Do you think European people have no interest in visiting New York or Hollywood, or Las Vegas, or Yellowstone, or the Grand Canyon or so many other sites they have seen in books and movies? Or is it that after paying their taxes the best they can do is visit some town in Europe?
New York I'd like to visit. The rest of those, meh. In particular, why in the world would anyone want to vist Las Vegas? Surely the only attraction even to Americans is that they can gamble there, whereas in most of the US that's illegal. So... since gambling is legal here... why would we want to travel five thousand miles to do it?
I live in a socialist country, and I am surrounded by socialist countries (UK and Europe respectively)
The UK is a socialist country? That's news to me. I seem to recall something called Clause IV being done away with by the Labour Party in about 1995. Since then there's been no real Socialist presence in Parliament, except for a few Old Labour backbenchers with no power. If you think our government are Socialists, why have they been privatising so many things?
This is something most games don't teach you, because driving over people in GTA3 is fun and the consequences are little.
GTA3 does, actually. If all you're after is a rampage, then you can freely drive around, cause mayhem, fight some cops, get killed, and repeat. Fine. But if you want to actually progress in the game you have to complete missions, and to do that you generally have to minimise police attention as far as possible. Running over pedestrians is not a good thing in this case.
Is it more harmful to be in a game where your character is a gang member shooting cops, or a game where your character is a pilot dropping bombs over Vietnam and Iraq? Are both games harmful?
If I were a parent looking to censor my kids' games, I'd be more worried about the second than the first. A game in which you are a gangster shooting cops portrays behaviour that both I and the State firmly discourage. A game in which you are a pilot blowing up Iraqis portrays behaviour that I firmly discourage, but for which the State keeps running adverts to encourage kids to go and join up. Which, then, is the more dangerous? I'd say the army one.
Would it imply an escalating tarrif war? Europe/Japan wouldn't risk playing that card for a fight that's not even theirs. No way do they break out the economic 'nuclear option' in defense of Antigua when they would be harmed as much as the US.
If the fight really wasn't ours, I'd say you were right; Europe would leave Antigua out to dry. But Antigua's not the only country troubled by America's protectionist gaming laws. There are plenty of European betting sites that would love a piece of that action. Right now they're being made unwelcome.
From TFA, it looks like Europe has accepted some unspecified concessions for accepting a change in the WTO treaty rules. But as I read it, that isn't yet in force, and would only change the process by which compensation is claimed, not whether or not a claim is viable. So it might still be on the cards that the EU might back Antigua. There's a lot of money to be made if we can get America to stop locking up legitimate British casino owners.
The difference being that the US's opponent in the steel case was the EU, whereas in the lumber case it was Canada; European retaliatory sanctions would have hurt. Which doesn't bode too well for Antigua, unless some big players decide to come in on their side. Europe actually might do just that; there are quite a few British gambling sites that would rather like access to the American market.
Then again, it remains to be seen how much Antigua's new status as a copyright free zone will hurt the US. A lot of media folk will scream. They own a lot of senators.
Even though the US Constitution ranks the treaty as being the supreme law of the land (theoretically above anything the executive, legislative or judiciary can do), this does not apply to whether or not you can legitimately grab a copy of Britney's latest dance video without concern for authority.
I've said elsewhere that it will probably still be illegal for US citizens to download mp3s from Antigua - it's just the Antiguans who will no longer be committing an offence. But it could still make you invulnerable to attacks from the RIAA in a practical rather than a legal sense. Encrypted connection to server in Antigua, transfer music direct from vast central database, no P2P involved. Then the RIAA can't even begin to find out who's using the service.
The bandwidth costs would be high, so it would have to be subscription-only. A well-resourced adversary might be able to follow the money, but small Caribbean island nations tend to be discreet about such things.
I suspect that anyone in the US downloading mp3s from Antigua will be "shocked" to discover that this only covers people in Antigua, not them.
Agreed; if I'm in the US and download an mp3 from an Antiguan server, I'm creating a copy on my PC in the US, in violation of applicable copyright laws. But what if someone sets up a mail order shop in Antigua? Request an album, any album by a US artist, and it gets burned and mailed to you for a dollar. Then the customer hasn't violated anybody's copyright - he hasn't copied anything at all. The operator hasn't violated anybody's copyrights either - US copyrights don't apply in Antigua. So, no foul, play on!
Correct me if I'm wrong but I think the mere possession of unauthorised copies is not illegal - only their creation and sale. That's why it's called copyright, the right to copy.
It's a token victory. It just means that that if they do sell mp3 without paying royalties, US won't be able to use WTO to impose sanctions on them. But US doesn't need WTO to impose sanctions. It can just do it.
The US doesn't need the WTO to impose sanctions, no. But if it does so then it's blatant protectionism of American gambling and copyright industries against Antiguan competition. The EU and Japan have both been making pro-Antiguan noises in this dispute, and if the US decides to try some form of economic bullying on Antigua, then it's possible that Europe and Japan might step in. The US is rich and powerful, but not so rich that it will risk a devastating trade war with Europe when the dollar's already on the slide, over a few gambling sites and pirate havens in the Caribbean.
Until then, I'd love to see Portal: the Flash Version ported to the DS.
Hell, why not Portal proper? It's not as if that game relies on exceptional graphics. The only time you ever benefit from a high resolution is when you're trying to read the graffiti. The only problem I'd foresee with it is that the portals might be too small on screen to make out detail in the room on the other side - which is important in solving a lot of puzzles. Maybe you could have the top screen show the view through the nearer portal, or something...
A copyright is a government-enforced monopoly on the distribution of a particular piece of information. I am enormously amused by the way you claim that this is a free market thing, and that the alternative is Communism.
With a little practice, they could easily point out that God, being all powerful, could have created the universe in an instant while fashioning it in such a manner that it appeared to already be billions of years old. Debate THAT.
The problem with that escape clause is that it makes God the biggest liar in the universe. Not something you want in an entity you're trying to market as the source of all truth.
Try living with George W. Bush as your leader for a while. You'll be BEGGING to go back to the UK.
To be honest, I'd rather have W as leader directly, rather than by proxy as we have it now. At least then I'd have the chance to vote against the idiot. As it is, whoever I vote for will still be taking orders from whatever moron the Yanks pick.
I'd like to see individual stories from the Silmarillion fleshed out into full movies / movie-series. Jackson et.al. have already shown a willingness to rewrite work, why not forge new ground from old ideas? The story of Morgoth, etc?
Take a look at The Children of Hurin. It's basically a greatly expanded version of the story of Turin Turambar. But where the story in the Silmarillion is very much from a Noldorin perspective, where the lives of mortal Men are of importance only insofar as they affect the fortunes of the Elf-kingdoms, The Children of Hurin lets us see the ordinary life of the Haladin people, and their hopes for the future ahead of the Nirnaeth Arnoediad. Suddenly all these places which were only names on a map, and all these armies which were only casualty statistics, become much more real, much more human.
I'd want to avoid trying to film anything in which any of the Valar take too direct a role, though. The Valar are there as a framing device for the whole Silmarillion - it's their plans and their quarrels that form the backdrop for the events, but it's the actions of Elves and Men that have to drive the plot. The early stories involving Morgoth take place before any of the Children of Iluvatar have awoken; the Fall of the Noldor could possibly work, but the film would probably end with the death of Feanor which is a bit of a downer. If you want Morgoth on stage it would have to be either the story of Beren and Luthien, or the duel with Fingolfin at the gates of Angband.
During the apollo program the crew was nearly killed twice by fuel reacting with sea water once during apollo 13 and another during the apollo soyuz test project.
Excuse me? I've never heard of this. Apollo 13 was lucky ever to meet any sea water, given what happened earlier in the mission, but as far as I'm aware there were no serious problems once they were down. As for ASTP, there was a problem with unburnt fuel vapour being drawn into the capsule on re-entry - which was because the crew made a mistake in re-entry preparations, and had nothing to do with sea water.
If you want to cite a near-miss with splashdowns, try Gus Grissom's near-drowning in the Mercury era. However, to my knowledge every loss of life in the course of a manned spaceflight has been related to spacecraft designed to return to land, not to the sea. Soyuz 1, Soyuz 11, X-15 191, STS-51L and STS-107.
If they want to go to the moon, why don't they just whip out the old blueprints and build a saturn rocket and an apollo capsule and go to the moon.
Not all the blueprints are still extant. Forty years of bureaucracy leads to things being misfiled, water-damaged, lost, or eaten. And even if they were all present and correct, the Saturn V relied on a vast 1960s industrial infrastructure that simply isn't there any more. Parts that were standard and off the shelf in 1967 are no longer made in 2007.
Either way you're going to be designing a substantial amount of rocket, and building the assembly lines from scratch. You might as well go with the available modern technology rather than trying to build a replica of an antique. Look at the crew-launch Ares - take rocket technology from Atlas or Titan, strap Shuttle SRBs to the side, and put a capsule on the top. Much better than doing an immense project in industrial archaeology to revive Saturn.
The capsule, on the other hand, is very Apollo. But bigger.
They flew at a profit all right. After the British and French governments realised they'd never make their money back and wrote off the massive development costs. BA and Air France basically got their Concordes as freebies from the state; they proceeded to make money with them, although the project as a whole was a big loss.
On a serious note, I'm surprised the scientific community hasn't been faster to adopt the "electric universe" theories.
I think the main problem there is that, well... 'electric universe' attracts an awful lot of loonies, who then give the whole concept a very bad reputation. Maybe there are some electromagnetic interactions being overlooked, but the 'electric universe' crowd are pushing for the complete rewriting of the entirety of astronomy based on not very much.
they'll just nuke us from orbit. After all, its the safest option.
You're right. Earth is clearly in danger from the alien menace. We need to prepare our defences - turn over all industry to the project, immediately. Build our own war fleet.
But the Earth's governments will not do this - they don't take the threat seriously enough. There's only one possible solution.
The Concorde didn't have many routes because there was a NiMBY problem. Nobody wanted the plane flying out of their airports because of the sonic booms.
There was only ever really one overland route that could have demanded a Concorde service: New York to Los Angeles. Concorde was barred from this route ostensibly because of the noise, but the real reason was probably that it was foreign. If it had been a Boeing supersonic jet, I'm sure all Americans would have come out of their houses to listen proudly and patriotically to their sonic booms.
Since Concorde didn't have the range for the LA - Tokyo route, that left it flying from London and Paris to New York, and so it never really made its money back. Shame. Glorious machine - entirely ridiculous, but still...
It's far more likely that they bomb the bejeezus out of us for our nutzoid obsession with cars and Britney Spears than it is that the triggering act will be Hitler - a problem we pretty publicly dealt with. Hell, we have satellites broadcasting the History channel doing nothing but trumpeting our defeat over that guy.
The Worst Guy In History invaded Poland. We went to war to stop him. We won. HURRAH! Then we went home and left Poland to the tender mercies of The Second Worst Guy In History. I'm not sure they'll forgive us all that much...
Slashdot Mirror
New York I'd like to visit. The rest of those, meh. In particular, why in the world would anyone want to vist Las Vegas? Surely the only attraction even to Americans is that they can gamble there, whereas in most of the US that's illegal. So... since gambling is legal here... why would we want to travel five thousand miles to do it?
The UK is a socialist country? That's news to me. I seem to recall something called Clause IV being done away with by the Labour Party in about 1995. Since then there's been no real Socialist presence in Parliament, except for a few Old Labour backbenchers with no power. If you think our government are Socialists, why have they been privatising so many things?
GTA3 does, actually. If all you're after is a rampage, then you can freely drive around, cause mayhem, fight some cops, get killed, and repeat. Fine. But if you want to actually progress in the game you have to complete missions, and to do that you generally have to minimise police attention as far as possible. Running over pedestrians is not a good thing in this case.
If I were a parent looking to censor my kids' games, I'd be more worried about the second than the first. A game in which you are a gangster shooting cops portrays behaviour that both I and the State firmly discourage. A game in which you are a pilot blowing up Iraqis portrays behaviour that I firmly discourage, but for which the State keeps running adverts to encourage kids to go and join up. Which, then, is the more dangerous? I'd say the army one.
If the fight really wasn't ours, I'd say you were right; Europe would leave Antigua out to dry. But Antigua's not the only country troubled by America's protectionist gaming laws. There are plenty of European betting sites that would love a piece of that action. Right now they're being made unwelcome.
From TFA, it looks like Europe has accepted some unspecified concessions for accepting a change in the WTO treaty rules. But as I read it, that isn't yet in force, and would only change the process by which compensation is claimed, not whether or not a claim is viable. So it might still be on the cards that the EU might back Antigua. There's a lot of money to be made if we can get America to stop locking up legitimate British casino owners.
The difference being that the US's opponent in the steel case was the EU, whereas in the lumber case it was Canada; European retaliatory sanctions would have hurt. Which doesn't bode too well for Antigua, unless some big players decide to come in on their side. Europe actually might do just that; there are quite a few British gambling sites that would rather like access to the American market.
Then again, it remains to be seen how much Antigua's new status as a copyright free zone will hurt the US. A lot of media folk will scream. They own a lot of senators.
I've said elsewhere that it will probably still be illegal for US citizens to download mp3s from Antigua - it's just the Antiguans who will no longer be committing an offence. But it could still make you invulnerable to attacks from the RIAA in a practical rather than a legal sense. Encrypted connection to server in Antigua, transfer music direct from vast central database, no P2P involved. Then the RIAA can't even begin to find out who's using the service.
The bandwidth costs would be high, so it would have to be subscription-only. A well-resourced adversary might be able to follow the money, but small Caribbean island nations tend to be discreet about such things.
Agreed; if I'm in the US and download an mp3 from an Antiguan server, I'm creating a copy on my PC in the US, in violation of applicable copyright laws. But what if someone sets up a mail order shop in Antigua? Request an album, any album by a US artist, and it gets burned and mailed to you for a dollar. Then the customer hasn't violated anybody's copyright - he hasn't copied anything at all. The operator hasn't violated anybody's copyrights either - US copyrights don't apply in Antigua. So, no foul, play on!
Correct me if I'm wrong but I think the mere possession of unauthorised copies is not illegal - only their creation and sale. That's why it's called copyright, the right to copy.
The US doesn't need the WTO to impose sanctions, no. But if it does so then it's blatant protectionism of American gambling and copyright industries against Antiguan competition. The EU and Japan have both been making pro-Antiguan noises in this dispute, and if the US decides to try some form of economic bullying on Antigua, then it's possible that Europe and Japan might step in. The US is rich and powerful, but not so rich that it will risk a devastating trade war with Europe when the dollar's already on the slide, over a few gambling sites and pirate havens in the Caribbean.
Hell, why not Portal proper? It's not as if that game relies on exceptional graphics. The only time you ever benefit from a high resolution is when you're trying to read the graffiti. The only problem I'd foresee with it is that the portals might be too small on screen to make out detail in the room on the other side - which is important in solving a lot of puzzles. Maybe you could have the top screen show the view through the nearer portal, or something...
A copyright is a government-enforced monopoly on the distribution of a particular piece of information. I am enormously amused by the way you claim that this is a free market thing, and that the alternative is Communism.
The problem with that escape clause is that it makes God the biggest liar in the universe. Not something you want in an entity you're trying to market as the source of all truth.
To be honest, I'd rather have W as leader directly, rather than by proxy as we have it now. At least then I'd have the chance to vote against the idiot. As it is, whoever I vote for will still be taking orders from whatever moron the Yanks pick.
You misspelled 'Tokyo'.
Take a look at The Children of Hurin. It's basically a greatly expanded version of the story of Turin Turambar. But where the story in the Silmarillion is very much from a Noldorin perspective, where the lives of mortal Men are of importance only insofar as they affect the fortunes of the Elf-kingdoms, The Children of Hurin lets us see the ordinary life of the Haladin people, and their hopes for the future ahead of the Nirnaeth Arnoediad. Suddenly all these places which were only names on a map, and all these armies which were only casualty statistics, become much more real, much more human.
I'd want to avoid trying to film anything in which any of the Valar take too direct a role, though. The Valar are there as a framing device for the whole Silmarillion - it's their plans and their quarrels that form the backdrop for the events, but it's the actions of Elves and Men that have to drive the plot. The early stories involving Morgoth take place before any of the Children of Iluvatar have awoken; the Fall of the Noldor could possibly work, but the film would probably end with the death of Feanor which is a bit of a downer. If you want Morgoth on stage it would have to be either the story of Beren and Luthien, or the duel with Fingolfin at the gates of Angband.
So when are you lot going to get around to stabbing Bush to death?
Excuse me? I've never heard of this. Apollo 13 was lucky ever to meet any sea water, given what happened earlier in the mission, but as far as I'm aware there were no serious problems once they were down. As for ASTP, there was a problem with unburnt fuel vapour being drawn into the capsule on re-entry - which was because the crew made a mistake in re-entry preparations, and had nothing to do with sea water.
If you want to cite a near-miss with splashdowns, try Gus Grissom's near-drowning in the Mercury era. However, to my knowledge every loss of life in the course of a manned spaceflight has been related to spacecraft designed to return to land, not to the sea. Soyuz 1, Soyuz 11, X-15 191, STS-51L and STS-107.
Not all the blueprints are still extant. Forty years of bureaucracy leads to things being misfiled, water-damaged, lost, or eaten. And even if they were all present and correct, the Saturn V relied on a vast 1960s industrial infrastructure that simply isn't there any more. Parts that were standard and off the shelf in 1967 are no longer made in 2007.
Either way you're going to be designing a substantial amount of rocket, and building the assembly lines from scratch. You might as well go with the available modern technology rather than trying to build a replica of an antique. Look at the crew-launch Ares - take rocket technology from Atlas or Titan, strap Shuttle SRBs to the side, and put a capsule on the top. Much better than doing an immense project in industrial archaeology to revive Saturn.
The capsule, on the other hand, is very Apollo. But bigger.
They flew at a profit all right. After the British and French governments realised they'd never make their money back and wrote off the massive development costs. BA and Air France basically got their Concordes as freebies from the state; they proceeded to make money with them, although the project as a whole was a big loss.
I think the main problem there is that, well... 'electric universe' attracts an awful lot of loonies, who then give the whole concept a very bad reputation. Maybe there are some electromagnetic interactions being overlooked, but the 'electric universe' crowd are pushing for the complete rewriting of the entirety of astronomy based on not very much.
You're right. Earth is clearly in danger from the alien menace. We need to prepare our defences - turn over all industry to the project, immediately. Build our own war fleet.
But the Earth's governments will not do this - they don't take the threat seriously enough. There's only one possible solution.
VOTE SAXON!
There was only ever really one overland route that could have demanded a Concorde service: New York to Los Angeles. Concorde was barred from this route ostensibly because of the noise, but the real reason was probably that it was foreign. If it had been a Boeing supersonic jet, I'm sure all Americans would have come out of their houses to listen proudly and patriotically to their sonic booms.
Since Concorde didn't have the range for the LA - Tokyo route, that left it flying from London and Paris to New York, and so it never really made its money back. Shame. Glorious machine - entirely ridiculous, but still...
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a scramjet full of DVDs...
The Worst Guy In History invaded Poland. We went to war to stop him. We won. HURRAH! Then we went home and left Poland to the tender mercies of The Second Worst Guy In History. I'm not sure they'll forgive us all that much...
It works well enough against Superman.