Do you think the screenplay writer(s) of say - friends or survivors designed their scripts with commercials in mind ?
These programmes are written to conform with whatever ad scheduling is common, in the US, when ther were written.
The problem has more to do with the audience "not being used to something". With TV shows, we are used to seeing them with commercials when there are options to watch movies without breaks on DVDs and tapes.
Movies are not written with ad breaks in mind, the only assumption with the typical movie is that the whole thing will be about an hour and an half long.
here in the Netherlands we have quite a bit of advertising on the commercial (non-public) stations. Not as much as in the US, but the thing is that advertising time on the commercial stations is very expensive, so you tend to see good quality commercials.
Also less chance of ads being simply overplayed. Though, no doubt, there are still cases where the ads don't appear to make much sense in the context of either the programme or the other ads.
If the US did commercials like England I think our shows would be much different. At least half of all commercials in US TV merely act to delay a moment of suspense. The show leaves off and picks up at the exact same moment in this case. The commercials are not merely in between scenes, but there to entrap you to watch at least part of the commercials so that you don't miss the pick up.
Which is against the rules in the UK anyway. Any ad breaks must be an some sort of "natural break" in drama, be it made for TV or a movie. The other difference is that because US broadcasters tend not to show commercials between programmes. Anything produced initially for the US market tends to have some sort of prologue/teaser prior to the title credits. TV produced elsewhere in the world has the title credits at the very beginning.
I don't have to pay a TV "LICENSE TAX", and I get get my choice of about 6-7 different stations(two are PBS and have only sponsorship 'messages' at the start of programs) here in Boston(including 4 different evening local AND national news programs.) WGBH, famous nationally if not worldwide, continuously produces some of the best television programs around(Frontline, Nova, Sesame Street, Mystery!, etc.)
You are aware that quite a few factual programmes are co-produced by WGBH and the BBC...
There is no government sponsored rhetoric. The BBC has a respnsibility to be neutral. The government gets no more say in the matter than the opposition.
Which has a few times upset the government of the day.
One of the interesting effects of the DVD zone system is that it means that to get the un-cut version of a film you have to get a region 1 player or a region free player.
Only if the film was originally produced in North America is the uncut version likely to be region 1. It's perfectly possible for a film, produced elsewhere in the rest of the world, to be cut for release in the USA or Canada, in which case the region 1 DVD would be the cut version.
Films tend to be worse affected by breaks in the middle than TV progs, which are designed with it in mind.
Sort of. An imported TV programme probably won't be made with the ad break schedule used in mind, the same applies to an older TV programme. Also it's hardly unknown for broadcasters to trim programme content to be able to fit more ads in. Personally I'd have though more fuss would be made about voicing over credits or even squashing them down to fit a promo in. Since these acknowlage the hardworking people who actually produced the programme or film.
The article is a bit misleading. Unlike the rest of Europe, England has never supported moral rights theory. This is why it is not part of the American legal tradition (except for works of visual arts produced only in limited numbers).
The term "moral right" is in the latest UK copyright law. Most current copyright laws are something of a mish-mash of different legal traditions. Which have been stuck together in the name of "harmonis/zation"
Anglo-America copyright law is based on the notion of a public bargain. In exchange for temporary protection, the creator lets the public have all rights to the work after the copyright expires. The rest of Europe (especially France) views a work as "the sacred child of its creator." This view grants creators far more control over their creations.
The difference is somewhat academic now that copyright always lasts longer that the creator. Especially since current copyright laws give what would previously have been these moral rights to the current copyright holder. The only real difference is that moral rights are non transferable. There is currently a case pending in the US against a organisation known as "cleanflicks" which censors films and rents the results. Which is a rather more drastic modification, than sticking commercials or news bulletins in the middle of a broadcast.
How can you possibly include Hawaii in your list of occupied countries? Hawaii became a
U.S. state in 1959.
When a choice was given between becomming a state and remaining a US territory. Either way control would remain with the Washington government thousands of miles away.
The citizens of Hawaii are fully represented in the U.S. government.
With 4 electoral votes, they have more representation than Alaska, Deleware, D.C.,
Montana, North & South Dakota, Vermont, and Wyoming.
How many of these examples are of independent and internationally recognised (including by the USA, which formally recognised the Hawaiian Kingdom in 1826) nation states, which the US occupied as a colonial power in the process supressing the existing government (in violation of the Hague convention of 1907, BTW)? The answer is zero. As for the 1959 vote this was supposedly held under article 73 of the UN charter. Problem is that this would have required 3 options, to remain a territory, to become part of the trustee country or to become independent. There are problems even here, since the US had placed Hawaii on a list of non self-governing territories, amongst US administered territories which had never been the entirity of a nation state. A more valid historical comparison would be with cold war Easten europe, the only one which comes to mind involving a non land border is the British occupation of Ireland. 1959 isn't the latest in the story from the US Government side anyway. In 1988 the DOJ concluded that the US had no authority to annex Hawaii by joint resolution of Congress. On November 23, 1993, President Clinton signed United States Public Law 103-150, which amongst other things, acknowlages that sovereignty of Hawaii was never surrendered, to the US or any other nation. In 1999 the UN confirmed that the 1959 vote as non binding, since it violated article 73.
Re:It's going to keep happening.
on
See Ya .su
·
· Score: 1, Troll
Many countries are going to change their names in the future. The article doesn't really
go into it, but I'm sure the name has some political overtones for many people in Russia.
Some other names with political ramifications are.tw (taiwan).cs (Czechoslovakia).kp
and.kr (Koreas) etc.
There is also Hong Kong and Yugoslavia which still have top level domains. There is also the issue of what to do about occupied countries, especially where the occupier claims them as part of their own, e.g. Chechnia, Tibet, Hawaii and Palestine.
If a business owner doesn't think that selling their product in region X will result in a profit, it's fully within their rights to stick to selling in region Y. A business owner has no obligation to sell in a given area, especially if the item in question is a mere luxury good.
They shouldn't complain if some third party buys the product in region Y and sells it in region X. Effectivly the doctorine of first sale should apply...
Stop and think about it. NTSC and PAL run at different resolutions.
NTSC, PAL and SECAM don't have resolutions at all. They are simply methods of converting RGB into a set of signals which are backward compatable with monochrome displays.
They want region encoding so they can charge outrageous prices and those people not have any other way to import games cheaply.
At the same time they want to be able to pick and choose where to manufacture so they get mimimised costs...
By what you said thier logic, in one sentance is "well, you know someone somewhere might have a PAL tv and buy an NTSC disk: therefore we will create regions based on language/hardware and then further divide them arbitrarily (which look suspiciously based on what the price they can charge),
Especially since the regions don't correspond well with either TV standards or language.
try and force govt to enforce them all for the consumers safety!" yea right.
It's more a case of legislation being needed to protect consumers, in some cases including retail businesses as much as end users, from the behaviour of transnationals.
Not only do almost all PAL TVs multisync to both PAL and PAL/M signals,
The multisyncing you need here is less sophisticated than needed for computer monitors. Most likely similar circuits are used of similar designs, possibly even the same chipsets.
many can also display NTSC signals.
A typical chip which converts YUV to RGB (or RGB to YUV) has a control input where one logic state is NTSC the other is PAL. Also the display of NTSC is typically only of composite video or YUV+S. Rather than tuning and demodulating NTSC.
Then why not simultaneously release in the United States and the United Kingdom?
Especially since there rarely appear attempts to deal with American spellings or American idioms. Some of which baffle the rest of the English speaking world.
Not such a valid reason these days, since the vast majority of modern TV sets (and lets face it, how many people likely to buy a PS2/Xsux/Gamecube *really* will be using an ancient television?) sold in Europe are more than capable of displaying NTSC signals.
PAL is a derivative of NTSC anyway. Typically chips which encode and decode PAL have a control input to switch into NTSC mode anyway. If it were about colour encoding standards then the French, who use SECAM, would be completly in trouble... The only difference then is between 525 lines 60Hz interlaced and 625 lines 50Hz interlaced. A set designed to display the latter can typically display the former, without major hassle. Just needs a few tricks to ensure the picture fills the screen.
Additionally, how the images are output to TV at hardware level has nothing to do with the game software at all.
If the frame rate did matter at all then the software can make any needed adjustments at runtime. Also the languages issue is probably bogus too, since all sorts of less sophisticated appliances can be set up to be switchable between multiple languages.
Millennium Challenge 2002 was two years in the making and involved a wide range of U.S. military commands across the country linked by computer networks to simulated troops, air and sea units with 13,500 actual military personnel fighting a classified war scenario.
Van Riper said exercise officials denied him the opportunity to use his own tactics and ideas against the Blue, or friendly, forces, and on several occasions the Red forces were directed not to use certain weapons against Blue.
His major complaint is that he was initially told that the exercise was "free play". Then was being told what weapons he could use and when.
Robert Oakley, a retired ambassador who played the role of civilian leader of the Red force, told the Times that Van Riper was outthinking the Blue force. He said, for example, that in the computer simulations, Van Riper used motorcycle messengers to transmit orders, negating the Blue forces' high-tech eavesdropping capabilities. When the Blue naval forces sailed into the Persian Gulf early in the experiment, Van Riper's forces surrounded the ships with small boats and planes.
What a suprise, a general is better at war fighting than an ambassador.
Much of the Blue force's ships ended up at the bottom of the ocean. Oakley said Joint Forces Command officials had to stop the exercise and "refloat" the fleet in order to continue.
Without this kind of "cheating" blue had lost the battle and probably the war. But since blue equated to the US and red equated to Iraq that result would not have been politically correct.
Vice Adm. Marty Mayer, the deputy commander of Joint Forces Command, defended the exercise.
"I want to disabuse anybody of any notion that somehow the books were cooked," Mayer told the Times. He said, however, that "certain things are scripted" in any large war game. "You have to execute in a certain way or you'll never be able to bring it all together," he said.
Mayer said that in some parts of the exercise Van Riper was constrained "in order to facilitate the conduct of the experiment.
How did this guy get be a senior navel officer without realising that in a real war then enemy might well do something you don't expect them to do?
What kind of applications are they finding that would require users to keep two computers at their desk?
This is the sort of situation where they have a secure and an insecure network. Hence 2 computers. quite probably even using a KVM wouldn't comply with the spec.
Yes, many previous Presidents were quite different. For most of the 20th century, there was an imminent threat from a nation representing a polar opposite of the principles on which America stood. When the US made an imperialistic move, understandably extending our sphere of influence, there was a global superpower willing to stand up and fight back.
Assuming you mean the USSR, this only existed as a super power for maybe 60 years in the 20th century. But the US as an imperial power started in the late 19th century with the Spanish American war.
When the Bush dictates his plans to smaller countries without veto power in the UN or representation in other global venues, he very effectively turns them into quasi-American colonies. They are ruled from Washington without representation. They must submit their sovereignty or be mowed over by force.
The existance of the USSR didn't do much to protect the people of Chilie, Nicaragua, Guatamala, Iran, Phillipines. The UN didn't even exist when the US initially occupied the Phillipines, Cuba, Hawaii and effectivly created Panama. All of these happened long before the USSR even existed, the only part that country played was in Cuban independence some 60 years later.
Ultimately, I will be voting for a President who views America's role in the world as the judge rather than the jury. It is unreasonable to deny our role as the executor of force and therefore justice (however it may be defined today), but we cannot afford to also convict whomever we like.
The original position of the US was to try and avoid "foreign entanglements" the US has been doing much the opposite for just over a century.
Those whom we disenfranchise will be attacking with pipebombs and knives rather than aircraft carriers and warplanes.
Or truck bombs, hijacked aircraft and even human bombs.
This nation is probably the most susceptible to covert terrorist attacks as a result of our liberty loving and largely anonymous society.
You can have very tight security, all sorts of identity checks, even try and build your own version of the Berlin wall, dosn't appear to work though. Better to avoid making too many enemies.
I think you meant to make a good point, but you screwed up. It wouldn't matter if mobsters had invested in the stock market. It would only matter if we had invested in the mobsters. The proper analogy is if our 401Ks had invested in a stock for "Murder, Inc." and then "Murder, Inc." is busted because it does just what its name implies.
More likely they'd use named like "Bank of Credit and Commerce International", or even "Enron"... If you have a broad based holding, such as a pension fund, it's quite likely that some of the stock holding encompases criminals and terrorists. The way stock markets work something which affects one stock can easily affect the entire market.
I think a very pressing issue in the future will be whether future administrations follow Bush's tendency to view the entire planet as the Holy American Empire or not.
Were the presidents before Bush really that different. Except that with no effective opposition Bush feels able to come out and say it.
While we can obliterate training camps and oust dictators,
Very often these turn out to be traning camps which the US people paid for and dictators installed by the US.
we're never going to subject every man who hates us to such abject poverty that he can't buy a box cutter and a plane ticket.
That's probably easier than asking why they should hate you in the first place. Since the answers are probably not what most Americans would want to hear.
I sincerely hope our future President will be some sort of diplomat rather than a caricature of a Texan cowboy.
Actually her or she would probably not have to be too much of a diplomat. They would just need to be radical enough to cease all economic and military aid to all other countries. All too often this ends up keeping undemocratic governments in office. especially where there is an interest for big business involved. Effectivly what would be needed would be a US president who would put the interests of the US people before a few big corporates, before some little country in the easten mediterranian. has no interest in being an emporor and wouldn't be afraid to tell fruit companies "if you want to grow fruit in Nicaragua talk to the Nicaraguan government, don't like their terms, tough" or to tell oil companies "if you want to extract oil in Iran, talk to the Iranian government..."
It is no secret that the U.S. used protective tariffs to protect early manufacturer's (who otherwise could not compete with England). It is also no secret that the U. S. really did not like it when others tried to do the same. Now we are doing it with GATT. Throughout the last century we were not so sublte: Marines were sent throughout this hemesphere to make sure that bananas were grown and local governments were not too concerned about the welafare of the common man at the exoence of U. S. buisness interests.
Hardly past tense, since the US hasn't actually stopped doing this sort of thing. Let alone make even token attempts at rectifying the problems this covert colonialism created.
These Mega-Corps are owned by the people, too. Their stock is in your 401-K, your IRA, and/or your pension plan. Joe Average owns a small piece of Microsoft and most other Mega-Corps.
Mobsters and drug dealers probably have quite a bit of money on the world's stock markets. No sane person would say "you can't go after the Mafia, because it might hurt pension funds (or might harm all sorts of businesses who didn't realise they were dependent on gangsters)".
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Do you think the screenplay writer(s) of say - friends or survivors designed their scripts with commercials in mind ?
These programmes are written to conform with whatever ad scheduling is common, in the US, when ther were written.
The problem has more to do with the audience "not being used to something". With TV shows, we are used to seeing them with commercials when there are options to watch movies without breaks on DVDs and tapes.
Movies are not written with ad breaks in mind, the only assumption with the typical movie is that the whole thing will be about an hour and an half long.
here in the Netherlands we have quite a bit of advertising on the commercial (non-public) stations. Not as much as in the US, but the thing is that advertising time on the commercial stations is very expensive, so you tend to see good quality commercials.
Also less chance of ads being simply overplayed. Though, no doubt, there are still cases where the ads don't appear to make much sense in the context of either the programme or the other ads.
If the US did commercials like England I think our shows would be much different. At least half of all commercials in US TV merely act to delay a moment of suspense. The show leaves off and picks up at the exact same moment in this case. The commercials are not merely in between scenes, but there to entrap you to watch at least part of the commercials so that you don't miss the pick up.
Which is against the rules in the UK anyway. Any ad breaks must be an some sort of "natural break" in drama, be it made for TV or a movie.
The other difference is that because US broadcasters tend not to show commercials between programmes. Anything produced initially for the US market tends to have some sort of prologue/teaser prior to the title credits. TV produced elsewhere in the world has the title credits at the very beginning.
I don't have to pay a TV "LICENSE TAX", and I get get my choice of about 6-7 different stations(two are PBS and have only sponsorship 'messages' at the start of programs) here in Boston(including 4 different evening local AND national news programs.) WGBH, famous nationally if not worldwide, continuously produces some of the best television programs around(Frontline, Nova, Sesame Street, Mystery!, etc.)
You are aware that quite a few factual programmes are co-produced by WGBH and the BBC...
There is no government sponsored rhetoric. The BBC has a respnsibility to be neutral. The government gets no more say in the matter than the opposition.
Which has a few times upset the government of the day.
One of the interesting effects of the DVD zone system is that it means that to get the un-cut version of a film you have to get a region 1 player or a region free player.
Only if the film was originally produced in North America is the uncut version likely to be region 1. It's perfectly possible for a film, produced elsewhere in the rest of the world, to be cut for release in the USA or Canada, in which case the region 1 DVD would be the cut version.
Films tend to be worse affected by breaks in the middle than TV progs, which are designed with it in mind.
Sort of. An imported TV programme probably won't be made with the ad break schedule used in mind, the same applies to an older TV programme. Also it's hardly unknown for broadcasters to trim programme content to be able to fit more ads in.
Personally I'd have though more fuss would be made about voicing over credits or even squashing them down to fit a promo in. Since these acknowlage the hardworking people who actually produced the programme or film.
The article is a bit misleading. Unlike the rest of Europe, England has never supported moral rights theory. This is why it is not part of the American legal tradition (except for works of visual arts produced only in limited numbers).
The term "moral right" is in the latest UK copyright law. Most current copyright laws are something of a mish-mash of different legal traditions. Which have been stuck together in the name of "harmonis/zation"
Anglo-America copyright law is based on the notion of a public bargain. In exchange for temporary protection, the creator lets the public have all rights to the work after the copyright expires. The rest of Europe (especially France) views a work as "the sacred child of its creator." This view grants creators far more control over their creations.
The difference is somewhat academic now that copyright always lasts longer that the creator. Especially since current copyright laws give what would previously have been these moral rights to the current copyright holder. The only real difference is that moral rights are non transferable.
There is currently a case pending in the US against a organisation known as "cleanflicks" which censors films and rents the results. Which is a rather more drastic modification, than sticking commercials or news bulletins in the middle of a broadcast.
How can you possibly include Hawaii in your list of occupied countries? Hawaii became a U.S. state in 1959.
When a choice was given between becomming a state and remaining a US territory. Either way control would remain with the Washington government thousands of miles away.
The citizens of Hawaii are fully represented in the U.S. government. With 4 electoral votes, they have more representation than Alaska, Deleware, D.C., Montana, North & South Dakota, Vermont, and Wyoming.
How many of these examples are of independent and internationally recognised (including by the USA, which formally recognised the Hawaiian Kingdom in 1826) nation states, which the US occupied as a colonial power in the process supressing the existing government (in violation of the Hague convention of 1907, BTW)? The answer is zero.
As for the 1959 vote this was supposedly held under article 73 of the UN charter. Problem is that this would have required 3 options, to remain a territory, to become part of the trustee country or to become independent. There are problems even here, since the US had placed Hawaii on a list of non self-governing territories, amongst US administered territories which had never been the entirity of a nation state.
A more valid historical comparison would be with cold war Easten europe, the only one which comes to mind involving a non land border is the British occupation of Ireland.
1959 isn't the latest in the story from the US Government side anyway. In 1988 the DOJ concluded that the US had no authority to annex Hawaii by joint resolution of Congress. On November 23, 1993, President Clinton signed United States Public Law 103-150, which amongst other things, acknowlages that sovereignty of Hawaii was never surrendered, to the US or any other nation.
In 1999 the UN confirmed that the 1959 vote as non binding, since it violated article 73.
Many countries are going to change their names in the future. The article doesn't really go into it, but I'm sure the name has some political overtones for many people in Russia. Some other names with political ramifications are .tw (taiwan) .cs (Czechoslovakia) .kp
and .kr (Koreas) etc.
There is also Hong Kong and Yugoslavia which still have top level domains. There is also the issue of what to do about occupied countries, especially where the occupier claims them as part of their own, e.g. Chechnia, Tibet, Hawaii and Palestine.
If a business owner doesn't think that selling their product in region X will result in a profit, it's fully within their rights to stick to selling in region Y. A business owner has no obligation to sell in a given area, especially if the item in question is a mere luxury good.
They shouldn't complain if some third party buys the product in region Y and sells it in region X. Effectivly the doctorine of first sale should apply...
Stop and think about it. NTSC and PAL run at different resolutions.
NTSC, PAL and SECAM don't have resolutions at all. They are simply methods of converting RGB into a set of signals which are backward compatable with monochrome displays.
They want region encoding so they can charge outrageous prices and those people not have any other way to import games cheaply.
At the same time they want to be able to pick and choose where to manufacture so they get mimimised costs...
By what you said thier logic, in one sentance is "well, you know someone somewhere might have a PAL tv and buy an NTSC disk: therefore we will create regions based on language/hardware and then further divide them arbitrarily (which look suspiciously based on what the price they can charge),
Especially since the regions don't correspond well with either TV standards or language.
try and force govt to enforce them all for the consumers safety!" yea right.
It's more a case of legislation being needed to protect consumers, in some cases including retail businesses as much as end users, from the behaviour of transnationals.
Not only do almost all PAL TVs multisync to both PAL and PAL/M signals,
The multisyncing you need here is less sophisticated than needed for computer monitors. Most likely similar circuits are used of similar designs, possibly even the same chipsets.
many can also display NTSC signals.
A typical chip which converts YUV to RGB (or RGB to YUV) has a control input where one logic state is NTSC the other is PAL.
Also the display of NTSC is typically only of composite video or YUV+S. Rather than tuning and demodulating NTSC.
Then why not simultaneously release in the United States and the United Kingdom?
Especially since there rarely appear attempts to deal with American spellings or American idioms. Some of which baffle the rest of the English speaking world.
Not such a valid reason these days, since the vast majority of modern TV sets (and lets face it, how many people likely to buy a PS2/Xsux/Gamecube *really* will be using an ancient television?) sold in Europe are more than capable of displaying NTSC signals.
PAL is a derivative of NTSC anyway. Typically chips which encode and decode PAL have a control input to switch into NTSC mode anyway. If it were about colour encoding standards then the French, who use SECAM, would be completly in trouble...
The only difference then is between 525 lines 60Hz interlaced and 625 lines 50Hz interlaced. A set designed to display the latter can typically display the former, without major hassle. Just needs a few tricks to ensure the picture fills the screen.
Additionally, how the images are output to TV at hardware level has nothing to do with the game software at all.
If the frame rate did matter at all then the software can make any needed adjustments at runtime. Also the languages issue is probably bogus too, since all sorts of less sophisticated appliances can be set up to be switchable between multiple languages.
Erm...how does refusing to sell a video game console "threaten the government of an entire country"?
Because they are putting the condition that the Australian government should do something. Who do they think they, Al Queda?
Millennium Challenge 2002 was two years in the making and involved a wide range of U.S. military commands across the country linked by computer networks to simulated troops, air and sea units with 13,500 actual military personnel fighting a classified war scenario.
Van Riper said exercise officials denied him the opportunity to use his own tactics and ideas against the Blue, or friendly, forces, and on several occasions the Red forces were directed not to use certain weapons against Blue.
His major complaint is that he was initially told that the exercise was "free play". Then was being told what weapons he could use and when.
Robert Oakley, a retired ambassador who played the role of civilian leader of the Red force, told the Times that Van Riper was outthinking the Blue force. He said, for example, that in the computer simulations, Van Riper used motorcycle messengers to transmit orders, negating the Blue forces' high-tech eavesdropping capabilities. When the Blue naval forces sailed into the Persian Gulf early in the experiment, Van Riper's forces surrounded the ships with small boats and planes.
What a suprise, a general is better at war fighting than an ambassador.
Much of the Blue force's ships ended up at the bottom of the ocean. Oakley said Joint Forces Command officials had to stop the exercise and "refloat" the fleet in order to continue.
Without this kind of "cheating" blue had lost the battle and probably the war. But since blue equated to the US and red equated to Iraq that result would not have been politically correct.
Vice Adm. Marty Mayer, the deputy commander of Joint Forces Command, defended the exercise.
"I want to disabuse anybody of any notion that somehow the books were cooked," Mayer told the Times. He said, however, that "certain things are scripted" in any large war game. "You have to execute in a certain way or you'll never be able to bring it all together," he said.
Mayer said that in some parts of the exercise Van Riper was constrained "in order to facilitate the conduct of the experiment.
How did this guy get be a senior navel officer without realising that in a real war then enemy might well do something you don't expect them to do?
1. Corporate bafflegab was their native language. Buzzwords like "synergy" and "traction" were used to inspire the troops.
Would this impress militry people even if it was translated into military jargon?
3. They were totally uninterested in creating anything new. All of our tech was "best of breed" technologies bought off the shelf.
The basic problem with the "commercial off the shelf" idea is if it will be supportable in 5, let alone 20-50 years.
What kind of applications are they finding that would require users to keep two computers at their desk?
This is the sort of situation where they have a secure and an insecure network. Hence 2 computers. quite probably even using a KVM wouldn't comply with the spec.
Yes, many previous Presidents were quite different. For most of the 20th century, there was an imminent threat from a nation representing a polar opposite of the principles on which America stood. When the US made an imperialistic move, understandably extending our sphere of influence, there was a global superpower willing to stand up and fight back.
Assuming you mean the USSR, this only existed as a super power for maybe 60 years in the 20th century. But the US as an imperial power started in the late 19th century with the Spanish American war.
When the Bush dictates his plans to smaller countries without veto power in the UN or representation in other global venues, he very effectively turns them into quasi-American colonies. They are ruled from Washington without representation. They must submit their sovereignty or be mowed over by force.
The existance of the USSR didn't do much to protect the people of Chilie, Nicaragua, Guatamala, Iran, Phillipines. The UN didn't even exist when the US initially occupied the Phillipines, Cuba, Hawaii and effectivly created Panama. All of these happened long before the USSR even existed, the only part that country played was in Cuban independence some 60 years later.
Ultimately, I will be voting for a President who views America's role in the world as the judge rather than the jury. It is unreasonable to deny our role as the executor of force and therefore justice (however it may be defined today), but we cannot afford to also convict whomever we like.
The original position of the US was to try and avoid "foreign entanglements" the US has been doing much the opposite for just over a century.
Those whom we disenfranchise will be attacking with pipebombs and knives rather than aircraft carriers and warplanes.
Or truck bombs, hijacked aircraft and even human bombs.
This nation is probably the most susceptible to covert terrorist attacks as a result of our liberty loving and largely anonymous society.
You can have very tight security, all sorts of identity checks, even try and build your own version of the Berlin wall, dosn't appear to work though. Better to avoid making too many enemies.
I think you meant to make a good point, but you screwed up. It wouldn't matter if mobsters had invested in the stock market. It would only matter if we had invested in the mobsters. The proper analogy is if our 401Ks had invested in a stock for "Murder, Inc." and then "Murder, Inc." is busted because it does just what its name implies.
More likely they'd use named like "Bank of Credit and Commerce International", or even "Enron"... If you have a broad based holding, such as a pension fund, it's quite likely that some of the stock holding encompases criminals and terrorists. The way stock markets work something which affects one stock can easily affect the entire market.
I think a very pressing issue in the future will be whether future administrations follow Bush's tendency to view the entire planet as the Holy American Empire or not.
Were the presidents before Bush really that different. Except that with no effective opposition Bush feels able to come out and say it.
While we can obliterate training camps and oust dictators,
Very often these turn out to be traning camps which the US people paid for and dictators installed by the US.
we're never going to subject every man who hates us to such abject poverty that he can't buy a box cutter and a plane ticket.
That's probably easier than asking why they should hate you in the first place. Since the answers are probably not what most Americans would want to hear.
I sincerely hope our future President will be some sort of diplomat rather than a caricature of a Texan cowboy.
Actually her or she would probably not have to be too much of a diplomat. They would just need to be radical enough to cease all economic and military aid to all other countries. All too often this ends up keeping undemocratic governments in office. especially where there is an interest for big business involved. Effectivly what would be needed would be a US president who would put the interests of the US people before a few big corporates, before some little country in the easten mediterranian. has no interest in being an emporor and wouldn't be afraid to tell fruit companies "if you want to grow fruit in Nicaragua talk to the Nicaraguan government, don't like their terms, tough" or to tell oil companies "if you want to extract oil in Iran, talk to the Iranian government..."
It is no secret that the U.S. used protective tariffs to protect early manufacturer's (who otherwise could not compete with England). It is also no secret that the U. S. really did not like it when others tried to do the same. Now we are doing it with GATT. Throughout the last century we were not so sublte: Marines were sent throughout this hemesphere to make sure that bananas were grown and local governments were not too concerned about the welafare of the common man at the exoence of U. S. buisness interests.
Hardly past tense, since the US hasn't actually stopped doing this sort of thing. Let alone make even token attempts at rectifying the problems this covert colonialism created.
Microsoft pays taxes.
Actually they appear very good at not paying taxes
Microsoft employs many Americans.
Not than many, especially when you consider H1B visas.
These Mega-Corps are owned by the people, too. Their stock is in your 401-K, your IRA, and/or your pension plan. Joe Average owns a small piece of Microsoft and most other Mega-Corps.
Mobsters and drug dealers probably have quite a bit of money on the world's stock markets. No sane person would say "you can't go after the Mafia, because it might hurt pension funds (or might harm all sorts of businesses who didn't realise they were dependent on gangsters)".