"Walmart alone dwarfes the RIAA; Walmart+Apple+Blockbuster+Target+Amazon+NetFlix+Al l the other outlets versus RIAA is a joke.
Especially when Walmart can distribute videos at a cost of 5-10 cents via electronic (or rental, or flash) distribution, and blu-ray disks cost $23 wholesale! Ever met a Walmart purchasing agent? Those guys give new meaning to "hard barginer", and make your look like a fool and his money."
You just said the RIAA were the middle men but it seems you are confused, retail is always the middle man.
Yea Walmart is tough, they're the ones keeping physical media alive.
Apple got lucky with the iPod and iTunes because they offered DRM to the studios before Microsoft could develop a standard people would accept but don't assume it will happen again.
When CD's stop being a reasonable option for distribution people will examine their options again and iTunes like pricing will become unfeasable...
iTunes doesn't offer anything, it just lets you access the music produced by the studios who are very capable of running their own services.
True the very action sequences I liked from the books will lead to a really craptacular action film.
I would love to see them make Diamond Age but that's not going to happen, the fact that the book is actually a useful teaching tool for children and just tonnes of the cultural elements simply wouldn't make it possible.
One that could be made into a movie would be Zodiac but without a female lead I doubt it would have the same viewership as Erin Brokovich and other do gooder movies:(.
Then yes the U.S. is showing increasing signs of totalitarianism, one we're getting right now is that the U.S. military is increasingly distanced for the political process, they don't know why they're fighting, every single interview with a soldier shows they don't know why they're fighting and no one seems to think this is a problem.
The U.S. has a very high ratio of spending on military vs. Education.
Heck today on slashdot they have an Artical about the U.S. military using video games to train soldiers, not to train them to be effective but to train them to kill without thinking.
Admittedly it is an aspect of an effective military that they don't ask questions but is it something you really want?
The U.S. government is increasingly breaking the rules that are laid out for it, not revising them or examining them but breaking them (Wiretaps?), from an even more tinfoil hat perspective they are looking into technologies like streetside video cameras and anti insurgent technologies (Seeing through walls anyone? How about robotic soldiers?) that aren't really compatible with an open society.
People in the U.S. don't feel they have any say in their government and feel that the political parties are too close together to really be distinguishable, most citizens aren't really sure what each party's platform is.
Maybe the literature about dictatorships doesn't apply to the U.S. but if it DOES then U.S. citizens should be very concerned.
Part of it is, /me peers through the mists of time... When intel was king computers cost $3000-4000 and people had no options.
Until recently laptops have cost approximately $2000.
Flash forward to 2006 and you see the $100 laptop and you wonder why there aren't good (feature complete, (80 gig HD, DVD burner, firewire, usb) reasonable performance laptops to match their desktop counterparts.
The desktop price wars are stagnating and will continue but AMD seems to be releasing $700-800 laptops when those laptops hit $500-600 desktops will need to hit $300.
Most laptop owners don't need 300 fps in Quake 3. So what we want is a stable processor design that consumes less and less power, with competition between intel and AMD that is what they'll end up offering, not better performance.
I had never played a football game before so one day I played a friend of mine. Huge football fan and really into the electronic games.
Now this one was pretty standard fare you choose a play they run it, you throw to the player, now after watching for a while it became obvious that it was totally scripted, each receiver would be open at a set point in their run and you throw them the ball.
When I mentioned it was simply a matter of watching 2 receivers (maybe the blitz is too quick for the first one) and hitting the right button it made him really upset. He was totally commited to the idea that each play was unique with the game generating random behaviour.
People who play a lot of one game get a really good idea of how it's going to act given any stimulus, what this movie shows is how the game uses semi random behaviour in conjunction with scripted behaviour to give the illusion of thought.
On the one hand it's cool to show how to make a game seem to react like it's thinking... on the other, we haven't come far from pong.
"it's much harder to change the mainstream when you're 1,000 miles away."
But most of the youth I've spoken to who are in the music or software industries are planning on seeing the end of copywrite law. What seems like youthful idealism now, if pursued, could be the political reality of the future.
Companies who rely less on proprietary standards and IP are starting up all around and offering an alternative for new startups, it's pretty clear that entire cities states and countries are moving towards open standards and it's going to change the landscape.
Stallman probably sees that open source software will inevitably take over, software development is accellerating but approaching a point where there is significantly less return (Operating systems and internet browsers are prime examples), the newest technologies have been embraced by open source, bittorrent, IpV6, CSS, etc. and anything new that comes out will have open source competition, while this competition remains donations for open source development from companies will stagnate but the companies who develop closed source will suffer. Stallman is trying to make the transition to open source faster to keep this battle short.
Stallman, I'm not a huge open source advocate but I can understand what Stallman is saying and it goes something like this.
Open source is good for hobbiests but to get government or corperate sponsorship that can make it's potential a reality it needs to differentiate itself from closed source software.
Stallman is trying to push open source software as a means towards redefining how our society values intellectual property.
Now people are payed hundreds maybe thousands of dollars for ideas which serve everyone and we consider these ideas bought and paid for, but realistically these ideas are worth far far more than can be paid for by the current system.
By destroying the closed software industry Stallman hopes to create massive government and business spending on open source projects... End result a more efficient system without boundaries and much higher spending due to combining resources.... Sounds pretty close to the goal of most open source advocates.
Yes he's willing to break some eggs to make an omellete but if it was impossible to patent or copywrite software do you really think they'd stop making it?
It seems clear that software will continue being produced and so this gamble will pay off.
Socialism, those billions from oil into a socialist system... It'll be pretty quick look at South America...
Leave some peace keepers, set an election schedule that's brisk maybe 1-2 years so people can trust it and have more control then simply honour their wishes as voters.
The reason it's not as simple as described is because America wants to "re-educate" Iraqi's about the virtues of passive capitalist subjugation, their pissed so that's going to take a while.
PC gaming's online systems are pretty rockey right now, for a while with HL1, Q3 etc it was possible to use third party server browsers that were INCREADIBLY powerful, All Seeing Eye is probably the best example, it did complex scripting to find you exactly the right server, it detected and screened for every publicly available aspect of the server down to which country/area the server was likely located in.
Then Gamespy attacked the publishers, I'm sure they talked to the publishers because their product is a big pile o' crap (Arcade at least Gamespy3D was fine) and developers wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole and now most games use in game server browsers that are slow, buggy, and control your search results.
Pretty sad:(
Consoles simply won't be able to replicate the golden age of server browsing computer gaming had with ASE or more recently with XFire (Thresh's IM/Browser/VOIP program).
Are you willing to bet that the problem isn't with liscencing?
If corperate IT departments get access to soemthing that's easy to install and moves easily between machines it will pop up on the internet, it will be dissected so that all the programs become instant warez celebrities (You don't want to have to reregister and find CD keys/CDs do you?)
Linux has tried with it's distro's containing files but the system for building a "distro" from your installed OS isn't particularly "User Friendly".
If Microsoft moves this direction we'll start seeing Blu-Ray discs coming out with OSX, Solaris, BSD, Linux, Windows and a backup partition, but that kind of choice and reliability (Through backups and multi- OS file access) there won't really be a market for upgrading the closed source aspects of the software.
Simple Backup Systems - > Multiboot OS right off one disk -> death of closed source.
I might be working with my english prof to produce a set of Shakespeare based video games and it occured to me that no one has done this yet...
It seems like something that would make a very interesting long term project, starting with the basic premise and theme and extending continuously to try and represent more and more of the nuance of the work...
The reference text is widely available and even the interpretations and criticism nescessary can be easily found.
I'm sure there are many similar sets of work which lend themself to distributed and ongoing development but there seem to be few gaming projects based on the same kind of incremental improvements we see in application software.
This is exactly why the U.N. gets upset about the U.S. controlling the internet, they are going to be taking down things like dns servers and major routing switches for THEIR OWN military testing and everyone else can just suck an egg.
See the thing about people who follow the law blindly and don't realize that it should always be followed in spirit not letter is that they act holier than thou while at the same time breaking almost as many rules.
Somewhere in your dark little mind is the niggling sensation "At least I'm not as bad as..." as you break EULA's don't read legal agreements, break driving laws, don't file every item on your income taxes... etc.
Have you had your car checked for emissions? Might want to do that EVERY day...
These law suits are charging people who wouldn't be buying the product anyway and unlike stealing they aren't costing the recording industry anything except better publicity and a few initial sales.
The truth is Britney is a big star on radio and TV but she won't be on the internet, while these people are downloading music from these mainstream artists they are keeping their industry alive instead of building it's replacement.
These lawsuits are very much like witch trials, charging people for something society doesn't really know anything about and hasn't decided what to do about because they're afraid it's going to get out of control.
In this case the music industry is done,it's over,finished, kaput... so people aren't going to stop pirating until the next musical economy starts up.
The chances of that new economy having space for lexus driving, music hating, marketting statistic driven executives is pretty slim and for most of the people on slashdot... We don't care. We won't miss them, they're not on stage they aren't doing sound checks and they aren't really helping to encourage artists who are great.
What they are doing is building a marketing machine to ensure only their music reaches your ears... these lawsuits are just a continuation of that.
In the long run, moving towards reviewing patents and getting rid of the illegitimate ones, will be much easier than the problem they are facing now...hundred year patents.
If companies start getting these short term patents before the old style patents pass through the system there might be interesting legal battles (no comparisons to existing patents after all)...
4 Years is a LONG time in technology fields, having access to the patents ATI or Nvidia held 4 years ago would be totally TOTALLY useless in terms of offering meaningful competition in the next few years... So for companies that are trying to use rapid innovation and not stifling patent ownership this is great.
Is supposed to be A STANDARD but Adobe has added so many small features that it has gotten out of control. These features are the plugins that make Adobe dog slow to load.
Realplayer has really taken a hit since real alternative came out, perhaps we'll see the same thing in the adobe sphere, maybe if firefox started having a pdf reader built in... Well I guess Opera would need to have it first but it could stop the insanity.
I have two technophobe parents, my mom occasionally knows tonnes of stuff about something like a VCR or Digital TV but mostly it's pretty painful.
I've tried everything, just explaining when something is easy and something is hard can be pretty tough.
I just put shareaza on her laptop, I know it's piracy but she's trying to find some really obscure stuff... It was too complicated.
I got them 2 matched usb mp3 players (work as usb drives)... But they say they are too complicated even though they have no more features than a CD player or Walkman...
At this point the shuffle is the only thing possible, it's like a nightmare dealing with them...
Silly, there is a reason that Russia has made more than 200,000 Nukes.
Once you have the tech it's not too hard, the old bombs needed a lot of components (Uranium, Tritium etc.) but the new ones can acheive fission with much less.
This is a little bit like video cards, it's just sand but figuring it out takes time and materials.
The best way to stop fears of nuclear holocaust is to give every international agreement reasonable escape clauses, I don't want to be tied to some stupid agreement that someone (probably bribed and unethical) ten political parties ago agreed to.
Things like U.S. military bases (with ensuant rapes, violence, and political threats), oil treaties (Did you know you can only buy Oil in $ U.S.), and debts (Some countries in the America's bought freedom from the U.S. by agreeing to pay for the slaves/revolutionaries these countries usually were under trade embargo and the compound interest means that they are still paying FOR THE PURCHASE OF THEIR CITIZENS today) etc are the reason countries really think the U.S. is unethical and used it's past position of power to build a very imperialist network of patently unfair agreements, often through threats of violence or blatant bribery.
Now they aren't a threat to anyone anymore, no oil, no tech, no industry, no money, just a bunch of lazy puritans sitting around ruled by the rich.
These days America has to make deals that are a lot closer to fair, and they just aren't developing the monopolies they wanted, Monsanto is probably the closest they've come in the last 100 years.
Have you been in a shooting war recently with Russia?
Isn't that, well, the whole point?
If American's want to persist in the beliefe that a real war will be without casualities they can and it seems their current government well let them live this pipe dream, it will only become a problem when people like the parent start to think of not having wars anymore as "giving up" and think their smart enough to attack the wrong country.
If people have to be willing to die to make a point by killing it's probably for the best.
I'm the owner of a sail boat on Lake Ontario, and I could lug a pretty serious weapon into downtown New York or Detroit without any trouble.
To stop this much easier attack you'll need a police state, and that might not even protect you from revolution.
As war equipment goes we are at a good level, we have the technology to deal with natural threats, lions, bears, asteroids, and not be a threat to each other thanks to mutually assured...
If the American government wants to create a system where everyone else is simply trying to maintain a balance of power they may find that EVERYONE gets fed up with it, socialist countries don't feel the need to spend 1/5 of their GDP on the military (we have health care, education, and the arts) and some day it'll probably be a lot cheaper in the long run to stop the creators of such militaristic policies rather than continue the rat race.
Slashdot Mirror
"Walmart alone dwarfes the RIAA; Walmart+Apple+Blockbuster+Target+Amazon+NetFlix+Al l the other outlets versus RIAA is a joke.
Especially when Walmart can distribute videos at a cost of 5-10 cents via electronic (or rental, or flash) distribution, and blu-ray disks cost $23 wholesale! Ever met a Walmart purchasing agent? Those guys give new meaning to "hard barginer", and make your look like a fool and his money."
You just said the RIAA were the middle men but it seems you are confused, retail is always the middle man.
Yea Walmart is tough, they're the ones keeping physical media alive.
Apple got lucky with the iPod and iTunes because they offered DRM to the studios before Microsoft could develop a standard people would accept but don't assume it will happen again.
When CD's stop being a reasonable option for distribution people will examine their options again and iTunes like pricing will become unfeasable...
iTunes doesn't offer anything, it just lets you access the music produced by the studios who are very capable of running their own services.
Storage has to be the first element of computers to increase by 1000x and get to the point where we don't care anymore.
It's frikkin dots! Of course we're going to be able to fit more than a few billion dots in 200 cm^3
We've all seen the size of a 1 gig micro sd card and these are all rewrittable technologies.
If you could release a 10 terabyte drive tommorow do you think anyone would care if you couldn't delete anything from it?
Canada, is considerably more liberal about freedom of speech than the U.S.
Child pornography might be associated with jail time but more likely with psychological evaluation.
I'd like to think they can distinguish pedophiles...
Ever seen robot combat anime? The stuff in space?
Imagine two people actually manipulating controllers in space and trying to destroy each other.
Initially it will be pretty free form, just orientation but no real way to make their motions somewhat realistic.
Eventually some mechanism for making the players not act crazy, then you can simulate dogfights with hand held little planes AWSOME!
Ah but I want to listen to REASON.
:(.
True the very action sequences I liked from the books will lead to a really craptacular action film.
I would love to see them make Diamond Age but that's not going to happen, the fact that the book is actually a useful teaching tool for children and just tonnes of the cultural elements simply wouldn't make it possible.
One that could be made into a movie would be Zodiac but without a female lead I doubt it would have the same viewership as Erin Brokovich and other do gooder movies
Then yes the U.S. is showing increasing signs of totalitarianism, one we're getting right now is that the U.S. military is increasingly distanced for the political process, they don't know why they're fighting, every single interview with a soldier shows they don't know why they're fighting and no one seems to think this is a problem.
The U.S. has a very high ratio of spending on military vs. Education.
Heck today on slashdot they have an Artical about the U.S. military using video games to train soldiers, not to train them to be effective but to train them to kill without thinking.
Admittedly it is an aspect of an effective military that they don't ask questions but is it something you really want?
The U.S. government is increasingly breaking the rules that are laid out for it, not revising them or examining them but breaking them (Wiretaps?), from an even more tinfoil hat perspective they are looking into technologies like streetside video cameras and anti insurgent technologies (Seeing through walls anyone? How about robotic soldiers?) that aren't really compatible with an open society.
People in the U.S. don't feel they have any say in their government and feel that the political parties are too close together to really be distinguishable, most citizens aren't really sure what each party's platform is.
Maybe the literature about dictatorships doesn't apply to the U.S. but if it DOES then U.S. citizens should be very concerned.
Part of it is,
/me peers through the mists of time...
When intel was king computers cost $3000-4000 and people had no options.
Until recently laptops have cost approximately $2000.
Flash forward to 2006 and you see the $100 laptop and you wonder why there aren't good (feature complete, (80 gig HD, DVD burner, firewire, usb) reasonable performance laptops to match their desktop counterparts.
The desktop price wars are stagnating and will continue but AMD seems to be releasing $700-800 laptops when those laptops hit $500-600 desktops will need to hit $300.
Most laptop owners don't need 300 fps in Quake 3. So what we want is a stable processor design that consumes less and less power, with competition between intel and AMD that is what they'll end up offering, not better performance.
I had never played a football game before so one day I played a friend of mine. Huge football fan and really into the electronic games.
Now this one was pretty standard fare you choose a play they run it, you throw to the player, now after watching for a while it became obvious that it was totally scripted, each receiver would be open at a set point in their run and you throw them the ball.
When I mentioned it was simply a matter of watching 2 receivers (maybe the blitz is too quick for the first one) and hitting the right button it made him really upset. He was totally commited to the idea that each play was unique with the game generating random behaviour.
People who play a lot of one game get a really good idea of how it's going to act given any stimulus, what this movie shows is how the game uses semi random behaviour in conjunction with scripted behaviour to give the illusion of thought.
On the one hand it's cool to show how to make a game seem to react like it's thinking... on the other, we haven't come far from pong.
Barney (as silly and sad as it is) are much calmer, they share with each other" /RIAA
RIAA"HEATHENS!"
"it's much harder to change the mainstream when you're 1,000 miles away."
But most of the youth I've spoken to who are in the music or software industries are planning on seeing the end of copywrite law. What seems like youthful idealism now, if pursued, could be the political reality of the future.
Companies who rely less on proprietary standards and IP are starting up all around and offering an alternative for new startups, it's pretty clear that entire cities states and countries are moving towards open standards and it's going to change the landscape.
Stallman probably sees that open source software will inevitably take over, software development is accellerating but approaching a point where there is significantly less return (Operating systems and internet browsers are prime examples), the newest technologies have been embraced by open source, bittorrent, IpV6, CSS, etc. and anything new that comes out will have open source competition, while this competition remains donations for open source development from companies will stagnate but the companies who develop closed source will suffer. Stallman is trying to make the transition to open source faster to keep this battle short.
Stallman, I'm not a huge open source advocate but I can understand what Stallman is saying and it goes something like this.
Open source is good for hobbiests but to get government or corperate sponsorship that can make it's potential a reality it needs to differentiate itself from closed source software.
Stallman is trying to push open source software as a means towards redefining how our society values intellectual property.
Now people are payed hundreds maybe thousands of dollars for ideas which serve everyone and we consider these ideas bought and paid for, but realistically these ideas are worth far far more than can be paid for by the current system.
By destroying the closed software industry Stallman hopes to create massive government and business spending on open source projects... End result a more efficient system without boundaries and much higher spending due to combining resources.... Sounds pretty close to the goal of most open source advocates.
Yes he's willing to break some eggs to make an omellete but if it was impossible to patent or copywrite software do you really think they'd stop making it?
It seems clear that software will continue being produced and so this gamble will pay off.
What's that about Bush's wife's Jack Daniels?
They're still running really shitty lines under the ocean, if we blast them they'll learn bandwidth is important to us.
Socialism, those billions from oil into a socialist system... It'll be pretty quick look at South America...
Leave some peace keepers, set an election schedule that's brisk maybe 1-2 years so people can trust it and have more control then simply honour their wishes as voters.
The reason it's not as simple as described is because America wants to "re-educate" Iraqi's about the virtues of passive capitalist subjugation, their pissed so that's going to take a while.
PC gaming's online systems are pretty rockey right now, for a while with HL1, Q3 etc it was possible to use third party server browsers that were INCREADIBLY powerful, All Seeing Eye is probably the best example, it did complex scripting to find you exactly the right server, it detected and screened for every publicly available aspect of the server down to which country/area the server was likely located in.
:(
Then Gamespy attacked the publishers, I'm sure they talked to the publishers because their product is a big pile o' crap (Arcade at least Gamespy3D was fine) and developers wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole and now most games use in game server browsers that are slow, buggy, and control your search results.
Pretty sad
Consoles simply won't be able to replicate the golden age of server browsing computer gaming had with ASE or more recently with XFire (Thresh's IM/Browser/VOIP program).
Too bad for us...
Are you willing to bet that the problem isn't with liscencing?
If corperate IT departments get access to soemthing that's easy to install and moves easily between machines it will pop up on the internet, it will be dissected so that all the programs become instant warez celebrities (You don't want to have to reregister and find CD keys/CDs do you?)
Linux has tried with it's distro's containing files but the system for building a "distro" from your installed OS isn't particularly "User Friendly".
If Microsoft moves this direction we'll start seeing Blu-Ray discs coming out with OSX, Solaris, BSD, Linux, Windows and a backup partition, but that kind of choice and reliability (Through backups and multi- OS file access) there won't really be a market for upgrading the closed source aspects of the software.
Simple Backup Systems - > Multiboot OS right off one disk -> death of closed source.
I might be working with my english prof to produce a set of Shakespeare based video games and it occured to me that no one has done this yet...
It seems like something that would make a very interesting long term project, starting with the basic premise and theme and extending continuously to try and represent more and more of the nuance of the work...
The reference text is widely available and even the interpretations and criticism nescessary can be easily found.
I'm sure there are many similar sets of work which lend themself to distributed and ongoing development but there seem to be few gaming projects based on the same kind of incremental improvements we see in application software.
And cheaper access to the Bill hotspots?
This is exactly why the U.N. gets upset about the U.S. controlling the internet, they are going to be taking down things like dns servers and major routing switches for THEIR OWN military testing and everyone else can just suck an egg.
See the thing about people who follow the law blindly and don't realize that it should always be followed in spirit not letter is that they act holier than thou while at the same time breaking almost as many rules.
Somewhere in your dark little mind is the niggling sensation "At least I'm not as bad as..." as you break EULA's don't read legal agreements, break driving laws, don't file every item on your income taxes... etc.
Have you had your car checked for emissions? Might want to do that EVERY day...
These law suits are charging people who wouldn't be buying the product anyway and unlike stealing they aren't costing the recording industry anything except better publicity and a few initial sales.
The truth is Britney is a big star on radio and TV but she won't be on the internet, while these people are downloading music from these mainstream artists they are keeping their industry alive instead of building it's replacement.
These lawsuits are very much like witch trials, charging people for something society doesn't really know anything about and hasn't decided what to do about because they're afraid it's going to get out of control.
In this case the music industry is done,it's over,finished, kaput... so people aren't going to stop pirating until the next musical economy starts up.
The chances of that new economy having space for lexus driving, music hating, marketting statistic driven executives is pretty slim and for most of the people on slashdot... We don't care. We won't miss them, they're not on stage they aren't doing sound checks and they aren't really helping to encourage artists who are great.
What they are doing is building a marketing machine to ensure only their music reaches your ears... these lawsuits are just a continuation of that.
In the long run, moving towards reviewing patents and getting rid of the illegitimate ones, will be much easier than the problem they are facing now...hundred year patents.
If companies start getting these short term patents before the old style patents pass through the system there might be interesting legal battles (no comparisons to existing patents after all)...
4 Years is a LONG time in technology fields, having access to the patents ATI or Nvidia held 4 years ago would be totally TOTALLY useless in terms of offering meaningful competition in the next few years... So for companies that are trying to use rapid innovation and not stifling patent ownership this is great.
Is supposed to be A STANDARD but Adobe has added so many small features that it has gotten out of control. These features are the plugins that make Adobe dog slow to load.
Realplayer has really taken a hit since real alternative came out, perhaps we'll see the same thing in the adobe sphere, maybe if firefox started having a pdf reader built in... Well I guess Opera would need to have it first but it could stop the insanity.
I have two technophobe parents, my mom occasionally knows tonnes of stuff about something like a VCR or Digital TV but mostly it's pretty painful.
I've tried everything, just explaining when something is easy and something is hard can be pretty tough.
I just put shareaza on her laptop, I know it's piracy but she's trying to find some really obscure stuff... It was too complicated.
I got them 2 matched usb mp3 players (work as usb drives)... But they say they are too complicated even though they have no more features than a CD player or Walkman...
At this point the shuffle is the only thing possible, it's like a nightmare dealing with them...
Silly, there is a reason that Russia has made more than 200,000 Nukes.
Once you have the tech it's not too hard, the old bombs needed a lot of components (Uranium, Tritium etc.) but the new ones can acheive fission with much less.
This is a little bit like video cards, it's just sand but figuring it out takes time and materials.
The best way to stop fears of nuclear holocaust is to give every international agreement reasonable escape clauses, I don't want to be tied to some stupid agreement that someone (probably bribed and unethical) ten political parties ago agreed to.
Things like U.S. military bases (with ensuant rapes, violence, and political threats), oil treaties (Did you know you can only buy Oil in $ U.S.), and debts (Some countries in the America's bought freedom from the U.S. by agreeing to pay for the slaves/revolutionaries these countries usually were under trade embargo and the compound interest means that they are still paying FOR THE PURCHASE OF THEIR CITIZENS today) etc are the reason countries really think the U.S. is unethical and used it's past position of power to build a very imperialist network of patently unfair agreements, often through threats of violence or blatant bribery.
Now they aren't a threat to anyone anymore, no oil, no tech, no industry, no money, just a bunch of lazy puritans sitting around ruled by the rich.
These days America has to make deals that are a lot closer to fair, and they just aren't developing the monopolies they wanted, Monsanto is probably the closest they've come in the last 100 years.
Have you been in a shooting war recently with Russia?
Isn't that, well, the whole point?
If American's want to persist in the beliefe that a real war will be without casualities they can and it seems their current government well let them live this pipe dream, it will only become a problem when people like the parent start to think of not having wars anymore as "giving up" and think their smart enough to attack the wrong country.
If people have to be willing to die to make a point by killing it's probably for the best.
I'm the owner of a sail boat on Lake Ontario, and I could lug a pretty serious weapon into downtown New York or Detroit without any trouble.
To stop this much easier attack you'll need a police state, and that might not even protect you from revolution.
As war equipment goes we are at a good level, we have the technology to deal with natural threats, lions, bears, asteroids, and not be a threat to each other thanks to mutually assured...
If the American government wants to create a system where everyone else is simply trying to maintain a balance of power they may find that EVERYONE gets fed up with it, socialist countries don't feel the need to spend 1/5 of their GDP on the military (we have health care, education, and the arts) and some day it'll probably be a lot cheaper in the long run to stop the creators of such militaristic policies rather than continue the rat race.