They so desperately want some crime to deal with, but there just isn't much other than the odd frat house kegger that gets out of control or the occasional parking ticket. I'd be bored to near-insanity too.
They should be grateful that nothing much happens and be happy. If they ever did get some real "action" (ala Virginia Tech) they would probably shit their pants.
In the case of tennis shoes, I prefer a higher quality well fitting shoe (I do not generally invest in the consumer products companies or at least not directly). I find that uneducated workers in Vietnam being paid 0.25$ per hour cannot meet my quality expectations. That, coupled with the fact that Nike shoes are almost as expensive or even more expensive as better quality alternatives, means that I haven't purchased a Nike product for 10+ years now and unless Nike changes their price/quality equation I probably will never purchase another pair of shoes from them. The returns might be good for you as an investor (good for you), but doesn't it worry you just a little bit, as an investor in a consumer products company, that I will never be a customer of Nike ever again (btw, I am not alone in my consumer dislike of Nike products)? Where do you think your dividends and share price appreciation are coming from? As a consumer of footwear I care about quality and price, not whether the investors earn a profit or not. If I like the quality and the price then I buy, otherwise I don't. There is nothing naive about that, its just good business.
Now as an investor I choose not to invest in mutual funds because, IMHO the fees are almost always too high compared to the returns received vs the risks. Also, funds held outside of tax protected accounts (like IRAs and 401Ks) can generate taxable capital gains at bad times for certain individual investors, resulting in increased tax liabilities. I am generally in agreement with the value style investment strategy favored by Warren Buffet. I guess you might say that in general I like to receive a good value for the money I spend or invest; not exactly a naive principle is it?
I say if this lawyer has talent, and is worthy of the appointment, what does it matter if he did work with the RIAA?
Agreeing to work for an organization that many of us find morally and ethically repulsive calls into question the ethics and judgment of the lawyers who do so. A lawyer is supposed to be an officer of the court (albeit one in private employ) who is obliged to represent his or her client(s), yes, but to do so within the framework provided by the law and according to the rules. The RIAA lawyers, by their abusive tactics, willfully and knowingly flouted the rules (rising in some cases to the level of rule 11 sanctions) and did damage to the law in service of their clients and that is what is so morally and ethically reprehensible, because without the rule of law and fair justice in this country, we are no better than any other politically motivated two-bit dictatorship on this planet.
Another factor in the special ire reserved for the RIAA by the nerds is the potential and actual collateral damage caused to the computer hardware, software, and technology industries in general by the ongoing RIAA litigation and their lobbying for particularly onerous and abusive new legislation when they are unable to enforce their will in court under the existing laws (i.e. if you don't like the way the game is playing, then cheat...change the rules). In their attempts to defend the business models of last century they are doing considerable damage (witness the DMCA) to the practice of free computing and open source software development and they couldn't care less. It is this casual and wanton attitude regarding aggrieved third parties and wrongly accused people that singles them out as being especially vile.
So you ask us why we are unable to separate the individual lawyers who agreed to work for them from the larger RIAA agenda? There is your answer
The Tower of the Winds, the public mechanical calendar/sundial in the old Roman agora in ancient Athens, was probably not more than a few hundred years old before it was stripped for parts, looted, and converted into the bell tower for a former Byzantine Christian church. If history is anything to go by, then this mechanism will also be broken up and destroyed long before 10,000 years have passed.
economy it will always gravitate towards "Better, Faster, Cheaper" where better usually = Faster and Cheaper.
That's interesting, because in my experience it is mostly three (3) choose (2) and rarely if ever can you get all three (3) at once. Take your Nike tennis shoes made in Vietnam for $0.25 per hour (where each pair of shoes is made in 15 minutes) and compare that to a pair of New Balance shoes stitched together in the United States for ~$8 per hour or so. The New Balance shoes are only marginally more at each price point, despite the fact that many are made in the United States (meaning that Nike is just pocketing the extra money), AND they last twice and three times longer than a similar pair from Nike. So, better, faster, OR cheaper...pick two (2), but you can't have all three (3). Nike is NOT faster, NOT better, and only marginally cheaper.
Often the best legal course is a really bad PR course.
That is true, but unless the bad PR reaches a mighty crescendo of public outrage, as the AIG bonus scandals did, then a bank holding company, like Goldman, is unlikely to change its ways. Goldman is not a consumer products or entertainment company and so is more insulated from, although not impervious to, the direct actions and opinions of the public.
In defense of young college students learning 'sexy' languages instead of mainframes and COBOL:
The COBOL programmers and mainframe operators, who can be somewhat (but not entirely) excused given the state of technology in the early 1970s, committed one of the cardianl sins of our profession. Namely, they failed to take into account future development and so built few or no interfaces to move data into and out of their closed systems. A major difference between modern systems written in Java (or.NET for Microsoft people) and the COBOL mainframe systems of the 1970s is that modern systems, properly built, include standard methods (W3C XML Web Services for example) of getting data into and out of the system. If someday the Java or.NET system needs to be retired then data can be easily and fully extracted through the escape hatches (Web Services), which the original developers wisely and graciously included in their design, before the ship is scuttled; thus allowing these systems to be retired in an orderly fashion when and if their time comes. So don't put all of the blame on young programmers who don't want to deal with COBOL, the original developers share in the blame for making their systems closed and not interoperable.
There is surely some of that yes, but on the other side of the coin are COBOL holdouts who hobble the growth of existing systems, particularly in the area of systems integration, because they want to work for a few more years and don't want some young turks coming in with their new-fangled web technologies and making their final years before retirement more difficult.
They probably made it into one of those cheesy government information films with a "Mr.Atom" character animated by Walt Disney to explain the wonderous benefits of peaceful nuclear explosions complete with unintentionally funny naration of the type favored by documentary film makers who dig out these old films to embarass the government and corporations ala the Better Living Through Chemsitry campaigns.
Although it would be best if email marketers were simply swallowed by the earth and sent directly to wherever it is the bad people go, if they are going to continue annoying us then I would prefer that it be through email and not postal mail. At least with email they are competing on our playing field where we have a decisive technical advantage in filtering. If the choice is between them stuffing my post box with paper or trying to stuff my inbox with spam (they will fail due to ThunderBayes among others. What's the word? Thunderbird) then I say bring on the spam, we are ready.
They could just as well move to other EU countries where taxes are even lower, Estonia for example (where an individual's income is taxable, as at 2008, at the rate of 22%). Germany was just used as an example of an EU country with somewhat lower taxes than say Sweden. The tax table on Worldwide-tax indicates that Germany is 15-45% while Sweden, for example, is 0-57%. However VAT in Germany is 19% whereas in Sweden it is 25% and as the poor tend to spend more of their after tax income simply living than do the rich the effective tax rate can seem much higher in a country like Sweden where goods and services are more expensive (+6% more in the case of Germany vs Sweden). It probably wouldn't work out to half as much, so I was wrong about that, but it probably would be fairly noticeable and particularly so to young professional people who may have higher incomes, higher personal spending rates, and may not yet have children to support.
Are income taxes the only taxes that Swedes pay or are there others? It is important to look at how monies remaining after the income tax is paid are spent and how that spending is taxed. What about excise taxes, property taxes, value-added tax, and other miscellaneous taxes. What I meant to talk about was total tax burden on the typical Nordic lifestyle (so I should have just said "taxes" instead of "income taxes" and I stand corrected on that point). I have often heard about the excellent health care, generous pensions, and other stated benefits of the nordic systems, but I have never heard it said that nordic (which would include Swedish) taxes are low compared to other countries and even other European countries where similar social safety features are made available to the citizenry. Does the average nordic EU citizen believe that they are getting good value for their tax money? It's a good question, but clearly some young Swedes have voted with their feet in recent years.
Perhaps they overpaid for what they got? Even if your health care is excellent, basic needs are taken care of, and living standard is decent it is still possible to look at a 90%+ income tax bill and wonder if the same or similar package of things could not have been had elsewhere for less than 90%+ of one's income. Even the average people in the nordic countries pay the highest taxes in Europe which is why it is not uncommon to see ambitious Swedish, Norwegian, and Finish youth (EU citizens can live in any member country) living in say Germany where the social safety net, health care, and other European societal elements are similar and can be had for about 1/2 the tax burden.
So what do you offer as an alternative? If we do nothing then bots will certainly invade and spam our sites. At least with random strings drawn on demand as image CAPTCHAs and limited attempts per IP per unit time we are discouraging casual attackers. To put it another way, there is NO safe sold on the market today as "unbreakable". Instead the manufacturers rate the tools and the amount of time required for a determined attacker to break into the safe. One could view CAPTCHAs in a similar way, providing some resistance to forced entry while at the same time not being absolute proof against determined attackers.
Although D&D has a long and venerable history with much background material, settings, and characters enjoyed by generations of gamers it has basically been in decline ever since WotC was bought by Hasbro and probably even before that. The D&D system was already outdated by about 1994 when newer and more innovative games, notably GURPS but also the HERO system and others, were equaling and surpassing the first generation games, most notably D&D, which arguably founded the genre. By the time Hasbro bought WotC the best things D&D had going for it were the immense body of extant work in the settings, characters, and modules published in Dragon and Dungeon magazines and a declining store of good will among older gamers with fond memories of D&D gaming during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Even if Hasbro hadn't bought WotC I think that D&D would have been difficult to salvage as a system. Indeed, many of the ideas and concepts pioneered by D&D were not and could not be copyrighted and therefore have been well translated into games like GURPS as source books, further weakening the D&D franchise. The D20 system was too little too late to salvage D&D in light of the superior systems being published by Steve Jackson Games, White Wolf, and others. The original D&D systems (pre WotC and Hasbro) will probably continue to be fondly remembered by and even occasionally played by older gamers, but really there are much better systems and source materials out there now and it is time for PPRPG gaming to move on.
but supporting such spending and then NOT paying taxes is just beyond contempt.
Yes, but what did you expect? That is about par for the course with the Dems; they know best how to spend your money after all (or at least that is the message that they send with their actions). Of course, being brilliant geniuses themselves they have no need to pay taxes since only the "little people", who aren't smart enough to spend their own money wisely, need to pay taxes. The world is already full of nanny-states so those people who want that can move to Canada, Sweeden, Denmark, or any number of other places where socialism is the rule of the day, but the United States (at least so far) is among the last bastions of free market thinking on the planet (and even the United States is at least 40% socialist IMHO). As long as Obama continues to Europeanate on capitalism there will be nothing to show for it decades later except who gets the blame for a moribund economy and declining standards of living with everyone equal in their share of the misery.
And one could level pretty much the same charges at the broadcast news stations (abc, nbc, cbs), but even with these stations and also Fox News, the charge is not wholly true. The real problem is that basic evening news + commentary, generally with little or no research (it's an evening daily news program, what did you expect Frontline every night?), is most of what the news business does because (a) it's cheaper than high-brow investigative documentary programs like Frontline on PBS and (b) it attracts more aggregate viewers than the high-brow programs which means more profitable advertising segments. The documentary style has been relegated mostly to special reports, even on the non-Murdoch owned networks. So blame Fox News for the decline in news if you want, but really they are not wholly or even mostly responsible. Investigative journalism in the for-profit news business has been in decline for some time now, even before Fox News became popular a little more than eight (8) years ago. In fact one paper in particular, the New York Times, bears special mention in the decline of journalistic standards. Take a look at their excellent WWII reporting and into the 1950s for example and then compare that to what passes for journalism at the New York Times today. Indeed, the venerable Gray Lady is now a pale shadow of her former self.
While I agree with you on the "Nuclear Attack" scenairo (it is not acceptable), the Conventional Attack scenario might be made more viable if, in preparation for the attack, the civilian population in of South Korea was evactuated further south and out of artillery range. The North Koreans do not have a competitive air force and would be unable to deliver any substantial payloads beyond the range of their aforementioned artillery. As part of the preparations, counter-battery rockets (ala MLRS) could be moved into range to eliminate the North Korean artillery after they begin firing; each battery would probably get only one or two shots, three at most before the counter-battery rockets arrived on target. The only option available to the North in such a scenario would be to attack first, before the evactuation of the civilians was complete, but I doubt that North Korea would do that, especially if the evacuation was ordered under cover of regularly scheduled exercises (i.e. they wouldn't be sure that the whole thing wasn't a bluff). Basically, if the North Korean artillery can be eliminated from the picture then a Conventional Attack by modern western forces, complete with close air support, would crush an outdated but large army of the type maintained by North Korea. The days where a million peasants with rifles were effective on a battlefield have been over for some time now, hence the efforts over the last decade at least by the Chinese to modernize their armed forces. Conventional Attack could be made to work if the world was serious about North Korea NOT getting nuclear weapons.
Missiles are really useless for the North Koreans. As you have pointed out, commercial satellite lanuches are many times cheaper (and probably more reliable) than any native capability. Their crumbling economy, which is going down all the time, would never be able to support a serious missile arms race with either the United States or Japan. The Soviet Union was unable to maintain spending in the arms race with the United States, how much less then the North Koreans? Finally, the North Koreans have no viable blue-water navy with nuclear missile submarines on rotating patrol to provide a credible second-strike deterrent. The North Koreans are wasting their time and money (neither of which they can afford) on these missiles simply to demonstrate their belligerent foolishness for all the world to see. Their small penis mentality would be funny in a ridiculous sort of way if not for the real suffering of their people which removes the humor and makes it merely pathetic.
Although I am an American and have never used NHS care I have always been troubled by the "no supplemental private treatment" policy of the NHS (no doubt an attempt by the government to gain monopsony power for themselves as the single buyer of all or most health care services). Why should people not be able to pay additional expenses out of their own pocket if they are willing and able and NHS doesn't cover a treatment which, "doesn't yield enough quality life years to be worthwhile if the public pays"?
and I think my health suffered because of it. At first I was annoyed. Then I got mad. And then I was completely flabbergasted.
Look on the bright side, your health care is paid for by the government, so your blood pressure meds should be either free or very cheap (don't know exactly what the deal is in France being that I am American and not French). On a more serious note, I wonder how long it will be before every free cafe WIFI hotspot in France is shut down for "three strikes"?
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They so desperately want some crime to deal with, but there just isn't much other than the odd frat house kegger that gets out of control or the occasional parking ticket. I'd be bored to near-insanity too.
They should be grateful that nothing much happens and be happy. If they ever did get some real "action" (ala Virginia Tech) they would probably shit their pants.
In the case of tennis shoes, I prefer a higher quality well fitting shoe (I do not generally invest in the consumer products companies or at least not directly). I find that uneducated workers in Vietnam being paid 0.25$ per hour cannot meet my quality expectations. That, coupled with the fact that Nike shoes are almost as expensive or even more expensive as better quality alternatives, means that I haven't purchased a Nike product for 10+ years now and unless Nike changes their price/quality equation I probably will never purchase another pair of shoes from them. The returns might be good for you as an investor (good for you), but doesn't it worry you just a little bit, as an investor in a consumer products company, that I will never be a customer of Nike ever again (btw, I am not alone in my consumer dislike of Nike products)? Where do you think your dividends and share price appreciation are coming from? As a consumer of footwear I care about quality and price, not whether the investors earn a profit or not. If I like the quality and the price then I buy, otherwise I don't. There is nothing naive about that, its just good business.
Now as an investor I choose not to invest in mutual funds because, IMHO the fees are almost always too high compared to the returns received vs the risks. Also, funds held outside of tax protected accounts (like IRAs and 401Ks) can generate taxable capital gains at bad times for certain individual investors, resulting in increased tax liabilities. I am generally in agreement with the value style investment strategy favored by Warren Buffet. I guess you might say that in general I like to receive a good value for the money I spend or invest; not exactly a naive principle is it?
I say if this lawyer has talent, and is worthy of the appointment, what does it matter if he did work with the RIAA?
Agreeing to work for an organization that many of us find morally and ethically repulsive calls into question the ethics and judgment of the lawyers who do so. A lawyer is supposed to be an officer of the court (albeit one in private employ) who is obliged to represent his or her client(s), yes, but to do so within the framework provided by the law and according to the rules. The RIAA lawyers, by their abusive tactics, willfully and knowingly flouted the rules (rising in some cases to the level of rule 11 sanctions) and did damage to the law in service of their clients and that is what is so morally and ethically reprehensible, because without the rule of law and fair justice in this country, we are no better than any other politically motivated two-bit dictatorship on this planet.
Another factor in the special ire reserved for the RIAA by the nerds is the potential and actual collateral damage caused to the computer hardware, software, and technology industries in general by the ongoing RIAA litigation and their lobbying for particularly onerous and abusive new legislation when they are unable to enforce their will in court under the existing laws (i.e. if you don't like the way the game is playing, then cheat...change the rules). In their attempts to defend the business models of last century they are doing considerable damage (witness the DMCA) to the practice of free computing and open source software development and they couldn't care less. It is this casual and wanton attitude regarding aggrieved third parties and wrongly accused people that singles them out as being especially vile.
So you ask us why we are unable to separate the individual lawyers who agreed to work for them from the larger RIAA agenda? There is your answer
The Tower of the Winds, the public mechanical calendar/sundial in the old Roman agora in ancient Athens, was probably not more than a few hundred years old before it was stripped for parts, looted, and converted into the bell tower for a former Byzantine Christian church. If history is anything to go by, then this mechanism will also be broken up and destroyed long before 10,000 years have passed.
economy it will always gravitate towards "Better, Faster, Cheaper" where better usually = Faster and Cheaper.
That's interesting, because in my experience it is mostly three (3) choose (2) and rarely if ever can you get all three (3) at once. Take your Nike tennis shoes made in Vietnam for $0.25 per hour (where each pair of shoes is made in 15 minutes) and compare that to a pair of New Balance shoes stitched together in the United States for ~$8 per hour or so. The New Balance shoes are only marginally more at each price point, despite the fact that many are made in the United States (meaning that Nike is just pocketing the extra money), AND they last twice and three times longer than a similar pair from Nike. So, better, faster, OR cheaper...pick two (2), but you can't have all three (3). Nike is NOT faster, NOT better, and only marginally cheaper.
Often the best legal course is a really bad PR course.
That is true, but unless the bad PR reaches a mighty crescendo of public outrage, as the AIG bonus scandals did, then a bank holding company, like Goldman, is unlikely to change its ways. Goldman is not a consumer products or entertainment company and so is more insulated from, although not impervious to, the direct actions and opinions of the public.
In defense of young college students learning 'sexy' languages instead of mainframes and COBOL:
The COBOL programmers and mainframe operators, who can be somewhat (but not entirely) excused given the state of technology in the early 1970s, committed one of the cardianl sins of our profession. Namely, they failed to take into account future development and so built few or no interfaces to move data into and out of their closed systems. A major difference between modern systems written in Java (or .NET for Microsoft people) and the COBOL mainframe systems of the 1970s is that modern systems, properly built, include standard methods (W3C XML Web Services for example) of getting data into and out of the system. If someday the Java or .NET system needs to be retired then data can be easily and fully extracted through the escape hatches (Web Services), which the original developers wisely and graciously included in their design, before the ship is scuttled; thus allowing these systems to be retired in an orderly fashion when and if their time comes. So don't put all of the blame on young programmers who don't want to deal with COBOL, the original developers share in the blame for making their systems closed and not interoperable.
So I can have a fucking job?
Would you like fries with that order?
There is surely some of that yes, but on the other side of the coin are COBOL holdouts who hobble the growth of existing systems, particularly in the area of systems integration, because they want to work for a few more years and don't want some young turks coming in with their new-fangled web technologies and making their final years before retirement more difficult.
Things were so much simpler then.
They probably made it into one of those cheesy government information films with a "Mr.Atom" character animated by Walt Disney to explain the wonderous benefits of peaceful nuclear explosions complete with unintentionally funny naration of the type favored by documentary film makers who dig out these old films to embarass the government and corporations ala the Better Living Through Chemsitry campaigns.
Although it would be best if email marketers were simply swallowed by the earth and sent directly to wherever it is the bad people go, if they are going to continue annoying us then I would prefer that it be through email and not postal mail. At least with email they are competing on our playing field where we have a decisive technical advantage in filtering. If the choice is between them stuffing my post box with paper or trying to stuff my inbox with spam (they will fail due to ThunderBayes among others. What's the word? Thunderbird) then I say bring on the spam, we are ready.
They could just as well move to other EU countries where taxes are even lower, Estonia for example (where an individual's income is taxable, as at 2008, at the rate of 22%). Germany was just used as an example of an EU country with somewhat lower taxes than say Sweden. The tax table on Worldwide-tax indicates that Germany is 15-45% while Sweden, for example, is 0-57%. However VAT in Germany is 19% whereas in Sweden it is 25% and as the poor tend to spend more of their after tax income simply living than do the rich the effective tax rate can seem much higher in a country like Sweden where goods and services are more expensive (+6% more in the case of Germany vs Sweden). It probably wouldn't work out to half as much, so I was wrong about that, but it probably would be fairly noticeable and particularly so to young professional people who may have higher incomes, higher personal spending rates, and may not yet have children to support.
Are income taxes the only taxes that Swedes pay or are there others? It is important to look at how monies remaining after the income tax is paid are spent and how that spending is taxed. What about excise taxes, property taxes, value-added tax, and other miscellaneous taxes. What I meant to talk about was total tax burden on the typical Nordic lifestyle (so I should have just said "taxes" instead of "income taxes" and I stand corrected on that point). I have often heard about the excellent health care, generous pensions, and other stated benefits of the nordic systems, but I have never heard it said that nordic (which would include Swedish) taxes are low compared to other countries and even other European countries where similar social safety features are made available to the citizenry. Does the average nordic EU citizen believe that they are getting good value for their tax money? It's a good question, but clearly some young Swedes have voted with their feet in recent years.
And this is a bad thing how?
Perhaps they overpaid for what they got? Even if your health care is excellent, basic needs are taken care of, and living standard is decent it is still possible to look at a 90%+ income tax bill and wonder if the same or similar package of things could not have been had elsewhere for less than 90%+ of one's income. Even the average people in the nordic countries pay the highest taxes in Europe which is why it is not uncommon to see ambitious Swedish, Norwegian, and Finish youth (EU citizens can live in any member country) living in say Germany where the social safety net, health care, and other European societal elements are similar and can be had for about 1/2 the tax burden.
What happens when the Sun burns through the clouds?
So what do you offer as an alternative? If we do nothing then bots will certainly invade and spam our sites. At least with random strings drawn on demand as image CAPTCHAs and limited attempts per IP per unit time we are discouraging casual attackers. To put it another way, there is NO safe sold on the market today as "unbreakable". Instead the manufacturers rate the tools and the amount of time required for a determined attacker to break into the safe. One could view CAPTCHAs in a similar way, providing some resistance to forced entry while at the same time not being absolute proof against determined attackers.
Although D&D has a long and venerable history with much background material, settings, and characters enjoyed by generations of gamers it has basically been in decline ever since WotC was bought by Hasbro and probably even before that. The D&D system was already outdated by about 1994 when newer and more innovative games, notably GURPS but also the HERO system and others, were equaling and surpassing the first generation games, most notably D&D, which arguably founded the genre. By the time Hasbro bought WotC the best things D&D had going for it were the immense body of extant work in the settings, characters, and modules published in Dragon and Dungeon magazines and a declining store of good will among older gamers with fond memories of D&D gaming during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Even if Hasbro hadn't bought WotC I think that D&D would have been difficult to salvage as a system. Indeed, many of the ideas and concepts pioneered by D&D were not and could not be copyrighted and therefore have been well translated into games like GURPS as source books, further weakening the D&D franchise. The D20 system was too little too late to salvage D&D in light of the superior systems being published by Steve Jackson Games, White Wolf, and others. The original D&D systems (pre WotC and Hasbro) will probably continue to be fondly remembered by and even occasionally played by older gamers, but really there are much better systems and source materials out there now and it is time for PPRPG gaming to move on.
but supporting such spending and then NOT paying taxes is just beyond contempt.
Yes, but what did you expect? That is about par for the course with the Dems; they know best how to spend your money after all (or at least that is the message that they send with their actions). Of course, being brilliant geniuses themselves they have no need to pay taxes since only the "little people", who aren't smart enough to spend their own money wisely, need to pay taxes. The world is already full of nanny-states so those people who want that can move to Canada, Sweeden, Denmark, or any number of other places where socialism is the rule of the day, but the United States (at least so far) is among the last bastions of free market thinking on the planet (and even the United States is at least 40% socialist IMHO). As long as Obama continues to Europeanate on capitalism there will be nothing to show for it decades later except who gets the blame for a moribund economy and declining standards of living with everyone equal in their share of the misery.
How about some Fracking Battlestar Galactica slang?
And one could level pretty much the same charges at the broadcast news stations (abc, nbc, cbs), but even with these stations and also Fox News, the charge is not wholly true. The real problem is that basic evening news + commentary, generally with little or no research (it's an evening daily news program, what did you expect Frontline every night?), is most of what the news business does because (a) it's cheaper than high-brow investigative documentary programs like Frontline on PBS and (b) it attracts more aggregate viewers than the high-brow programs which means more profitable advertising segments. The documentary style has been relegated mostly to special reports, even on the non-Murdoch owned networks. So blame Fox News for the decline in news if you want, but really they are not wholly or even mostly responsible. Investigative journalism in the for-profit news business has been in decline for some time now, even before Fox News became popular a little more than eight (8) years ago. In fact one paper in particular, the New York Times, bears special mention in the decline of journalistic standards. Take a look at their excellent WWII reporting and into the 1950s for example and then compare that to what passes for journalism at the New York Times today. Indeed, the venerable Gray Lady is now a pale shadow of her former self.
While I agree with you on the "Nuclear Attack" scenairo (it is not acceptable), the Conventional Attack scenario might be made more viable if, in preparation for the attack, the civilian population in of South Korea was evactuated further south and out of artillery range. The North Koreans do not have a competitive air force and would be unable to deliver any substantial payloads beyond the range of their aforementioned artillery. As part of the preparations, counter-battery rockets (ala MLRS) could be moved into range to eliminate the North Korean artillery after they begin firing; each battery would probably get only one or two shots, three at most before the counter-battery rockets arrived on target. The only option available to the North in such a scenario would be to attack first, before the evactuation of the civilians was complete, but I doubt that North Korea would do that, especially if the evacuation was ordered under cover of regularly scheduled exercises (i.e. they wouldn't be sure that the whole thing wasn't a bluff). Basically, if the North Korean artillery can be eliminated from the picture then a Conventional Attack by modern western forces, complete with close air support, would crush an outdated but large army of the type maintained by North Korea. The days where a million peasants with rifles were effective on a battlefield have been over for some time now, hence the efforts over the last decade at least by the Chinese to modernize their armed forces. Conventional Attack could be made to work if the world was serious about North Korea NOT getting nuclear weapons.
Missiles are really useless for the North Koreans. As you have pointed out, commercial satellite lanuches are many times cheaper (and probably more reliable) than any native capability. Their crumbling economy, which is going down all the time, would never be able to support a serious missile arms race with either the United States or Japan. The Soviet Union was unable to maintain spending in the arms race with the United States, how much less then the North Koreans? Finally, the North Koreans have no viable blue-water navy with nuclear missile submarines on rotating patrol to provide a credible second-strike deterrent. The North Koreans are wasting their time and money (neither of which they can afford) on these missiles simply to demonstrate their belligerent foolishness for all the world to see. Their small penis mentality would be funny in a ridiculous sort of way if not for the real suffering of their people which removes the humor and makes it merely pathetic.
Although I am an American and have never used NHS care I have always been troubled by the "no supplemental private treatment" policy of the NHS (no doubt an attempt by the government to gain monopsony power for themselves as the single buyer of all or most health care services). Why should people not be able to pay additional expenses out of their own pocket if they are willing and able and NHS doesn't cover a treatment which, "doesn't yield enough quality life years to be worthwhile if the public pays"?
and I think my health suffered because of it. At first I was annoyed. Then I got mad. And then I was completely flabbergasted.
Look on the bright side, your health care is paid for by the government, so your blood pressure meds should be either free or very cheap (don't know exactly what the deal is in France being that I am American and not French). On a more serious note, I wonder how long it will be before every free cafe WIFI hotspot in France is shut down for "three strikes"?
Clothesline are very ecologically friendly.
What a wonderful excuse for any wrong doing. Can I have your car towed away and crushed because driving is ecologically un-friendly?