Hell, we could double your example Chinese worker's salary at a cost of much less than $.25 per T-Shirt. How would this be a bad thing? My point here is that there is no real economic reason for garment workers to be so economicly screwed.
You are engaging in wishful-thinking-economics. Since one white cotton T-shirt can basically be substituted for any other white cotton T-shirt, the T-Shirt market is extremely elastic, that is, suppliers that can provide a shipload of T-shirts for just $10 less than their competitor will get the contract from the supermarket chain, no matter whether or not the individual customer would have been ready to pay $0.25 more or not. If the supermarket chain would indeed add, as a bonus, $0.25 per shirt to benefit the labourers, it would quickly be outperformed by other, not-so-generous supermarket chains, retail margins being extremely low as they are. Suppliers would, as well, underbid each other by approximately $0.25/shirt to get the contract that is now worth $0.25/shirt more to them.
This is called "market economy". Its mechanics have been well understood ever since Smith and Riccardo, and there is indeed a rational reason why trade flows are what they are. To change the equilibrium result, e.g. to raise Chinese worker's salaries, some form of government intervention would be required, which by definition would destroy some measure of wealth by disrupting the equilibrium.
Consider, though, that every single Chinese worker works at $0.25/shirt not because the State forces her to (China is now capitalist in all but name), but because she considers herself better off in that position than in any other (e.g. unemployed, other job). If any social engineering remains to be done, then, it's up to the Chinese government to institute it (e.g. with minimum wage laws), and not the U.S. or European taxpayer.
The "free trade costs jobs" and "free trade creates jobs" arguments have already been juxtaposed ad nauseam. However,
To an economist, both sides of the debate ring hollow. Supply and demand in the labour market may be expected to balance in the long run just as it does in any other market, although transitory periods of disequilibrium may occur. The number of jobs in an economy will be determined by the labour supply and by the reservation wages of workers.... Incremental trade liberalization (such as that associated with NAFTA or the recent Uruguay Round) should not have much effect on real wages on average. To be sure, workers with specific human capital investments in import-competing industries can anticipate that their wages will fall with increased import competition, and the number of jobs in those industries will thus tend to decline. But workers in the export side of the economy will see increasing wages and employment opportunities as production shifts toward areas of greater comparative advantage. As a first order approximation, these effects may be expected to cancel out on average. Trade-related changes in the number of jobs, therefore, if any, are likely to be vastly smaller than other forces affecting job growth or loss such as the business cycle.
(ALAN O. SYKES, Comparative Advantage and the Normative Economics of International Trade Policy, in: JIEL 1 (1998), pp. 49-82)
This only applies to one particular country on a reduced time scale, however. As global economic integration progresses, the amount of additional net wealth produced by free trade is bound to "trickle down" to the global (but not necessarily every local) labour market again in the form of increased economic growth, which means more jobs overall.
Here's a backgrounder on the pertinent trade law on clothing and software (I don't believe it: something on Slashdot that falls into my area of competence!):
According to the WTO Agreement governing trade in Textiles and Clothing must be made subject to GATT disciplines until Jan 1, 2005, at the latest. That is, all textile import quotas that were legal unter the 1973 Multifibre Agreement must be abolished, and WTO Members must afford textile imports full most-favoured-nation treatment (i.e. you can't discriminate between imports of different countries any more) and national treatment (i.e. you can't treat imported textiles less favourable than those of national origin, such as by taxing them higher).
This was the principal concession made to developing countries during the Uruguay Round that gave birth to the WTO, liberalizing the clothing sector where developing countries tend to have the competitive advantage. This caused them to accept other WTO packages such as GATS, TRIPs and TRIMs, liberalizing areas where developed counties tend to have competitive advantages. (Never mind that the EU and US in particular have since resorted to all kind of dirty tricks to delay and circumvene the liberalizing provisions of the Agreement on Textiles and Clothing...)
However, the US-PRC situation is peculiar: As a condition to agreeing to China's WTO accession - which had to be OK'd, as everything in the WTO, by consensus of all Members - the PRC Accession Protocol provides that the U.S. may legally maintain import quotas on Chinese clothing up to 2009. After that, China can sue the US in the WTO Dispute Settlement Body (a kind of World Trade Court system) if quotas are maintained.
As to the Chinese software quota, this seems to be a clear-cut violation of the WTO Agreement on Government Procurement, in particular Article III thereof. It's possible, though, that the Chinese may invoke exceptions, such as the security exception of Article XXIII. The same provision was, incidentally, used (or abused, IMHO) by the U.S. to deny Iraq reconstruction contracts to the countries opposed to the war. At any rate, given the interests at stake, expect legal action by the U.S. soonest if this measure is not abolished immediately.
Painting half the rock black will not do: a) asteroids rotate, b) they already have a pretty low albedo and c) the irradiated area is likely too small to cause trajectory changes outside the margin of error. Large solar sails might work better.
Even so, the considerable problem of detecting a small, dark object at a very great distance with enough time left to be able to deploy countermeasures is not solved. This might require deploying a network of passive sensors across the solar system...
This is not new. It has been generally surmised that quipus (khipus, qipus) served as a carrier of complex informations. See e.g. this page for pictures and info.
According to the article, the quoted scientist merely says that the permutations possible in a quipu weaving might indicate a septary (not, by any means, a binary) code. He also says he's looking for a Rosetta stone equivalent.
Well, do go on looking, old fellow. But I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for a whip-toting archaeologist-hero to stumble out of a collapsing jungle temple with a quipu-to-English dictionary under his arm. Remember, the Incas were one of the more institutionally stupid (and thus, extinct) civilizations in history - after independently inventing the wheel, they used it for children's toys exclusively.
And he expects to unearth the original quipu RFC? It's probably in quipu, too. And eaten by a llama.
The WTO is always rules against protectionist tarrifs and environmental laws.
I know I am late replying to this, but the WTO is well capable of recognizing non-trade issues.
In EC-Asbestos, it upheld a ban on imports of poisonous asbestos, and in US-Shrimp, it allowed the U.S. to ban imports of shrimp caught under conditions such as to endanger sea turtles.
Article XX(b) and (g) of GATT, the major WTO treaty, explicitly allows States to take measures to protect the environment.
what's to stop the aforementioned Asian countries from declaring our patent system null and void? (Along with some other IP practices like say, copyright.)
Because the WTOTRIPs Agreement says they' re not allowed to. The Agreement provides for minimum IP standards, the principle of nondiscrimination, and even procedural safeguards.
Because "otherwise we won't trade with them?" That's just silly.
Oh my, no. Violate a WTO Agreement, and you get slapped with some $billion in trade sanctions by the WTO court system. Quit the WTO, and suddenly you face huge trade barriers all over the world, because you can't profit from the automatical WTO Most Favoured Nation Tariffs anymore.
The WTO is by far the least silly of all the multigovernmental institutes, because it has a strong and independent judicial system, and most of all because the U.S. and the EU have an intense interest in it to work.
Basically consciousness is a mechanism for interpreting the world into a coherent story about the decisions that the subconscious mind is making.
I've once read a vaguely similar but IMHO more convincing approach: Territorial animals (and primates are territorial) must evolve a mechanism of modeling their surroundings in order to react appropriately to whatever might happen. It's basically a mental map ("The sleeping tree is over there, and the creek to drink from is a bit to the side from it, and...")
The more complex this mental "map" gets, the more useful it can be to you: You can factor in mobile "landscape features" like enemies, prey, mates... and then you need to model their possible reactions to what you do So you grow some more neurons.
Then at some point your "map" has grown so complex that it is only meaningful when you include yourself, your needs and preferences into its model equations. And then you have... consciousness, or a functional equivalent thereof. The neuronic "map" subsystem has become "self-aware" by referencing its host organism as its focal point, as seems practical from a natural-selection point of view. When this calibration is lost, disorders like schizophrenia ensue.
Add Dawkinian memetics to the mix and you have a reasonable framework to explain the human mind and the culture it has produced. Not bad, huh?:-)
One reader sent me screenshots to prove that his Windows NT v4 server is still up and running of 1,079 days with nary a reboot, and being used to serve up IP addresses for about 3,500 client workstations.
Just the far end of the bell curve? A quick photoshop job on the screenshots? Or... maybe Windows is of some use as a server OS after all?
In some countries, school teachers are dying of AIDS faster than they can be trained
AIDS is not inevitable (except in rare cases: infected blood serum etc). A person that is ignorant or stupid enough not to use condoms is not a person that should be teaching kids anyway.
Re:The Upper House is effectively a formality
on
DMCA, Auf Deutsch
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Since only the FDP - who have around 7% of the vote - are against this, consider the Bundesrat to be a formality
And the FDP are against it because they think the law is not hard enough on users.
As a Swiss, I'm happy that we're not in the EU, so we don't have to comply with the EU directive. But our government has the nasty habit of "autonomously" implementing virtually every piece of EU legislation... often well in advance of most EU Member states. I'm afraid.
As an European I find it amusing that you can actually get arrested for possessing pornography
As another European, I'd like to point out that in some major European countries you can get arrested for merely possessing items with swastikas on them. (Not that I like nazis, but you get the point).
Also, both the U.S. and European countries ban the possession of, inter alia: drugs, certain non-mainstream pornography, certain weapons, certain chemicals, etc.
Or: say you stand in Texas, and shoot and kill a person in Mexico? Where (if anywhere) are you charged with a crime??
Both Mexico and the United States can charge you and sentence you (that is, the nation that gets hold of you first will). This is so because a crime is considered to have occurred, for purposes of jurisdiction, in the place it was committed and in the place it caused its effect. I guess that's the solution for the HD-over-the-border variant, too.
At least that's the law in Continental Europe, not sure about you Anglos... I guess Texas wins by default:-)
I kind of get your vagueish point, but: Laser rifles to feed the hungry? You make me sneer. There's already lots of cheap AK-47s available in you-know-what-kind-of-country to kill game. Game of which there of course there isnt't nearly enough to sustain all of the "hungry". Homo sapiens did find out about 15'000 years ago that an agricultural-sedentary lifestyle tends to be more efficient than a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, you know.
A recent example of SciFi influencing (predicting?) world polity is the concept of Anglosphere, coined by Neal Stephenson in The Diamond Age. It refers to a "natural", cultural-political unity amongst Anglo-saxon countries. As the war against Iraq appears to illustrate this concept, the phrase has come into widespread use, serving as the title of a recent book apparently intended to rally Britons against the EU.
This incident is big news here in Switzerland, because organized crime has been using the anonymous prepaid SIM cards (Switzerland being the only nation, I believe, to allow this) for some years now to evade police surveillance. The police, being organized at the cantonal level (the level of the states) has virtually no COMINT assets to speak of to deal with this (unlike the U.S., it appears...)
It appears very likely now that Parliament will enact legislation to make personal registration mandatory, despite the protest of the biggest telco, Swisscom, who's been making very good profits off it.
I'm sure this is, technically, good cryptography software. However, keep in mind that this software is explicitly designed to hide information from governmental law enforcement authorities. Therefore
it is just as useful to criminals as to human rights workers. This is not, of course, a problem per se, but
using this as a pretext, governments will simply ban possession and usage of this software. If they need any pretext, that is - in the kind of country this software is designed to be used, "human rights worker" is just another word for criminal.
This kind of software is useful to preserve personal privacy in a civilized nation. In a thugocracy, however, the police will just confiscate your computer, or you will be extradited/tortured/shot for being in possession of this software.
The game's main site features icons for several languages. The Korean icon features the flags of both North and South Korea.
Now I know this has nothing to do with the game, but somehow the probability of this site being accessed by a North Korean RPG fan strikes me as slightly lower than the possibility of it being accessed by an Afghani teen using a Babbage's Analytical Engine built from spare AK-47 parts and pigeons.
For inmates of the People's Republic of Korea, it is probably even illegal to know there is such a thing as the Internet.
Did people in the middle ages, for example, ever think much past the end of their own lives?
While most common (European) Medieaval people may not have been able to imagine a future different from their present, they certainly did think past the end of their lives. Remember that Mediaeval Christianity emphasized the afterlife (heaven or hell) as the central aspect of human existence, physical life being a brief, painful trial of the soul. Only after the Renaissance and then Enlightenment did the Western memepool's focus shift to the human being and its needs in the real world: the "pursuit of happiness".
Quite possibly this was the time where the entire concept of "progress" and indeed "the future" originated. It is no coincidence that timekeeping beyond the counting of seasons and ruler's reigns did virtually not exist in the aptly named Dark Age. There are historians who theorize that several decades of history (at around the time of Charlemagne) did not in fact take place! Such theories are possible only because the documents of that time are few and seldom are dated at all.
I'm not generally one for conspiracy theories, but... For reasons of national security, the U.S. government may not really be interested in cheap commercial space access. Expensive launches guarantee that only the U.S. and a few other major nations can put military hardware in orbit. The demand for commercial satellites can be met with current disposable launchers. And of course, with $500 million per shuttle missions, space contractors are very happy with things as they are.
In short, I don't see any real (read: economical or military) necessity for a cheap SSTO launch vehicle. Sad, really.
As far as Switzerland is concerned, I can help out.
ADSL: Provided by the ex-monopolist Swisscom and many resellers at about 50 CHF (35/$) per month for 256 kbps.
Cable: Depending on your location, your cable access is controlled by Cablecom (which now also offers telephony services) or small, regional providers. Here's Cablecom's English page. Prices tend to be slightly higher than ADSL.
Just call the corporations I mentioned if you' re interested, virtually everybody in Switzerland speaks English.
They all fall victim to anthromorphism.... Occam's razor says that our conclusion should be that it's unlikely life could exist at all.
Nobody expects intelligent alien life to be humanoid (although the observation of convergent evolution on Earth implies that it will be a likelier shape than, say, sentient avians). However, what we know of physics, astronomy and the observed rules of evolution tells us that in this universe, places where life-like molecular mechanisms can evolve at least to the single-celled (or equivalent) stage should be relatively abundant.
Mars and Europa are such places, that's why we should look there. Although I am baffled why you should mention corporate funding. How should any (probably microscopic) life-form likely to be found in the Sol system be suitable for commercialization? Corporations do look at the bottom line, you know.
Maybe we can create a "space-bubble" mass hysteria, just like the "dot-com bubble"... they'll throw billions after anything space-related!:-)
The discovery raises some doubts about whether the fourth-largest and second-closest Jovian moon is capable of sustaining life, as scientists have speculated. (UPI article)
IANAX (I Am Not A Xenobiologist), but offhand I cannot really think why this should be so. So Jupiter's magnetic field knocks the sh*t out of the Europan ice crust and creates a vapour trail all along the Europan orbit, big deal.
Remember, Europa is one big Arctic Ocean, a frozen crust of water ice swimming on an ocean of unknown depth. I believe nobody ever intended to look for life on the ice-crusted, irradiated, cold surface of the planet, but rather on the ocean floor, where volcanic vents could sustain life just as they do on Earth. Down there, what little radiation gets through all that water may be even speeding up evolution with its mutagenic effect.
Indeed, the warmth generated by the irradiation of the surface may be great enough to create a heat gradient between the Jupiter side and the dark side of Europa, which in turn may help sustain life.
After WWII and continuing today, the UN mandates the teaching of the Nazi era to all German school children
This is untrue. After the war, the Allies did in fact educate the public about Nazi crimes, but in modern times, the Germans do it all by themselves. The UN has neither the legal competence to enact nor the means to enforce any such legislation.
The only examples of blatant propaganda that come even close to [American media] are Stalinst-era Soviet broadcasts and the works of Goebels in Nazi Germany.
This, too, is evidently untrue. Be it in print media, on the Internet or on TV, the government line is not only criticized regularly, but often derided. Even entire cities publicly oppose the war. The mere comparison is a disgrace and an insult to those who suffered under and helped owerthrow totalitarian systems.
Slashdot Mirror
Hell, we could double your example Chinese worker's salary at a cost of much less than $.25 per T-Shirt. How would this be a bad thing? My point here is that there is no real economic reason for garment workers to be so economicly screwed.
You are engaging in wishful-thinking-economics. Since one white cotton T-shirt can basically be substituted for any other white cotton T-shirt, the T-Shirt market is extremely elastic, that is, suppliers that can provide a shipload of T-shirts for just $10 less than their competitor will get the contract from the supermarket chain, no matter whether or not the individual customer would have been ready to pay $0.25 more or not. If the supermarket chain would indeed add, as a bonus, $0.25 per shirt to benefit the labourers, it would quickly be outperformed by other, not-so-generous supermarket chains, retail margins being extremely low as they are. Suppliers would, as well, underbid each other by approximately $0.25/shirt to get the contract that is now worth $0.25/shirt more to them.
This is called "market economy". Its mechanics have been well understood ever since Smith and Riccardo, and there is indeed a rational reason why trade flows are what they are. To change the equilibrium result, e.g. to raise Chinese worker's salaries, some form of government intervention would be required, which by definition would destroy some measure of wealth by disrupting the equilibrium.
Consider, though, that every single Chinese worker works at $0.25/shirt not because the State forces her to (China is now capitalist in all but name), but because she considers herself better off in that position than in any other (e.g. unemployed, other job). If any social engineering remains to be done, then, it's up to the Chinese government to institute it (e.g. with minimum wage laws), and not the U.S. or European taxpayer.
This only applies to one particular country on a reduced time scale, however. As global economic integration progresses, the amount of additional net wealth produced by free trade is bound to "trickle down" to the global (but not necessarily every local) labour market again in the form of increased economic growth, which means more jobs overall.
Here's a backgrounder on the pertinent trade law on clothing and software (I don't believe it: something on Slashdot that falls into my area of competence!):
According to the WTO Agreement governing trade in Textiles and Clothing must be made subject to GATT disciplines until Jan 1, 2005, at the latest. That is, all textile import quotas that were legal unter the 1973 Multifibre Agreement must be abolished, and WTO Members must afford textile imports full most-favoured-nation treatment (i.e. you can't discriminate between imports of different countries any more) and national treatment (i.e. you can't treat imported textiles less favourable than those of national origin, such as by taxing them higher).
This was the principal concession made to developing countries during the Uruguay Round that gave birth to the WTO, liberalizing the clothing sector where developing countries tend to have the competitive advantage. This caused them to accept other WTO packages such as GATS, TRIPs and TRIMs, liberalizing areas where developed counties tend to have competitive advantages. (Never mind that the EU and US in particular have since resorted to all kind of dirty tricks to delay and circumvene the liberalizing provisions of the Agreement on Textiles and Clothing...)
However, the US-PRC situation is peculiar: As a condition to agreeing to China's WTO accession - which had to be OK'd, as everything in the WTO, by consensus of all Members - the PRC Accession Protocol provides that the U.S. may legally maintain import quotas on Chinese clothing up to 2009. After that, China can sue the US in the WTO Dispute Settlement Body (a kind of World Trade Court system) if quotas are maintained.
As to the Chinese software quota, this seems to be a clear-cut violation of the WTO Agreement on Government Procurement, in particular Article III thereof. It's possible, though, that the Chinese may invoke exceptions, such as the security exception of Article XXIII. The same provision was, incidentally, used (or abused, IMHO) by the U.S. to deny Iraq reconstruction contracts to the countries opposed to the war. At any rate, given the interests at stake, expect legal action by the U.S. soonest if this measure is not abolished immediately.
#1 - TELLMI (Digitspace): interactive hedgehog with blinking lights and moving limbs
#2 - THE SNOMOLD (SnoMold Industries): plastic bag filled with snow makes instant snowman
#3 - BLADE RACERS (Dynatech Action): "High velocity infrared racing system"
#4 - VOOT-VUE FARM (HSP Nature Toys): plexiglass box to see vegetables grow
#5 - MARVEL MYSTERY BAGS (Visionary Concepts): Plastic Marvel figures hidden in water-dissolvable bags
#6 - THE REAL SHRUNKEN HEAD (Witch Doctors?): "extremely lifelike", or deathlike, as it were, plastic shrunken human heads
#7 - THE FLYBAR (Flybar Inc.): Pogo stick.
#8 - WHAT'S IN NED'S HEAD (Fundex Games): Plush head containing fake vomit, bugs, moldy cheese, rats and worms
#9 - TKO FIT KIDS (TKO Sports Group): Inflatable child-size wrestlers
#10 - BABOOCHI (Baboochi World): Anthropomorphic blue furry M&M-shaped doll
Painting half the rock black will not do: a) asteroids rotate, b) they already have a pretty low albedo and c) the irradiated area is likely too small to cause trajectory changes outside the margin of error. Large solar sails might work better.
Even so, the considerable problem of detecting a small, dark object at a very great distance with enough time left to be able to deploy countermeasures is not solved. This might require deploying a network of passive sensors across the solar system...
This is not new. It has been generally surmised that quipus (khipus, qipus) served as a carrier of complex informations. See e.g. this page for pictures and info.
According to the article, the quoted scientist merely says that the permutations possible in a quipu weaving might indicate a septary (not, by any means, a binary) code. He also says he's looking for a Rosetta stone equivalent.
Well, do go on looking, old fellow. But I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for a whip-toting archaeologist-hero to stumble out of a collapsing jungle temple with a quipu-to-English dictionary under his arm. Remember, the Incas were one of the more institutionally stupid (and thus, extinct) civilizations in history - after independently inventing the wheel, they used it for children's toys exclusively.
And he expects to unearth the original quipu RFC? It's probably in quipu, too. And eaten by a llama.
The WTO is always rules against protectionist tarrifs and environmental laws.
I know I am late replying to this, but the WTO is well capable of recognizing non-trade issues.
In EC-Asbestos, it upheld a ban on imports of poisonous asbestos, and in US-Shrimp, it allowed the U.S. to ban imports of shrimp caught under conditions such as to endanger sea turtles.
Article XX(b) and (g) of GATT, the major WTO treaty, explicitly allows States to take measures to protect the environment.
what's to stop the aforementioned Asian countries from declaring our patent system null and void? (Along with some other IP practices like say, copyright.)
Because the WTO TRIPs Agreement says they' re not allowed to. The Agreement provides for minimum IP standards, the principle of nondiscrimination, and even procedural safeguards.
Because "otherwise we won't trade with them?" That's just silly.
Oh my, no. Violate a WTO Agreement, and you get slapped with some $billion in trade sanctions by the WTO court system. Quit the WTO, and suddenly you face huge trade barriers all over the world, because you can't profit from the automatical WTO Most Favoured Nation Tariffs anymore.
The WTO is by far the least silly of all the multigovernmental institutes, because it has a strong and independent judicial system, and most of all because the U.S. and the EU have an intense interest in it to work.
Basically consciousness is a mechanism for interpreting the world into a coherent story about the decisions that the subconscious mind is making.
:-)
I've once read a vaguely similar but IMHO more convincing approach: Territorial animals (and primates are territorial) must evolve a mechanism of modeling their surroundings in order to react appropriately to whatever might happen. It's basically a mental map ("The sleeping tree is over there, and the creek to drink from is a bit to the side from it, and...")
The more complex this mental "map" gets, the more useful it can be to you: You can factor in mobile "landscape features" like enemies, prey, mates... and then you need to model their possible reactions to what you do So you grow some more neurons.
Then at some point your "map" has grown so complex that it is only meaningful when you include yourself, your needs and preferences into its model equations. And then you have... consciousness, or a functional equivalent thereof. The neuronic "map" subsystem has become "self-aware" by referencing its host organism as its focal point, as seems practical from a natural-selection point of view. When this calibration is lost, disorders like schizophrenia ensue.
Add Dawkinian memetics to the mix and you have a reasonable framework to explain the human mind and the culture it has produced. Not bad, huh?
One reader sent me screenshots to prove that his Windows NT v4 server is still up and running of 1,079 days with nary a reboot, and being used to serve up IP addresses for about 3,500 client workstations.
Just the far end of the bell curve? A quick photoshop job on the screenshots? Or... maybe Windows is of some use as a server OS after all?
I completely agree with your statements, but...
In some countries, school teachers are dying of AIDS faster than they can be trained
AIDS is not inevitable (except in rare cases: infected blood serum etc). A person that is ignorant or stupid enough not to use condoms is not a person that should be teaching kids anyway.
Since only the FDP - who have around 7% of the vote - are against this, consider the Bundesrat to be a formality
And the FDP are against it because they think the law is not hard enough on users.
As a Swiss, I'm happy that we're not in the EU, so we don't have to comply with the EU directive. But our government has the nasty habit of "autonomously" implementing virtually every piece of EU legislation... often well in advance of most EU Member states. I'm afraid.
As an European I find it amusing that you can actually get arrested for possessing pornography
As another European, I'd like to point out that in some major European countries you can get arrested for merely possessing items with swastikas on them. (Not that I like nazis, but you get the point).
Also, both the U.S. and European countries ban the possession of, inter alia: drugs, certain non-mainstream pornography, certain weapons, certain chemicals, etc.
Or: say you stand in Texas, and shoot and kill a person in Mexico? Where (if anywhere) are you charged with a crime??
:-)
Both Mexico and the United States can charge you and sentence you (that is, the nation that gets hold of you first will). This is so because a crime is considered to have occurred, for purposes of jurisdiction, in the place it was committed and in the place it caused its effect. I guess that's the solution for the HD-over-the-border variant, too.
At least that's the law in Continental Europe, not sure about you Anglos... I guess Texas wins by default
I kind of get your vagueish point, but: Laser rifles to feed the hungry? You make me sneer. There's already lots of cheap AK-47s available in you-know-what-kind-of-country to kill game. Game of which there of course there isnt't nearly enough to sustain all of the "hungry".
Homo sapiens did find out about 15'000 years ago that an agricultural-sedentary lifestyle tends to be more efficient than a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, you know.
A recent example of SciFi influencing (predicting?) world polity is the concept of Anglosphere , coined by Neal Stephenson in The Diamond Age. It refers to a "natural", cultural-political unity amongst Anglo-saxon countries. As the war against Iraq appears to illustrate this concept, the phrase has come into widespread use, serving as the title of a recent book apparently intended to rally Britons against the EU.
This incident is big news here in Switzerland, because organized crime has been using the anonymous prepaid SIM cards (Switzerland being the only nation, I believe, to allow this) for some years now to evade police surveillance. The police, being organized at the cantonal level (the level of the states) has virtually no COMINT assets to speak of to deal with this (unlike the U.S., it appears...)
It appears very likely now that Parliament will enact legislation to make personal registration mandatory, despite the protest of the biggest telco, Swisscom, who's been making very good profits off it.
it is just as useful to criminals as to human rights workers. This is not, of course, a problem per se, but
using this as a pretext, governments will simply ban possession and usage of this software. If they need any pretext, that is - in the kind of country this software is designed to be used, "human rights worker" is just another word for criminal.
This kind of software is useful to preserve personal privacy in a civilized nation. In a thugocracy, however, the police will just confiscate your computer, or you will be extradited/tortured/shot for being in possession of this software.
The game's main site features icons for several languages. The Korean icon features the flags of both North and South Korea.
Now I know this has nothing to do with the game, but somehow the probability of this site being accessed by a North Korean RPG fan strikes me as slightly lower than the possibility of it being accessed by an Afghani teen using a Babbage's Analytical Engine built from spare AK-47 parts and pigeons.
For inmates of the People's Republic of Korea, it is probably even illegal to know there is such a thing as the Internet.
Did people in the middle ages, for example, ever think much past the end of their own lives?
While most common (European) Medieaval people may not have been able to imagine a future different from their present, they certainly did think past the end of their lives. Remember that Mediaeval Christianity emphasized the afterlife (heaven or hell) as the central aspect of human existence, physical life being a brief, painful trial of the soul. Only after the Renaissance and then Enlightenment did the Western memepool's focus shift to the human being and its needs in the real world: the "pursuit of happiness".
Quite possibly this was the time where the entire concept of "progress" and indeed "the future" originated. It is no coincidence that timekeeping beyond the counting of seasons and ruler's reigns did virtually not exist in the aptly named Dark Age. There are historians who theorize that several decades of history (at around the time of Charlemagne) did not in fact take place! Such theories are possible only because the documents of that time are few and seldom are dated at all.
I'm not generally one for conspiracy theories, but... For reasons of national security, the U.S. government may not really be interested in cheap commercial space access. Expensive launches guarantee that only the U.S. and a few other major nations can put military hardware in orbit. The demand for commercial satellites can be met with current disposable launchers. And of course, with $500 million per shuttle missions, space contractors are very happy with things as they are.
In short, I don't see any real (read: economical or military) necessity for a cheap SSTO launch vehicle. Sad, really.
ADSL: Provided by the ex-monopolist Swisscom and many resellers at about 50 CHF (35 /$) per month for 256 kbps.
Cable: Depending on your location, your cable access is controlled by Cablecom (which now also offers telephony services) or small, regional providers. Here's Cablecom's English page. Prices tend to be slightly higher than ADSL.
Just call the corporations I mentioned if you' re interested, virtually everybody in Switzerland speaks English.
They all fall victim to anthromorphism. ... Occam's razor says that our conclusion should be that it's unlikely life could exist at all.
:-)
Nobody expects intelligent alien life to be humanoid (although the observation of convergent evolution on Earth implies that it will be a likelier shape than, say, sentient avians). However, what we know of physics, astronomy and the observed rules of evolution tells us that in this universe, places where life-like molecular mechanisms can evolve at least to the single-celled (or equivalent) stage should be relatively abundant.
Mars and Europa are such places, that's why we should look there. Although I am baffled why you should mention corporate funding. How should any (probably microscopic) life-form likely to be found in the Sol system be suitable for commercialization? Corporations do look at the bottom line, you know.
Maybe we can create a "space-bubble" mass hysteria, just like the "dot-com bubble"... they'll throw billions after anything space-related!
The discovery raises some doubts about whether the fourth-largest and second-closest Jovian moon is capable of sustaining life, as scientists have speculated. (UPI article)
IANAX (I Am Not A Xenobiologist), but offhand I cannot really think why this should be so. So Jupiter's magnetic field knocks the sh*t out of the Europan ice crust and creates a vapour trail all along the Europan orbit, big deal.
Remember, Europa is one big Arctic Ocean, a frozen crust of water ice swimming on an ocean of unknown depth. I believe nobody ever intended to look for life on the ice-crusted, irradiated, cold surface of the planet, but rather on the ocean floor, where volcanic vents could sustain life just as they do on Earth. Down there, what little radiation gets through all that water may be even speeding up evolution with its mutagenic effect.
Indeed, the warmth generated by the irradiation of the surface may be great enough to create a heat gradient between the Jupiter side and the dark side of Europa, which in turn may help sustain life.
You, sir, are a troll.
After WWII and continuing today, the UN mandates the teaching of the Nazi era to all German school children
This is untrue. After the war, the Allies did in fact educate the public about Nazi crimes, but in modern times, the Germans do it all by themselves. The UN has neither the legal competence to enact nor the means to enforce any such legislation.
The only examples of blatant propaganda that come even close to [American media] are Stalinst-era Soviet broadcasts and the works of Goebels in Nazi Germany.
This, too, is evidently untrue. Be it in print media, on the Internet or on TV, the government line is not only criticized regularly, but often derided. Even entire cities publicly oppose the war. The mere comparison is a disgrace and an insult to those who suffered under and helped owerthrow totalitarian systems.
Plus, I invoke Godwin's Law. Go home.