I think the scariest part of globalism is that with free movement of corporations between nations, there will be a tendency for those corporations to be attracted to nations with a vacuum of regulations, enabling them to operate in what they find to be the friendliest environment from a pure market perspective. Zero corporate taxes, little corporate liability or responsibility apart from "returning shareholder value"
This isn't quite the scariest part. The scariest part is that western governments (especially the US) have been known to "engineer" such nations through covert warfare (terrorism, but they don't want it called that). So as to help their corporations. This can go purely diplomatic "persuasion" to outright government overthrow. Such things as corporate taxes, corporate liability can be very low in a dicatorship or even where there is a civil war and no functional government to speak of.
The US is currently one of the largest benefactor nations in the world. But in most cases our beneficence only engenders more hatred.
The issue is exactly who you are benefiting. A lot of the money appears to be winding up being spent on weapons to help oppressive governments opress people. Probably funding quite a few more Marcos she collections too.
Oh, the Iraqi's? The invaders of Kuwait - a country which ASKED us for help to repell them?
How exactly is Iraq illegaly occuping a smaller neighboring country and claiming it as its own, any different from the USA doing the same thing?
No, the anti-US feelings in SA are caused by what I said. Anyone who looks at the history of US use of force since WW-II, and especially since the '70s, has to be deluded to see it as anything but beneficial to the world as a whole.
This neatly ignores anything which happened prior to 1975. Notably installing a tyrant in Iran. Waging war on Korea, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. But dosn't quite ignore the genocide which occured in Cambodia after being "bombed by the USA". This made the world a better place exactly how?
And as far as supporting Israel. Israel is supported by UN resolutions and international treaties dating in some cases back to the turn of the 20th century. Israel is the ONLY democratic state in the region, which is one reason we support them
Rather a selective interpretation since Israel has ignored UN resolutions to withdraw from land they have attempted to expand into...
You are forgetting the minupulation the west (Britain & France, until the end of WW2 and then the USA, who had less knowledge of controling countries)
May have something to do with it. But remember the US didn't just start doing this in 1945. They actually started in at least 1893, indeed the events which brought the US into the second world war relate to this rather directly.
Re:Misconceptions on "Wahabism" and Arabs
on
Globalism Post 9/11
·
· Score: 2
And how many democracies has the US Govt and other Western Govts Toppled because the wrong guys came to power?
Or were in power anyway...
Research who toppled the Iranian Democracy in 1950's to insert the Despotic Shah? US/UK...
The reason being that the Iranian government intended nationalisation of oil production. Which would have taken control and profit away from the foreign oil companies operating in the country.
And that precipitated the Iranian Revolution.
Because it is vitutally impossible for democratic opposition to overthrow a dictatorship. Especially one supported by a much larger foreign government. The only exception which comes to mind is the Phillipines.
The whole thing was done for the sake of control of Oil - where've we seen that before...
Actually it isn't even directly about oil. There is (and indeed cannot be) oil in Hawaii nor are Nicaragua, Guatemala, Chilie, Argentina, etc especially noted for oil production. 1950's Iran is simply an example roughly in the middle of a process which started in the 1890's
I think people hate America because the american foreign policy is not and has never been consequent.
Actually it is reasonably consistent. It can mostly be summed up as "ensure maximum short term gains for US corporate interests operating abroad". Which appears to come before opposing communism and unilateral support for Israel.
Taking this into account and the fact that most Americans literally do not care what happens outside their own borders,
Most Americans do not know and do not care to know what happens outside their borders. The population of the US is generally rather isolationist. I'm not convinced they wouldn't care if they knew. Remember what happened over Vietnam... But most would not look beyond the filtered and selective mainstream media.
It is important to also note that America has refused to ratify the UN law on international court (Milojevic is being tried there for crimes against humanity), because of fears that an American president could be taken to court for "crimes" his country has commited! This is something America knows is bound to happen!
There is quite a list of things the US hasn't ratified. Not that it would make any difference anyway. The US frequently ignores treaties which have been ratified. Also such a trial would probably cover a lot more people than just a single US president.
Foreign intrigants like the CIA like such scenarios. Power abusers like the Saudi's are opportunists who will do whatever it takes to stay in power. That is much preferable above democratic leaders who say that the US stinks because the big majority of the population believes so.
It's more that foreign commercial interests prefer such a situation to operating in a democratic country. Operating in a dictatorship ie generally easier in terms of such things as how much you pay your workers and how much you bother about their health & safety. Where the CIA tends to come in is getting rid of democratic government and ensuring that such dictatorships are more difficult to overthrow.
No the US started it. The US trained Bin Laden to take on the USSR. The US poured arms and money into the war ravaged Afghanistan to push out the USSR.
The US having a foreign policy of covert war and manipulation of other people's goverments goes back to the Spanish/American war of the late 19th century. The USSR provided a nice distraction for most of the 20th century.
The US used the afghans as pawns in its activities against USSR and then ditched them with all the weapons and destructive technologies and walked out.All that money ended up in creating organisations like Al-queda.
Probably more significent than any money would have been training in terrorism techniques.
Actually, you've just provided a very useful demonstration of how easy it is to demonise a substance (or activity) by popular and sustained propaganda, when the problem is binge abuse of it by sad people with no hope or life to start with. It's so tempting to cry "Can't something be done!"... and then take the easy way out by banning the substance or activity and pretending that this solves the problem with the person.
If anything prohibition makes "binge abuse" more likely. People are more likely to binge on something where supply is uncertain and holding onto the substance unconsumed is risky.
How is this any different from the cigarette companies putting more addictive chemicals in their product.
Games don't come bundled with hard drugs, for starters. So they cannot be physically addictive. Whereas anything can be psychologically addictive, including every single product Sony puts out.
I guess my point is this: I see all the "this guy had no life" comments and that disturbs me: This guy probably had a more active social life than 90% of the people out there who spend their lives in a stupor watching TV, but as I mentioned: It's not my position to judge them. Growing up my favourite hobby was computers, and it astounded me how often people would give me their opinion of how wrong it was to spend hours in front of the computer, but rather I should be doing more socially accepted time suckage wasters like watching football or the latest episode of the Cosby Show. The sad thing is how many people buy into this "life is conformity" mentality.
You also get the situation where person A who dresses to resemble a sports star is seen differently from person B who dresses to resemble a pop star and person C who dresses to resemble a sci-fi character. Even though these are fundermentally exactly the same behaviour. Or consider how fans of different kinds of televison programmes are percieved. Even when you get soaps with storylines which are more fantastic than some sci-fi and fantasy series.
Cruise missiles guide[d] themselves not with GPS, but just using a machine vision systems. They compare actual land beneath them to a map stored in the missile, and generate corrections this way. Does not work well at night, but totally self-contained and jam-proof.
I though they used radar rather than optical systems. The only missiles I recall using optical sensors are SLBMs.Anyway they also have an inertial navigation
navigation system.
Besides, there are many other solutions to the "last 100 meters" problem.
Control by kamikazie being the most low tech option.
It was around 100 meters in any direction from your current location. And yes, it was by the U.S. government to prevent people from bombing the White House. As if a bomb big enough, off by 100 meters, would actually miss the white house
Also based on the asumption that whoever is doing the bombing cannot see the target.
They removed it sometime last year, I believe. With 9-11, there are rumors they may impose the restriction again, but that's assuming any primary threats have missiles capable of using GPS.
Ignoring the fact that the terrorists that morning probably worked by eye.
It seems that the framers of the constitution didn't foresee this loophole that copyright seems to have created. They were worried about people in government abusing power.. not corporations seeking profit.
All this would appear to stem from the granting of "personhood" to corporations in the 19th century. This isn't so much a loophole in copyright as it is inability to predict human stupidity. Once this happened it was only a matter of time before corporations became patricians and ordinary people became plebeans.
If big companies are losing money due to "stealing" of information they own, perhaps they need to figure out a new way to make money, or go out of business,
There is no actual right to make money, under capitalism. The closest you'd come would be a right to attempt to make money. The point of copyright is to ensure that if there is money to be made on a work the creator should get first dibs.
they arent needed anymore, distribution is free now, the consumer can distribute better than they can, musicians wont make any more or less money either way, consumers will save a fortune.
Some musicians could end up making more money. No expensive middle men to pay. Also some who couldn't get a recording contract (because they didn't play the "right" kind of music) could discover they have a big enough fan base that touring is possible.
This is the key to the entire copyright situation. Basically, what we're witnessing is an end to supply-and-demand economics in relation to information.
IMHO supply and demand will continue to exist. What is at risk is the paradigm of big publishers facilitaing that supply and demand.
The ninth ammendment merely says that fair use might be a right. The first and tenth, combined with the copyright clause, say that fair use is a right. None of them, incidently, say that distribution of devices which allow fair use is a right, or that perfect lossless digital copying is a right.
The first ammendment does however cover distribution of all aspects of how such a device works and how to construct one however. The distinction between "analogue" and "digital" copies is a very modern idea. Created by the lobbying of the publishing industry. It's the sort of nitpicking issue the law, IMHO, really shouldn't be bothering with. What does it matter if a copy is exact or inexact in the first place?
Not entirely true, read the amendment process - an amendment must specifically state what provision of the Constitution it is amending. The First Amendment does no such thing. Therefore, any apparent conflicts between the Constitution and the First Amendment must be resolved, not discarded.
Therefore wouldn't the normal meaning of the word "ammendment" apply. Which would be that the newer text "trumps" the older. Also if the first ammendment does apply very broadly, i.e. to any law ever passed through the US Congress.
So-called "special interest groups" (or "lobbyist groups"), however, are in the business of spinning perception. They know how to scream louder, talk faster, and generally end up influencing things more than groups of "ordinary citizens." We run into a problem here: most of these lobbyist groups are funded by corporations with motives based on finance, rather than human rights.
Most of those which arn't obviously representing corporations tend to be political extremists out of touch with most people anyway Another thing you will find with such groups is attempting to create the imperssion that their narrow viewpoint is all there is on the issue (or that their position is the only rational one, preferably with the spin than any opposing viewpoint is somehow criminal or evil.) Then they don't even have to "shout" because their voice is the only one politicans get to hear.
I think a *lot* of people have forgotten one very basic principle: the Constitution of the United States (a la Bill of Rights) is not designed to enumerate every single "right" we have as human beings. This is a very common misconception, and an extremely dangerous one at that.
The actual purpose of the US constitution (or indeed the constitution of any nation state) is the regulation of government. It enumerates what powers the US government has and what powers it explicitally does not have.
Kids in school these days are being taught that the government "gives" us a set of basic rights. This is an incorrect, but unfortunately somewhat prevalent view. The government does not *give* us rights; we have these rights just as surely as we have a nose. The role of government in this case is to *protect* those rights which we already have.
Which is not even the sole role of government. The assumption in the US constitution is that people will defend their own rights. Hence the second ammendment...
Here's the problem: if you "educate" an entire generation of Americas to believe that the government gives us rights, you end up with the unfortunate consequence that we must also accept that what is given may be taken away. This tends to work out well for those in positions of power, and poorly for the average citizen.
It's also a viewpoint which can be held simaltaniously by people with power and people without power.
See, we think it's counterproductive to write an HTML engine for one product (IE), then write a completely different one which probably won't be 100% compatible for another product (Windows XP's help files, OE, Outlook, Front Page, hell Visual Studio.NET, etc.)
You only want to use the same rendering engine if you make sure that applications such as email "sanitise" what they have rendered.
It seems to me that they have enough profit to maintain a server version of the OS where a bad video call won't bring the entire freaking server down. Not to mention, why does my DB server need a web browser?!?!
Or even a sound card... Plenty of servers don't even realistically need a high resolution video display either.
I simply can't understand why they say 'Windows is not designed to be modular'. It IS setup and designed to be modular. The problem is: the modules designed are not designed in a way that they are usable:).
Or even deliberatly implimented in a way that makes actual modular use virtually impossible. The same way that Windows does not actually need to copy files back and forth as "roaming profiles". But try making it simply alter the relevent registry keys to point at the server copy...
And that would then proceed to break compatibility with 90% of the software I use. All my professional AV software relies on DirectX, ActiveMovie (a part of DirectX if you really get down to it) and such. My games need DirectX as well.
Plenty of people using Windows have no need these types of software. e.g. the stereotypical office worker who needs a wordprocessor and email...
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I think the scariest part of globalism is that with free movement of corporations between nations, there will be a tendency for those corporations to be attracted to nations with a vacuum of regulations, enabling them to operate in what they find to be the friendliest environment from a pure market perspective. Zero corporate taxes, little corporate liability or responsibility apart from "returning shareholder value"
This isn't quite the scariest part. The scariest part is that western governments (especially the US) have been known to "engineer" such nations through covert warfare (terrorism, but they don't want it called that). So as to help their corporations.
This can go purely diplomatic "persuasion" to outright government overthrow.
Such things as corporate taxes, corporate liability can be very low in a dicatorship or even where there is a civil war and no functional government to speak of.
The US is currently one of the largest benefactor nations in the world. But in most cases our beneficence only engenders more hatred.
The issue is exactly who you are benefiting. A lot of the money appears to be winding up being spent on weapons to help oppressive governments opress people. Probably funding quite a few more Marcos she collections too.
Oh, the Iraqi's? The invaders of Kuwait - a country which ASKED us for help to repell them?
How exactly is Iraq illegaly occuping a smaller neighboring country and claiming it as its own, any different from the USA doing the same thing?
No, the anti-US feelings in SA are caused by what I said. Anyone who looks at the history of US use of force since WW-II, and especially since the '70s, has to be deluded to see it as anything but beneficial to the world as a whole.
This neatly ignores anything which happened prior to 1975. Notably installing a tyrant in Iran. Waging war on Korea, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. But dosn't quite ignore the genocide which occured in Cambodia after being "bombed by the USA". This made the world a better place exactly how?
And as far as supporting Israel. Israel is supported by UN resolutions and international treaties dating in some cases back to the turn of the 20th century. Israel is the ONLY democratic state in the region, which is one reason we support them
Rather a selective interpretation since Israel has ignored UN resolutions to withdraw from land they have attempted to expand into...
You are forgetting the minupulation the west (Britain & France, until the end of WW2 and then the USA, who had less knowledge of controling countries)
May have something to do with it. But remember the US didn't just start doing this in 1945. They actually started in at least 1893, indeed the events which brought the US into the second world war relate to this rather directly.
And how many democracies has the US Govt and other Western Govts Toppled because the wrong guys came to power?
Or were in power anyway...
Research who toppled the Iranian Democracy in 1950's to insert the Despotic Shah? US/UK...
The reason being that the Iranian government intended nationalisation of oil production. Which would have taken control and profit away from the foreign oil companies operating in the country.
And that precipitated the Iranian Revolution.
Because it is vitutally impossible for democratic opposition to overthrow a dictatorship. Especially one supported by a much larger foreign government. The only exception which comes to mind is the Phillipines.
The whole thing was done for the sake of control of Oil - where've we seen that before...
Actually it isn't even directly about oil. There is (and indeed cannot be) oil in Hawaii nor are Nicaragua, Guatemala, Chilie, Argentina, etc especially noted for oil production.
1950's Iran is simply an example roughly in the middle of a process which started in the 1890's
I think people hate America because the american foreign policy is not and has never been consequent.
Actually it is reasonably consistent. It can mostly be summed up as "ensure maximum short term gains for US corporate interests operating abroad". Which appears to come before opposing communism and unilateral support for Israel.
Taking this into account and the fact that most Americans literally do not care what happens outside their own borders,
Most Americans do not know and do not care to know what happens outside their borders. The population of the US is generally rather isolationist. I'm not convinced they wouldn't care if they knew. Remember what happened over Vietnam... But most would not look beyond the filtered and selective mainstream media.
It is important to also note that America has refused to ratify the UN law on international court (Milojevic is being tried there for crimes against humanity), because of fears that an American president could be taken to court for "crimes" his country has commited! This is something America knows is bound to happen!
There is quite a list of things the US hasn't ratified. Not that it would make any difference anyway. The US frequently ignores treaties which have been ratified.
Also such a trial would probably cover a lot more people than just a single US president.
Foreign intrigants like the CIA like such scenarios. Power abusers like the Saudi's are opportunists who will do whatever it takes to stay in power. That is much preferable above democratic leaders who say that the US stinks because the big majority of the population believes so.
It's more that foreign commercial interests prefer such a situation to operating in a democratic country. Operating in a dictatorship ie generally easier in terms of such things as how much you pay your workers and how much you bother about their health & safety.
Where the CIA tends to come in is getting rid of democratic government and ensuring that such dictatorships are more difficult to overthrow.
No the US started it. The US trained Bin Laden to take on the USSR. The US poured arms and money into the war ravaged Afghanistan to push out the USSR.
The US having a foreign policy of covert war and manipulation of other people's goverments goes back to the Spanish/American war of the late 19th century. The USSR provided a nice distraction for most of the 20th century.
The US used the afghans as pawns in its activities against USSR and then ditched them with all the weapons and destructive technologies and walked out.All that money ended up in creating organisations like Al-queda.
Probably more significent than any money would have been training in terrorism techniques.
Statistical analysis of this have always shown that people who play D&D are less likely to commit suicide than the average public.
Wonder how this compares with more PC activities, such as sporting fans.
Actually, you've just provided a very useful demonstration of how easy it is to demonise a substance (or activity) by popular and sustained propaganda, when the problem is binge abuse of it by sad people with no hope or life to start with. It's so tempting to cry "Can't something be done!"... and then take the easy way out by banning the substance or activity and pretending that this solves the problem with the person.
If anything prohibition makes "binge abuse" more likely. People are more likely to binge on something where supply is uncertain and holding onto the substance unconsumed is risky.
How is this any different from the cigarette companies putting more addictive chemicals in their product.
Games don't come bundled with hard drugs, for starters. So they cannot be physically addictive. Whereas anything can be psychologically addictive, including every single product Sony puts out.
I guess my point is this: I see all the "this guy had no life" comments and that disturbs me: This guy probably had a more active social life than 90% of the people out there who spend their lives in a stupor watching TV, but as I mentioned: It's not my position to judge them. Growing up my favourite hobby was computers, and it astounded me how often people would give me their opinion of how wrong it was to spend hours in front of the computer, but rather I should be doing more socially accepted time suckage wasters like watching football or the latest episode of the Cosby Show. The sad thing is how many people buy into this "life is conformity" mentality.
You also get the situation where person A who dresses to resemble a sports star is seen differently from person B who dresses to resemble a pop star and person C who dresses to resemble a sci-fi character. Even though these are fundermentally exactly the same behaviour.
Or consider how fans of different kinds of televison programmes are percieved. Even when you get soaps with storylines which are more fantastic than some sci-fi and fantasy series.
Cruise missiles guide[d] themselves not with GPS, but just using a machine vision systems. They compare actual land beneath them to a map stored in the missile, and generate corrections this way. Does not work well at night, but totally self-contained and jam-proof.
I though they used radar rather than optical systems. The only missiles I recall using optical sensors are SLBMs.Anyway they also have an inertial navigation navigation system.
Besides, there are many other solutions to the "last 100 meters" problem.
Control by kamikazie being the most low tech option.
It was around 100 meters in any direction from your current location. And yes, it was by the U.S. government to prevent people from bombing the White House. As if a bomb big enough, off by 100 meters, would actually miss the white house
Also based on the asumption that whoever is doing the bombing cannot see the target.
They removed it sometime last year, I believe. With 9-11, there are rumors they may impose the restriction again, but that's assuming any primary threats have missiles capable of using GPS.
Ignoring the fact that the terrorists that morning probably worked by eye.
It seems that the framers of the constitution didn't foresee this loophole that copyright seems to have created. They were worried about people in government abusing power.. not corporations seeking profit.
All this would appear to stem from the granting of "personhood" to corporations in the 19th century. This isn't so much a loophole in copyright as it is inability to predict human stupidity.
Once this happened it was only a matter of time before corporations became patricians and ordinary people became plebeans.
If big companies are losing money due to "stealing" of information they own, perhaps they need to figure out a new way to make money, or go out of business,
There is no actual right to make money, under capitalism. The closest you'd come would be a right to attempt to make money. The point of copyright is to ensure that if there is money to be made on a work the creator should get first dibs.
they arent needed anymore, distribution is free now, the consumer can distribute better than they can, musicians wont make any more or less money either way, consumers will save a fortune.
Some musicians could end up making more money. No expensive middle men to pay. Also some who couldn't get a recording contract (because they didn't play the "right" kind of music) could discover they have a big enough fan base that touring is possible.
This is the key to the entire copyright situation. Basically, what we're witnessing is an end to supply-and-demand economics in relation to information.
IMHO supply and demand will continue to exist. What is at risk is the paradigm of big publishers facilitaing that supply and demand.
The ninth ammendment merely says that fair use might be a right. The first and tenth, combined with the copyright clause, say that fair use is a right. None of them, incidently, say that distribution of devices which allow fair use is a right, or that perfect lossless digital copying is a right.
The first ammendment does however cover distribution of all aspects of how such a device works and how to construct one however. The distinction between "analogue" and "digital" copies is a very modern idea. Created by the lobbying of the publishing industry. It's the sort of nitpicking issue the law, IMHO, really shouldn't be bothering with. What does it matter if a copy is exact or inexact in the first place?
Not entirely true, read the amendment process - an amendment must specifically state what provision of the Constitution it is amending. The First Amendment does no such thing. Therefore, any apparent conflicts between the Constitution and the First Amendment must be resolved, not discarded.
Therefore wouldn't the normal meaning of the word "ammendment" apply. Which would be that the newer text "trumps" the older.
Also if the first ammendment does apply very broadly, i.e. to any law ever passed through the US Congress.
So-called "special interest groups" (or "lobbyist groups"), however, are in the business of spinning perception. They know how to scream louder, talk faster, and generally end up influencing things more than groups of "ordinary citizens." We run into a problem here: most of these lobbyist groups are funded by corporations with motives based on finance, rather than human rights.
Most of those which arn't obviously representing corporations tend to be political extremists out of touch with most people anyway
Another thing you will find with such groups is attempting to create the imperssion that their narrow viewpoint is all there is on the issue (or that their position is the only rational one, preferably with the spin than any opposing viewpoint is somehow criminal or evil.) Then they don't even have to "shout" because their voice is the only one politicans get to hear.
I think a *lot* of people have forgotten one very basic principle: the Constitution of the United States (a la Bill of Rights) is not designed to enumerate every single "right" we have as human beings. This is a very common misconception, and an extremely dangerous one at that.
The actual purpose of the US constitution (or indeed the constitution of any nation state) is the regulation of government. It enumerates what powers the US government has and what powers it explicitally does not have.
Kids in school these days are being taught that the government "gives" us a set of basic rights. This is an incorrect, but unfortunately somewhat prevalent view. The government does not *give* us rights; we have these rights just as surely as we have a nose. The role of government in this case is to *protect* those rights which we already have.
Which is not even the sole role of government. The assumption in the US constitution is that people will defend their own rights. Hence the second ammendment...
Here's the problem: if you "educate" an entire generation of Americas to believe that the government gives us rights, you end up with the unfortunate consequence that we must also accept that what is given may be taken away. This tends to work out well for those in positions of power, and poorly for the average citizen.
It's also a viewpoint which can be held simaltaniously by people with power and people without power.
See, we think it's counterproductive to write an HTML engine for one product (IE), then write a completely different one which probably won't be 100% compatible for another product (Windows XP's help files, OE, Outlook, Front Page, hell Visual Studio .NET, etc.)
You only want to use the same rendering engine if you make sure that applications such as email "sanitise" what they have rendered.
It seems to me that they have enough profit to maintain a server version of the OS where a bad video call won't bring the entire freaking server down. Not to mention, why does my DB server need a web browser?!?!
Or even a sound card...
Plenty of servers don't even realistically need a high resolution video display either.
I simply can't understand why they say 'Windows is not designed to be modular'. It IS setup and designed to be modular. The problem is: the modules designed are not designed in a way that they are usable :).
Or even deliberatly implimented in a way that makes actual modular use virtually impossible.
The same way that Windows does not actually need to copy files back and forth as "roaming profiles". But try making it simply alter the relevent registry keys to point at the server copy...
And that would then proceed to break compatibility with 90% of the software I use. All my professional AV software relies on DirectX, ActiveMovie (a part of DirectX if you really get down to it) and such. My games need DirectX as well.
Plenty of people using Windows have no need these types of software.
e.g. the stereotypical office worker who needs a wordprocessor and email...