I 'fix' this by slowing down tech advances by a factor of 20 when I play the game, meaning that there'll be at least some measure of time spent in each 'period' before advancing to the next. I just hope the game gives you the option of doing this without having to monkey with the tech tree and rules.txt files.
Yes, it looks very good in this regard. Check out the screen shot in the developer's update section:
http://www.civ3.com/devupdate.cfm
It looks like you'll really be able to fine-tune a whole lot of things using the in-game edit tool.
I just wanted to again point out that according to gamespot, civ 3 will not be multiplay.
It will be multiplayer, just not when it's initially released. They've said nothing so far on when/how the multiplayer aspect will be released, but I suspect it will be some sort of expansion.
To me this smacks pretty heavily on relying on code from 10 years ago. Someone please tell me this is not the case.
It's not. They claim to have re-designed the AI from scratch, which is what I'm most interested in, forget the flashy graphics and sound.
Hmmm; weird. I tried it again, and it works for me. I tweaked the link a little; try it again. If that doesn't work, try going to www.newsweek.com, and then click on the big "why do they hate us" graphic. That should take you to the link that I posted, which is http://www.msnbc.com/news/nw-101501issue_front.asp [msnbc.com] .
Let me know what happens... I'm curious if you still have problems. I'd really like for people to read that Newsweek article. It's a great in-depth analysis of the cultural problems surrounding the Middle East.
Tried from both Solaris and win95, same deal. It looks like it redirects you out of msnbc.com to:
http://www.wimbledon.com/includes/js/external_la un ch.js
Seems like it's supposed to be some kind of crappy ad pop-up, but it stops me from reading the article. I can't get to it from newsweek.com, either.
I'm not a fan of newsweek, but I'll check it out since you recommend it.
Maybe email it to me or post it as a response if it's short?
Agnostic: You take the position that the existence of God is not knowable. This IMO is the most intellectually honest position
I can see why you'd say that, but I'm not sure I agree. If one thinks of God as some nebulous figure manipulating the universe from "above", your statement would be true. But if one thinks of all things and people as being part of God, then there's nothing dishonest in the least in saying that God exists and in fact we experience her every day.
Why do they hate us? [msnbc.com] Excellent. Error 404
The file was not found, even after searching on any extensions to the file name. The file does not exist or is read-protected.
In this case, the FTC made the an initial decision. This decision will be reviewed by the court. The court decision will be reviewed by congress and congress decision will be reviewed by voters.
That's true, of course, but you're not addressing the point I was trying to make, which is:
Why is the government in the business of defining what a nuisance is in the first place?
I find the tyranny of the majority to be an unacceptable way of dealing with many problems. For example, homeless people could be defined to be a nuisance, and thrown in jail just because people don't want to look at them.
According to your logic, if I invite a plumber to fix my sink, I cannot call the police if he starts emptying my refrigerator.
Not true, you're misrepresenting my views with another innacurate analogy.
If I enter a restaurant, the owner is free to poison me.
Again, untrue.
Doesn't it make sense to use common sense and see that all privileges that we grant each other when we willingly engage in transactions are limited and assume a trust that they will not be abused?
I don't think that it does make sense to make that assumption. The fact that some of us browse with JS on, and websites can pop up as many windows as they want is a technical problem, and it should be dealt with as such, not as a political problem.
That's somewhat irresponsible to assume the worst of Kekler, unless you have a reason for doing so. As far as increasing public profile, he was already involved in the Ollie North trial, and the Xilinx vs Altera lawsuit, it's not like he's trying to break into the bigtime.
If a man is looking at any kind of child pornography, I want him behind bars.
So who cares what you want? Maybe I want people who think as you do behind bars.
Guys who look at young children naked or doing lewd acts should be put behind bars.
How about providing a rationale to your beliefs instead of this "there oughta be a law" bullshit.
That is absolute perversion.
Highly subjective. One person's perversion is another's entertainment.
I don't care if the images are computer generated or not.
Why stop there? How about criminalizing anything that could remind you of something that you find offensive? Like an inkblot that looks to you personally to be a person killing someone else?
This is the question posed by some:
"What is the harm or crime in a man jacking off to computer generated photos of six year olds?"
And to that, I say this : If you actually need an answer to that question, you are yourself in dire need of help.
And to you, I say this:
If you can't even provide a meaningful answer to that question other than just dismissing it and saying "you need help", then you have no business posting to/.; this is a forum for the exchange of ideas, not a place to post meaningless drivel saying this is how it should be and how dare you have a different opinion than I do.
Why does the govenment regulates cleaning your dog poop from the street? Can't we have Dupont invent a tarmac that disolves it?
Why does the government regulate noise? Can't you invest in better insulation for your home?
Bad analogy, I think. The street is a public area, and people are responsible for their actions (and those of "their" pets, not that I believe that one animal, such as a human, can own another animal, such as a dog, that's no different than slavery). With the noise example, that's an UNINVITED invasion of your home, a kind of assult, no one has the right to do that.
In the case of a website, no one can force you to visit that site. If you go there and run their javascript, that's a choice that you make. And if you intended to go elsewhere but made a typo, the typo was your mistake, as well, not theirs.
As far as your argument about nuisance, you could substitute the word "obscenity" for "nuisance". Who decides what a nuisance is?
All in all, I trust the feds a lot less than I trust some stupid greedy spammers.
1. They get a nice recession to knock down pay - can't let the proles get too rich now. Didn't you notice that Bush's little recession wasn't getting deep enough before this.
There's a lot of things about this mess that bother me, but this isn't one of them. Bush is no more to blame for the recession than Clinton is to be credited for the high economic growth of the late 90's.
...of letting commercial interests take over a part of your computer network, I would like to know a few things:
Do you understand the concept of a screen saver? It has nothing to do with the network.
Are the computers counting how many times the ads are viewed? Wouldn't this constitute a privacy violation on their part?
Yeah, sure, the computer knows when you're looking at the screen saver and when you're not.
Are the ads going to be "click-through" to Internet sites, like the ones used in Bezerk's games [bezerk.com]? If so, wouldn't the university be concerned about the productivity lost?
Again, do you understand the concept of a screen saver? There's no "click-through". When you move the mouse, the screen saver goes away. A screen saver is not a web browser.
- How do they plan to keep the software installed? Unless these are highly-public, short-term use terminals (i.e. email checking between classes) it will just be a matter of time before some clever employee or student removes the annoyance, permissions or no.
So? A clever 1% who figures out how to remove it form the system that they use means the program is 99% effective.
- If they've got all this space to spare, surely they'd be better off developing some SETI@Home-like software and using it for research. Is this really the best use of their computing resources, to bring more advertising to the campus?
They're not considering how to best use computing resources, they're considering how to generate revenue.
I can't tell if you're just really, really dumb or if your post is a troll...
Nicely said, So when are you going to stop Irish, and Spanish visitors from coming to the USA? After all, ETA (the Basque seperatist movement) are Terrorists, and so are the IRA.
I'm not going to stop them. But hopefully the govt will. And the IRA and Basque terrorists have no anti-US agenda that I know of.
And when is the US Government going to really do something about not funding Terrorists? Are they going to seize the assets of Noraid?
How about the CIA? They've been involved with Terrorists once or twice...
People seem to be waking up a tiny bit about some of the far-reaching consequences of US foreign policy. Karma is not just an abstract concept, it's for real.
I don't Seriously expect the US government to be impartial about their "War on Terrorism" but I'm just so surprised at some of the convenient blanks in the collective memory.
I'm not at all surprised. Most Americans seem to want to think that we are the good guys and they're the bad guys, and don't want to look any deeper than that. Bush encourages this attitude with his "make no mistake about it, this is a war of Good vs. Evil". And this is a dangerous situation. Democracy needs education to thrive. It needs people who are willing to think, and who can make intelligent, informed choices; not mindless drones that will go along with whatever view is presented to them in 15-second sound bytes that get past their low attention span filters.
But suspending the rights of people who aren't even Arabic,
While I agree with the rest of your post, don't make it into a racial issue. If you really believe in freedom, you believe in the freedom of all people, and that laws apply to all people equally. While today *some* Arabs may be our "enemies" (and Afgans aren't Arabs, BTW), yesterday Russians were the enemies and tomorrow it may be the Chinese.
The track records on terrorism of nations should be recognized, with regard to allowing entrance or immigration, but once here people need to be equal under the law.
this is called severance pay. And don't you mean minimum warning? i.e., there should be some minimum amount of time that an employer would need to give to a laid off employee to find work?
I think he says maximum warning meaning give employees as much notice in advance as possible.
also note that there are a lot of legal issues for public companies regarding lay offs that makes this impossible
Good point. If a worker knows he has no future with a company and will be gone in a few months, he will have very little incentive to do any work, and may in fact be harmful to the company.
So, the answer is to never trust anything, eh? Must be a miserable life you live.
No, I have a very good life, thanks for asking.
Yes, I do trust many people, individuals that I know. But polititians I don't trust (except for
a precious few that have earned that trust).
How do you define obscenity? If I recall, it has a really vague "offends the community" type of legal definition, but things still work out in court.
Maybe they do, but that's a big problem. Whether or not something is illegal should be clearly defined, and not dependent on what mood the judge or jury happens to be in that day.
And the reason 'obscenity' has such a vague definition is that it's an attempt by some persons to impose their moral or aesthetic judgements on others, when those persons have differing views themselves. The fact that it's so poorly defined is a clear indication that the law is entering into muddy waters that it has no business entering into.
No, it really isn't that simple.:)
Culture is one small factor. There's other things, such as economic climate, most of my friends being in the US, etc., that are more of an influence at present.
Getting into the ethical bit: nor should they, IMHO. We need smaller government, yes, but if there are not some controls placed on businesses they'll screw us over. This is a sensible place for gov't regulation. It protects us, and not in that offensive reading-your-email way.
LOL! Ok, I see, govt regulation is good, but only if it helps you personally.
For example, what if price fixing was legal... Imagine how much gas would cost. (Green freaks, replace "gas" with any other important product manufactured by only a few companies, and keep your "I wish!" statements to yourself.) With such a high barrier to entering that market, there is no practical way for a competitor to jump in and undercut the price-fixing consortium. That is the system with maximum freedom, but it still sucks!
Yes, and that's exactly why I said businesses should be able to set their own prices IF THEY'RE NOT A MONOPOLY. A price-fixing consortium is the same kind of deal.
Second and most important a small country can beat a super power if the small country has a super power as a friend. This means given weapons, training, and Intel.
Note that I said that the behavior was immoral - not illegal, impractical, unprofitable, etc. A fundamental moral behavior for a trader is to not aggressively exploit your customer. Sure, a good profit is nice, but exploitation and establishing abnormal pricing solely upon your customer's actual or perceived crisis is predatory and unethical.
Why is unethical? Isn't that what business is about? To sell your product at as high a price as conditions will allow? And how do you make a distincion between making a profit and abnormal or predatory pricing?
Plus, there is a function of mass hystaria that is fed by unethical traders and I'd expect them to have accountability for further inciting fear and panic.
Seems to me that only the hysterical masses can be blamed for mass hysteria. Hysteria is not a rational thing, you can't predict what people will get hysterical about. If someone is putting ads on the air saying the end of the world is at hand, and bob's gas is the only place left in the state with gas for sale, that would be irresponsible. But if some business feels that its supply of gas is in question, there's nothing wrong with raising one's price to reflect that economic reality.
Fortunately, gas stations in my town were reasonable and didn't jack up their prices on gas that was already in their gas tanks and billed to them. I swear if they'd have gone up to 4 or 5 bucks, they'd have never seen another non-gas dollar from me again, and I'd be very vocal in suggesting others do the same. And yeah, that's another of the ways a free markets works...
I'm all in favor of consumer activism, I think that's the right attitude, don't support businesses that you feel act in harmful ways to society.
But I'm against giving government more control over how people run their businesses. Politicians are often not very smart, and are rather biased towards whoever pays them their bribes (aka "campaign contributions"), to make rational decisions in this area.
Is this cultural imperialism? God damned right, it is. If you have a problem with that, try living in some fourth-world shithole for a few years and then tell me that all cultures are equally good and valuable.
No, it's not cultural imperialism, it's economic imperialism.
And economic success does not equate with the value of a culture, nor are "all cultures equally good and valuable". I would far, far, prefer Indian culture to American, and that has nothing to do with economics.
Not a bad idea in general, but MCDONALDS???
That's hardly killing them with kindness, that's killing them with heart attacks and bovine growth hormones...
Slashdot Mirror
I 'fix' this by slowing down tech advances by a factor of 20 when I play the game, meaning that there'll be at least some measure of time spent in each 'period' before advancing to the next. I just hope the game gives you the option of doing this without having to monkey with the tech tree and rules.txt files.
Yes, it looks very good in this regard. Check out the screen shot in the developer's update section:
http://www.civ3.com/devupdate.cfm
It looks like you'll really be able to fine-tune a whole lot of things using the in-game edit tool.
I just wanted to again point out that according to gamespot, civ 3 will not be multiplay.
It will be multiplayer, just not when it's initially released. They've said nothing so far on when/how the multiplayer aspect will be released, but I suspect it will be some sort of expansion.
To me this smacks pretty heavily on relying on code from 10 years ago. Someone please tell me this is not the case.
It's not. They claim to have re-designed the AI from scratch, which is what I'm most interested in, forget the flashy graphics and sound.
Hmmm; weird. I tried it again, and it works for me. I tweaked the link a little; try it again. If that doesn't work, try going to www.newsweek.com, and then click on the big "why do they hate us" graphic. That should take you to the link that I posted, which is http://www.msnbc.com/news/nw-101501issue_front.asp [msnbc.com] .
a un ch.js
Let me know what happens... I'm curious if you still have problems. I'd really like for people to read that Newsweek article. It's a great in-depth analysis of the cultural problems surrounding the Middle East.
Tried from both Solaris and win95, same deal. It looks like it redirects you out of msnbc.com to:
http://www.wimbledon.com/includes/js/external_l
Seems like it's supposed to be some kind of crappy ad pop-up, but it stops me from reading the article. I can't get to it from newsweek.com, either.
I'm not a fan of newsweek, but I'll check it out since you recommend it.
Maybe email it to me or post it as a response if it's short?
Thanks!
Agnostic: You take the position that the existence of God is not knowable. This IMO is the most intellectually honest position
I can see why you'd say that, but I'm not sure I agree. If one thinks of God as some nebulous figure manipulating the universe from "above", your statement would be true. But if one thinks of all things and people as being part of God, then there's nothing dishonest in the least in saying that God exists and in fact we experience her every day.
Why do they hate us? [msnbc.com] Excellent.
Error 404
The file was not found, even after searching on any extensions to the file name. The file does not exist or is read-protected.
In this case, the FTC made the an initial decision. This decision will be reviewed by the court. The court decision will be reviewed by congress and congress decision will be reviewed by voters.
That's true, of course, but you're not addressing the point I was trying to make, which is:
Why is the government in the business of defining what a nuisance is in the first place?
I find the tyranny of the majority to be an unacceptable way of dealing with many problems. For example, homeless people could be defined to be a nuisance, and thrown in jail just because people don't want to look at them.
According to your logic, if I invite a plumber to fix my sink, I cannot call the police if he starts emptying my refrigerator.
Not true, you're misrepresenting my views with another innacurate analogy.
If I enter a restaurant, the owner is free to poison me.
Again, untrue.
Doesn't it make sense to use common sense and see that all privileges that we grant each other when we willingly engage in transactions are limited and assume a trust that they will not be abused?
I don't think that it does make sense to make that assumption. The fact that some of us browse with JS on, and websites can pop up as many windows as they want is a technical problem, and it should be dealt with as such, not as a political problem.
That's somewhat irresponsible to assume the worst of Kekler, unless you have a reason for doing so. As far as increasing public profile, he was already involved in the Ollie North trial, and the Xilinx vs Altera lawsuit, it's not like he's trying to break into the bigtime.
If that's the case, I'll bet this would be a great substitute for acid!
Acid doesn't exist. The perception of ingesting LSD is just a hallucinatory by-product brought on by the trip.
If a man is looking at any kind of child pornography, I want him behind bars.
/.; this is a forum for the exchange of ideas, not a place to post meaningless drivel saying this is how it should be and how dare you have a different opinion than I do.
So who cares what you want? Maybe I want people who think as you do behind bars.
Guys who look at young children naked or doing lewd acts should be put behind bars.
How about providing a rationale to your beliefs instead of this "there oughta be a law" bullshit.
That is absolute perversion.
Highly subjective. One person's perversion is another's entertainment.
I don't care if the images are computer generated or not.
Why stop there? How about criminalizing anything that could remind you of something that you find offensive? Like an inkblot that looks to you personally to be a person killing someone else?
This is the question posed by some:
"What is the harm or crime in a man jacking off to computer generated photos of six year olds?"
And to that, I say this : If you actually need an answer to that question, you are yourself in dire need of help.
And to you, I say this:
If you can't even provide a meaningful answer to that question other than just dismissing it and saying "you need help", then you have no business posting to
Why does the govenment regulates cleaning your dog poop from the street? Can't we have Dupont invent a tarmac that disolves it?
Why does the government regulate noise? Can't you invest in better insulation for your home?
Bad analogy, I think. The street is a public area, and people are responsible for their actions (and those of "their" pets, not that I believe that one animal, such as a human, can own another animal, such as a dog, that's no different than slavery). With the noise example, that's an UNINVITED invasion of your home, a kind of assult, no one has the right to do that.
In the case of a website, no one can force you to visit that site. If you go there and run their javascript, that's a choice that you make. And if you intended to go elsewhere but made a typo, the typo was your mistake, as well, not theirs.
As far as your argument about nuisance, you could substitute the word "obscenity" for "nuisance". Who decides what a nuisance is?
All in all, I trust the feds a lot less than I trust some stupid greedy spammers.
1. They get a nice recession to knock down pay - can't let the proles get too rich now. Didn't you notice that Bush's little recession wasn't getting deep enough before this.
There's a lot of things about this mess that bother me, but this isn't one of them. Bush is no more to blame for the recession than Clinton is to be credited for the high economic growth of the late 90's.
Do you understand the concept of a screen saver? It has nothing to do with the network.
Are the computers counting how many times the ads are viewed? Wouldn't this constitute a privacy violation on their part?
Yeah, sure, the computer knows when you're looking at the screen saver and when you're not.
Are the ads going to be "click-through" to Internet sites, like the ones used in Bezerk's games [bezerk.com]? If so, wouldn't the university be concerned about the productivity lost?
Again, do you understand the concept of a screen saver? There's no "click-through". When you move the mouse, the screen saver goes away. A screen saver is not a web browser.
- How do they plan to keep the software installed? Unless these are highly-public, short-term use terminals (i.e. email checking between classes) it will just be a matter of time before some clever employee or student removes the annoyance, permissions or no.
So? A clever 1% who figures out how to remove it form the system that they use means the program is 99% effective.
- If they've got all this space to spare, surely they'd be better off developing some SETI@Home-like software and using it for research. Is this really the best use of their computing resources, to bring more advertising to the campus?
They're not considering how to best use computing resources, they're considering how to generate revenue.
I can't tell if you're just really, really dumb or if your post is a troll...
Nicely said, So when are you going to stop Irish, and Spanish visitors from coming to the USA? After all, ETA (the Basque seperatist movement) are Terrorists, and so are the IRA.
I'm not going to stop them. But hopefully the govt will. And the IRA and Basque terrorists have no anti-US agenda that I know of.
And when is the US Government going to really do something about not funding Terrorists? Are they going to seize the assets of Noraid?
How about the CIA? They've been involved with Terrorists once or twice...
People seem to be waking up a tiny bit about some of the far-reaching consequences of US foreign policy. Karma is not just an abstract concept, it's for real.
I don't Seriously expect the US government to be impartial about their "War on Terrorism" but I'm just so surprised at some of the convenient blanks in the collective memory.
I'm not at all surprised. Most Americans seem to want to think that we are the good guys and they're the bad guys, and don't want to look any deeper than that. Bush encourages this attitude with his "make no mistake about it, this is a war of Good vs. Evil". And this is a dangerous situation. Democracy needs education to thrive. It needs people who are willing to think, and who can make intelligent, informed choices; not mindless drones that will go along with whatever view is presented to them in 15-second sound bytes that get past their low attention span filters.
But suspending the rights of people who aren't even Arabic,
While I agree with the rest of your post, don't make it into a racial issue. If you really believe in freedom, you believe in the freedom of all people, and that laws apply to all people equally. While today *some* Arabs may be our "enemies" (and Afgans aren't Arabs, BTW), yesterday Russians were the enemies and tomorrow it may be the Chinese.
The track records on terrorism of nations should be recognized, with regard to allowing entrance or immigration, but once here people need to be equal under the law.
this is called severance pay. And don't you mean minimum warning? i.e., there should be some minimum amount of time that an employer would need to give to a laid off employee to find work?
I think he says maximum warning meaning give employees as much notice in advance as possible.
also note that there are a lot of legal issues for public companies regarding lay offs that makes this impossible
Good point. If a worker knows he has no future with a company and will be gone in a few months, he will have very little incentive to do any work, and may in fact be harmful to the company.
Please move out of the US and take your friends with you.
...says the flag-waving patriot. "America! Love it or leave it!"
LOLOL!!!
So, the answer is to never trust anything, eh? Must be a miserable life you live.
No, I have a very good life, thanks for asking.
Yes, I do trust many people, individuals that I know. But polititians I don't trust (except for
a precious few that have earned that trust).
How do you define obscenity? If I recall, it has a really vague "offends the community" type of legal definition, but things still work out in court.
Maybe they do, but that's a big problem. Whether or not something is illegal should be clearly defined, and not dependent on what mood the judge or jury happens to be in that day.
And the reason 'obscenity' has such a vague definition is that it's an attempt by some persons to impose their moral or aesthetic judgements on others, when those persons have differing views themselves. The fact that it's so poorly defined is a clear indication that the law is entering into muddy waters that it has no business entering into.
Then move; it really is that simple.
:)
No, it really isn't that simple.
Culture is one small factor. There's other things, such as economic climate, most of my friends being in the US, etc., that are more of an influence at present.
Getting into the ethical bit: nor should they, IMHO. We need smaller government, yes, but if there are not some controls placed on businesses they'll screw us over. This is a sensible place for gov't regulation. It protects us, and not in that offensive reading-your-email way.
LOL! Ok, I see, govt regulation is good, but only if it helps you personally.
For example, what if price fixing was legal... Imagine how much gas would cost. (Green freaks, replace "gas" with any other important product manufactured by only a few companies, and keep your "I wish!" statements to yourself.) With such a high barrier to entering that market, there is no practical way for a competitor to jump in and undercut the price-fixing consortium. That is the system with maximum freedom, but it still sucks!
Yes, and that's exactly why I said businesses should be able to set their own prices IF THEY'RE NOT A MONOPOLY. A price-fixing consortium is the same kind of deal.
I trust the leaders of my country. I trust our military.
Then you need serious help. That's the way to build a totalitarian state. The way to build a democracy is to think for oneself.
I will sacrifice my life so that we call live free from fear in the liberty our grandparents died for.
LOL! Bravo, bravo, great performance. Now what will you do for an encore?
Second and most important a small country can beat a super power if the small country has a super power as a friend. This means given weapons, training, and Intel.
Or, better yet, weapons, training, and AMD...
Note that I said that the behavior was immoral - not illegal, impractical, unprofitable, etc. A fundamental moral behavior for a trader is to not aggressively exploit your customer. Sure, a good profit is nice, but exploitation and establishing abnormal pricing solely upon your customer's actual or perceived crisis is predatory and unethical.
Why is unethical? Isn't that what business is about? To sell your product at as high a price as conditions will allow? And how do you make a distincion between making a profit and abnormal or predatory pricing?
Plus, there is a function of mass hystaria that is fed by unethical traders and I'd expect them to have accountability for further inciting fear and panic.
Seems to me that only the hysterical masses can be blamed for mass hysteria. Hysteria is not a rational thing, you can't predict what people will get hysterical about. If someone is putting ads on the air saying the end of the world is at hand, and bob's gas is the only place left in the state with gas for sale, that would be irresponsible. But if some business feels that its supply of gas is in question, there's nothing wrong with raising one's price to reflect that economic reality.
Fortunately, gas stations in my town were reasonable and didn't jack up their prices on gas that was already in their gas tanks and billed to them. I swear if they'd have gone up to 4 or 5 bucks, they'd have never seen another non-gas dollar from me again, and I'd be very vocal in suggesting others do the same. And yeah, that's another of the ways a free markets works ...
I'm all in favor of consumer activism, I think that's the right attitude, don't support businesses that you feel act in harmful ways to society.
But I'm against giving government more control over how people run their businesses. Politicians are often not very smart, and are rather biased towards whoever pays them their bribes (aka "campaign contributions"), to make rational decisions in this area.
Is this cultural imperialism? God damned right, it is. If you have a problem with that, try living in some fourth-world shithole for a few years and then tell me that all cultures are equally good and valuable.
No, it's not cultural imperialism, it's economic imperialism.
And economic success does not equate with the value of a culture, nor are "all cultures equally good and valuable". I would far, far, prefer Indian culture to American, and that has nothing to do with economics.
Not a bad idea in general, but MCDONALDS???
That's hardly killing them with kindness, that's killing them with heart attacks and bovine growth hormones...