"Free will has absolutely nothing to do with event following cause. It has absolutely nothing to do with physics at all, because it's a made-up concept. It's philosophical."
Free will is an example of a cause. Whether it's "philosophical" or not at this point is a red herring, because at issue is whether anything, "philosophical" or not, can be considered to have caused something else.
If you want to avoid talking about something you seem to frown upon, how about this: there is a spark, there is a fire. For us tardyons, the spark precedes the fire, and we may think that the spark caused the fire. For tachyons, the fire precedes the spark, and they may think they fire caused the spark. However (so long as the tachyon oberver is possible), both must be taken into account, each presumption of what caused what cancel each other out, and both spark and fire "just happen," with no relation to each other beyond, coincidentally, being near each other in space-time.
"We know that if we were facing situtations that we faced before with exactly the same knowledge, if we were reliving a moment of history, we'd do exactly the same thing,"
Red herring. Entropy dictates that the past will never repeat, and quantum mechanics dictate that we cannot know the past with complete certainty, which would be required to recreate it.
"If "cause" doesn't bring about "effect", then it was not the cause, since cause is by definition the thing that brought about the effect. Therefore, the concept of cause that doesn't bring about effect is nonsensical."
That's why I put "cause" and "effect" into quotation marks. Without causality, anything and everything in the universe "just happens," with no causes and no effects.
"On the other hand, if you are merely talking about effect preceding cause, then does that affect free will in any way ? What's to say that action cannot precede decision ?"
If action precedes "decision," was a decision actually made? If action precedes thought, then obviously you cannot decide not to act.
Unless decision, in all valid frames of reference, can be shown to be before (or at least coinciding with) action, then it cannot be argued that action was taken because of your decision. All that can be said definitively is that A and B happened, and any attempt to say one caused the other will be cancelled out by an equally valid argument in the opposite direction. Preferring the tardyon interpretation would then be little more than an act of faith, faith that you are in control of your own body instead of a passenger pretending to be in control.
"And I can prove that I thought about jumping before I began jumping. And, as you said below, my observations are equally valid than yours."
And by taking both valid views into consideration, all that can be said is "I thought" and "I jumped on one foot." You cannot say "I jumped because I thought" because thought did not precede jumping in all frames of reference. If jumping happens first, you can't decide not to jump.
"Why would the temporal order of the two be crucial to free will ?"
If action precedes decision, could you decide not to act? In order for action to precede thought, the future must be as immutible as the past, allowing no room for alteration through free will.
"Besides, if effect can precede cause"
It cannot. You render "cause" and "effect" meaningless if that happens.
"then my jumping may still be caused by my decision to start jumping, even if I started jumping before I thought about jumping"
You're making an assumption that you would be agreeing with your future self. You may be free to agree, but you're not free to disagree or change your mind. If you start jumping before the thought that "caused" it, you are locked in an inescapable fate until you have that thought (and you must have that thought).
"Um, if two things happen simultaneously from my frame of reference, and my observations are equally valid and true than anyone else's observations, then obviously there is such a thing than "simultaneous". I just saw it myself, and my observations are valid and true."
But the concept of simultaneous loses meaning since it is no longer true for all observers.
"and that faster-than-light communication may make some observer observe the effect before the cause, "
It is not merely an observation. The tardyon interpretation of events is no better and no worse than the tachyon interpretation. Both accounts must be considered when interpreting the true nature of reality, and considering both eliminates the causality arguments of each.
Consider this paradox. There are three ways to get out of it:
Special Relativity is wrong to some extent (no SR)
Tachyons cannot exist (no FTL)
The shooters are not free to act in such a way (no free will)
Besides, the meter is defined as the distance light goes in 1/299792458 s, so if light went faster, we'd still use the same number, it's just our meters (and, consequently, feet/yards/etc) will get longer.
"Um, how does a causality violation force me to do anything ?"
Because when you start talking about communicating faster than speed of light in special relativity, there is no reason for "cause" to precede (let alone bring about) "effect."
""There's tachyons, so I must jump on one foot without any reason""
Are you jumping on one foot because you want to, or do you want to because you're jumping on one foot? It is not that free will is "violated" without causality, it is that free will is an illusion. You're jumping on one foot, you only think it's because you want to, but with tachyons in special relativity I can proove that you started jumping before you thought about jumping.
Even limiting ourselves to tardyons, we can already demonstrate that there is no such thing as "simultaneous," because where A and B happen "simultaneously" for one observer, A precedes B for another, and both are equally valid and equally true. With tachnyons thrown into the mix, B can precede A, and that too would be just as true as A preceding B, so you can never say "A caused B "without having an equal case for "B caused A"
So far, the only thing saying that causality can't be violated is the apparent lack of tachyons. Other than that, causality can be wrong, it's just that means there's no such thing as free will.
GDP? As in a perentage of what people make? So all we will have to do is raise our taxes to pay this debt, hm? That will go over real well with the voters on election day.
Looking at the government's debt as a percentage of GDP isn't realistic, because a government surviving longer than two years (the term of the House) with that kind of mentality isn't realistic. There's a history in this country of people being tarred and feathered for being accused of having that kind of "The people exist to be taxed" mentality and, in fact, it's why we have a country separate from the UK to begin with.
Look at the debt as a percentage of the national budget (considerably lower than the GDP). You can consider a possible modest increase in the size of that budget, but nothing that wouldn't survive a popular election.
I mean, really, if you're gonna jack up the national taxes to that level, where will the states get their money? Do you really want to see them call for a new constitutional convention?
"Then you have a definition of fraud that goes something like "using unethical means to deprive someone of something of value"."
I don't know about Japan, but in the US that word "value" refers to monetary value and not normally emotional attachment. For example, you're not going to get locked up for defrauding someone out of $0.25, even if it was in the form of the owner's Number One Extra-Lucky Quarter that he got from his grandfather on his deathbed.
In that sense, the only way I could see this act as being classifiable as fraud is when the guy pawned the goods to goldbuyers. Unless and until things can be negotiable in real-world money, it's purely an in-game matter.
"in a farming/logging town of less than 1,000 people can get broadband access, and how all these centres in the US cannot?"
Because it's easier to deal with your brother when he's an outlier instead of the norm. When the vast, vast majority of Canadians live close together, there is enough leftover resources to run that single trunk out to serve those outliers. It's cheaper to run a single trunk to a single community of 1000 people than, say, run ten trunks out in different directions to serve ten neighborhoods of 100 people.
Being able to point to the situation of 1 or even 10,000 specific, carefully chosen Canadians doesn't change the situation for the whole of the 3E7 north of the 49th. If you really want, I can point out a similar number of connected rural users in the US, but that doesn't change the fact that people in Canada cluster together far more tightly than people in the US.
Go here and check out how the distribution in Canada compares to the US. In the east, civilization all but ends at the St. Lawrence. In the west, the distribution is a little smoother (at least within a particular spur), but it's still easier to pick out Winnipeg and Calgary than, say, Minneapolis/St. Paul or even Houston. Heck, some of the Plains States look like a Cartesian grid.
Let's see, I made two claims in my supposed troll.
First, I said the PS2 doens't have an HDD. While it is true that one can get an HDD for some models of the PS2, effectively the only game that uses the HDD is the game that comes with it. On top of that, with the introduction of the series 70000 PS2s (a/k/a "PStwo"), there are PS2s that are incapable of having an HDD connected to it. The HDD is effectivley a red herring and may as well not exist for the vast majority of PS2 owners, even those who play online (wich is why the series 70000 doesn't support HDD connectivity).
As for who is the leader in online play, about a year ago there were two PlayStation 2s online for every Xbox Live subscriber. And while the 2:1 ratio may not still hold true today, if you're playing a console online, odds are that console is a PS2.
So I'm a troll for pointing out that what is supposedly the Xbox's strongest trait is still more popular on their chief competitor's platform? Or for pointing out that this is true without any benefit of a hard drive?
Putting HDDs in consoles today continues to be little more than a gimmick, and is treated as such by both hardware manufacturers and game publishers. Deal with it.
"one could come to a scientific conclusion that the domino arranger could exist."
Logical and rational, perhaps, but there's no scientific evidence confirming (or denying) the conclusion. All science can say at this point is that there were conditions in the physical and chemical make-up of the primordial earth/solar system that favored the rapid development and sporradic speciation of life on earth. If we ever get to the point where we can check out the development of life on other planets in the galaxy (i. e. see how other dominoes found elsewhere are arranged), we might have a better grasp of the uniqueness of our situation or any general tendancies towards life and speciation, etc. But the interpretation of life on earth, the "why?" requires an arbitrary (and inherently unscientific) assumption of what we could classify as signs of intelligent design and what we could classify as purely chaotic.
Science can say it could or couldn't, but not did or didn't.
"This has been precisely my argument in favor of Intelligent Design. Evolution could have been the product of the creator stacking the dominoes so the right tap made it all happen."
But that's not science.
The creationist says the dominoes were arranged by some intelligent arranger. The Darwinist says that the dominoes were arranged gradually over time by random natural forces. The scientist says "Look, dominoes!"
The job of the scientist is to look at the information at hand and make educated guesses about reality based on the gathered information and only the gathered information. Now, if you find fingerprints on the dominoes or even footprints leading up to where the dominoes are arranged, then Intelligent Design may have a scientific leg to stand on, but the presence of dominoes in and of themselves says jack and shit about how they got there, at least as far as science is concerned.
Once you start basing assumptions on evidence that "could be out there," "hasn't been discovered yet" or, in the case of religion, "can never be discovered," you're talking philosophy.
If you're designing a single, rotating bar, the tension at the bar will be the strongest in the middle, with the "weight" of each half pulling fully in opposite directions. Because of that, the closer you get to the middle, the stronger the structure will have to be, and this would probably increase the mass of materials used. This could throw off the moment of inertia ("center of gravity," if you will).
On the other hand, in a ring-shaped structure, the tension of keeping the ring together is distributed equaly throughout the structure, naturally keeping the distrubtion of materials in the structure balanced.
There's also the matter of moving throughout the structure ("Where are you going to go?"). In a linear shape, odds are you will have traffic going through the middle, involving decreasing spin-gravity and increasing dizziness as you approach the center, and a potentially dangerous transfer of "up" and "down" at the middle. In a ring, on the other hand, centripetal acceleration is generally uniform throughout.
The relatively lax immigration policies of what some call the anglosphere countries (especially the US and Canada) tend to be the exception rather than the norm when it comes to national attidudes towards immigration (and, yes, I am taking into account the current US attitude towards immigration from Mexico). Japan is perhaps more xenophobic than most, but I'm not comfortable calling it an extreme position.
"The chinese and koreans are nice folks:)"
In this particular case, it's probably more a matter of these immigrants hating the Japanese more. Whenever Koizumi visits a certain war (criminals) shrine, you'll typically hear news stories about, say, Koreans cutting off their own fingers in protest. Most Mexicans may hate the US, but not to this degree.
Most of Japan's foreign labor, I believe, comes from the other direction, like the Philippines.
"You wouldn't have to go too far back before you'd have said the same thing about refrigeration,"
Cue the bizarre mental image:
The Refrigeration Industry of America, having long enjoyed an oligopoly on producing ice for the nation's iceboxes, has announced a slew of new of lawsuits against upstart Frigidaire, accusing the company of aiding home users in violating patents on solid dihydrogen monoxide in their homes. Frigidaire claims that they cannot be held responsible for what their customers do with these new "refrigerators," but the inclusion of an "ice dispenser" on newer models can only harm their defense.
In pushing Congress for legislation against these new, smaller compressors, the RIA has repeatedly pointed out the numerous employees at the nation's ice plants who could be left unemployed if people were free to produce their own ice.
"When you are talking about significantly large amounts of data (hundreds of GBs to TBs) it is actually faster and cheaper to put it on a hard drive and FedEx or (insert your favorite delivery company here) and ship it."
Probably more secure, too. I suspect that the USPS, at least, would want to see more than a nasty-gram from some RIAA/MPAA lawyer before they let other people see the contents of packages sent to me.
"Help me out, here, with some post-Cold War examples. That's crucial, because stopping the tyranny of the Soviet Union was paramount."
How convenient, then, that there was something "more important" than "government with consent of the governed." I suppose the "War on Terror" is similarly crucial. It's nice to know the US always has Something More Important to work on.
At any rate, were we aiding democracy more when we put Aristide in power or helped him leave? How is democracy being served with our de facto support of a military junta in Pakistan? Interesting things have been happening in other central Asian countries, which we've at least turned a blind eye to in the name of "stratiegic interests." And unlike "Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, Poland ect" these countries were actually part of the Soviet Union.
You bring up Chavez in Venezuela. It was interesting how quickly our national government moved to support the coup that temporarily overthrew him. And speaking about support from China, it's interesting how such a government could have Permanent Normal Trade Relations with us, demonstrating our willingness and desire to turn a blind eye when there's actual money involved.
There are probably more examples I could name, usually in the name of the "War on Terror" or even the older "War on Drugs," but the problem with CIA support is that the general public won't know much about it for another decade or so. So, for example, we don't know how much the US government is involved in, say, putting down unionization efforts in oil-rich Nigeria.
Slashdot Mirror
"Free will has absolutely nothing to do with event following cause. It has absolutely nothing to do with physics at all, because it's a made-up concept. It's philosophical."
Free will is an example of a cause. Whether it's "philosophical" or not at this point is a red herring, because at issue is whether anything, "philosophical" or not, can be considered to have caused something else.
If you want to avoid talking about something you seem to frown upon, how about this: there is a spark, there is a fire. For us tardyons, the spark precedes the fire, and we may think that the spark caused the fire. For tachyons, the fire precedes the spark, and they may think they fire caused the spark. However (so long as the tachyon oberver is possible), both must be taken into account, each presumption of what caused what cancel each other out, and both spark and fire "just happen," with no relation to each other beyond, coincidentally, being near each other in space-time.
"We know that if we were facing situtations that we faced before with exactly the same knowledge, if we were reliving a moment of history, we'd do exactly the same thing,"
Red herring. Entropy dictates that the past will never repeat, and quantum mechanics dictate that we cannot know the past with complete certainty, which would be required to recreate it.
That's why I put "cause" and "effect" into quotation marks. Without causality, anything and everything in the universe "just happens," with no causes and no effects.
"On the other hand, if you are merely talking about effect preceding cause, then does that affect free will in any way ? What's to say that action cannot precede decision ?"
If action precedes "decision," was a decision actually made? If action precedes thought, then obviously you cannot decide not to act.
Unless decision, in all valid frames of reference, can be shown to be before (or at least coinciding with) action, then it cannot be argued that action was taken because of your decision. All that can be said definitively is that A and B happened, and any attempt to say one caused the other will be cancelled out by an equally valid argument in the opposite direction. Preferring the tardyon interpretation would then be little more than an act of faith, faith that you are in control of your own body instead of a passenger pretending to be in control.
"And I can prove that I thought about jumping before I began jumping. And, as you said below, my observations are equally valid than yours."
And by taking both valid views into consideration, all that can be said is "I thought" and "I jumped on one foot." You cannot say "I jumped because I thought" because thought did not precede jumping in all frames of reference. If jumping happens first, you can't decide not to jump.
"Why would the temporal order of the two be crucial to free will ?"
If action precedes decision, could you decide not to act? In order for action to precede thought, the future must be as immutible as the past, allowing no room for alteration through free will.
"Besides, if effect can precede cause"
It cannot. You render "cause" and "effect" meaningless if that happens.
"then my jumping may still be caused by my decision to start jumping, even if I started jumping before I thought about jumping"
You're making an assumption that you would be agreeing with your future self. You may be free to agree, but you're not free to disagree or change your mind. If you start jumping before the thought that "caused" it, you are locked in an inescapable fate until you have that thought (and you must have that thought).
"Um, if two things happen simultaneously from my frame of reference, and my observations are equally valid and true than anyone else's observations, then obviously there is such a thing than "simultaneous". I just saw it myself, and my observations are valid and true."
But the concept of simultaneous loses meaning since it is no longer true for all observers.
"and that faster-than-light communication may make some observer observe the effect before the cause, "
It is not merely an observation. The tardyon interpretation of events is no better and no worse than the tachyon interpretation. Both accounts must be considered when interpreting the true nature of reality, and considering both eliminates the causality arguments of each.
Consider this paradox. There are three ways to get out of it:
Besides, the meter is defined as the distance light goes in 1/299792458 s, so if light went faster, we'd still use the same number, it's just our meters (and, consequently, feet/yards/etc) will get longer.
"Um, how does a causality violation force me to do anything ?"
Because when you start talking about communicating faster than speed of light in special relativity, there is no reason for "cause" to precede (let alone bring about) "effect."
""There's tachyons, so I must jump on one foot without any reason""
Are you jumping on one foot because you want to, or do you want to because you're jumping on one foot? It is not that free will is "violated" without causality, it is that free will is an illusion. You're jumping on one foot, you only think it's because you want to, but with tachyons in special relativity I can proove that you started jumping before you thought about jumping.
Even limiting ourselves to tardyons, we can already demonstrate that there is no such thing as "simultaneous," because where A and B happen "simultaneously" for one observer, A precedes B for another, and both are equally valid and equally true. With tachnyons thrown into the mix, B can precede A, and that too would be just as true as A preceding B, so you can never say "A caused B "without having an equal case for "B caused A"
"or causality is violated"
So far, the only thing saying that causality can't be violated is the apparent lack of tachyons. Other than that, causality can be wrong, it's just that means there's no such thing as free will.
GDP? As in a perentage of what people make? So all we will have to do is raise our taxes to pay this debt, hm? That will go over real well with the voters on election day.
Looking at the government's debt as a percentage of GDP isn't realistic, because a government surviving longer than two years (the term of the House) with that kind of mentality isn't realistic. There's a history in this country of people being tarred and feathered for being accused of having that kind of "The people exist to be taxed" mentality and, in fact, it's why we have a country separate from the UK to begin with.
Look at the debt as a percentage of the national budget (considerably lower than the GDP). You can consider a possible modest increase in the size of that budget, but nothing that wouldn't survive a popular election.
I mean, really, if you're gonna jack up the national taxes to that level, where will the states get their money? Do you really want to see them call for a new constitutional convention?
"Then you have a definition of fraud that goes something like "using unethical means to deprive someone of something of value"."
I don't know about Japan, but in the US that word "value" refers to monetary value and not normally emotional attachment. For example, you're not going to get locked up for defrauding someone out of $0.25, even if it was in the form of the owner's Number One Extra-Lucky Quarter that he got from his grandfather on his deathbed.
In that sense, the only way I could see this act as being classifiable as fraud is when the guy pawned the goods to goldbuyers. Unless and until things can be negotiable in real-world money, it's purely an in-game matter.
"in a farming/logging town of less than 1,000 people can get broadband access, and how all these centres in the US cannot?"
Because it's easier to deal with your brother when he's an outlier instead of the norm. When the vast, vast majority of Canadians live close together, there is enough leftover resources to run that single trunk out to serve those outliers. It's cheaper to run a single trunk to a single community of 1000 people than, say, run ten trunks out in different directions to serve ten neighborhoods of 100 people.
Being able to point to the situation of 1 or even 10,000 specific, carefully chosen Canadians doesn't change the situation for the whole of the 3E7 north of the 49th. If you really want, I can point out a similar number of connected rural users in the US, but that doesn't change the fact that people in Canada cluster together far more tightly than people in the US.
Go here and check out how the distribution in Canada compares to the US. In the east, civilization all but ends at the St. Lawrence. In the west, the distribution is a little smoother (at least within a particular spur), but it's still easier to pick out Winnipeg and Calgary than, say, Minneapolis/St. Paul or even Houston. Heck, some of the Plains States look like a Cartesian grid.
Let's see, I made two claims in my supposed troll.
First, I said the PS2 doens't have an HDD. While it is true that one can get an HDD for some models of the PS2, effectively the only game that uses the HDD is the game that comes with it. On top of that, with the introduction of the series 70000 PS2s (a/k/a "PStwo"), there are PS2s that are incapable of having an HDD connected to it. The HDD is effectivley a red herring and may as well not exist for the vast majority of PS2 owners, even those who play online (wich is why the series 70000 doesn't support HDD connectivity).
As for who is the leader in online play, about a year ago there were two PlayStation 2s online for every Xbox Live subscriber. And while the 2:1 ratio may not still hold true today, if you're playing a console online, odds are that console is a PS2.
So I'm a troll for pointing out that what is supposedly the Xbox's strongest trait is still more popular on their chief competitor's platform? Or for pointing out that this is true without any benefit of a hard drive?
Putting HDDs in consoles today continues to be little more than a gimmick, and is treated as such by both hardware manufacturers and game publishers. Deal with it.
"one could come to a scientific conclusion that the domino arranger could exist."
Logical and rational, perhaps, but there's no scientific evidence confirming (or denying) the conclusion. All science can say at this point is that there were conditions in the physical and chemical make-up of the primordial earth/solar system that favored the rapid development and sporradic speciation of life on earth. If we ever get to the point where we can check out the development of life on other planets in the galaxy (i. e. see how other dominoes found elsewhere are arranged), we might have a better grasp of the uniqueness of our situation or any general tendancies towards life and speciation, etc. But the interpretation of life on earth, the "why?" requires an arbitrary (and inherently unscientific) assumption of what we could classify as signs of intelligent design and what we could classify as purely chaotic.
Science can say it could or couldn't, but not did or didn't.
Light-years, parsecs... neither are SI units. Thou shalt use meters.
"This has been precisely my argument in favor of Intelligent Design. Evolution could have been the product of the creator stacking the dominoes so the right tap made it all happen."
But that's not science.
The creationist says the dominoes were arranged by some intelligent arranger. The Darwinist says that the dominoes were arranged gradually over time by random natural forces. The scientist says "Look, dominoes!"
The job of the scientist is to look at the information at hand and make educated guesses about reality based on the gathered information and only the gathered information. Now, if you find fingerprints on the dominoes or even footprints leading up to where the dominoes are arranged, then Intelligent Design may have a scientific leg to stand on, but the presence of dominoes in and of themselves says jack and shit about how they got there, at least as far as science is concerned.
Once you start basing assumptions on evidence that "could be out there," "hasn't been discovered yet" or, in the case of religion, "can never be discovered," you're talking philosophy.
"not something like nice-tits.org a bird watching site."
That isn't really a bird-watching site, it's satire. If only real pr0n sites were half as original and/or creative.
" To sell a version without harddrive would be stupid"
And nothing stupid ever happens?
"Used for saved games"
Even the current Xbox uses memory cards.
"Free parts XBOX Live needs hard drive to save content"
The majority of Xbox owners don't have Live.
"Developers would be unable to rely on the ability of a customer to save games, customers would be turned off and annoyed once they figured this out"
And this is why the N64 trounced the PlayStation.
"XBOX Live argueably one the reasons the XBOX was so successfull in the first place would be neutered"
The majority of Xbox owners do not have Xbox live.
"which would directly harm there marketshare and continued dominance in the consule online market"
The PS2, without a hard drive, is the current leader in online console gaming.
Wind Waker is a reminder that a bad game from Nintendo tends to be better than most other companies' good games.
Distribution of stresses.
If you're designing a single, rotating bar, the tension at the bar will be the strongest in the middle, with the "weight" of each half pulling fully in opposite directions. Because of that, the closer you get to the middle, the stronger the structure will have to be, and this would probably increase the mass of materials used. This could throw off the moment of inertia ("center of gravity," if you will).
On the other hand, in a ring-shaped structure, the tension of keeping the ring together is distributed equaly throughout the structure, naturally keeping the distrubtion of materials in the structure balanced.
There's also the matter of moving throughout the structure ("Where are you going to go?"). In a linear shape, odds are you will have traffic going through the middle, involving decreasing spin-gravity and increasing dizziness as you approach the center, and a potentially dangerous transfer of "up" and "down" at the middle. In a ring, on the other hand, centripetal acceleration is generally uniform throughout.
"but do they hate immigrants that much?"
:)"
Yes.
The relatively lax immigration policies of what some call the anglosphere countries (especially the US and Canada) tend to be the exception rather than the norm when it comes to national attidudes towards immigration (and, yes, I am taking into account the current US attitude towards immigration from Mexico). Japan is perhaps more xenophobic than most, but I'm not comfortable calling it an extreme position.
"The chinese and koreans are nice folks
In this particular case, it's probably more a matter of these immigrants hating the Japanese more. Whenever Koizumi visits a certain war (criminals) shrine, you'll typically hear news stories about, say, Koreans cutting off their own fingers in protest. Most Mexicans may hate the US, but not to this degree.
Most of Japan's foreign labor, I believe, comes from the other direction, like the Philippines.
Nobody seems to be catching your reference. I feel old.
"(Googles cookie implodes some time around January 2039)"
Remind me not to have my laptop in my lap when the singularity forms.
Looks more like camel toe to me...
"You wouldn't have to go too far back before you'd have said the same thing about refrigeration,"
Cue the bizarre mental image:
The Refrigeration Industry of America, having long enjoyed an oligopoly on producing ice for the nation's iceboxes, has announced a slew of new of lawsuits against upstart Frigidaire, accusing the company of aiding home users in violating patents on solid dihydrogen monoxide in their homes. Frigidaire claims that they cannot be held responsible for what their customers do with these new "refrigerators," but the inclusion of an "ice dispenser" on newer models can only harm their defense.
In pushing Congress for legislation against these new, smaller compressors, the RIA has repeatedly pointed out the numerous employees at the nation's ice plants who could be left unemployed if people were free to produce their own ice.
"When you are talking about significantly large amounts of data (hundreds of GBs to TBs) it is actually faster and cheaper to put it on a hard drive and FedEx or (insert your favorite delivery company here) and ship it."
Probably more secure, too. I suspect that the USPS, at least, would want to see more than a nasty-gram from some RIAA/MPAA lawyer before they let other people see the contents of packages sent to me.
5% of Americans can afford to spring for tickets for the other 95%.
So my copy willy be having all sorts of fun, but what about me?
"Help me out, here, with some post-Cold War examples. That's crucial, because stopping the tyranny of the Soviet Union was paramount."
How convenient, then, that there was something "more important" than "government with consent of the governed." I suppose the "War on Terror" is similarly crucial. It's nice to know the US always has Something More Important to work on.
At any rate, were we aiding democracy more when we put Aristide in power or helped him leave? How is democracy being served with our de facto support of a military junta in Pakistan? Interesting things have been happening in other central Asian countries, which we've at least turned a blind eye to in the name of "stratiegic interests." And unlike "Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, Poland ect" these countries were actually part of the Soviet Union.
You bring up Chavez in Venezuela. It was interesting how quickly our national government moved to support the coup that temporarily overthrew him. And speaking about support from China, it's interesting how such a government could have Permanent Normal Trade Relations with us, demonstrating our willingness and desire to turn a blind eye when there's actual money involved.
There are probably more examples I could name, usually in the name of the "War on Terror" or even the older "War on Drugs," but the problem with CIA support is that the general public won't know much about it for another decade or so. So, for example, we don't know how much the US government is involved in, say, putting down unionization efforts in oil-rich Nigeria.