all German taxpayers (straight and gay, Catholic or atheist).
One can meaningfully talk about a lot of things without mathematical scores or aggregation. You seem to think of all these issues of liberty and representation in terms of check lists and theories. But in reality, proportional representation systems produce government that's less representative than the US system; they produce party rule, career politicians, and political apathy. Nor do check-list items like "gay marriage" translate into more liberty: after you get married to your same-sex partner, society can (and does) go right back discriminating against you in many of these places.
No, your numbers are all wrong. An ice age is any age during which large continental ice shelves exist. We have been in a continuous ice age for at least 2.6 million years. During an ice age, there are glacial (colder) and interglacial (warmer) periods. The last glacial period began maybe 100000 years ago and ended about 20000 years ago.
That statement is simply false. The correct statement would be that "Milankovitch-type calculations raise the possibility that the current interglacial period _might_ continue for tens of thousands of years". You can see that in your own references if you read them carefully.
Milankovitch cycles by themselves are insufficient to account for an extended warm period; there have to be positive feedback effects. Nobody knows whether the other required conditions that led to an extended warm period back then still exist today.
So, while there is a reasonable possibility that it will stay warm another 20000 years, the default assumption should still be that the cycles will continue as they usually do.
You mean systems so complicated that half the representatives are appointed by party committees? Systems so complicated that the supreme court of Germany just declared Germany's system to be unconstitutional? Systems that regularly put right and left wing extremists in power and allowed large parts of Europe to become fascist? Proportional representation sounds good in theory, but the US winner-take-all system has definite advantages in practice.
None of the big nations (UK, Germany, France) in Europe have gay marriage either.
That's a lousy comparison. The question is: overall, where do you have the most freedom and where does the political system work best overall, and for all its fault, the US is pretty much at the top there.
There's quite a bit more known. Since about 7 million years ago, we have been in a continuous ice age, with rapid cycling between warmer and colder periods. We're currently towards the end of a warm period, which started about 20000 years ago.
Unless man-made global warming is strong enough, within somewhere between a few hundred and a few thousand years, temperatures are going to start dropping rapidly, and within another few thousand years, large parts of Europe and North America will be covered by ice sheets again.
"Liberty" also means the right of Delta not to accept someone as passenger, and that's the kind of liberty Delta exercised here.
The pilot doesn't need to "justify his actions"; unless he discriminates against one of those "protected minorities", it's his choice who to accept as passengers, and the only people he has to answer to are his management.
And your basis for comparison is what exactly? Do you think Europeans are any smarter or less herd oriented?
Sadly, for all its faults and increasing problems, the US is still a freer society than anywhere else in the world.
No, people simply disagree about what "helping" means. Does helping mean creating a lifetime dependency on government handouts, as in Obama's The Life of Julia? Is that the kind of life you want for yourself and your children, a life in which other people decide where and how you go to school, how you insure yourself, how you receive medical care, how you retire?
Nope, it's the same article and the same numbers: it contains BOTH mean and median values, from the OECD.
You simply refuse to accept the simple, objective fact that Americans are financially a lot better off than Germans, let alone Europeans as a whole.
It's OECD numbers, not American numbers. The mean disposable household income in the US is even higher relative to Gemany.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Ranking_of_Household_Income
The numbers on the page you point to is about electrictiy. The numbers I stated are about energy. I'll leave it to you to verify my numbers on Wikipedia.
Percentage living below the national poverty line in Germany: 15.5%, percentage living below the national poverty line in the US: 15.1%.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_percentage_of_population_living_in_poverty
Of course, that's relative poverty; if you ask about how many Germans live below the US poverty line, the picture becomes worse.
I used median disposable household income in terms of PPP, the right measure to use in this case. If you don't understand why, you can always look at the raw income distributions; they tell you the same thing.
The last totalitarian German government ended little more than 20 years ago and communists are an active part of Germany politics. Germany has a massive problem with neo-Nazi extremists, and the current governing party is the successor to the party that installed Hitler as dictator. Pardon me for not having much confidence in the German political system. Do you even know what's going on in your own country?
Many people can treat a $270 laptop as "disposable". Treating a $2700 Apple MacBook Pro as "disposable" is only an option for people with too much money.
No, I'm not. $40 Android tablets are a heck of a lot more useful to the world than Apple's overpriced toy.
Contrary to Apple lore, tablets are nothing new, and both hospitals and Fortune 500 companies have been using Windows-based tablets for many years. Is iPad an improvement over those? Definitely, but that's hardly a ringing endorsement. And if those companies can get the same functionality at 1/10th the price, we're all better off.
Also, if you want more products like the iPad, the last thing you want to do is give Apple a virtual monopoly, because Apple doesn't spend a dime on developing new technologies. They just rip off the ideas of others and rush to market.
And the harm in that would be what?
The iPad is doing a good job at planting the idea in people's minds that tablets are overpriced toys for kids.
In 2009, Germany emitted 750 Mt CO2 to produce 1478 TWh of energy, or 0.5 Mt CO2/TWh (and imports another 2360 TWh). The US emitted 5195 Mt CO2 to produce 19613 TWh of energy, or 0.26 Mt CO2/TWh (and imports 6501 TWh). That not only makes US energy production more efficient than Germany's, it also shows that Germany is fond of exporting its problems elsewhere and then pretending it didn't cause them.
I'm sorry, I didn't put that well: I was talking about productive economic activity. Naturally, there are tons of things you can do to create unproductive economic activity. One of the reasons Germany's unemployment is nominally so low is because lots of people are engaged in unproductive activities in order to keep them off the streets. That's one of the reasons Germans are poorer than Americans. Of course, given Germany's violent history, this is still probably a good arrangement.
If you're willing to pay as much (in constant dollars) as people paid decades ago, you can fly business or first class, or even hire an air taxi. What you can't do is get 1950's style at 2012 prices. And once something becomes as cheap as air travel has become, people wearing flip-flops will use it. You'll just have to live with it, or pay the price of exclusivity.
You mean reasons other than that European criminal justice is a mess? That Europe is still a bunch of squabbling nation states who can't agree on anything? That political correctness is so out of control in parts of Europe that you can be convicted of rape for what Assange did? I think a simple look at the political and judicial mess in Europe is ample explanation.
You need conspiracy theories to explain this only if you start with the incorrect assumption that Europe is intrinsically perfect and just, and all problems must therefore be America's fault. That's really the same kind of thinking that used to blame all of Europe's problems on "the Jews".
US representatives don't speak for the legal system. European communist or fascist MPs say stupid things all the time too and nobody pays any attention either. No, the US government doesn't go around making assurances that it won't do stupid things that US representatives of the opposing party want it to do, any more than European governments do.
Assange will have to live with the fact that he won't get assurances. If he chooses to rot in the Ecuadorean embassy out of paranoia, that's his choice. I think it's poetic justice.
Manning is getting a trial. It's pretty clear that he is guilty, and he should go to prison for at least some time.
For Assange, it's not clear whether he is guilty. If the Obama justice department brought charges, the case would go through the courts all the way up to SCOTUS. Jail is a possibility, but unlikely. More likely, they'd just not let Assange travel to the US anymore and that would be the end of it.
Nothing's going to happen. Why bother imprison Assange if he has done it himself already? And how exactly do you the the US executive branch is going to get the judicial branch to do its political dirty work, even if Obama wanted to? What examples of unjust extradition and conviction by the US can you actually give?
What Assange should do is try to travel to the US and if he gets arrested, take his case all the way up to the SCOTUS. Groups like the ACLU would have a field day with the case and it would bring some legal clarity for future whistle blowers. Assange would actually be respected for his backbone, instead of sounding like a nutcase.
Of course, what would actually happen is that the US would just deny his visa and that would be the end of it.
The US killed people in the Iraq war, including civilians. That's part of war and if what Assange "revealed" was anything new to you, you were pretty naive.
Is that OK? Given the large number of people Saddam Hussein was killing, the war probably overall saved lives. However, it wasn't America's responsibility to get its hands dirty in this war. We should have stayed out of it out of simple self-interest. Let the people in the Middle East take care of their own problems.
Right now, Assange is charged with sexual misconduct by Sweden. The idea that there is some grand master plan by which the US is pulling the strings to have Assange extradited to Sweden in order to nab him, charge him with espionage, and then execute him exists only in Assange's head.
In different words, there is no "witch hunt" that could possibly be ended. For now, it's just Assange and the rape charges he faces in Sweden.