Indeed. Not only have bubbles like this come and gone since the Tulip bubble in the Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie back in the fifteenhundreds, but the headlines are the same all the time. It feels like the "demise of tape" discussions I had for 16 years at HP, and every year some clown would come and tell me my job would be gone next month. Yet somehow these technologies survive, and yet somehow we all need a good old fashioned piece of hardware to run our software and networks on.
The author of the main article suffers from a pure stroke of cognitive dissonance when this sentence is uttered: "The first is putting computer devices, mobile and tablet especially, in the hands of billions of people". The first argument for the demise of physical technology is the fact that physical technology is now finding its way into the hands of billions of people. That's just, well, ironic.
I'd argue that sites like Facebook and the increasing digitization of all walks of life, be it in communication, documentation or content creation and the enjoyment thereof only spur the profitability of the Silicon Valley giants. Although I do object to the Silicon Valley moniker for any and all hardware development. It would behoove us to realize that the cathode ray tube was a British invention, the mouse/trackball was a Canadian idea, the LED was a Russian invention while LCD seems to have its roots in Austrian and Swiss research, with a lot of ideas from the Koreans and Japanese thrown in.
So firstly Silicon Valley has never been the end-all-be-all of all electronics engineering, secondly the hardware business shows no signs of becoming obsolete any time soon. In short, the main article is self-aggrandizing on quite a few points. I am very happy not to be a student of Mr Blank.
If Silicon Valley is teetering at all, it's down to geopolitical and macroeconomic developments that will see the end of the US as the absolute economic superpower on this planet. I worked at HP for years and years, but for quite a while now the most significant market for HP is the European Union. The GDP's of several Asian nations is steadily growing, the total GDP of the EU is larger than the US GDP and everywhere you see cracks in the US as a whole. Let alone all the unemployed, homeless and uninsured the US counts, but whenever I go to the US, I am struck with the disarray and decay that can be seen everywhere in that country.
Having said that, I don't think the Facebook IPO will bankrupt Apple, HP, IBM, Dell, Canon, Samsung and quite a few other players just yet, so my musings on the balance of power in the world should be taken with quite the pinch of salt.
The African continent doesn't need high speed access to pull itself out of its misery. The African continent needs to find a way to quit being shafted by global corporations and first world governments working in tandem to keep them from developing a decent infrastructure of transportation of food, basic building materials, electricity and health care. To get a more fully developed idea of my argument here, I suggest reading "Bad Samaritans" by Ha Joon Chang of Cambridge. He details quite nicely how the Free Market doctrine of the WTO, IMF and other suchlike organizations are destroying the tariff system that might protect what's left of the markets in non-first-world countries so as to protect Big Business, and thus stifle any upward mobility and innovation that might come from developing nations.
I firmly believe that protection of internal markets, a system of tariffs on import and the national protection of emerging industries using tariff money might do the Africans a wee bit more good than "high speed access", and I am not the only one that agrees with that viewpoint. Nokia, funnily enough, seems to get this. They just introduced the Nokia 103, a very dumb phone which can last up to 10 days on standby and which can be used for speaking 11 hours on a single charge. They market this because they feel quite a few people on the African continent don't even have access to electricity on a regular enough basis to drive a smartphone. And by proxy of that insight, they can't drive a laptop with "high speed access" either.
Another thing that doesn't help are the IP Protection laws that are trying to root out the copying of technology for use in countries that can't afford "the original", and when I say technology I don't just mean content, electronics or physical devices, but also stuff like regular old tools, medicine and lord knows what you can throw at that concept.
As Ha Joon Chang rightfully puts it: Players can only compete on a level playing field if the teams are somewhat balanced. If you have a very disparate and skewed set of players in the world, the only way to deal with that is by having some kind of handicap system in place. In other words, opposite to the free-market and democracy for all doctrines in this world, the playing field simply needs to be kept uneven if a mom and pop shop in Africa ever wants to grow its business in the face of competition from GM, John Deere, Astra Zeneca, Monsanto or IBM, because otherwise these giants will simply wipe out local players in a heartbeat. The analogy is simple. If I can play a round of golf with sticks I managed to buy for 200 USD, I cannot compete about a corporate backed Tiger Woods unless there's a stiff handicap system in place.
So while I feel the OLTP project and all of these people that cry out for high speed access for all Africans are benign have the best of intentions, I also believe they're full of shit and don't know their ass from their elbow. This may sound harsh, but during my 17 years in the IT business I have learned that you never, ever solve anything by attacking random symptoms of a problem rather than finding the root causes and eliminating them.
Once infrastructure, local business and a steady flow of cash are guaranteed, stuff like high speed access to the net will follow. Not the other way around. I don't see how a penniless African could benefit from the ability to read the Wiki on Nuclear Fission or the ability to shop for books on Amazon if he doesn't have food, basic infrastructure or even a bank.
By the way, the previous AC comment was mine. I just migrated to a new Mac, and had forgotten to check if I was logged on to the website at all. Damn. I hate it when stuff like that happens.
My country being one of them. In the Netherlands, prostitution is indeed legal, but pimping is not. So the ladies are only really allowed to work if they're not the victim of slave trade or extortion. This measure is only partially effective, unfortunately, because some of the ladies are arguably extorted into the business. However, I think the system is vastly superior to zero-tolerance policies such as in Sweden or the US, where prostitutes don't get health care, can't unionize and are usually run out of seedy apartments or neighborhoods.
Having said that, mainland Europe also does not have the litigation culture the US and UK have. One cannot sue people willy nilly. Firstly because one actually doesn't have a service level agreement on paper with a prostitute, so it's pretty much your word against hers, so there's usually very little reason for a court case.
Secondly because frivolous litigation is frowned upon, and this type of stuff would immediately thrown out by a judge. If one actually gets robbed, one could alert the police, and they could technically take action, resulting in prosecution with a minimal amount of damages, more like restitution than actual damages.
IANAL, but I do work as a pre-sales consultant for e-Discovery software for an American company, and I guarantee you that the American's view on the legal system is a hugely different one from what's practiced in mainland Europe.
As far as the United States are concerned, they rank on the #47 spot of the Freedom of the Press index, whereas the Netherlands rank #3 behind Finland, Norway and, funnily enough, Estonia. The Land of the Free doesn't seem to be as free as it wants to let everyone believe.
One example of why this comment and rank are deserved is highlighted in the documentary "Peace, Propaganda and the Promised Land" in which the narrative surrounding the Israëli occupation of the West bank and Gaza strip are examined.
In it it becomes clear that US journalists don't deviate from the narrative that AIPAC and the Israëli government present, and memo's are circulated inside networks such as CNN to call Gilo, a Jewish colonial settlement in the West Bank, a "nice Jewish neighborhood in Jerusalem".
Stories like that are indicative of why the press in the US is indeed not free and arguably run by lobby groups, government and big business. I'm not saying other journalists in the world are without fault, but one can see that international coverage is much more balanced at BBC World and, indeed, Al Jazeera International.
So while Crystal Cox is indeed what looks like a parasite and morally void, your comment about Journalists seems quite fair.
I have 1200+ proofs of purchase standing in a CD cabinet in my living room. When I try to rip those CD's to 320 MP3 (yeah, yeah, go ahead... hit me with the AAC, OGG or FLAC arguments), quite a few of them fail for having developed read problems while standing in my cabinet.
Since I will not invest this money again, I will simply download a FLAC version and convert it, or find a decent 320 rip which I will then tag, supply with cover art and import to iTunes. I only have 400+ albums to go out of my collection, because 700+ are already of said quality by now. The rest is sub-320 Mp3. Don't ask... storage *was* more expensive at some point in time, you know. If they come knocking, I would be delighted to go through my record collection with any interested party.;)
My point here is that I might be seen as a pirate too because of my downloading behaviour. However, I'm just creating a much needed backup copy for information I have purchased on a physical media. I find the moniker "pirate" somewhat offensive for someone who has put as much effort and money into a music collection as I have.
No. As some other poster already commented, apologizing to his family, or for that matter to all families of people that got persecuted for similar reasons, would go a long way towards the right direction, but a pardon is just silly. The man got convicted, and is dead as a result of what happened A posthumous pardon would just feel like a big wallop of mustard after the meal.
So at the end of the day I find the statement of the House of Lords quite correct, but would appreciate it if someone could apologize for this. Having said that, this is an endless cycle. In Holland, the Catholic Church needs to apologize for the Inquisition, but the protestants need to apologize for what they did to Catholics after the inquisition, the VOC people should apologize to the Indonesians, West-Africans, South-Africans (the black ones), the KNIL people should apologize to some Indonesians, the Japanese should apologize to some KNIL people I know, the English should apologize to us for taking Manhattan away, the Dutch should apologize to the English for giving them Manhattan, etc etc etc.
The apology business is a never ending circle-jerk because if I had a dime for every group that has been maltreated somewhere on the planet during mankind's history, I'd never have to work again.
You might say it's not the same, but I guarantee you there's plenty of people on the street that don't understand the difference in nuance. A restriction is a restriction is a restriction, and quite a few humans have issues accepting those restrictions from the powers that be, whatever their shape may take.
So a reaction against totalitarian States will be similar to a reaction against restrictive Corporate Policies.:)
To copy behaviour, tools and ideas is an Evolutionary force that is embedded in our brains. Quite frankly, it's a force that has done us as a species quite a bit of good over evolutionary history. We are, after all, at the top of the food chain.
There is no possible solution to the "piracy problem" apart from lobotomizing most of mankind. I am very surprised that people don't seem to realize this. If your business model doesn't fit reality, I suggest you try to adapt the business model, not reality.
Why? TOAC had a point. A very valid point. What's funny about this is that on the same page I saw this article, I saw an article entitled "Should science rethink the definition of "Life"?". It even said "With the increase of extremophile discovery in recent years perhaps it's time to reassess what the definition of "life" should be."
And here you are arguing the poster just wants people to believe his or her viewpoint without ever countering the actual counterargument you complain about.
Ad hominem character assassination just isn't cool.
I have to second what the AC said below. That is the most idiotic thing I've heard in a long time.
You're really asking us what the difference is between choosing not to say something or having your government making sure you don't say a given thing? If you are a US citizen AND you would say such a thing, I suggest you print out your Constitution and Declaration of Independence and henceforth use it to wipe your ass with.
I work for an American company and my work territory consists of Scandinavia, the Benelux and France while my boss is in the UK.
My wife is from Israel, and my son and my ex also live in Israel. Apart from that I have friends all over the world, including Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, Israel, Russia, the US and Austria.
Could you explain to me how knowing what methods of communication are used in those countries is not relevant?
And, more to the point, what rock have you been living under in the last 15 years?
I believe in spanking too. Sometimes I am a naughty boy, and my wife dresses up in heels and spanks me while speaking with a German accen..... Oh.... Wait....;)
First of all, as others have commented, most of the civilized world doesn't consider whipping your children an appropriate disciplinary action. So his "Fuck you, asshole" in reply to the gentleman's defense of the whipping is completely justified. Saying that my asshole dad whipped me does indeed not make it OK for some asshole dad to whip someone else, and I can understand this is an emotional topic.
My son lives with his mother in Israel while I am far away. We try to maintain a good contact. However, if I ever find out that my ex or her current boyfriend would structurally whip Daniel with a belt, I'll be on the first plane to Israel to end their lives. I am not kidding, it is something I will gladly do jail time for in an unsavory country. Mind you, by structurally I mean more than once. If I found out it happened once I'd just fly there to punch their lights out and claim custody of my child. I am a reasonable man.
Secondly, the video is about a 200 pound dude whipping a girl. My mother always taught me that I shouldn't hit women. I don't think it's a man's job to hit a woman. We have quite the different physique, and quite frankly I don't give a shit who beat who for what reason... You just don't hit women. Period.
To all the people that claim "children behaved far better when I was a kid" I can call bullshit. Records of a 15th century monk's writings find him complaining about "today's youth" who refuse to dress properly, are lazy, stupid and ill-mannered. It is a property of mankind to become the sort of "it was all better before" grumpy old bastard, and yet I see we have the longest life expectancy ever, and people seem on the whole to become more and more domesticated.
So no, I really don't think the "Fuck you, asshole" gentleman needs more discipline. I think his reaction is honest and balanced.
Actually, the law disagrees where I'm from. Over here, you are an adult at 18, but the law does state that until 21 you should be able to count on support from your parents. From 16 you can drive a 50 cc motor cycle, drink beer and have consensual sex with your peers (certain limitations apply to the last point), but driving, joining armies, voting, complete sexual self-determination and the ability to smoke weed, drink hard liquor and such all come at 18.
That would be the legal aspect. From a neurological perspective, the Rotterdam professor of Neurology Dick Swaab has been claiming for years that a human brain doesn't reach a stable state until it's 23 or 24 years old. The way the brain physically fires and the way hormones affect a person's mindset is enough reason to collectively say that all persons below 23 are of diminished mental capacity or at the very least show a diminished sense of good judgment.
Car Insurance companies will definitely back that claim up, if you look at the way a person's car insurance premium is calculated, by the way. So saying that this judge is whipping an adult is just plain wrong from both a legal and scientific perspective, and I find it morally objectionable.
This is a kid who got whipped viciously with a leather belt for downloading some songs from internet. The man in the video doesn't seem to whip his daughter in an orderly fashion that suggests the administration of a measured disciplinary whipping, the man in the video beats his daughter in a completely emotionally over the top manner that suggests a somewhat vicious nature.
From my perspective, this man is not fit to be a judge or parent, for that matter. On top of that, I am relatively sure my mother would strike him exactly once, across the face, for behaving in this way. After that he'd have to sit through a full hour lecture with a lot of finger-wagging and stern staring during which he'd feel strangely compelled to listen real damn well lest he get one of those measured smacks across the face again.
By the way, my mother struck me twice in my whole upbringing. It was deserved in both cases, and done in such a way that I will never forget them. I dearly love the woman. She is wise, kind and on the whole, just.
I don't get that. Now you're glorifying things without looking at past failures and current successes.
Firstly, HP's NetServer products, for those that remember, were a complete failure when compared to Compaq's ProLiant Servers, and after the merge we rightfully went with that line of servers. If you then look at the current C-class blade product line and the attached Flexfabric stuff, you'll have to agree that it is, in your words, exquisitely engineered stuff.
You're going on about a printer, but if you then look at what a printer used to cost versus what you buy now for a couple of dollars, yes, the ink is expensive in comparison, but that's only because the device doesn't cost you anything anymore. The same can be said for lasers. In the 80's, the average private person couldn't afford a laser printer for the home, whereas now I can buy color laser for the same price a consumer inkjet with no frills cost me in 1993.
Now HP's line of ProCurve Switches were hot shit back in the day, but they never went anywhere commercially. So we had very well-engineered network infrastructure for sale that never went anywhere for the longest time. Same goes for Storage devices (Marathon, anyone?).
Having said all that, the market and economy of scale have changed. For all players in the market. You don't solder together a PC in your garage anymore. You move millions of products all over the globe at a breakneck pace and with 4 hr response on breakdowns, sometimes even 6 hr to fix contracts.
With those constraints in mind, I don't think HP is doing that badly.
Might be significantly more than 1/3 or 1/4 of that market. They capture over 70% of the Blade Infrastructure market in quite a few countries, to mention one thing.
Actually, the front end device (laptop, tablet, phone) is not something that a Computing company would produce.
Apple, Samsung and Lenovo are Consumer Electronics companies. They make commodity products for the masses that serve as an input device and content reader. Now Apple is the odd one out, because they also provide Data Center (Cloud), Storage and Content Retail services. Which makes them a Consumer Electronics and an Internet company.
Computing, in my opinion, is still done in the Data Center with the server, network and storage infrastructure we all use but most of us never think about. And the key players in that market are still IBM and HP for Servers, Software and Consulting, Cisco, Juniper and still HP for Networking, EMC, Hitachi, Netapp, Dell and HP for Storage.
In terms of infrastructure, HP is definitely a computing company and Apple really is not. We're comparing apples (no pun intended) and pears here.
HP employs roughly 320.000 people. Apple is somewhat smaller than that. Secondly, the current CEO of Apple is an HP man. It was funny to see him present the iPhone 4S recently, because he reminds me of people like Lew Platt.
Whether Apple has the money to acquire HP isn't really even the discussion. It's whether they have the clout and manpower. HP is a huge organization with quite a few people that are used to a particular culture. If Apple were to ever acquire HP and merge with it, at the end of the day you'd have... HP. This is a matter of politics and psychology, not of money or stock prices.
Wow. I wish the EU was as concerned about the income gap at the end of the life of the average brick-layer or coal-miner from Croydon or Manchester.
Really.... Do you think we ought to be worried about Elton John's, Bono's and Mick fucking Jagger's income gap? If they have an income gap, given all the money they made, they shouldn't have snorted all that cocaine for all those years, is what I say.
My mother has had an income gap for most of her life the size of which could have been fixed by the sale of one of Jamiroquai's sports cars, and we're expected to bend over for these people?
Even so, Mick Jagger, Elton John, Bono and (from a Dutch perspective) the guys from the Golden Earring would be entitled to the legally mandated normal retirement benefits everyone else on this continent has to scrape by on. But you don't see 'm closing my income gap.
Anyone in the States with a 401K should be livid about this piece of news if it came from the US.
I hate to say this, but I'm 36 years old now, and when I look at movies from the 80's, I am sooooo happy it's 2011. A mediocre movie from 2011 tends to be more entertaining than cult movies of that decade. Even stuff like Citizen Kane, usually proclaimed to be the best thing since sliced bread, is excruciatingly slow on the uptake and generally unwatchable unless you zip through it at three times the speed.
There are certain movies that are timeless to me. The Shining is still interesting to this day. As is Casablanca, and I'm sure I can come up with a list, like Brando's On the Waterfront, the Godfather and other cult films that are deservedly up there. But the amount of trite shit that has emanated from the movie and music business is staggering. But even respectable titles like Blade Runner don't stand the test of time completely. IMHO, The Fifth Element is far less passé.
I think the people that look at all the stuff that comes out now and compare it to one or two great movies from three decades ago just suffer from selective memory usage. Seriously. Have you looked at Back to the Future with adult eyes? It's insufferable.
Listen, the amount of terrorist plots involving planes in the last forty years is breathtakingly small. So small in fact that Israel would be wise to focus on traffic safety and driving courses rather than terrorism. The amount of traffic deaths in the last 40 years in Israel is larger than the amount of MDK during war and terrorism. Given the one in a million risk factor of plane bombings, I'd say you can just do the physical checks and luggage checks without climbing into people's asses and violate their integrity as a person.
Specifically since if I had a long term plan not to get my luggage checked, all it would take is to move to Israel and befriend some Israelis. Because whenever I showed up with an Israeli friend or girlfriend at Ben Gurion or any El Al check in desk on the planet, they whizzed me through security no questions asked. This punches large holes into the notion of a 100% accurate, intelligent verification.
On top of that, if you subject one passenger to certain treatment, you need to subject the rest to the same treatment. I do not have a sense of humour when the "Gelijkheidsprincipe" is violated. Right now we have a fascist political movement in Holland that wants to violate the first article in our Constitution. All the way down from 1579, we've had clauses in constitution-like documents that guarantee the equal treatment of people of various religious and philosophical views.
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Indeed. Not only have bubbles like this come and gone since the Tulip bubble in the Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie back in the fifteenhundreds, but the headlines are the same all the time. It feels like the "demise of tape" discussions I had for 16 years at HP, and every year some clown would come and tell me my job would be gone next month. Yet somehow these technologies survive, and yet somehow we all need a good old fashioned piece of hardware to run our software and networks on.
The author of the main article suffers from a pure stroke of cognitive dissonance when this sentence is uttered: "The first is putting computer devices, mobile and tablet especially, in the hands of billions of people". The first argument for the demise of physical technology is the fact that physical technology is now finding its way into the hands of billions of people. That's just, well, ironic.
I'd argue that sites like Facebook and the increasing digitization of all walks of life, be it in communication, documentation or content creation and the enjoyment thereof only spur the profitability of the Silicon Valley giants. Although I do object to the Silicon Valley moniker for any and all hardware development. It would behoove us to realize that the cathode ray tube was a British invention, the mouse/trackball was a Canadian idea, the LED was a Russian invention while LCD seems to have its roots in Austrian and Swiss research, with a lot of ideas from the Koreans and Japanese thrown in.
So firstly Silicon Valley has never been the end-all-be-all of all electronics engineering, secondly the hardware business shows no signs of becoming obsolete any time soon. In short, the main article is self-aggrandizing on quite a few points. I am very happy not to be a student of Mr Blank.
If Silicon Valley is teetering at all, it's down to geopolitical and macroeconomic developments that will see the end of the US as the absolute economic superpower on this planet. I worked at HP for years and years, but for quite a while now the most significant market for HP is the European Union. The GDP's of several Asian nations is steadily growing, the total GDP of the EU is larger than the US GDP and everywhere you see cracks in the US as a whole. Let alone all the unemployed, homeless and uninsured the US counts, but whenever I go to the US, I am struck with the disarray and decay that can be seen everywhere in that country.
Having said that, I don't think the Facebook IPO will bankrupt Apple, HP, IBM, Dell, Canon, Samsung and quite a few other players just yet, so my musings on the balance of power in the world should be taken with quite the pinch of salt.
The African continent doesn't need high speed access to pull itself out of its misery. The African continent needs to find a way to quit being shafted by global corporations and first world governments working in tandem to keep them from developing a decent infrastructure of transportation of food, basic building materials, electricity and health care. To get a more fully developed idea of my argument here, I suggest reading "Bad Samaritans" by Ha Joon Chang of Cambridge. He details quite nicely how the Free Market doctrine of the WTO, IMF and other suchlike organizations are destroying the tariff system that might protect what's left of the markets in non-first-world countries so as to protect Big Business, and thus stifle any upward mobility and innovation that might come from developing nations.
I firmly believe that protection of internal markets, a system of tariffs on import and the national protection of emerging industries using tariff money might do the Africans a wee bit more good than "high speed access", and I am not the only one that agrees with that viewpoint. Nokia, funnily enough, seems to get this. They just introduced the Nokia 103, a very dumb phone which can last up to 10 days on standby and which can be used for speaking 11 hours on a single charge. They market this because they feel quite a few people on the African continent don't even have access to electricity on a regular enough basis to drive a smartphone. And by proxy of that insight, they can't drive a laptop with "high speed access" either.
Another thing that doesn't help are the IP Protection laws that are trying to root out the copying of technology for use in countries that can't afford "the original", and when I say technology I don't just mean content, electronics or physical devices, but also stuff like regular old tools, medicine and lord knows what you can throw at that concept.
As Ha Joon Chang rightfully puts it: Players can only compete on a level playing field if the teams are somewhat balanced. If you have a very disparate and skewed set of players in the world, the only way to deal with that is by having some kind of handicap system in place. In other words, opposite to the free-market and democracy for all doctrines in this world, the playing field simply needs to be kept uneven if a mom and pop shop in Africa ever wants to grow its business in the face of competition from GM, John Deere, Astra Zeneca, Monsanto or IBM, because otherwise these giants will simply wipe out local players in a heartbeat. The analogy is simple. If I can play a round of golf with sticks I managed to buy for 200 USD, I cannot compete about a corporate backed Tiger Woods unless there's a stiff handicap system in place.
So while I feel the OLTP project and all of these people that cry out for high speed access for all Africans are benign have the best of intentions, I also believe they're full of shit and don't know their ass from their elbow. This may sound harsh, but during my 17 years in the IT business I have learned that you never, ever solve anything by attacking random symptoms of a problem rather than finding the root causes and eliminating them.
Once infrastructure, local business and a steady flow of cash are guaranteed, stuff like high speed access to the net will follow. Not the other way around. I don't see how a penniless African could benefit from the ability to read the Wiki on Nuclear Fission or the ability to shop for books on Amazon if he doesn't have food, basic infrastructure or even a bank.
By the way, the previous AC comment was mine. I just migrated to a new Mac, and had forgotten to check if I was logged on to the website at all. Damn. I hate it when stuff like that happens.
My country being one of them. In the Netherlands, prostitution is indeed legal, but pimping is not. So the ladies are only really allowed to work if they're not the victim of slave trade or extortion. This measure is only partially effective, unfortunately, because some of the ladies are arguably extorted into the business. However, I think the system is vastly superior to zero-tolerance policies such as in Sweden or the US, where prostitutes don't get health care, can't unionize and are usually run out of seedy apartments or neighborhoods.
Having said that, mainland Europe also does not have the litigation culture the US and UK have. One cannot sue people willy nilly. Firstly because one actually doesn't have a service level agreement on paper with a prostitute, so it's pretty much your word against hers, so there's usually very little reason for a court case.
Secondly because frivolous litigation is frowned upon, and this type of stuff would immediately thrown out by a judge. If one actually gets robbed, one could alert the police, and they could technically take action, resulting in prosecution with a minimal amount of damages, more like restitution than actual damages.
IANAL, but I do work as a pre-sales consultant for e-Discovery software for an American company, and I guarantee you that the American's view on the legal system is a hugely different one from what's practiced in mainland Europe.
As far as the United States are concerned, they rank on the #47 spot of the Freedom of the Press index, whereas the Netherlands rank #3 behind Finland, Norway and, funnily enough, Estonia. The Land of the Free doesn't seem to be as free as it wants to let everyone believe.
One example of why this comment and rank are deserved is highlighted in the documentary "Peace, Propaganda and the Promised Land" in which the narrative surrounding the Israëli occupation of the West bank and Gaza strip are examined.
In it it becomes clear that US journalists don't deviate from the narrative that AIPAC and the Israëli government present, and memo's are circulated inside networks such as CNN to call Gilo, a Jewish colonial settlement in the West Bank, a "nice Jewish neighborhood in Jerusalem".
Stories like that are indicative of why the press in the US is indeed not free and arguably run by lobby groups, government and big business. I'm not saying other journalists in the world are without fault, but one can see that international coverage is much more balanced at BBC World and, indeed, Al Jazeera International.
So while Crystal Cox is indeed what looks like a parasite and morally void, your comment about Journalists seems quite fair.
I have 1200+ proofs of purchase standing in a CD cabinet in my living room. When I try to rip those CD's to 320 MP3 (yeah, yeah, go ahead... hit me with the AAC, OGG or FLAC arguments), quite a few of them fail for having developed read problems while standing in my cabinet.
Since I will not invest this money again, I will simply download a FLAC version and convert it, or find a decent 320 rip which I will then tag, supply with cover art and import to iTunes. I only have 400+ albums to go out of my collection, because 700+ are already of said quality by now. The rest is sub-320 Mp3. Don't ask... storage *was* more expensive at some point in time, you know. If they come knocking, I would be delighted to go through my record collection with any interested party. ;)
My point here is that I might be seen as a pirate too because of my downloading behaviour. However, I'm just creating a much needed backup copy for information I have purchased on a physical media. I find the moniker "pirate" somewhat offensive for someone who has put as much effort and money into a music collection as I have.
No. As some other poster already commented, apologizing to his family, or for that matter to all families of people that got persecuted for similar reasons, would go a long way towards the right direction, but a pardon is just silly. The man got convicted, and is dead as a result of what happened A posthumous pardon would just feel like a big wallop of mustard after the meal.
So at the end of the day I find the statement of the House of Lords quite correct, but would appreciate it if someone could apologize for this. Having said that, this is an endless cycle. In Holland, the Catholic Church needs to apologize for the Inquisition, but the protestants need to apologize for what they did to Catholics after the inquisition, the VOC people should apologize to the Indonesians, West-Africans, South-Africans (the black ones), the KNIL people should apologize to some Indonesians, the Japanese should apologize to some KNIL people I know, the English should apologize to us for taking Manhattan away, the Dutch should apologize to the English for giving them Manhattan, etc etc etc.
The apology business is a never ending circle-jerk because if I had a dime for every group that has been maltreated somewhere on the planet during mankind's history, I'd never have to work again.
You might say it's not the same, but I guarantee you there's plenty of people on the street that don't understand the difference in nuance. A restriction is a restriction is a restriction, and quite a few humans have issues accepting those restrictions from the powers that be, whatever their shape may take.
So a reaction against totalitarian States will be similar to a reaction against restrictive Corporate Policies. :)
To copy behaviour, tools and ideas is an Evolutionary force that is embedded in our brains. Quite frankly, it's a force that has done us as a species quite a bit of good over evolutionary history. We are, after all, at the top of the food chain.
There is no possible solution to the "piracy problem" apart from lobotomizing most of mankind. I am very surprised that people don't seem to realize this. If your business model doesn't fit reality, I suggest you try to adapt the business model, not reality.
Why? TOAC had a point. A very valid point. What's funny about this is that on the same page I saw this article, I saw an article entitled "Should science rethink the definition of "Life"?". It even said "With the increase of extremophile discovery in recent years perhaps it's time to reassess what the definition of "life" should be."
And here you are arguing the poster just wants people to believe his or her viewpoint without ever countering the actual counterargument you complain about.
Ad hominem character assassination just isn't cool.
I have to second what the AC said below. That is the most idiotic thing I've heard in a long time.
You're really asking us what the difference is between choosing not to say something or having your government making sure you don't say a given thing? If you are a US citizen AND you would say such a thing, I suggest you print out your Constitution and Declaration of Independence and henceforth use it to wipe your ass with.
Wow.
Actually, I can talk to more than three different people at the same time. Physically, that is.
If they give me an amp, it becomes quite scalable. ;)
Money is money. If you're buying what I'm selling, I'm ok with you using a feather and ink or sms if need be. Specifically in these times.
What you just said is amazing. Wow.
Right.
I work for an American company and my work territory consists of Scandinavia, the Benelux and France while my boss is in the UK.
My wife is from Israel, and my son and my ex also live in Israel. Apart from that I have friends all over the world, including Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, Israel, Russia, the US and Austria.
Could you explain to me how knowing what methods of communication are used in those countries is not relevant?
And, more to the point, what rock have you been living under in the last 15 years?
I believe in spanking too. Sometimes I am a naughty boy, and my wife dresses up in heels and spanks me while speaking with a German accen..... Oh.... Wait.... ;)
First of all, as others have commented, most of the civilized world doesn't consider whipping your children an appropriate disciplinary action. So his "Fuck you, asshole" in reply to the gentleman's defense of the whipping is completely justified. Saying that my asshole dad whipped me does indeed not make it OK for some asshole dad to whip someone else, and I can understand this is an emotional topic.
My son lives with his mother in Israel while I am far away. We try to maintain a good contact. However, if I ever find out that my ex or her current boyfriend would structurally whip Daniel with a belt, I'll be on the first plane to Israel to end their lives. I am not kidding, it is something I will gladly do jail time for in an unsavory country. Mind you, by structurally I mean more than once. If I found out it happened once I'd just fly there to punch their lights out and claim custody of my child. I am a reasonable man.
Secondly, the video is about a 200 pound dude whipping a girl. My mother always taught me that I shouldn't hit women. I don't think it's a man's job to hit a woman. We have quite the different physique, and quite frankly I don't give a shit who beat who for what reason... You just don't hit women. Period.
To all the people that claim "children behaved far better when I was a kid" I can call bullshit. Records of a 15th century monk's writings find him complaining about "today's youth" who refuse to dress properly, are lazy, stupid and ill-mannered. It is a property of mankind to become the sort of "it was all better before" grumpy old bastard, and yet I see we have the longest life expectancy ever, and people seem on the whole to become more and more domesticated.
So no, I really don't think the "Fuck you, asshole" gentleman needs more discipline. I think his reaction is honest and balanced.
Actually, the law disagrees where I'm from. Over here, you are an adult at 18, but the law does state that until 21 you should be able to count on support from your parents. From 16 you can drive a 50 cc motor cycle, drink beer and have consensual sex with your peers (certain limitations apply to the last point), but driving, joining armies, voting, complete sexual self-determination and the ability to smoke weed, drink hard liquor and such all come at 18.
That would be the legal aspect. From a neurological perspective, the Rotterdam professor of Neurology Dick Swaab has been claiming for years that a human brain doesn't reach a stable state until it's 23 or 24 years old. The way the brain physically fires and the way hormones affect a person's mindset is enough reason to collectively say that all persons below 23 are of diminished mental capacity or at the very least show a diminished sense of good judgment.
Car Insurance companies will definitely back that claim up, if you look at the way a person's car insurance premium is calculated, by the way. So saying that this judge is whipping an adult is just plain wrong from both a legal and scientific perspective, and I find it morally objectionable.
This is a kid who got whipped viciously with a leather belt for downloading some songs from internet. The man in the video doesn't seem to whip his daughter in an orderly fashion that suggests the administration of a measured disciplinary whipping, the man in the video beats his daughter in a completely emotionally over the top manner that suggests a somewhat vicious nature.
From my perspective, this man is not fit to be a judge or parent, for that matter. On top of that, I am relatively sure my mother would strike him exactly once, across the face, for behaving in this way. After that he'd have to sit through a full hour lecture with a lot of finger-wagging and stern staring during which he'd feel strangely compelled to listen real damn well lest he get one of those measured smacks across the face again.
By the way, my mother struck me twice in my whole upbringing. It was deserved in both cases, and done in such a way that I will never forget them. I dearly love the woman. She is wise, kind and on the whole, just.
Eh,
I don't get that. Now you're glorifying things without looking at past failures and current successes.
Firstly, HP's NetServer products, for those that remember, were a complete failure when compared to Compaq's ProLiant Servers, and after the merge we rightfully went with that line of servers. If you then look at the current C-class blade product line and the attached Flexfabric stuff, you'll have to agree that it is, in your words, exquisitely engineered stuff.
You're going on about a printer, but if you then look at what a printer used to cost versus what you buy now for a couple of dollars, yes, the ink is expensive in comparison, but that's only because the device doesn't cost you anything anymore. The same can be said for lasers. In the 80's, the average private person couldn't afford a laser printer for the home, whereas now I can buy color laser for the same price a consumer inkjet with no frills cost me in 1993.
Now HP's line of ProCurve Switches were hot shit back in the day, but they never went anywhere commercially. So we had very well-engineered network infrastructure for sale that never went anywhere for the longest time. Same goes for Storage devices (Marathon, anyone?).
Having said all that, the market and economy of scale have changed. For all players in the market. You don't solder together a PC in your garage anymore. You move millions of products all over the globe at a breakneck pace and with 4 hr response on breakdowns, sometimes even 6 hr to fix contracts.
With those constraints in mind, I don't think HP is doing that badly.
I just spent sixteen years of my life at HP, and I can wholeheartedly agree with that statement.
Carly Fucking Fiorina. Makes Mark Hurd look good.
Might be significantly more than 1/3 or 1/4 of that market. They capture over 70% of the Blade Infrastructure market in quite a few countries, to mention one thing.
Actually, the front end device (laptop, tablet, phone) is not something that a Computing company would produce.
Apple, Samsung and Lenovo are Consumer Electronics companies. They make commodity products for the masses that serve as an input device and content reader. Now Apple is the odd one out, because they also provide Data Center (Cloud), Storage and Content Retail services. Which makes them a Consumer Electronics and an Internet company.
Computing, in my opinion, is still done in the Data Center with the server, network and storage infrastructure we all use but most of us never think about. And the key players in that market are still IBM and HP for Servers, Software and Consulting, Cisco, Juniper and still HP for Networking, EMC, Hitachi, Netapp, Dell and HP for Storage.
In terms of infrastructure, HP is definitely a computing company and Apple really is not. We're comparing apples (no pun intended) and pears here.
Actually,
HP employs roughly 320.000 people. Apple is somewhat smaller than that. Secondly, the current CEO of Apple is an HP man. It was funny to see him present the iPhone 4S recently, because he reminds me of people like Lew Platt.
Whether Apple has the money to acquire HP isn't really even the discussion. It's whether they have the clout and manpower. HP is a huge organization with quite a few people that are used to a particular culture. If Apple were to ever acquire HP and merge with it, at the end of the day you'd have... HP. This is a matter of politics and psychology, not of money or stock prices.
Reading the title of this one, and not knowing who or what OnStar are, I completely thought this was about The Original Series.
Bummer. Dude. Seriously? No Shatner?
Wow. I wish the EU was as concerned about the income gap at the end of the life of the average brick-layer or coal-miner from Croydon or Manchester.
Really.... Do you think we ought to be worried about Elton John's, Bono's and Mick fucking Jagger's income gap? If they have an income gap, given all the money they made, they shouldn't have snorted all that cocaine for all those years, is what I say.
My mother has had an income gap for most of her life the size of which could have been fixed by the sale of one of Jamiroquai's sports cars, and we're expected to bend over for these people?
Even so, Mick Jagger, Elton John, Bono and (from a Dutch perspective) the guys from the Golden Earring would be entitled to the legally mandated normal retirement benefits everyone else on this continent has to scrape by on. But you don't see 'm closing my income gap.
Anyone in the States with a 401K should be livid about this piece of news if it came from the US.
I hate to say this, but I'm 36 years old now, and when I look at movies from the 80's, I am sooooo happy it's 2011. A mediocre movie from 2011 tends to be more entertaining than cult movies of that decade. Even stuff like Citizen Kane, usually proclaimed to be the best thing since sliced bread, is excruciatingly slow on the uptake and generally unwatchable unless you zip through it at three times the speed.
There are certain movies that are timeless to me. The Shining is still interesting to this day. As is Casablanca, and I'm sure I can come up with a list, like Brando's On the Waterfront, the Godfather and other cult films that are deservedly up there. But the amount of trite shit that has emanated from the movie and music business is staggering. But even respectable titles like Blade Runner don't stand the test of time completely. IMHO, The Fifth Element is far less passé.
I think the people that look at all the stuff that comes out now and compare it to one or two great movies from three decades ago just suffer from selective memory usage. Seriously. Have you looked at Back to the Future with adult eyes? It's insufferable.
Listen, the amount of terrorist plots involving planes in the last forty years is breathtakingly small. So small in fact that Israel would be wise to focus on traffic safety and driving courses rather than terrorism. The amount of traffic deaths in the last 40 years in Israel is larger than the amount of MDK during war and terrorism. Given the one in a million risk factor of plane bombings, I'd say you can just do the physical checks and luggage checks without climbing into people's asses and violate their integrity as a person.
Specifically since if I had a long term plan not to get my luggage checked, all it would take is to move to Israel and befriend some Israelis. Because whenever I showed up with an Israeli friend or girlfriend at Ben Gurion or any El Al check in desk on the planet, they whizzed me through security no questions asked. This punches large holes into the notion of a 100% accurate, intelligent verification.
On top of that, if you subject one passenger to certain treatment, you need to subject the rest to the same treatment. I do not have a sense of humour when the "Gelijkheidsprincipe" is violated. Right now we have a fascist political movement in Holland that wants to violate the first article in our Constitution. All the way down from 1579, we've had clauses in constitution-like documents that guarantee the equal treatment of people of various religious and philosophical views.
Funny how neither you nor I are American.
I really wonder about current demographics on this site.