We have laws saying you can't steal stuff. What do people think is special about music that you should be able to steal music in contravention of this general principle?
Because it is possible to copy music, so that I get music for free, without depriving anybody else of their music.
(If you don't believe in the general principle please let me know where you live and I'll come round and help myself to all your stuff.)
If you have a magic wand that can create perfect duplicates of my stuff without depriving me of the originals, come along and help yourself.
He's the guy who pays attention to things like seasons and weather, and how the moon moves. The guy who has memorised - because there is no writing - the lineages of everyone in the tribe and the history of heroes and deeds. The guy with the lore of plants and herbs, and which kill, and which heal, and which bring visions of the gods.
He's the Stone Age nerd, and he's very powerful because of it. Signs in the sky tell him when the buffalo migration is due, and because of this the hunters bring home great bounty. His authority on matters of history settles disputes over ancestral status within the tribe. And because he is the one who eats of the sacred root and speaks with the gods, not even the chieftain is prepared to gainsay him.
Or leaving it up to the IRA to decide whether more restrictions should be imposed on the sale of shotguns in the US.
The IRA usually go a bit beyond shotguns. Assault rifles and high explosives are more their scene. They'd be more interested in avoiding restrictions on the sale of Armalite rifles in the US. Possibly you meant the NRA?
The only difference between a GPL violation and infringement of copyright on a commercial movie is that people on Slashdot see the former as evil and disgusting and the latter as heroic. Both are the exact same violation of law.
Of law, yes, of ethics, perhaps not. Both are violations of copyright, but the GPL violation is usually also plagiarism. The BitTorrent uploader does not claim that the music he distributes is of his own creation; instead he clearly labels it with the name of the original artist, giving credit where it is due. The GPL violator appropriates the work of others and passes it off as his own. Legally they're both in the same boat, but morally there's a world of difference.
When your entire business model is based on violating copyright for money. Which Google DOES NOT do. But Pirate Bay does.
So Google has permission from every copyright holder of every web page on the net to copy their pages to its servers, hash them, index them, and cross-reference them to create a derivative work from which Google will make immense profits, of which the original artists will see not one penny?
I hope you realize that you just made the "nothing to hide" argument.
Not quite. It's not true that the innocent have nothing to hide, but they certainly have much less to hide; the guilty have to hide their guilt in addition to all the rest of their secrets, and it's their guilt which attracts attention to them specifically. As a result, given the choice between the NSA and the MAFIAA, many of us would rather our ISP protect us from the latter.
They rolled over for the NSA. They fought when it was convenient for them. Being inconsistent means nothing.
Oh, but it does. If you're worried about the NSA, you're... well, stuffed, really. Encrypt everything you can, and check for hardware keyloggers on the cable every morning before you log on.
Most of us, in practice, aren't worried about the NSA other than in the abstract. We're not organising political protests or anything. We're doing nothing to attract their attention. But we are worried about the MAFIAA, because a lot of us are... well, we are doing things to attract their attention. Gigabytes of things. Daily. An ISP that will stand up for its customers against those guys is golden.
Yes, I love Wii. But... no, it's not the greatest of all time. It's not even the greatest Nintendo console of all time. Depending on what happens in the future we might improve its ranking, especially if all the next generation copy its control system, but as it stands, no.
For the greatest console of all time, I have two words:
GAME BOY.
Every other console has had credible rivals that did much the same thing. The NES competed with home computers, early on with Spectrums and C64s and later with Acorns and Amigas. SNES faced the Mega Drive. And so on, and so on. Often there's been a clear leader, but there's never been anything else remotely like the Game Boy's dominance. And as pack-in games go, Tetris was an absolute killer.
The Game Boy lasted a decade and saw off every rival that ever dared try it on. Sega had a good go, they had a colour screen and everything, but the Game Gear sank while Nintendo marched on, and on, and on... I thought it was finally dying off, then Pokemon happened - and suddenly every one of the countless millions of old Game Boys came out of the attic and lit up again, played with by the original owners' younger brothers! And hence a miniaturised Gameboy Pocket made with modern technology, and then colour...
Its contemporary successor is nearly as crazy. Everyone thought the DS was a stopgap. A cheap gimmick produced to slow down the PSP while Nintendo worked on the real next-gen Game Boy. How very, very wrong we were.
My point with bringing up that war as a justified war. Fighting against the Nazis was a noble and worthy goal, one that people less selfish than yourself dearly cared about and thus joined the war, and sacrificed so much.
We went to war ostensibly to liberate Poland. Having vanquished Hitler, we left that country to the tender mercies of Stalin. I suppose it was an improvement, but it doesn't quite fit the legend of our brave boys fighting for freedom against tyranny.
We did not go to war because Hitler was an evil Fascist dictator. We deliberately appeased that monster for years, and had he not invaded Poland I doubt we would ever have gone to war against him. We let Franco keep Spain for the rest of his natural life, after all, and Stalin died of old age in his bed in the Kremlin. We went to war because Hitler had become a clear threat to British interests and imperial possessions, and because we thought we could win. The war may later have become a heroic crusade against a murderous villain, but it began as the bad old-fashioned European politics of power and wealth.
Was the fight noble and worthy? Worthy, yes. I'll not deny that the defeat of Hitler was worth the price, at least from a survivor's point of view; it cost us hundreds of thousands of lives and the whole Empire, and we only finished paying the Americans for the equipment in 2006, but what otherwise might have been really doesn't bear thinking about. I don't know about noble; it was a filthy, brutal and sordid affair throughout.
May I suggest to you to try to become, or at least try to look a bit less selfish.
If I'm selfish, I'm in good company; I'm following the best examples given by our esteemed leaders throughout the generations.
Not everyone who says, "thank god", is actually referring to any specific god and is merely using a colloquialism.
Perhaps, but the word 'god' in that phrase is a proper noun. If it wasn't a personal name, it would be 'Thank the god' or 'Thank a god' or 'Thank some god' or 'Thank any god' or 'Thank whichever god was responsible for that near escape!' The phrase makes no sense unless the word is a proper name, and so it should take a capital letter. They may not have any particular god in mind, but they use the word as a name. It gets a capital.
As for the "Him", "His", nonsense, aren't people referring to a *specific* "him" in those cases (that was part of your argument)?
Yes, but pronouns don't conventionally take capital letters, just the nouns themselves. You wouldn't write 'This is David and this is His car', even though the 'his' refers to a specific person. The practice of capitalising pronouns referring to God exists to show religious devotion, and thus can be dispensed with by those who do not believe in God but who do still believe in the importance of good written English.
"God" isn't a him or a her. It's a concept. People who consider that concept to be a real entity tend to want to codify that belief with a capital g. Those that don't tend to not want to be confused for someone who considers god to be anything more than a concept, and prefer to lowercase g in order to make *that* position clear.
I'm a fan of the Sandman comics. As a result I often use the word 'dream' as a proper noun, referring to a character of that name in the series. He's a fictional character, but in accordance with the rules of English grammar I write it 'Dream'. Not only is it good English grammar, it distinguishes clearly between the general practice of dreaming, and the specific character in the book. Same with God. God gets a capital letter because it's a proper noun, because it's a name, and whether or not the thing it names exists as a clearly-defined entity is quite irrelevant.
To tell people to adhere to (what you claim to be proper) grammar at the expense of the meaning they are trying to convey is to apply (what you claim to be proper) grammar where it doesn't belong.
Words are meant to convey meaning, not meant to adhere to an arbitrary set of rules. When those rules work *against* the conveyance of meaning, adherence to those rules becomes of questionable value.
Oh, it makes it perfectly clear. It says 'My disdain for religious belief is so important to me that I'm wilfully going to violate the rules of written English just to emphasise my contempt for the whole concept.' It comes off as tremendously juvenile and arrogant, and makes us all look bad. Please don't do it.
You're totally in the wrong on this one. The original "christian" bible didn't refer to god in mixed case - lowercase letters hadn't been invented until well after Jesus' death. So there was never, in the original text, a way of differentiating usage by diferences in character case.
OR WOULD YOU RATHER I WRITE EVERYTHING IN UPPER_CASE_ONLY TO CONFORM WITH THE OLD AND NEW TESTAMENT PRACTICE?
No, I'd rather you use a small g when referring to gods in general, and a large G when using 'God' as a proper noun. I don't much care how the ancient Hebrews or Greeks used to write. In English, names take a capital letter. In German they capitalise every noun, in Japanese they don't really have case, and if you are in fact a Hebrew scholar then you may proceed as you see fit in that language, but don't butcher the Queen's good English in the name of some theological quibble.
Insisting on any form of capitalization of the word god is just another of those extreme (and unjustifiable from a historic context) conservative and religious mindsets the article talks about.
Conservative, perhaps. Religious, only if the First Church of Lynne Truss counts.
The shop across the street was unionized. The manager at my dad's plant said, "I'll give you everything the union shop gets, no questions asked. They can go on strike, get a better deal, and then you'll get that deal. Plus, you don't have to miss that pay while you'd be out on strike." They never unionized, and never went on strike. I guess the moral is that if you treat your employees with respect and treat them well (with good pay, good benefits, etc.) then unions aren't really required.
Sounds to me like the union was required. The workers across the street unionised, and they struck for better pay and conditions, and they got them. As a side-effect of this, your father's company gave its workers the same benefits, for fear that they would see what their comrades had achieved and then struggle to obtain the same for themselves. But neither set of workers would have gained anything at all if not for the union.
The Christian god's name is God with a capital G. That's his name. Since he seemed to be thanking a specific god then it was incorrect English to use lowercase.
That's something that really, really annoys me. People lowercasing the word 'god' when using it as a proper noun. It's not big and it's not clever, it's just pisspoor grammar. If you want to say 'I am the god of hellfire and I bring you...', then 'god' is a generic noun and takes a small g. If you want to say 'Well, thank God for that' then 'god' is a proper noun, a name used for a specific god, and it takes a big G. It's just good English, and messing about with it just to piss off the Christians is silly and makes us all look bad.
Feel free to drop all that nonsense about capitalising pronouns that happen to refer to God, though. All that His and Him stuff. That's completely unnecessary religious flummery and can be dispensed with forthwith.
It takes a person with a big head to look at the 95% of the earth's population that believes in a supreme being and declare them all delusional.
I suspect that figure's a little high. That would put it at no more than 300,000,000 who don't believe in a supreme being. Yet Buddhists alone probably exceed that figure, before we even begin to count the explicitly secular population.
The only way to coerce us would be all-out war. They'd send their millions of soccer players, and we'd have guns. Fun for the gun-havers, but the soccer afficianados would be very sad.
There is nothing intrinsic about the legitimacy of file sharing. It is not intrinsically illegitimate. What makes it illegitimate is the fact that those who create the files that are shared are not compensated for their effort.
What makes it illegitimate is a government-enforced monopoly called 'copyright'. That is all. So if the government wish to amend the terms of this monopoly, in accordance with the desires of the public to share files freely, they can do so. What government edict giveth, government edict can take away.
Virtually all sharing on the internet and wireless devices would be tracked. Companies who currently do this type of tracking have prepared themselves and are waiting in the wings. Creators and rights holders will be paid with a level of speed and accuracy never before possible.
Who are these mysterious people waiting in the wings that have been spying on everyone?
And how are they going to track sharing via wireless devices, not on the internet? On Saturday I bought a four gigabyte memory card for my phone. It's the size of a fingernail. Call it a thousand songs. It's a Bluetooth phone, like just about every other one on the market today. I can send any of those thousand songs to any other Bluetooth phone within range. I might set myself a project of writing Bluester: the Java application that makes your mp3 collection freely available to all-comers. I can see that thing going viral in every high school in the land. Where will the record cartels even begin?
I think I speak for all the astronomy geeks here when I say I'd like to take that thing and introduce it rather directly to its user, by way of where the sun does not shine. And then switch it on.
Ummm...HEAT RAY!! Did you NOT read/listen to/see/experience War of the Worlds? You're the FIRST puny human I'm using this thing on! And no common cold is gonna stop me!
* ring ring. ring ring. *
Hello. Yes. Get me the First Lord of the Admiralty, would you? I need to have a word with the Navy. Thanks awfully. Yes, I'll hold......... Ah, hello Sir Rupert. Yes, we've got a bit of a flap on down near Foulness. Yes. Somebody with a... very intense light beam of some kind, setting fire to shipping. Yes, it's a new one on me too. Amazing what they think up. Well, y'see, it's not going to be long before they get the pictures on the old television, and we really have to look like we're doing something about it... HMS Thunder-Child is free? You'll shell the source of the beam? I say, that's wonderful. It'll look quite dashing on the six o'clock news all right. Well, terrific. Best of luck to you all, and give them a couple of shells from me too! Cheerio!
Would you not have fought for the allies in World War II?
Who knows? I'd have grown up in a very different culture and would have been bathed in imperialistic propaganda all my life. If it was asked of me today, I'd claim Irish citizenship on the spot and get the hell out. It's a straightforward calculation. I can fight or not fight, and my country can win or not win. Assume that it is of substantial benefit to me if my country wins, by whatever value system you want to measure that. Now, if I fight I place myself at extreme risk of death or disability, and increase the probability of victory by a negligible amount. The expected payoff simply isn't worth it. The best place for me would be either at Bletchley or in some aircraft factory optimising production capacity - less risk, far greater difference made to the war effort.
Was it also a fight for the millionaires?
It would be a gross oversimplification to say yes. Fascism was a popular movement of the masses, which the German elites tried and failed to keep under control; for them it was a fight for lebensraum, for the restoration of national pride after the humiliation of Versailles, and to destroy the Bolshevik menace (that last, by the way, would meet with hearty approval from about any millionaire you cared to ask). But why did we care if Germany invaded Poland? In part, because we feared that their next move might be against North Africa, which would threaten the Suez Canal and hence India - this at a time when the Japanese were already behaving very badly in east Asia. That was always the richest colony of the Empire, milk cow for the entire comfortable imperial class of the British Raj. Vast fortunes were made there, and if it had been lost Britain would rapidly have gone from a great maritime trading empire to a third-rate power occupying a small island off the coast of Europe, and would probably have been reduced to being a satellite state of the Americans or the Germans by the end of the century. Unthinkable!
I've always wondered how HAL or Joshua would interpret:
Rule 1: Kill enemy combatants.
Rule 2: Do not kill or abuse prisoners.
"Take no prisoners, kill everything that moves" would be the most efficient means of satisfying both, especially after friendly-fire ensues.
It's all just a question of which AI happens to be in charge at the time. If you're lucky, when you get to the POW camp there will be cake.
War is about sacrifice, cost, and essentially fighting for what you believe in, hold dear, and WILL DIE to preserve. If you remove the *human* cost from war, then where is the cost? What will it mean if no-one dies? Will anyone remember what was fought for? Will they even recognize why it was so important in the first place?
Bullshit. War is about taking orders, fighting for what someone else believes in, and then getting blown up. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori and all that shite. That poetic nonsense you spout there is just part of the cultural lie that sells war as romantic and idealistic to every generation of young fools who sign up and go out there to put their lives on the line for the sake of the millionaires. You got it from anime, too... how sad is that? You're buying the same line of bullshit that inspired the damn kamikaze! Clue: Bushido is a lie. Chivalry is a lie. War is about nothing but power.
Also, if we have mass armies of robots, won't the victor simply be the one with the most natural resources (metal, power, etc) to waste? (Better weapons technology aside)
Yes. How does that differ from the present situation?
However, when Iraq refuses to cooperate, or the Arabs in Israel refuse to cooperate,
The Arabs in Israel? I thought it was the Arabs outside Israel who were the problem. Hamas causing bother in the Occupied Territories and all that. The Arabs in Israel itself, I haven't heard that they're such a big problem.
Unless of course you have an unusually broad definition of what constitutes Israel?
Slashdot Mirror
Because it is possible to copy music, so that I get music for free, without depriving anybody else of their music.
(If you don't believe in the general principle please let me know where you live and I'll come round and help myself to all your stuff.)
If you have a magic wand that can create perfect duplicates of my stuff without depriving me of the originals, come along and help yourself.
He's the guy who pays attention to things like seasons and weather, and how the moon moves. The guy who has memorised - because there is no writing - the lineages of everyone in the tribe and the history of heroes and deeds. The guy with the lore of plants and herbs, and which kill, and which heal, and which bring visions of the gods.
He's the Stone Age nerd, and he's very powerful because of it. Signs in the sky tell him when the buffalo migration is due, and because of this the hunters bring home great bounty. His authority on matters of history settles disputes over ancestral status within the tribe. And because he is the one who eats of the sacred root and speaks with the gods, not even the chieftain is prepared to gainsay him.
The IRA usually go a bit beyond shotguns. Assault rifles and high explosives are more their scene. They'd be more interested in avoiding restrictions on the sale of Armalite rifles in the US. Possibly you meant the NRA?
OK. F... o... o...
Of law, yes, of ethics, perhaps not. Both are violations of copyright, but the GPL violation is usually also plagiarism. The BitTorrent uploader does not claim that the music he distributes is of his own creation; instead he clearly labels it with the name of the original artist, giving credit where it is due. The GPL violator appropriates the work of others and passes it off as his own. Legally they're both in the same boat, but morally there's a world of difference.
So Google has permission from every copyright holder of every web page on the net to copy their pages to its servers, hash them, index them, and cross-reference them to create a derivative work from which Google will make immense profits, of which the original artists will see not one penny?
Ehhh... it looks more like a duck to me.
Not quite. It's not true that the innocent have nothing to hide, but they certainly have much less to hide; the guilty have to hide their guilt in addition to all the rest of their secrets, and it's their guilt which attracts attention to them specifically. As a result, given the choice between the NSA and the MAFIAA, many of us would rather our ISP protect us from the latter.
Oh, but it does. If you're worried about the NSA, you're... well, stuffed, really. Encrypt everything you can, and check for hardware keyloggers on the cable every morning before you log on.
Most of us, in practice, aren't worried about the NSA other than in the abstract. We're not organising political protests or anything. We're doing nothing to attract their attention. But we are worried about the MAFIAA, because a lot of us are... well, we are doing things to attract their attention. Gigabytes of things. Daily. An ISP that will stand up for its customers against those guys is golden.
For the greatest console of all time, I have two words:
GAME BOY.
Every other console has had credible rivals that did much the same thing. The NES competed with home computers, early on with Spectrums and C64s and later with Acorns and Amigas. SNES faced the Mega Drive. And so on, and so on. Often there's been a clear leader, but there's never been anything else remotely like the Game Boy's dominance. And as pack-in games go, Tetris was an absolute killer.
The Game Boy lasted a decade and saw off every rival that ever dared try it on. Sega had a good go, they had a colour screen and everything, but the Game Gear sank while Nintendo marched on, and on, and on... I thought it was finally dying off, then Pokemon happened - and suddenly every one of the countless millions of old Game Boys came out of the attic and lit up again, played with by the original owners' younger brothers! And hence a miniaturised Gameboy Pocket made with modern technology, and then colour...
Its contemporary successor is nearly as crazy. Everyone thought the DS was a stopgap. A cheap gimmick produced to slow down the PSP while Nintendo worked on the real next-gen Game Boy. How very, very wrong we were.
We went to war ostensibly to liberate Poland. Having vanquished Hitler, we left that country to the tender mercies of Stalin. I suppose it was an improvement, but it doesn't quite fit the legend of our brave boys fighting for freedom against tyranny.
We did not go to war because Hitler was an evil Fascist dictator. We deliberately appeased that monster for years, and had he not invaded Poland I doubt we would ever have gone to war against him. We let Franco keep Spain for the rest of his natural life, after all, and Stalin died of old age in his bed in the Kremlin. We went to war because Hitler had become a clear threat to British interests and imperial possessions, and because we thought we could win. The war may later have become a heroic crusade against a murderous villain, but it began as the bad old-fashioned European politics of power and wealth.
Was the fight noble and worthy? Worthy, yes. I'll not deny that the defeat of Hitler was worth the price, at least from a survivor's point of view; it cost us hundreds of thousands of lives and the whole Empire, and we only finished paying the Americans for the equipment in 2006, but what otherwise might have been really doesn't bear thinking about. I don't know about noble; it was a filthy, brutal and sordid affair throughout.
If I'm selfish, I'm in good company; I'm following the best examples given by our esteemed leaders throughout the generations.
Perhaps, but the word 'god' in that phrase is a proper noun. If it wasn't a personal name, it would be 'Thank the god' or 'Thank a god' or 'Thank some god' or 'Thank any god' or 'Thank whichever god was responsible for that near escape!' The phrase makes no sense unless the word is a proper name, and so it should take a capital letter. They may not have any particular god in mind, but they use the word as a name. It gets a capital.
Yes, but pronouns don't conventionally take capital letters, just the nouns themselves. You wouldn't write 'This is David and this is His car', even though the 'his' refers to a specific person. The practice of capitalising pronouns referring to God exists to show religious devotion, and thus can be dispensed with by those who do not believe in God but who do still believe in the importance of good written English.
I'm a fan of the Sandman comics. As a result I often use the word 'dream' as a proper noun, referring to a character of that name in the series. He's a fictional character, but in accordance with the rules of English grammar I write it 'Dream'. Not only is it good English grammar, it distinguishes clearly between the general practice of dreaming, and the specific character in the book. Same with God. God gets a capital letter because it's a proper noun, because it's a name, and whether or not the thing it names exists as a clearly-defined entity is quite irrelevant.
Oh, it makes it perfectly clear. It says 'My disdain for religious belief is so important to me that I'm wilfully going to violate the rules of written English just to emphasise my contempt for the whole concept.' It comes off as tremendously juvenile and arrogant, and makes us all look bad. Please don't do it.
No, I'd rather you use a small g when referring to gods in general, and a large G when using 'God' as a proper noun. I don't much care how the ancient Hebrews or Greeks used to write. In English, names take a capital letter. In German they capitalise every noun, in Japanese they don't really have case, and if you are in fact a Hebrew scholar then you may proceed as you see fit in that language, but don't butcher the Queen's good English in the name of some theological quibble.
Conservative, perhaps. Religious, only if the First Church of Lynne Truss counts.
Sounds to me like the union was required. The workers across the street unionised, and they struck for better pay and conditions, and they got them. As a side-effect of this, your father's company gave its workers the same benefits, for fear that they would see what their comrades had achieved and then struggle to obtain the same for themselves. But neither set of workers would have gained anything at all if not for the union.
That's something that really, really annoys me. People lowercasing the word 'god' when using it as a proper noun. It's not big and it's not clever, it's just pisspoor grammar. If you want to say 'I am the god of hellfire and I bring you...', then 'god' is a generic noun and takes a small g. If you want to say 'Well, thank God for that' then 'god' is a proper noun, a name used for a specific god, and it takes a big G. It's just good English, and messing about with it just to piss off the Christians is silly and makes us all look bad.
Feel free to drop all that nonsense about capitalising pronouns that happen to refer to God, though. All that His and Him stuff. That's completely unnecessary religious flummery and can be dispensed with forthwith.
I suspect that figure's a little high. That would put it at no more than 300,000,000 who don't believe in a supreme being. Yet Buddhists alone probably exceed that figure, before we even begin to count the explicitly secular population.
It's not the players you have to worry about ;-)
What makes it illegitimate is a government-enforced monopoly called 'copyright'. That is all. So if the government wish to amend the terms of this monopoly, in accordance with the desires of the public to share files freely, they can do so. What government edict giveth, government edict can take away.
And how are they going to track sharing via wireless devices, not on the internet? On Saturday I bought a four gigabyte memory card for my phone. It's the size of a fingernail. Call it a thousand songs. It's a Bluetooth phone, like just about every other one on the market today. I can send any of those thousand songs to any other Bluetooth phone within range. I might set myself a project of writing Bluester: the Java application that makes your mp3 collection freely available to all-comers. I can see that thing going viral in every high school in the land. Where will the record cartels even begin?
I think I speak for all the astronomy geeks here when I say I'd like to take that thing and introduce it rather directly to its user, by way of where the sun does not shine. And then switch it on.
* ring ring. ring ring. *
Hello. Yes. Get me the First Lord of the Admiralty, would you? I need to have a word with the Navy. Thanks awfully. Yes, I'll hold... ... ... Ah, hello Sir Rupert. Yes, we've got a bit of a flap on down near Foulness. Yes. Somebody with a... very intense light beam of some kind, setting fire to shipping. Yes, it's a new one on me too. Amazing what they think up. Well, y'see, it's not going to be long before they get the pictures on the old television, and we really have to look like we're doing something about it... HMS Thunder-Child is free? You'll shell the source of the beam? I say, that's wonderful. It'll look quite dashing on the six o'clock news all right. Well, terrific. Best of luck to you all, and give them a couple of shells from me too! Cheerio!
Who knows? I'd have grown up in a very different culture and would have been bathed in imperialistic propaganda all my life. If it was asked of me today, I'd claim Irish citizenship on the spot and get the hell out. It's a straightforward calculation. I can fight or not fight, and my country can win or not win. Assume that it is of substantial benefit to me if my country wins, by whatever value system you want to measure that. Now, if I fight I place myself at extreme risk of death or disability, and increase the probability of victory by a negligible amount. The expected payoff simply isn't worth it. The best place for me would be either at Bletchley or in some aircraft factory optimising production capacity - less risk, far greater difference made to the war effort.
Was it also a fight for the millionaires?
It would be a gross oversimplification to say yes. Fascism was a popular movement of the masses, which the German elites tried and failed to keep under control; for them it was a fight for lebensraum, for the restoration of national pride after the humiliation of Versailles, and to destroy the Bolshevik menace (that last, by the way, would meet with hearty approval from about any millionaire you cared to ask). But why did we care if Germany invaded Poland? In part, because we feared that their next move might be against North Africa, which would threaten the Suez Canal and hence India - this at a time when the Japanese were already behaving very badly in east Asia. That was always the richest colony of the Empire, milk cow for the entire comfortable imperial class of the British Raj. Vast fortunes were made there, and if it had been lost Britain would rapidly have gone from a great maritime trading empire to a third-rate power occupying a small island off the coast of Europe, and would probably have been reduced to being a satellite state of the Americans or the Germans by the end of the century. Unthinkable!
It's all just a question of which AI happens to be in charge at the time. If you're lucky, when you get to the POW camp there will be cake.
Bullshit. War is about taking orders, fighting for what someone else believes in, and then getting blown up. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori and all that shite. That poetic nonsense you spout there is just part of the cultural lie that sells war as romantic and idealistic to every generation of young fools who sign up and go out there to put their lives on the line for the sake of the millionaires. You got it from anime, too... how sad is that? You're buying the same line of bullshit that inspired the damn kamikaze! Clue: Bushido is a lie. Chivalry is a lie. War is about nothing but power.
Also, if we have mass armies of robots, won't the victor simply be the one with the most natural resources (metal, power, etc) to waste? (Better weapons technology aside)
Yes. How does that differ from the present situation?
The Arabs in Israel? I thought it was the Arabs outside Israel who were the problem. Hamas causing bother in the Occupied Territories and all that. The Arabs in Israel itself, I haven't heard that they're such a big problem.
Unless of course you have an unusually broad definition of what constitutes Israel?