While I don't know about software, hardware is often produced for the US and imported to the Netherlands from there.
I recently pre-ordered a Leap Motion. It's presale price is $69.99. If you order it from the Netherlands, they take care of any import duties since they ship it from a European warehouse. This hikes the price, including $12 shipping, up to about $96, which boils down to about €70.
If I were the importer from the US, I'd have to pay duties myself, but only if they intercepted the package. Sadly, I don't get the choice to try and stiff my government. But that is the reason why people tend to order from the US rather than locally.
Yes, they have. Because they've shoved more different products out the door in a year than they've done in any year before this one, and they have a loyal following that buys whatever they put out. For now.
I'm not saying that they're going to run out of money soon. They'll be around in ten to fifteen years, sure, but not as a market leader, if they keep this shit up.
Apple is dying. They've got three phones on offer now (the ideas used to be that you'd go buy "The iPhone") and four tablets, of which one is in a format that just doesn't fill an apple niche and two of them were released without much fanfare VERY shortly after "The New iPad".
I think they're flooding the market with products in order to do as big a cash grab as possible and then bunker down in the coming lean years until they can find a new Steve Jobs.
So in exchange for shutting up about it, they'll probably get it officiously, thanks to nations who also want full control but didn't formally ask for it (ie, all of them?).
You know, the Germans once owned my own fair nation in much the same way.
We had people who killed Germans where and how they could. We call them 'heroes of the resistance'.
With an attitude like yours, it's not surprising that people keep firing rockets at you. With an attitude like yours, don't be surprised when your support falls away.
Because the people living in Israel are somehow Egypt's problem? No, if the people in Gaza aren't able to flee, it's because they're living in a prison. And, technically, by their own government. The parallel to ghetto's, specifically the Warsaw Ghetto, is not exactly fiction. The suffering in the Warsaw Ghetto was much, much greater, but the people inside it are in a very similar situation.
They fire rockets at you and your family and blow up buses, and you fire tanks and bombs into fully built-up and barricaded (by you) residential areas (effectively an open-air prison or, if you will, a ghetto) without letting people flee. In my outsiders' view, that makes you both pretty much equally shitty.
I'm wondering what an Israeli perspective on this is. Do you see a separation between Palestinians and Hamas? Are Israeli actually still striving for actual peace (rather than defeat of Palestinians) or is it a matter of time until the ethnic cleansing starts, or... what?
Because as I said, from here, both parties look equally and homogeneously shitty, with the Palestinians being the underdogs. Usually in such a situation, I'm very wrong, and I'd like to know if I am, and how so.
For the series Space: Above and Beyond, they were loading the Hammerhead full-scale models onto a ship, when a Russian spy was caught taking pictures of them. Since they were stamped USMC, he thought they were the US' next generation bomber or some such.
Future shock is a state of mind. I have worked tech support (I was young, I needed the money) at an ISP, and there were quite a few 60-70+ folks who'd ring up because they got everything set up except E-mail. Best customers to have, as they actually listen, and learn.
People who believe the world has grown too alien have given up in general. We are all now generations that are used to rapid technological change. I don't think we'll be too scared of what'll happen when we're ancient.
Your system of broken beyond voting machine snafu's and other voting mechanisms.
You have an electoral system. You don't decide who gets to be president, you get to decide who your State thinks should be president. And that State gets a vote that is dependant on how many people there are (ideally). If 49% of people pick Republican, and 51% pick Democrat, then 100% of the electoral votes of the State go towards the Democrat. And because of this, other parties can't get a word in edgewise.
There have been states that have gone to vote for third parties (or independents), but these were barely even a blip because mainly it's Republican or Democrat.
Let's face it, the concept of United States is dead anyway; the federal government has seized so much centralized power since the Civil War, it's no longer a collection of states with a small central government. So either fix that, or don't pretend any more and go the full monty. National elections, where every vote is a vote.
Pictures like this are pictures OF ACTUAL REAL BONAFIDE PEOPLE. If you see a picture of a child being raped, that child was actually raped. That is why normal people have an adverse reaction to pictures and movies, as well as in-person, because they have that realization.
What you're saying is, you'd be horrified if anything depraved happened to his children while you were there, but you'd be A-ok watching pictures of the same happening. Please, seek counseling, you need it.
I certainly do hope you're alone. If you had been working for me, you wouldn't be working for me.
(a) Don't obfuscate your own development base. On par with "don't shit in your own bed" for common sense practices. (b) Don't insult customers (external OR internal) within the product. Or in writing at all, really. Preferably not orally as well, but there are limits. (c) Be semantic wherever practical.
For two years my only security on my iPhone was 'slide to unlock' (ie none) and keeping it on my person except at trusted locations. Worked fine. It's like writing things down in a notebook. You don't tie a stronger string around it, you keep track of where it's at.
Beyond that, it's convenience.
Ten steps to wiping the phone? Talk about opening yourself up for a DoS attack.
Saying that Jesus was an inspirational guy but not the son of God is what the Jews and Muslims do. Prophet, yes, son of God, no. And if a Christian did say that, nothing would happen to him. Certainly Interpol would not be involved.
Three gods or one god is a matter of semantics. It's the Christians who muddled that one up.
And Islam does recognize other prophets than Muhammad, such as Jesus, as well as many of the Jewish prophets, right down to Adam. They do, however, reject the idea that Jesus is a son of God.
The histories in the holy books of these three religions is so incredibly similar that it's obvious these are different interpretations of the same mythology. Since all three religions claim that the god in their histories is still their god, the position that these three gods are the same isn't an obviously incorrect one.
In the Netherlands we have two types of taxes. 'Belasting', which are taxes such as income tax and sales tax, and 'accijns', which are taxes like tobacco and alcohol taxes, as well as fuel (about 70% of the price of gas in Holland is taxes), and import duties, probably among many others.
The latter, 'accijns', are all about encouraging a certain type of behavior, in practice. They don't work as far as I can see, although smoking is very unpopular right now partly due to cost.
Actually in the Netherlands we get paid vacations of AT LEAST one month. Or rather, four weeks. Most companies up that to five weeks, some go a bit higher, but the legal minimum is four weeks.
And we are now mandated to pay around 1100 euro's a year for medical insurance from our wages, after taxes. Even so, it's still better than the American 'system'.
As said, muslim invasion will only be a problem if current immigrant groups turn violent. Which they may; Sharia-4-Holland is a group which has recently gone from online protests to throwing eggs and disturbing meetings, and are watched closely for signs of radicalization, for example. The major cities are approaching or have passed 50% immigrant populations, which will definitely be a problem.
Yes, it would attempt to undo some of the damage you sustained when you lost your own civil war. (Slavery banned, yay, but at the cost of sovereignty of the States.)
If a county does something you dislike, you can easily move to a different county. If a state does something you cannot agree with, you can move to another state with moderate ease. Leaving your country of residence, however, is a lot of harder. Instead of moving away, you could try to change the politics, which becomes harder the bigger government is. Name the last president who wasn't a millionaire (or equivalent, for his time).
Think of this in the opposite. States could easily legalize marijuana and other drugs, they could allow gay marriage, and federal government wouldn't be able to stomp down on it.
As a Dutch person, I'd like to point out I am not aware of any law that states what the parent says.
Work you do with company resources belongs to the company, but anything you create after-hours on your own equipment is your own. There is no legal basis by which a company can claim copyright. I have seen language in contracts that claims works on products related to the company's portfolio, but never anything else.
Agreed, on the cooked statistics. Same in my country (the Netherlands). In a country of 16 million people, the labor force is about 4-5 million. That means people who work or are looking for work. A few million live on government welfare of various sorts, a million or so work *for* government, etc. These numbers are worse for us because we spend a LOT of money on social security. That said, I'm all for subsidizing students and retired people. Stay-at-home parents could be encouraged depending on your political views. And we do not have the proportionally massive prison population you do in the States.
I like to approach these positions from an extreme, much in the same way Rand did, but realizing that we're not at that extreme. If all manual labor jobs have been taken and we've achieved national welfare that can sustain all citizens in comfort, then you need to either abolish money, or give everyone a government grant, because noone can contribute enough to live. So it seems logical to me that, as low-skilled labor dries up due to increasing technology and wealth, we will have more and more people receiving part of that wealth without doing anything in return.
The discussion, then, is how can we keep people contributing as much as possible, without sacrificing that increase in wealth. People who contribute are happier than those who are parasitical.
Also I, for one, welcome our gun-wielding robot overlords.
You'd *have* to dole out food and goods and housing. The problem is, this gives you power over them, and that will be abused. To say nothing of the big-L Libertarians (or worse) who'd posit that since these people no longer contribute, they're getting what they deserve. Or just simply greedy people.
You think leisure, which is fine, but moneyless leisure time sucks ass.
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While I don't know about software, hardware is often produced for the US and imported to the Netherlands from there.
I recently pre-ordered a Leap Motion. It's presale price is $69.99. If you order it from the Netherlands, they take care of any import duties since they ship it from a European warehouse. This hikes the price, including $12 shipping, up to about $96, which boils down to about €70.
If I were the importer from the US, I'd have to pay duties myself, but only if they intercepted the package. Sadly, I don't get the choice to try and stiff my government. But that is the reason why people tend to order from the US rather than locally.
I thought it a rather appropriate metaphor. Neither software patents nor circumcision are intrinsically desirable, yet huge support for them exists.
And you can improve them, but really, that's not the discussion you should be having.
Yes, they have. Because they've shoved more different products out the door in a year than they've done in any year before this one, and they have a loyal following that buys whatever they put out. For now.
I'm not saying that they're going to run out of money soon. They'll be around in ten to fifteen years, sure, but not as a market leader, if they keep this shit up.
Apple is dying. They've got three phones on offer now (the ideas used to be that you'd go buy "The iPhone") and four tablets, of which one is in a format that just doesn't fill an apple niche and two of them were released without much fanfare VERY shortly after "The New iPad".
I think they're flooding the market with products in order to do as big a cash grab as possible and then bunker down in the coming lean years until they can find a new Steve Jobs.
So in exchange for shutting up about it, they'll probably get it officiously, thanks to nations who also want full control but didn't formally ask for it (ie, all of them?).
Or am I being paranoid?
You know, the Germans once owned my own fair nation in much the same way.
We had people who killed Germans where and how they could. We call them 'heroes of the resistance'.
With an attitude like yours, it's not surprising that people keep firing rockets at you. With an attitude like yours, don't be surprised when your support falls away.
Because the people living in Israel are somehow Egypt's problem? No, if the people in Gaza aren't able to flee, it's because they're living in a prison. And, technically, by their own government. The parallel to ghetto's, specifically the Warsaw Ghetto, is not exactly fiction. The suffering in the Warsaw Ghetto was much, much greater, but the people inside it are in a very similar situation.
They fire rockets at you and your family and blow up buses, and you fire tanks and bombs into fully built-up and barricaded (by you) residential areas (effectively an open-air prison or, if you will, a ghetto) without letting people flee. In my outsiders' view, that makes you both pretty much equally shitty.
I'm wondering what an Israeli perspective on this is. Do you see a separation between Palestinians and Hamas? Are Israeli actually still striving for actual peace (rather than defeat of Palestinians) or is it a matter of time until the ethnic cleansing starts, or... what?
Because as I said, from here, both parties look equally and homogeneously shitty, with the Palestinians being the underdogs. Usually in such a situation, I'm very wrong, and I'd like to know if I am, and how so.
For the series Space: Above and Beyond, they were loading the Hammerhead full-scale models onto a ship, when a Russian spy was caught taking pictures of them. Since they were stamped USMC, he thought they were the US' next generation bomber or some such.
Ah yes, the way taxes on cigarettes and gasoline work in the Netherlands. Make it more expensive, and people won't use it.
Except it doesn't work. Even at >$8.50 per gallon.
Future shock is a state of mind. I have worked tech support (I was young, I needed the money) at an ISP, and there were quite a few 60-70+ folks who'd ring up because they got everything set up except E-mail. Best customers to have, as they actually listen, and learn.
People who believe the world has grown too alien have given up in general. We are all now generations that are used to rapid technological change. I don't think we'll be too scared of what'll happen when we're ancient.
Your system of broken beyond voting machine snafu's and other voting mechanisms.
You have an electoral system. You don't decide who gets to be president, you get to decide who your State thinks should be president. And that State gets a vote that is dependant on how many people there are (ideally). If 49% of people pick Republican, and 51% pick Democrat, then 100% of the electoral votes of the State go towards the Democrat. And because of this, other parties can't get a word in edgewise.
There have been states that have gone to vote for third parties (or independents), but these were barely even a blip because mainly it's Republican or Democrat.
Let's face it, the concept of United States is dead anyway; the federal government has seized so much centralized power since the Civil War, it's no longer a collection of states with a small central government. So either fix that, or don't pretend any more and go the full monty. National elections, where every vote is a vote.
Just to hit you with a clue-by-four:
Pictures like this are pictures OF ACTUAL REAL BONAFIDE PEOPLE. If you see a picture of a child being raped, that child was actually raped. That is why normal people have an adverse reaction to pictures and movies, as well as in-person, because they have that realization.
What you're saying is, you'd be horrified if anything depraved happened to his children while you were there, but you'd be A-ok watching pictures of the same happening. Please, seek counseling, you need it.
I certainly do hope you're alone. If you had been working for me, you wouldn't be working for me.
(a) Don't obfuscate your own development base. On par with "don't shit in your own bed" for common sense practices.
(b) Don't insult customers (external OR internal) within the product. Or in writing at all, really. Preferably not orally as well, but there are limits.
(c) Be semantic wherever practical.
For two years my only security on my iPhone was 'slide to unlock' (ie none) and keeping it on my person except at trusted locations. Worked fine. It's like writing things down in a notebook. You don't tie a stronger string around it, you keep track of where it's at.
Beyond that, it's convenience.
Ten steps to wiping the phone? Talk about opening yourself up for a DoS attack.
Saying that Jesus was an inspirational guy but not the son of God is what the Jews and Muslims do. Prophet, yes, son of God, no. And if a Christian did say that, nothing would happen to him. Certainly Interpol would not be involved.
Three gods or one god is a matter of semantics. It's the Christians who muddled that one up.
And Islam does recognize other prophets than Muhammad, such as Jesus, as well as many of the Jewish prophets, right down to Adam. They do, however, reject the idea that Jesus is a son of God.
The histories in the holy books of these three religions is so incredibly similar that it's obvious these are different interpretations of the same mythology. Since all three religions claim that the god in their histories is still their god, the position that these three gods are the same isn't an obviously incorrect one.
And in Dutch it's street slang for 'gun'.
In the Netherlands we have two types of taxes. 'Belasting', which are taxes such as income tax and sales tax, and 'accijns', which are taxes like tobacco and alcohol taxes, as well as fuel (about 70% of the price of gas in Holland is taxes), and import duties, probably among many others.
The latter, 'accijns', are all about encouraging a certain type of behavior, in practice. They don't work as far as I can see, although smoking is very unpopular right now partly due to cost.
Actually in the Netherlands we get paid vacations of AT LEAST one month. Or rather, four weeks. Most companies up that to five weeks, some go a bit higher, but the legal minimum is four weeks.
And we are now mandated to pay around 1100 euro's a year for medical insurance from our wages, after taxes. Even so, it's still better than the American 'system'.
As said, muslim invasion will only be a problem if current immigrant groups turn violent. Which they may; Sharia-4-Holland is a group which has recently gone from online protests to throwing eggs and disturbing meetings, and are watched closely for signs of radicalization, for example. The major cities are approaching or have passed 50% immigrant populations, which will definitely be a problem.
Yes, it would attempt to undo some of the damage you sustained when you lost your own civil war. (Slavery banned, yay, but at the cost of sovereignty of the States.)
If a county does something you dislike, you can easily move to a different county. If a state does something you cannot agree with, you can move to another state with moderate ease. Leaving your country of residence, however, is a lot of harder. Instead of moving away, you could try to change the politics, which becomes harder the bigger government is. Name the last president who wasn't a millionaire (or equivalent, for his time).
Think of this in the opposite. States could easily legalize marijuana and other drugs, they could allow gay marriage, and federal government wouldn't be able to stomp down on it.
As a Dutch person, I'd like to point out I am not aware of any law that states what the parent says.
Work you do with company resources belongs to the company, but anything you create after-hours on your own equipment is your own. There is no legal basis by which a company can claim copyright. I have seen language in contracts that claims works on products related to the company's portfolio, but never anything else.
Because it's often not what you can do, but who you know, to get cushy jobs. Not a skill many techs are great at, making use of contacts.
That said, sales people tend to have pretty strict targets which directly impacts their reward and/or continued employment.
Wow, you're coherent.
Agreed, on the cooked statistics. Same in my country (the Netherlands). In a country of 16 million people, the labor force is about 4-5 million. That means people who work or are looking for work. A few million live on government welfare of various sorts, a million or so work *for* government, etc. These numbers are worse for us because we spend a LOT of money on social security. That said, I'm all for subsidizing students and retired people. Stay-at-home parents could be encouraged depending on your political views. And we do not have the proportionally massive prison population you do in the States.
I like to approach these positions from an extreme, much in the same way Rand did, but realizing that we're not at that extreme. If all manual labor jobs have been taken and we've achieved national welfare that can sustain all citizens in comfort, then you need to either abolish money, or give everyone a government grant, because noone can contribute enough to live. So it seems logical to me that, as low-skilled labor dries up due to increasing technology and wealth, we will have more and more people receiving part of that wealth without doing anything in return.
The discussion, then, is how can we keep people contributing as much as possible, without sacrificing that increase in wealth. People who contribute are happier than those who are parasitical.
Also I, for one, welcome our gun-wielding robot overlords.
You'd *have* to dole out food and goods and housing. The problem is, this gives you power over them, and that will be abused. To say nothing of the big-L Libertarians (or worse) who'd posit that since these people no longer contribute, they're getting what they deserve. Or just simply greedy people.
You think leisure, which is fine, but moneyless leisure time sucks ass.