You state that Andreesen, the guy primarily responsible for promulgating browser technology for the masses, is wrong based on....based on what ?!?
Andreesen just wants to justify his failure and switching into the enemy's camp -- the only thing he can do to make himself look as a less of a moron is to claim that enemy is invincible.
In fact his contribution to anything other than Mosaic is negligible, and no one cares what he thinks.
In Russian some people call Macrovision "Mracovision", what can be approximately translated as "see the darkness". I find it a very funny and appropriate name for that bullshit.
The problem is completely different. It's not actual unmanned aircraft's capabilities -- they can be easily matched by the enemy that will just make the same thing. It's making the aircraft expendable. When some fighters "enforce no-fly zone" in Iraq they can treat being even followed by fire-control radar as a hostile act sufficient to fire missiles at the radar, but how would one set the rules for unmanned aircrafts? If one will see such a thing, say, approaching the borders in a semi-peace time, wouldn't it be natural to just fire at them (missiles, EMP, whatever) because there are no people involved? Most of the things military does is not fighting but "sitting there" threatening potential enemies, and enemies don't attack those "sitting" armies because that will mean starting a war, but will there be any war if some government will wipe out hundreds of someone else's fighters when they were doing something more or less hostile over a disputed or neutral territory/water/...? Say, US will swarm a bunch of those things around Taiwan, and China will send similar fighters to destroy them? No people will be killed, and China will just argue that those machines weren't supposed to be there in the first place, and US will have a lot of trouble to claim property damage or similar bullshit over that.
This means that the border between peace and war becomes very fuzzy -- now the fuzzy area is when "militants", "rebels" and "separatists" are fighting somewhere and being blamed (right or wrong) on someone else's government, but with unmanned weapons something that otherwise would be considered to be an act of war will become perceived as harmless fight. At this point in history the only "unmanned weapon" widely deployed is a nuclear missile, and launching it is an unambiguous act of war. But messing around between two fleets of unmanned fighters will be something like subs of hostile to each other countries chasing each other -- except that subs still don't fire at each other, and fighters can without actually endangering anyone.
It's all nice and dandy when the government of the country that believes that it has a god-given right to police the rest of the world and also god-given exclusive ability to develop technology is planning yet another weapon. Few years later when everyone, his brother, his dog, his son's bully and his ex-girlfriend has the same weapon, all the government can think of is "non-proliferation" bullshit.
Re:One can't measure the decadence of a nation...
on
The Almighty Buck
·
· Score: 2
1. American dollar floats on inertia. It's only 50 years since all other currencies started recovering, and Cold War was very helpful to US to play a leader.
2. Japan is a self-contained + export-oriented economy. It can't exploit foreign producers because it has none, all it can exploit is American consumers, however those are chased by the rest of the world, too. US through financial and political results of WWII and Cold War usurped control of foreign producers, something that Japan can't even dream of.
3. The need for a currency can't justify one nation's domination over everything else. Many monopolies tried to justify themselves the same way, and monopoly on green paper is not any better.
4. Free trade and parasitic economy are not mutually exclusive -- as long as freedom goes only in one direction. When one nation has to grow coffee instead of rice to pay for "loans" made by IMF (controlled by US because only US supplies the currency), and another country can't do independent biotech production and research because US feels that it can enforce its patents abroad, US behaves as a parasite. One may argue that if other countries had as much political and military power as US, they would be able to dictate their conditions in the current "free" world, however then in the process of becoming such a worthy opponent to US the country will be probably labeled an intersection point of at least twelve "axis of evil", bombed and invaded.
Re:One can't measure the decadence of a nation...
on
The Almighty Buck
·
· Score: 2
Export and import, as taken in which prices -- local or international? Try to measure import of consumer products in local retail or even local wholesale prices that those products will be sold at, and the picture will be different -- what is dirt cheap for American companies to get from overseas isn't as cheap for consumer to get (and those companies' profits will be counted as domestic part of GDP even though they merely resell imports). Oil is an exception from this rule because its prices are jacked up by the cartel of producer countries, so it's sold by "american" price by them already.
One can't measure the decadence of a nation...
on
The Almighty Buck
·
· Score: 2
...by consumption figures alone, one has to take in account production. And this is where US has nothing at all for a long time already. US may be "rich" because it uses internally the currency that everyone else uses as a precious resource for international trade. So while in US a dollar is something you pay for everything without thinking, abroad it's something you save for trade with other countries fot their goods (not with US -- US doesn't export much) and can obtain only by international trade (including US -- US imports a lot).
This situation formed after WWII when US economy was in a good condition while everyone else was in deep crisis and had very weak and unstable local currency. By starting a stream of worthless in itself green paper from US to others US managed to create a mechanism that supplies it with goods and power for merely providing international currency.
When inflation of dollar in US reach the extent that will make dollar undesirable for international trade, or another currency will start competing with it, or when countries will develop more advanced trading system that will instantly adjust prices based on the expected behavior of the currency offered, US will lose that advantage. If at that point US won't develop a non-parasitic economy it can just as well start randomly nuking foreign countries in an attempt to discredit their currencies just like WWII did.
Relying on "platform competition" would be like relying on horses (dialup), cars (wireless) and airplanes (satellite) to unseat railroad monopolies (telcos) about a century ago -- sure, they all provide transportation, but only one of them has infrastructure built and suitable for low-cost service while others have to deal with basically a lot of empty space and technology that makes sense only where infrastructure is built, ot for some limited uses.
If you had a clue you would have realized that I have never commented on Bush. What I have commented on is that propaganda comes from all side and that the notion that Americans don't have access to world info is merely false anti-american propoganda. In short, "bullshit of a different color".
The whole piece of thread was started from someone claiming that great amount of information available to him proves that Bush is better than various other heads of governments that are known to be "evil" -- and the list of traditional minor assholes/propaganda scapegoats followed.
Again, you are misinformed. You confuse someone who turns on the TV waiting to get the sports scores and happens to watch "news" while waiting, and people who actually have broader interests and reading habits. It is false anti-american propaganda that the latter do not exist.
I live in US. What you are describing is an extreme that does not apply to most of people, however the fact that most of people are not at the extremes does not mean automatically that majority of them are anywhere close to behaving reasonably -- it only means that extremes are absolutely disgusting. Americans, even intellectuals, often have very trusting attitude toward information/news they are bombarded with, tell them long enough that the sky is purple, or that they are the superior race, and they will start buying purple filters for cameras, or elect neonazi for a president correspondingly. It is not something limited to trailer trash, soccer moms and Jerry Springer viewers, it's a tradition deeply seated in the American society now, and getting stronger with time.
If you are really so informed you would not claim that Bush somehow managed to create less harm than any of people mentioned in the comment that started this discussion.
Anyone in the US who wants to research a subject has access to abundant material. In other words, there is almost always no need to go their personally since some one else has already done that for you. For example persecuted groups, rebels, and others often create websites in the US to help raise their visibility. Now some sites are propoganda, but others contain legitimate first hand accounts. Reader beware. The problem in the US is more of too much information, not a lack of it. And no I am not suggesting the web is where all information comes from, the above was just one example.
The problem is not that there is too much or too little information -- the problem is that most of information is, just like everywhere, not truthful, however people, unlike everywhere else, accept it uncritically.
Regarding your example of antisemitism often being racial/national in nature not religious. You are mistaken in that we are unaware of that. Without going to Russia, Eastern Europe, or Western Europe the information gets to us.
The information gets to you -- but so does information that says directly the opposite. You have no way to verify it, and merely accept what sounds more believable. By applying art of sounding believable media influences what information gets to people, and people, following the ideology that tells them to "consume" media as a product, don't want to apply the effort necessary to find out any proof or evidence before accepting it as the truth.
This is why I think that consumerism and apathy reduced freedom of speech to the right to lie with impunity.
How naive, the truth is a matter of perspective, and the truth is less important. It doesn't matter whether or not it is true that the suicide bomber will go to paradise, it only really matters that he believes he will. Beliefs, not truth, inspire action.
Don't change the subject. I am talking about actual actions that were done by people, and their impact on others' lives, not about someone's beliefs.
Again, naive. We learn the truth directly from people in those contries, from people who come here from those contries, from people we send to those countries. There is no barrier to the opinions and beliefs held by others, even those opposed to our government and our own beliefs.
The only way to learn the truth is to be there. I lived in Russia for most of my life, so I know what actually was there over the time when I was there. But even people who came here from Russia rarely bother to actually tell your media or politicians anything close to the truth -- usually they say whatever benefits them.
Ex: Religious prosecututions ot jews in Russia. The prosecution of jews ("official" by the government and casual in various spheres of life) is, just like all other prosecutions directed to national minorities, racist in natire. Almost all jews in Russia (muself included) are jewish by national origin, not by religion, Judaism is simply unpopular among them, yet all of them after arriving here had to claim that their prosecution was not racist but religious because otherwise they will be unable to prove it and will be kicked out. No one ever in your mass media reported on it being a load of bullshit because this is what suits politicians in US and Israel, "jewish" (religious) communities, jewish immigrants themselves, and is easier to believe for the public. But the truth is still unchanged -- in most of the world antisemitism is completely unrelated to the Judaism as a religion, and no "perspective" changes that. Anyone who will bother to travel and find out, will see that, but no, this nation neither knows nor cares, it is better being fed "perspectives" until it won't even suspect that there is such a thing as a fact.
This is just one detail, but there are shitloads of things around the world, Americans know nothing about, and "perspectives" don't change this.
It doesn't matter what or where we colonize. It doesn't matter who does it. When is becoming paramount. If it takes big ugly corporate greed to get the ball rolling then so be it. The fact is, we as human beings absolutely must find an outlet for growth beyond this planet.
The problem is, there is NOTHING in outer space that makes sense to take and bring to Earth, where all the corporations are. What does make sense is to create settlements there, so those settlements will use those resources -- but then don't expect big companies' CEOs to go there, not until the life there will become more comfortable than one on Earth. Space, no matter how ironically this phrase will sound now, is a frontier, and only severely misguided people will go that far out of greed, repeating the Gold Rush's stupidity. And even if that will happen, not ones who expected to dig a lot of gold and bring it home, will benefit, but ones that went there to start some kind of new life and stay.
I've been around a great deal of the planet, between military time, and various jobs. **I**, as do more people than you realize, recognize propaganda, of ALL sorts, and file it accordingly in the nearest/dev/null equivalent.
Propaganda exists at different levels of sophistication and persistence -- recognizing all of it is a hard work. Primitive propaganda, or one that can be easily detected by a contrast to what is culturally acceptabke (usually taken from earlier times) often is used to create a contrast to more sophisticated, or more pervasive one, so sophisticated one will be harder to notice.
I have been to 37 other countries. I speak four languages and read/understand three more besides english. I have a masters in Political Science, with certificates from three universities in three other nations.
That identifies you as a propaganda worker.
If George W Bush is the anti-christ as you would have it, then about 2/3rds of the world leaders are the lowest demons in hades themselves.
And this is your tool -- twisting the opponents' words instead of providing arguments. Now go home.
We don't have to go overseas to find opposition, to find dissent, to find pro-Hitler, pro-Stalin, pro-Mao, etc. perspectives.
I don't give a rat's ass about "perspectives", only the truth matters, and you won't find a truth about other countries by sitting in US and listening to whatever "perspectives" you can find.
Get back to me when Bush starts gassing entire ethic groups, the way Saddam did to the Marsh Arabs and the Kurds.
Saddam is now at the level of a large gang leader -- what he does may be evil, but it's not even in his power to cause harm comparable to what a leader of a large country can do.
Get back to me when Bush fucks up the economy so bad people have to resort to cannibalism to stay alive, as in North Korea.
Get back to me when Bush starts executing people just to provide organ transplants for government officials, as in China.
What, someone started an anti-communist version of National Enquirer? I really dislike communist governments' actions but those accusations are absolutely ridiculous.
Exactly backwards. Poverty and weak property rights are related, but it's the weakness of the latter that maintains the former, not the other way around. Poverty is the state of nature; if it caused weak property rights, then strong property rights would never have formed in the first place.
Weak property rights maintain the natural state human condition of poverty by preventing the formation of capital, which is necessary to the investment needed to raise productivity, which is the prerequisite of reducing poverty.
It's very, very sad to hear this from a literate person.
Sure thing. Bush is WAY more evil than say, Kim Jong Il, Saddam Hussein, or the leaders of China.
You might want to rethink your post a little bit.
Actually he is. You just happened to never been abroad and fed propaganda the whole your life, so you have no way to compare those people and consequences of their actions.
But, these treaties do have a fundamental problem in not providing any mechanism for private property rights in space, nor particularly envisioning any sort of settlement process.
It's not evident that property rights will do any good in outer space. If any society will be formed there, and it won't be something with very close ties to Earth, by Earth terms it will live in extreme poverty and hardship, the conditions that on Earth itself caused societies with no or weak property rights to be formed. Also whatever society will be there, it will lack any mechanism for effective law enforcement, and trying to enforce the law beyond the society's abilities usually breeds corruption and degradation. So if we will accept the fact that because of extreme distances societies formed in space will have to live separated from Earth and be self-sufficient, automatically copying legal system, be it common law or a law of some particular country, may never let them to develop.
...let's screw everything, antagonize everybody and unilaterally proclaim US sovereignity on a bunch of planets? What about proclaiming it on something where Americans ever stepped on? Or how about proclaiming it on unexplored areas of the planets? There is an american piece of junk on Mars => let's claim the whole Mars as an US territory! And why end with planets, US can claim that it owns the sun, Asteroid belt, all the space within Solar system (except one that is filled by other countries on Earth)? Or just claim the whole galaxy?
The point is, no one gives a shit who and why signed a treaty, it was and still is a right thing to do, and if US government will try to bite everything in its reach, they may find not only that they won't be able to chew it but that everyone else will be happy to help them to choke.
I don't see ReplayTV device being rented or Sonicblue having a lien on it, so formally any kind of intentional destruction of it after it's purchased by the user will be a destruction of personal property, what is very, very illegal. Illegal clauses in contracts don't make attempts to implement them any less of a crime, no matter what the other side does, or is alleged to do.
...is going to attack them -- they even have similar attitude toward Microsoft. So maybe THIS is whom American milirary is trying to protect by swarming around Taiwan;-P
Yes, it's a joke, but sometime political assholes that are ready to trade people's lives for large companies' profits really worry me.
The "exclusivity" caused by copyright and applied to the actual product is sufficient to give the format creator sufficient advantage already -- what patents and trade secrets on formats (as opposed to code being copyrighted) do is giving an additional protection against competitors or even collaboration that was never the intention of copyright or even patent laws.
It's a side effect that benefits copyright owners, however this effect is accidental, unintentional (where were no file formats when law was written), and counterproductive, so the right way to remove this unnecessary additional protection is to strip it from all means that this protection can be achieved through. If it will be illegal to use patent protection against interoperable software products, or prosecute against trade secret disclosure made for interoperability purpose, copyright and patents will be still there, but interoperability will get a special protection against patents and trade secrets. It will be still illegal to copy someone's else code into a product without a permission, but, say, an employee disclosing a format that company is unwilling to publish will not be afraid of prosecution because trade secret won't even exist for that kind of information.
In fact most of companies will benefit from this "blanket" exemption of patents and trade secrets protection for interoperability purpose, they protect those things because other have them, but they also are stuck with unreasonable licenses that stem from this protection, so most of them will better off if this protection will be lifted. Ones that won't, are most likely not benefitting anyone else anyway, and it's not the copyright and patent law's purpose to encourage parasitic behavior.
...and I still don't know why would anyone ask such a question, because the answer is obvious -- Microsoft doesn't give a rat's ass about Open Source, and Open Source/Free Software/... certainly doesn't give rat's ass about Microsoft's business. They are enemies with incompatible interests, and the last thing they need is to care about is how the other will survive.
The question, which of them serves the interests of users and programmers is a completely different thing, and at this point it's pretty cleat that Microsoft is their enemy as well. If anything may be worth thinking about, it is what will happen when Microsoft will lose its driving ambition -- it grew out of one rich kid's effort to prove the world that he is not dumb and ugly, and that his BASIC interpreter is a worthy piece of software. That rich kid is now not any smarter but much older, and much more frustrated, so he has only about a decade left of being capable of controlling the company. Soon Microsoft will have nothing to fight for -- its profits don't really depend on crushing everyone else, Gates' ambition does. Microsoft may have enough inertia to continue antagonizing everyone, but more likely it will become a "dead" company, an equivalent of AT&T or IBM, and when that will happen they may adopt some semi-evil but more or less sane strategy that all other faceless corporations have. So for now good Microsoft is dead Microsoft, and maybe Microsoft with dead (physically or at least intellectually) Gates.
Slashdot Mirror
You state that Andreesen, the guy primarily responsible for promulgating browser technology for the masses, is wrong based on....based on what ?!?
Andreesen just wants to justify his failure and switching into the enemy's camp -- the only thing he can do to make himself look as a less of a moron is to claim that enemy is invincible.
In fact his contribution to anything other than Mosaic is negligible, and no one cares what he thinks.
In Russian some people call Macrovision "Mracovision", what can be approximately translated as "see the darkness". I find it a very funny and appropriate name for that bullshit.
The problem is completely different. It's not actual unmanned aircraft's capabilities -- they can be easily matched by the enemy that will just make the same thing. It's making the aircraft expendable. When some fighters "enforce no-fly zone" in Iraq they can treat being even followed by fire-control radar as a hostile act sufficient to fire missiles at the radar, but how would one set the rules for unmanned aircrafts? If one will see such a thing, say, approaching the borders in a semi-peace time, wouldn't it be natural to just fire at them (missiles, EMP, whatever) because there are no people involved? Most of the things military does is not fighting but "sitting there" threatening potential enemies, and enemies don't attack those "sitting" armies because that will mean starting a war, but will there be any war if some government will wipe out hundreds of someone else's fighters when they were doing something more or less hostile over a disputed or neutral territory/water/...? Say, US will swarm a bunch of those things around Taiwan, and China will send similar fighters to destroy them? No people will be killed, and China will just argue that those machines weren't supposed to be there in the first place, and US will have a lot of trouble to claim property damage or similar bullshit over that.
This means that the border between peace and war becomes very fuzzy -- now the fuzzy area is when "militants", "rebels" and "separatists" are fighting somewhere and being blamed (right or wrong) on someone else's government, but with unmanned weapons something that otherwise would be considered to be an act of war will become perceived as harmless fight. At this point in history the only "unmanned weapon" widely deployed is a nuclear missile, and launching it is an unambiguous act of war. But messing around between two fleets of unmanned fighters will be something like subs of hostile to each other countries chasing each other -- except that subs still don't fire at each other, and fighters can without actually endangering anyone.
It's all nice and dandy when the government of the country that believes that it has a god-given right to police the rest of the world and also god-given exclusive ability to develop technology is planning yet another weapon. Few years later when everyone, his brother, his dog, his son's bully and his ex-girlfriend has the same weapon, all the government can think of is "non-proliferation" bullshit.
1. American dollar floats on inertia. It's only 50 years since all other currencies started recovering, and Cold War was very helpful to US to play a leader.
2. Japan is a self-contained + export-oriented economy. It can't exploit foreign producers because it has none, all it can exploit is American consumers, however those are chased by the rest of the world, too. US through financial and political results of WWII and Cold War usurped control of foreign producers, something that Japan can't even dream of.
3. The need for a currency can't justify one nation's domination over everything else. Many monopolies tried to justify themselves the same way, and monopoly on green paper is not any better.
4. Free trade and parasitic economy are not mutually exclusive -- as long as freedom goes only in one direction. When one nation has to grow coffee instead of rice to pay for "loans" made by IMF (controlled by US because only US supplies the currency), and another country can't do independent biotech production and research because US feels that it can enforce its patents abroad, US behaves as a parasite. One may argue that if other countries had as much political and military power as US, they would be able to dictate their conditions in the current "free" world, however then in the process of becoming such a worthy opponent to US the country will be probably labeled an intersection point of at least twelve "axis of evil", bombed and invaded.
Export and import, as taken in which prices -- local or international? Try to measure import of consumer products in local retail or even local wholesale prices that those products will be sold at, and the picture will be different -- what is dirt cheap for American companies to get from overseas isn't as cheap for consumer to get (and those companies' profits will be counted as domestic part of GDP even though they merely resell imports). Oil is an exception from this rule because its prices are jacked up by the cartel of producer countries, so it's sold by "american" price by them already.
...by consumption figures alone, one has to take in account production. And this is where US has nothing at all for a long time already. US may be "rich" because it uses internally the currency that everyone else uses as a precious resource for international trade. So while in US a dollar is something you pay for everything without thinking, abroad it's something you save for trade with other countries fot their goods (not with US -- US doesn't export much) and can obtain only by international trade (including US -- US imports a lot).
This situation formed after WWII when US economy was in a good condition while everyone else was in deep crisis and had very weak and unstable local currency. By starting a stream of worthless in itself green paper from US to others US managed to create a mechanism that supplies it with goods and power for merely providing international currency.
When inflation of dollar in US reach the extent that will make dollar undesirable for international trade, or another currency will start competing with it, or when countries will develop more advanced trading system that will instantly adjust prices based on the expected behavior of the currency offered, US will lose that advantage. If at that point US won't develop a non-parasitic economy it can just as well start randomly nuking foreign countries in an attempt to discredit their currencies just like WWII did.
Why would anyone want to build a large business? To hire more middle managers who will eat a lot, and demand higher margins?
Relying on "platform competition" would be like relying on horses (dialup), cars (wireless) and airplanes (satellite) to unseat railroad monopolies (telcos) about a century ago -- sure, they all provide transportation, but only one of them has infrastructure built and suitable for low-cost service while others have to deal with basically a lot of empty space and technology that makes sense only where infrastructure is built, ot for some limited uses.
If you had a clue you would have realized that I have never commented on Bush. What I have commented on is that propaganda comes from all side and that the notion that Americans don't have access to world info is merely false anti-american propoganda. In short, "bullshit of a different color".
The whole piece of thread was started from someone claiming that great amount of information available to him proves that Bush is better than various other heads of governments that are known to be "evil" -- and the list of traditional minor assholes/propaganda scapegoats followed.
Again, you are misinformed. You confuse someone who turns on the TV waiting to get the sports scores and happens to watch "news" while waiting, and people who actually have broader interests and reading habits. It is false anti-american propaganda that the latter do not exist.
I live in US. What you are describing is an extreme that does not apply to most of people, however the fact that most of people are not at the extremes does not mean automatically that majority of them are anywhere close to behaving reasonably -- it only means that extremes are absolutely disgusting. Americans, even intellectuals, often have very trusting attitude toward information/news they are bombarded with, tell them long enough that the sky is purple, or that they are the superior race, and they will start buying purple filters for cameras, or elect neonazi for a president correspondingly. It is not something limited to trailer trash, soccer moms and Jerry Springer viewers, it's a tradition deeply seated in the American society now, and getting stronger with time.
If you are really so informed you would not claim that Bush somehow managed to create less harm than any of people mentioned in the comment that started this discussion.
Anyone in the US who wants to research a subject has access to abundant material. In other words, there is almost always no need to go their personally since some one else has already done that for you. For example persecuted groups, rebels, and others often create websites in the US to help raise their visibility. Now some sites are propoganda, but others contain legitimate first hand accounts. Reader beware. The problem in the US is more of too much information, not a lack of it. And no I am not suggesting the web is where all information comes from, the above was just one example.
The problem is not that there is too much or too little information -- the problem is that most of information is, just like everywhere, not truthful, however people, unlike everywhere else, accept it uncritically.
Regarding your example of antisemitism often being racial/national in nature not religious. You are mistaken in that we are unaware of that. Without going to Russia, Eastern Europe, or Western Europe the information gets to us.
The information gets to you -- but so does information that says directly the opposite. You have no way to verify it, and merely accept what sounds more believable. By applying art of sounding believable media influences what information gets to people, and people, following the ideology that tells them to "consume" media as a product, don't want to apply the effort necessary to find out any proof or evidence before accepting it as the truth.
This is why I think that consumerism and apathy reduced freedom of speech to the right to lie with impunity.
Yeah, I was wondering about that one ... saying 'fork' around an open-source project ;-)
It depends... One can't reasonably launch it on Unix without calling fork(2) and execve(2).
How naive, the truth is a matter of perspective, and the truth is less important. It doesn't matter whether or not it is true that the suicide bomber will go to paradise, it only really matters that he believes he will. Beliefs, not truth, inspire action.
Don't change the subject. I am talking about actual actions that were done by people, and their impact on others' lives, not about someone's beliefs.
Again, naive. We learn the truth directly from people in those contries, from people who come here from those contries, from people we send to those countries. There is no barrier to the opinions and beliefs held by others, even those opposed to our government and our own beliefs.
The only way to learn the truth is to be there. I lived in Russia for most of my life, so I know what actually was there over the time when I was there. But even people who came here from Russia rarely bother to actually tell your media or politicians anything close to the truth -- usually they say whatever benefits them.
Ex: Religious prosecututions ot jews in Russia. The prosecution of jews ("official" by the government and casual in various spheres of life) is, just like all other prosecutions directed to national minorities, racist in natire. Almost all jews in Russia (muself included) are jewish by national origin, not by religion, Judaism is simply unpopular among them, yet all of them after arriving here had to claim that their prosecution was not racist but religious because otherwise they will be unable to prove it and will be kicked out. No one ever in your mass media reported on it being a load of bullshit because this is what suits politicians in US and Israel, "jewish" (religious) communities, jewish immigrants themselves, and is easier to believe for the public. But the truth is still unchanged -- in most of the world antisemitism is completely unrelated to the Judaism as a religion, and no "perspective" changes that. Anyone who will bother to travel and find out, will see that, but no, this nation neither knows nor cares, it is better being fed "perspectives" until it won't even suspect that there is such a thing as a fact.
This is just one detail, but there are shitloads of things around the world, Americans know nothing about, and "perspectives" don't change this.
It doesn't matter what or where we colonize. It doesn't matter who does it. When is becoming paramount. If it takes big ugly corporate greed to get the ball rolling then so be it. The fact is, we as human beings absolutely must find an outlet for growth beyond this planet.
The problem is, there is NOTHING in outer space that makes sense to take and bring to Earth, where all the corporations are. What does make sense is to create settlements there, so those settlements will use those resources -- but then don't expect big companies' CEOs to go there, not until the life there will become more comfortable than one on Earth. Space, no matter how ironically this phrase will sound now, is a frontier, and only severely misguided people will go that far out of greed, repeating the Gold Rush's stupidity. And even if that will happen, not ones who expected to dig a lot of gold and bring it home, will benefit, but ones that went there to start some kind of new life and stay.
I've been around a great deal of the planet, between military time, and various jobs. **I**, as do more people than you realize, recognize propaganda, of ALL sorts, and file it accordingly in the nearest /dev/null equivalent.
Propaganda exists at different levels of sophistication and persistence -- recognizing all of it is a hard work. Primitive propaganda, or one that can be easily detected by a contrast to what is culturally acceptabke (usually taken from earlier times) often is used to create a contrast to more sophisticated, or more pervasive one, so sophisticated one will be harder to notice.
I have been to 37 other countries. I speak four languages and read/understand three more besides english. I have a masters in Political Science, with certificates from three universities in three other nations.
That identifies you as a propaganda worker.
If George W Bush is the anti-christ as you would have it, then about 2/3rds of the world leaders are the lowest demons in hades themselves.
And this is your tool -- twisting the opponents' words instead of providing arguments. Now go home.
We don't have to go overseas to find opposition, to find dissent, to find pro-Hitler, pro-Stalin, pro-Mao, etc. perspectives.
I don't give a rat's ass about "perspectives", only the truth matters, and you won't find a truth about other countries by sitting in US and listening to whatever "perspectives" you can find.
Get back to me when Bush starts gassing entire ethic groups, the way Saddam did to the Marsh Arabs and the Kurds.
Saddam is now at the level of a large gang leader -- what he does may be evil, but it's not even in his power to cause harm comparable to what a leader of a large country can do.
Get back to me when Bush fucks up the economy so bad people have to resort to cannibalism to stay alive, as in North Korea.
Get back to me when Bush starts executing people just to provide organ transplants for government officials, as in China.
What, someone started an anti-communist version of National Enquirer? I really dislike communist governments' actions but those accusations are absolutely ridiculous.
Exactly backwards. Poverty and weak property rights are related, but it's the weakness of the latter that maintains the former, not the other way around. Poverty is the state of nature; if it caused weak property rights, then strong property rights would never have formed in the first place. Weak property rights maintain the natural state human condition of poverty by preventing the formation of capital, which is necessary to the investment needed to raise productivity, which is the prerequisite of reducing poverty.
It's very, very sad to hear this from a literate person.
Sure thing. Bush is WAY more evil than say, Kim Jong Il, Saddam Hussein, or the leaders of China. You might want to rethink your post a little bit.
Actually he is. You just happened to never been abroad and fed propaganda the whole your life, so you have no way to compare those people and consequences of their actions.
But, these treaties do have a fundamental problem in not providing any mechanism for private property rights in space, nor particularly envisioning any sort of settlement process.
It's not evident that property rights will do any good in outer space. If any society will be formed there, and it won't be something with very close ties to Earth, by Earth terms it will live in extreme poverty and hardship, the conditions that on Earth itself caused societies with no or weak property rights to be formed. Also whatever society will be there, it will lack any mechanism for effective law enforcement, and trying to enforce the law beyond the society's abilities usually breeds corruption and degradation. So if we will accept the fact that because of extreme distances societies formed in space will have to live separated from Earth and be self-sufficient, automatically copying legal system, be it common law or a law of some particular country, may never let them to develop.
...let's screw everything, antagonize everybody and unilaterally proclaim US sovereignity on a bunch of planets? What about proclaiming it on something where Americans ever stepped on? Or how about proclaiming it on unexplored areas of the planets? There is an american piece of junk on Mars => let's claim the whole Mars as an US territory! And why end with planets, US can claim that it owns the sun, Asteroid belt, all the space within Solar system (except one that is filled by other countries on Earth)? Or just claim the whole galaxy?
The point is, no one gives a shit who and why signed a treaty, it was and still is a right thing to do, and if US government will try to bite everything in its reach, they may find not only that they won't be able to chew it but that everyone else will be happy to help them to choke.
I don't see ReplayTV device being rented or Sonicblue having a lien on it, so formally any kind of intentional destruction of it after it's purchased by the user will be a destruction of personal property, what is very, very illegal. Illegal clauses in contracts don't make attempts to implement them any less of a crime, no matter what the other side does, or is alleged to do.
...is going to attack them -- they even have similar attitude toward Microsoft. So maybe THIS is whom American milirary is trying to protect by swarming around Taiwan ;-P
Yes, it's a joke, but sometime political assholes that are ready to trade people's lives for large companies' profits really worry me.
The "exclusivity" caused by copyright and applied to the actual product is sufficient to give the format creator sufficient advantage already -- what patents and trade secrets on formats (as opposed to code being copyrighted) do is giving an additional protection against competitors or even collaboration that was never the intention of copyright or even patent laws.
It's a side effect that benefits copyright owners, however this effect is accidental, unintentional (where were no file formats when law was written), and counterproductive, so the right way to remove this unnecessary additional protection is to strip it from all means that this protection can be achieved through. If it will be illegal to use patent protection against interoperable software products, or prosecute against trade secret disclosure made for interoperability purpose, copyright and patents will be still there, but interoperability will get a special protection against patents and trade secrets. It will be still illegal to copy someone's else code into a product without a permission, but, say, an employee disclosing a format that company is unwilling to publish will not be afraid of prosecution because trade secret won't even exist for that kind of information.
In fact most of companies will benefit from this "blanket" exemption of patents and trade secrets protection for interoperability purpose, they protect those things because other have them, but they also are stuck with unreasonable licenses that stem from this protection, so most of them will better off if this protection will be lifted. Ones that won't, are most likely not benefitting anyone else anyway, and it's not the copyright and patent law's purpose to encourage parasitic behavior.
...and I still don't know why would anyone ask such a question, because the answer is obvious -- Microsoft doesn't give a rat's ass about Open Source, and Open Source/Free Software/... certainly doesn't give rat's ass about Microsoft's business. They are enemies with incompatible interests, and the last thing they need is to care about is how the other will survive.
The question, which of them serves the interests of users and programmers is a completely different thing, and at this point it's pretty cleat that Microsoft is their enemy as well. If anything may be worth thinking about, it is what will happen when Microsoft will lose its driving ambition -- it grew out of one rich kid's effort to prove the world that he is not dumb and ugly, and that his BASIC interpreter is a worthy piece of software. That rich kid is now not any smarter but much older, and much more frustrated, so he has only about a decade left of being capable of controlling the company. Soon Microsoft will have nothing to fight for -- its profits don't really depend on crushing everyone else, Gates' ambition does. Microsoft may have enough inertia to continue antagonizing everyone, but more likely it will become a "dead" company, an equivalent of AT&T or IBM, and when that will happen they may adopt some semi-evil but more or less sane strategy that all other faceless corporations have. So for now good Microsoft is dead Microsoft, and maybe Microsoft with dead (physically or at least intellectually) Gates.