"I prefer these sorts of games running at 30 fps. It's artistically more pleasing on the eyes. This is the same reason that a cinematic film running at 24 fps is artistically more pleasing on the eyes than a digital camera home movie running at 60 fps."
WTF? NOOOOOooooo!!11!!1! We have another ignoramus here! Someone who has no idea how technology works, and can't be bothered to look up some biology/visual tech pieces on the intarweb!
Please, get hit with a clu-by-four.
fps has little to no bearing on how a game 'looks', appart from the fact that less than 25 fps is really irritating for games where you move around even a little, and the more/faster you move around, the higher the fps you want.
25 fps is fine for movies, not for games. Research project: find out why this is.
My god, why is it that in threads like these nowadays we get much more of our fair share of neophyte know-nothings?
Halo had a HUGE following before it was released. And it had an even bigger following than that before it was announced to be xbox only (ie before Bungie sold out). That's because Bungie made the Marathon series of games.
Everyone knew what kind of game Halo would be, too. Marathon on steroids.
Can we say the same about Gears of War? Not really, because it's a new franchise (in the way Halo wasn't really), and it's EPIC who are making it, and they're only known for some good multiplayer work.
And it is equally well known that for consoles, the dev's can only program for the core system. They can not program for a niche; the publishers just won't give 'em the money. Go look on gamasutra, gamebindustry.biz etc. Bethesda won't require a HD...hardly any gamedev will....therefore, the x360 just as well might not have a HD.
In loco parentis? How many parents prosecute their kids for talking back to them, or jaywalking? If schools deign to use that phrase, they better act like it.
I'll go one further here, on a somewhat relevant subject; zero-tolerance policies. These are what cause things like Columbine to happen (and no, zero tolerance wasn't due to Columbine, although that did accelerate it). Zero tolerance (ZT) is dangerous, because it constricts aggression. A schoolyard scuffle, no matter what else, relieve mental pressure on all involved (if the nerd gets at least one punch in:wry-smiley:). Without any mental or verbal acting out, the aggression gets bottled up, to erupt in only the worst way possible, for when simple child agressive behaviour is outright banned, the only way it can be expressed is when it has reached boiling point and the child doesn't care about the consequences anymore .
Damn, I realise this has no real place in this thread, but now I've typed it out, and I'm not gonna delete it:P
No, they don't, because it helps them distinguish between the technical differences. A standard PAL/NTSC channel outputs at a low res and a low refresh rate. Ditto for a console. A HDTV operates at a different one, and a pc operates at a different one again. A monitor can support many different displays, a tv can't, a HDTV can operate at a few more.
They might all be display devices, and there might be many hacks and kludges available to interconnect them, but they don't do so natively. They might be getting there, but in 2005, they ain't that far yet.
Yeah, sure. Want anything near pc quality gfx? And have you wanted that the past couple of years? Add a grand for a decent HDTV to get a lower resolution than a monitor. And you sit further away from that lesser monitor, to boot.
And if you have that much trouble with gfx cards...what are you doing here on/.? Nvidia and ati, both with budget, medium and premium cards. They last about 2 to 3 years in a pc before you'll even have to think about getting another one. Wow. Confusing, time draining. It's not much difference time wise from sorting out the best wireless controller, which you do every 5 years, together with the bongo mat, ddr-mike, memory card, harddisk et all.
I dunno how many I'm speaking for, but the first thing I thought was 'holy shit! The Bush hegemony is pulling a Cultural Revolution...they're going after the bourgeoisie and the intellectuals'.
Then I remembered the 'no child left behind act', the library surveilance, the FCC half million dollar fines, and I added '...again'.
There's something quite amusing there; the only way Sony could check up on bittorent usage is by connecting to the torrent...thereby making the movie/song available themselves. Seeing as Sony is the copyright holder, and they are connected to the trackers, and disseminating the movie/song themselves...they are basically giving their own copyrighted material away!
Simply put: if the copyright holder is giving you it's copyrighted material...how in hell's bells can they say that what you're doing is wrong? They/gave/ it to you in the first place (or at least helped give it to you)!
So what? I know that many more people don't know the difference between an autonomous inhomogenous differential equation and a linear equation...doesn't mean that those aren't well established technical terms; it's called jargon, and just because the general populace doesn't knwo what they denote, it doesn't mean they have no meaning/don't exist.
BTW: good examples of hard sci-fi are Greg Egan and sometimes AC Clarke.
I'd rather think it's when we find our first gravety wave and really understand space-time (and can play around with it, instead of just know it's there) that warp drive has a chance. Repulsive matter isn't neccessary if we can play around with the attractive properties and change them.
"Joss Whedon decided he didn't need to throw out Einstein (there's no faster than light travel)"
Yes there is; there's no way to get to other planets in other solarsystems without being years older when you get there. Sure, there time dilation, but that doesn't have the effect you think it has. Einstein got thrown out the window as soon as they reached another solar system and weren't years older.
Lara Croft isn't sci-fi either. Oddly enough, none of the shows mentioned are sci-fi. So how can they possibly say that more women watch sci-fi than men? At most you could say that more women than men watch today's (or actually yesterday's) "hip" shows.
The only thing the article metions that is sci-fi is the Matrix, but that was a good movie (discounting the sequels), not a tv show. Seems like girls watch mopre tv nowadays; there are not (that many) more geek girls.
And comically, that looks like a tautology; bever/and/ taco in the same name! (just try saying it in english...maakt niet uit dat het correct nederlands is:P)
I have never seen such a study (and I've looked). I've never heard of such a study, although I had imagined they must be done (and probably overwhelmingly by companies who produce copyprotection).
"Comparable games from comparable publishers from comparable design houses sell more units with cd copy protection on them."
Except that in all likelyhood their game wasn't comparable...it was probably just plain better. And since AAA games need a publisher, and publishers ALWAYS require copyprotection, I'm pretty sure that such a comparison CAN NOT be made.
And fans of a game will always buy the game, and then download the pirated version for ease of use. Untill the beancounters realise that they're spending an awfull lot of money on something which doesn't raise their profit margins, we're stuck with copyprotection which makes the games we buy mroe expensive.
Eghads, the stale strawman 'casual copying' argument:(
EVERYONE knows someone in their environment who can get a game illegaly for them. EVERYONE. 'Casual copying' as it is represented is a MYTH. It does not exist in nature, not like publishers present it. Fact is, if you want a game (or an aplication) and you don'\t have the money for it or don't want to spend the money on it, you can get it for free. There's either the nerd in your class, the geek at work or yourself on internet.
Now maybe it's a limitation in my social circles, but I hardly know anyone who does the 'casual copying' thing for music. Hell, it didn't work like that back in the day of the code wheels (remember them?)! Ever since electronic media, retail has more or less been on the honour system; if you like the game and want the dev to make more like it, you buy the game. Insane copyprotection which forces me to disable my bloody DVD-writer (like Civ 4 does, I bought it today, and the fucking thing does not work! Turns out that two optical drives in a system is 'illegal'/suspicious nowadays...) literally forces people towards the illegal scene...'cause the pirated version plays flawlessly, and the distribution is MUCH better.
Copy protection doesn't stop piracy in any form. 'Casual piracy' does not exist (and no, neither does 'casual copyright infringement'). The only thing copy protection does is make games more expensive ('cause that stuff is bought from third parties!) and drive people into the underground to find no-cd patches.
Oh, and in one case, copyprotection actively fucks over your system, too (hello, Starforce!)...in which case the pirate is even better off than the buyer of the original software.
I agree with your sentiment that in the current administration, this is a very dangerous development, I'd say a land grab, really.
However, here at/. and elsewhere, we're always bitching about new laws being drafted to cover stuff which happens on the 'net, when there are perfectly sane and established ones which would cover the case. And here's just a situation like that, only the other way 'round. Wire-tapping is (if there is oversight to prevent abuse, checks and balances etc) something which law-enforcement needs. Any non-tinfoil hat type would agree to that. And that should apply to any instance, be it POTS or VoIP (or email, I'd say). Wiretapping is about intercepting communications between criminals, irrespective of the system used.
Now I can understand people being quite scared of the current US administration (what with the Guantanamo, we can put you away and no-one will ever hear from you again, AND we can torture you 'cause we say the Geneva convention doesn't apply to us government you have right now), but !!with a decent government and decent checks and balances in place!!, I personally find it rediculous that anyone could be against the tapping of VoIP/e-mail or whatever. It's how you catch criminals.
Note, however, that I'm fully for encryption; you really don't want your next door neighbour/copeting company to be tempted to read that open communication you're discussing your trade secrets over. But then a government would just have to outspend if they want to decrypt and read it...having to hand over keys is too insecure; encryption is secure so long as it's only governments which have the computing power to crack it.
Yup...that's [unbounded] capitalism in action for you. No, really: this is exactly what capitalism does, it concentrates wealth/resources/power. Remember that phrase 'it takes money to make money' (and every variation thereof)? Well, capitalism drives people to seek money (it's the prime motivator, the american dream). Once they have money, they make money, until the few have the whole pie. It's exactly what capitalsm's end state is.
Now this is not a rant against capitalism per se. It's one against unbounded capitalism. I'm always amazed at (predominantly) americans who praise capitalism without any criticism, who call commy on anyone who does, and who are subsequently surprised when something like this happens. Captialism can be good, especially as a motivator, but unrestrained capitalism leads to an environment where resources are concentrated in very few hands, where money buys laws (because it's money which is the 'currency' of power), where companies don't give a shit and dump jobs overseas and don't mind killing a few people with their toxic run-off, and where that's considered a profit-calculated risk.
I would need a lot more space to put this theory down in a more nuanced way, but the way unchecked capitalism works, you could almost find a mathematical proof that concentration of money (and thus power/resources) in the hands of the few is exactly what you get when you run the signal through the system called capitalism.
So to me, this isn't really surprising news. We've seen it happen with entertainment, finance, what have you. The Bell's getting back together (when they had been broken up by law years ago! The law hasn't changed...anti-trust has just been bought off) is just another datum point pointing towards the end-result of unbounded capitalism.
Please explain to me what legal basis the government would have for that? And when factoring in 'satire', could you explain to me the practical basis?
The reason I ask is because your point seems to be merely: "It's trivial for The Onion to make a parody of the seal". So what? Who cares if it's trivial...they're allowed to do so by formal law, common law and by common sense; de jure, de facto et de practico.
Fact is your government has shown itself to be so scared by a satire based internet site that they have slapped an unlawfull injunction on them. Not that that's very surprising...they've done much, MUCH worse.
What I have never got, since the first laptop came around, and especially now with the widescreen models, is this: why not just have a full keyboard in there? Especially now, with widescreens, why not just put a full qwerty+numpad layout? It'd even make carying easier; a rectangle is nicer to carry on a shoulderstrap than a square (it's a distribution of mass thing...a rectangle adjusts better due to it's longer base).
Shit, I should patent that and make a killing from Appple for their next gen hyped up 'oh-so-cool-and-practial' line of ibooks.
"You have absolutely no idea about international politics, do you?"
No...8 years of MUN (delegate and organisation), a healthy interest in world affairs, a special interest in the long game, reading the classics (and the modern writers) and friends of the family who are ambassadors...I have no idea about politics. Not the history, no idea about it's forms or it's function. Not a clue about how politics is practiced in different parts of the world, nor an understanding of how those different systems interact or what different ideologies or realpolitik underlies it all. I have no clue as to where basic materials are produced in the world, and who has control over their extraction and distribution. Nor do I have a clue as to who the current players are, or who (likely) put them there and who would likely replace them. Strike me with thy clue-by-four, oh mighty low-ID#!
"Every time the UN has failed, it was due to not enough diplomacy"
Sir, it seems you know even less about politics and especially about the history of different organisations and the different actions those organisations have undertaken. Although it's true that what you say is correct in many cases, claiming that it is/only/ so is patently false. The League of Nations is a prime example of what too much diplomacy does. Quite a few UN (in)actions point to an overdose of diplomacy and a lack of common sence (Burma on the human rights commisssion? WTF? And that's one of the lesser ones). Read up on the history of the UN, it's different NGO's and mission (hell, read a few preambulatory clauses of some recurring UN resolutions!) and you'll be a lot wiser and you won't embarres yourself with such broad and false assertions.
"Trying to get well over a hundred nations with different cultures, governments, languages, to agree on anything is about a hundred times as difficult as your "america first" would allow you to believe, unless you consider steamrolling over everyone else and forcing your attitude, believes and values on them a proper method."
First of all...no shit sherlock. Getting a hundered anythings to agree on whatever is hard, and the problems scale up. How insightfull of you. And I'd like to point out I'm an englishman brought up in the dutch education system, and still live in the Netherlands; where you get the 'america first' idea from is utterly implausible, especially considering what I was advocating.
"unless you consider steamrolling over everyone else and forcing your attitude, believes and values on them a proper method."
Again, not at all, or even remotely, what I was saying or even implying. But as many conflicts have proven, having the UN as a buffer is immensely valuable. This is not the same as what you're saying at all.
"And that includes free speech, free internet, basic human rights even. They aren't as basic as you think. Heck, most of them weren't basic in the US 200, 100, some even 50 years ago!"
Did you even READ my comment? Go back, re-read it. Especially the last paragraph.
Slashdot Mirror
"I prefer these sorts of games running at 30 fps. It's artistically more pleasing on the eyes. This is the same reason that a cinematic film running at 24 fps is artistically more pleasing on the eyes than a digital camera home movie running at 60 fps."
WTF? NOOOOOooooo!!11!!1! We have another ignoramus here! Someone who has no idea how technology works, and can't be bothered to look up some biology/visual tech pieces on the intarweb!
Please, get hit with a clu-by-four.
fps has little to no bearing on how a game 'looks', appart from the fact that less than 25 fps is really irritating for games where you move around even a little, and the more/faster you move around, the higher the fps you want.
25 fps is fine for movies, not for games. Research project: find out why this is.
My god, why is it that in threads like these nowadays we get much more of our fair share of neophyte know-nothings?
Halo had a HUGE following before it was released. And it had an even bigger following than that before it was announced to be xbox only (ie before Bungie sold out). That's because Bungie made the Marathon series of games.
Everyone knew what kind of game Halo would be, too. Marathon on steroids.
Can we say the same about Gears of War? Not really, because it's a new franchise (in the way Halo wasn't really), and it's EPIC who are making it, and they're only known for some good multiplayer work.
AHAHAHHAHAHAHAHahahghahahahhahaha....
Name one. Just one. Don't post here unless you know what you're talking about. Now go tell everyone how good your daddy's job is.
And it is equally well known that for consoles, the dev's can only program for the core system. They can not program for a niche; the publishers just won't give 'em the money. Go look on gamasutra, gamebindustry.biz etc. Bethesda won't require a HD...hardly any gamedev will....therefore, the x360 just as well might not have a HD.
In loco parentis? How many parents prosecute their kids for talking back to them, or jaywalking? If schools deign to use that phrase, they better act like it.
:wry-smiley:). Without any mental or verbal acting out, the aggression gets bottled up, to erupt in only the worst way possible, for when simple child agressive behaviour is outright banned, the only way it can be expressed is when it has reached boiling point and the child doesn't care about the consequences anymore .
:P
I'll go one further here, on a somewhat relevant subject; zero-tolerance policies. These are what cause things like Columbine to happen (and no, zero tolerance wasn't due to Columbine, although that did accelerate it). Zero tolerance (ZT) is dangerous, because it constricts aggression. A schoolyard scuffle, no matter what else, relieve mental pressure on all involved (if the nerd gets at least one punch in
Damn, I realise this has no real place in this thread, but now I've typed it out, and I'm not gonna delete it
No, they don't, because it helps them distinguish between the technical differences. A standard PAL/NTSC channel outputs at a low res and a low refresh rate. Ditto for a console. A HDTV operates at a different one, and a pc operates at a different one again. A monitor can support many different displays, a tv can't, a HDTV can operate at a few more.
They might all be display devices, and there might be many hacks and kludges available to interconnect them, but they don't do so natively. They might be getting there, but in 2005, they ain't that far yet.
Yeah, sure. Want anything near pc quality gfx? And have you wanted that the past couple of years? Add a grand for a decent HDTV to get a lower resolution than a monitor. And you sit further away from that lesser monitor, to boot.
/.? Nvidia and ati, both with budget, medium and premium cards. They last about 2 to 3 years in a pc before you'll even have to think about getting another one. Wow. Confusing, time draining. It's not much difference time wise from sorting out the best wireless controller, which you do every 5 years, together with the bongo mat, ddr-mike, memory card, harddisk et all.
And if you have that much trouble with gfx cards...what are you doing here on
I dunno how many I'm speaking for, but the first thing I thought was 'holy shit! The Bush hegemony is pulling a Cultural Revolution...they're going after the bourgeoisie and the intellectuals'.
Then I remembered the 'no child left behind act', the library surveilance, the FCC half million dollar fines, and I added '...again'.
It gets even better: "...so you could purchase only the excerpt you're interested in." [from the blurb].
Basically, they're selling you what fair use already allows you to do!
There's something quite amusing there; the only way Sony could check up on bittorent usage is by connecting to the torrent...thereby making the movie/song available themselves. Seeing as Sony is the copyright holder, and they are connected to the trackers, and disseminating the movie/song themselves...they are basically giving their own copyrighted material away!
/gave/ it to you in the first place (or at least helped give it to you)!
Simply put: if the copyright holder is giving you it's copyrighted material...how in hell's bells can they say that what you're doing is wrong? They
So what? I know that many more people don't know the difference between an autonomous inhomogenous differential equation and a linear equation...doesn't mean that those aren't well established technical terms; it's called jargon, and just because the general populace doesn't knwo what they denote, it doesn't mean they have no meaning/don't exist.
BTW: good examples of hard sci-fi are Greg Egan and sometimes AC Clarke.
Negative energy is not "one of those fun non-yet-found physics quirks"; go check your quantum mechanics.
I'd rather think it's when we find our first gravety wave and really understand space-time (and can play around with it, instead of just know it's there) that warp drive has a chance. Repulsive matter isn't neccessary if we can play around with the attractive properties and change them.
"Joss Whedon decided he didn't need to throw out Einstein (there's no faster than light travel)"
Yes there is; there's no way to get to other planets in other solarsystems without being years older when you get there. Sure, there time dilation, but that doesn't have the effect you think it has. Einstein got thrown out the window as soon as they reached another solar system and weren't years older.
"Buffy, Lara Croft, and Xena"
Lara Croft isn't sci-fi either. Oddly enough, none of the shows mentioned are sci-fi. So how can they possibly say that more women watch sci-fi than men? At most you could say that more women than men watch today's (or actually yesterday's) "hip" shows.
The only thing the article metions that is sci-fi is the Matrix, but that was a good movie (discounting the sequels), not a tv show. Seems like girls watch mopre tv nowadays; there are not (that many) more geek girls.
And comically, that looks like a tautology; bever /and/ taco in the same name! (just try saying it in english...maakt niet uit dat het correct nederlands is :P)
I'll add to the list: my 9800pro works fine. Perfect, even...and that at 1280x1024.
I have never seen such a study (and I've looked). I've never heard of such a study, although I had imagined they must be done (and probably overwhelmingly by companies who produce copyprotection).
"Comparable games from comparable publishers from comparable design houses sell more units with cd copy protection on them."
Except that in all likelyhood their game wasn't comparable...it was probably just plain better. And since AAA games need a publisher, and publishers ALWAYS require copyprotection, I'm pretty sure that such a comparison CAN NOT be made.
And fans of a game will always buy the game, and then download the pirated version for ease of use. Untill the beancounters realise that they're spending an awfull lot of money on something which doesn't raise their profit margins, we're stuck with copyprotection which makes the games we buy mroe expensive.
Eghads, the stale strawman 'casual copying' argument :(
EVERYONE knows someone in their environment who can get a game illegaly for them. EVERYONE. 'Casual copying' as it is represented is a MYTH. It does not exist in nature, not like publishers present it. Fact is, if you want a game (or an aplication) and you don'\t have the money for it or don't want to spend the money on it, you can get it for free. There's either the nerd in your class, the geek at work or yourself on internet.
Now maybe it's a limitation in my social circles, but I hardly know anyone who does the 'casual copying' thing for music. Hell, it didn't work like that back in the day of the code wheels (remember them?)! Ever since electronic media, retail has more or less been on the honour system; if you like the game and want the dev to make more like it, you buy the game. Insane copyprotection which forces me to disable my bloody DVD-writer (like Civ 4 does, I bought it today, and the fucking thing does not work! Turns out that two optical drives in a system is 'illegal'/suspicious nowadays...) literally forces people towards the illegal scene...'cause the pirated version plays flawlessly, and the distribution is MUCH better.
Copy protection doesn't stop piracy in any form. 'Casual piracy' does not exist (and no, neither does 'casual copyright infringement'). The only thing copy protection does is make games more expensive ('cause that stuff is bought from third parties!) and drive people into the underground to find no-cd patches.
Oh, and in one case, copyprotection actively fucks over your system, too (hello, Starforce!)...in which case the pirate is even better off than the buyer of the original software.
I agree with your sentiment that in the current administration, this is a very dangerous development, I'd say a land grab, really.
/. and elsewhere, we're always bitching about new laws being drafted to cover stuff which happens on the 'net, when there are perfectly sane and established ones which would cover the case. And here's just a situation like that, only the other way 'round. Wire-tapping is (if there is oversight to prevent abuse, checks and balances etc) something which law-enforcement needs. Any non-tinfoil hat type would agree to that. And that should apply to any instance, be it POTS or VoIP (or email, I'd say). Wiretapping is about intercepting communications between criminals, irrespective of the system used.
However, here at
Now I can understand people being quite scared of the current US administration (what with the Guantanamo, we can put you away and no-one will ever hear from you again, AND we can torture you 'cause we say the Geneva convention doesn't apply to us government you have right now), but !!with a decent government and decent checks and balances in place!!, I personally find it rediculous that anyone could be against the tapping of VoIP/e-mail or whatever. It's how you catch criminals.
Note, however, that I'm fully for encryption; you really don't want your next door neighbour/copeting company to be tempted to read that open communication you're discussing your trade secrets over. But then a government would just have to outspend if they want to decrypt and read it...having to hand over keys is too insecure; encryption is secure so long as it's only governments which have the computing power to crack it.
Yup...that's [unbounded] capitalism in action for you. No, really: this is exactly what capitalism does, it concentrates wealth/resources/power. Remember that phrase 'it takes money to make money' (and every variation thereof)? Well, capitalism drives people to seek money (it's the prime motivator, the american dream). Once they have money, they make money, until the few have the whole pie. It's exactly what capitalsm's end state is.
Now this is not a rant against capitalism per se. It's one against unbounded capitalism. I'm always amazed at (predominantly) americans who praise capitalism without any criticism, who call commy on anyone who does, and who are subsequently surprised when something like this happens. Captialism can be good, especially as a motivator, but unrestrained capitalism leads to an environment where resources are concentrated in very few hands, where money buys laws (because it's money which is the 'currency' of power), where companies don't give a shit and dump jobs overseas and don't mind killing a few people with their toxic run-off, and where that's considered a profit-calculated risk.
I would need a lot more space to put this theory down in a more nuanced way, but the way unchecked capitalism works, you could almost find a mathematical proof that concentration of money (and thus power/resources) in the hands of the few is exactly what you get when you run the signal through the system called capitalism.
So to me, this isn't really surprising news. We've seen it happen with entertainment, finance, what have you. The Bell's getting back together (when they had been broken up by law years ago! The law hasn't changed...anti-trust has just been bought off) is just another datum point pointing towards the end-result of unbounded capitalism.
Please explain to me what legal basis the government would have for that? And when factoring in 'satire', could you explain to me the practical basis?
The reason I ask is because your point seems to be merely: "It's trivial for The Onion to make a parody of the seal". So what? Who cares if it's trivial...they're allowed to do so by formal law, common law and by common sense; de jure, de facto et de practico.
Fact is your government has shown itself to be so scared by a satire based internet site that they have slapped an unlawfull injunction on them. Not that that's very surprising...they've done much, MUCH worse.
What I have never got, since the first laptop came around, and especially now with the widescreen models, is this: why not just have a full keyboard in there? Especially now, with widescreens, why not just put a full qwerty+numpad layout? It'd even make carying easier; a rectangle is nicer to carry on a shoulderstrap than a square (it's a distribution of mass thing...a rectangle adjusts better due to it's longer base).
Shit, I should patent that and make a killing from Appple for their next gen hyped up 'oh-so-cool-and-practial' line of ibooks.
Hehe...seen "I, robot"? Feel that slight woble in the earth's rotation? That's Asimov spinning in his grave...
"You have absolutely no idea about international politics, do you?"
/only/ so is patently false.
No...8 years of MUN (delegate and organisation), a healthy interest in world affairs, a special interest in the long game, reading the classics (and the modern writers) and friends of the family who are ambassadors...I have no idea about politics. Not the history, no idea about it's forms or it's function. Not a clue about how politics is practiced in different parts of the world, nor an understanding of how those different systems interact or what different ideologies or realpolitik underlies it all. I have no clue as to where basic materials are produced in the world, and who has control over their extraction and distribution. Nor do I have a clue as to who the current players are, or who (likely) put them there and who would likely replace them. Strike me with thy clue-by-four, oh mighty low-ID#!
"Every time the UN has failed, it was due to not enough diplomacy"
Sir, it seems you know even less about politics and especially about the history of different organisations and the different actions those organisations have undertaken. Although it's true that what you say is correct in many cases, claiming that it is
The League of Nations is a prime example of what too much diplomacy does. Quite a few UN (in)actions point to an overdose of diplomacy and a lack of common sence (Burma on the human rights commisssion? WTF? And that's one of the lesser ones). Read up on the history of the UN, it's different NGO's and mission (hell, read a few preambulatory clauses of some recurring UN resolutions!) and you'll be a lot wiser and you won't embarres yourself with such broad and false assertions.
"Trying to get well over a hundred nations with different cultures, governments, languages, to agree on anything is about a hundred times as difficult as your "america first" would allow you to believe, unless you consider steamrolling over everyone else and forcing your attitude, believes and values on them a proper method."
First of all...no shit sherlock. Getting a hundered anythings to agree on whatever is hard, and the problems scale up. How insightfull of you.
And I'd like to point out I'm an englishman brought up in the dutch education system, and still live in the Netherlands; where you get the 'america first' idea from is utterly implausible, especially considering what I was advocating.
"unless you consider steamrolling over everyone else and forcing your attitude, believes and values on them a proper method."
Again, not at all, or even remotely, what I was saying or even implying. But as many conflicts have proven, having the UN as a buffer is immensely valuable. This is not the same as what you're saying at all.
"And that includes free speech, free internet, basic human rights even. They aren't as basic as you think. Heck, most of them weren't basic in the US 200, 100, some even 50 years ago!"
Did you even READ my comment? Go back, re-read it. Especially the last paragraph.