"in cases of child labor and physical assault on children"
If that was the logic used in writing and passing the law, then the goals of the law should have been satisifed with a single state-required disclaimer attatched to all video games: "No children were harmed in the making of this video game."
Seriously, kids don't go out and say "Yippie skippie, I wanna work in a coal mine for 12 hours a day!" or something similar.
Who needs a country name when you instead put QEII's smiling face on each and every one?
Besides, in the early days before the Universal Postal Union it didn't matter what country the stamps were from if they weren't from the country the letter was in right now; you had to have stamps from your home country to get the letter out, and additional stamps from the destination country to get it delivered.
"What would you do when someone builds a computer controlled spark gap (substitute in approbiate technological device), and proceeds to jam every frequency they can."
Who would be affected?
You might have had a case for bandwidth management being a federal concern 100 years ago when the audience was primarily interested in medium- to shortwave transmissions, but between television and FM radio all anybody today really cares about is the VHF and UHF bands. Your spark gap may piss of DXers nationwide, but the vast majority of pissed off people will be within a single metropolitan area.
Throw the essentially point-to-point nature of cable and satellite providers, and there simply isn't a compelling national (let alone federal) interest any more, at least not above... say 50 MHz?
What does the federal government do for the New York City market that an agreement hammered out by New York, New Jersey and Connecticut couldn't do better? Who outside those three states actually cares what gets broadcasted out of New York City?
So the General Assembly will be overseeing the internet as a Committee of the Whole and won't instead set up a small, select committee of those members to manage affairs?
The United States will not get a vote in how the Internet will be managed, only a vote for who will do the managing. I would hope you are able to see the difference.
"Yes, for the same reason I want criminals to be able to vote. Every nation should be represented in a fair and democratic Internet administration, not just the people we like."
Right to self-determination be damned? Come now, it's far easier for China to censor what's coming into it than it is for the United States to "un-censor" what a UN-regulated internet would provide. The United States is not forcing China to allow access to the Internet, restricted or otherwise, but you would have China dictate the terms of internet usage to the United States?
Fuck democracy, what about liberty? If the People's Republic of China wants to protect its people from "harmful information," then it's upon them to do so, not to go through some proxy which would force those same standards on others. Even if the information was truly harmful, it is the role of a nation's government ot protect its people from outside harm. The majority should not be allowed to step on the liberties of the minority.
I don't for a second buy the "freedom and enterprise" bull this GOP moutpiece is spouting (I don't care if he is a "good guy," that just means he was hand-picked by party leaders to soften the blow of a party-approved message), but what pathetic ability I may have in swaying politics in Washington is far more influence than I have in Beijing.
Letting convicted felons vote is one thing. Letting them serve on a jury, especially a jury where you're the defendant, is something else entirely.
Considering the whole "aluminum" vs. "aluminium" flamewar we've had in a recent story (it's like vi vs. emacs, only there's no ed), it seems all they'd need to be "culturally different" is to throw in a few extra letters. "Astrounaughtte?"
People in NY and NJ still have to pay federal taxes. I suspect if New York were a separate country (or at least as separate as South Korea is), penetration would be better.
Thank the expanding role/power/price tag of the federal government.
"Oh yeah, that strategy worked so well for the Russians. How's that Russian cell phone you are using? Reading this on a Russian computer? How about your GLONASS receiver? Your Russian-built TV? Washer-dryer? Car? Tractor even? Combine-harvester?"
Two things:
The USSR was more than just Russia. A good deal of the economic collapse we saw in the region in the 1990's was precipitated by the fact that the Soviet Union broke up and saw no successor. If even a half-dozen of the more important Soviet Republics managed to hammer out some sort of confederacy or federation after the collapse instead of all going their separate ways, things would be very different today. Would the US aerospace industry be what it is today if Texas and Florida were two different countries? And we're not just talking about aerospace; the Soviet Union allowed the member republics to specialize in particular industries, relying on the other republics to produce what is no longer made locally. Kazakhstanis could worry about oil and leave wheat production to the Russians.
The Soviets felt they had to spend an inordinate part of their budget on defense, thanks to the antagonism of Western Europe (who initially dragged the US along; IMO, Bolshevik Russia made a far more natural ally to the US than either the UK/French alliance or Imperial Germany during the 1910's). Things didn't pan out into other industries as we saw in the US because the benefits were funneled back into the defense industry. The results were that, though the Soviets certainly couldn't build a better toaster, the military hardware the Soviets did focus on were easily on par to NATO technology. If the Soviets didn't (need to) focus so much on defense and allowed more civillian development, I see no reason to believe those techonlogies wouldn't also be on par to what we see in the United States. And if US taxpayers weren't paying for the defense of Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, the technology available in the US wouldn't be what it is.
"Unless you are a third-world dictator needing some cheap airplanes, tanks, or guns"
"Inexpensive" isn't always the same as "cheap." And the reason they're on the market for low prices is because there isn't a Soviet Union around any more than can afford the upkeep and maintenance. Ever had to pay for the upkeep of a luxury car that was out of warranty?
ICBMs are difficult to destroy after they launch, but fairly easy to take out with your own ICBMs before they lauch. You only have a few minutes (at best) after you pick up an incoming warhead on radar to launch your own missiles before they're vaporized on the ground.
This is what drove the USA/USSR nuclear arms race: most missiles were pointed at the other guy's missiles, with only a minority left to target other stratiegic interests (runways long enough for B-52s, for example).
And if it was China's main intent to use space travel as a way of improving their ICBMs, then they've already lost before they began: the US has (at worst) a 3:1 advantage in nuclear weapons, and even assuming all Chinese warheads are sitting on top of an ICBM, the US can take them all out at its liesure. And even if we again give the Chinese the benefit of the doubt and assume they can build a single nuclear-tipped ICBM as quickly as the US, it's going to be a slow linear progression.
With that said, space travel has very little to do with missile technology; when was the last time somebody put something into orbit with a Minuteman III? Don't attribute to technological or military ambitions what can be attributed to pure politics.
"Corporations are going to take over where the governments leave off."
Why? Unless tomorrow somebody discovers something everybody must have and must be made in microgravity, or some probe discovers a huge stash of unobtainium on the surface of Mars, there's no commercial impulse for space travel to progress beyond where it is now: putting microwave repeaters into geosynchronus orbit.
Exploration (space or otherwise) is nothing if not a long-term investment, and Wall Street prefers the short-term to boost quarterly profits.
"An ICBM warhead is a satellite whose orbit happens to intersect the surface of the earth."
Wrong limiting case. Orbit is a ballistic arc that continually misses. It's easier to put something in a ballistic arc (Freedom 7, SpaceShip 1) than it is to put something into orbit (Vostok 1, Friendship 7). Anybody that can put something into LEO can build an ICBM, but not everybody that can build an ICBM can put something into LEO.
The USA/USSR space race was pure politics that spun off from missile technology. It just so happens that, at the time, Soviet nuclear weapons were considerably heavier than their American counterparts, even heavier than a manned capsule, so it was simple to modify an existing Soviet ICBM to put a lighter payload into orbit.
We are complying with standards, just a different standard set. Oxford vs. Webster is like VHS vs. Betamax, to use a loose analogy. The Oxford standard may be more widely accepted over a geographical area (though perhaps not a larger population), but Webster has a technical advantage with somewhat more rigid spelling rules, especially where extraneous vowels are dropped from the catalogue^H^H.
Now, it just so happens there is a great deal of cross-compatability between the two standards, but that doesn't mean that one is "more correct" than the other. If the author really wanted to reach the widest audience, the title would have just been left at "Transparent Al," but then people would wonder who this Al person is and we'd see a whole lot of posts involving quotes from UHF.
"Yes, yes, I know, a whole continent of people can't spell that metal's name. It's just like the English who wrote "cocoa" when they should have written "cacao". Amazing how an illiterate in the wrong place at the wrong time can screw up a dictionary."
Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote The droghte of March hath perced to the roote And bathed every veyne in swich licour, Of which vertu engendred is the flour; Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth Inspired hath in every holt and heeth The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne Hath in the Ram his halfe cours yronne, And smale foweles maken melodye, That slepen al the nyght with open eye- (So priketh hem Nature in hir corages); Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes; And specially from every shires ende Of Engelond, to Caunterbury they wende, The hooly blisful martir for to seke That hem hath holpen, whan that they were seeke.
Haven't you ever seen The Pentagon Wars, particularly the scenes involving "sheep specs?" You don't want to use aluminum as armor, as it has the nasty tendancy of catching fire and giving off extremely toxic fumes.
"I still recommend that my clients purchase a Nintendo DS"
"Clients?" So you contract your entertainment-reccomending skills out for a living, or are you just a GameWhore employee who thinks he's a little more important than he really is?
Ultimatley doesn't matter. Jack Thompson is the one with the burden of proof (to use legal-ese) in his ongoing bickerings with video game players. One that claims to know what is best for us is supposed to be held to a higher standard.
"Every time some country starts getting decent governance,"
Which government? If by "decent government" you mean "turns a blind eye to businesses forcibly putting down organized labor," you have a point. After all, the mighty China is where it is today by converting elementary schools into fireworks factories and coal mines that seem to blow up and/or collapse based on a weekly schedule.
India may be a democracy, but they still have enforcement problems as Union Carbide was kind enough to point out.
These businesses aren't moving away solely because the foreign governments are improving but because there's still exploitable holes in the system. The general improvement is simply useful to get the federal government to normalize trade relations.
Lower first-world wages is one thing, but no wages, thanks to unemployment, is something else. At least some examples of organized labor have consented to pay cuts in order to save a business or an industry (such as what we're seeing in airlines, but whether or not that's helped any is debatable.
"A union doesn't help your skills or your experience."
That's not the point of unionization. The point of unionization is to establish a balance of power, using the laws of supply and demand to get concessions from employers that they would not otherwise get. Job training and the like are just perks.
Were the EA employers suing because they weren't getting "skills" or "experience," or because they were disposable and too disorganized to even seek enforcement of existing labor laws?
"The balance is going to happen one way or another."
Then it's a question of on whose terms this change is going to happen. We can have the status quo, with outsourcing coupled with skyrocketing executive salaries, or unorganized workers can establish new unions to make sure that, though paid less, at least have an income.
What if your wages were higher than they are now even after you had to pay union dues? And then there's less-tangible benefits like job security and knowing you'll get 150% after 40 hours.
Slashdot Mirror
"Women" isn't a single political group.
"in cases of child labor and physical assault on children"
If that was the logic used in writing and passing the law, then the goals of the law should have been satisifed with a single state-required disclaimer attatched to all video games: "No children were harmed in the making of this video game."
Seriously, kids don't go out and say "Yippie skippie, I wanna work in a coal mine for 12 hours a day!" or something similar.
Who needs a country name when you instead put QEII's smiling face on each and every one?
Besides, in the early days before the Universal Postal Union it didn't matter what country the stamps were from if they weren't from the country the letter was in right now; you had to have stamps from your home country to get the letter out, and additional stamps from the destination country to get it delivered.
"If aliens would like to see webpage of WHOLE earth's goverment, where would they go?"
GOP.com, of course.
"Everyone knows it's truly Astronaught"
Well, with the ban in place, the UK was certainly left with naught.
"What would you do when someone builds a computer controlled spark gap (substitute in approbiate technological device), and proceeds to jam every frequency they can."
Who would be affected?
You might have had a case for bandwidth management being a federal concern 100 years ago when the audience was primarily interested in medium- to shortwave transmissions, but between television and FM radio all anybody today really cares about is the VHF and UHF bands. Your spark gap may piss of DXers nationwide, but the vast majority of pissed off people will be within a single metropolitan area.
Throw the essentially point-to-point nature of cable and satellite providers, and there simply isn't a compelling national (let alone federal) interest any more, at least not above... say 50 MHz?
What does the federal government do for the New York City market that an agreement hammered out by New York, New Jersey and Connecticut couldn't do better? Who outside those three states actually cares what gets broadcasted out of New York City?
So the General Assembly will be overseeing the internet as a Committee of the Whole and won't instead set up a small, select committee of those members to manage affairs?
The United States will not get a vote in how the Internet will be managed, only a vote for who will do the managing. I would hope you are able to see the difference.
"Yes, for the same reason I want criminals to be able to vote. Every nation should be represented in a fair and democratic Internet administration, not just the people we like."
Right to self-determination be damned? Come now, it's far easier for China to censor what's coming into it than it is for the United States to "un-censor" what a UN-regulated internet would provide. The United States is not forcing China to allow access to the Internet, restricted or otherwise, but you would have China dictate the terms of internet usage to the United States?
Fuck democracy, what about liberty? If the People's Republic of China wants to protect its people from "harmful information," then it's upon them to do so, not to go through some proxy which would force those same standards on others. Even if the information was truly harmful, it is the role of a nation's government ot protect its people from outside harm. The majority should not be allowed to step on the liberties of the minority.
I don't for a second buy the "freedom and enterprise" bull this GOP moutpiece is spouting (I don't care if he is a "good guy," that just means he was hand-picked by party leaders to soften the blow of a party-approved message), but what pathetic ability I may have in swaying politics in Washington is far more influence than I have in Beijing.
Letting convicted felons vote is one thing. Letting them serve on a jury, especially a jury where you're the defendant, is something else entirely.
Considering the whole "aluminum" vs. "aluminium" flamewar we've had in a recent story (it's like vi vs. emacs, only there's no ed), it seems all they'd need to be "culturally different" is to throw in a few extra letters. "Astrounaughtte?"
Courts are bound to interpret the laws Congress gives them, and our popularly-elected Congress has seen fit to allow patents such as these.
People in NY and NJ still have to pay federal taxes. I suspect if New York were a separate country (or at least as separate as South Korea is), penetration would be better.
Thank the expanding role/power/price tag of the federal government.
Two things:
"Unless you are a third-world dictator needing some cheap airplanes, tanks, or guns"
"Inexpensive" isn't always the same as "cheap." And the reason they're on the market for low prices is because there isn't a Soviet Union around any more than can afford the upkeep and maintenance. Ever had to pay for the upkeep of a luxury car that was out of warranty?
ICBMs are difficult to destroy after they launch, but fairly easy to take out with your own ICBMs before they lauch. You only have a few minutes (at best) after you pick up an incoming warhead on radar to launch your own missiles before they're vaporized on the ground.
This is what drove the USA/USSR nuclear arms race: most missiles were pointed at the other guy's missiles, with only a minority left to target other stratiegic interests (runways long enough for B-52s, for example).
And if it was China's main intent to use space travel as a way of improving their ICBMs, then they've already lost before they began: the US has (at worst) a 3:1 advantage in nuclear weapons, and even assuming all Chinese warheads are sitting on top of an ICBM, the US can take them all out at its liesure. And even if we again give the Chinese the benefit of the doubt and assume they can build a single nuclear-tipped ICBM as quickly as the US, it's going to be a slow linear progression.
With that said, space travel has very little to do with missile technology; when was the last time somebody put something into orbit with a Minuteman III? Don't attribute to technological or military ambitions what can be attributed to pure politics.
"Corporations are going to take over where the governments leave off."
Why? Unless tomorrow somebody discovers something everybody must have and must be made in microgravity, or some probe discovers a huge stash of unobtainium on the surface of Mars, there's no commercial impulse for space travel to progress beyond where it is now: putting microwave repeaters into geosynchronus orbit.
Exploration (space or otherwise) is nothing if not a long-term investment, and Wall Street prefers the short-term to boost quarterly profits.
"An ICBM warhead is a satellite whose orbit happens to intersect the surface of the earth."
Wrong limiting case. Orbit is a ballistic arc that continually misses. It's easier to put something in a ballistic arc (Freedom 7, SpaceShip 1) than it is to put something into orbit (Vostok 1, Friendship 7). Anybody that can put something into LEO can build an ICBM, but not everybody that can build an ICBM can put something into LEO.
The USA/USSR space race was pure politics that spun off from missile technology. It just so happens that, at the time, Soviet nuclear weapons were considerably heavier than their American counterparts, even heavier than a manned capsule, so it was simple to modify an existing Soviet ICBM to put a lighter payload into orbit.
We are complying with standards, just a different standard set. Oxford vs. Webster is like VHS vs. Betamax, to use a loose analogy. The Oxford standard may be more widely accepted over a geographical area (though perhaps not a larger population), but Webster has a technical advantage with somewhat more rigid spelling rules, especially where extraneous vowels are dropped from the catalogue^H^H.
Now, it just so happens there is a great deal of cross-compatability between the two standards, but that doesn't mean that one is "more correct" than the other. If the author really wanted to reach the widest audience, the title would have just been left at "Transparent Al," but then people would wonder who this Al person is and we'd see a whole lot of posts involving quotes from UHF.
Haven't you ever seen The Pentagon Wars , particularly the scenes involving "sheep specs?" You don't want to use aluminum as armor, as it has the nasty tendancy of catching fire and giving off extremely toxic fumes.
"I still recommend that my clients purchase a Nintendo DS"
"Clients?" So you contract your entertainment-reccomending skills out for a living, or are you just a GameWhore employee who thinks he's a little more important than he really is?
I was hoping he was rescinding his other offer.
Ultimatley doesn't matter. Jack Thompson is the one with the burden of proof (to use legal-ese) in his ongoing bickerings with video game players. One that claims to know what is best for us is supposed to be held to a higher standard.
I can finally run Mozilla on my MS-DOS box? Sweet!
Because the SNES emulators for the PSP are more solid and don't require me to use the knife swap trick.
"Every time some country starts getting decent governance,"
Which government? If by "decent government" you mean "turns a blind eye to businesses forcibly putting down organized labor," you have a point. After all, the mighty China is where it is today by converting elementary schools into fireworks factories and coal mines that seem to blow up and/or collapse based on a weekly schedule.
India may be a democracy, but they still have enforcement problems as Union Carbide was kind enough to point out.
These businesses aren't moving away solely because the foreign governments are improving but because there's still exploitable holes in the system. The general improvement is simply useful to get the federal government to normalize trade relations.
Lower first-world wages is one thing, but no wages, thanks to unemployment, is something else. At least some examples of organized labor have consented to pay cuts in order to save a business or an industry (such as what we're seeing in airlines, but whether or not that's helped any is debatable.
"A union doesn't help your skills or your experience."
That's not the point of unionization. The point of unionization is to establish a balance of power, using the laws of supply and demand to get concessions from employers that they would not otherwise get. Job training and the like are just perks.
Were the EA employers suing because they weren't getting "skills" or "experience," or because they were disposable and too disorganized to even seek enforcement of existing labor laws?
"The balance is going to happen one way or another."
Then it's a question of on whose terms this change is going to happen. We can have the status quo, with outsourcing coupled with skyrocketing executive salaries, or unorganized workers can establish new unions to make sure that, though paid less, at least have an income.
What if your wages were higher than they are now even after you had to pay union dues? And then there's less-tangible benefits like job security and knowing you'll get 150% after 40 hours.