This kind of teleologico-evolutionary raving is no better than the kind of nonsense spouted by Creationists and is a nice example of how many people blindly subscribe to evolutionary theory as a kind of religion without having the faintest clue of what it's actually about.
Then again, maybe it's just poetic, like the rain dancing on the rooftop or life happening as a series of snapshots. After all, this is resulting the decimation of lifeforms that have evolved in modern conditions, leaving only the more ancient and "unevolved" lifeforms behind. What better term than an "evolutionary reset?"
I'm sure you could describe up the situation in a series of long sentences detailing with the most scientifically accurate prose possible what is going on, but the person you are railing against did it better by tagging the whole concept with just two words that summed up the whole shebang. "Evolutionary reset" -- a wiping out of more recently developed life.
The problem is that third parties are not viable in the US due to the way our electoral system works. A combination of the electoral college with its winner-take-all votes for each state ensures that at a national level only two parties can survive. Only a handful of time in American history has a third party won, and in doing so it replaced one of the other two parties. Never has the US had a coallition government because the very structure of the system prevents it.
So, I'll vote for one of the two major parties, and you can vote for a Libertarian, a Green, a cartoon character, or Santa Claus for all the good it will do you. The math doesn't allow for change except in periods of turmoil and extreme weakness by one of the two parties.
Not only is this technically impossible, but it also doesn't address the problem of the person in question being a public nuisance who should be punished under the law.
The Japanese are prohibited from engaging in warfare. It's in their Constitution.
The US Constitution doesn't allow the government to do a lot of things that it does now at a first read. In particular, consider all the areas the federal government has its fingers in that it couldn't have touched 200 years ago. Judicial interpretation, amendments, and just plain flouting of violations happen with time.
Japan's Constitution states the following:
ARTICLE 9. Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes.
In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized.
It's pretty clear that they can't have any standing military forces. However, it's been interpreted that they can have a force for self-defense only which seems to be directly flouting of the language of their Constitution. This force has stayed completely at home from its creation in the 1950s until recently, but nationalism has been quietly stirring in the corridors of power in Japan as well as denial of any wrongs done in WWII (see visits to Yasukuni shrine, for example), so there are voices calling for an amendment to revoke article 9.
In a move widely seen as a first step towards having a full military force, Japan sent non-combtant peacekeepers to Iraq. This really steps outside of self-defense, though it hasn't yet stepped necessarily into "belligerence." It's a way for Japan to dip its toe in the water, so to speak, and the move was widely disliked by most Japanese both because of the general unpopularity of the war and by generations that have grown up to believe that Japan is a pacifist nation.
So, don't stand too confidently by the idea that Japan has no intention of ever again waging war. The Japanese right-wing has grown in power and, while still looked at as slightly ridiculous by the majority of Japanese, has the ear of some of the LDP's current and next generation.
Oh, sweet hell. There's an Atlas Shrugged movie in production. That doesn't leave me much time to do all those things I've always wanted to and still be able to kill myself before the licensed tie-in game comes out.
The only reason Vinod is interested in ethanol is because there is money to be made. For him.
That's a little harsh. If there's money to be made, does that mean that we have to automatically assume that the person who stands to make it has absolutely no motives other than greed? Is it impossible to want to further a good cause and to want to get rich while doing it?
Besides, how is Vinod going to get filthy rich without having a viable market?
Bush already thinks he has a line-item veto in the form of signing statements. Let's not actually give him the power to further neuter Congress and expand executive power in the ways that he's been striving to do by legitimizing his acts with an actual line-item veto power.
No, I used to sort of support the line-item veto, but I'll never support it again. Even if just restricted to budgetary affairs, it's too much power.
In looking this up, I found what everyone else found about barrels of salted pork, slaves, etc., but I also found this bit from the Straight Dope about the term slush fund, which is a related term frequently used in American politcs.
This doesn't even account for ethanol from cellulose. If we can devise a way to efficiently break cellulose down to sugar, then ethanol become trivial to produce.
The most annoying part is I can type 100+ wpm, and can't write anywhere near that...
Who can!? You realize, I hope, that it takes years of experience with shorthand to get to writing that fast (though some savants have gotten up to 350 wpm).
Normal handwriting tops out at about 50 wpm for people good at it, according to what I've read.
Sure, that's the way it is in real life, but they're already subsidizing the meal! Why not charge more for the unhealthy food and make it easier for kids to get something good for lunch?
Because the unhealthy food is cheaper. We subsidize the heck out of corn, which is mostly made into high-fructose corn sweetener and corn starch to go into junk food or fed to cows and chicken to go into junk food. Potatoes are also really cheap to grow compared to green beans or other healthier vegetables. Junk food really is just cheaper than healthy food as a result of our farm policy.
Junk food inputs are the biggest cash crops in the US. The USDA basically exists to promote the interests of US farmers (or actually large US agribusiness now) and sets the federal school lunch guidelines to maximize the consumption of major US crops. School lunch programs are basically the dumping ground for surplus product that's taken off the market to control prices. Kids health is not a primary concern.
So yes, no matter how you turn the equation around, law is subtractive in all situations. If your right takes precedent over mine, then my right has been lessened while yours remains intact. Your right isn't "additive", because you had it in the first place.
The problem is that no right exists until people are told they can't take it away from you. Just because you're doing something and no one is currently stopping you doesn't mean that it's a right.
Property rights don't exist until people are told that only you have the right to use something. The right to free speech doesn't exist until people are told they can't punish you for what you say -- a point I tried to illustrate with the dichotomy between speech rights as preserved by the government and as not preserved by private organizations. The right to bear arms only exists so long as they can't be taken from you.
In essence, the equation often balances (more or less). It is incorrect to only look at the negative side and to label all laws as taking rights away when, without laws, the only right that exists is that of might.
Thank you for saying everything that I wanted to say in a few short sentences. People who believe that some mythical "good parenting" exists that will result in kids always being well-behaved doesn't know kids.
Laws are subtractive, not additive. This is a common misperception by the public at large.
It's not a misconception. There are times that your rights and the rights of another are in conflict and the law must define which is supreme. For example, the right to live vs. the "right" to defend one's honor against insult. We chose to outlaw dueling to positively affirm life. Another example would be the right to use one's property as one sees fit in pursuit of profit vs. the right to breathe clean air and drink clean water. We have anti-pollution laws for this reason.
The classic, defining conflict of rights in my mind is free speech vs. private property. Can you express any opinion you want on someone else's property? Without coming down in favor of one right or the other by barring the opposition, neither right can truly be said to exist since either can be abridged at arbitrarily. In fact, all private property rights are essentially the creation of rights by the removal of the rights of others to use the property that belongs to you -- from laws against trespassing to laws against theft. And yet, without private property, how could we have privacy rights?
What the Constitution (and especially the Bill of Rights) does to protect your rights is to bar the government from taking certain rights away. You have a right to free speech only insomuch as the government cannot take it away, but private property owners can censor you or drive you out for speech such as wearing a T-shirt that contains a political message they don't like. You have the right to bear arms because the government can't take them away, but private individuals have the right to toss your out of their places if you come onto their property and refuse to let them confiscate your weapon.
This is different from rights created by legislation such as the right not be racially discriminated against. While the courts have repeatedly allowed private organizations to ban speech they don't like, they've repeatedly disallowed racial and sexual discrimination. You don't have the right to say whatever you want in a place of business, but you do have the right not to be treated poorly for your skin color. This is an example of a right that is not in the Constitution that is in some ways stronger than the rights that are in the Constitution.
Law is never so simple. It's always a give and a take, and it's not always an equittable trade, but to say that all law is subtractive is like saying that refrigerators add heat to an apartment without noting the cooling of the food that the net heat gain creates. It ignores half the equation.
I firmly believe that the terrorists won with their 9/11 attack.
One attack, a few thousand people killed, and your country's civil rights are now being violated like never before "for the sake of security", and your constitution isn't worth the paper it's printed on.
That's a common trope meant originally to shock people into think about what they're giving up for security, but to be honest, the terrorists couldn't give a damn about our civil rights at all. What the terrorists want is for the US to pull out of the Middle East, leave Israel to fend for itself, leave the Middle Eastern regimes that are not theocracies (like Jordan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia) to fend for themselves against Islamist movements at home, and to reestablish the Caliphate.
If the US were to become a 1984-style eternal dictatorship where the very humanity was crushed out of our souls, the terrorist wouldn't care at all so long as we weren't in the Middle East anymore. The fact that our slide towards militaristic authoritarianism is being bolstered by fear of Muslims and desire to kick over more of their territory actually represents a significant loss for their agenda of getting us out of the Middle East.
We're not winning the "War on Terrorism," but neither are they. We're losing civil rights and world prestige, they're losing lives in droves and seeing us become more entrenched in their backyards. This conflict is many, many decades from being resolved, but right now it's a lose-lose battle.
The problem is that none of those classes are really anything but a guy better at some skills than others.* When your powers are easily exchanged tools that are generally sensibly designed to be easily used by new users, nothing you do it really all that special, and there's no reason not to let you learn how to use the powers of other classes. Any attempt to restrict tools to one class or another becomes blatantly arbitrary and unsatisfying in play in a way the restricting magical abilities isn't.
Sci-fi classes are meaningless for most types of characters that you are likely to play (i.e. combat classes instead of professionals).
* I ignore "techno-mage" because it opens the world up to fantasy and all the benefits there in.
It depends on whether or not some version of trusted computing is involved to ensure that the underlying OS isn't tampered with. Otherwise, it's only your favorite distro's Live CD away from being a completely ad-free system.
If I were evil and designing it, I'd apply some of the Xbox 360's security provisions into the machine to ensure that no OS other than a trusted MS OS with TCPA protections was running on the system. I'd then make much of the functioning of the OS contingent on being able to contact certain ad-servers over the same channels used to fetch ads & report back private profiling info -- say a simple SSL connection so that stateful firewalls can't risk blocking it.
It's really possible to lock down such a system, and MS holds enough related patents to make it happen.
I agree. There's a big difference between, "I blast things with my tool," and "*I* blast things."
In addition, I'd like to note that having the powers be personal means that it's easier to distinguish between character types without BS restrictions. In a world of magic, you can have necromancers, elementalists, healers, summoners, etc. each with wildly different abilities that makes them more differentiated and gives a greater feeling of being somehow special.
In a world of technology, anyone can use a gun, a laser, a medpack, cybernetics, nanotechnology, etc. You can be more skilled at it than someone else, but there's no reason for strong differentiation between ability types. Your character isn't necessarily Special. Any artificial restrictions on access to tools and powers become more blatantly arbitrary than in a fantasy setting.
The remaining 36% percent has been determined to consist of: 15.08% squeely beeps 18.00% necrophagy 27.71% drugs 24.02% gender ambiguity 10.62% spin-offs
4.08% blue period
0.57% unknown... scratch that... tar
I'd hate to break this to "Kieren" but being patriotic does not make one mindless. There is nothing wrong with being proud of your country, no matter where you are from.
I hate to break it to JavaLord, but "mindlessly" is a modifier to "patriotic."
You can be intelligently patriotic, like our founding fathers were, such as Sam Adams who said, "If ever time should come, when vain and aspiring men shall possess the highest seats in government, our country will stand in need of its experienced patriots to prevent its ruin." Or, you can be mindlessly patriotic and believe that "you're either with us or you're against us," that dissent should be punished, and that your country has never and can never do anything wrong.
Pride often goes before the fall because pride often leads to blindness and overconfidence. The line between patriotism and nationalism is very thin.
What's the problem with South Korea? In fact, given the cheap abundance of super high-speed connections they have there and the national love of online gaming, I'd almost rather have them in charge of the Internet than us.
If the market isn't providing enough incentive, then the market doesn't really want more innovation/services, which means it would be wasteful and rather stupid for corporations to innovate.
That is a faith-driven belief that doesn't have a basis in reality. People want more innovation and services. The companies don't see enough profit in it compared to just squeezing customers more for what they have. Remember, the market only reacts to where the money is which does not always correlate to what the customers want.
For example, what customer in the market really wants DRM? No one. However, it enhances the profits of the companies, so "the market" demands it.
Right now though, only a small percentage of people will actually find a benefit from a higher bandwidth internet connection.
That same exact argument was valid when everyone was on dial-up. However, market demand has changed as new services became available.
The market is often shaped by the services available. In Europe, text messaging is very popular. Over there, text messaging is not charged per message, whereas in the states, it is, and adoption is low. You can pay for services everywhere with your cell phone in Europe because the companies there bend over backwards to make it happens, whereas in America, companies charge huge fees and set up ridiculous terms that discourage the survival of such third-party services.
Never assume that the market always delivers the best results possible and that it shows what people truly want. That's putting the cart before the horse. Instead, look at what the market (or government, free swapping, etc.) provide and what people want and evaluate the system based on that. Assuming the market is always right as a postulate is a large part of why a lot of things in America suck compared to the rest of the world -- healthcare, telecom, transportation, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
This kind of teleologico-evolutionary raving is no better than the kind of nonsense spouted by Creationists and is a nice example of how many people blindly subscribe to evolutionary theory as a kind of religion without having the faintest clue of what it's actually about.
Then again, maybe it's just poetic, like the rain dancing on the rooftop or life happening as a series of snapshots. After all, this is resulting the decimation of lifeforms that have evolved in modern conditions, leaving only the more ancient and "unevolved" lifeforms behind. What better term than an "evolutionary reset?"
I'm sure you could describe up the situation in a series of long sentences detailing with the most scientifically accurate prose possible what is going on, but the person you are railing against did it better by tagging the whole concept with just two words that summed up the whole shebang. "Evolutionary reset" -- a wiping out of more recently developed life.
The problem is that third parties are not viable in the US due to the way our electoral system works. A combination of the electoral college with its winner-take-all votes for each state ensures that at a national level only two parties can survive. Only a handful of time in American history has a third party won, and in doing so it replaced one of the other two parties. Never has the US had a coallition government because the very structure of the system prevents it.
So, I'll vote for one of the two major parties, and you can vote for a Libertarian, a Green, a cartoon character, or Santa Claus for all the good it will do you. The math doesn't allow for change except in periods of turmoil and extreme weakness by one of the two parties.
Not only is this technically impossible, but it also doesn't address the problem of the person in question being a public nuisance who should be punished under the law.
The Japanese are prohibited from engaging in warfare. It's in their Constitution.
The US Constitution doesn't allow the government to do a lot of things that it does now at a first read. In particular, consider all the areas the federal government has its fingers in that it couldn't have touched 200 years ago. Judicial interpretation, amendments, and just plain flouting of violations happen with time.
Japan's Constitution states the following:
It's pretty clear that they can't have any standing military forces. However, it's been interpreted that they can have a force for self-defense only which seems to be directly flouting of the language of their Constitution. This force has stayed completely at home from its creation in the 1950s until recently, but nationalism has been quietly stirring in the corridors of power in Japan as well as denial of any wrongs done in WWII (see visits to Yasukuni shrine, for example), so there are voices calling for an amendment to revoke article 9.
In a move widely seen as a first step towards having a full military force, Japan sent non-combtant peacekeepers to Iraq. This really steps outside of self-defense, though it hasn't yet stepped necessarily into "belligerence." It's a way for Japan to dip its toe in the water, so to speak, and the move was widely disliked by most Japanese both because of the general unpopularity of the war and by generations that have grown up to believe that Japan is a pacifist nation.
So, don't stand too confidently by the idea that Japan has no intention of ever again waging war. The Japanese right-wing has grown in power and, while still looked at as slightly ridiculous by the majority of Japanese, has the ear of some of the LDP's current and next generation.
There are more intelligent ways to mark a piece of paper than an easily detachable pre-punched hole.
Oh, sweet hell. There's an Atlas Shrugged movie in production. That doesn't leave me much time to do all those things I've always wanted to and still be able to kill myself before the licensed tie-in game comes out.
Amen.
The only reason Vinod is interested in ethanol is because there is money to be made. For him.
That's a little harsh. If there's money to be made, does that mean that we have to automatically assume that the person who stands to make it has absolutely no motives other than greed? Is it impossible to want to further a good cause and to want to get rich while doing it?
Besides, how is Vinod going to get filthy rich without having a viable market?
All repeat after me:
"Line item Veto"
Repeat after me: McCain's Anti-Torture Amendment.
Repeat after me: Patriot Act Oversight Rules.
Bush already thinks he has a line-item veto in the form of signing statements. Let's not actually give him the power to further neuter Congress and expand executive power in the ways that he's been striving to do by legitimizing his acts with an actual line-item veto power.
No, I used to sort of support the line-item veto, but I'll never support it again. Even if just restricted to budgetary affairs, it's too much power.
In looking this up, I found what everyone else found about barrels of salted pork, slaves, etc., but I also found this bit from the Straight Dope about the term slush fund, which is a related term frequently used in American politcs.
Not only are Pimental's figures grossly incorrect for corn, but there are much more efficient feedstocks that blow them completely out of the water.
This doesn't even account for ethanol from cellulose. If we can devise a way to efficiently break cellulose down to sugar, then ethanol become trivial to produce.
The most annoying part is I can type 100+ wpm, and can't write anywhere near that...
Who can!? You realize, I hope, that it takes years of experience with shorthand to get to writing that fast (though some savants have gotten up to 350 wpm).
Normal handwriting tops out at about 50 wpm for people good at it, according to what I've read.
Sure, that's the way it is in real life, but they're already subsidizing the meal! Why not charge more for the unhealthy food and make it easier for kids to get something good for lunch?
Because the unhealthy food is cheaper. We subsidize the heck out of corn, which is mostly made into high-fructose corn sweetener and corn starch to go into junk food or fed to cows and chicken to go into junk food. Potatoes are also really cheap to grow compared to green beans or other healthier vegetables. Junk food really is just cheaper than healthy food as a result of our farm policy.
Junk food inputs are the biggest cash crops in the US. The USDA basically exists to promote the interests of US farmers (or actually large US agribusiness now) and sets the federal school lunch guidelines to maximize the consumption of major US crops. School lunch programs are basically the dumping ground for surplus product that's taken off the market to control prices. Kids health is not a primary concern.
So yes, no matter how you turn the equation around, law is subtractive in all situations. If your right takes precedent over mine, then my right has been lessened while yours remains intact. Your right isn't "additive", because you had it in the first place.
The problem is that no right exists until people are told they can't take it away from you. Just because you're doing something and no one is currently stopping you doesn't mean that it's a right.
Property rights don't exist until people are told that only you have the right to use something. The right to free speech doesn't exist until people are told they can't punish you for what you say -- a point I tried to illustrate with the dichotomy between speech rights as preserved by the government and as not preserved by private organizations. The right to bear arms only exists so long as they can't be taken from you.
In essence, the equation often balances (more or less). It is incorrect to only look at the negative side and to label all laws as taking rights away when, without laws, the only right that exists is that of might.
Thank you for saying everything that I wanted to say in a few short sentences.
People who believe that some mythical "good parenting" exists that will result in kids always being well-behaved doesn't know kids.
Laws are subtractive, not additive. This is a common misperception by the public at large.
It's not a misconception. There are times that your rights and the rights of another are in conflict and the law must define which is supreme. For example, the right to live vs. the "right" to defend one's honor against insult. We chose to outlaw dueling to positively affirm life. Another example would be the right to use one's property as one sees fit in pursuit of profit vs. the right to breathe clean air and drink clean water. We have anti-pollution laws for this reason.
The classic, defining conflict of rights in my mind is free speech vs. private property. Can you express any opinion you want on someone else's property? Without coming down in favor of one right or the other by barring the opposition, neither right can truly be said to exist since either can be abridged at arbitrarily. In fact, all private property rights are essentially the creation of rights by the removal of the rights of others to use the property that belongs to you -- from laws against trespassing to laws against theft. And yet, without private property, how could we have privacy rights?
What the Constitution (and especially the Bill of Rights) does to protect your rights is to bar the government from taking certain rights away. You have a right to free speech only insomuch as the government cannot take it away, but private property owners can censor you or drive you out for speech such as wearing a T-shirt that contains a political message they don't like. You have the right to bear arms because the government can't take them away, but private individuals have the right to toss your out of their places if you come onto their property and refuse to let them confiscate your weapon.
This is different from rights created by legislation such as the right not be racially discriminated against. While the courts have repeatedly allowed private organizations to ban speech they don't like, they've repeatedly disallowed racial and sexual discrimination. You don't have the right to say whatever you want in a place of business, but you do have the right not to be treated poorly for your skin color. This is an example of a right that is not in the Constitution that is in some ways stronger than the rights that are in the Constitution.
Law is never so simple. It's always a give and a take, and it's not always an equittable trade, but to say that all law is subtractive is like saying that refrigerators add heat to an apartment without noting the cooling of the food that the net heat gain creates. It ignores half the equation.
I firmly believe that the terrorists won with their 9/11 attack.
One attack, a few thousand people killed, and your country's civil rights are now being violated like never before "for the sake of security", and your constitution isn't worth the paper it's printed on.
That's a common trope meant originally to shock people into think about what they're giving up for security, but to be honest, the terrorists couldn't give a damn about our civil rights at all. What the terrorists want is for the US to pull out of the Middle East, leave Israel to fend for itself, leave the Middle Eastern regimes that are not theocracies (like Jordan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia) to fend for themselves against Islamist movements at home, and to reestablish the Caliphate.
If the US were to become a 1984-style eternal dictatorship where the very humanity was crushed out of our souls, the terrorist wouldn't care at all so long as we weren't in the Middle East anymore. The fact that our slide towards militaristic authoritarianism is being bolstered by fear of Muslims and desire to kick over more of their territory actually represents a significant loss for their agenda of getting us out of the Middle East.
We're not winning the "War on Terrorism," but neither are they. We're losing civil rights and world prestige, they're losing lives in droves and seeing us become more entrenched in their backyards. This conflict is many, many decades from being resolved, but right now it's a lose-lose battle.
The problem is that none of those classes are really anything but a guy better at some skills than others.* When your powers are easily exchanged tools that are generally sensibly designed to be easily used by new users, nothing you do it really all that special, and there's no reason not to let you learn how to use the powers of other classes. Any attempt to restrict tools to one class or another becomes blatantly arbitrary and unsatisfying in play in a way the restricting magical abilities isn't.
Sci-fi classes are meaningless for most types of characters that you are likely to play (i.e. combat classes instead of professionals).
* I ignore "techno-mage" because it opens the world up to fantasy and all the benefits there in.
Let's lock them in their rooms until they're 30!
I'll bet you have stock in Vivendi and Blizzard, don't you?
It depends on whether or not some version of trusted computing is involved to ensure that the underlying OS isn't tampered with. Otherwise, it's only your favorite distro's Live CD away from being a completely ad-free system.
If I were evil and designing it, I'd apply some of the Xbox 360's security provisions into the machine to ensure that no OS other than a trusted MS OS with TCPA protections was running on the system. I'd then make much of the functioning of the OS contingent on being able to contact certain ad-servers over the same channels used to fetch ads & report back private profiling info -- say a simple SSL connection so that stateful firewalls can't risk blocking it.
It's really possible to lock down such a system, and MS holds enough related patents to make it happen.
I agree. There's a big difference between, "I blast things with my tool," and "*I* blast things."
In addition, I'd like to note that having the powers be personal means that it's easier to distinguish between character types without BS restrictions. In a world of magic, you can have necromancers, elementalists, healers, summoners, etc. each with wildly different abilities that makes them more differentiated and gives a greater feeling of being somehow special.
In a world of technology, anyone can use a gun, a laser, a medpack, cybernetics, nanotechnology, etc. You can be more skilled at it than someone else, but there's no reason for strong differentiation between ability types. Your character isn't necessarily Special. Any artificial restrictions on access to tools and powers become more blatantly arbitrary than in a fantasy setting.
The remaining 36% percent has been determined to consist of:
15.08% squeely beeps
18.00% necrophagy
27.71% drugs
24.02% gender ambiguity
10.62% spin-offs
4.08% blue period
0.57% unknown... scratch that... tar
Celes, trying to commit suicide by throwing herself off a cliff if you fail to save Cid in the first bit after Kefka's apocalypse.
Aeris got more of a, "What? That's f---ing b---s---!" when I saw it.
I'd hate to break this to "Kieren" but being patriotic does not make one mindless. There is nothing wrong with being proud of your country, no matter where you are from.
I hate to break it to JavaLord, but "mindlessly" is a modifier to "patriotic."
You can be intelligently patriotic, like our founding fathers were, such as Sam Adams who said, "If ever time should come, when vain and aspiring men shall possess the highest seats in government, our country will stand in need of its experienced patriots to prevent its ruin." Or, you can be mindlessly patriotic and believe that "you're either with us or you're against us," that dissent should be punished, and that your country has never and can never do anything wrong.
Pride often goes before the fall because pride often leads to blindness and overconfidence. The line between patriotism and nationalism is very thin.
What's the problem with South Korea? In fact, given the cheap abundance of super high-speed connections they have there and the national love of online gaming, I'd almost rather have them in charge of the Internet than us.
Maybe you meant North Korea?
If the market isn't providing enough incentive, then the market doesn't really want more innovation/services, which means it would be wasteful and rather stupid for corporations to innovate.
That is a faith-driven belief that doesn't have a basis in reality. People want more innovation and services. The companies don't see enough profit in it compared to just squeezing customers more for what they have. Remember, the market only reacts to where the money is which does not always correlate to what the customers want.
For example, what customer in the market really wants DRM? No one. However, it enhances the profits of the companies, so "the market" demands it.
Right now though, only a small percentage of people will actually find a benefit from a higher bandwidth internet connection.
That same exact argument was valid when everyone was on dial-up. However, market demand has changed as new services became available.
The market is often shaped by the services available. In Europe, text messaging is very popular. Over there, text messaging is not charged per message, whereas in the states, it is, and adoption is low. You can pay for services everywhere with your cell phone in Europe because the companies there bend over backwards to make it happens, whereas in America, companies charge huge fees and set up ridiculous terms that discourage the survival of such third-party services.
Never assume that the market always delivers the best results possible and that it shows what people truly want. That's putting the cart before the horse. Instead, look at what the market (or government, free swapping, etc.) provide and what people want and evaluate the system based on that. Assuming the market is always right as a postulate is a large part of why a lot of things in America suck compared to the rest of the world -- healthcare, telecom, transportation, etc.