An equally valid way to interpret those numbers is that people tend to get certain types of information from other sources than Cable TV News. With economics, there's the Internet, there's Newspapers, there's cable TV stations entirely dedicated to economic news, and so forth. General-purpose Cable TV News is not intended or perceived as a person's sole resource on the current state of the world today.
You are over simplifying things. Western provinces can't survive without the East, why do you think so many people from the West travel to the East for work. If they become separate and independent, say goodbye to an open border.
This is in itself an over-simplification. Eastern provinces couldn't survive without the West, the factories and the construction boom are pretty much 100% based on a constant influx of rural poor from Western China.
Anyway, there's already a system in place of people from the west not having a hukou/local citizenship, and essentially being foreign workers without rights. If they became separate and independent, the system would barely have to change.
Chen Shui-bian was caught, forced out of office, and is facing criminal charges. I think that is a very suitable outcome, and I'm sure you know everyone involved in the PRC government is corrupt and taking bribes, from top to bottom, it's common knowledge - the fact that they generally don't get punished for it does not mean that the government is any less corrupt.
Really there's very little relation between automated docking and automated mining of the moon. My telling machine is also automated, but that's not a step towards mining space rocks.
It's obviously not the one person's life that is so important. It's the vast amount of resources that would have to be spent, on something that is (to my mind) a pretty worthless goal.
Having a person go on a suicide mission would be more painful, because putting a man on Mars is already a pointless goal, aside as some kind of massive PR effort. If the PR effort results in the man's death...well it's not much of a PR effort.
Maybe in the future technology will have gotten to the point that there's a good reason to go to Mars. As it is, the current technology isn't in need of further refinement - the current technology needs to be entirely replaced. A PR trip to Mars isn't going to help one bit.
The hardest to mimic? Playing live. This is where bands should make their money -- performing for fans.
Why? What about the Beatles? Their best music was made after they were able to stop performing live and concentrate on making albums. Dvorák didn't get up and wow the crowds with his latest number. Selling music has dominated the industry for centuries, it seems to have done a pretty good job of it.
Anyway, concerts come out after albums for a reason - nobody would want to pay $80 to see big-time rockers in a stadium if it wasn't for the promotional powers of the RIAA labels, and their ability to manufacture successful singles. Saying the music should be free and then the concerts would be the source of revenue ignores that indie musicians often give their music away freely, often have concerts that are cheaper and more interesting than big-rock-stadium concerts, and yet don't make very much money at it. Most of their money comes from selling CDs and other merchandise at the concerts.
It's hypocritical to bring up NIN or Radiohead. These are two bands who got big and made millions of dollars in the studio system, and now that their deals have expired, are able to cash in even more. Good for them, but more than anything this validates the studio system, it doesn't show any sort of new alternative.
Everything the guy was saying was, in fact, pretty much on-point. And frankly it is a little strange for a country where the economy is so thoroughly dependent on exports to be so throughly bad at English. It's not English-language chauvinism, it's just the way the modern world economy works.
Japan will also claim hotels are full when they're obviously not, policemen give passport checks to foreigners just walking down the street - I live in China and would never claim it's an immigrant paradise, but people's attitudes and the government's implemented policies are far, far more accommodating than Japan's.
Quite frankly something is wrong with a society that would rather build fanciful robots than allow other ethnicities to naturalize. A little criticism of Japan is just going to come in naturally to the discussion.
Kimchi is pretty good. I'm not Korean but it's pretty common in Hawai'i, it obviously has a smell but I've never heard anyone complain about it. I can't imagine what kind of white-bread Twinkie-eating motherfucker you must be, to have only tried it once, and thought it was so revolting.
In Japan, very fast broadband is common, but online shopping is much less popular in Japan than in the US, and in fact Japanese people are more likely to use their cell phones to browse the Internet than their broadband connections - mostly for chatting, which could easily be done on a 2400 baud modem. The Japanese software industry sucks, their economy has been in an 18 year rut...
Just saying "the economic impact of real broadband would be immense" isn't enough. What would be the economic impact? You vaguely mention "people becoming content providers", but isn't Youtube a better model than running your own server off broadband for this? Why is Youtube popular in Japan? And why haven't amazing new business models been developed in nations that do have near-universal broadband?
Anyway, generally speaking, broadband is easily and widely available in the US as long as you live in an urban or semi-populated area. Any business model would revolve around them, not people in the countryside or people who just haven't bothered upgrading from AOL, because it's good enough for e-mail.
(for instance, no foreign companies can have more than 49% ownership in a domestic company over there).
This is not true. Foreign companies may own 100% of Chinese companies. Foreigners may operate businesses in China. In industries considered vital to the nation, foreign ownership is limited - for instance banking, oil, transportation, telecommunication. The US, which has the world's most liberal policies in terms of foreign ownership, has similar limits in place, and in the case of banking, China's policy is more liberal.
In the end, all great countries have declined. This has happened to China as well in the past. From what I see in history, it's usually when a people, as a whole, want to live for today with no thought of tomorrow.
This is a very Judaic/Christian look at history - a nation being punished for its decadence! It doesn't have much to do with reality though. "Barbarians," "disease," and "war" are much better answers, but really aren't as thematically interesting.
It's seen in our media companies who can't bear the thought of letting go of old systems or even 80 year old cartoons (Steamboat Willy), songs, etcetera
Oh get off it. Tying copyright to the downfall of a nation is just too Slashdot. Try reading a newspaper or a real source of news.
Switzerland never really looked America enviously - they are the leaders in many technological areas of the world
Ha ha, I take it reading comprehension is not your forte. Anyway, he stated demand is effected, but "quantity of demand" isn't - it's a meaningless statement and obviously not what "economics" says.
Uhhh...they already do this. Here's the first one that came up on Amazon, but they have more and less expensive of boxed Linux available at just about any computer-related retail store.
Of all the methods of getting people to adopt Linux, I just don't think "it needs to cost more" is one of them.
Wow, no "MAFIAA" tags on this one. All the responses attacking the artists on this one (just about every high-modded response) shows that Slashdot is willing to blindly attack anyone who gets in the way of stealing music. Let's stop pretending it's a matter of principle.
If you're trying to use history to sound smart and add gravitas to your argument, you shouldn't be so entirely ignorant and incorrect about it. Athens didn't go bankrupt from wars before the Peloponnesian War (which I assume you were referring to), it led an economic league that was at the height of its powers and ruled Mediterranean trade. Wu didn't go bankrupt, perhaps you were thinking of the Shu kingdom but more likely you were talking out of your ass, anyway the country was invaded many years after repeatedly defending itself from invasion, and was clearly the least offensive of the three kingdoms, and probably the most economically successful.
Alexander the Great & Genghis Khan didn't just have delusions of power that poetically "slipped through their fingers"- they each ruled huge, expanding empires at the time of their deaths. Genghis Khan's descendants went on to rule what would become the largest empire ever.
Did you ever play SimEarth, SimLife, or SimZoo? They really sucked. This is his fourth try at the same basic idea, and it's hard to believe this one will be any better, much less take it for granted it will be some kind of classic. This is a game developer who's made a couple classics, but the large majority of his releases are either instantly forgettable, or add-on packs. All the hype over a collection of mini-games seems out of place.
Iran's economy is in free-fall suffering from stagflation, the US has set up essentially a permanent military presence on both their Western and their Eastern borders, and Iran's newspapers are calling for a need to call back the theology and take a more practical stance towards dealing with the West. I'd love to hear on what level you think Iran has "won" these wars. Many things have not gone the US's way, but that's not quite the same thing.
Iran rattles it's sabers from time to time (subjecting British soldiers to games of ping-pong, for instance), but it hasn't gained the nation the negotiation position that even North Korea enjoys. And Iran's oil supply has always been their bargaining chip, their ticket to being a country with any money or power. Claiming it's a by-product of the recent war is silly.
You're trying to make a point but you're just showing your ignorance of history. I'd go for the 13th century - Genghis Khan's killing off entire civilizations to increase the amount of grazing land for his horses is pretty hard to beat, he'd have entire cities massacred and giant piles of skulls made, and he conquered a huge portion of the civilized world.
Maybe, if we're talking about 20 years ago, and the quote was "beam me up, Scotty!" But a detail from a 40 years old TV show/25 year old movie, that most people have forgotten? The vast majority of the world won't get the reference - it's sub-culture literacy, at most.
And MPAA and RIAA officials... should acknowledge, respect and strongly support the continuing efforts of campus officials to address copyright issues, in part by ending the public posturing that portrays colleges and universities as dens of digital piracy.
For that to happen, colleges and universities will have to stop being dens of digital piracy. Everybody who's been to college in the last 10 or 15 years knows it's true. Slashdot it being ridiculous, ignoring well-known facts because they happen to disagree with their argument.
Why is this post modified insightful? What insight is it providing? It has a comparison of a city council proposal to the Nazis and the Jews and to American slavery. It doesn't actually make any sense if you think about it for half a second, then there's some general crazy rantings, an appeal to his post history (the quick version: a bunch of posts with no responses and no modding), and that's it.
Is the poster suggesting the citizens of New York will be enslaved and then killed, and that requiring permits for a Geiger Counter is inevitably a first step towards this? Can someone outline the insights, for those who don't see any?
As I see it, he's nothing more than the typical Slashdot Anti-Social nerd, raving on against all the "sheep," and getting modded up because it vaguely seems to go along with Slashdot's pervasive groupthink.
I download movies I wouldn't pay to see at the cinema. If I like it, I buy the DVD.
So you don't rent them? If such movies really don't have any value to you, why do you bother seeking them out, and then spend your time watching them? Why don't you download the freely available movies on (say) archive.org? Obviously you think they're better in some way.
I can't argue with you on this one, but a lot of the community here uses all freeware/open source and has no need to pirate shitty overpriced software.
I very much doubt the amount of people browsing Slashdot from a Linux computer is more than a couple percent. Anyway if the software is shitty & overpriced, does that make it OK to steal it? Wouldn't that just drive people into using freeware/open source? Most Slashdot discussion of high-profile open source projects is given to how shit they are - Gimp comes to mind.
Your after-the-fact rationalizations are absurd. Just admit that you can steal easily and there's likely no direct personal consequences, so you go ahead and do it.
Slashdot Mirror
An equally valid way to interpret those numbers is that people tend to get certain types of information from other sources than Cable TV News. With economics, there's the Internet, there's Newspapers, there's cable TV stations entirely dedicated to economic news, and so forth. General-purpose Cable TV News is not intended or perceived as a person's sole resource on the current state of the world today.
This is in itself an over-simplification. Eastern provinces couldn't survive without the West, the factories and the construction boom are pretty much 100% based on a constant influx of rural poor from Western China.
Anyway, there's already a system in place of people from the west not having a hukou/local citizenship, and essentially being foreign workers without rights. If they became separate and independent, the system would barely have to change.
Chen Shui-bian was caught, forced out of office, and is facing criminal charges. I think that is a very suitable outcome, and I'm sure you know everyone involved in the PRC government is corrupt and taking bribes, from top to bottom, it's common knowledge - the fact that they generally don't get punished for it does not mean that the government is any less corrupt.
Really there's very little relation between automated docking and automated mining of the moon. My telling machine is also automated, but that's not a step towards mining space rocks.
It's obviously not the one person's life that is so important. It's the vast amount of resources that would have to be spent, on something that is (to my mind) a pretty worthless goal.
Having a person go on a suicide mission would be more painful, because putting a man on Mars is already a pointless goal, aside as some kind of massive PR effort. If the PR effort results in the man's death...well it's not much of a PR effort.
Maybe in the future technology will have gotten to the point that there's a good reason to go to Mars. As it is, the current technology isn't in need of further refinement - the current technology needs to be entirely replaced. A PR trip to Mars isn't going to help one bit.
Why? What about the Beatles? Their best music was made after they were able to stop performing live and concentrate on making albums. Dvorák didn't get up and wow the crowds with his latest number. Selling music has dominated the industry for centuries, it seems to have done a pretty good job of it.
Anyway, concerts come out after albums for a reason - nobody would want to pay $80 to see big-time rockers in a stadium if it wasn't for the promotional powers of the RIAA labels, and their ability to manufacture successful singles. Saying the music should be free and then the concerts would be the source of revenue ignores that indie musicians often give their music away freely, often have concerts that are cheaper and more interesting than big-rock-stadium concerts, and yet don't make very much money at it. Most of their money comes from selling CDs and other merchandise at the concerts.
It's hypocritical to bring up NIN or Radiohead. These are two bands who got big and made millions of dollars in the studio system, and now that their deals have expired, are able to cash in even more. Good for them, but more than anything this validates the studio system, it doesn't show any sort of new alternative.
That's funny, I never heard of MIT before, I've always heard of it as "The University of Waterloo (Canada) of the South."
Japan will also claim hotels are full when they're obviously not, policemen give passport checks to foreigners just walking down the street - I live in China and would never claim it's an immigrant paradise, but people's attitudes and the government's implemented policies are far, far more accommodating than Japan's.
Quite frankly something is wrong with a society that would rather build fanciful robots than allow other ethnicities to naturalize. A little criticism of Japan is just going to come in naturally to the discussion.
Kimchi is pretty good. I'm not Korean but it's pretty common in Hawai'i, it obviously has a smell but I've never heard anyone complain about it. I can't imagine what kind of white-bread Twinkie-eating motherfucker you must be, to have only tried it once, and thought it was so revolting.
Wow, jokes about AOL CDs - thanks for another memory from the mid 90s! Hey, did you hear the one about how Bill Clinton keeps his ankles warm?
Just saying "the economic impact of real broadband would be immense" isn't enough. What would be the economic impact? You vaguely mention "people becoming content providers", but isn't Youtube a better model than running your own server off broadband for this? Why is Youtube popular in Japan? And why haven't amazing new business models been developed in nations that do have near-universal broadband?
Anyway, generally speaking, broadband is easily and widely available in the US as long as you live in an urban or semi-populated area. Any business model would revolve around them, not people in the countryside or people who just haven't bothered upgrading from AOL, because it's good enough for e-mail.
This is not true. Foreign companies may own 100% of Chinese companies. Foreigners may operate businesses in China. In industries considered vital to the nation, foreign ownership is limited - for instance banking, oil, transportation, telecommunication. The US, which has the world's most liberal policies in terms of foreign ownership, has similar limits in place, and in the case of banking, China's policy is more liberal.
In the end, all great countries have declined. This has happened to China as well in the past. From what I see in history, it's usually when a people, as a whole, want to live for today with no thought of tomorrow.
This is a very Judaic/Christian look at history - a nation being punished for its decadence! It doesn't have much to do with reality though. "Barbarians," "disease," and "war" are much better answers, but really aren't as thematically interesting. It's seen in our media companies who can't bear the thought of letting go of old systems or even 80 year old cartoons (Steamboat Willy), songs, etcetera
Oh get off it. Tying copyright to the downfall of a nation is just too Slashdot. Try reading a newspaper or a real source of news.
Switzerland never really looked America enviously - they are the leaders in many technological areas of the world
No they aren't.
Ha ha, I take it reading comprehension is not your forte. Anyway, he stated demand is effected, but "quantity of demand" isn't - it's a meaningless statement and obviously not what "economics" says.
What does this even mean?
Of all the methods of getting people to adopt Linux, I just don't think "it needs to cost more" is one of them.
Wow, no "MAFIAA" tags on this one. All the responses attacking the artists on this one (just about every high-modded response) shows that Slashdot is willing to blindly attack anyone who gets in the way of stealing music. Let's stop pretending it's a matter of principle.
Alexander the Great & Genghis Khan didn't just have delusions of power that poetically "slipped through their fingers"- they each ruled huge, expanding empires at the time of their deaths. Genghis Khan's descendants went on to rule what would become the largest empire ever.
Did you ever play SimEarth, SimLife, or SimZoo? They really sucked. This is his fourth try at the same basic idea, and it's hard to believe this one will be any better, much less take it for granted it will be some kind of classic. This is a game developer who's made a couple classics, but the large majority of his releases are either instantly forgettable, or add-on packs. All the hype over a collection of mini-games seems out of place.
7!
And furthermore, if more people used OpenOffice, Microsoft Office would be less popular.
Any opinions on whether the pope is Catholic, or if bears shit in the woods?
Iran rattles it's sabers from time to time (subjecting British soldiers to games of ping-pong, for instance), but it hasn't gained the nation the negotiation position that even North Korea enjoys. And Iran's oil supply has always been their bargaining chip, their ticket to being a country with any money or power. Claiming it's a by-product of the recent war is silly.
You're trying to make a point but you're just showing your ignorance of history. I'd go for the 13th century - Genghis Khan's killing off entire civilizations to increase the amount of grazing land for his horses is pretty hard to beat, he'd have entire cities massacred and giant piles of skulls made, and he conquered a huge portion of the civilized world.
Maybe, if we're talking about 20 years ago, and the quote was "beam me up, Scotty!" But a detail from a 40 years old TV show/25 year old movie, that most people have forgotten? The vast majority of the world won't get the reference - it's sub-culture literacy, at most.
For that to happen, colleges and universities will have to stop being dens of digital piracy. Everybody who's been to college in the last 10 or 15 years knows it's true. Slashdot it being ridiculous, ignoring well-known facts because they happen to disagree with their argument.
Is the poster suggesting the citizens of New York will be enslaved and then killed, and that requiring permits for a Geiger Counter is inevitably a first step towards this? Can someone outline the insights, for those who don't see any?
As I see it, he's nothing more than the typical Slashdot Anti-Social nerd, raving on against all the "sheep," and getting modded up because it vaguely seems to go along with Slashdot's pervasive groupthink.
So you don't rent them? If such movies really don't have any value to you, why do you bother seeking them out, and then spend your time watching them? Why don't you download the freely available movies on (say) archive.org? Obviously you think they're better in some way.
I can't argue with you on this one, but a lot of the community here uses all freeware/open source and has no need to pirate shitty overpriced software.
I very much doubt the amount of people browsing Slashdot from a Linux computer is more than a couple percent. Anyway if the software is shitty & overpriced, does that make it OK to steal it? Wouldn't that just drive people into using freeware/open source? Most Slashdot discussion of high-profile open source projects is given to how shit they are - Gimp comes to mind.
Your after-the-fact rationalizations are absurd. Just admit that you can steal easily and there's likely no direct personal consequences, so you go ahead and do it.