" The USA and most countries only have one federally-owned/funded/operated army."
Most of the military forces in the US today are federally funded (there are actually exceptions), but a good chunk of them fall under a dual command structure, and I'd say we're only some new state tax laws away from changing the "federally funded" bit if the need arises.
Also, part of having an Eighteenth Century constitution means having Eighteenth Century ideas about federalism and statehood. As such, the states are constitutionally allowed to go so far as to raise armies and prosecute a war on their own if they're "actually invaded, or in such imminent Danger as will not admit of delay."
There's also the issue of our soldiers and militiamen taking an oath to the constitution itself and not to the government. Sure, the oath will be taken more seriously by some more than others, but there will probably be a non-negligible number of them unwilling to carry out any orders they see as unconstitutional, and some of those might even jump the fence.
So just because you can't have a "classical" civil war in the US tomorrow, it'd require quite a bit of constitutional amendment (which would require the consent of the states) to keep one from being possible in, say, 50 years.
"The difference between the described and your post is that the described used a seemingly FOREIGN tax with FOREIGN collectors."
How can you claim they were foreign? Everybody was a subject of the Crown, most of them proud to be considered British. Nobody was "foreign" until after the UK officially relinqueshed claim on the colonies. Even after the beginning of hostillities in 1775, most people, including the ones we've dubbed "Foundin Fathers," considered themselves loyal Britons.
"The suggested fix was to simply make the local governments impose a tax (anything really) and simply forward that money to Britain, without the colonists even knowing for the most part."
That's also something that's possible with our current federal structure. In many ways, it's been broken by the Sixteenth Amendment, which essentially declares all income taxes to be "indirect" (all in an effort to solve a more confusing situation of some income taxes being "direct" and others "indirect"). However, what you describe is apparently what was intended with apportionment for direct taxes, essentially the feds were intended to bill the states first (according to the number of seats they had in the House), billing the people directly only in the case of an uncooperative state unwilling to cough up the funds.
The only possible difference is that folks over here didn't get to elect members of Parliament, but now the question is whether or not the representation we have is actually effective, let alone worthwhile. Sure, we get to vote, but are we even "represented" any more?
Different from the change of perspective of, say, someone during the Age of Sail watching all trace of land sink below the horizon for the first time, never to reappear again for months, if not years?
"The mistake made by the British government was to impose socially unpopular taxes (sugar, stamp, tea, etc...) on the colonist to raise money which undercut the authority of the colonial legislatures."
So, basically, we're talking about a pre-Revolution version of the IRS?
I'd rather be that than believe this is the best of all possible worlds.
"Dominican Republic never wanted to be annexed."
And yet, at the time, they kept on ending up with a president that wanted just that. At the time, we would have been far less imperialistic than either the Spanish or the French (the treaty specified instant statehood, IIRC), and as a state they'd actually be better able to, say, prevent Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt or Clinton from occupying them with federal troops (for decades at a time). If anything, as a state the Dominican Republic would have been less subject to US occupation and interference from Washington.
Think about how less misguided US policy in the Caribbean might have been if there were two Senators and a few Representatives from a Caribbean republic in Congress.
"What the hell make you think that US is a great nation after all the bullying, human rights abuse, human death that it has done throught history ?"
Who's saying I was? The majority of the human rights violations being done by the US today is being done to peoples outside of our borders, outside of the various protections we provide our own citizens. The only two solutions to this problem are to either raise awareness of the situation with current US voters and make them care (fat chance!), or to make the abused US citizens themselves.
So long as US borders are held as sacred and immutable, and US citizens are allowed to believe that those born within them are somehow better human beings than those born outside of them, the current situation will continue. I'd say it's easier to change US borders than the current US mindset, and changing the former will ultimately accomplish the latter.
The two industrialized exceptions in the list. Cuba, Philippines, Dominican Republic (repeatedly), Panama, Iran, South Vietnam... All those two seem to show is that we work best when there's already an established indusrial base and democratic institutions to work with. For the Japanese, we had them shift more power to pre-existing democratic institutions, and in Germany we more or less turned back the clock on what the Nazis did to the previous government.
"His argument is that if China, with it's huge population, can find ways to provide for it's citizens, without destroying their ecology, then it's likely we, as a species will be able to overcome our current problems."
Do the ends justify the means? If survival of the species means having to live under such a government, I'd personally rather die off.
Because we have a bad history of invading countries to "fix" them and leave them as puppet states that ultimately collapse in on themselves (re: Cuba). About the only mechanism we seem to have for actually ensuring a stable and popular government in a country is a process that involves adding more stars to the flag.
Labor interests have their cake because federal laws are guaranteed to apply to them, corporate interests get some cake with constitutionally-guaranteed unfettered trade access to the region, humanitarian interests get served, and local people get to vote for their own government as well as the US government (far more than they would as a CIA-sponsored dictatorship). The national economy would likely take a hit in the short term as things stabilize between the new state and the rest of the nation, but we've built infrastructure from scratch before (that describes thirty-something states so far) to our ultimate economic benefit, and there's little reason to believe the same can't happen again.
The only downside is that everybody's nationalistic pride takes a hit. Oh well. Everybody in this country seems keen on talking about the benefits of liberty and freedoms but seem to forget about the benefits of union, which is what drove the ratification our current constitution to begin with. We want people around the world to have free and fair elections, freedom of speech and all, but few seem willing to take personal responsibility for pursuing these aims.
And no, annexation doesn't require military action. An uncooperative Senate was all that stood in the way of both a peaceful annexation of the Dominican Republic during the Grant administration as well as a far more honorable annexation of Hawai'i during the reign of Kamehameha III.
Moderators: I already turned off my karma and subscriber bonuses, and with the number of posts this article is going to get, nobody is going to read it anyway. Go use your points to mod someone up instead of wasting them on modding me down.
"If the series has such a high sales growth trend do you really believe a few advance copies would destroy that?"
Here's the problem: Define "few"
The concept of the universal release date is there to protect the small vendors indirectly and the publishers directly. Right now, the publisher has exclusive rights to the book and, if you want to sell the book, you have to come to them. This way the publisher has the ability to not only name the terms of the sale, but also to ensure the widest distribution available.
Once you start allowing stores to sell a book as soon as they get it as opposed to a universal release date, this will give an advantage to the larger distributers, the ones who have their own supply chains, because they will "have" the books first. People will go to the larger distributers to get their next Harry Potter fix and you end up with a situation where it's the major stores that dictate the terms of selling the book. "If you want anybody to see your book on a store shelf anywhere, you have to play by our terms."
This can already be seen to some extent in the music industry, where publishers have to cowtow to Wal-Mart's sense of morality.
So then you have the problem where, if 15 books is OK to let slip out, how about 16? 17? 1800? Where does the line get drawn?
There's also the issue of scalping and price gouging. If you have one of those books, they could go for a lot of money on eBay. Good for the seller, but the publisher sees no benefit from this (legal, yes, but there's also no reason to allow it if they can avoid it), it also reflects poorly on the publisher. People will start to whisper whether or not this really happened without the publisher's involvement, and whether or not this was really some cheap marketing scheme to drum up support for the book. A publisher's reputation can effect whether or not a profitable writer chooses to publish with them over a "more reputable" competitor.
Give me one at a reasonable price and with the ability to use my current hardware and software with the chip, and I'll use it. There's no reason for me to "be fair" and try using it when I can't use it. It is, for my intents and purposes, useless.
"On the other hand, we can thank AMD for keeping us stuck on x86 to begin with, for without AMD we'd almost certainly all be on IA64 today."
Personally, I'm thanking AMD for making the AMD64 architecture hardware-compatible with the 32-bit instruction set, just as Intel made the Pentium backwards-compatible with the 16-bit 486. It's nothing but hubris on Intel's part to expect the world to change overnight for just a processor, any processor.
I've got an AMD64 box, and I've tinkered with 64-bit NT 5.2 a little bit. My conclusion right now is that it gives me all the "joys" of Windows with all the "advantages" of Linux-esque driver support. Until Microsoft can remember how they got 16-bit drivers to work in Windows 95 in compatability mode, today is not the day to jump to 64-bit hardware and software on the desktop.
However, I can still dual-boot with NT 5.1, and it works fine while waiting for the rest of the world to catch up. This is not an option on Itanium.
Now that I think about it, Intel's "64-bit only!" stance is exactly what's holding back 64-bit applications to begin with. AMD64 can handle 32-bit drivers just fine, it's because of Itanium that Microsot rigged their 64-bit OS to require 64-bit drivers. If Microsoft would simply drop support for the Itanium in its products, save the resources spent on "Windows on Windows" emulation (a non-issue on AMD64 machines, so sayeth Microsoft's own documentation), I could see the world moving on to x86 64-bit machines within two years, tops.
Can't Microsoft at least fork 64-bit Windows? After all, they maintained different codebases for NT for how long now? It was only with NT 5.x that they dropped Alpha support...
"When are game companies going to learn? Quality assurance and play-testing should not be an afterthought!"
They'll learn as soon as their players and customers stop paying for the privelege of being that "quality assurance and play-testing." Why pay for these concepts when you can get others to pay you?
On the other hand, I'm moderately proud of my fellow subscribers for catching a pending dupe of the "you can't affect the past in time travel" article.
Of course, the fact that this is only one hit in how-many misses and that we're paying for this privelege of telling the editors their mistakes kinda mitigates this...
"Uh, a year before the Dreamcast hardware hit the store shelves the president of the very large console dev house I was working at stood up in front of the entire company and, among other topics, stated we weren't going to bother wasting development money on the Dreamcast as it was a deadend platform and that we were going into an all out PS2 development ramp up."
What "big name" company are we talking about here? The only ones I could think of that would hire the likes of you would be Acclaim. You're an AC, why not drop a name?
And I seem to recall that most of the software developers that I care about were involved on the Dreamcast. For example, it looked like Konami's Castlevania game was pretty far along before the plug was pulled, well after the launch of the Dreamcast. I probably would have bought a Dreamcast if that game had made it to store shelves.
"The Dreamcast 360 is aptly named, "
The paragraph following this statement goes off on a tangent (and I'm being forgiving in calling it that) and has utterly failed to answer the question "How do you justify nicknaming the Xbox 360 as the 'Dreamcast 360?'"
"Blah,blah,blah fanboys. Same old every new console cycle. It's like the same dumb indignant fucks posting the same shit every four or five years."
Such as yourself? "Indignant" describes these past two posts of yours very well.
"Console wars are won and lost long before the hardware has hit the store shelves."
That was a decade ago. Now most games are released for all three consoles, so such "exclusive" contracts have little to no meaning in the ultimate fate of a console. "Exclusive" isn't half as exclusive as it used to be.
With all three consoles using both CPUs and GPUs from the same manufacturers, I see little reason to believe that the number of these hardware agnostic games will drop any time soon.
Why not? Slap a 25% excise on Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office in order to compensate for the dangers to national security and the national economy that over-reliance on these hole-laden programs present. If we're going to have to pay federal law enforcement agencies to track down the writers of exploits of holes that shouldn't be there to begin with, the money should come from somewhere appropriate.
Even the die-hard Libertarian folks should be able to acknowledge that the widespread use of Windows and Office places a real fiscal burden on the government.
Slashdot Mirror
" The USA and most countries only have one federally-owned/funded/operated army."
Most of the military forces in the US today are federally funded (there are actually exceptions), but a good chunk of them fall under a dual command structure, and I'd say we're only some new state tax laws away from changing the "federally funded" bit if the need arises.
Also, part of having an Eighteenth Century constitution means having Eighteenth Century ideas about federalism and statehood. As such, the states are constitutionally allowed to go so far as to raise armies and prosecute a war on their own if they're "actually invaded, or in such imminent Danger as will not admit of delay."
There's also the issue of our soldiers and militiamen taking an oath to the constitution itself and not to the government. Sure, the oath will be taken more seriously by some more than others, but there will probably be a non-negligible number of them unwilling to carry out any orders they see as unconstitutional, and some of those might even jump the fence.
So just because you can't have a "classical" civil war in the US tomorrow, it'd require quite a bit of constitutional amendment (which would require the consent of the states) to keep one from being possible in, say, 50 years.
"This site has been around for at least 6-7 years."
Seriously, why doesn't Slashdot post a link to Zophar's Domain while we're on the subject of old video game sites.
However, as long as we're talking about sites hosting on classicgaming.com, I'll throw in my two cents and say I prefer the Metroid Database myself...
"The difference between the described and your post is that the described used a seemingly FOREIGN tax with FOREIGN collectors."
How can you claim they were foreign? Everybody was a subject of the Crown, most of them proud to be considered British. Nobody was "foreign" until after the UK officially relinqueshed claim on the colonies. Even after the beginning of hostillities in 1775, most people, including the ones we've dubbed "Foundin Fathers," considered themselves loyal Britons.
"The suggested fix was to simply make the local governments impose a tax (anything really) and simply forward that money to Britain, without the colonists even knowing for the most part."
That's also something that's possible with our current federal structure. In many ways, it's been broken by the Sixteenth Amendment, which essentially declares all income taxes to be "indirect" (all in an effort to solve a more confusing situation of some income taxes being "direct" and others "indirect"). However, what you describe is apparently what was intended with apportionment for direct taxes, essentially the feds were intended to bill the states first (according to the number of seats they had in the House), billing the people directly only in the case of an uncooperative state unwilling to cough up the funds.
The only possible difference is that folks over here didn't get to elect members of Parliament, but now the question is whether or not the representation we have is actually effective, let alone worthwhile. Sure, we get to vote, but are we even "represented" any more?
"It's a radical change of perspective."
Different from the change of perspective of, say, someone during the Age of Sail watching all trace of land sink below the horizon for the first time, never to reappear again for months, if not years?
"The mistake made by the British government was to impose socially unpopular taxes (sugar, stamp, tea, etc...) on the colonist to raise money which undercut the authority of the colonial legislatures."
So, basically, we're talking about a pre-Revolution version of the IRS?
"a company based mainly in the United States and employs our people."
Posting from Indonesia, are we?
One involves the choice of an individual, one involves the choice of the state.
"Every country has the sovereign right to make its own laws."
So national sovereignty trumps individual sovereignty?
All gateways are routers but not all routers are gateways.
"Your are an idealistic person."
I'd rather be that than believe this is the best of all possible worlds.
"Dominican Republic never wanted to be annexed."
And yet, at the time, they kept on ending up with a president that wanted just that. At the time, we would have been far less imperialistic than either the Spanish or the French (the treaty specified instant statehood, IIRC), and as a state they'd actually be better able to, say, prevent Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt or Clinton from occupying them with federal troops (for decades at a time). If anything, as a state the Dominican Republic would have been less subject to US occupation and interference from Washington.
Think about how less misguided US policy in the Caribbean might have been if there were two Senators and a few Representatives from a Caribbean republic in Congress.
"What the hell make you think that US is a great nation after all the bullying, human rights abuse, human death that it has done throught history ?"
Who's saying I was? The majority of the human rights violations being done by the US today is being done to peoples outside of our borders, outside of the various protections we provide our own citizens. The only two solutions to this problem are to either raise awareness of the situation with current US voters and make them care (fat chance!), or to make the abused US citizens themselves.
So long as US borders are held as sacred and immutable, and US citizens are allowed to believe that those born within them are somehow better human beings than those born outside of them, the current situation will continue. I'd say it's easier to change US borders than the current US mindset, and changing the former will ultimately accomplish the latter.
"So West Germany and Japan don't count?"
The two industrialized exceptions in the list. Cuba, Philippines, Dominican Republic (repeatedly), Panama, Iran, South Vietnam... All those two seem to show is that we work best when there's already an established indusrial base and democratic institutions to work with. For the Japanese, we had them shift more power to pre-existing democratic institutions, and in Germany we more or less turned back the clock on what the Nazis did to the previous government.
So we do well when there is little to do. Yay us.
"His argument is that if China, with it's huge population, can find ways to provide for it's citizens, without destroying their ecology, then it's likely we, as a species will be able to overcome our current problems."
Do the ends justify the means? If survival of the species means having to live under such a government, I'd personally rather die off.
Because we have a bad history of invading countries to "fix" them and leave them as puppet states that ultimately collapse in on themselves (re: Cuba). About the only mechanism we seem to have for actually ensuring a stable and popular government in a country is a process that involves adding more stars to the flag.
Labor interests have their cake because federal laws are guaranteed to apply to them, corporate interests get some cake with constitutionally-guaranteed unfettered trade access to the region, humanitarian interests get served, and local people get to vote for their own government as well as the US government (far more than they would as a CIA-sponsored dictatorship). The national economy would likely take a hit in the short term as things stabilize between the new state and the rest of the nation, but we've built infrastructure from scratch before (that describes thirty-something states so far) to our ultimate economic benefit, and there's little reason to believe the same can't happen again.
The only downside is that everybody's nationalistic pride takes a hit. Oh well. Everybody in this country seems keen on talking about the benefits of liberty and freedoms but seem to forget about the benefits of union, which is what drove the ratification our current constitution to begin with. We want people around the world to have free and fair elections, freedom of speech and all, but few seem willing to take personal responsibility for pursuing these aims.
And no, annexation doesn't require military action. An uncooperative Senate was all that stood in the way of both a peaceful annexation of the Dominican Republic during the Grant administration as well as a far more honorable annexation of Hawai'i during the reign of Kamehameha III.
Moderators: I already turned off my karma and subscriber bonuses, and with the number of posts this article is going to get, nobody is going to read it anyway. Go use your points to mod someone up instead of wasting them on modding me down.
"If the series has such a high sales growth trend do you really believe a few advance copies would destroy that?"
Here's the problem: Define "few"
The concept of the universal release date is there to protect the small vendors indirectly and the publishers directly. Right now, the publisher has exclusive rights to the book and, if you want to sell the book, you have to come to them. This way the publisher has the ability to not only name the terms of the sale, but also to ensure the widest distribution available.
Once you start allowing stores to sell a book as soon as they get it as opposed to a universal release date, this will give an advantage to the larger distributers, the ones who have their own supply chains, because they will "have" the books first. People will go to the larger distributers to get their next Harry Potter fix and you end up with a situation where it's the major stores that dictate the terms of selling the book. "If you want anybody to see your book on a store shelf anywhere, you have to play by our terms."
This can already be seen to some extent in the music industry, where publishers have to cowtow to Wal-Mart's sense of morality.
So then you have the problem where, if 15 books is OK to let slip out, how about 16? 17? 1800? Where does the line get drawn?
There's also the issue of scalping and price gouging. If you have one of those books, they could go for a lot of money on eBay. Good for the seller, but the publisher sees no benefit from this (legal, yes, but there's also no reason to allow it if they can avoid it), it also reflects poorly on the publisher. People will start to whisper whether or not this really happened without the publisher's involvement, and whether or not this was really some cheap marketing scheme to drum up support for the book. A publisher's reputation can effect whether or not a profitable writer chooses to publish with them over a "more reputable" competitor.
"Your anecdote probably has little to do with the current processor."
"Fool me once, shame on you..."
Apparently "Dreamcast 360" is some new kind of troll, up there with "Ninendo employee Samir Gupta."
"They've never used one. "
Give me one at a reasonable price and with the ability to use my current hardware and software with the chip, and I'll use it. There's no reason for me to "be fair" and try using it when I can't use it. It is, for my intents and purposes, useless.
"On the other hand, we can thank AMD for keeping us stuck on x86 to begin with, for without AMD we'd almost certainly all be on IA64 today."
Personally, I'm thanking AMD for making the AMD64 architecture hardware-compatible with the 32-bit instruction set, just as Intel made the Pentium backwards-compatible with the 16-bit 486. It's nothing but hubris on Intel's part to expect the world to change overnight for just a processor, any processor.
I've got an AMD64 box, and I've tinkered with 64-bit NT 5.2 a little bit. My conclusion right now is that it gives me all the "joys" of Windows with all the "advantages" of Linux-esque driver support. Until Microsoft can remember how they got 16-bit drivers to work in Windows 95 in compatability mode, today is not the day to jump to 64-bit hardware and software on the desktop.
However, I can still dual-boot with NT 5.1, and it works fine while waiting for the rest of the world to catch up. This is not an option on Itanium.
Now that I think about it, Intel's "64-bit only!" stance is exactly what's holding back 64-bit applications to begin with. AMD64 can handle 32-bit drivers just fine, it's because of Itanium that Microsot rigged their 64-bit OS to require 64-bit drivers. If Microsoft would simply drop support for the Itanium in its products, save the resources spent on "Windows on Windows" emulation (a non-issue on AMD64 machines, so sayeth Microsoft's own documentation), I could see the world moving on to x86 64-bit machines within two years, tops.
Can't Microsoft at least fork 64-bit Windows? After all, they maintained different codebases for NT for how long now? It was only with NT 5.x that they dropped Alpha support...
"When are game companies going to learn? Quality assurance and play-testing should not be an afterthought!"
They'll learn as soon as their players and customers stop paying for the privelege of being that "quality assurance and play-testing." Why pay for these concepts when you can get others to pay you?
On the other hand, I'm moderately proud of my fellow subscribers for catching a pending dupe of the "you can't affect the past in time travel" article.
Of course, the fact that this is only one hit in how-many misses and that we're paying for this privelege of telling the editors their mistakes kinda mitigates this...
"Imo, this money should go towards more teacher training/more teachers."
Neither laptops nor textbooks have tenure or unions enforcing said tenure.
Wouldn't you make yourself even more productive if you kept your hands on the keyboard and simply hit Alt+Tab to change focus between the two windows?
You'd have been better off if you looked up the word "excise" before going on about the LP and income taxes.
"Uh, a year before the Dreamcast hardware hit the store shelves the president of the very large console dev house I was working at stood up in front of the entire company and, among other topics, stated we weren't going to bother wasting development money on the Dreamcast as it was a deadend platform and that we were going into an all out PS2 development ramp up."
What "big name" company are we talking about here? The only ones I could think of that would hire the likes of you would be Acclaim. You're an AC, why not drop a name?
And I seem to recall that most of the software developers that I care about were involved on the Dreamcast. For example, it looked like Konami's Castlevania game was pretty far along before the plug was pulled, well after the launch of the Dreamcast. I probably would have bought a Dreamcast if that game had made it to store shelves.
"The Dreamcast 360 is aptly named, "
The paragraph following this statement goes off on a tangent (and I'm being forgiving in calling it that) and has utterly failed to answer the question "How do you justify nicknaming the Xbox 360 as the 'Dreamcast 360?'"
"Blah,blah,blah fanboys. Same old every new console cycle. It's like the same dumb indignant fucks posting the same shit every four or five years."
Such as yourself? "Indignant" describes these past two posts of yours very well.
"Console wars are won and lost long before the hardware has hit the store shelves."
That was a decade ago. Now most games are released for all three consoles, so such "exclusive" contracts have little to no meaning in the ultimate fate of a console. "Exclusive" isn't half as exclusive as it used to be.
With all three consoles using both CPUs and GPUs from the same manufacturers, I see little reason to believe that the number of these hardware agnostic games will drop any time soon.
Why not? Slap a 25% excise on Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office in order to compensate for the dangers to national security and the national economy that over-reliance on these hole-laden programs present. If we're going to have to pay federal law enforcement agencies to track down the writers of exploits of holes that shouldn't be there to begin with, the money should come from somewhere appropriate.
Even the die-hard Libertarian folks should be able to acknowledge that the widespread use of Windows and Office places a real fiscal burden on the government.