Whenever they can't compete, they'll find a way within their system to thwart the competition. They are a sad lot. Thankfully Britain doesn't have the same mentality.
I read that post three times over wondering what the hell Britain had to do with Microsoft's mentality regarding competition. Then I noticed the subject field said 'Europe'...
I like to think of it as a "Free Market of Laws." Municipalities compete on tax codes, restrictions on drugs, tobacco, alcohol, and firearms, and on anything else government tends to get involved in. Unfortunately, there are so many people with Sacred Cows (abortion, the "temperance" movement, slavery, drug use, whatever) that they believe must be universally abolished or allowed, that they'll never allow local populations to compete on it and see what's *really* best.
The case of slavery doesn't fit here. Suppose Town S has slavery, while Town N does not. In a free market of laws, someone disagreeing with Town S's policy could simply go to Town N. But of course, the people living in Town S who have a problem with slavery are not free to go to Town N, because, well... they're slaves.
A free market is all very well, provided that all participants are free. If some are slaves, then that market is definitely not free.
... skimpy costumes worn by booth chix0rz should only be permitted if they're replicas of those worn by characters in the game, movie or anime in question.
I've nothing against it, as long as it's geekily appropriate:)
There's many a state right now gnashing their teeth over the almost universal jump in tobacco taxes a few years ago. They claimed that they were raising those taxes to get people to quit smoking. Well it worked and now they're complaining that they're not getting as much tax revenue from cigarettes.
Meanwhile, in Ireland, they imposed a tax a few years ago of fifteen cents on every plastic carrier bag provided by stores to their customers.
Just about every bugger in the country immediately switched to reusing their existing bags, and / or got themselves durable shopping bags rather than counting on getting some at the store when needed.
Result? The government in Dublin gets practically nothing in revenue from this tax. However, the Irish countryside and landfills are remarkably free from discarded plastic bags. Which was, of course, the idea in the first place...
You know as a child I made up invisible things to blame and was told that was a bad thing to do. Only now I find out I was really a budding scientist...
I suspect your invisible things weren't of the 'no, really, hang around and watch, you'll see, it's about to do it again!' kind. More of the 'uh... well, it went away when you came in. It's only around when you're not looking. And it knocks things over when I'm the only one in the room' variety, if you were a kid making excuses.
of course, China can make good products, but the popular stuff in the big-box stores is pretty shit.
I've got to disagree there. I've got a no-name super-cheap Chinese-made DVD player picked up in a discount supermarket, and an expensive branded DVD player picked up in a specialist TV store.
Guess which one plays every DVD I put in it without complaint, and which one barfs on many of them with some dumb error message about the region, and refuses to let me skip the trailers and legal threats on the ones it does deign to play?
Hooray for cheap Chinese electronics, that's what I say!
With that attitude, you'd have loved the Sarin gas market in 1943-44.
So far as I'm aware, nobody was using Sarin in 1943-44. Chemical weapons were stockpiled throughout the war, but never used.
The Germans were, however, getting through rather a lot of Zyklon B, and carbon monoxide at that time. They used them for, er, fumigating buildings. And delousing prisoners' belongings. Yep. That's all. Honest. Nothing else, why do you ask...?
Did you mean to say "More opportunities for English speaking people to misinterpret Arabic media."?
Pah. English-speaking people never misinterpret Arabic media. al-Jazeera is a terrorist front organisation and ought to be bombed, and that's all there is to it!
I doubt that a grainy "Star Wars" prequel making it to the web stopped anybody (even those that downloaded it) from going to the movie or buying the DVD later.
Not sure about that. There's at least one Star Wars prequel which, if I'd seen a download of it beforehand, I would never have gone to see at the cinema. In fact I'd have been there outside the cinema on opening day hitting people over the head with their own toy lightsabers and screaming NO! NO! FOR THE LOVE OF YODA, DON'T! IT SUCKS! IT REALLY REALLY SUCKS! YOU HAVE NO IDEA OF THE POWER OF THE DARK SIDE! DON'T SAY MEESA NEVER WARNEDS YOU!...
May we have some nice light sweet crude and/or Liquified Natural Gas, please?
Dear Mr George Georgovitch Bush,
Sorry, but we're running rather low on natural gas ourselves at the moment. The Russians are hogging the whole supply and using the money to buy footballers. If you could help us out with the gas bill to Sibneft, though, we'd be happy to send some your way.
It made it very clear to me that I never want to be in a firefight - I lost way too often, which in RL is defined as "more than once".
Actually, I'd prefer not to be on the losing side of a firefight even once. More than once is, well... overkill. Literally.
The trick with these things is to cajole, trick, bully, bribe, deceive or persuade others into going into firefights on your behalf. Cf. Messrs. G. W. Bush and A. R. P. Blair in their recent disputes with Messrs. S. Hussein and O. B. Laden.
To think that malicious employees waited until flash drives to steal data! Dear god, what about paper printouts, hard drives, e-mail, and (dare I say it?) floppy disks?!?
Heh. Flash drives are old hat anyway. The modern data thief uses a palmtop and a Bluetooth-enabled rock, almost certainly prepared by Q.
Always make a backup. I think it's in the Bible too
Yep. It's in Genesis. Something about a bloody great boat.
What worries me is how far the lesson has been taken. What happens if Him Upstairs has full backups? What if he decides he doesn't like the direction things are going and rolls back to an earlier saved state? How would we ever know if he did?
Just one third? That's the EU, Japan, Canada... What's going on? Do American businesses upgrade more frequently? Do European servers all run that commie OS from Finland?
If the Rest of the World only adds up to half of what Microsoft makes from Americans, then surely their monopoly in most places isn't worth a hill of beans. That's not what I'm seeing.
please, just because terrorists have no rights here doesnt mean the rest of us are losing them.
Alleged terrorists. I don't think any of the people in that gulag in Cuba have been so much as charged with an offence, let alone gone before a trial with judge and jury and public presentation of evidence.
So: to lose all your rights, all it takes is for you to be accused of terrorism. Some of us think that a country where accusation is considered equivalent to proof is, well... a tyranny. YMMV.
If it's loved so much (and it is), why is the industry constantly under attack?
Because people are socially obliged to pretend that they think porn is a bad thing. People in positions of power, especially. It's an easy way to seem Family-Friendly. A crackdown on Pornography, for the sake of The Children.
The point was that Britain reduced its own freedom and allowed the USA to grow and overtake it as world leader.
The USA would always have surpassed Britain. Larger population and greater availability of natural resources. In the late 19th century, we were looking at the industrial production figures from the US and Germany in the same kind of way as the US is looking at China now...
What really did for the Empire was the fact that twice in the first half of the twentieth century pretty much the entire industrial capacity of the United Kingdom was given over to the military. While Europeans murdered each other by the millions, Americans profited and quietly took over our supply contracts.
In 1945, Europe was a wreck. The UK had got off comparatively lightly, but was still desperately short of cash. Couldn't afford to field both the Imperial garrisons and the NATO troops... so the Empire had to go.
Interestingly enough, our technology has remained excellent. Alas, because so much of it came out of military necessity it remained classified - and the Americans ended up profiting by it. There's the lesson: tying up technology in artificial restrictions is a bad, bad idea. Silicon Valley could so easily have appeared in England, developing out of Turing's wartime work - but of course that was all kept very, very secret.
It only works if we find water on the moon and water on mars. Doesn't that mean this plan is science fiction? Or should billions be invested on a maybe?
Clementine indicated that there may be water ice on the moon; however, this was not confirmed by the later impact of Lunar Prospector, so further investigation will be needed. Mars Express indicated that there is very probably water on Mars - in the polar icecaps, and in subsurface permafrost.
Before constructing a manned infrastructure that relies on these supplies, we'd need to confirm their availability by dedicated robot probe, but there's certainly good reason to think that the water is there.
Damn was that game ever hard. The intelligence agencies were bloody useless, as well... I once played a two-player game against myself, running both sides with equal incompetence, and the KGB were assuring me that the Americans were about to orbit a minishuttle - I'd barely even got Gemini spaceworthy:)
I figure that my electronic devices, with their "waste heat" are actually heating my place. I don't see that as a bad thing -- I want the heat.
Well, kind of. But you're not really doing your bit for the national Kyoto commitment that way. Consider: if you heat your home by burning gas, you're getting pretty much 100% efficiency. All the energy turns to heat. If, OTOH, you heat your home by electricity, somewhere there's a powerplant burning gas at much less than 100% efficiency to provide that power. Much better to cut out the middleman, and usually it's a good deal cheaper too.
If there's a device you really have to have on, then its waste heat is a bonus in your cold house, that's fine. But in general, it's better to switch off any superfluous electrical devices and let the thermostat burn a little more gas to make up the difference.
Then the terrorists will come after us for severely damaging their economy and thus causing further pain and suffering to their people. No matter what terrorists always find some excuse to be terrorists.
Sure, they'll always find some excuse to be terrorists. There'll always be angry young hotheads keen to set the world to rights.
But the thing is, once we have no further use for they're oil then we're gone from the Middle East, and they no longer have the unifying focus of the Great Satan. What happens then? You're going to love it: they turn on each other. That's what religious bigots do, when left to themselves. They get into an 'I'm more pious than you' pissing match, fragment, faction and murder each other. All that's stopping the various terrorist cells and groups from going after each other is that they'd all far rather go after us. We leave the Middle East, they'll kill each other off in a beautiful bloodbath. Hell, that's what they were doing anyway, before they got on this jihad about America.
The only problem with this dream scenario is Israel; however, I suspect that most of the West's support for Israel comes from the value of having a powerful country there whose allegiance is totally to our side, and ties back in to the oil addiction. Once we don't need the oil any more, we don't need Israel either, and I think it's very likely that we'll cut them loose to look after themselves.
I realise that all this involves civil wars across an entire region, the deaths of huge numbers of people, and human suffering on an enormous scale. But that's what things are like already in large parts of Africa, which we don't care about at all because there's no oil there. Once we don't need the Middle East's oil, we won't care about them either.
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I read that post three times over wondering what the hell Britain had to do with Microsoft's mentality regarding competition. Then I noticed the subject field said 'Europe'...
The case of slavery doesn't fit here. Suppose Town S has slavery, while Town N does not. In a free market of laws, someone disagreeing with Town S's policy could simply go to Town N. But of course, the people living in Town S who have a problem with slavery are not free to go to Town N, because, well... they're slaves.
A free market is all very well, provided that all participants are free. If some are slaves, then that market is definitely not free.
I've nothing against it, as long as it's geekily appropriate :)
Meanwhile, in Ireland, they imposed a tax a few years ago of fifteen cents on every plastic carrier bag provided by stores to their customers.
Just about every bugger in the country immediately switched to reusing their existing bags, and / or got themselves durable shopping bags rather than counting on getting some at the store when needed.
Result? The government in Dublin gets practically nothing in revenue from this tax. However, the Irish countryside and landfills are remarkably free from discarded plastic bags. Which was, of course, the idea in the first place...
I suspect your invisible things weren't of the 'no, really, hang around and watch, you'll see, it's about to do it again!' kind. More of the 'uh... well, it went away when you came in. It's only around when you're not looking. And it knocks things over when I'm the only one in the room' variety, if you were a kid making excuses.
That, I think, makes you a budding theologian :)
... and given that he thinks it's a good idea to tax nonintoxicating beverages, I'd suggest he put a largish tax on tea.
I've got to disagree there. I've got a no-name super-cheap Chinese-made DVD player picked up in a discount supermarket, and an expensive branded DVD player picked up in a specialist TV store.
Guess which one plays every DVD I put in it without complaint, and which one barfs on many of them with some dumb error message about the region, and refuses to let me skip the trailers and legal threats on the ones it does deign to play?
Hooray for cheap Chinese electronics, that's what I say!
So far as I'm aware, nobody was using Sarin in 1943-44. Chemical weapons were stockpiled throughout the war, but never used.
The Germans were, however, getting through rather a lot of Zyklon B, and carbon monoxide at that time. They used them for, er, fumigating buildings. And delousing prisoners' belongings. Yep. That's all. Honest. Nothing else, why do you ask...?
Pah. English-speaking people never misinterpret Arabic media. al-Jazeera is a terrorist front organisation and ought to be bombed, and that's all there is to it!
Not sure about that. There's at least one Star Wars prequel which, if I'd seen a download of it beforehand, I would never have gone to see at the cinema. In fact I'd have been there outside the cinema on opening day hitting people over the head with their own toy lightsabers and screaming NO! NO! FOR THE LOVE OF YODA, DON'T! IT SUCKS! IT REALLY REALLY SUCKS! YOU HAVE NO IDEA OF THE POWER OF THE DARK SIDE! DON'T SAY MEESA NEVER WARNEDS YOU!...
Dear Mr George Georgovitch Bush,
Sorry, but we're running rather low on natural gas ourselves at the moment. The Russians are hogging the whole supply and using the money to buy footballers. If you could help us out with the gas bill to Sibneft, though, we'd be happy to send some your way.
Actually, I'd prefer not to be on the losing side of a firefight even once. More than once is, well... overkill. Literally.
The trick with these things is to cajole, trick, bully, bribe, deceive or persuade others into going into firefights on your behalf. Cf. Messrs. G. W. Bush and A. R. P. Blair in their recent disputes with Messrs. S. Hussein and O. B. Laden.
Heh. Flash drives are old hat anyway. The modern data thief uses a palmtop and a Bluetooth-enabled rock, almost certainly prepared by Q.
Yep. It's in Genesis. Something about a bloody great boat.
What worries me is how far the lesson has been taken. What happens if Him Upstairs has full backups? What if he decides he doesn't like the direction things are going and rolls back to an earlier saved state? How would we ever know if he did?
Just one third? That's the EU, Japan, Canada... What's going on? Do American businesses upgrade more frequently? Do European servers all run that commie OS from Finland?
If the Rest of the World only adds up to half of what Microsoft makes from Americans, then surely their monopoly in most places isn't worth a hill of beans. That's not what I'm seeing.
Alleged terrorists. I don't think any of the people in that gulag in Cuba have been so much as charged with an offence, let alone gone before a trial with judge and jury and public presentation of evidence.
So: to lose all your rights, all it takes is for you to be accused of terrorism. Some of us think that a country where accusation is considered equivalent to proof is, well... a tyranny. YMMV.
Because people are socially obliged to pretend that they think porn is a bad thing. People in positions of power, especially. It's an easy way to seem Family-Friendly. A crackdown on Pornography, for the sake of The Children.
... that he should lean on his publisher to release Katamari Damacy in Europe, dammit!
I think that's what's referred to as 'Mode Execute Ready' - not 'Access Standby' and certainly not the appallingly stone-aged 'Off'...
(panic!)
The USA would always have surpassed Britain. Larger population and greater availability of natural resources. In the late 19th century, we were looking at the industrial production figures from the US and Germany in the same kind of way as the US is looking at China now...
What really did for the Empire was the fact that twice in the first half of the twentieth century pretty much the entire industrial capacity of the United Kingdom was given over to the military. While Europeans murdered each other by the millions, Americans profited and quietly took over our supply contracts.
In 1945, Europe was a wreck. The UK had got off comparatively lightly, but was still desperately short of cash. Couldn't afford to field both the Imperial garrisons and the NATO troops... so the Empire had to go.
Interestingly enough, our technology has remained excellent. Alas, because so much of it came out of military necessity it remained classified - and the Americans ended up profiting by it. There's the lesson: tying up technology in artificial restrictions is a bad, bad idea. Silicon Valley could so easily have appeared in England, developing out of Turing's wartime work - but of course that was all kept very, very secret.
Clementine indicated that there may be water ice on the moon; however, this was not confirmed by the later impact of Lunar Prospector, so further investigation will be needed. Mars Express indicated that there is very probably water on Mars - in the polar icecaps, and in subsurface permafrost.
Before constructing a manned infrastructure that relies on these supplies, we'd need to confirm their availability by dedicated robot probe, but there's certainly good reason to think that the water is there.
Damn was that game ever hard. The intelligence agencies were bloody useless, as well... I once played a two-player game against myself, running both sides with equal incompetence, and the KGB were assuring me that the Americans were about to orbit a minishuttle - I'd barely even got Gemini spaceworthy :)
... but I read it first in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe.
Well, kind of. But you're not really doing your bit for the national Kyoto commitment that way. Consider: if you heat your home by burning gas, you're getting pretty much 100% efficiency. All the energy turns to heat. If, OTOH, you heat your home by electricity, somewhere there's a powerplant burning gas at much less than 100% efficiency to provide that power. Much better to cut out the middleman, and usually it's a good deal cheaper too.
If there's a device you really have to have on, then its waste heat is a bonus in your cold house, that's fine. But in general, it's better to switch off any superfluous electrical devices and let the thermostat burn a little more gas to make up the difference.
Sure, they'll always find some excuse to be terrorists. There'll always be angry young hotheads keen to set the world to rights.
But the thing is, once we have no further use for they're oil then we're gone from the Middle East, and they no longer have the unifying focus of the Great Satan. What happens then? You're going to love it: they turn on each other. That's what religious bigots do, when left to themselves. They get into an 'I'm more pious than you' pissing match, fragment, faction and murder each other. All that's stopping the various terrorist cells and groups from going after each other is that they'd all far rather go after us. We leave the Middle East, they'll kill each other off in a beautiful bloodbath. Hell, that's what they were doing anyway, before they got on this jihad about America.
The only problem with this dream scenario is Israel; however, I suspect that most of the West's support for Israel comes from the value of having a powerful country there whose allegiance is totally to our side, and ties back in to the oil addiction. Once we don't need the oil any more, we don't need Israel either, and I think it's very likely that we'll cut them loose to look after themselves.
I realise that all this involves civil wars across an entire region, the deaths of huge numbers of people, and human suffering on an enormous scale. But that's what things are like already in large parts of Africa, which we don't care about at all because there's no oil there. Once we don't need the Middle East's oil, we won't care about them either.